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In General

Double thumbs up.

I’m all for shitstorms. But I regard them as arguments, not fights. I’d buy a drink for anybody on here if you happened to be in Little Rock. But of course, nothing is safe but congratulations and gushings forth of luv and admiration. If I should express concern over the EPIDIMIC of kids prescribed methamphetamines to help them conform to the stupid rules of shitty schools, someone would surely get on here and tell me how his third cousin once removed has ADtripleHD with a Merlin complex and Ritalin is the only thing that enables him to sit still in school, and obviously I’m a giant dick who wants to take away little Billy’s medicine and have him flunk 4th grade and be on welfare for the rest of his life.

By the way, I remind you that the most shitstorm-provoking descriptions of Fayetteville, "Neverneverland" and "transient," were posted by a native and an early transplant respectively. And they kinda got me thinking.

I’m completely in favor of breastfeeding in public. It was just a convenient example for a point about being surrounded by like-minded people versus enduring some actual diversity. How about this: move to a red state, or a Republican district in Arkansas, and vote liberal. Make your kids learn the Bible through and through so they can argue with fundamentalist kids. I don’t know…

I don’t have a rational defense for the anti-Fayetteville sentiments. They’re just sentiments. You don’t want to be rational about a place; that’s what I meant about amenities and malaise. For about eight years I thought I never wanted to leave. In fact, when I heard people call it boring, I thought that if you’re not creative enough to have a good time in Fayetteville you don’t deserve a more lively place.

Sense of opposition may be important, too. If you’re kind of a hippy and you regard the town as a Southern Baptist/fratboy stronghold, then maybe that makes you feel more alive. But if you’re kind of left-leaning and you regard the town as a lefty stronghold (for Arkansas, anyway), then you start to feel like you’re living in a gated community. In other words, I think everybody who’s thinking about moving and communing should band together and move to a cheap, declining, yet conservative town in South Arkansas and breastfeed in public.

Meredith: when I used to drive through the ARV, especially what they used to call "the Dardanelles," weekly, I would think of you and your people.

Cara, I’m probably exaggerating. I met some very warm, decent people in Fayetteville who were working hard to do what’s right. And I’m sure it’s different if you grow up there and it’s in your blood. I had near neighbors, including people who went several generations back in Fayetteville, who were wonderful and looked after me and got me drunk on Sundays. But what I tend to remember is the many neighbors who never said "hi" and avoided eye contact. Yesterday I was at the grocery store on South Main in LR and this lady stopped her cart and turned around to talk about the heat and her diabetes and when we parted she told me to have a "blessful day." That kind of thing just didn’t happen at IGA. I think if I had stayed in Fayetteville 1999 to 2001 to get my master’s according to original plan, I would be terribly nostalgic for it now. I know people who went to college there who still cry when they go back to visit.

Samantha: I’m sorry, did your Flying Burrito experience not include a kid with gross facial hair and possibly some piercings talking for five minutes about how awesome the Dolly Parton bluegrass version of "Heaven Let Your Light Shine Down" is and wondering if it was her original composition, while the original version (by ~~Creed~~ Collective Soul) of same played loud?

Gut feeling is the only way to decide where to stay. I’m pretty sure that deja vu was the only thing anchoring me in Fayetteville for eleven years. Considering a place’s amenities (esp restaurants and live music venues) is the surest way to malaise.

Wikipedia says that in 2000 Fayetteville was 86.5% white. After I got home, I thawed out and wondered what the hell an alleged Southern historian was doing up there. Another thing is that the faded nineteenth century part of town that Harington’s talking about in the excerpt below is so much bigger than Fayetteville’s old part. I ride my bike around our comparatively flat, grid-plan downtown in awe and lust. The flatness and the open layout and the porches make even mansions downtown look welcoming. Compare to Mt. Nord, home of J. William Fulbright.

I thought of Fayetteville as a convenient escape from the "social pressure cooker" (Walker Percy’s term) of Little Rock. But the thing is is that the reason Fayetteville doesn’t feel like a social pressure cooker is because it’s cold. An outsider is never going to penetrate the insular cliques of sharing, caring, open-minded, art-loving Fayettevillians. And it turns out that LR is big enough to hide out in.

Part of my bitterness comes from having bought the hippy-drippy, open, tolerant Fayetteville thing for six or seven years. Ooh, I thought, girls here have hairy armpits and breastfeed in public! This is the real deal. Then, in maybe 2005, I had walked down to the farmer’s market to make my purchases from the meager organic, stony soil and short growing season Ozark produce and I overheard a slightly fat middle aged woman praising a "Draft SUV Drivers First" bumper sticker: "That’s so true! We should!" That kind of snapped me out of it.

Lately

See ya (breastfeeding) on facebook.

“We turned up Markham once more. The sun was sinking into the pine hills of Perry County, far away. Dusk was setting in. We drove all the way out to the west end of town, exploring the vastness of the new housing developments: Briarwood, Leawood, Robinwood, Kingwood, Birchwood, Grandwood, Brookwood, Westwood, Coolwood, Point O’Woods, and others; the innumerable ranch-styles and split-levels, faceless in the dusk but not shapeless, swarming in the butchered pine woods like a heard of neoteric mammoths munching and masticating bushels of green trading stamps. “Don’t it make you wonder?” Naps said, getting us lost on some twisting, terraced drive dipping through the center of what once had been a pleasant woodland in Boyle Park but now was cancerously crowded with the bedrooms of subexecutive insurance men who had driven home from the Tower Building in Comets and Corvairs. “It makes me wonder,” I said, and we found our way out of there, getting on Twelfth Street and heading back toward town, past the less pretentious outpost houses of the early Eisenhower era, then past the outmoded ranch-types of the Truman years, the stuccoed duplexes of the Roosevelt reign, on past the symmetrical white clapboard bungalows of the Hoover bad times, until fianlly we were back among old and faded parts of the nineteenth century again…”

ArkansasRockers.com

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In General

Lately