Nate Briggs's Blog - Posts Tagged "rural"
Visions in Small Places
“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all....” - Fitzgerald
As our culture slides into its post-literate phase, the names of writers left behind will inevitably grow longer: authors of "difficult" books vehemently debated in graduate seminar...but nowhere else. Even Shakespeare gets farther and farther behind in the rear view mirror, for reasons explained in an essay of mine: https://medium.com/@T…/shakespeare-fu...…
When a woman told William Faulker that she’d read “The Bear” three times, and still didn’t know what it was about, Faulkner replied: “Then you should probably read it again....” — and that’s why I’m sure he'll be among the most easily dismissed of the difficult writers of the late 20th Century.
I don't agree with him that readers should serve an apprenticeship of comprehension.
But where we do meet (and shake hands) is the idea — summarized by Fitzgerald, above — that maybe it can be best to write about what’s close to you. Looking at one particular place long and hard...for a long time.
The American Nation is now divided along several major fault lines. But one of the least discussed is the gulf between Urban and Rural. New York is vastly overrepresented in our current media, and Middle America vastly underrepresented.
For most of his work, Faulkner used the people, the landscape, and the history of northern Mississippi in a place he invented: Yoknapatawpha County. Terminally rural. A place in the middle of nowhere, you might say. Unworthy of attention, according to majority opinion.
But, the longer he looked at it, the more interesting it got.
A strong sense of place gives fiction a useful depth: the “universe in a grain of sand”. John Cheever hardly ever strayed from Long Island, and Garrison Keillor has been living off Lake Wobegone for decades.
Why not the Great Plains, I thought? There is no poet laureate for the modern Bible Belt — that peculiar slice of nowhere. And so this series of posts will be introducing the not-quite-lost town of Elsinore — where you can pull off the Interstate if you want to (but most people don't want to) — where the weather is pretty awful about 300 days of the year — where the smart ones have left to make their fortunes, and the loyal ones stayed behind — where nothing much seems to happen and yet, where the whole human landscape is on display as much as anywhere else.
As usual, stay tuned....
As our culture slides into its post-literate phase, the names of writers left behind will inevitably grow longer: authors of "difficult" books vehemently debated in graduate seminar...but nowhere else. Even Shakespeare gets farther and farther behind in the rear view mirror, for reasons explained in an essay of mine: https://medium.com/@T…/shakespeare-fu...…
When a woman told William Faulker that she’d read “The Bear” three times, and still didn’t know what it was about, Faulkner replied: “Then you should probably read it again....” — and that’s why I’m sure he'll be among the most easily dismissed of the difficult writers of the late 20th Century.
I don't agree with him that readers should serve an apprenticeship of comprehension.
But where we do meet (and shake hands) is the idea — summarized by Fitzgerald, above — that maybe it can be best to write about what’s close to you. Looking at one particular place long and hard...for a long time.
The American Nation is now divided along several major fault lines. But one of the least discussed is the gulf between Urban and Rural. New York is vastly overrepresented in our current media, and Middle America vastly underrepresented.
For most of his work, Faulkner used the people, the landscape, and the history of northern Mississippi in a place he invented: Yoknapatawpha County. Terminally rural. A place in the middle of nowhere, you might say. Unworthy of attention, according to majority opinion.
But, the longer he looked at it, the more interesting it got.
A strong sense of place gives fiction a useful depth: the “universe in a grain of sand”. John Cheever hardly ever strayed from Long Island, and Garrison Keillor has been living off Lake Wobegone for decades.
Why not the Great Plains, I thought? There is no poet laureate for the modern Bible Belt — that peculiar slice of nowhere. And so this series of posts will be introducing the not-quite-lost town of Elsinore — where you can pull off the Interstate if you want to (but most people don't want to) — where the weather is pretty awful about 300 days of the year — where the smart ones have left to make their fortunes, and the loyal ones stayed behind — where nothing much seems to happen and yet, where the whole human landscape is on display as much as anywhere else.
As usual, stay tuned....
Whispered Imagination - Jul 2
And now a few words about Elsinore, Oklahoma – with a particular nod to our folks in the Major Media who only interrupt the in-flight move to gaze at the American Heartland from 30,000 feet.
Like Lake Wobegon, Yoknapatawpha County, or Brigadoon, you won’t find Elsinore on any map. No telephone directory shows it. No Google mapping cars have ever found it.
Not invented though. Stitched together. Quilting squares of memory from the tiny town where I grew up, the village where we were exiled for a time, the city where I went away to college, and fragments of so many people whose attitudes, and conversation, and schemes I remember.
Elsinore is proudly rural – which suggests a brief mention of what might be called our Two Americas Problem. Even though this issue gets some media attention, it doesn’t seem to be the right kind of attention. Because the split we are experiencing, the vehemence and barking we hear every day, is a matter of Time – Past versus Future. A matter of Age – Old versus Young. And a matter of Place – Rural versus Urban.
Within the last two days, I have heard the phrases “depopulated America” and “knuckledragger Amerca” used as equivalents. The good people who still reside in the Heartland might label themselves “ignored America”.
They didn’t want to be ignored before – and they don’t want to be ignored now. They don’t want their states to be thought of as natural grasslands where buffalo can be released to wander free again, now that so many people have gone.
The Heartland feels that America is losing its heart. Losing its way. Losing focus. Losing its heritage — and its priorities.
The Heartland was once very young. And now is becoming very old. It is not just the “brain drain” of the best and brightest. It is the absence of children, and grandchildren, as older people find themselves in the company of the Unworthy - the Worthy children having left, never to return. Small town America is filled with people who settled for what was there at home - and they're not a very inspiring bunch.
They are caught up, of course, in the epic movement of people all over the world – the inexorable movement from farms to the city. One of the foundational characteristics of the 21st Century: the countryside emptying out while the cities fill up. But rural people don’t really concern themselves about trends in global population. They would love to feel a little less left behind – a little less marginalized. At the same time, they’re not particularly interested in the challenges of Modern Times.
That’s part of the charm. Small Town America is not the site of challenges. Not the theatre of ambition. The operative phrase is "used to". Place where things used to happen. Where people used to live. (https://medium.com/@TheFurryMarxist/w...).
But even in the tiny sparks of light you can see from 30,000 feet there are people living, loving, working, hoping, and (sometimes) losing hope.
As much as any street in Brooklyn, any slum in Calcutta, any apartment house in Paris, Elsinore shows people living as they have always lived. My people of Elsinore might wonder if the Heartland will ever be relevant to the larger nation again, but – in the meantime – they have things to do.
Like figuring out how to gt their hands on their husbands' life insurance. (More on this later).
Like Lake Wobegon, Yoknapatawpha County, or Brigadoon, you won’t find Elsinore on any map. No telephone directory shows it. No Google mapping cars have ever found it.
Not invented though. Stitched together. Quilting squares of memory from the tiny town where I grew up, the village where we were exiled for a time, the city where I went away to college, and fragments of so many people whose attitudes, and conversation, and schemes I remember.
Elsinore is proudly rural – which suggests a brief mention of what might be called our Two Americas Problem. Even though this issue gets some media attention, it doesn’t seem to be the right kind of attention. Because the split we are experiencing, the vehemence and barking we hear every day, is a matter of Time – Past versus Future. A matter of Age – Old versus Young. And a matter of Place – Rural versus Urban.
Within the last two days, I have heard the phrases “depopulated America” and “knuckledragger Amerca” used as equivalents. The good people who still reside in the Heartland might label themselves “ignored America”.
They didn’t want to be ignored before – and they don’t want to be ignored now. They don’t want their states to be thought of as natural grasslands where buffalo can be released to wander free again, now that so many people have gone.
The Heartland feels that America is losing its heart. Losing its way. Losing focus. Losing its heritage — and its priorities.
The Heartland was once very young. And now is becoming very old. It is not just the “brain drain” of the best and brightest. It is the absence of children, and grandchildren, as older people find themselves in the company of the Unworthy - the Worthy children having left, never to return. Small town America is filled with people who settled for what was there at home - and they're not a very inspiring bunch.
They are caught up, of course, in the epic movement of people all over the world – the inexorable movement from farms to the city. One of the foundational characteristics of the 21st Century: the countryside emptying out while the cities fill up. But rural people don’t really concern themselves about trends in global population. They would love to feel a little less left behind – a little less marginalized. At the same time, they’re not particularly interested in the challenges of Modern Times.
That’s part of the charm. Small Town America is not the site of challenges. Not the theatre of ambition. The operative phrase is "used to". Place where things used to happen. Where people used to live. (https://medium.com/@TheFurryMarxist/w...).
But even in the tiny sparks of light you can see from 30,000 feet there are people living, loving, working, hoping, and (sometimes) losing hope.
As much as any street in Brooklyn, any slum in Calcutta, any apartment house in Paris, Elsinore shows people living as they have always lived. My people of Elsinore might wonder if the Heartland will ever be relevant to the larger nation again, but – in the meantime – they have things to do.
Like figuring out how to gt their hands on their husbands' life insurance. (More on this later).
