It’s easy to forget about America until you hear, in a voice like John’s, an assemblage of syllables that feels more like home than any address, something like “Little Caesars-Pizza Hut”. I mean a throwaway piece of color in a speech can so specifically place you: I guess that’s what we call culture. So it’s funny: in these bits of commentary I usually find my impulse is to rub my critical apparatus against the most abstracted feature, the form—or rather, that’s the mode of the academic, ever since Plato ruined all of thought in its crib with the hoax of the ideal. The thesis of Shittown warms my heart: that of course this bizarre man from a self-made rural intelligentsia is more interesting than “solving a murder”—it’s not even an idea with the muscularity of a thesis, it’s just so from the first time you hear John’s voice leaping up and down a couple of octaves of speech and goodness are you grateful that Reed feels the same way. In the first phone call you hear him trying to mine out facts and pin down names: that stops then. 

Everybody told me to listen to Shittown when I was doing my oral history project for five years in this town in Mississippi and I think I was supposed to feel embarrassed that the same thing happened to me that happened here: I mean I basically stopped caring about the “topic”—murder, etc. here, in my case the climate crisis—and became embroiled in the precise specificities of my narrator’s life stories. It’s very interesting to note that motion and see how its the reverse of how life stories are so often wielded: I mean they’re used to prove a point, they’re subservient to a topic, they’re there to catch on our heartstrings or attention and lead us by that leash towards something more important: a politic, a crisis, an issue or a worldview. Climate change let me meet people. And then I am always expected to say something like, “and, also, through these life stories, we can learn a lot about climate change.” Which I think is true too. But it’s the same way that so many of the summaries and paraphases of Shittown wonder why we are satisfied with a podcast that gives “no answers” to its “mysteries” as if that’s what I really want to know, whodunit and where the gold’s buried. John naming all the flowers in his yard while the dogs pull him is the main content here, for me. I’m sure other folks will write about the ethical quandaries, the carpetbagger dilemma, etc. but I wanted to write a little about why I can’t get “Little Caesars-Pizza Hut” in John’s voice from episode 1 out of my head as an associative piece of verbal poetry.