Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Thinking about Place

I've received some interesting responses to my editorial on "The Farmer Wants a Wife" on Counterpunch. One guy wrote from Europe (location unspecified) and mentioned that the show is not a hit in Europe to the degree stated by FreeMantleMedia. He said he had never seen it on French or Belgian TV, and that people weren't really talking about it there. He said that he thoughtthat in the Netherlands the show played to a small audience. He said he thought TV2, the channel on which it appears, is probably only playing to two people! I wrote back and sent him an article from WorldScreen.com that noted the show had a strong debut in Austria recently. Another person wrote from out Portland, OR and mentioned the prevalence of corporate farms and explained the correct label by which to refer to a family farmer in Germany. Some good trivia. I have received a few other responses, but these were the most interesting. You never know who will turn up and what they will say.

My latest preoccupation is working on turning a chapter from my book into an article AND working on my sylllabus on Writing a Sense of Place. I have been researching definitions on place, and as I surmised, there are many debates over defining place across the discplines. The positions seem to be (and this is from memory) as follows. I'll come back in another post this week with some references.

--The most common definition seems to be this: place involves the interaction between people and their environment, whether it is a farmer's corn field or an urban street or a kitchen in a suburban cul de sac or a forest in a beautiful national park.
--Place is sometimes referred to as state of mind or a phase of someone's life, a "state of being." Some examples: "I was in a good place" or " I was in a place in my life where...." Some pan this definition because it's too "fuzzy." Which leads to the next definition.
--A sense of place is an extremely ambiguous phrase that can be used to describe anything, and it is often misused and abused. A newly minted suburb with houses that are identical can have a "sense of place." "It has a sense of place" (as in fake barn doors on the utility sheds and fake wagon wheel fences or something like that). When I saw how one of the writers I was reading had panned that phrase, I gave a guilty start. I use that phrase in my course title1

--There are also "non-places"--places that are "non-places": airport lounges, mega malls with chain stores, etc. There are also places that are not part of nations, but liminal places.

Writing about place often gets conflated with "nature writing" or "travel writing," but everything I'm reading suggests that this is a mistake. The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment has a number of very interesting syllabi for literature and composition courses that I am consulting. More later....