Fargo - via Lileks
James Lileks has a great piece on growing up in Fargo in the latest American Enterprise. Here's a great quote:
My Dad would have loved that. Growing up in South Dakota, he could wax eloquently about the prairie. Once on a family vacation to the Rocky Mountains, when everyone was oohing and aahing over the scenery, he kept complaining that the mountains kept "getting in the way" of his attempts to view the scenery.
You can't describe the vastness of the Panavision prairie to East Coasters. Either the idea bores them--sorry, if there's not an all-night Thai take-out every ten blocks I am so not there. Or it's incomprehensible--what, a dirt ocean that just sits there?
Yes. That's it. The earth is flat and the sky is big, and you're a small lone thing rolling between the two. True Midwesterners have no time for oceans--all that pointless motion. It comes in, it goes out. What's the point? True Midwesterners have no time for mountains. They're so obvious. They don't do anything. We have mountains, in a way; they're called clouds. And they move. Can yours do that?
My Dad would have loved that. Growing up in South Dakota, he could wax eloquently about the prairie. Once on a family vacation to the Rocky Mountains, when everyone was oohing and aahing over the scenery, he kept complaining that the mountains kept "getting in the way" of his attempts to view the scenery.
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