The Most Photographed Barn in America
Back in 1986, I got introduced to Don DeLillo in a contemporary American literature class through his National Book Award-winning novel, . DeLillo is still one of my favorite American novelists (although I’ve enjoyed his recent work less than his novels from the 80’s and 90’s), and White Noise is one of those books that I re-read every few years, just for the hell of it. I own several copies of it, but the favorite copy is the original white-covered Penguin edition I bought for that contemporary American lit class back in ‘86. It has margin notes scrawled in it from the course, and again from several years later when I made White Noise part of the focus of my Master’s thesis. And some margin notes from when I taught it to my own students.
I taught White Noise in my own literature courses at least four times, alway somewhat disappointed that the vast majority of my students weren’t as blow away by it as I was (and many were actually violently put off by DeLillo’s highly stylized prose). More to the point, after I began to focus more on teaching composition & rhetoric than literature, I used an excerpt from White Noise — the oft-excerpted “Most Photographed Barn in America” scene — as a writing prompt in many more composition/rhetoric courses.
Imagine my delight then when this morning I read (via Kottke) a blog post that points out the combination of Flickr with mapping functionality that allows you to “theoretically pick any place in the world — a city, a neighborhood, a street corner, a building, and literally view that place through the lenses of the people who had photographed that place” means that we can now look at the actual Most Photographed Barn in America.
Still . . . the presence of the Rockies in the background makes me think that maybe this isn’t in proximity to the idyllic College-on-the-Hill, and maybe Jack and Murray are still standing on that elevated spot looking at the signs of another barn. Ah . . . what’s the differance? ;-)