i mean i went to the beach that makes you old and im still the same age. down to the minute actually. it’s kind of creepy but i also found this cool horseshoe crab that gets uglier when i sin
“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.
“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.
“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”
And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:
Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.
“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know … they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.
Give me a map of the midwest how you imagine it, and don’t just use state lines, show me how you think the cultural area of the midwest actually exists in the US
Blue dots: cities that come to mind if I’m trying to name a Midwestern city to explain the Midwest to someone
Green dots: other cities among the 120 most populous cities in the US which feel probably Midwestern to me
Orange shaded region: Midwest core
Purple shaded region: yeah sure probably Midwestern but it kind of depends on context (Food? Demographics? Religion? Politics? Music? Natural environment/climate?)
Black dotted line: approximate “upper Midwest” versus “lower Midwest” boundary
Red line: approximate “the South” boundary- yes I guess I believe the South and the Midwest aren’t mutually exclusive
Pink circled region: the Great Plains- a unified region which should be included or excluded from the Midwest as a package deal. I typically include it but I don’t feel strongly about whether it would be better to consider it a separate but related region. However, if someone thinks the only thing west of the Midwest is The West, then the Great Plains should be in the Midwest, because they are definitely NOT the West.
I thought about some of the qualities people might think about the Midwest and looked up maps for them. Here they are, with the Midwest indicated by that quality circled. Note I am not making claims about whether any of these qualities are good or bad, they’re just things that get associated with midwesternness.
“the Midwest is flat”
“the Midwest is not diverse”
“the Midwest was a hub for the Great Migration”
“the Midwest is union states that were not the original colonies or the far west”
“the Midwest has a significant mainline protestant population” (pink ABCUSA, orange ELCA, and green UMC on this map)
“the Midwest is farmland”
“the Midwest has wet summers and dry winters”
“people in the Midwest are of primarily German, Scandinavian, and Native American ancestry”
There are lots of these kinds of things that aren’t occurring to me at the moment. But just for fun let’s combine these ones into a map! There’s a transparent purple layer for each of the previous maps, and a black outline for places that fall into at least 5 of the 8 regions.
Maybe this is the Midwest? Probably better than my first reblog on instinct alone.
I am sad that op never gave me feedback like they did for some others :( I want a good grade in making pictures and interacting with my current favorite theme blog :(
