Round on the Edges, High in the Middle

As I buy more books, I'm updating some past lists. Here's one from 2012 with a few additions. Thought this one timely since every presidential election year, Ohio gets some time to be the big man on the Electoral College Campus. And remember, lists are random and incomplete samples of what's on my shelf at a moment in time.

I learned the hard way moving to the east coast that Ohio was the Rodney Dangerfield of states. Telling an east or west coaster you’re from Ohio was a guaranteed death-knell to any conversation. The usual response is "oh" followed by an excuse to find the bar for a refill. You may even feel you are suddenly invisible. This is because we lack distinctive identities. There’s no aura of New York sophistication or the hipness of California or Seattle or intellectual superiority of Cambridge. We can’t charm folks with lilting accents, distinctive hats and boots or entice pastoral romantics with our picturesque fall calendars (even though our less showy maples spew out more syrup than all those cute little New England states combined). We don't have in your face bumper stickers (what is it about Texas that we're not supposed to mess with?) And we don’t have distinctive, over-spiced cuisines with colorful names like "jumbuliah."  There’s just nothing flashy a Buckeye can show off to get a conversation out of first gear.  Here's a few books that I've collected to show the hidden beauty of the first Midwest state. 


Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America, David Giffels (2020). Giffels looks at Ohio’s history and influence on the national culture. Bought online from an independent bookstore in Mansfield, Ohio (now closed). 

 

 

The Hard Way on Purpose, David Giffels. (2014). Profiles the city of Akron following the economic bust. Bought three copies online; two for friends and one for me. 

 

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, David McCullough (2019). McCullough tells the story of the families that migrated from New England to create one of Ohio’s first thriving towns moving west with a spirit of invention.   

 

Ohio Town, A Portrait of Xenia, Helen Hooven Santmyer (1984). Blending history and memoir of small town Ohio to show a snapshot of how small towns thrive and reinvent themselves. Reminiscent of Thorton Wilder's, Our Town and Sherwood Anderson's, Winesburg, Ohio. Paperback disintegrated and replaced with a hard copy bought online.

 

Family, Ian Frazer (1994).  New Yorker contributor Frazier weaves a fascinating family from the small northern Ohio town of Norwalk, Ohio.  He turns his family story into a fascinating saga. Bought as a remainder at Kramer Books and Afterwards in Washington, D.C. Norwalk is located one county east of the book below.

Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson (1919).  Coming of age for a Midwestern boy, set in the fictional town of Winesburg (a fictional name for Anderson's boyhood hometown, Clyde, Ohio).  

Ohio States: A Twentieth Century Midwestern, Jeffery Hammond.  Hammond's growing up was done in the the northern Ohio landscape of flat farmland and gritty rust belt cities.  Hammond's writing is strong enough show the idyllic side of growing up in a small town and restlessness that eventually comes with leaving.  

Out of the Midwest, Johnathan T. Frederick (1944).  A collection of stories running from the western edge of the Appalachians to the Great Lakes to Great Plains.  

The Frumious Bandersnatch!

 

For a couple of semesters in college I worked at the on-campus student coffee shop, The Bandersnatch, named after the creature in Lewis Carroll's famous nonsensical poem, Jabberwocky. When you work inside a Lewis Carroll nonsense poem, you start to take nonsense seriously. While I was toasting bagels and brewing coffee, I thought about it enough to create my own incomplete, nonsense hierarchy. (The lists here reflect my myopia with modern pop culture.)

1. Understandable Nonsense. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is a sentence composed by the MIT Professor of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, and the best example I can think of as nonsense where the words are all understandable but whose meaning is nonsensical. This category is not a lot of fun, mostly because it seems to be the playground for academics to make linguistic arguments. 

 

2. Mixed-Up Nonsense. Second degree of nonsense would be a mix of the understandable and made up. Carroll's 1855 Jabborwocky is what I think of -- writing that is grammatically correct and partially understandable but filled with lot's of made-up, fun words. 

 

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

      And the mome raths outgrabe. 

 

I don't know what a slithy tove is but the sound of the words along send me a direction I can conjure up an image of something amphibian-like. 

 

Carroll's contemporary, Edward Lear, wrote a whole book of nonsense including poems, short stories, songs, drawings, alphabets, and even botanical drawings. 

 

Over a century later, this was fertile ground for writers of pop-songs.

 

The Chrystals had a Top Ten Billboard it with The Da Doo Ron Ron 

 

    I knew what he was doing when he caught my eye
    Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron
    He looked so quiet but my oh my
    Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron

And the pop music variations go on and on. The De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da by The Police gets a special mention with Sting being self-aware enough to expressly call out the meaninglessness of the words.

 
    De do do do, de da da da
    Is all I want to say to you
    De do do do, de da da da
    They're meaningless and all that's true

 

Sting had been playing with mixed non-sense starting as early as their first album, Outlandos d'Amor with the track Masako Tango, most of which are nonsense words.

 

Key wo wa di com la day wa da
Co wa da zu ma pu wa all day
See po wa ta na po ba ba
Zoe ka mo wa I've been sleepin' all day

 

John Lennon filled some of the Beatles most memorable songs with Mixed-Up Nonsense like I am the Walrus

 

    I am the egg man

    They are the egg men

    I am the walrus

    Goo goo g'joob

3. Total Nonsense. Here's where there are no recognizable words and, while it might feel grammatically correct, it's not like a foreign language where you can find a translation because there are no translations. The best example I can think of is the Dada poet, Hugo Ball, who in 1916 wrote a poem, Karawane, consisting of nonsensical words. Some commentators called it a "sound poem."  Here's the opening verse

 

    Gadji beri bimba clandridi
    Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
    A bim beri glassala glandride
    E glassala tuffm I zimbra 

 

The Talking Healds revived the poem in their 1979 song I Zimbra, from their album Fear of Music. Ball received a writing credit for the song on the track listing. If you want to say you've seen everything on the internet, you can watch a video of Marie Osmond reciting Karawane.

 

John Lennon added his own pure nonsense to the Abbey Road song, Sun King with the lryics:

 

    Quando para mucho mi amore de felice corazón
    Mundo paparazzi mi amore chicka ferdy parasol
    Cuesto obrigado tanta mucho que canite carousel

The lyrics sound like a romance language just out of reach but were in fact total nonsense.

There's a lot more nonsense out there for another day but for now I've got to Gimble in the wabe.