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

Tue Nov 6 16:02:39 CST 2012

On 11/6/2012 3:19 PM, 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).

"Middletown" was Muncie, Indiana, home of Mason Jars for canning, also 
call Ball jars, which some p-listers may remember from visits to their 
grandmother's house.

While we're in the Middle West lets not forget the fictional state 
Winnemac, featured in Sinclair Lewis's novels.
Recently I enjoyed rereading Main Street (1921) on the kindle--it might 
have been a freebie, or practically one.

H. L. Menken characterized Winnemac as exemplifying the "standardized 
chain-store state" of the 
midwest.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnemac_%28fictional_U.S._state%29#cite_note-3>

I had a grandfather originally from Ohio.

Round on the end and high in the middle, O-HI-O.  (Melvin Douglas in 
"Third Finger Left Hand" (1940) with Myrna Loy.

P

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

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