Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Identical Twin Cities

John Page, Together Now (2011). Collage on canvas, 34 x 40 in.














Trevor Fishlock, in Americans and Nothing Else. Cassell (1980)—

Minneapolis and St Paul..are nicknamed the Twin Cities. They are divided by the Mississippi River, and united by the belief that the inhabitants on the other side of the river are inferior.

...

Harrison Salisbury, in Chester G. Anderson, ed., Growing Up in Minnesota. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976—

Once [after he moved to New York], on top of the Woolworth Building (the Empire State Building did not yet exist), a man asked my mother what it was that lay beyond the Hudson. She said New Jersey. "Oh, yes," he said. "Well, I've never been west of the Hudson." How to explain Minnesota—not only west of the Hudson but west of the Mississippi? It was not easy. New Yorkers didn't seem to understand the difference between Minneapolis and Indianapolis. And even when I explained they didn't seem to think it really made a difference. I knew that New Yorkers were very sophisticated people. In fact, I was ashamed of coming from a place out west where, as I understood the New York view, no one really lived and certainly no one from New York ever ventured.

...

Art Buchwald, More Caviar. New York: Harper, 1959—

Brno is a vry nce cty, but we ddn't get a chance to spnd mch tme thre... Thre are mny twns in Czechoslovakia wthout vwels, but Brno is the lrgest one of thm all.