Spoon River

As I mentioned some time before, in the mornings I have been dipping into Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology in my initial, spiritual reading slot with my first cup of coffee. Reading maybe four of his "epitaphs" each day. While it's maybe not a great, great book and it has been left behind by the canon, it's nonetheless a very singular work.

The Anthology consists of the voices of a couple of hundred residents of the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois. Men, women, kids. Bankers, gamblers, priests, scorned wives, outcasts, doctors, poets. Certainly there appears to be greater breadth of erudition than I would have expected in a random small town in the midwest, but what the hell, I was born a lot later and this was a time before radio, television, film, the internet, all of that. Pretty much all people had was books, and public libraries, and both book and library were esteemed.

Putatively all these many voices, but somehow they are united in a narratorial voice. Masters was thoughtful about how various people may have thought than perhaps he was to their idioms. But, again, the absence of lots of filmed and TV footage of various people and the unifying center of a more written culture might have meant that dialects and idiolects were less well-developed and less ossified than they are now. People might also have tried to self-define less with their language.

Qua project, the Anthology seems deeply akin the genre of the physiology which flowered in the 19th century in the hands of Balzac and other lesser writers. In photography the best analog is August Sander's "People of the 20th Century." 

It's very interesting to read a book in which the largest stock of metaphors derives squarely from nature. This is something we have long since lost.

In short, I could probably teach a whole course around this book. I don't know if anyone would take it, but it would be fun.