Flickr Slideshow of Mankato, MN, and American Literature

The slide show you've just seen is, apparently, an odd miscellany of images from Flickr. There's no explicit, coherent theme, I don't think, so don't think you've missed anything! (Sounds a little like Mark Twain at the beginning of Huck Finn, don't you think? "Persons attempting ....") However, being the English professor that I am, I suppose there's something lurking under the surface. Maybe we can find something there?

Also, Flickr does not let me organise my faves, so there's no way I can impose upon my choices a coherent, linear narrative. Maybe that's where VoiceThread will come in handy? Moreover, my faves seem not to be organised in the order I chose them on Flickr, so that's not even helpful, where one might try to choose images in a certain order so that the faves are organised. (Did you like the British spelling of organize? I hope so. I also think we should go metric! Powers of 10 are so much easier.)

The coherent narrative is this: I went to college in Mankato, and in college I studied American Literature, first with Dr. Robert Houston, and then with Dr. Ronald Gower, both excellent professors--perhaps more on them later, in another blog post. Literature has an imaginative, playful component, much like I'm trying to adopt in this blog post, which some of these images demonstrate, and Mankato has a picturesque past and present, which also lends itself to the imagination. For example, while I could not find any images of the Dakota Sioux hanging in Mankato (it happened around 1862, I think), I did find the image of a Mankato-area man tarred-and-feathered for not supporting the war. This stuff should only happen in the imagination, right?

So there's the coherent theme or narrative. Of course, you might also see things I didn't, and that's OK too. It's what we English professors call "reader response," where the act of reading, or viewing, or interpreting, is as much a creative act as the act of composing. There are no wrong answers, right? Not as long as one can support their "reading" with evidence from the "text." (Sorry! Don't know where that lecture came from.)

NOTE: All images in the slide show have a "Creative Commons" license, which is great, and I thank the artists for allowing their use. (However, limiting a Flickr search to only those images with the "CC" license does, sometimes dramatically, limit your choices. Using your own images and/or checking other image repositories on the web, such as Google Images, might be even better.)