This is an excerpt from a long email I sent to a friend yesterday, in discussion about the city and the country and how we think about the two, a topic I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

 I grew up rural – in small town Kansas, surrounded by wheat and soybean fields, spending my summers riding bikes on dirt roads and making a little money helping local farmers throw hay bales. And now, I’ve spent most of my adult life in big cities (OKC, Kansas City, Tulsa, Wichita, Chicago.) I love the city, but I also pine for the quiet and the sensory experience of the country.

I also feel keenly the dismissiveness of the city folks towards those who don’t live in cities. Those are my people, and to hear them continually be denigrated and dragged, its no wonder the country folk have extended a giant “Fuck You” via the ballot box to urban voters over the last two decades. One of the big notes in my thesis work was reflecting on the talking point you hear in liberal circles, about poor, rural white working class folks “voting against their own best interests”, as if, (1) they have any idea what those interests could even be, and (2) as if those interests could be merely boiled down to tax rates or government handouts. Since when did issues of culture become something that can be excluded from an understanding of one’s best interests? I’ve attached my thesis work here, if you’re interested; you’ll find the section where I talk about that on pages 32-33.

One thing I think about a lot is how the rural-urban divide naturally flattens out and overly simplifies the lived context of so many people. I think about the place I grew up in: rural, small town Kansas, about 20 minutes outside Wichita. Obviously, there was the unambiguous Country – dirt roads, farms, fields, but also mobile homes on small plots, rural subdivisions and the like. And there was the city – inside the city limits of Wichita, all strip malls and apartment blocks, crosswalks and concrete and “green spaces.” But how do we think about, for instance, the small town I grew up in – 1,000 people, a mile wide by 3 miles long, made possible simply because of a railroad track and the grain elevator it ran past. In two minutes on foot, I could leave my very suburban neighborhood – street lamps and minivans and well manicured lawns – and be in a wheat field with a well stocked pond. We didn’t have a grocery store, but we definitely had a good gas station, that serviced folks driving the four lane highway between Wichita and El Dorado, keeping our town (just barely) alive. My immediate family is not “country” in any sense of the word – they would fit into suburban Wichita very well. I think also about the suburbs themselves, attached to the city, but mere moments from the country, and so many of their lives lived in those country places. Liminality abounds in much of America; I think many of our elites envision NYC/Chicago/DFW/LA, and a very sharp divide between those places, and the rural places. But it’s gradual, right? You know this as well as I do. How do we account for these people?

Today’s Song: “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan

I’ve written here before about my love for Bob Dylan. Can you tell what movie I’m getting cautiously excited about?

Each Sunday at Fellowship Congregational UCC Tulsa, where I am on staff, I usually give a sermon or message to our youth during our Youth Worship. I try to keep them short and often conversational. I’d like to start sharing them more often. Here is the one I gave this last Sunday, the Third Sunday in Advent; the theme in our series this week was Do the good that is yours to do.

Scripture: Isaiah 58:9b-12

“If you get rid of unfair practices,
quit blaming victims,
quit gossiping about other people’s sins,
If you are generous with the hungry
and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out,
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness,
your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.
I will always show you where to go.
I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places—
firm muscles, strong bones.
You’ll be like a well-watered garden,
a gurgling spring that never runs dry.
You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew,
rebuild the foundations from out of your past.
You’ll be known as those who can fix anything,
restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,
make the community livable again.

Message:

Today’s Video: “Gilraen’s Memorial” from The Fellowship of the Rings OST by Howard Shore

I went this weekend, along with my oldest son and a friend, to see the new Lord of the Rings animated film, The War of the Rohirrim. The film is done in anime style, and tells the story of King Helm Hammerhand of Rohan, about two hundred years before the events of The Hobbit and LOTR. I wanted to share a few thoughts on what I found to be an enjoyable and faithful telling of this story, but before I do, I’ll just say here that a few light spoilers follow from this point.

The story is drawn from the Appendices to LOTR, where the story of Helm is given about two pages of treatment. I was pleased with how true the filmmakers stuck to the story that Tolkien outlines, outside of one key change, which is the centering of Hera, daugher of Helm, as the main character. In Tolkien’s writing, Hera goes unnamed and does not play a central role outside of being the hand asked for marriage by Wulf, who is the primary antagonist of Helm’s story. Despite my best attempts to evade most LOTR-related forums and such on social media (I don’t feel like I need to explain the toxicity of online fandom, especially the too-online Tolkien bros who make up most of the LOTR conversation online), I have seen a bit of entirely predictable gnashing of teeth about a woman main character, or about changes made to the story to make it flow better on screen, or just general complaints about any attempt to adapt Tolkien’s work.) I don’t share these feelings at all; I love the good faith attempt at adaptation, even when some changes are made to the source material. Its for this reason that I also have loved The Rings of Power, the Tolkien-based TV series on Amazon Prime; I feel the same way about The War of the Rohirrim. Tolkien’s works aren’t scripture, forever etched in stone unchanging for future generations to venerate and fear; Middle Earth is a story, one that is on-going, that we get to play in now. Maybe one day I’ll write about Tolkien’s take on subcreation, but for now, suffice to say that if you don’t like The War of the Rohirrim, or The Rings of Power, or even Peter Jackson’s films, and you want to maintain some form of mythical purity for the original text, well, you don’t ever have to watch any of this stuff, and you also don’t have to spend any time attacking those of us who want to and find enjoyment in it. Protect your personal Tolkien totem as you wish; the rest of us will enjoy a fascinating and powerful tale that isn’t done being told.

My only quibbles with the film reside in the nature of anime storytelling. I am not an anime fan; I don’t particuarly care for the animation style, and I find the overly dramatic style of storytelling grating and distracting, especially in a universe that is so often very understated and self-serious as Tolkien’s is. This quibble, though, is entirely personal and not a broader statement on the quality of the film or the storytelling. Anime doesn’t work for me, in general¹. But I would – and will – gladly watch The War of the Rohirrim again.

There are so many unexplored and lightly alluded to stories and threads contained in the brief historical frames Tolkien included in his Appendices. I would love to see more of those stories expanded and adapted, and if The War of the Rohirrim is any indication of the quality and the faithfulness this endeavor will be approached with, then we are in for some good storytelling in the Middle Earth.

I want to add a new little feature to these Daily Diaries, one that I draw from something the “Morning Hoddle of Coffee” posts at Cartilage Free Captain, and which Greg Sargent used to do waaaayyyy back in the day when he blogged for the MaddowBlog on MSNBC. This feature is sharing, daily, a piece of music I have been listening to or that’s been on my mind, for whatever reason. I don’t listen to a ton of music, but I have a few things I really like. So, I’ll share a song each day, with a few words why.

Today’s Song: “Good Time Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin is my favorite band of the 70s, and I’ve been on a bit of a kick the last few days. This is first song from their first album; one hell of a way to announce themselves to the world, if you ask me.

1. The Star Wars: Visions series on Disney+ is a noted exception for me, as well as the Miyazaki classics. ↩︎