It was the palpable bold shape of the edible spindles, a good score of them stacked up among the turkey and the other vegetables. They looked knitted, felt glabrous, and brought the outdoors to the table more than any baked potato or celery root. Corn on the cob has bemused me ever since. Rigid with its tiny-chambered juices, a round-tower skyscraper of the year 2000, a convolvulus of dimples that comes sheathed in palmy leaves and wispy silk, it is my emblem of the American land, not phallic as some reckon but a wrapped, near-aerodynamic gift, which one devours row by row, as if stripping fertility from the axis of the Earth itself.
-Paul West, Ode to Corn.
As Cather scholar Bernice Slote describes it, Lincoln in the 1890s was a frontier capital city bursting with urban aspirations, “a place in which to set down civilization.” For a girl from Texas unable to place Nebraska on a map, I expected, in 2009, to encounter the prairie in Lincoln, to be surrounded by cornfields, tractors, men with straw between their teeth. Of course, Lincoln is no such place. It is a bicyclers’ city, with a tall capitol and a crowded downtown farmer’s market. It is a brick and mortar city, possessed of particular charms (ubiquitious Cornhuskers gear among them) but not, in fact, stranded in a cornfield.
I anticipated some of the vibrancy of this community in the way we now often glimpse faraway places: online. And yet the myth of the cornfield is persistent, insisted upon by romatics squinting to see beyond the supercomputers and the think tanks and the bungalows. In stubbornly titling these posts of my summer internship “Digital Cornfield,” I am grasping at the visitor’s sense of what is foreign in the familar. But, too, I am referencing the fertility of the place, and the shelter it proffers. And paying homage to Paul West’s description of corn on the cob as a glabrous futurist tower, beckoning for consumption.
