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.

Weekly Feed: El Teatro Campesino, Protecting The Reservation, Realities of Local Food, and more

 El Teatro Campesino Founder Luis Valdez

Each week we present a compendium of links and perspectives offered daily on our Rural Arts and Culture Feed. We encourage folks who have upcoming events (local or national) to contribute to The Daily Yonder Calendar. 

By Rachel Rudi, Digital Contributor

• El Teatro Campesino has created powerful, boundary-crossing work in San Juan Bautista, California for over forty years. Below, composer Daniel Valdez discussing Cancion De San Juan: Oratorio of a Mission Town.

Story One: The Research from El Teatro Campesino on Vimeo.

From the Cancion De San Juan online exhibition:

Through CANCIÓN DE SAN JUAN: ORATORIO OF A MISSION TOWN, El Teatro Campesino and composer Daniel Valdez hoped to honor history’s forgotten voices by telling human stories through music and images – evoking the moments and memories of real people who lived and died staking a claim to this little corner of the world. Together these stories, researched and collected by current residents of San Juan Bautista, were woven into an epic tapestry that unfolded as a paean to the rise, fall and constant rebirth of a small town in all its multicultural glory. CANCIÓN DE SAN JUAN: ORATORIO OF A MISSION TOWN explored the many transformations experienced by the people of this region – and their perseverance, resilience and stubborn refusal to cease existing in the face of overwhelming odds.

• "I wish a lot of people could see this. This is something that's going on in the reservation: This don't look too cool." Appalling news from Wyoming: 

Loophole Lets Toxic Flow Over Indian Land, Elizabeth Shogren, NPR

• "A hundred years ago, when extension was founded, one-third of our nation's population was involved in agriculture.... We need extension today, more than ever, because our society is growing not only in size, but also in the nature and complexity of its problems:"

Extension Programs, Now A Century Old, Remain Relevant as They Face New Challenges, Speaker Says, Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education 

• Shelby Grebenc, a Colorado poultry farmer in her teens, writes beautifully in The Denver Post: "If you want sustainable, wholesome, pasture-raised organic, hormone- and antibiotic-free food, you have to support it. You cannot get these things by talking about it and not paying for it."

• A must-read: During World War II, the Rowher and Jerome camps in Arkansas housed over 16,000 Japanese Americans. An intern at the University of Arkansas's Institute on Race and Ethnicity considers the legacy of these camps and their relation to contemporary American life:

Reflections on Rowher, Jessica Yamane, The Boiled Down Juice

• "Even as cities from Philadelphia to Chicago to Detroit mobilize to hydrate the food deserts, it's becoming clear that even if you make fresh produce affordable, people may not buy it."  

Cheaper Fruit and Vegetables Alone Can't Save Food Deserts, Eliza Barclay, NPR

• "Kultivator is an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice, situated in rural village Dyestad, on the Island of Oland on the southeast coast of Sweden. By installing certain functions in abandoned farm facilities, near to the active agriculture community, Kultivator provides a meeting and workign space that points out the parallels between provision production and art practice, between concrete and abstract processes for survival Kultivator initiates and executes  meetings between idealism and realism, hoping that fruitful cooperations should should take form." 

• "The joy is not just for me, it's for others too. The colors do that. Mural art is transforming small-town Martin, Tennessee." 

Colorful Murals a Welcome Addition to the Landscape of Martin, Sandy Koch, NWTN Today 

• Welcome to Shelbyville "takes an intimate look at a southern town as its residents – whites and African =Americans, Latinos and Somalis – grapple with their beliefs, their histories and their evolving ways of life:"

• Mark Your Calendars: The 2012 Rural Arts & Culture Summit will happen this June 5–6, in Morris, Minnesota, hosted by the Center for Small Towns at University of Minnesota-Morris. We will be sharing much more on this event in the coming months -- please plan to join us there!

• This week in 1975, Waylon's "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way" was the number one country single in the land. Via the essential Southern Folklife Collection:

Double Weekly Feed: Wild Girls, Our Town, Native Ground, Westbrook Artists, and more

 International Sonoran Desert Alliance, recipient of a NEA Our Town grant

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• Congratulations to our colleague Mary Stewart Atwell, whose debut novel Wild Girls was recently published by Scribner. "Fire-lit from start to finish, Wild Girls is a story of Appalachian magic, conflagration, and supernatural violence," writes Swamplandia! author Karen Russell. Around Art of the Rural, we call it The Appalachian Anti-Twilight. Check out the book trailer below, directed by Charlie Cline:


Wild Girls by Mary Stewart Atwell Book Trailer from Charlie Cline on Vimeo.

• GALA Hispanic Theatre is bringing a reality of rural Southwestern culture to audiences in Washington, D.C. via the Mexican dance company Teatro Linea de Sombra and their newest multimedia program. Celia Wren offers this introduction in The Washington Post: "a theatrical meditation on the harsh realities that face undocumented migrants and their families, “Amarillo” also features projections, throat singing, a surveillance camera, 100 water bottles, a 15-foot-high wall that actors climb and bounce off – and a poem by Harold Pinter." 

This event was made possible, as Wren writes, thanks to "Southern Exposure: Performing Arts of Latin America, a program of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, supports U.S. arts presenters that band together to bring Latin American performers to this country."

 

• National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grants fund creative placemaking projects that enliven communities through vibrant and sustainable art. Information is available online, and two webinars are scheduled to aid in the application process. 

November 6: 
http://artsgov.adobeconnect.com/our-town-guidelines-nov6/ 

November 13:  
http://artsgov.adobeconnect.com/our-town-guidelines-nov13/

Rural projects have been prominently featured in this program in the past, so folks should consider applying. We will be featuring much more information on the Our Town program in the weesks to come.

• The folks at Dust-to-Digital are directing a new non-profit, Music Memory, which will feature an expansive digital database that "will serve as a musical Rosetta Stone for future generations by showing the links and cross-influences of the many musical styles captured on phonograph records in the first half of the 20th century."

• "I'm not nothin' new 'cause I'm black. Bill Pickett was black. He was one of the greatest rodeo acts of all time. A black man, DeFord Bailey, was the first country-music superstar ever. I'm just doing what the greats have already done before me."

Wild Bill Young infuses his country singing, and his strutting, with elements of hip-hop and rap, a mixture of the musics and lifestyles of his Missouri childhood, and has found he is able to defy racist stereotypes and expand cultural understanding among the audiences he performs for across the country. Calvin Cox offers a profile in The Riverfront Times.

• On Native Ground "captures a demographic of youth through elders, and reaches past all cultural and ethnic barriers, by highlighting positive role models and current and historical events that are uniquely Native American." 

Here's the premiere episode, first broadcast on First Nations Experience on October 24:


On Native Ground vol 1 from jack kohler on Vimeo.
 

• Don't Forget This Song, the Carter Family comic book, is out now – complete with a CD of eleven rare radio recordings. Says American Songwriter Magazine: "Affectionate and admiring, The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song captures the family’s rise to success through numerous struggles as well as the enduring power of music and love." 

 selection from Don't Forget This Song

• Check out this great write-up on Brian Frink and Rural America Contemporary Art in The Free Press of Mankato, Minnesota. We encourage folks to check out the amazing range of work presented on the gorgeous new RACA site -- and stay tuned, RACA is about to debut its online magazine!

• Located in Madison County, Iowa, The Westbrook Artists' Site operates as "a project for exploration of the post-industrial rural condition." We are excited about their mission statement: 

The Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS) explores the continuity between rural and urban contexts. If the rural is typically viewed as what was left behind in the process of urbanization, WAS insists, to the contrary, that rural life and landscape need to be seen as vital parts of a system that is urban and rural. WAS cultivates art and design as purposeful interventions within such an interconnected system. The WAS project mission challenges participants to find and explore the connective tissue binding rural and urban worlds and to create modes of address that speak from a rural landscape to both rural and urban audiences. 

• "Big Tex – his mouth moved as he uttered ‘Howdy, folks!’ – was celebrating its, or his, 60th birthday. But on Friday, Big Tex caught fire and was all but destroyed in the flames and thick smoke. His fiberglass head, hat and boots were consumed, as were most of his fabric clothes, leaving only his outstretched arms, belt buckle and metal skeleton intact." Folks can read Manny Fernandez's piece New York Times story here.

Left, LM Otero, Associated Press; right, John McKibben, Associated Press

Weekly Feed: Collaboration, Ecology, Digital Media and Food for Thought

Photograph of the Fennimore Art Museum

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• "Rural art museums face distinct challenges when it comes to building audiences for exhibitions and programs," writes Paul D’Ambrosio, president of the New York State Historical Association. “Unlike our counterparts located in urban areas or population centers, rural art museums must compel their audience to travel a good distance to partake of their offerings, and they must tailor their exhibitions and programs to the particular patterns favored by those travelers. At the same time, they must do so while building a donor and sponsorship base that is likewise not local or at least only seasonal.” The Fenimore Art Museum of rural Cooperstown, NY, found a solution through regional collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking. 

Photograph from the Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives

• “Rising before daylight and perched on a bench at his Sauk County shack in Depression-era Wisconsin, [Aldo] Leopold routinely took notes on the dawn chorus of birds. Beginning with the first pre-dawn calls of the indigo bunting or robin, Leopold would jot down in tidy script the bird songs he heard, when he heard them, and details such as the light level when they first sang. He also mapped the territories of the birds near his shack, so he knew where the songs originated.” 

Using these astounding records, two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have managed to recreate the sounds that surrounded Leopold seventy years ago, compiling the various calls and sounds described and compressing them into one five-minute audio track. Listen here.

Folks may also be interested in perusing this 2011 program anchored at Arizona State University: Rethinking the Land Ethic: Sustainability and the Humanities. 


The Migrating Mural by Jane Kim from Jane Kim on Vimeo.

Artist and science illustrator Jane Kim is on a mission to educate travelers and everyday commuters about the wildlife around them. Following the routes of America’s endangered migratory animals, Kim pulls off the highway to transform the sides of old barns and houses into murals of the animals who seasonally pass by. View Kim’s Kickstarter video here.

New York Times; Kiersten Essenpreis

• "We’re Here, We’re Queer, Y’all" is a must-read New York Times editorial addressing regional stereotypes. Professor Karen Cox also edits the Pop South site and tweets at @SassyProf.

• Standing Bear’s Footsteps crafts workshops and classes for the youth of the Ponca Tribe in Nebraska and Oklahoma. Available on the project’s website is a collection of brief interviews conducted and filmed by Southern Ponca students in a digital media course. In this clip, "Mikhael Laravie, a 7th grade participant in Standing Bear's Footsteps Youth Media Camp, interviews his grandmother Lola Laravie asking about her childhood growing up on a farm in Nebraska."

Discovering Christ in a Michigan Laundromat

from the On Wisconsin project; Mark Brautigam, as seen on fly over art

Please find below an excerpt from "That Story," by Jack Driscoll, a work that was awarded a Pushcart Prize this year after appearing in print in The Georgia Review. Polly Atwell's previous piece on Driscoll's fiction can be read here.

Wherever my mom finds these articles I haven’t a clue. All I know is that she clips them out and hands them to me to read. “Look, Fritzi, another miracle,” she says, the most recent having occurred somewhere outside San Francisco.

      For a good laugh I pass them along to Dieter and Brinks while we smoke in my dad’s Plymouth Fury, the odometer frozen at 172,605 miles. The car is up on blocks, transmission shot and the hubs painted purple. Rear risers but no tires, and snow up to both doors so we have to crawl inside, like it’s an igloo or a fort, and always with some half-wrapped notion of someday firing it alive and driving hellbent away from Bethlehem. Not the one in Pennsylvania, but a town so remote you can’t even locate its position on a USGS map.

       And therein resides both the irony and the farthest far-flung implausibility that somebody hereabouts discovers a visage of Christ in a lint screen at the local Laundromat, and that then, along with our name, we got ourselves a shrine and a destination to boot. “Imagine it,” my mom says, but a million pilgrims desperate to put a knee down in this nothing town suddenly adjacent to God and heaven confounds even the dreamer in me. And yet, as misguided as such an influx sounds, it’s what she’s apparently banking on. Which might explain why she’s hand-painting all those baby Jesus Christmas ornaments, preparing to make a fortune off the endless caravans of sinners soon to arrive here in the provinces. But she says, “Nope. Uh-uh.” They’re nothing more than another scheme designed to fill and quiet time. Besides, she says, each month at the diner she always manages to sell at least a few to the truckers to take home to their wives.

Jack Driscoll: Place Forms Character

Editor's Note: Today we are pleased to welcome Polly Atwell as a contributor. Polly is a writer, critic, and author of Wild Girls, a novel forthcoming from Scribner this fall. For more information on her work, please see our contributors page.

By Polly Atwell

Mention Jack Driscoll’s name to a fiction writer, and you’ll likely get nods of recognition and admiration.  Mention his name to someone who’s spent time in northern Michigan and you’ll get the same response, perhaps with even more enthusiasm.  Since his debut story collection, Wanting Only to Be Heard, was published in 1995, Driscoll has been recognized as the chronicler of that snowbound and still-remote country between Detroit and the Mackinac Bridge.  His stories and novels mine the rural landscape, producing characters that feel like people we know, whether or not we’ve ever been north of Chicago.  In his new collection, The World of a Few Minutes Ago, Driscoll’s flawless sense of prose rhythm, his well-trained eye for the perfect and often humorous detail, and his deep compassion for his characters make the stories a great pleasure for writers and non-writers alike.

Driscoll’s compassion and sense of humor extend into the real world, where they have benefited legions of students at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the MFA program at Pacific University.  I was lucky enough to be one of those students, and recently I had the chance to talk to Jack about his work, his life as a writer and teacher, and what it means to tell stories of those small rural communities at the 38th Parallel.  An excerpt from our conversation is included below.

“I’ve lived now for thirty-seven years up here in the northern provinces, long enough to have witnessed a literal transformation of the place itself.  When I first arrived in 1975 there were, as I remember, no full stoplights, and so at best we had to slow down a bit for those blinking yellows, and the spaces between them mostly farmland and uninhabited coastline.  Somewhat barren but not as if ‘creation had stopped halfway through the third day,’ to pilfer from Whitney Groves.  Because of the region’s great beauty, and the town’s gentrification, our status as a destination—via the New York Times and elsewhere—has coordinated an entirely new look.  Coffee shops on every corner, and upscale restaurants, film and literary festivals, organic co-ops and farmers markets, and the population during the summer months increasing tenfold.  To varying degrees, cultural collision does occur, though those inherent hostilities are not so directly confronted in my stories.  The focus for me is always something else, by which I mean that tension created by what a place/community offers and what it can’t possibly provide.

“Here’s our standing joke: we have three seasons in northern Michigan—July, August, and winter, and in 2010 we endured an official 209 inches of snow.  Place forms character.  Or, as Ortega y Gasset says, ‘Tell me the place in which you live and I will tell you who you are.’  Up north this protracted winter season overlays and outlines a terrain as gorgeous as it is terrifying, empty, cut-off, unforgiving.  I’ve come to love such extremes, and how these conditions conspire to define behavior.  As the teenage narrator in ‘That Story’ says, ‘I’m eye-level with the snowdrifts that the wind has sculpted, the temperature single-digit at best, and it’s beyond me why I say what I say, but I do, inviting trouble of a magnitude that we don’t need and yet sometimes covet.’  Eliminate this frozen landscape and the story ceases to exist.  It’s the nature, I suppose, of a writer’s sensibility with a particular place, where the characters’ inwardness is informed by all that surrounds them in the actual physical world in which they operate.  Nothing comes more naturally—and less self-consciously—to me than setting my stories here, where I’ve now lived for thirty-seven years.  Not to mention the wildness of such a terrain, which I’ve always, from the time I was a little kid, craved, the woods and the waterways.  And why writers such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau have been so important to me.”


This feature will continue in a second part, with a selection from "That Story" by Jack Driscoll.

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?

Bob Dylan's Direction Home

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines over the second half of February, this seems like a good time to give a retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural. Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse audience. In March we will offer new articles and series, and share some new projects related to our mission.

Bob Dylan's Direction Home was originally published on January 25, 2011. His summer tour did not travel through Minnesota.]

**********

City’s just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away.
I was raised in the country, I been working in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.

     --from "Mississippi"

Last week Aaron, a reader from Ohio, passed along some very interesting news. It appears that Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan's birthplace, is actively working to bring back their estranged native son for a concert on his 70th birthday. The news of these plans has been documented in forums on the encyclopedic Dylan resource Expecting Rain, and was confirmed last month in the Duluth News Tribune, where John Ziegler reported that city officials are currently in talks with Dylan and his management to bring him back to Minnesota on or around his May 24th birthday. 

As with all things Bob Dylan, this story contains a good deal of rumor and apocrypha. For instance, I heard that the small mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan's hometown, had originally sought to welcome the musician back on his 70th birthday (Aaron tells me that Dylan last visited for his ten-year high school reunion, where he was roundly ignored by his former classmates), yet Mr. Ziegler reports that Duluth had extended their invitation a full year ahead of schedule, contacting him on his 69th birthday. Regardless, if Dylan accepts this invitation we will see a great deal of media attention focused on his rural Minnesota roots. While there may be a nostalgic whiff to such reflections, it is significant to think of Dylan-the-70-year-old back in Minnesota, over four decades after he recorded his generation-defining howl of "no direction home".

If we put that song--and the long-view of Dylan's legacy--in perspective, then what could also come out of such a birthday in Minnesota could be a reappraisal of a whole generation's relationship to rural place. While Dylan did his best to shirk his "voice of a generation" status, it's clear that his life narrative, captured so eloquently in "Mississippi," is representative of many of his fellow baby boomers: that first wave of the "rural-brain drain," many of whom would later take part in the flight out of America's urban centers and into a suburban life where rolling stones meet their cul-de-sac. 

However, Dylan's last handful of records have embraced the traditional forms of blues and country music just as baby boomers are returning to facets of their own rural upbringing. While the local and organic food phenomenon is part and parcel of this generational trend, many are realizing (as Wendell Berry did so many years ago, in his essay "A Native Hill")  that you can go home again. In my own home region this has been occurring for a few years, as baby-boomers begin to form organizations to preserve our small Ohio Valley town--and to hopefully bring it back to some semblance of its former self. 

Beyond this, the issue becomes one of what "homecoming" means, and how the rural diaspora negotiates this return. As this teenager's video from Hibbing suggests, life never stopped in these communities, and those who stayed both welcome and resent the influence of those who left.

We'll be following the events surrounding this birthday concert; until then, here's a short video produced by the University of Minnesota in conjunction with the UM Press's release of Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World, edited by Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss:

Two For Mardi Gras

Zulu Parade 2010 King Jimmie L Felder; Eliot Kamenitz, Times Picayune

Here's two videos with a bit of Mardi Gras spirit. First, from the Alan Lomax Archive Channel, comes this footage shot by Alan Lomax and his crew in 1982: "Big Chief Jake Millon and the White Eagles Mardi Gras Indians rehearse 'Little Liza Jane' at Darrell's Lounge, 7th Ward, New Orleans."

Though geographically distant, David Lundahl's "Volcan Man" performances are located in a similar region of exuberance, also honoring the passing of a season. Yesterday we published a consideration of this boundary-crossing artist in Contemporary (Rural) Art: You Can't Make That Here.

Many thanks to Rachel Reynolds Luster for her assistance. Happy Mardi Gras!

Contemporary (Rural) Art: You Can't Make That Here

photograph by David Lundahl

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines over the second half of February, this seems like a good time to give a retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural. Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse audience. In March we will offer new articles and series, and share some new projects related to our mission.

[Contemporary (Rural) Art: You Can't Make That Here was originally published on August 3, 2010. Please see the links below the article for further coverage of Lundahl's work here and here ; we recommend a visit as well to the Rural America Contemporary Artists organization.]

*****

I recently had an opportunity to re-visit David Lundahl, the photographer, sculptor and musician from southern Wisconsin who (over 15 years) has taken 115,000 Polaroid self-portraits. When we originally discussed his work a few months ago, I spoke of the process itself: how the layers of stencils, gelled prints, and natural media (scarves, bark, shark jaws, among others) combine with a complex series of mirrors to harness natural light to create a startling level of three-dimensionality to his photographs. I also spoke of his life itself in some detail, which I'll reprint below:

The story of David Lundahl's art and life can't really be put into one paragraph, but, as an introduction, here it goes. Mr. Lundahl's art, and his choice to live in rural Wisconsin, all speak to his lived experiences. He contracted polio as a boy in the 1950's and has worn a leg brace ever since; his family were prominent executives in John Deere; he came of age in the heady years of the late 1960's and decided to set out on his own path...

But part of the story here is New Light Studios, the dilapidated farm that Mr. Lundahl rebuilt, largely by himself. Despite his restricted mobility, he reroofed and refloored the barn and completely rehabilitated the house and other buildings. Thus, an abandoned dairy farm became a place for people to come and visit and make art: the silo contains musical instruments, the barn is floored to accomidate dance performances, one room in the house is covered in three layers of white shellac to make it an overwhelming space for music-making, a modified shed is a welding studio and the corn silo is affixed with a level of decks leading all the way to the top--so that one can watch the sunset or just read a book 100 feet in the air.

Here is a slideshow I created that traces the arc of these photographs, from the early representational stencil works to the intensely abstract self-portraits of the later years. They appear larger and in greater detail by following the link to the web album:

David Lundahl's art, and the story of how he overcame physical adversity to create a place equal to his art, ranks among the most inspired and visionary collections of work I've ever encountered. However, the more recent chapters of this story have thrown his accomplishment into a light that may be all-too-familiar to our readers and to those attempting to make art outside of our country's urban centers. 

Put simply, the very place that gives Mr. Lundahl the space and freedom to create his art--by virtue of its remove from urban and suburban centers--actively works against his desire to share it with people beyond his handful of local friends. While these audiences may feel more comfortable with someone from rural Wisconsin engaging in the folk arts, or portraying subject matter they deem sufficiently "rural," an artist like David Lundahl (and his social non-conformity) throws all of those assumptions to the side. One visitor from New York City, after sitting around the artist's kitchen table and viewing some of his photographs, perhaps articulated this predicament best; "you can't make that here," he yelled, shaking Mr. Lundahl by the shoulders, imploring him to leave Wisconsin for New York. 

Yet David Lundahl is staying put at New Light Studios, albeit uneasily. Though he despises the line of thinking that suggests that modern art can only be made in cities, and only with by entering "the art world," he simultaneously feels a desperate need to connect with anyone, artists or otherwise. When he talks through this bind to me, it's clear that his work has left him at the crossroads, to decide between valuing the place he calls home or leaving it for the sake of an artform that only exists because of its rural genesis. 

I'm wondering if other readers have encountered similar issues--either themselves, or in the story of other rural artists. Here's a few questions we're considering here at The Art of the Rural, inspired by Mr. Lundahl's position: are modern rural artists who don't work in a folkloric vein solely considered "outsider artists?" Is there a rural-urban dynamic beneath that term (even though there are many urban outsider and self-taught artists)? Wendell Berry has written of "the prejudice against country people;" is there a similar prejudice against (or misunderstanding of) rural artists, or has the internet eroded those limiting assumptions?

If you have any ideas, or suggestions for artists that address these questions, please feel free to contact us or discuss the matter on our Facebook page--we're hoping to discover more artists such as Mr. Lundahl.