{"id":30909,"date":"2023-08-30T08:27:35","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T12:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=30909"},"modified":"2023-08-31T08:54:25","modified_gmt":"2023-08-31T12:54:25","slug":"japan-48-norway-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/30\/japan-48-norway-2\/","title":{"rendered":"JAPAN 48, NORWAY 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\nPoet Robert <\/strong><\/span>Bly\u2019s worst nightmare was visiting his family in Minnesota and attending hockey games.\u00a0 Maybe not as bad as Vietnam, but up there pain-wise, he said. Bly\u2019s anti-Midwest rap was a big hit in Ann Arbor in the 1970s. Bly\u2019s main message: your parents are middle-class stiffs; your real family is elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Robert Bly, 1970<\/p><\/div>\n

Bly was a 44-year-old Harvard man in a serape. He had a lot of chutzpah dispensing life advice in that shmate<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I was a mama\u2019s boy. Whenever I went home for vacation, I received the treatment due a future Dr. Stratton. I did the occasional minor chore, like emptying the dishwasher and dusting. Some of my college buddies didn\u2019t go home. They were scared of becoming middle-class, even for a weekend.<\/p>\n

At home I hung around with old pals from my street. My friend John was installing tanning booths. My friend Frank (not his real name) owned shares in a racehorse. Frank worked as a mutuel clerk at the day-time Thoroughbred track and at the trotters\u2019 track at night. When Frank wasn\u2019t working, he was\u00a0 firing his .357 magnum at beer cans in the woods.<\/p>\n

Bly knew about guns, too, and Midwestern culture.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t his thing.<\/p>\n

***
\nFor my <\/strong><\/span>American English class at the U. of Michigan, I traveled with a friend — and classmate — Mark Schilling to southwest Ohio to research dialects. We asked the southwest Buckeyes to choose between<\/p>\n

bag\/sack
\neavestrough\/gutter
\nbelly whopper\/belly slam
\nlightning bug\/firefly\u00a0<\/em>
\nwarsh\/wash<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Mark Schilling, 1977<\/p><\/div>\n

Mark\u2019s parents said \u201cwarsh\u201d instead of \u201cwash.\u201d They lived in Troy, Ohio, just north of Dayton. (This was North Midland dialect country.) Mark didn\u2019t return to Troy after college. He wasn\u2019t interested in becoming a J.C. Penney store manager like his dad. Mark went to L.A., then on to Japan. He\u2019s still in Japan,\u00a048 years later. Beat the drum for Mark Schilling, Bly.<\/p>\n

Bly, you<\/strong> <\/span>only spent a year — maybe two — in Norway! And then you wound up back in Minnesota and died there.<\/p>\n

Check out the trailer for Mark’s movie\u00a0 Convenience Story<\/em><\/a>, recently released.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Poet Robert Bly\u2019s worst nightmare was visiting his family in Minnesota and attending hockey games.\u00a0 Maybe not as bad as Vietnam, but up there pain-wise, he said. Bly\u2019s anti-Midwest rap was a big hit in Ann Arbor in the 1970s. Bly\u2019s main message: your parents are middle-class stiffs; your real family is elsewhere. Bly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age","category-on-the-road"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30909"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30921,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30909\/revisions\/30921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}