Date:  Tue, 16 Dec 1997 10:38:19 -0500
From:  Gregory {Greg} Downing <downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IS2.NYU.EDU>
Subject: Re: The ephemeral Mudville

At 09:38 AM 12/16/97 EST, you wrote:
>I suspect we really are trying too hard. This quest has all the earmarks of
>the perennial dispute on alt.tv.simpsons about which Springfield the writers
>of "The Simpsons" are "really" situating the weekly cartoon show in; every
>week or so various posters chime in with new clues based on that week's
>episode. I would imagine that similarly there is no true Mudville per se--as
>Alan suggests, a general rather than specific label.   --Larry
>

Right -- but I'm not sure who the "we" would be since I don't know that
anyone on this list is supporting the idea there is a "real" Mudville. I
believe that several people not on this list favor certain hypotheses:
Robert Smith of the Boston Globe as cited by Gerald Cohen supports Mass.; a
sportswriter friend anonymously cited by Gerald Cohen supports Stockton, CA;
and Martin Gardner's _Annotated Casey_ as cited by Alan Baragona supports
(or at least reports) a putative Mudville in Kansas.

My sense (absent really strong proof to the contrary) would be that
"Mudville" is intentionally general and fictional, like "Lake Wobegon" -- or
"Springfield," another deliberately generic name (wish I'd thought of that
one). Such names are chosen either for how common they are (Springfield) or
for how over-the-top they are (who would ever name a place "Lake Wobegon" in
real life?). Mudville may in fact be in the latter category: there may have
been people who referred to some town or another sarcastically as Mudville,
but I don't know that it was ever a formal town-name. Somebody who was
interested in that would have to check the 1895 (or some other later-19th
cent.) atlas. Of course, there *were* some fairly outrageous local names
before the Post Office got on people's cases in the late 19th cent. -- e.g.,
Hell Town, VA was supposedly renamed Temperanceville, and lots of cases like
that (some probably historically accurate, and others not).

Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu