Eric Meyer posted a nice list of Ten Things To Do In Cleveland Before You’re Dead last week. Being a Columbus native, I had to give Cleveland an obligatory jab.
The post reminded me of a few nice quotes about Columbus. Actually, they’re not nice at all, since they make fun of Ohio’s capitol city.
Anyway, here are a some that I could track down on the web.
- In chapter9 of Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. (Summarized by John Diebold and Michael Goodwin)
It seems that Wayvone and the Mafia try to hire her to put the deadly, delayed-action Vibrating Palm ninja move on Vond (who is threatening their drug dealing), but despite her hatred of Vond for seducing and subverting Frenesi, DL is afraid of getting involved with the Mafia. She flees to Columbus, Ohio, where she tries to hide in the Clark Kent guise of a mild-mannered file clerk.
- One from Columbus native James Thurber.
Nobody from Columbus has ever made a first-rate wanderer in the Conradean tradition. Some of them have been fairly good at disappearing for a few days to turn up in a hotel in Louisville with a bad headache and no recollection of how they got there, but they always scurry back.
- Now for a longer, more detailed view of my birthplace. Bill Roorbach, who may or may not like Columbus, notes in his piece, Scioto Blues, that:
If you move to Columbus, Ohio, from Farmington, Maine (as I did three years ago to take a job at Ohio State), you will not be impressed by the landscape. It’s flat there–as I write I’m back in Maine, escaped from Ohio for a third summer straight–and the prairie rivers move sluggish and brown. In Maine you pick out the height of flood on, say, the Sandy River by the damage to tree trunks and the spookily exact plane made by ice and roaring current tearing off the lowest branches of riverside trees. In Columbus you pick out the height of flood on the Olentangy or Scioto Rivers by the consistent plane attained by 10,000 pieces of garbage, mostly plastic bags, caught in tree branches…
I mean, the river is a junkfest.
That’s the Olentangy before it gets to campus, and before it gets to the large skyscraper downtown of Columbus. And Columbus is big–bigger than you think, an Emerald City that pops up on the prairie. It’s the biggest city in Ohio, population about 1.25 million inside the Greater Columbus loop of 1-270. The city’s official slogan should be It’s Not That Bad, since that’s what people tell you, over and over. I think the actual civic slogan is More Than You Dreamed…
On the northeast bank of the river is Blowjob Park, as one of my students called it in a paper, which I found because it is at the very end of the bike path. The path ends at a parking lot where lonely and harmless-looking men sit in cars gazing at each other and waiting for liaisons. The city sometimes arrests these men in courageless raids, not a homophobic act, says a spokesperson, for the men are said not to be gay exactly, but married guys looking for action of any kind, loitering and littering and certainly dangerous so close to the impound lot and the defunct sewage-treatment plant.