and it's interesting how most americans have such distance from the farm. i am going to dig out a douglas coupland book called Souvenir of Canada from under a couple layers of stuff in a box i packed yesterday and type you a passage. it's a book about canada and there are all these headings arranged in alphabetical order. i love it, it's exactly right. ok, hang on.
ok, here it is. it's the entry entitled Small Towns. i'm going to reproduce it for you in its e ntirety, so this comment will get a bit long.
A lot of Canadian literature deals with small town or rural life and/or the immigrant experience. Metropolitan novels with characters who don't discuss the family barn or their country of origin are nearly n on-existent. CBC national radio also feeds this trend, with a hefty number of programs ending with a moral along the lines of I think we all know there's a small town in each of us. The reason for this is simple: outside of a handful of largish ci ties, Canada is a nation of small towns, far more than most other industrialized countries. Many Canadians are only one generation away from the farm. I remember standing in the receiving line at my brother's wedding in Winnipeg. After shaking about th e tenth hand missing umpteen digits, I asked one of the Winnipeg relatives what was the deal. The one-word answer? Threshers. Everyone thinks small towns are folksy and cute - and mostly they are. But having visited relatives who live in small t owns, I acknowledge that you sometimes need to substitute "bizarre" for folksy, and "scary" for cute. I don't always have a soft-focus view of small towns - there are too many of them in my ancestry to be totally comfortable. ...That Judy was bright a s a dickens, but she never talked much after the night of the storm when they found Kenny's empty Chevelle in the middle of the canola field. ...Your great-grandfather had the four finest horses in the tri-county region - why, even the prime minister once looked out the window of a passing train and remarked, "Those are the four finest horses I've seen in the surrounding tri-county area!" ...Sure we told the RCMP it was just a stove fire, but everybody in the McGrath family lost their sense of smell that afternoon. Obviously you need to remember that small towns now, and small towns back then, are different things altogether. Back then, they were prisons of sorts, the only escapes being religious orders or the military, which could be equally as frea ky as the town you'd left behind. But now, small towns have almost become lifestyle choices. People who live in northern Manitoba can get a dish and watch MTV Europe or most of the Asian and European stations. Hydro workers in deepest Labrador can trade aluminum futures in real time and then watch streaming video porn so hard-core that it's more a biological treatise than, uh, "casual entertainment." So these days, if someone's working on the farm, it's likely they really enjoy doing it, as opposed to farm work being a life sentence handed to them at birth. Even still, the stories will undoubtedly go on forever. ...Well, you know, old Clem down by the poultry plant? It was never true he went off to Bermuda that winter like everybody said. ...Your great-great-grandmother really put that little mill town on the map. She could imitate every songbird on the North American continent minus Mexico! ¨
Thank you for showing that to me! I think the US still has some of that too, but it's more like Appalachia and the Deep South than the Midwest. Still though, it was weird for me in the first few weeks of college to go days without seeing a familiar face and not knowing every classmate's name and parents and life story. I take for granted that most people didn't grow up that way.
and it's interesting how most americans have such distance from the farm. i am going to dig out a douglas coupland book called Souvenir of Canada from under a couple layers of stuff in a box i packed yesterday and type you a passage. it's a book about canada and there are all these headings arranged in alphabetical order. i love it, it's exactly right. ok, hang on.
ok, here it is. it's the entry entitled Small Towns. i'm going to reproduce it for you in its e ntirety, so this comment will get a bit long.
A lot of Canadian literature deals with small town or rural life and/or the immigrant experience. Metropolitan novels with characters who don't discuss the family barn or their country of origin are nearly n on-existent. CBC national radio also feeds this trend, with a hefty number of programs ending with a moral along the lines of I think we all know there's a small town in each of us.
The reason for this is simple: outside of a handful of largish ci ties, Canada is a nation of small towns, far more than most other industrialized countries. Many Canadians are only one generation away from the farm. I remember standing in the receiving line at my brother's wedding in Winnipeg. After shaking about th e tenth hand missing umpteen digits, I asked one of the Winnipeg relatives what was the deal. The one-word answer? Threshers.
Everyone thinks small towns are folksy and cute - and mostly they are. But having visited relatives who live in small t owns, I acknowledge that you sometimes need to substitute "bizarre" for folksy, and "scary" for cute. I don't always have a soft-focus view of small towns - there are too many of them in my ancestry to be totally comfortable.
...That Judy was bright a s a dickens, but she never talked much after the night of the storm when they found Kenny's empty Chevelle in the middle of the canola field.
...Your great-grandfather had the four finest horses in the tri-county region - why, even the prime minister once looked out the window of a passing train and remarked, "Those are the four finest horses I've seen in the surrounding tri-county area!"
...Sure we told the RCMP it was just a stove fire, but everybody in the McGrath family lost their sense of smell that afternoon.
Obviously you need to remember that small towns now, and small towns back then, are different things altogether. Back then, they were prisons of sorts, the only escapes being religious orders or the military, which could be equally as frea ky as the town you'd left behind. But now, small towns have almost become lifestyle choices. People who live in northern Manitoba can get a dish and watch MTV Europe or most of the Asian and European stations. Hydro workers in deepest Labrador can trade aluminum futures in real time and then watch streaming video porn so hard-core that it's more a biological treatise than, uh, "casual entertainment."
So these days, if someone's working on the farm, it's likely they really enjoy doing it, as opposed to farm work being a life sentence handed to them at birth. Even still, the stories will undoubtedly go on forever.
...Well, you know, old Clem down by the poultry plant? It was never true he went off to Bermuda that winter like everybody said.
...Your great-great-grandmother really put that little mill town on the map. She could imitate every songbird on the North American continent minus Mexico!
¨
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