Kenyon Gradert To Discuss Midwest Culture On NPR This Morning -- Join The Conversation!

Photograph by Robert Josiah Bingaman; via fly over art tumblr

This morning from 11 to noon Central Time, Kenyon Gradert will appear on the NPR program Saint Louis on the Air to discuss Midwest culture. Also joining host Don Marsh: Mike Draper of the extraordinary art/clothing store RAYGUN. He recently published The Midwest: God's Gift To Planet Earth. It's going to be lively and wide-ranging discussion.

If folks have questions for these guests, they can call (314) 382-TALK (8255) or send an email to talk@stlpublicradio.org.

Kenny would love to hear the questions and comments of Art of the Rural readers -- those within the Midwest and beyond. As his Course on Midwest Culture pieces suggest, this region has a particular rural ethos, and a unique rural-urban connection, that will make for an illuminating conversation this morning.

Course on Midwest Culture: Midwest Realism in the Contemporary Novel

Selection from the cover of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections

By Kenyon Gradert,  Course on Midwest Culture Editor

The consistently excellent N+1 recently published a wonderful piece by Nicholas Dames. In “The Theory Generation,” Dames paints the generational portrait examined by a string of some of today’s most popular American novelists, undergraduate English majors in the heyday of academic literary theory now attempting to engage its ambivalent legacy. About half of the novelists cited are New Yorkers; more are native or transplanted Midwesterners (often from scholarly families, interestingly).

Jeffrey Eugenides cites the influence of his hometown Detroit in his life and his writing, the setting for his award-winning Middlesex. Cal, the novel’s protagonist, attempts to come to terms with his family’s conflicted Greek-American identity in Detroit and eventually escapes to San Francisco to come to terms with his own intersex identity. The novel received praise for its lucid engagement of the American Dream, an idea that gained mythic stature with Midwestern Gilded Age figures like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie and one whose decline is especially vivid in Midwestern rust belts like Detroit. Both haunted and inspired by his city, Eugenides commented in a BOMB interview with Jonathan Safran Foer "I think most of the major elements of American history are exemplified in Detroit, from the triumph of the automobile and the assembly line to the blight of racism, not to mention the music, Motown, the MC5, house, techno.”

St. Louis’ own Jonathan Franzen (with a more ambivalent relation to his hometown) semi-autobiographically tells of a suburban Midwestern family attempting to navigate changing times in his renowned The Corrections. 

A novelist not mentioned by the article who could fit the demographic of theory-heavy realists is David Foster Wallace. Though born in New York and a professor in California, Wallace grew up between Champaign and Urbana, Illinois as his father taught within the state’s flagship university.

Ben Lerner, born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, sets his Leaving the Atocha Station as a sort-of reverse of Eugenides’ abandonment of Detroit. The protagonist Adam, a slacker poet and escapee Midwesterner on fellowship in Madrid, “invents fictional alibis for others—such as the ‘fascism’ of his kind, liberal Midwestern father. ” Free in Madrid, he remains fixated on familial roots.

Lorrie Moore; photograph by Linda Nylind

Lorrie Moore wasn't born in the Midwest, but teaches here and sets her novels in the region. What’s more, Dames latches on to such a setting by using “Midwest” as a worthwhile description of the realist style that contrasts with the metropolitan university stylings of Theory:


Take, for instance, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, a young woman named Tassie raised in rural Wisconsin, who describes the shock of her first term at her state university:

"Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of sunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie."

The deadpan Midwestern humor, so pointedly stark in its syntax, brilliantly evokes the moment of initiation into Theory.

With an American populace marked by quick and constant geographic flux from education and career-pursuits—well-exemplified by these novelists—it is remarkable that the Midwest still holds such adjectival power in first-rate literary criticism. This small coterie of realist, theory-drenched novelists may have transferred their geography to their style, osmosis-like. Others may argue Dames relies on hackneyed stereotypes of the “prosaic Midwest” when the region has sprouted its fair share of magical realism too.

Richard C Longworth, Senior Fellow at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism (an excellent work featured on my bibliography) summarizes on his blog The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest:

In earlier days, much Midwestern literature was super-realistic: the work of Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell come to mind, not to mention the wonderful work of black Midwestern authors such as Richard Wright and Lorraine Hansberry. But later writing reveals an urge to the bizarre, a sort of magic realism absent from the epics of the South or the hard-boiled policiers of the West. Keillor uses this. So does the baseball writing of W.P. Kinsella, such as Shoeless Joe (the inspiration for Field of Dreams) and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. It's no accident that Ray Bradbury's Midwestern youth led to so much his work.

Perhaps we’re witnessing a shift back to the region’s realist origins. Perhaps, more likely, the Midwest is blooming into a wide proliferation of literary style just as in other regions, where Ray Bradbury’s spaceships and Lief Enger’s miracles can exist alongside the different realisms of Franzen et al. Regardless of style, the Midwest still serves as ambivalent setting or temporary home for some of the nation’s finest writers. Not quite dead yet; perhaps alive and well.

Osawatomie And Midwestern Millenialism: The Broadsword of John Brown, Teddy, and Obama

Tragic Prelude; John Steuart Curry

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture series Editor

The Midwest—half of its name ringing with the romantic potential of the frontier—has long been the home to millennial hopes. Contrary to today’s popular opinion, many have believed that this flyover region would be where everything came together in the end. From Bleeding Kansas to Farm Crisis, things fell apart.

Many Jews look to Jerusalem for the final millennial establishment of their end-times temple, but Mormon eschatology has traditionally declared that in the end times, their heavenly temple will be in Independence, Missouri.  Before Brigham Young led his Israelites into the desert, Mormons called Nauvoo, Illinois their home in exile. Not far away and not long before, New Harmony, Indiana was one of the most successful utopian communities in the United States.  In between New Harmony and Nauvoo, a group of quixotic philosophers called the “St. Louis Hegelians” believed that, because of the city’s strategic location in geography and history, it would be the site of the full unfolding of Absolute Spirit—everything marvelous in human development would reach its apex here. If world history ended with the 1904 World’s Fair, perhaps.

The most pervasive Midwestern Millennialism came with the Civil War, for it was here that geopolitical tensions first threatened to tear apart the nation. As the status of slavery was in the air for the territories west of the Mississippi, Yankee abolitionists came to the region with hopes of guaranteeing universal liberty. (And it was here Elijah Lovejoy became one of the first abolitionist martyrs just across the river.) Pro-slavery advocates flocked to the region in equal force and blood was spilt. “Bleeding Kansas” saw the most violent of these conflicts years before Fort Sumter.

One small Kansas town in particular continues to ring with millennial hope into the present. Osawatomie is where prophetic abolitionist John Brown’s sons hacked pro-slavery Kansans to death with broadswords. (The old man confined himself to shooting the injured in the head.) Fifty-six years later, Teddy Roosevelt paid the town a stop on his 1912 campaign trail and baptized the site with his famous “New Nationalism” speech in which he outlined his progressive platform.

The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.

President Obama greeting the audience in Osawatomie; Associated Press

Last December, Barack Obama also stopped in Osawatomie, to revive Teddy’s New Nationalism, but also to claim its foundation of Heartland values:

I have roots here…I like to say that I got my name from my father, but I got my accent--and my values--from my mother. She was born in Wichita. Her mother grew up in Augusta. Her father was from El Dorado, so my Kansas roots run deep. And my grandparents served during WWII…together they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression and Fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off and responsibility was rewarded and anyone could make it if they tried…And these values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy that the world has ever known.

Obama claims regional roots for himself effectively, sprouting from these roots the values that flower into the same millennial hopes nurtured by Roosevelt a century prior. Contrary to the thoughts of the St. Louis Hegelians, though, such fruits are not necessary and inevitable, nor are they without the nourishment of blood. The Midwest cannot be forgotten as a fertile field for the best of our millennial hopes, nor can it be forgotten as the home of John Brown’s broadsword, sent straight from the God that gives us such end-time visions of dread and hope.

In 2008, Obama’s campaign focused on hope; detractors deemed it naïve. In returning to bloody Osawatomie and reclaiming his Kansas roots, it seems Obama himself has taken the criticism to heart, neither abandoning the Ideal nor ignoring the violent realpolitik through which it must trudge. 

• The painting above, Tragic Prelude, one of the most famous paintings of regionalist Kansan John Steuart Curry. This depiction of John Brown holding the fragile nation together was painted in 1939—the same year that the US attempted neutrality in the Second World War, The Wizard of Oz premiered, FDR approved the Manhattan Project, and Lou Gherig ended his consecutive games streak due to disease. The center could not hold. The mural is now located in the Kansas Statehouse.

Course on Midwest Culture: Big Ten

Ohio State preseason open practice, 2012; Ohio StateBuckeyes.com

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture series Editor

I was at a party filled with English PhD students and I was asking a Cajun girl about New Orleans. When she showed amusement at my curiosity, another student piped up. “Kenny is a regionalist!” 

Out of the closet. So I proceeded on to research, asking students from various parts of the country what they thought of the Midwest as a regional entity. Intelligent interlocutors pointed to history, to contemporary cultural analysis, to literature, to socio-economics. I turned to the only fellow Iowan in the room— who also happened to be one of the few who wasn’t a student—and asked him what he considered to be the Midwest. Matter-of-factly, he responded “The Big Ten.”

A damn good point. And one I in all my scholarly wisdom had never thought of.

The rise of collegial and professional sports as billion-dollar industries have likewise led to a rise in regionalist spectacle. Game days become liturgical and individuals spend hundreds on vestments to display allegiance. America has always loved sports and has always been regionally diverse. Now, though, it’s harder to pinpoint regional identity based on accent, food, or ethnicity; instead, we buy our jerseys and caps. 

On NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Frank Deford recently spoke of “Southern Pride and the Southeastern Conference:” 

But, of course, it's impossible to ignore the pride the South feels for its football. As no other section of the country remains so closely connected — "Save your Confederate money, boys!" — so does no other section of the country boast of a regional predominance in any sport. Just because the Yankees have won all these years, the Northeast has never said, "Hey, we got the best baseball up here." It's impossible not to sense that because the South usually brings up the rear in important things like health, education and income, it looks to college football to enhance its national standing. We're No. 1, well, in something else besides beauty pageants.

Deford continues:

I don't know when exactly the SEC took over America. I know this is hard to believe, but the epicenter of college football used to be in the Midwest. I'm so old, I can remember when Notre Dame actually mattered, and the real tough players were supposed to come from Western Pennsylvania and Ohio.

One can’t argue with the tremendous success—and dollar value—of the SEC in recent years. But I quote Deford not to proffer a competing Midwestern narrative of football supremacy (for that, I’ll give James Wright’s beautiful football poem “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”. Instead, I quote Deford simply to illustrate the incredible intertwining of sports and regional identity, both influencing each other within terribly market-driven forces.

I push a simple formula with my own conclusion: Sports are good. Regionalist identity is good.  Money isn’t bad. But money can turn sports from regionalist narratives rich with history of stadiums and heroes into the shallow spectacle of a game-day beer commercial. Kick back with some buds and some Buds® and don’t forget to carefully craft your self-image with NFL Network, Our Proud Sponsors, and jerseys, available online.

Again, cash isn’t bad. In fact, owners may find more money to be made precisely by acknowledging old regional identities rather than peddling shallow party image. Sports fans like a good time, but they are becoming more intelligent, more sophisticated, and more aware of history. History and the regional identities it shapes will continue to be a guiding factor in sports narrative. Do our new stadiums do justice to the old? Do our mascots make sense given our place? Do we preserve the stories of old heroes or simply peddle the merchandise of the new?

Superman of Kansas and Krypton and Cleveland

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture Series Editor

 

“Behind the high-flying legend lies a true-to-life saga every bit as compelling, one that begins not in the far reaches of outer space but in the middle of America’s heartland. During the depths of the Great Depression, Jerry Siegel was a shy, awkward teenager in Cleveland.”

 Much like a comic book origin story, thus begins Larry Tye’s Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, released last June.  

I grew up on comics. When I met others like myself, the inevitable question was “Marvel or DC?” Expected to declare an allegiance, I placed my loyalty with Marvel, avowing that they do “more human stories.” Spiderman grew up in a place on a real map (Queens) and generally seemed like me.  Where was Gotham City? Aquaman from Atlantis? Wonder Woman was Amazonian? Why were the rest from space?

Superman seemed the height of this romanticism. He was a god with but a single weakness that seemed tacked-on so that writers could actually create stories (which, we all know, require weakness). To boot, the magnitude of superhuman power was grafted onto an utterly bland personality. He was a terrible combination of übermenschlich Everyman (Walt Whitman being a fantastic combination, for the record). At least Marvel’s equivalent, Captain America, came from New York City and fought in a war I’d heard of through grandparents. Even if Marvel writers risked the ridiculous by freezing Cap in ice, they revamped him through showing the moral and psychological tensions of dropping a robust member of The Greatest Generation into the 21st-century. Superman was from space and a fictional place blandly called “Metropolis.”

But he wasn’t just from space, which makes for the draw of Tye’s biography. Superman, the quintessentially red-blooded American, was created by two Jewish kids in Cleveland trying to fit in to a part of the country that too often considered itself quintessentially American. Ironically, in the process of trying to fit in, Siegel and Shuster stood two heads above all by creating a definitive American myth.

What’s more, Superman’s Jewish-Cleveland creators dropped their mythic creation from the starry heights of Krypton and into Kansas to be raised by humble farmers—not without significance. Superman would not be the same were he placed in Brooklyn like Cap. He’d be too earthly and less pure. As an Americanized Christ-figure, Superman could come from nothing short of a backwoods Nazareth, a pastoral landscape famed for supposedly producing the good, the representative, the plain, but also safely distant and ideal.
 
As stories have matured, writers increasingly paid attention to Superman’s earthly dwellings to ward off these potentially alienating mythic qualities. Smallville was perhaps the most popular renovation of the character, which materialized after series developers Gough and Millar pitched their "no tights, no flights" rule in the wake of a failed pitch for a Batman series.

The new film, Man of Steel (June 14, 2013), holds the promise of producer Christopher Nolan (of The Dark Knight franchise fame) and his trademark realist perspective on a story that is often too hard to make realistic. What can we expect? The recently released teaser-trailer focuses heavily on Superman’s rural origins (read, “cornfields”) but also frames a mythic struggle. In the American teaser, the montage features a voiceover of Superman’s earthly parent, farmer Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) telling his extraordinary son “you’re not just anyone.” The European trailer is identical, but with a voiceover from Superman’s celestial father, Kryptonian Jor-El (Russell Crowe) telling his son “you will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will rise behind you. They will stumble. They will fall. In time, they will join you in the sun.” 

 
By the teaser’s account, the film promises to be a balance between Superman’s mythic strengths and his earthly troubles, between Krypton and Kansas, between the ideal and the real. Although the teaser seems to emphasize Superman’s troubles fitting in to the Heartland, it also balances these human struggles with the mythic image of a god’s loneliness in sea, earth, and sky. The balancing act is a tricky one, but necessary for a figure both ideally mythic and near to our hearts.

• A final Midwest connection. Larry Tye also wrote an award-winning biography on Satchel Paige, a southerner who made his name as a wild pitcher for the famed Negroe-League Kansas City Monarchs and later, the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Browns.

Course on Midwest Culture: A Bibliography

Airborne, 2010; Alex Roulette as seen in fly over art

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture Series Editor

A quality course begins with quality secondary sources. Such quotidian details may seem annoying for those chomping at the bit to get on to the primary stuffs of Garland, Anderson, et al, but, quite simply, it needs to be done.



Humanities-folks aren’t always much for the quantitative, but some data can help. A quick Googling of “Southern literature” reveals a Norton Anthology and 293,000 hits. The same for “Midwest literature” offers up no Norton and 72,400 hits. A region with roughly twice the population of the Midwest (according to the most recent census, including Texas) has four times as much online material. If Google accurately mirrors the grander world, then, per capita, the south gets twice as much literary attention as the Midwest. 



But we’re not starting from scratch. Fine scholars have established a modest but quality base of secondary material on Midwest literature (with far more on our region’s fine history, specifically--not included here) and, while I’m still spoiled by my university’s excellent library system, I intend to get most such books atop my desk and write all too brief reviews for your reading pleasure.

• Sisson, Zacher, Cayton, ed. The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Indiana UP, 2007). The most valuable member of the pack is an eight pound beast with equally heavy endorsements from Kurt Vonnegut and Toni Morrison. Its impressive advisory board and editorial staff divide the book between “Landscapes and People” (including charming individual “portraits” of the twelve states), “Society and Culture,” “Community and Social Life,” “Economy and Technology,” and “Public Life.” Most of our time will be spent in the section on culture, of course, with a strong bent towards the encyclopedia’s invaluable section on literature. The book is both meaty and handsome, a scholar and a gentleman, and would make a fine addition to any sturdy bookshelf (and available for around $35 from the consistently impressive Abebooks.com). What the Oxford English Dictionary is for English nerds, The American Midwest is for Midwestern nerds: you page through it intending a brief sojourn and raise your eyes to discover an hour has gone by.

• Barillas, William. The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland. (Ohio UP, 2006). William Barillas’ book examines five midwestern authors from a wide spread of time and genres: Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison. Barillas’ introduction and first chapter may be a good place to start for the fledgling Midwestern scholar simply because it is one of the newest pieces of scholarly work. Therein, Barillas poses important questions that build upon previous scholarship: the Midwest’s relationship to America at large as a sort-of synecdochal representative; the problems with regionalisms; and, of course, the centrality of the pastoral myth in the Midwest. Barillas also writes wonderfully. He introduces us to both utilitarian individualist types like “the tinkerer” and “the booster” as well as the romantic individualists who were born and bred on the East Coast but largely shaped by the Westward movement into what would become the Heartland: Emerson, Whitman, Bryant, et al.

• Holden, Greg. The Booklovers Guide to the Midwest: A Literary Tour. (Clerisy Press, 2010). If we’re undertaking the regionalist project of studies-attached-to-place, what better guidebook than one that literally takes you up and down major Midwestern highways for a literary road trip? Just plain fun.

• Weber, Ronald. The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing. (Indiana UP, 1992). An eminently readable work of scholarship by Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Notre Dame, Ronald Weber, and part of the (mainly historical) Midwestern History and Culture series (Madison & Schlereth, ed.). Weber’s work is that excellent type of scholarship in which readers trust the scholar’s detachment yet feel his zeal for the subject matter. Weber’s scholarly work has a broader focus than Barillas’ six-author format, which both expands its value yet restricts sustained close textual analyses. Like Barillas, his introduction is especially helpful for students wishing to get a feel for regionalist scholarship. 

• Greasley, Philip A., ed. Dictionary of Midwestern Literature: Volume One: The Authors. (Indiana UP, 2001) Self-explanatory. A second volume is to be released, according to a contributing colleague of mine, precisely at “some time.” “These things take time,” she added.

• Longworth, Richard C. Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism. (Bloomsbury, 2008). So this work only tangentially focuses on literature and culture. The book is instead sociological and economic, its central thesis being that the Midwest has adapted poorly to globalization. I enjoy the book, though, because it is written by a fellow Iowan and because it is a call-to-arms, explicitly challenging readers to creatively adapt their regional home. Something is at stake. In addition, the book’s sociological and economic focus are nice “empirical glosses” on our study of nebulous words like “culture” and “regionalism.” Finally, the book starkly contrasts today’s midwest from the Midwest of the 1890s-1930s, a time period that many other scholars deem the area’s Golden Age for both literature and industry. Longworth also maintains The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest, a blog in conjunction with The Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

• Frederick, John T. Out of the Midwest: A Collection of Present-Day Writings. The late John Frederick was a fellow Iowan and founder of Midland, a regionalist literary journal at the height of Midwestern literary prominence, compiled an anthology of contemporary midwestern writings.  The anthology is available online free and in its entirety, including an enlightening introduction.

• Wuthnow, Robert. Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s. (Princeton: UP, 2012). Like Longworth’s Caught in the Middle, I include Robert Wuthnow’s piece as an enlightening bit of sociological analysis. Its central thesis: the Midwest is not the withering, atrophied wasteland but “has undergone a strong, positive transformation since the 1950s.”  In his introduction, Wuthnow admits he was originally “working on the assumption that the heartland was a place of withering decline...I thought that was the story that needed to be told. It made sense of small towns with empty storefronts. Large fields with no farmsteads. Reports of joblessness. But it did not square with other evidence. New technology. A surprisingly robust economy. Strong schools. An upbeat feeling among residents about the future. Clearly I needed to think harder about what was happening. By the time I finished with the research, I had a much different story in mind than when I started.”

• Cayton, Andrew R.L. & Gray, Susan E., ed. The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History. (Indiana UP, 2001). This anthology is perhaps second in scholarly worth only to the encyclopedia as all other subsequent works of scholarship on Midwest culture cite Cayton and Gray’s work. This collection of essays is the result of an experimental 1998 conference held at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) in which historians pondered whether or not the Midwest had a regional identity--the same question that undergirds a course on Midwest Culture. The essays give a diverse but focused variety of topics: historian John Larson writes on his experience being hired by an open-air frontier museum in Indiana to dispel the folkish caricatures that had heretofore reigned among museum staff. These new historians and their more objective analysis, Larson reminisces, “were about as welcome as the Grinch who stole Christmas.” Nicole Etcheson discusses the Pioneer as the Midwest’s heroic yet unromantic archetype and ordinariness as a historic burden that can mask real issues of class and race. Quite simply, an impressive and enjoyable collection of essays.

In addition to these fine books of scholarship--the majority put out by Indiana UP to whom we owe a big “thank you”--there are more popular takes on the region, like Ian Frazier’s The Great Plains (only one half of the Midwest, we know) or My Kind of Midwest by John A. Jakle. Finally, there is the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, a scholarly society that seems to focus on contemporary works and is anticipating a conference on Midwestern “country noir.” 



Such a spectrum provides a description of the majority of the work I’ve discovered on Midwest literature and culture. If I’ve passed over any great books or organizations, let us all know on our facebook page.

PS + Preview:

PS: My focus was on scholarly works. Have I narrow-mindedly missed great secondary sources (print or otherwise) for Midwestern culture by focusing on books published by university presses? More broadly, what ought to be a proper relationship between university work on regionalism and the actual region it studies?

Preview: Can those largely unmapped nineteenth-century territories of sprawling prairies known as “The West” be subsumed under the banner of the twentieth-century entity known as “The Midwest”? Or are they separate historical and cultural identities occupying the same geographic space? What exactly is the relationship of the West to the Midwest?


Related Articles:
Course on Midwest Culture archives

Course On Midwest Culture: The Paradox of Heartland Rock

Photograph from the insert to the Bruce Springsteen & E-Street Band Live 1975-1985 LP box set

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture editor

Last week in the New York Times, David Brooks cited Bruce Springsteen’s vast international appeal as evidence for “the tremendous power of particularity” -- place being one of the most vivid of these particulars. 



Along with more Midwestern-based acts like Seger and Mellencamp, Springsteen took up the mantle of Skynyrd and CCR (and, of course, the many older musicians from America’s folk tradition) and re-channeled myth away from the south and into America’s “heartland.” He crafted what Brooks calls a “paracosm,” a little mental landscape of sorts that guides our actions and thoughts.


But here’s the rub: if Springsteen was an artist of particular place known for capturing the zeitgeist of the modern “Heartland,” why does no one quite know the geographical location of this heartland?

 Though Springsteen himself would surely have acknowledged the power of place, the reality is that he was a New Jersey boy and his music’s mythical place was flexible enough to accommodate Mellencamp from the Hoosier State, Segar from Detroit Rock City, Tom Petty from Florida, and the Iron City Houserockers. Deeming such a group “Heartland Rock” reveals both the loose boundaries of the term “Heartland” and the Midwest’s paradoxical identity as an everyman, embodying only the traits that transcend the quixotic oddities of particular places. A Midwesterner is more American than Midwestern, at least in mythic identity.



Likewise, an explanation for the vast international appeal of “Heartland Rock” lies in its name. The myth of the heartland is not particular to the Midwest. More so, it is perhaps the oldest and most universal of tropes: a romantic fall from (an often pastoral) innocence. Adam and Eve pine for their lost garden. Milton’s Satan does the same. Doctor Frankenstein regrets ever leaving the peaceful Swiss Alps. Springsteen sings lamentations on the death of his hometown:


Herein lies the tensions of regionalism. We love art that vividly captures the color of particular place, but art forfeits its title if local color fails to capture human universals. This is why the rural is a fundamental part of Midwest identity and why pastoral myths will remain popular. This is why John Mellencamp can sing “Pink Houses” to a sold-out crowd for the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois in the midst of the Farmers’ Crisis of the 1980s:

Human history inevitably leads to Frankensteins and Rust Belts. We balance these Falls with our need for a mythic, pure landscape still untainted by the human imagination and its history.

Course On Midwest Culture: Ray Bradbury, RIP



By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture series Editor

Perhaps tied with Jules Verne and J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury may be my longest-running literary friend. His leatherbound anthology was on my nightstand for the past few months and I'd just read "The Last Night of the World," oddly enough.



His works initially sucked me in as a grade schooler on the mere creativity of their fantasy premises: incessant Venusian rains that could wash the pigments from one’s skin, a murderous hi-tech house, robot clones who fell in love with their masters’ wives. For a kid who liked comic books, the stuff was as golden as Martian eyes and apples of the sun. This initial luster was all LA and Hollywood--wizbang scifi ideas.



I kept returning to Bradbury, however, because the psychological depth of the stories grew with me. He was in that deeply-introspective American literary tradition of Hawthorne which I would grow to love.



And I return today to Bradbury to claim but a small piece of his Hollywood legacy for the Midwest. One obituary briefly deemed Bradbury’s work colored with “Midwest populism”--not taking the time to explain what exactly that could mean--and many others refer to him as a “Midwest surrealist,” mostly based upon his trilogy of bildungsromans based in his hometown of Waukegon, Illinois: Dandelion Wine (‘57), Something Wicked This Way Comes (‘62), and Farewell Summer (‘06).



Bradbury’s status as a Midwesterner--more accurately a dual-citizenship with LA--seems safe to me based on these three novels alone. Even more, though, this Midwestern-ness spills into his other works.



Growing older, I discovered in Bradbury’s short stories echoes of that Midwestern opus, Winesburg, Ohio. They weren’t just deeply, Protestantly introspective--Faulkner too grew out of Hawthorne in that respect. They were laconic, more restrained (or repressed) than violent. The extraordinary sci-fi premises of Bradbury’s stories--the Hollywood--were always captured in the plainest of prose and set in motion with rather ordinary characters and their rather ordinary, quiet struggles. Bradbury’s Anns, Toms, and Susans were bourgeois, heartland vanilla. Moderate. Normal. Nice. But amazing stories lay just beyond their heartland propriety.



The Illustrated Man and his interlocutor are representative. 

It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky...

    ...He seemed only to sense my presence, for he didn’t look directly at me when he spoke his first words:


    “Do you know where I can find a job?”


    “I’m afraid not,” I said.


    “I haven’t had a job that’s lasted in forty years,” he said.


    Though it was a hot late afternoon, he wore his wool shirt buttoned tight about his neck. His sleeves were rolled and buttoned down over his thick wrists. Perspiration was streaming from his face, yet he made no move to open his shirt.


    “Well,” he said at least, “this is as good a place as any to spend the night. Do you mind company?” 


    “I have some extra food you’d be welcome to,” I said


    He sat down heavily, grunting. “You’ll be sorry you asked me to stay,” he said. “Everyone always is. That’s why I’m walking. Here it is, early September, the cream of the Labor Day carnival season. I should be making money hand over fist at any small town side show celebration, but here I am with no prospects.”


    He took off an immense shoe and peered at it closely. “I usually keep a job about ten days. Then something happens and they fire me. By now every carnival in America won’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.”


    “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked.


    For answer, he unbuttoned his tight collar, slowly. With his eyes shut, he put a slow hand to the task of unbuttoning his shirt all the way down. He slipped his fingers in to feel his chest. “funny,” he said, eyes still shut. “You can’t feel them but they’re there. I always hope that someday I’ll look and they’ll be gone. I walk in the sun for hours on the hottest days, baking, and hope that my sweat’ll wash them off, the sun’ll cook them off, but at sundown they’re still there.” He turned his head slightly toward me and exposed his chest. “Are they still there now?”


    After a long while I exhaled. “Yes,” I said, “They’re still there.

    The Illustrations.

..   

   ...“How long have you been Illustrated?”


    “In 1900, when I was twenty years old and working a carnival, I broke my leg. It laid me up, I had to do something to keep my hand in, so I decided to get tattooed.”


    “But who tattooed you? What happened to the artist?”


    “She went back to the future,” he said. “I mean it. She was an old woman in a little house in the middle of Wisconsin here somewhere not far from this place. A little old witch who looked a thousand years old one moment and twenty years old the next, but she said she could travel in time. I laughed. Now, I know better.”

    …“So people fire me when my pictures move. They don’t like it when violent things happen in my Illustrations. Each Illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking you could see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts.”

    …I lay back a few feet from him. He didn’t seem violent, and the pictures were beautiful. Otherwise I might have been tempted to get out and away from such babbling. But the Illustrations...I let my eyes fill up on them. Any person would go a little mad with such things upon his body.


    The night was serene. I could hear the Illustrated Man’s breathing in the moonlight. Crickets were stirring gently in the distant ravines. I lay with my body sidewise so I could watch the Illustrations. Perhaps half an hour passed. Whether the Illustrated Man slept I could not tell, but suddenly I heard him whisper, “They’re moving, aren’t they?”


    I waited a minute.


    Then I said, “Yes.”

••••••••••

POST-SCRIPT + PREVIEW: With the wonderful response on AOTR’s facebook page, I’ve decided to include this “PS+Preview” at the end of every post. Here I’ll look for your response to the current post and input on the post to come—to keep this experiment as democratic as possible.

PS: Is Bradbury more Hollywood or more Midwest?

Preview: My next post will risk boredom by looking for secondary rather than primary sources on the Midwest. Are any of you involved in some form of “Midwest Studies” (publications, conferences, societies, etc)? Does such a field formally exist? Do you have any favorite secondary publications on the culture of the region?

Introducing A Course On Midwest Culture

Steam Coming Off The Grain Bins, Outside Sioux Center, Iowa; Kenyon Gradert

Art of the Rural is excited to announce A Course On Midwest Culture, a new series that promises to apply a wide interdisciplinary lens to a region of the country often relegated to reductive myths and cliches. 

With this, we are also pleased to welcome Kenyon Gradert to our staff. Kenyon is a doctoral student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis with primary research interests in religion and philosophy, romanticism, and nineteenth-century American literature. He was raised on a third-generation grain and cattle farm in northwest Iowa. His father and younger brother continue to live in this region and work as cropdusters.

Kenyon will curate the Course on Midwest Culture series, a project that seeks to utilize new media to find a common ground between the discussions that occur within the Academy and those that take place everyday in the American Midwest. His introduction to this effort begins below.

••••••••••

The Midwest holds a complicated spot in American cultural thought. While it has competing claims to both blasé “flyover” and that core of American moral fiber, the “Heartland,” other regions encroach upon its cultural capital. The South seems to have a monopoly on popular rurality and the East coast keeps old-school cosmopolitanism tucked in its pocket, never mind the lake cities’ key role in our industrial revolution, the historical centrality of St. Louis and Chicago in the 19th-century, and the rather straightforward fact that the Midwest today has almost twice as many farmers as the South.

Culturally, the Midwest may seem nothing more than that quaint vacuum between New York and LA without even the literary charm of the south. Indeed, some may think “Midwest culture” the height of oxymoron.

But the region has been home to significant literary endeavor--and long before the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Someday I’d like to use this literature to form a college course that challenges presumptions and assaults (im)pieties both within and towards the Midwest, a place that is neither quaint Georgic pastoral nor vacuous meth ghetto. Perhaps a bit of both, with much in between.

A Course on Midwest Culture will be a recurring series, a syllabus in the making, if you will. I’ll post a brief excerpt of a possible primary text along with my own brief observations and arguments for why such a text should be in such a course. 

Like the internet itself, this cultural studies project will be interdisciplinary. Mosaic-like, I may use a post on Hamlin Garland’s short story “Under the Lion’s Paw” to examine the rural complications of Marxist thought, meanwhile providing web links to Johnny Carson’s Public Service Announcement for the Farmers’ Crisis of the 1980s, a University of Missouri sociological study on rural versus urban poverty, or even John Mellencamp’s first Farm Aid show on the University of Illinois-Champaign campus.


Most importantly, I’ll look for your feedback. 

When it’s all said and done, my hope is that this project demonstrates the necessity of such a course offering, which I might teach at some point in my time as a doctoral student. Thus, with your help, this series becomes an experiment in a more democratic course-construction. 

Professors most often go to other professors via listservs to determine course material. Why not let Midwesterners outside of the academy help?