The Corn-Fed Chronicles

Those of you who attend these pages regularly will recall my interest in the strange & fascinating process by which Davenport, Iowa—my hometown and Bix Beiderbecke’s hometown—has somehow transformed into something bigger than itself. It has become, to quote myself, “a shining beacon for all that is right & good with Planet Earth, a potent symbol that a mistress of the op-ed like Sarah Vowell might even wield against a sitting president.”

A new case in point comes from the political blog Brilliant at Breakfast (run by Jill Cozzi, a self-described “Card-carrying factinista and brainiac on the nerd patrol”). In an April 27 post, Cozzi wrote:

That quote from the Administration about creating their own reality? They weren’t kidding. The trigger from Glenn’s blog entry is the insistence by Matt Drudge that Crashing the Gate, the book by Kos and Jerome Armstrong, has only sold some 3600-odd copies, despite the fact that this is a book by bloggers and not only does that number not include online sales, but Great Aunt Mary in Davenport, Iowa is unlikely to be rushing out to get the latest book by any blogger, however alpha-dog he may be in blogistan.

This is Davenport in the role of the über-American town—virtuous but square—but why Davenport? I asked Cozzi that question and she was nice enough to reply:

The reason I chose Davenport, Iowa is really quite pedestrian—here in the Godless liberal northeast, Iowa is really the most corn-fed, middle-America, heartland place we can think of that isn’t full of the Christofascist Zombies (© Marc Maron) you find in the south and in places like Kansas. Iowa has a strong progressive tradition, as I found when I did some research for a novel I’ve been working on intermittently for seven years, which is set partially in Cedar Rapids.

So why Davenport? Because Amazon Dry Goods is there. That’s a mail-order catalog that sells reproduction patterns for vintage-type clothing of the 19th and early 20th century.

Interesting. I’d never heard of Amazon Dry Goods. (Check out the website. Who knew heroin chic was the thing a hundred years ago, too?) Nothing to do with Bix Beiderbecke, admittedly, but nothing much to do with the present day, either. Thanks for the explanation, Jill.

PREVIOUSLY: Would that the world were all Davenport

IMAGE: City of Davenport, Iowa by Rufus Wright (“Scarce important bird’s eye view . . . based upon a renowned painting then in the possession of George L. Davenport, after whom the city was named”)