Challenge: Describe other things like Rolling Stone describes Duluth
The way Ana Marie Cox describes Duluth in her article “A Night Among the Trump Believers Way Up North” really needs its own genre. Here’s a quote from the original piece to give you a sense of it:
Lake Superior’s merciless beauty crashes up against a town whose shoreside skyline is dominated by stolid, brutalist mid-century relics and precarious-seeming industrial shipping contraptions, rusty and mostly silent. Downtown, every surface is covered with a thin layer of grime. It is, in other words, Trump Country.
Genius, right? In the comments, leave your ideas for how Ana Marie Cox would describe other things in Duluth!
Here are mine:
The first smile of a Duluth baby
“The shriveled demi-human jerked toward me, then stretched out a claw-like hand in a hideous parody of friendship. A twisted rictus contorted its face. It was a smile but also not, straight from the pit of hell.”
A springtime picnic in Duluth
“The brilliant orange sunset was a stark contrast to the environmental devastation and human misery of this failed mining region. Dew hung heavily from every blade of grass like so much urine. The children at the picnic skipped somberly forward, as heedless as sheep being led to a slaughterhouse.”
Leave yours below!
For the opening shot, not an attempt to write like Ana Marie Cox, but Duluth Mayor Emily Larson’s response to the article.
Each spring, the roses at a park on Duluth’s crumbling east side wearily open their petals, as if wondering why they should even bother, since they’ll just be dead in a few months anyway. Standing over them on a brutal cube of concrete, a grotesque bronze statue of long-dead Leif Erikson shades blind eyes as he stares to the west, plotting new routes of pillage and destruction. A few tourists listlessly stroll the paths, overwhelmed by the chilling breeze off Superior, an old and outdated lake. What’s the point of this? they wonder. Why did we come?
As soon as this post went up I thought to myself, “John Ramos will be good at this.”
Why did she even move to Duluth? The relentlessly omnipresent, depressingly huge cold lake, the annoyingly polite, Minnesota nice people. The boring lack of traffic jams, long commutes, and rude drivers. The sky so blindingly blue no sunglasses could shield her eyes. The bleak, mournful, never-ending sounds of boats, bridge, foghorn. Perky diverse and confusing greenery everywhere, rudely vying for attention with sneaky, snaking creeks and huge intimidating, foreboding rocky outcrops. Bears and wolves roaming the city, unchecked and uncontrolled. Why indeed did she move here?
Maybe when she returns, as promised, she’ll go full James Joyce on us. *swoon*
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will
The pages are smaller in height and width than they used to be: it shrank from 10×12 to 8×11, a decade ago. And it’s thinner, too. As Jim Dees said, “The menu at your local IHOP is thicker.” The magazine used to have heft. No longer.
Blogging didn’t kill print because people refused to pay for print. Blogging killed print because the quality of writing in print declined to the quality of blogging.
As a source for investigation, insight, the magazine used to have heft. No longer.
The predictably brief Summer confuses most of the tourists who wander aimlessly in the Canal wondering why they came in the first place. Perhaps the Lakewalk should just be dismantled to allow the string of scrap yards to return. Old Chevys and Fords should be desperately trying to rust in the oxidation-depriving cold — a slow-motion cage match between the shore and lake, calling the iron back home. Come Winter, the locals erect small shacks out on the hard water of Superior. They sit, shivering in darkness, staring into a hole, contemplating their sin…
“He didn’t need to actually read the magazine. A cursory glance was enough to cement his opinions—however hastily summoned or perfunctory they might be. The cover was a timeworn cliché, a nod to better days, when multidimensional talent and true artistry had been celebrated within, instead of the cookie cutter icons of low culture that now infected the pages. Not surprisingly, the physical weight of it was also unsubstantial, flimsy… again, an anemic and diminished vestige of former glory, tangible confirmation of the rot infecting publishing and society. He considered that if America is the new Rome, this is what supplants journalism after the great libraries are forsaken, then burned in the sacking of culture and craft. Perfunctorily skimming the opening sentences of two or three mildewed essays, the hackneyed and lackluster prose told him everything he needed to know, and confirmed a pitiful irony: like a stagnant puddle trapped between moldering roots, this rag gathered moss.”
The hunching castoffs of industrial society line the narrow tube of glass and metal leading to an arena, which rises forebodingly like the Morlocks’ mountain lair in the Time Machine. They wait in 100 degree heat. Their minds have been cleansed of reason and history, their hearts are free of obsolete compassion. Phantoms on their glowing screens have told them to come here to sit at the feet of their Orange Messiah, and revel in his message of hatred and fear. The crowd chants on cue for another scripted soundbite to be broadcast across the righteous affiliate stations of the One True Fox News: “Space Force! Space Force! Space Force!”
She hunches toward the bay, a mere child of exiles, mocking the idea of her larger formsake. It is as if this sleepy hamlet’s s all-white denizens erected her as a swift kick to the heart to anyone foreign, brown or good-looking who the cruel tides of fate saw fit to abandon upon its filmy shores. Elsewhere, no monument to the Wonkette is even attempted.
I wrote a nearly 3,000-word screed against Rolling Stone on my own blog, but alas, I can’t email it to Rolling Stone, as their inbox is full.
Well done, Duluth. Well done.
In what passes for summer in Duluth, residents gather in the shadow of a stolid, blocky church to honor one of the few plants that will grow this far north: rhubarb. The celebration of this bitter vegetable with its toxic leaves is a desperate fundraiser for one of the seventeen transitional housing shelters in the shadow of the Amsoil arena. Each year attendees wander listlessly along the cracked street among tents displaying their dismal products. One must have something to celebrate, and Duluthians will cling to whatever comes their way. An empty-eyed mascot made of frayed pool noodles staggers through the crowd, and children stuff themselves with food containing the vast amounts of sugar necessary to make rhubarb palatable. In other words: Trump country.
I’ve been laying on the longest freshwater sand dune all day drinking white wine and sunbathing so I’m not in any form to contribute to this yet… but can I just say how giddy I am to be reading this post and comments?! ❤️
A hike on Park Point.
As I stroll past what seems to be Duluth’s version of an airport I see a couple approaching with a pair of unleashed and possibly rabid golden retrievers with fur like that of Trump’s famous quaff. I cower in fear near the fly infested sand dunes at the thought of the rust-colored canines prancing over to greet me with their ignorant joy. Thankfully they pass me untouched. I near the desolate-looking forest and gawk unwittingly at the plethora of what appears to be Norwegian Pines left to grow untouched like the Buckhorn Plantain weeds of deep south Alabama. Immediately I retreat back to the rental car and curse the local hipster who had suggested I attempt such a horrific activity. I won’t be tricked into hiking into Trump country.