"We are all Sisyphus and Prometheus in Michigan."
October 21, 2022 5:59 PM Subscribe
Ah, just for context, Ann Arbor's population, including students, is a good 10% Jewish. (Without, it's lower.) The idea that a liberal Jewish writer would be a foreign creature in Ann Arbor is, mm, a little self-indulgent. In Alpena or wherever-the-hell he went for Thanksgiving dinner, sure. (Additional side note: Dearborn, MI has one of the largest Arabic populations in the country.)
The comments about driving are correct, however.
posted by praemunire at 7:50 PM on October 21, 2022 [9 favorites]
The comments about driving are correct, however.
posted by praemunire at 7:50 PM on October 21, 2022 [9 favorites]
What makes you think he was talking about Ann Arbor?
Like all writers from or living in Ann Arbor they don't use Ann Arbor by name when writing about Ann Arbor.
Except the Dharma Initiative.
posted by clavdivs at 9:32 PM on October 21, 2022
Like all writers from or living in Ann Arbor they don't use Ann Arbor by name when writing about Ann Arbor.
Except the Dharma Initiative.
posted by clavdivs at 9:32 PM on October 21, 2022
Congregation of Moses in Kalamazoo had about 400 members in Kalamazoo, a city of roughly 90,000 people. I can assure you, growing up Jewish there meant a lot of questions that were meant as polite conversation, but were all basically “what do Jews do for (insert holiday here)?” Some of my favorites were variations on “wait, if Jews don’t eat ham, what do they eat for Christmas dinner?”
As exhausting as those conversations could be, they were greatly preferred to outright anti-semitism, or having my hair checked for horns.
posted by Ghidorah at 10:12 PM on October 21, 2022 [6 favorites]
As exhausting as those conversations could be, they were greatly preferred to outright anti-semitism, or having my hair checked for horns.
posted by Ghidorah at 10:12 PM on October 21, 2022 [6 favorites]
Having just finished the whole thing… it’s a lot to take in, but none of it unfamiliar. I’ve never been hunting (in Michigan), and never been to a casino, but I can understand the need to flee the scene (to the basement, or the screened in porch, or where ever for the sweet relief 1) of alcohol and 2) from family seen only this one time a year, for reasons. I know that’s not exactly unique to Michigan, but it’s also fully and totally a part of the state, as is so much else in this piece.
I just had to go back home for the first time since Corona, to be with my mother as she was dying, and, once she had actually died, sat with my sister, trying to figure out what we were supposed to do next. “We should go to Flint” I said, not wanting to, but because that’s where she was from, and that’s where her side of the family, a side of the family almost entirely unknown to me due to my own stupid choices, a side of the family I hadn’t seen since the summer of 1999, right before I moved overseas, not realizing at the time that it’d be a permanent move.
We rented a car. My sister drove out of Chicago because, no, I wasn’t ready for driving in Chicago, the assholes on the roads there seem to have fermented, become concentrated in the last three years, and become somehow purer, almost crystalline in their assholery. We stopped at the rest stop in New Buffalo, my first time in Michigan since the death of my father thirteen years ago. I reveled in the travel brochures, the lighthouse nowhere near the lake, and, oh shit, I’d forgotten the little standing public use grills next to every picnic table, as if there’s some legal code stating that there can be no picnic table on public land without a grill next to it (I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were).
We stayed with my sisters friends in St. Jo, a city I’d been past hundreds of times on i94, but never to. The next morning, I took over driving duties, getting us to Flint, and driving in Michigan was the absolute most I felt at home in that entirely awful month back in a country I no longer recognized. The line in this post, about never forgetting how to be from Michigan, it’s like riding a bicycle made of ice, it washed over me like that whole bizarre weekend, and it’s true.
It wasn’t thanksgiving, but it was one of the larger family gatherings that had been put together for a while. We gathered to be together, my aunt (a second or third cousin, I think, but my aunt all the same) who’d taken, or been forced to take the role of matriarch of the family, of those that are still here, took a moment, only one, to call everyone to the barn where we’d set up tables since the weather wouldn’t decide if it wanted to be gorgeous, as it was, in turns with freezing downpour, as Michigan is. She said kind things, she said brutally honest things, and we toasted her memory. Past that, most conversations seemed to be either an echo of the “how do Jews do things” where being Jewish was replaced by living in Japan, and no offense was intended, but oof, or being made to prove my Michiganderness, which had become something I’d only just rediscovered in myself, hiding inside, with pride and defiance the whole time (but screw UoM, go State). “You don’t talk like you’re from here” I was told, not a question, a challenge. “I’m from Kalamazoo, we sound different, and anyway, I’ve been away a while.” I couldn’t really take part in the hunting conversations, but gained some measure of acceptance by being able give advice on curing and sausage making. It felt, as unfamiliar and long ago as everything was, all around me, the entire month I spent in the states, like home in a deep and profound way. I’d spent the last decade happily not thinking I’d ever go back, and all the drive home, through zero visibility September rain showers, trying to figure out when I’d go back, and how I’d convince Mrs. Ghidorah that no, Michigan is great, okay, good, okay nice, no? Well, it’s Michigan, and that’s at once enough, and not nearly ever enough, all at once.
posted by Ghidorah at 10:48 PM on October 21, 2022 [27 favorites]
I just had to go back home for the first time since Corona, to be with my mother as she was dying, and, once she had actually died, sat with my sister, trying to figure out what we were supposed to do next. “We should go to Flint” I said, not wanting to, but because that’s where she was from, and that’s where her side of the family, a side of the family almost entirely unknown to me due to my own stupid choices, a side of the family I hadn’t seen since the summer of 1999, right before I moved overseas, not realizing at the time that it’d be a permanent move.
We rented a car. My sister drove out of Chicago because, no, I wasn’t ready for driving in Chicago, the assholes on the roads there seem to have fermented, become concentrated in the last three years, and become somehow purer, almost crystalline in their assholery. We stopped at the rest stop in New Buffalo, my first time in Michigan since the death of my father thirteen years ago. I reveled in the travel brochures, the lighthouse nowhere near the lake, and, oh shit, I’d forgotten the little standing public use grills next to every picnic table, as if there’s some legal code stating that there can be no picnic table on public land without a grill next to it (I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were).
We stayed with my sisters friends in St. Jo, a city I’d been past hundreds of times on i94, but never to. The next morning, I took over driving duties, getting us to Flint, and driving in Michigan was the absolute most I felt at home in that entirely awful month back in a country I no longer recognized. The line in this post, about never forgetting how to be from Michigan, it’s like riding a bicycle made of ice, it washed over me like that whole bizarre weekend, and it’s true.
It wasn’t thanksgiving, but it was one of the larger family gatherings that had been put together for a while. We gathered to be together, my aunt (a second or third cousin, I think, but my aunt all the same) who’d taken, or been forced to take the role of matriarch of the family, of those that are still here, took a moment, only one, to call everyone to the barn where we’d set up tables since the weather wouldn’t decide if it wanted to be gorgeous, as it was, in turns with freezing downpour, as Michigan is. She said kind things, she said brutally honest things, and we toasted her memory. Past that, most conversations seemed to be either an echo of the “how do Jews do things” where being Jewish was replaced by living in Japan, and no offense was intended, but oof, or being made to prove my Michiganderness, which had become something I’d only just rediscovered in myself, hiding inside, with pride and defiance the whole time (but screw UoM, go State). “You don’t talk like you’re from here” I was told, not a question, a challenge. “I’m from Kalamazoo, we sound different, and anyway, I’ve been away a while.” I couldn’t really take part in the hunting conversations, but gained some measure of acceptance by being able give advice on curing and sausage making. It felt, as unfamiliar and long ago as everything was, all around me, the entire month I spent in the states, like home in a deep and profound way. I’d spent the last decade happily not thinking I’d ever go back, and all the drive home, through zero visibility September rain showers, trying to figure out when I’d go back, and how I’d convince Mrs. Ghidorah that no, Michigan is great, okay, good, okay nice, no? Well, it’s Michigan, and that’s at once enough, and not nearly ever enough, all at once.
posted by Ghidorah at 10:48 PM on October 21, 2022 [27 favorites]
i think his in laws probably live in the houghton lake area - cops and doughnuts is in clare, and is even advertised on 131, although no one who goes up north by that route is likely to end up in clare
the casino would be in mt pleasant
he's basically describing "up north" - it's a land with its own culture - wait until you get to the u p
posted by pyramid termite at 3:43 AM on October 22, 2022 [7 favorites]
the casino would be in mt pleasant
he's basically describing "up north" - it's a land with its own culture - wait until you get to the u p
posted by pyramid termite at 3:43 AM on October 22, 2022 [7 favorites]
What you won't tell your mother-in-law is that Jews eat Thanksgiving "dinner" at dinner time, as opposed to 1 p.m., which is the time you'll be having this conversation. Because Jews are generally in the habit of beginning all ritual meals after sundown, because our ritual calendar is a lunar calendar, because that actually makes sense, as opposed to having "dinner" at lunch which has always struck you as a patently bizarre gentile aberration.
Thinking hard about whether this is true... when my grandmother was alive and hosting all the holidays, yes, but since she passed my aunt (not Jewish by birth) hosts Thanksgiving and we have it at a compromise time of about 4pm. Which makes sense to me because it's a large meal that replaces lunch and dinner and I think it's "dinner" like "Sunday roast" is dinner in the UK.
posted by subdee at 5:19 AM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
Thinking hard about whether this is true... when my grandmother was alive and hosting all the holidays, yes, but since she passed my aunt (not Jewish by birth) hosts Thanksgiving and we have it at a compromise time of about 4pm. Which makes sense to me because it's a large meal that replaces lunch and dinner and I think it's "dinner" like "Sunday roast" is dinner in the UK.
posted by subdee at 5:19 AM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
I am from the Midwest, not Michigan, but have enough familiarity to really enjoy this. Great writing. Thank you for posting it.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:56 AM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:56 AM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
What makes you think he was talking about Ann Arbor?
"the Champions of the West"
he's basically describing "up north" - it's a land with its own culture
Michigan isn't defined by the land of the trolls, though. I'm just not crazy comfortable with an essay on the Vibes of Michigan which pretty much reads Detroit and Dearborn out of the story. (One that reads Ann Arbor and Bloomfield Hills out is also somewhat questionable, but in different ways.)
posted by praemunire at 9:03 AM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]
"the Champions of the West"
he's basically describing "up north" - it's a land with its own culture
Michigan isn't defined by the land of the trolls, though. I'm just not crazy comfortable with an essay on the Vibes of Michigan which pretty much reads Detroit and Dearborn out of the story. (One that reads Ann Arbor and Bloomfield Hills out is also somewhat questionable, but in different ways.)
posted by praemunire at 9:03 AM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]
he's basically describing "up north" - it's a land with its own culture
I'd say he's describing most of Michigan outside of the Southeast (which is "up north" only in the way that non-NYC NY is "upstate").
I'm just not crazy comfortable with an essay on the Vibes of Michigan which pretty much reads Detroit and Dearborn out of the story. (One that reads Ann Arbor and Bloomfield Hills out is also somewhat questionable, but in different ways.)
I agree. I do see that the author positions himself as representing the SE parts of Michigan, and I do think that this is itself a point to make. Rural Michigan can feel very other if you're from urban Michigan - in this, he puts his finger on a feeling that I grew up with too (as an Ann Arborite child with relatives in central and western MI).
But even as I appreciate this reflection on feeling alien in one's own state, I'm not delighted about the otherizing stance that it reinforces. It can certainly feel like there are incommensurate Michigans - but they're born of the same history, and they mix constantly still.
My father's family lived all over Michigan as my grandfather changed positions within General Motors, starting as a tool-and-die maker and eventually becoming an executive. Once ensconced in an office in Detroit's Fisher Building, my grandfather would go off with his fellow execs on weekend deer hunting expeditions. Other rural-born relatives were GM workers too, working on factory floors their whole careers. Even amidst alienation (and racism and classism), Michiganders share having been shaped - one way or another - by the rapid, rampant auto boom and bust.
I'd like to see someone write the incommensurate Michigans back together into one.
posted by marlys at 2:23 PM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
I'd say he's describing most of Michigan outside of the Southeast (which is "up north" only in the way that non-NYC NY is "upstate").
I'm just not crazy comfortable with an essay on the Vibes of Michigan which pretty much reads Detroit and Dearborn out of the story. (One that reads Ann Arbor and Bloomfield Hills out is also somewhat questionable, but in different ways.)
I agree. I do see that the author positions himself as representing the SE parts of Michigan, and I do think that this is itself a point to make. Rural Michigan can feel very other if you're from urban Michigan - in this, he puts his finger on a feeling that I grew up with too (as an Ann Arborite child with relatives in central and western MI).
But even as I appreciate this reflection on feeling alien in one's own state, I'm not delighted about the otherizing stance that it reinforces. It can certainly feel like there are incommensurate Michigans - but they're born of the same history, and they mix constantly still.
My father's family lived all over Michigan as my grandfather changed positions within General Motors, starting as a tool-and-die maker and eventually becoming an executive. Once ensconced in an office in Detroit's Fisher Building, my grandfather would go off with his fellow execs on weekend deer hunting expeditions. Other rural-born relatives were GM workers too, working on factory floors their whole careers. Even amidst alienation (and racism and classism), Michiganders share having been shaped - one way or another - by the rapid, rampant auto boom and bust.
I'd like to see someone write the incommensurate Michigans back together into one.
posted by marlys at 2:23 PM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
I'm from west Michigan and we never think about Detroit. Vice versa, I think. Nobody here wants to be there - I'm moving to Portland - and nobody there wants to be here - they all move on to Chicago.
posted by rebent at 3:29 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by rebent at 3:29 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
I am a 57-year-old who, with a few forays elsewhere, has lived in Michigan my whole life. This essay got me thinking about the geography of Michigan.
We have the Upper Peninsula, of course. I spent a lot of time there in my teens, because relatives I liked who did not mind having me around had an old house on the north shore of Lake Michigan. I recognize a lot of northern Minnesota culture, and even North Dakota, where my partner is from, because of my time in the UP, among people with names like Knudson who ate a lot of fish.
And we have Northern Michigan, which is, amusingly, south of the Upper Peninsula, but north of whatever we call everything west of Detroit and south, of, oh, say, a bit north of a line drawn above Grand Rapids east to just above Flint. It's a fuzzy line, and things are more built up than they were when I was younger, but I'm always surprised by how quickly one gets into rural farms-and-small-towns Michigan whenever you leave a city and its suburbs, especially to go north. A few years ago, I made a new friend from Boston, and he was asking me what was just north of where I lived. "Fields and small towns," I said. East? "Fields and small towns." South? "Fields and small towns." West? "Lansing. And then fields and small towns until Grand Rapids."
Detroit is its own whole thing. One time a few years ago, I was on a night bus going through Detroit. The bus was quiet, but an older Black man was talking to someone about his life in Detroit, how Detroit had changed, and at one point he said, "Now out there in the mitten, out there in the mitten, it ain't nothing but corn and cows, nothing but corn and cows out there in the mitten," and I laughed at the truth of it.
I, a white person, grew up in a very small Michigan town. Our house backed up on cornfields; a dairy farm was around the corner. Sometimes I helped in the milking room. Sometimes I bottle-fed the calves. In the summer we ate green baby corn off the stalks. As we got older, we hid in the barns to make out.
But we were within broadcast distance of Detroit, so my TV and radio stations were all Detroit. My dad worked for an auto company; everybody who wasn't a farmer was dependent on the auto industry one way or another.
When I meet someone who grew up in Detroit around the same era I was growing up, we have a lot to talk about, even though they never left Detroit and my family never took us there, except some years for the Auto Show.
We know the same TV commercials: That one guy who sold appliances and always said, "I'll give you five pounds of coffee if I can't beat your best deal!" (There was a coffee shortage and prices were high.) The Faygo pop song. "Go to Dick Scott, for a Buick. He's your best shot, Dick Scott Buick" and "Mel Far, Superstarr!" We can talk about DJs and Sparky Anderson and Ernie Harwell, and it will feel like we have more in common than we maybe really do.
And we can talk about cars. The Detroit Auto Show and working on cars in the street or the garage. We can all talk about cars. I think there's someplace in that fuzzy line between southern and northern Michigan where the car culture gives way to fishing and hunting culture. It's fuzzy in part because we cross it all the time; I also spent scads of time at my grandparents' cabin in Gaylord, which is in Northern Michigan. And it's fuzzy because manufacturing gives way to the extractive industries that had already done their damage and moved on, for the most part, before I was spending time there. It was recreation driving the economy in Northern Michigan and the UP: tourists and poor people cheek-by-jowl. Certainly that was my experience. Though people like my grandparents, who were working class with true cabins, were something complicated, neither tourists nor residents.
Ann Arbor does have a pretty sizable Jewish community, and I'm grateful to have gone to college there, to have known a lot of Jewish lesbians (I was a lesbian as well), well enough that for some years I had a nodding acquaintanceship with the rabbi at Temple Beth Emeth, I'd been there often enough for services, for the occasional bat mitzvah, for the odd wedding.
Ann Arbor is full of grad students from New York who like to talk about how they can't believe Ann Arbor is what passes for "cultured" and "liberal" in Michigan. It can be pretty insufferable. But then, Ann Arbor itself can be pretty insufferable, being constantly aware (and wanting you to be constantly aware) of what a precious flower of liberal culture it is here in the benighted midwest. I live in the Greater Lansing area now, and there are things I miss about my school years in Ann Arbor (going on 40 years ago now) but overall I do like it better here.
The epigram to the linked essay is from the poem A Primer by Bob Hicok. It first appeared in The New Yorker in 2008 but I know it from the excellent 2013 anthology Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry from New Issues Poetry & Prose in Kalamazoo.
I will include the whole poem below, but first a song about Michigan which a friend shared with me just the other day, by the band The Accidentals, who are originally from Traverse City. This song, called Michigan and Again, calls Michigan, "Home of blue water, Canada's daughter," which also feels true, but not the complete truth, because what can possibly be the complete truth?
I draw your attention to the final lines of Hicok's poem:
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.
=========
A Primer
Bob Hicok
I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.
posted by Well I never at 5:29 PM on October 22, 2022 [15 favorites]
We have the Upper Peninsula, of course. I spent a lot of time there in my teens, because relatives I liked who did not mind having me around had an old house on the north shore of Lake Michigan. I recognize a lot of northern Minnesota culture, and even North Dakota, where my partner is from, because of my time in the UP, among people with names like Knudson who ate a lot of fish.
And we have Northern Michigan, which is, amusingly, south of the Upper Peninsula, but north of whatever we call everything west of Detroit and south, of, oh, say, a bit north of a line drawn above Grand Rapids east to just above Flint. It's a fuzzy line, and things are more built up than they were when I was younger, but I'm always surprised by how quickly one gets into rural farms-and-small-towns Michigan whenever you leave a city and its suburbs, especially to go north. A few years ago, I made a new friend from Boston, and he was asking me what was just north of where I lived. "Fields and small towns," I said. East? "Fields and small towns." South? "Fields and small towns." West? "Lansing. And then fields and small towns until Grand Rapids."
Detroit is its own whole thing. One time a few years ago, I was on a night bus going through Detroit. The bus was quiet, but an older Black man was talking to someone about his life in Detroit, how Detroit had changed, and at one point he said, "Now out there in the mitten, out there in the mitten, it ain't nothing but corn and cows, nothing but corn and cows out there in the mitten," and I laughed at the truth of it.
I, a white person, grew up in a very small Michigan town. Our house backed up on cornfields; a dairy farm was around the corner. Sometimes I helped in the milking room. Sometimes I bottle-fed the calves. In the summer we ate green baby corn off the stalks. As we got older, we hid in the barns to make out.
But we were within broadcast distance of Detroit, so my TV and radio stations were all Detroit. My dad worked for an auto company; everybody who wasn't a farmer was dependent on the auto industry one way or another.
When I meet someone who grew up in Detroit around the same era I was growing up, we have a lot to talk about, even though they never left Detroit and my family never took us there, except some years for the Auto Show.
We know the same TV commercials: That one guy who sold appliances and always said, "I'll give you five pounds of coffee if I can't beat your best deal!" (There was a coffee shortage and prices were high.) The Faygo pop song. "Go to Dick Scott, for a Buick. He's your best shot, Dick Scott Buick" and "Mel Far, Superstarr!" We can talk about DJs and Sparky Anderson and Ernie Harwell, and it will feel like we have more in common than we maybe really do.
And we can talk about cars. The Detroit Auto Show and working on cars in the street or the garage. We can all talk about cars. I think there's someplace in that fuzzy line between southern and northern Michigan where the car culture gives way to fishing and hunting culture. It's fuzzy in part because we cross it all the time; I also spent scads of time at my grandparents' cabin in Gaylord, which is in Northern Michigan. And it's fuzzy because manufacturing gives way to the extractive industries that had already done their damage and moved on, for the most part, before I was spending time there. It was recreation driving the economy in Northern Michigan and the UP: tourists and poor people cheek-by-jowl. Certainly that was my experience. Though people like my grandparents, who were working class with true cabins, were something complicated, neither tourists nor residents.
Ann Arbor does have a pretty sizable Jewish community, and I'm grateful to have gone to college there, to have known a lot of Jewish lesbians (I was a lesbian as well), well enough that for some years I had a nodding acquaintanceship with the rabbi at Temple Beth Emeth, I'd been there often enough for services, for the occasional bat mitzvah, for the odd wedding.
Ann Arbor is full of grad students from New York who like to talk about how they can't believe Ann Arbor is what passes for "cultured" and "liberal" in Michigan. It can be pretty insufferable. But then, Ann Arbor itself can be pretty insufferable, being constantly aware (and wanting you to be constantly aware) of what a precious flower of liberal culture it is here in the benighted midwest. I live in the Greater Lansing area now, and there are things I miss about my school years in Ann Arbor (going on 40 years ago now) but overall I do like it better here.
The epigram to the linked essay is from the poem A Primer by Bob Hicok. It first appeared in The New Yorker in 2008 but I know it from the excellent 2013 anthology Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry from New Issues Poetry & Prose in Kalamazoo.
I will include the whole poem below, but first a song about Michigan which a friend shared with me just the other day, by the band The Accidentals, who are originally from Traverse City. This song, called Michigan and Again, calls Michigan, "Home of blue water, Canada's daughter," which also feels true, but not the complete truth, because what can possibly be the complete truth?
I draw your attention to the final lines of Hicok's poem:
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.
=========
A Primer
Bob Hicok
I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.
posted by Well I never at 5:29 PM on October 22, 2022 [15 favorites]
"In Michigan, no amount of driving is too much driving, nor any distance too short to drive."
Yes, this is true.
posted by doctornemo at 6:15 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yes, this is true.
posted by doctornemo at 6:15 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]
I moved to Michigan when I was 13, and lived there into my early 30s.
Well I never's account felt truer to me than the post's first linked article, mostly. I also remember Mel Farr, Superstar! Agreed on cars, although that never took for me (it did for my family and just about everyone else I know from Michigan).
Definitely agreed about Ann Arbor. As a UM student and someone who worked in town I saw those New Yorkers (I'm kinda one, being born in NYC and moved from Long Island, but not straight to AA) and had fun with the attitude. And also saw the insufferability of A Squared.
The linked article... I did have that experience of vast Thanksgiving dinners with an extended family which were at times hard to endure, and for which alcohol was both partial cause and respite. I've been in those log cabin/high tech bars. But the article is really, as praemunire says, about the rural state (except the UP). Detroit, most of the southeast is very different.
posted by doctornemo at 6:21 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]
Well I never's account felt truer to me than the post's first linked article, mostly. I also remember Mel Farr, Superstar! Agreed on cars, although that never took for me (it did for my family and just about everyone else I know from Michigan).
Definitely agreed about Ann Arbor. As a UM student and someone who worked in town I saw those New Yorkers (I'm kinda one, being born in NYC and moved from Long Island, but not straight to AA) and had fun with the attitude. And also saw the insufferability of A Squared.
The linked article... I did have that experience of vast Thanksgiving dinners with an extended family which were at times hard to endure, and for which alcohol was both partial cause and respite. I've been in those log cabin/high tech bars. But the article is really, as praemunire says, about the rural state (except the UP). Detroit, most of the southeast is very different.
posted by doctornemo at 6:21 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]
This May we went back to Michigan for a funeral and to see my father.
Driving around Detroit brought back plenty of memories: the patches of desolation, the spikes of new construction. The billboards for cannabis were new (we hadn't been for a few years) - one proclaimed that "DETROIT IS BETTER WITH CANNABIS."
My father lives up in Pontiac, and it was pretty much the same, alternating between decay and ruin with shiny spots of investment. He really likes it there.
Our friend's funeral was in the Livonia area. Very diverse population, as I remembered it, with a lot of Middle Eastern and South Asian folks.
Riptides of emotion from that trip - the linked piece gradually brought them to mind. Our deceased friend (died suddenly, far too young, in another state) was an artist who loved rural life. One of his friends told the assembly a story about this man, younger, hunting a dear in the wild, inspired by _Last of the Mohicans_.
My father prefers to stay inside his facility and look, sometimes, at the birds outside his window.
posted by doctornemo at 6:26 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
Driving around Detroit brought back plenty of memories: the patches of desolation, the spikes of new construction. The billboards for cannabis were new (we hadn't been for a few years) - one proclaimed that "DETROIT IS BETTER WITH CANNABIS."
My father lives up in Pontiac, and it was pretty much the same, alternating between decay and ruin with shiny spots of investment. He really likes it there.
Our friend's funeral was in the Livonia area. Very diverse population, as I remembered it, with a lot of Middle Eastern and South Asian folks.
Riptides of emotion from that trip - the linked piece gradually brought them to mind. Our deceased friend (died suddenly, far too young, in another state) was an artist who loved rural life. One of his friends told the assembly a story about this man, younger, hunting a dear in the wild, inspired by _Last of the Mohicans_.
My father prefers to stay inside his facility and look, sometimes, at the birds outside his window.
posted by doctornemo at 6:26 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'd like to see someone write the incommensurate Michigans back together into one
Arguably, the most difficult task in American Literature. Perhaps no state or region can.
I asked a crime writer once about that, that Michigan novel. "Might not be possible. Once it becomes effete, it's doomed."
"you gotta uncle in the furniture business"
posted by clavdivs at 7:02 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]
Arguably, the most difficult task in American Literature. Perhaps no state or region can.
I asked a crime writer once about that, that Michigan novel. "Might not be possible. Once it becomes effete, it's doomed."
"you gotta uncle in the furniture business"
posted by clavdivs at 7:02 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]
I'm not delighted about the otherizing stance that it reinforces. It can certainly feel like there are incommensurate Michigans - but they're born of the same history, and they mix constantly still.
I've been chewing it over, and I guess what troubles me about this essay (because, in the end, who amongst us hasn't occasionally indulged in a little exaggeration of our outsider status?) is that his approach tends to dovetail with the right-wing idea that only white rural or semi-rural people (in this case, either clean-living but narrow-minded rural evangelicals or dirtbags) are "real Americans." I don't think he intended it that way at all, but it makes me itchy. Some of my cousins grew up in the world he's sketching, some of them grew up in the Ann Arbor version (now that I think about it, pretty sure the first bar or bat mitzvah I ever attended was at the Reconstructionist synagogue there), but I grew up in the one that appears here only as a place where copper pipe is stolen, even though it's still the biggest city in the state, and I know the right is all too happy to treat it, and its voters, as illegitimate, somehow "not America/n."
So I just wish he'd framed it a little differently, I guess.
posted by praemunire at 8:56 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]
I've been chewing it over, and I guess what troubles me about this essay (because, in the end, who amongst us hasn't occasionally indulged in a little exaggeration of our outsider status?) is that his approach tends to dovetail with the right-wing idea that only white rural or semi-rural people (in this case, either clean-living but narrow-minded rural evangelicals or dirtbags) are "real Americans." I don't think he intended it that way at all, but it makes me itchy. Some of my cousins grew up in the world he's sketching, some of them grew up in the Ann Arbor version (now that I think about it, pretty sure the first bar or bat mitzvah I ever attended was at the Reconstructionist synagogue there), but I grew up in the one that appears here only as a place where copper pipe is stolen, even though it's still the biggest city in the state, and I know the right is all too happy to treat it, and its voters, as illegitimate, somehow "not America/n."
So I just wish he'd framed it a little differently, I guess.
posted by praemunire at 8:56 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]
For those of you thinking, How much driving can there be?...from Detroit to Houghton is a good nine hours' driving. About half again as much time as it would take to drive from Boston to DC.
posted by praemunire at 9:07 PM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 9:07 PM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
Well shoot, it appears that I was born and raised in Insufferable, MI. Maybe Nelson was too, hence feeling himself alien and rural relatives the “true” Michiganders? Is this piece mere manifestation of an Ann Arborite’s internalized self-denigration? (I jest - partly.)
On reflection, leaving Detroit almost completely absent in a piece about Michiganness is at once extraordinarily problematic and disturbingly familiar.
Well I Never, I wished for someone to write different Michigans together, and you did so beautifully in your comment. Much appreciation.
posted by marlys at 10:25 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]
On reflection, leaving Detroit almost completely absent in a piece about Michiganness is at once extraordinarily problematic and disturbingly familiar.
Well I Never, I wished for someone to write different Michigans together, and you did so beautifully in your comment. Much appreciation.
posted by marlys at 10:25 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]
This was a lot of fun. So hard to wrap my head around this being the same Michigan that Detroit is in. Then again, they don’t call it “Militiagan” out of nowhere, I guess.
Also, people eat Thanksgiving dinner at lunchtime? Really? (ok yes I’m Jewish but this is news to me)
posted by Mchelly at 4:56 AM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
Also, people eat Thanksgiving dinner at lunchtime? Really? (ok yes I’m Jewish but this is news to me)
posted by Mchelly at 4:56 AM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
For those of you thinking, How much driving can there be?...
The only part of Michigan I know even half as well as the town I spent 17 years growing up is is I-94, which I could drive (like so many drivers seem to) with my eyes closed from Detroit to Chicago
(and yes, I-94 remains a part of Michigan until it reaches Chicago because even I-94 is self aware enough to be mortified at the idea of even partly being from Indiana)
posted by Ghidorah at 5:03 AM on October 23, 2022 [6 favorites]
The only part of Michigan I know even half as well as the town I spent 17 years growing up is is I-94, which I could drive (like so many drivers seem to) with my eyes closed from Detroit to Chicago
(and yes, I-94 remains a part of Michigan until it reaches Chicago because even I-94 is self aware enough to be mortified at the idea of even partly being from Indiana)
posted by Ghidorah at 5:03 AM on October 23, 2022 [6 favorites]
For those of you thinking, How much driving can there be?...from Detroit to Houghton is a good nine hours' driving. About half again as much time as it would take to drive from Boston to DC.
My brother went to college at Michigan Tech, and I, briefly, went to college in western Pennsylvania. My mom observed that it felt like I was farther away, having to cross two state lines, even though the drive was significantly shorter.
"you gotta uncle in the furniture business"
thanks for the memories, clavdivs
praimumire, thanks for teasing out the outsider tone of the linked piece. Your thoughts were really useful.
posted by Well I never at 6:04 AM on October 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
My brother went to college at Michigan Tech, and I, briefly, went to college in western Pennsylvania. My mom observed that it felt like I was farther away, having to cross two state lines, even though the drive was significantly shorter.
"you gotta uncle in the furniture business"
thanks for the memories, clavdivs
praimumire, thanks for teasing out the outsider tone of the linked piece. Your thoughts were really useful.
posted by Well I never at 6:04 AM on October 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
"No town in Michigan is too small to have a decent brewery or large enough to have decent public transit." That tracks for this Michigander. Also the "Michigan and Again" song linked above makes me homesick whenever I hear it. The Accidentals have a lot of other good songs too.
posted by kittensyay at 9:40 AM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by kittensyay at 9:40 AM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
people eat Thanksgiving dinner at lunchtime?
My childhood memories would have it more early afternoon. But remember that the Lions have been playing on Thanksgiving Day for many years, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many families tried to avoid a conflict.
posted by praemunire at 10:11 AM on October 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
My childhood memories would have it more early afternoon. But remember that the Lions have been playing on Thanksgiving Day for many years, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many families tried to avoid a conflict.
posted by praemunire at 10:11 AM on October 23, 2022 [4 favorites]
Also, people eat Thanksgiving dinner at lunchtime?
I've known some people who do more lunch time and others who do later evening. TG appetizers start around 1ish in my family, but the turkey is served at an early dinner time, like 4ish. Thanksgiving is a day that anyone and everyone is welcome for us, so there's always people popping in and out at randomish times as they work around other family events.
Earlier eating time may be more common if you have people driving a ways in for dinner who then have to be back home and work on Friday.
I was a bit confused by what a secondary family feast is. Unless maybe that was a reference to having a slightly smaller meal so people can go to other family events with their in-laws?
This definitely felt like it was more about rural Michigan, outside of the Detroit-Lansing-ann arbor swath of suburbs. We grew up eating rice pilaf in a SE Michigan suburb on a weekly basis.
But any distance is driving distance is fairly universal in the mitten state.
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:45 PM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
I've known some people who do more lunch time and others who do later evening. TG appetizers start around 1ish in my family, but the turkey is served at an early dinner time, like 4ish. Thanksgiving is a day that anyone and everyone is welcome for us, so there's always people popping in and out at randomish times as they work around other family events.
Earlier eating time may be more common if you have people driving a ways in for dinner who then have to be back home and work on Friday.
I was a bit confused by what a secondary family feast is. Unless maybe that was a reference to having a slightly smaller meal so people can go to other family events with their in-laws?
This definitely felt like it was more about rural Michigan, outside of the Detroit-Lansing-ann arbor swath of suburbs. We grew up eating rice pilaf in a SE Michigan suburb on a weekly basis.
But any distance is driving distance is fairly universal in the mitten state.
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:45 PM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
« Older "beautiful emergent things that happen... once you... | Vitrification heating up at Hanford Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Yes, that is Michigan.
posted by Adridne at 6:55 PM on October 21, 2022 [1 favorite]