Ohio is the geographical no-place that you fly over to get from one coast to the other. Wedged into a vast geographical space known simply as “the American Midwest,” Ohio is a flat, dull, boring space in which someone — no one knows who — grows corn. It is just a dull place where nothing interesting happens. Yet, Ohio is stranger than one might imagine and more significant than one might like to admit. It is a land of cannibals and the children of the corn, ancient kingdoms brought down by incest and murder. Ohio is the substrate on which global Empire functions, and it brings the world the magic of the alchemist from the cornfield to the gas tank.
The Ohiomachine is an exploration of the ways that Ohio has become the empty vessel of global capital while the people of the state have become near throwaways to the spectacular world of the image, twenty-first-century despair, and a quiet but deranged sense of being the most ordinary of all the ordinary people on Earth, and also the most virtuous by being the most ordinary. From the corn fields that fuel petrochemical industrial power, to the cowering civil warriors lost amid the forgotten small towns, and into the cities where the simulations of life manufactured by the culture industry have separated and atomized people according to their credit scores and criminal background checks, Ohio is the vacuous substrate of global capital and its digital imaginary.
About the Author
Michael Templeton is a writer and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir (Erratum, 2023), the awaiting of awaiting: a novella (Nut Hole, 2024), and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications. He has published articles and essays on contemporary culture and numerous works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Ohio with his wife who is an artist.