Hardly TRP at all, yet............

[Bekah]

And there's always "Winesburg, Ohio"  by Sherwood Anderson (!919) .   The characters are all kind of middling grotesque - grotesque like a "gnarled, twisted apple."  .  
http://www.angelfire.com/zine/donnamford/anderson.html

Also,  there were the 1930s "Middletown Studies" done by a pair of sociologists.   
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middletown_studies

"The Lynds' findings were detailed in Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, published in 1929, and Middletown in Transition : A Study in Cultural Conflicts, published in 1937. They wrote in their first book:

"The city will be called Middletown. A community as small as thirty-odd thousand...[in which] the field staff was enabled to concentrate on cultural change...the interplay of a relatively constant...American stock and its changing environment" (1929: p. 8).

http://cms.bsu.edu/Academics/CentersandInstitutes/Middletown.aspx

***
Bekah


On Nov 6, 2012, at 8:37 AM, Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:

> 
> As someone who has spent three months in Ohio, I can't understand this
> vitriol either. When it comes to fiction, however, there does seem to be
> a tradition of portraying Ohio.
> 
> "The zone sometimes appears where we least expect it. In Ohio, for
> instance. In the literary imagination and the popular imagination alike,
> Ohio has long maintained, as they say, a low profile. Its image is one
> of colorlessness and poverty of associations. It is middle-American in
> every sense: middling in its landscapes and natural phenomena, culturally
> middling, sociologically middling - not, one would think, likely raw
> material for ontological improvisation. Yet, as we have seen, a number of
> postmodernist writers have chosen to improvise on the theme of Ohio:
> Patchen in The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Barthelme in Up, Aloft in
> the Air, Davenport in The Invention of Photography in Toledo. The zone
> of Ohio, it would appear, is a recurrent feature of postmodernist writing,
> a topos in both senses, geographical as well as rhetorical. --- [I]n
> order to understand why Ohio, of all places, belongs to the postmodernist
> repertoire, we need to take into account the semiotics of American space
> in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
> Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987), p. 49.
> 
> This was, of course, before AtD, yet after VL, where DL tries to hide in
> the middle-American town of Columbus, OH, in the guise of a moderate clerk.
> 
> [Cf. Sherwood Anderson et al...]
> 
> 
> Heikki
> 
> On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, rich wrote:
> 
>> I think the sentiments are fairly parallel. not sure where all this vitriol
>> about Ohio comes from. i think it's dumb
>> 
>> rich
>> 
>> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 10:23 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I think this thread has been about Columbus, OH, not the Spanish explorer.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 9:15 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> i find all this columbus hating rather tiresome. as if native peoples
>>>> were living in harmony and not murdering each other, too. read fathers &
>>>> crows. it's standard reductions of a complicated world into an easily
>>>> identifiable good guy-bad guy history which I find moronic. i dont condone
>>>> wounded knee or cortez or like injustices but surely we can be a bit more
>>>> discerning than chorusing cortez the killer.
>>>> 
>>>> rich
>>>> 
>>>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Yeah it started with Columbus and spread from the asshole of Ohio out.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Nov 5, 2012, at 5:27 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> amen to that...
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:13 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> there's enough mediocrity to go around no matter where you are
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Kirn is a novelist, as you may know, covering this election as a
>>>>>>> writer not like a journalist. I am not sending this to
>>>>>>> start plist conversations on the election or OHIO, yet I bet, in the
>>>>>>> way we do, it might and they will be better than some journalists'.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I am sending it because the very novelistic judgment of "mediocrity"
>>>>>>> reminds me like a knocking stick of TRP's take on OHIO, via
>>>>>>> the Swiftian savaging of Columbus in that greater and greater book:
>>>>>>> Against the Day. And, of course, Columbus has naming resonance
>>>>>>> with the promise of America. Goodbye,Columbus (but I hope you come
>>>>>>> through for this election. Again.)
>>>>>>> **
>>>>>>> *The New Republic (@tnr <https://twitter.com/tnr>)*
>>>>>>> 11/5/12, 8:00 AM <https://twitter.com/tnr/status/265438354118684672>
>>>>>>> . at walterkirn <https://twitter.com/@walterkirn> says the fact that
>>>>>>> #Ohio <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#Ohio>, the cradle of U.S.
>>>>>>> mediocrity, gets to pick the president is terrifying bit.ly/SsPXxC<http://t.co/N7ZouPUm>
>>>>>>> **Download the official Twitter app here<https://twitter.com/download>
>>>>>>> ****Sent from my iPad
>>>>>>> ****
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> --
>>>>> www.innergroovemusic.com
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>