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11/28/2005 Archived Entry: "A New Geography Course"

A New Geography Course
In Yonder Life on the Far Side of Change, Jim Corder writes:

Some months ago I proposed a new course to the curriculum committee at the university where I teach. I recommended it as sort of a geography course, though I thought it should bring together literature, history, art, and geography into a place to think about place, what it has meant to us, why a sense of place is strong in some of us but not in others. I'd be glad if I could say that I came to be interested in a geography course because of apparent student needs or because of society's apparent needs. But it did not arise out of students' needs or society's needs. It arose out of my need, my longing to know here, to know there, to know the one in relation to the other.

My needs in term of place. "Why do some people become attached to places while others don't?" Corder asks. "What are our personal geographies?" What indeed. A short list: Those places that construct my sense of geography, that are my personal geography.

  • Detroit. My adopted town (the one I don't live in but live near). Its ruins are romanticized everywhere, yet they are metaphoric as well. That metaphor is the invention of a rhetoric of a city not dependent on referentiality, not dependent on grand narratives or sweeping gestures promising economic revival. A rhetoric of fragments and linkages and broken linkages and dead ends and open writing spaces and folksonomy and websites and an odd passion that I read daily across the Web. I call that rhetoric a network.

  • Atlanta. A city of intimacy and southern charm. Yet it is a city of style and yuppies too. Where are the signs of its burning? In the bars or pizza places or half a million dollar homes (1300 square feet!) or Zagat rated restaurants? My ideal place to find good food and drink all day. Even when the food is just “ok” the places one sits in look wonderful and renovated. Old world charm? I always imagine myself a southerner even if the southern city I originally came from (Miami) is hardly considered southern by most people. No matter how hip it becomes, Atlanta is still southern.

  • Homestead, Florida. My mythical city of origins. Where my father and his family once lived. The frontier. Best mythologized for me in an anecdote regarding a pump in the back of my grandmother's house and the back cover of Parliament's Motor Booty Affair (an image which connects me back to Detroit): Riding the waves in a cowboy hat. The frontier meets South Beach. Where you can dance underwater and not get wet.

  • State College. Not really my place. But my connection to it is obvious if even new. It, too, is imaginary (what places aren’t) but personal in ways that the most personal of all my places aren’t. A large body of work struggles to understand relationships among places – argument, textual relationships, professional discourse, theoretical assumptions, memoir – but few can account for the thin line which connects two unrelated places like Detroit and State College. Only two specific people can make that connection occur.

    Replies: 4 comments

    Outkast: Southernplayalisticcadillacfunkymusic & ATLiens: in the words of my drama-queen roommate, "that shit is LIFE."

    Posted by srt @ 11/29/2005 10:27 PM EST

    Nope. 1300 sq feet.
    I'm talking about old neighborhood homes (comp mafia..) not mcmansions. Really great homes...but with real estate up (I'm not sure if these neighborhoods will ever really go down), homes slightly bigger than mine are five times the price.

    Posted by jeff @ 11/29/2005 09:34 PM EST

    Atlanta has been downsizing since the tech bubble burst in 2001. Those 500K+ houses are relics of the go-go, high-tech bubble, late 90's.

    Hey, it's not all that bad. People in 500K+ homes have great garage and estate sales when they have to downsize. Garage-saling is a great way to see all facets of Atlanta, from the inside out, old and new.

    Posted by comp mafia @ 11/29/2005 08:49 PM EST

    (1300 square feet!)

    I think you mean 3100. Or 13,000.

    We have friends with one of those big $500K houses in the Atlanta burbs. Half the rooms are empty. You can hear the expressway from their back porch. And there are no sidewalks on the two main streets that lead out of their subdivision. Ugh.

    Posted by cbd @ 11/29/2005 02:22 PM EST

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