Approaching the Rural Theme

Sven Birk­erts, in one of his many books or essays—every one is worth your while, by the way; I've read them many times in some cases—makes a case that we haven't real­ly seen a rep­re­sen­ta­tive lit­er­ary nov­el (I'd expand this to oth­er gen­res too) of the elec­tron­ic age in the way we might have been able to pick one or two out from past eras, that images and sounds and bits of infor­ma­tion whiz by us at such break­neck speed no one's been able to over­come the sheer mass and ampli­tude to make sense of it all. Which res­onates for me, I have to say. It's why realism—let's argue about what that means lat­er, shall we?— is the dom­i­nant lit­er­ary mode in the mar­ket­place for both poet­ry and fic­tion. Com­bine that with pub­lish­ers who don't see val­ue in exper­i­men­ta­tion, and you get a pub­lish­ing land­scape dom­i­nat­ed by his­tor­i­cal fic­tions and Carvere­seque sto­ries with lots of craft and lit­tle heart, mem­oirs and mem­oirish fic­tion, tiny domes­tic dra­ma poems, small moments of insight, etc, or, even more annoy­ing­ly, the one-trick pony high-con­cept nov­el or poem. You can find crit­ics and oth­er peo­ple all over the web com­plain­ing about it. I'm not going to both­er to link.

But Birk­erts makes the point: what's next? who's going to write that book, that poem, that col­lec­tion, the one that encom­pass­es life as we know it, some­thing to which you could attach a road­side sign, or, more like­ly, a pop-up win­dow. This is espe­cial­ly true for us, for you'uns, for any­one who writes rur­al-based mate­r­i­al or the kind of thing that might get tagged as 'region­al' in the library. Most peo­ple who buy books live in or near cities on either coast, with obvi­ous usu­al­ly-near-uni­ver­si­ties excep­tions. And the vast efflu­via of large­ly rur­al folks in the mid­dle and flanks of the coun­try, what pub­lish­ers and politi­cians call the fly-over zones, don't buy books. So we, as writ­ers, have to find ways to keep our region­al instincts, as well as pay homage to the fast-dis­ap­pear­ing rur­al ways in which we grew up, and make that all rel­e­vant to a more-urban-by-the-minute pop­u­la­tion that buys books, and a rur­al pop­u­la­tion that would rather do some­thing out­side the house or watch TV, or surf the web or whatever—you get the point by now. Who's going to do that? Where is the great (small‑m) mod­ernist or Post­mod­ernist (maybe con­tem­po­rary is the bet­ter word? Less loaded any­way.) rur­al nov­el or poem? The con­cepts don't even seem to work togeth­er. It's easy for inter­lec­tu­als like us to sneer at the aston­ish­ing suc­cess of a book like Cold Moun­tain a few years ago. I was a book­store man­ag­er then, and I resist­ed the book for ages even though Lar­ry Brown and Rick Bass porked off in the blurbs, nor­mal­ly a sure sign I'd like the thing. I resist­ed, and I resist­ed, and I caved final­ly, and I fell com­plete­ly in love. No sur­prise, maybe. But why that book? Why did it get so pop­u­lar, and who bought it, as its sales say it obvi­ous­ly cut through the nor­mal book-buy­ing demo­graph­ic (women age 35–40 and over, gen­er­al­ly) and spread.

The neg­a­tive first: yes, it's most­ly an exer­cise in nos­tal­gia: a nov­el with all the trap­pings of a time and place many peo­ple, in their dirty-greedy-lust­ful-acqui­si­tion­al lit­tle still-flut­ter­ing hearts, would like to go back to, a time in which men were men and women were women, they could over­come hard­ships, and peo­ple did what they had to to sur­vive, and love could (almost) con­quer all. And that's why it was suc­cess­ful: it said for peo­ple what they didn't think they need­ed said about love and war; it com­fort­ed them, build­ing an ide­al­ish world that some­what resem­bles the 'real'; it had (let's not for­get this) a care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed and expen­sive stealth PR cam­paign; it had the back­ing of Ses­salee Hens­ley at B&N. Enough to make me sneer, yeah, dis­miss it as unwor­thy of my time and atten­tion, yeah—but I loved it, and talked it up in my store, and we sold tons, and I was hap­py about it. I even liked the movie, for all its faults, and maybe because of them.

I had grown up around peo­ple like the old lady who helps Inman in the mid­dle of the woods, cur­ing his wounds and feed­ing him, peo­ple who lived out in the sticks and nev­er came to town, the odd sin­gle man who'll help out a fam­i­ly for no reward, and even the randy preach­er: my family's min­is­ter had left his own wife for a parish­ioner just a few years before, some­thing that might have been a scan­dal years ago but bare­ly caused a blip, those days, only fif­teen or so years go.

Tow­er Hill near Daggett was my Cold Moun­tain, a place where my dad had grown up hunt­ing, and where I could find arrow­heads in the plowed fields, where my uncles told sto­ries about the dogs run­ning off in the mid­dle of the night when they caught a scent oth­er than the coon they were sup­posed to be chas­ing, and where we some­times came to draw water from the spring on the side­hill peo­ple had been using for years, since our drink­ing water was iron-filled and rot­ten, and would sep­a­rate if you left it sit for a few moments. My fam­i­ly had been in the area for a hun­dred years, and in some cas­es, had farms just up the road. It's my place, in a way that it'll nev­er be for the fuck­ing flat­landers who've moved in there now and built nice hous­es where trail­ers and clap­board-walled shacks used to be. Improve­ment my ass. I am moved to right­eous anger just to think about it even though I live 300 miles away now… and that's why the book was suc­cess­ful. It keys to the things that make peo­ple most right­eous if you try to take them away: love, land, food, shel­ter. It's a great book, I think, for all its faults. It hits me. But it is nos­tal­gic, and maybe dan­ger­ous­ly so.

That time is gone, and the one we live in is dom­i­nat­ed by large cor­po­ra­tions who rape the land, force peo­ple out, build strip­malls and bypass­es, and chil­dren leave the places in which they've grown up for green­er (dol­lar signs, baby) pas­tures, and what we think and do is increas­ing­ly dic­tat­ed to us by the cor­po­ra­tized media. No won­der we should want some­thing to read that reminds us not of bet­ter times, but of any oth­er time but this one. I want to see the poem or sto­ry or essay that deals with that. Mod­ern con­texts, rur­al set­tings. There's your chal­lenge. Take it up or not.

Lat­er on today I'll hope­ful­ly post the first piece of work to ever appear on Fried Chick­en and Cof­fee. Come back then. I'm going out to drag my kids through the woods in Saugus right now.