Novel Waves of Grain

Perhaps you’re familiar with my longtime fascination (bordering on genuine expertise) around a strange slice of 1980s and ‘90s Americana called “Sweet Valley High.” First this interest materialized as a book collection, then it was a blog, and for the past three and a half years, it’s been a podcast, Sweet Valley Diaries.

I am not a traditional “fan” of these books. As such, the show is not really a fan-cast. For me, there is immense fun in examining a cultural artifact and mining it for clues about society and history. Call me a weirdo (I can take it), but I find that overthinking relatively unsophisticated artifacts is even more fun than taking something “serious” seriously. And I have never found more amusingly fertile territory for cultural examination than Sweet Valley High.

The thing about examining culture through conversation? You also end up finding out a thing or two about yourself.

I edit the show, which means listening back through an entire recording session. Last week I was editing an episode about a book called Spring Fever, wherein the main characters — resolute California girls, the Wakefield twins — go spend their spring break with relatives in Kansas.

In the recording, I laugh at the way the book describes the teenagers’ wide-eyed awe at the beauty of the “celery colored” fields that greeted them in Kansas, spread out beyond the windows of their uncle’s car as far as the eye could see. I remember countless marathon road-trips from Chicagoland to Albuquerque where those same fields had bored me to tears. As a kid, I would have told you that the most exciting thing about driving through Kansas was that the highway signs have a sunflower on them.

During the recording, I could tell my complaint was not landing with my guest, Megan, who has lived all over the country but was born and raised in Los Angeles — a Californian, like the book’s Wakefield twins. On the episode, I posit that maybe I was seeing The Wheat State¹ through jaded eyes. “I was living in the Midwest,” I say, “so [driving through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas,] it was just more and more and more Midwest. Whereas them, coming from California, they were seeing something that was novel to them.” 

This is the kind of thing that (over)analyzing a work of literature, however minor, can reveal to you. Any place can be romantic and beautiful if you’re seeing it with fresh eyes!

I think of the foreign exchange program that was an annual tradition of my high school’s German department. Students from suburban Munich (the delightfully named Pfaffenhofen, to be exact) traveled to Northwest Indiana and spent three weeks (their own “spring break” — they were on a year-round school calendar) staying in the homes of families who had a kid studying German. Then, that summer, we American kids trekked to Bavaria to stay with the families of our new German friends.

No offense to any Regioners reading this, but at the time, it struck me as borderline cruel to send these teenagers all the way to the USA and only show them Chesterton, Indiana². Perhaps they felt the same way about our stay in their hometown (though, Pfaffenhofen’s tourist site describes it as a “cultural hot spot”, a claim only slightly bolder than Chesterton’s own “the art of living”). 

Yet Pfaffenhofen holds a hallowed place in my memories. If I hadn’t stayed in Pfaffenhofen, I might never have seen a hop farm, so I’d have no idea how bizarre and beautiful hops are when towering in a field. And how many 17-year-old Americans can say they’ve pumped a too-tall bicycle up and down the hills of a European subdivision? Our Bavarian counterparts likely experienced a similar rush of novelty in the world that we found so pedestrian. Who else among their Gymnasium peers could boast of the singular joy of eating at a Pizza Hut on Indian Boundary Road, or of shopping for jeans at a Michigan City outlet mall? The best of America it is not, but name a more American experience, I dare you. 

It’s both appropriate and pointed that this new insight comes at a moment when novelty of environment is at an all-time low. Lately, turning down a new street on my daily walk is what passes for a change of scenery. But honestly, as much as long for the day I am once more able to set foot in entirely new-to-me lands, turning down a new street rarely disappoints. Even in throughly familiar country, novel vantage points exist. Go see for yourself.

Maybe they’ll even be celery-colored.

`- Marissa

The cover of SPRING FEVER gives new meaning to the name “Wakefield.” Note the color of that field. I hope no one’s celery is this color.

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MOAR! CONTENT!

Are you Sweet-Valley curious? The Super Edition: SPRING FEVER episode of Sweet Valley Diaries is good, weird fun.

This week, America was forced into yet another race reckoning, and once again, many white Americans are tying themselves in knots trying to explain how we don’t need a race reckoning. In doing so, they are, implicitly, unfathomably empathizing more with a mass murderer than with his innocent victims. To make excuses for murder is bad enough, but in doing so, the excusers are actively engaging in the long, real, and racist fetishization and objectification of specifically Asian women. Here’s some further reading from someone who can speak more ably about this topic than I ever could.

This Ocean Vuong episode of ON BEING was recorded before the pandemic, and recently re-released. It’s fascinating and beautiful, but there’s one idea I can’t get out of my head: Humanity is not like technology, growing and evolving exponentially. Because we all have to start from zero at birth, and because we all die, each new generation has to start all over again to make sense of the world around us — hopefully with excellent written knowledge from the past to guide us.

Move over cookies and bread; I see a lot of little layer cakes in my baking future.

1. Kansas is more commonly (and officially) referred to as “The Sunflower State,” (hence those highway signs) but “The Wheat State” is also a real nickname

2. Ok, ok, it WAS suburban Chicago. We took the German kids to Chicago once or twice. Many of them were really excited to see Buckingham Fountain, as it was featured in the opening credits of Married, With Children, apparently still popular in Germany in the late ‘90s. They called it “Al Bundy Fountain.”