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

Tue Nov 6 15:07:43 CST 2012

Thanks, Bekah, for the links, and thanks, Joe, for the song.

I was being sloppy, sorry. Naturally, McHale's Postmodernist Fiction
preceded VL. Had it been the other way around, McHale, a huge TRP fan,
would quite likely have included DL's spell in Ohio in his study.

On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, Bekah wrote:

> 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
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>
>
>