Rust Belt Blues a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University in Partial Fulfil
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Rust Belt Blues A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Alison A. Stine June 2013 © 2013 Alison A. Stine. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Rust Belt Blues by ALISON A. STINE has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Dinty W. Moore Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT STINE, ALISON A., Ph.D., May 2013, English Rust Belt Blues Director of Dissertation: Dinty W. Moore Alison Stine’s Rust Belt Blues is a book-length work of linked creative nonfiction essays set in former manufacturing towns in Ohio, Indiana, and upstate New York. In pieces that range from autobiography to literary journalism, she focuses on abandoned places and people in the area known as the Rust Belt—a section of ex-industrial centers stretching from New York to Chicago—covering such topics as feral houses, graffiti, and the blues. She researches the Westinghouse factory that once employed a third of her hometown, explores a shuttered amusement park, re-visits a neglected asylum, and writes of rural poverty. In her critical introduction “The Abandoned Houses are All of Us: Toward a Rust Belt Persona,” Stine examines the work of contemporary nonfiction writers born in and / or concerned with the Rust Belt, finding that their work shares traits of deflection, obsession, lying, dark subject matter, and stubborn optimism—what she calls the defining characteristics of the emerging Rust Belt persona. 4 Regards to Jackson: The Blues Run the Game, Al 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “Blue” was originally published in Mount Hope. “Swimming Dreams” was originally published in Los Angeles Book Review (under the title “Poetry and Swimming”). Thank you to the members of my committee: Janis Butler Holm, Jill P. Ingram, Jody Lamb, and Dinty W. Moore. Thank you to friends and colleagues, especially Geri Lipschultz, Sarah Green, Angel Lemke, Marlene Tromp, Brad Daugherty, and Lauren Bandman; and to caregivers Amanda Culley and Emily Wood. Thank you most of all to my family for their support. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract............................................................................................................................... 3 Dedication........................................................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. 5 List of Figures..................................................................................................................... 7 Critical Introduction............................................................................................................ 8 The Abandoned Houses are All of Us: Toward a Rust Belt Persona ............................. 8 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 45 Part I: Secrets .................................................................................................................... 47 Everything Was Beautiful............................................................................................. 49 Blue............................................................................................................................... 69 Real Detective............................................................................................................... 84 Part II: Lies ..................................................................................................................... 119 The Reptile King......................................................................................................... 120 Lovers' Madness ......................................................................................................... 133 Snowfall Blues............................................................................................................ 145 Part III: Nowhere ............................................................................................................ 190 The Apple Trees ......................................................................................................... 191 The Building ............................................................................................................... 204 Swimming Dreams ..................................................................................................... 222 Notes ............................................................................................................................... 229 7 LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Secrets..............................................................................................................48 Figure 2. Charlie, The Reptile King..............................................................................132 8 CRITICAL INTRODUCTION The Abandoned Houses are All of Us: Toward a Rust Belt Persona This is my hometown: Mansfield, Ohio, rated “Worst City to Live in North America” by Places Rated Almanac of 1996, the year I graduated high school. Population: 47,000—though that keeps falling. General Motors left. Before that: Westinghouse, Mansfield Tire & Rubber Company, Ohio Brass, Tappan, Armco Steel. My town is a town of abandonment, oxidized steel, broken and boarded-up windows, warehouses gone to fields, fields gone to seed. More stores are closed than open. More people flee here than are born or move here. This is the story of a band of former manufacturing towns across the upper Midwest and Northeast. On maps, we’re often shaded in red, red for the net loss, red for the rust. What’s unique about the Rust Belt? Decay is a part of life. We’re used to it, the factories leaving and leaving their structures. We don’t always rebuild. Often, we don’t raze either, letting the old buildings get taken over by weeds and rot; time will do the demolition. It’s a striking combination: the rusted steel and the rural wildness. The land seizes control, running its course: trees sprouting up through the roofs of warehouses, mushrooms growing in the shells of old cars. Abandoned buildings, ruined houses, collapsing barns, weedy boxcars—the landscape here is so arresting, so beautiful and broken, an artistic phrase has been coined to described its rough beauty: “rust porn” (also referred to as “ruin porn”). But in literature, the Rust Belt—especially the darkness and weirdness of the Rust Belt, the violence and seediness—has yet to really receive its due. So much has been written of the Southern Gothic, but what of the Midwestern? There is art here; there is 9 also madness. There is beauty and crime. There are stories worth telling. Several years ago, an independent literary journal was founded in Ann Arbor to do just that, publish stories set in and by writers of the Midwest, particularly stories of a darker nature. On their website, Midwestern Gothic notes an editorial interest in this “often-overlooked region of the United States ripe with its own mythologies and tall tales” (“Midwestern Gothic: About”). The journal defines the Gothic as “the inclusion of deeply flawed, often “grotesque” characters in realistic (and, oftentimes unpleasant) settings / situations” (“Midwestern Gothic: About”). Is it unpleasant here? I remember the first time my future husband, a New Yorker, visited my family in Mansfield. He stared at the dead deer out the car window—the carcasses, in various stages of decay, along the side of the road, along many roads, so gory. Just left, left to rot. But I barely glanced at them, those carcasses. The bones and hooves and frozen blood were so familiar to me. Part of this nonchalance is the product of growing up on farms or near farms. As children, my mother and her sisters used to play in the swept-out pig houses on a neighbor’s hog farm. Why were the houses, shelters for the hogs, empty at the same time every season? Where did the pigs go? They knew, my mother and her sisters. They knew—but they still played in the houses. My grown cousin, now a father, let his own daughter help raise a couple of pigs recently. The girl wanted to name them. My cousin said, “Breakfast and Dinner. Those are their names.” We know where our food comes from here. We grow it. Some of us slaughter or hunt it. I grew up knowing the dogs at the edge of my grandparents’ farm, half a dozen or more long-eared, baying hounds, were not to be played with, nor petted or visited. They were tied with chains to their houses. Those dogs were for hunting. I grew used to the sound 10 of gunshots—many times, in many seasons throughout the year—shattering the otherwise tranquil setting of my parents’ farm. Certainly our Midwestern weather may be thought unpleasant: extreme heat and humidity in the summers, numbing frozen winters, and shorter and shorter springs and falls. In my early twenties, when I moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan—a place even colder than Mansfield—to teach, one of my students reminisced about Halloween; as children, they always had to think of costumes that would be warm, that would include hoods and gloves, fur or plush. They dressed as sheep and tigers and bundled bears. Our first class was canceled due to a blizzard that next quarter. Spring quarter. I remember trudging to my car after a night class. I was wrapped, almost to oblivion, in a puffy down coat, but it wasn’t