Monday, April 10, 2006
"Lonely" North Dakota
About every six months or so (more or less, I'm uncertain; it'd be real burdensome to do a check), the New York Times or some other news rag runs a story about northern Dakota, and in all the stories the theme has been the same (if not, then just incredibly similar), but it's a theme that Serious Newspaper Journalists always tout as "New[spaper]." The late Dr. Elwyn B. Robinson published his History of North Dakota in 1966, and he was saying these same truths. Can the New York Times ever say anything different about North Dakota? Probably not. Therefore, I offer my criticism: a resounding B-O-R-I-N-G!
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3 comments:
...so I found myself in the middle of a long long article of vacant Times prose. I didn't remember how I got there and I was unsure how to get out. I would click to advance the pages but would make no appreciable headway through the bleak cold wastes of talk of cold bleak wastes of North Dakota's cold, bleak, bleak, cold wastes of Times prose about cold bleak...
Just trying to figure out how these articles get written every 6 months. MFT. I kinda liked it myself. Ain't never been up there. Toronto is about as close as I got. Glad to be out.
Yeah, in freecounterpoint to myself, I agreed with a history prof who hails from out east, and who had similar sentiments. He said that he enjoyed the article. While I bashed its nostalgia, I told him that, in the end, it at least told the NYTimes readership that northwestern NoDak exists.
I've been up there doing fieldwork in the summers. It wasn't cold, but you could seriously hear yourself think. The mosquito luftwaffe was also incredible in the area I was in, or at least near Corinth.
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