Who Wants to Talk Disappointing Fall Foliage & Sameness of Place? (SWWC, vol 4, issue 5)
HELLO!
Readers, I am going to level with you all: Sometimes, the day job takes all my brainial (brain + cranial -- let's get this portmanteau trending!) reserves. And then this inner dialogue takes place:
SELF: I want to write a So What, Who Cares!
ALSO SELF: Can you write 500-750 words of analysis on a news topic right now?
SELF: ... But I want to write a So What, Who Cares!
ALSO SELF: Look, you know the rules. You made up the rules. If you can't provide the "so what" and the "who cares," you don't get to write!
SELF: ...
ALSO SELF: No newsletter for you until you up your brainial capacities.
SELF: I don't think that's a word.
ALSO SELF: A critique coming from you? Try to expand on that, maybe you'll get a newsletter out of it.
And then one day, a third voice chimed into this fruitless loop
SELF: ... But I want to write a So What, Who Cares!
ALSO SELF: Look, you know the rules. You made up the rules. If you can't provide the "so what" and the "who cares," you don't get to write!
ALSO ALSO SELF: Wait -- if you made up the rules, you can also modify the rules.
SELF: I can do that?
ALSO SELF: No! We live in a society! Rule of law applies!
SELF: Do we? Does it really?
So! Welcome to a more freeform version of SWWC. Sometimes you'll get old-school formats, sometimes you'll get me sharing a paragraph or two on something I'm noodling on.
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I have traveled a lot recently -- something I mention in the edition of Two Bossy Dames I guest-edited with Terri Coles -- and I will be chewing over the cross-country drive I did with my mom for some time.
The first thing: The fall foliage east of the Rockies and south of the Great Lakes was mostly terrible. We had a small spike in old-school "It's fall, y'all!" in Chicago, and then when I drove east and down the Appalachians, it was back to feeling as if I had somehow driven into the month of August. Even the trees, limp and faded green, seemed over their lingering leaves.
Perhaps, I thought, I was romanticizing what fall was like back east. But science has backed me up in confirming that verily, the fall foliage season disappointed
. Blame warm, wet weather. And if you'd like, blame climate change:
In New England, a combination of warmer and wetter winters is expected to threaten iconic color-producing trees like sugar maple, according to a recent government report [U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service plant physiologist Kevin] Smith noted there could be myriad potential effects, from changes in species composition to changes in the genetic makeup of the species present.
First fall fashion had to adjust to changing weather, and now fall foliage. It makes one wonder if the capitalist fetishization of fall -- pumpkin-spice everything! Cable-knit sweaters and apple-picking! Approximately $9 billion in Halloween spending! -- is some sort of collective wishful thinking. If we all spend enough on the totems of the season, we can keep it going. Clap your hands and open your wallet if you believe in fall.
The second thing I was chewing over: The sameness of place in the U.S. I'm not here to be all, "small towns, blah blah blah, there's no THERE there," because Buzz Bissinger said it better:
I’ve been to a lot of towns like this, not quintessentially small towns, but isolated American places. And it, frankly, struck me, in that it was relentless and ugly and had that awful, endless strip mall, in a sense, that went on for miles and miles. The main street is sweet and cute, but it really serves no real purpose anymore. It’s that strip of Highway 81 that has become a nexus of life in a place like Duncan, and there really is no nexus to a place like that, there is no there, there.
Rather, what struck me about sameness-of-place were the places Dan Savage characterized as the urban archipelago. My mom and I stopped in Ft. Collins, Colorado, for lunch and I was struck by how very similar it felt to Pleasanton, California. Brewpubs across the street from high-tech business parks; wide sidewalks and well-tended trees on the streets; a Trader Joe's easily available. When I got out of the car, I was struck by how familiar it felt.
Re-reading "The Unbearable Sameness of Cities" by Oriana Schwindt, I do wonder if this is really what happened:
Perhaps it’s inevitable, this sameness, when you’re taking a broad view of a country in which nearly 326 million people are strewn across 3.8 million square miles. A country which is connected by the light-speed of the internet and hundreds of millions of people looking at Instagram photos of bistros in Nashville, in Los Angeles, in Brooklyn, and going, “I want that.”
But then I think back to this excellent piece, "Small Is Bountiful," and its explanation for the explosion of craft beer:
Craft beer succeeded by opting not to compete directly, instead pursuing what can be called a “true differentiation” strategy. That means they established a product that, in the mind of the consumer, is markedly and undeniably different (as opposed to “false differentiation,” which is more or less the same thing with different packaging). True differentiation, if it works, actually changes consumer preferences.
You can not -- and should not -- conflate the roles of "citizen" and "consumer." But I think you can take a look at where certain brands go (this piece on Dollar General as a harbinger of doom for small towns is a good example) and how people self-sort to specific parts of the country. I am still thinking over what it meant to feel so at home in some places and so alien in others.
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Your pop culture recommendation: Enjoy a one-two hit of pirate parodies! SNL's "Female Sea Captains" is so close to being genuinely hilarious as opposed to just funny, and I recommend it for two reasons: it's serving some serious pirate-chic looks if you're up for channeling a bit of Anne Bonney or Mary Read for your fall lewks. Also I like imagining the ghost of John "Women Aren't Funny" Belushi prowling uneasily around the outskirts of Studio 8H watching regular lady cast members kill it on the show.
But the gold standard for pirate parodies is the Key & Peele "Pirate Chantey." We say "yo-ho," but we don't say "ho," 'cause "ho" is disrespectful, yo!
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