The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It
Digital photograph of my well-thumbed copy
Author: Molly Bashaw
In This Issue: Brad writes about his inspiration for the title of this newsletter—the poem There Were No Mirrors in That Farmhouse by Molly Bashaw.
Football, Farming, and Poetry; aka In Praise of Molly Bashaw
This essay is an explainer: why we named the Crosshatch newsletter “The Whole Field,” with diversions on advertising, propaganda, and romancing the rural.
I like to have conversations, out loud, with commercials. TV ads love your half-attention, all the better to infiltrate the subconscious. Steel your gaze and start talking back, and the illusion falters, revealing the ticky tacky beneath, caulked and painted.
So it goes with televised images of modern farming, broadcast on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights. Just as modern basketball finds its roots in urban neighborhood courts, football shouts “rural south.” When we turn on the game, we find ourselves in small-town farm communities, places outside time, with outsized pigskin talent and shared identity around Friday night lights. Advertisers have long recognized that football, the most uniquely American sport, attracts an audience primed for country messages: nostalgia, male potency, and the locker room simplicity of the coach/player (father/son) bond.
The ads follow suit, leaning mostly on four images: oversized farm machinery, especially pickup trucks; stoic multi-generational men in flannels, barn coats, and work gloves; the sun rising or setting over a golden windswept monoculture grain field; physical labor limited to either the slow-motion heave of a hay bale into a truck bed (dust glittering in the sun) or the firm but tender care of large mammals. If we include the imagery of Western ranching, add a few more: handsome and disarmingly charming cowboys, sturdy horses, and wide open land beneath a wide open sky. And, again: trucks. Lots of trucks.
These images aren’t hard to decipher, which is the point. This romancing of the rural is hugely appealing to our middle income middle manager stuck in a veneered and vinyl-ed suburb, longing for “simple living” and some ineffable “authenticity” instead of all the troublesome complexity of the HOA, PTA, and IRS. In other words, rural imagery sells—trucks, beer, insurance, beef sticks, whatever.
The Warp — Ideas and Inspiration
|| 1 || Our first erratum: In a previous Whole Field, Taylor noted that the Central Lake Waste Transfer Facility was closing. Not so! The station is still openwith reduced hours, and is operational on Saturdays from 9 am to 3 pm.
|| 2 || I learned about Object Oriented Ontology from the philosopher Timothy Morton, who has written about ecological matters many times. They are an incredibly prolific author who also knows how to speak to a non-academic audience. If you’re looking for an introduction to their ideas, start with the short book Being Ecological. Morton’s work also expands on the idea of OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology), even including a helpful beginners’ guide on their website.
|| 3 || The study of images and the way they "speak” in the context of a culture is called semiotics. I happened upon this essay (this link goes to a search page; click the first link titled “The Stuff You Need Out Here”), a semiotic case study of Tractor Supply ads, by Emily B. Rhoades and Tracy Irani. If this kind of thinking is both new for and interesting to you, you might love Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (a comic about the meaning of comics). For a deeper dive, check out Roland Barth’s S/Z, a “scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story Sarrasine.”
Or, if you want a reason to avoid all this reading, just check out this Slate interview with Ira Glass from This American Life, where he calls semiotics a “hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.” Of course, he then goes on to say “the radio stories I make, the way I think about them is the way I thought about stories when I was in college reading Roland Barthes’s S/Z.”
A little taste of semiotics is good for your literacy, friends.
|| 4 || Since we’re talking about interviews, poetry, and animism, we’ll cover all three with this link to a Manchester Review interview with the poet Robert Bringhurst. I love this Q&A:
EJ: What do you see as the difference between prose and poetry, if the visual aspect is less significant?
RB: Texture. There’s more of it in poetry, less of it in prose. And it seems to me this is not just a matter of language. A poem has something to say, and the thing it has to say reverberates or resonates with the rest of reality in a way that is not prosaic. Even before it’s written, a poem is in motion, and its motion has a texture. It doesn’t just walk or stride or shuffle along; it dances.
|| 5 || If animism is compelling, may I recommend Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen? He is a Danish scholar deconstructing Nordic Animism for a general audience, while making a direct case for a decolonial approach that also resists the way white supremacy has co-opted nordic symbols (which brings us back to semiotics). Here Rune dives into the complexity around using the word “indigenous.” The entire 17-minute video is worth a watch, and hopefully it leads you to seek out more of his thinking. Here, he argues that while many Europeans can claim “firstness” in a region, that also claiming indigeneity only weakens the definition of that term—one that’s essential for those communities currently struggling against colonizers for land rights and cultural rights.
The Weft — News and Events
|| 1 || Upcoming Preservation Station Event: Save the Scraps! Join SEEDS staff and partners to learn about multiple methods to save food scraps to incorporate into delicious dishes, as well as how to preserve the abundance of harvests for yourself and your community. Stretch your food budget while reducing carbon emissions. Held at Historic Barns Park, Thursday, August 25th, 3-6pm. Requires NMC registration here.
|| 2 || Traverse City Dance Project is returning to the Crosshatch meadow! The program features a stellar cast of eight professional dancers from national and international companies, including Traverse City natives Sarah Wolff and Gabriella Dorman. This year, TCDP will feature four works, including new creations by directors Jen Lott and Brent Whitney, and a staging of Italian-born Mauro de Candia’s Something I Had in Mind. TCDP originally presented this playful balletic comedy as part of their very first season in 2012.
The evening will also feature live music—a collaboration by former Alonzo King LINES dancer and rehearsal director Kara Wilkes and celebrated Kalamazoo-based cellist and vocalist Jordan Hamilton. Hamilton and Wilkes are recipients of the TCDP’s 2022 NewVo Fellowship, which supports new creations by choreographers and composers. The NewVo Fellowship is made possible by a seed grant from Rotary Charities of Traverse City.
Scheduled date: Wednesday, August 3rd at 7 pm, with a rain date of Friday, August 5th. Tickets are available on a sliding scale from 0 to $20. (We can’t link directly to the tickets, so start here instead.)
|| 3 || Update on the Alluvion. We did it! A huge thank you for supporting art in our community. Your contributions put us way over our goal, meeting our stretch goal of $65,000. Unlocking two matches means that we raised a total of $135,000, with a whopping 222 donors.
Thank you again for saying YES! Read more here.
|| 4 || Running a Land-Based Project (or thinking about it?) We’re at the early stages of building a Great Lakes Network of Land-Based Projects. What is that?
A definition: Land-based projects (LBP) are projects integrated into the surrounding ecological and social environment, run by communities, smallholdings, farms, organizations, or businesses, and that encompass more than a single building or service.
This broad definition includes music festivals, land-based artist residencies, and folk schools; education centers, nature centers and research stations, eco-villages, ecological housing projects, intentional communities, and cohousing—or even individual co-op housing projects that are situated in a natural landscape or integrated into the larger community; commons-based projects, including community gardens, farms and orchards; retreat centers and camps; and farms with a strong public component.
If this describes you or your dreams, check out our new survey.
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