So you didn’t win a Nobel Prize in Literature this week. Unless your name is Mr. Mo. Although, if you live in Europe, you did win a consolation Nobel Peace Prize at least. (Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union is like giving an Oscar to Alf.) Anyway, I know, it’s total bullshit. You totally deserved it. But you might just be a calendar year away from getting the recognition you so obviously deserve. Let me show you the way.

I waited by the phone all week for that congratulatory call from overseas myself! Not for the stuff I’ve already written, which, let’s admit, is pretty amazing. But for the stuff I could write. I’m not saying I’m the most deserving writer on Earth for this recognition. I just want the Swedish people to tell the world I am. Just as the Nobel Prize people preemptively gave President Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for what he could or would do in office, they should give a Nobel Prize in Literature to me (and then maybe the year after that to you) for what we will accomplish in our Literary Careers with the million bucks, the free donuts and champagne and the NPR drive-time interviews we’ll receive as a Nobel Prize Winner. No one remembers who wins the other prizes. They are in subjects most people failed. Chemistry, geometry? Who knows. And I’m not exactly a selfless hero leading my people to any kind of freedom. I have no good intentions here. Writers are all about ourselves! And although my half-written novel Yay-o-wolf remains half-written I think we can all agree it’s going to be the greatest thing since The Bridges of Madison County, which I believe won the Nobel Prize twice it was so good. (I just checked that on Ms. Google and The Bridges of Madison County hasn’t won the Nobel Prize — yet.) The Nobel Prize in Literature is given to a writer for the body of their work while they’re still alive, so they can give a speech in cold, cold Sweden. To blond children who do not laugh or clap, such as those featured in the documentary The Children of the Corn.

So what can you do, oh writer who has not yet died? Here are some helpful hints that you and I can use on our way to the top of the Literature Anthill!

RENOUNCE YOUR AMERICANISM

Everyone hates America. Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada, New York City, all the Penguins in Antarctica — everyone. In their eyes, we’re basically a Hedonistic Iran. With a better military. We have to pay other countries to be our friends. Lots of money. Just to pick up the phone when we call. And although they may enjoy our “Jason Bourne” movies and Ke$ha songs, they couldn’t care less about the things we consider art. Unless you’re a Southern Writer. They love that twang. But Northern Fancy Yankee writing? No one cares. Joyce Carol Oates is never going to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. Possibly she will win one if they start giving one away for writing about Boxing, which they should. If she spent more than 50 seconds writing a book, she might have better odds. I mean, imagine it. Suddenly every three months there isn’t a new Joyce Carol Oates book. People get nervous. Is she OK, etc.? Yes, she’s fine. She is working on a book. And by working on it, we mean really working on it. Like taking years making everything just right. That book would probably be a million pages long and super-amazing. Because no one has ever edited a Joyce Carol Oates book. They come at you too fast, like snowballs in a nor’easter! You have to fight them off with a ski pole or they’ll hit you in the face. She just types with one hand and whips manuscript pages over her shoulder with the other.

So forget her. She’s talented, and at some point we may discover that she’s secretly half the writers in America, but she’s not going to win. John Updike was supposed to win the Nobel like every year I was growing up. Why didn’t he? If he’d stopped writing in 1985 he probably would have. Unfortunately we had book after book from him, too. It’s not a volume industry, this heady literature thing. Most people only have one-and-a-half good books inside them. The idea is to spread that greatness through a career of maybe ten books. Why do great American writers write bad books? Because publishers put so much pressure on them to write the next book. When will you be delivering the next book? What will the next book be? Stephen King is just as prolific as Oates and Updike, and in some ways a much better writer. Why won’t he ever win the Nobel Prize? Because he stopped writing Big Macs and started writing Arch Deluxes. Remember when McDonald’s wanted to attract adults back so they made an adult burger? No, no one remembers this. Because it was a terrible idea. But our pal Stephen is attempting to get critical praise for his books from critics who will never like his books, and why bother, no one likes critics anyway, they are just failed writers. Look at this way, they don’t give a Nobel Prize away for Criticism, do they? Because no one reads the critics except the heartbroken writers, hoping someone will finally understand and appreciate their genius. And no one will. You wouldn’t sit with critics at the lunch table! They’re too critical! Always with the Arch Deluxes, always with the criticizing! Enjoy something unequivocally for once, you nerds. We like to read not because we want to understand a writer, but to enjoy ourselves. I read on the subway, not from the inside of some velvet envelope. I want to enjoy myself! Unless we’re reading like Jonathan Franzen, which is like eating the corn out of people’s poo. The lesson here? There’s nothing wrong with writing Big Macs. All that money is real, and people will love you for entertaining them. Will you win the Nobel Prize? I don’t know, they give it to lots of people I have never heard of. But I know who Stephen King is!

Anyway, being an American writer is not going to give you a leg up on the Nobel. They hate us, those Nobel givers. How can we convince them to give Americans a literature Nobel? Possibly they would if an American wrote a series about how awful and dumb Norway was for them. The whole Norway/Sweden thing is like Yankees v. Red Sox, except with 100 feet of snow melted on top. I think it’s best to distance yourself from America and Americans. So it’s best to completely dump on Americans and the American Way of Life in your novels. None of those Brooklyn ironic writers have ever won the Nobel Prize. Pearl Buck wrote about Chinese people. O’Neill wrote about Irish immigrants. Toni Morrison about poor blacks. If Philip Roth was from France he would have won one by now. So, it may be time for you to…

GO EX-PAT

Americans living overseas always end up writing the best stuff. All that Paris sexy stuff of the 20s. Jane Austen actually grew up in Detroit, people forget that. People forget. Trust me. Just get your shit and go. Being an American is doing nothing for you. If you started wearing burkas and titled your next book Death To The Olive Garden you’d have a much better chance of getting noticed by the international critics. And not just the ones who drive those people-assassinating drones.

I always wanted to move away from America, change my name to Matthias and become a shepherd. It’s just incredibly rewarding work, watching sheep hang out all day. A great gig for a writer. I think you only have to work like two days out of the week, just hanging out on a hill watching sheep. You don’t even have to watch them that hard, just keep an eye on ’em; they’re like nature’s version of an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” And then you just gently guide them home to safety. It’s the kind of work Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness once rode all the way to the top of World Literature. He was an Icelandic writer — we’ve never heard of him because no one has been able to make the definitive shepherding movie. Sheep just are terrible actors, so selfish. And without a movie you might as well be writing plays. Who goes to those? I mean, “Cats” was great. That should have won a Nobel Prize. But they don’t give prizes to pets; they’re really picky and there are so many rules.

America isn’t yet a fully formed country. We haven’t decided quite what we want to be yet. And until we do, it would be best if you stay away. Only Alice Munro has made the suburban lifestyle even approach Literature-worthiness. But that’s Canada, where everything seems magical. I think that’s because the whole nation is so close to all that ice and when the sun or the stars hit it everything glistens. Everyone else just seems to sneer at boring middle-class people. As well they should. The most interesting thing that can happen in Suburban America is, like, having an affair or losing your baby in a mall. And relax, the kid is probably at Orange Julius. All they do in World Literature is have affairs, too. But that’s not the whole story. In America having an affair is still so scandalous it causes existential grief in the lives of all the main characters. Imagine if Christian Grey from Fifty Shades Of Grey was married? They wouldn’t be able to handle all the awards that would be coming their way at 50 SHADES HQ. In Europe even if you don’t want to sleep around on your spouse, you’re still going to sleep around on your spouse. Every one is just assigned a lover and away you two hafta go.

In most other places on Earth, the literature has had thousands of years to evolve. They write about really sophisticated things. Things I frankly don’t understand, I’m just a poor little American. Most of my thoughts are wasted on baseball and small-breasted women. The Literature Award mostly goes to Europeans. Or to World Authors who write like Europeans. So the more European you sound in your work, the better. If your characters could start wearing socks and sandals, forgo showers for a while and smoke even while asleep, you’ll be a winner in no time. If that’s just not going to be possible, you might have to get creative. Clearly I should have stayed in Czechoslovakia when I traveled there in 1991. That would have given me a better chance at winning. And even though most of my influences still are Czech: Franz Kafka, Ivan Klíma, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Paulina Porizkova and Chubby Czecher, people will always see me as just a big fat stupid American that drinks Starbucks all day and shoots people with my handgun rifle at night. But that’s just because I lack a certain quality that all Nobel winners have.

BE DEEP, BUT NOT TOO DEEP

I’m not a deep person. I don’t have deep thoughts. I am not contemplative at all. I have no idea how the universe works or why it does the things it does. And my experiences haven’t given me any insight into the way people live or any ideas of how we could all live better together. Does that mean I won’t win the Nobel Prize? That does not mean that! The Nobel Committee isn’t necessarily looking for the most-daring, most-experimental, nost-smarty-pantsy of writers. They’re kind of middle of the road readers themselves. But like everyone else, they want authors to make them feel smart. Can you make them feel like they’re daring and edgy readers? Then you will soon have a Nobel, my friend. Although they hate any kind of reading that is at all fun, enjoyable, amusing. It’s an eat-your-vegetables kind of vibe they’re looking for. So just fake that kind of tone for like 30–40 years. Dour, solemn, lots of meaningful death shit and lots of adultery. Adultery is like the pinnacle of Literary Themes. If you’re a guy and you sleep around on your wife in books you are deep, existential, Nobel-worthy. If you’re a lady and you sleep around on your husband, the universe will shame you. And that shame will be deep.

But not too deep. It’s not like avant garde writers win the Nobel. Sartre refused his Nobel, which is pretty punk, because he both felt that he wasn’t avant garde enough and therefore winning wasn’t avant garde enough. That’s a lot of money to flush down the toilet. But you can always tell people in bars “The Nobel Prize? Fuck that! I threw mine in the river!” Very punk. But someone probably fished that Nobel out and sold it on ebay. Money’s money, and most writers would gladly tear your heart out and seal their grant-writing envelopes with your still-hot blood if they thought it would get them a few extra bucks. Writers are lazy or they’d go get real jobs like everybody else. Instead they live in the center of a universe in which they are the most interesting character. Yikes!! Double exclamation points!!

The John Cages and Gertrude Steins of the world don’t win prizes. They earn our lip-servicey love. We don’t actually enjoy reading them. We enjoy feeling better than everyone else for reading and listening to people like Cage and Stein. I learned more from every Raymond Chandler novel than I did by reading all the weird Woo Woo Shit I could ever get my hands on. They never gave an award to that French guy who wrote an entire book without using the letter e. Who knows if it was a good book or anything. You should win SOMETHING for writing a whole book without using an e. I can barely write a sentence without using an e. I’m munching on walrus poo. There’s one sentence. It took me an hour to write that. And I’m pretty sure walrus is spelled wrong there, doesn’t it usually have an E in it? I am seeing Es everwhere. So they never give the awards to the people who truly deserve them. That’s why they should give them to you! And me! We’re not up to anything truly complicated or trailblazing. They keep giving the award to people writing in the Magic Realism form. Talking giraffes. Monkeys dressed like angels. That kind of thing. Trees that make you cheeseburgers. Magic cheeseburgers! They love magic realism because it’s safe and it makes people feel smart. And it makes for good movies. Who doesn’t like movies with talking cats? Assholes, that’s who!

So don’t get fancy. Don’t try to do too much. Use E’s, apparently. You just have to learn how to make people feel smarter about themselves without saying much. It’s like how people who don’t talk much seem contemplative, thoughtful. When they’re probably just playing Tetris in their heads. Cheat on your wives in books but not on your husbands! Has a gay writer ever won the Nobel? Maybe just Gide! Although I have my suspicions about Hemingway. So be straight and white and male and old, maybe grow a big bushy beard. And always hold your head or face in your author photos, that helps you sell 10,000 extra copies per book. Blue covers are better. People are always asking for “that book with the blue cover.” Are you writing all this down? This is some serious Nobel-prize-winning gold. Well, get a pen! Go, now!

NO TIME MACHINES, NO WOOKIES, NO VAMPIRES

Genre work might win Nerd Oscars, but if you want a Nobel your writing has to live in the very real world. With dancing pandas that can fly. But no dystopian futures. No Batmobiles. No sexy young psychotic bisexual hackers. Why on earth would that sexy young psychotic bisexual hacker sleep with that boring old reporter dude in The Girl Who Was Much Too Good To Sleep With Some Boring Old Dude? I like my women skinny and crazy. And if they might kill me at any moment, even better. But what exactly is so interesting enough to fuck about Steig Larssen’s main character, Sven McBoringssun? Nothing. Nothing at all. I haven’t read any of those books. I read the first chapter during Jury Duty and was like, this sucks. I saw the American and Klingon movie versions of the first one, and the dude was boring. And that lady was awesome. Journalists shouldn’t be characters in books. Because they’re boring. And they do boring things. Like write stories. Stieg Larssen can’t win the Nobel Prize because he’s dead. But he wouldn’t win it anyway. Because they only give Nobels to boring books that don’t have car chases or rising action or tension.

Vampires might be hot to think about. Having them bite you, suck your blood and read you The Fountainhead while you’re woozy. They’re metaphors for Republicans, naturally, The 1% living off the life-force of the rest of us. We’re delicious snacks to them, in an Alexander Pope Cookbook kind of way. But they’re not the stuff of serious literature, at least the kind of serious literature they bless with Nobels. I like the mad scramble after the award is given out when book people pretend they’ve ever heard of who just won the Nobel. “Oh, sure, Gebuha Xigglebewl! I’ve always loved her writing! She’s been a huge influence on me with her bovine imagery.”

Sci-fi. Mystery. Romance. Fantasy. Porno. Readers love them. But the Nobel prizes aren’t about the books people actually love, they’re about the books you ought to love. If you only had a little class, a little taste. Not too much! Virginia Woolf and James Joyce never won Nobels! Too weird! Too hard to understand! We just want to feel a little smarter, a little more sure of our own well-worn tastes. Not, like, actually challenged! Some of the genre work of the last half-century is among the best story-telling the world has ever know. That doesn’t mean that we should give those writers any awards. We give that to fancy authors. But not too fancy!

Why do I want to win the Nobel Prize? It would mean a lot to my parents, who had to put up with a lot of my shit. I’m probably never gonna get married and make grandkids. I could at least bring my Nobel Prize home for the holidays. We could all have a bite of its delicious chocolate. Yeah, the Nobel Prize is actually made of Swiss Dark Chocolate, look it up.

SEXY! BUT NOT TOO SEXY!

Who doesn’t love a sexy book? Nobel people. Why didn’t Nabokov, Henry Miller or Anne Rice ever win a Nobel? Their books are too sexy. Probably. Or maybe the Nobel People never read those books? The committee is not attracted to that type of thing. And you think they would be because Sweden is so cold all the time. Like in June it is Zero Kelvin. On a clear day you can watch molecules stop moving. Some people are embarrassed about reading dirty books and just never admit to it. I only read dirty books in public. Mostly Nicholson Baker’s Vox and The Fermata. They’re dirty and filthy and they’re about doughie boys like me getting some. That gets you the JimBehrl Prize, Nick! Congratulations! Will Nobel ever coming calling for actually hot books? They had that Piano Teacher book a few years ago. Not exactly sexxy vampire sluts or anything, but decent. People in serious books yearn for great sex, but never quite get all the way there to some kind of earth-shattering release. Kinda like my prom night.

They don’t necessarily reward greatness, or edginess, or talent, or great story-telling with World Famous Lifetime Achievement Awards. They reward Polish poets. Seriously. Every Polish poet ever has won the Nobel Prize. If you just say to any member of the committee “PJestem poetą i jestem z Polski” and they will just hand you one. Probably Sartre’s river-wet hand-me-down. If the Nobels don’t actually reward the most deserving work, if they disqualify you for simply having died, if it’s really just a bunch of wacky Scandos giving awards to pretty much whoever they want, like some kind of wild bookclub with global implications, then why do we pay so much attention? I mean, not too much attention. Big Bird made a bigger splash on twitter than the guy who won this year’s Nobel. I won’t even pretend I remember the guy’s name. And not just because of my white-hot envy at the man who stole my birthright. Don’t the Nobel hotshots read the internet? Do they even know what a haiku is? They’re hard to write! Every week! About the Tennessee Titans! Whatever. I can write middle-of-the-road somewhat-deep-seeming stuff too. I’ve read the first chapter of Crime and Punishment like a million times, I can do anything. I’ll be waiting by the phone! In advance of next year’s congratulatory phone call. If you’ve read this article, thank you. You’ve given me like a half-hour head start on kicking your ass! So suck it, Milan Kundera!

Related: How To Write A Love Poem

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

Photo by San Francisco Foghorn.

America’s vice president delivered many robust bursts of laughter last night, laughter that seemed (to us) to mean the usual “Oh come on, Paul Ryan, you are a ridiculous liar.”

But there are varying opinions! Those on the right, for example, would never vote for Obama-Biden — and they are none too pleased with this Joe Biden and his laughter. Why, they have even less intention of voting for him now, if that’s possible.

The important question is whether anyone is trying to “spin” this on Twitter.

Laughter is a precious gift between two people who love each other, and for Joe Biden to laugh at Paul Ryan’s lies is nothing less than hate speech. Of course, he also handily won the debate, so maybe he was laughing about that?

• “Reckoner,” Radiohead
• “The Big Guns,” Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins
• “Love Story,” Taylor Swift
• “You’ve Got a Friend In Me,” Randy Newman
• “Seven Nation Army,” White Stripes
• “Fuck and Run,” Liz Phair
• “Rock and Roll All Night,” KISS
• “O’Sailor,” Fiona Apple
• “Youth Without Youth,” Metric
• “Ray of Light,” Madonna
• “Common People,” Pulp
• “Rolling In the Deep,” Adele
• “In The Future When All Is Well,” Morrissey
• “The Future,” Leonard Cohen
• “Keep Trying,” Yo Gabba Gabba monsters

★★★★★ No more ersatz November. Even through the uncorrected blur of early-morning eyes, the Hudson had a far bank, solid and luminous in the sun’s first rays. Light smashed into light down the cross street to the school, throwing stroller shadows forward and backward and to the sides as they rolled. Brightness spread and multiplied and stayed through a last amber glow on the building tops. Not a cloud in the sky, a man marveled aloud, waiting at a crosswalk on Broadway. Crossing the street, checking both way, confirmed it. Not a one.

It’s all but forgotten now, but six weeks ago the biggest news on Earth was that geriatric movie actor Clint Eastwood brought an empty chair to accompany his improv at the Republican National Convention. Millions of people laughed and said, “What even was that?” And then they went back to their lives: thinking about tomorrow’s lunch, ordering the new iPhone, forgetting to give the dog its heartworm medicine, etc.

But there are parts of the country where bizarre right-wing political-media stunts outlive the churn of the news cycle by weeks, sometimes even months. These parts of the country are called “rural and exurban areas.” And they are everywhere, basically surrounding the edge of each metropolis and reaching out to fill almost every part of America’s landscape that hasn’t been protected as wilderness, forest or parkland.

The photograph of the chair was taken in the Mojave Desert sprawl some two hours east of Los Angeles. It is a red chunk of a blue state, a sparsely populated region with no industry or commerce beyond that which comes from government largesse: military bases, national park tourism, and direct deposits from Social Security and disability. Naturally, the overwhelmingly white voters are strongly anti-government.

It’s a beautiful part of the world, loved by the musicians and writers and painters and hikers and other gays who fill the vacation rentals and the one terrible Indian restaurant during “the season,” which started yesterday when it finally became Fall, and will end around the first 100-degree days in April. Those who live here year-round generally do not have any Edward Abbey-esque love for the stark wilderness. They are here because housing is relatively cheap and there’s lots of desert for the dumping of old blood-stained mattresses, target practice with their required dozen guns per household, and riding around in circles upon their off-road motorcycles and “quads.” The Food4Less is always busy on the first weekday of the month, when the SSI payments arrive, and both methamphetamine and tattoo parlors are in cheap and abundant supply.

The “Bear Arms” guns shop, however, has fallen upon hard times. It used to be in a bigger, standalone barn-style building on the old side of town. Then, four years into the recession, it relocated to a former candy shop next to a tile store. The “under new ownership” sign just went up this month. (There is very little agriculture here, because there is no water and most of the land belongs to the Departments of Defense and Interior, but the barn style is popular here as in all self-aware rural areas.)

For one glorious week, the Tea Party congressional candidate’s huge sign on the highway was defaced with a Christian message. The candidate, some slob, put up giant yellow signs, each showing a Minuteman with a tricorn hat and a musket. The friendly slogan “Live Free or DIE!” basically told everyone here to die. A mysterious hippie painted “Who Would Jesus Shoot?” in colorful Comic Sans lettering over the sign, which was finally replaced with a new design that left no room for graffiti.

The vandalism was blamed on “liberal thugs” working for the campaign of fellow Republican and retired Marine Corps Col. Paul Cook, but it was really too charming for that.

The most mysterious roadside tableau in the region is this, uhh, tire in a chair. What could it mean?

In Texas and Virginia and probably a lot of other backwaters, charming white Americans have “lynched chairs” in their front yards, because how about that Clint Eastwood? Was this black tire in a chair something along these creative thought lines?

I watched it carefully, for weeks, and finally a crudely scribbled cardboard sign was attached (or reattached?) to the tire. It seems the tire/wheel combination is, in fact, for sale. Simple capitalism at work.

Ken Layne has been living in the Mojave Desert since 2008. If you’d like to buy a very nice house that is literally next to Joshua Tree National Park, send him an email! It’s best as a “seasonal home.”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

from Pythia Says

Pythia says missile guidance systems are locked on locked out door slamming the slopes where cattle graze it’s just a satellite or he is winking and dropping into the folds her water worn down over time channeling anger and something else besides

Wood smoke dark blue sky the walls have blackened in a strategy for asset allocation it tastes like candy canyon cannons passing strange or what could be left the bends it starts far away and when we were young

A stone dropped and each concentric ring feels farther than the last the in-between light time of soft violence and hard-core regretting

I told you and felt this importance slipping as though the sun a flower a seed this people are ungovernable or one time I remember simulator set to activate isolate audio screaming down on the avenue

Loretta Clodfelter is a writer living in the Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Pom2, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Coconut, and Cricket Online Review. She also edits the poetry journal There.

When it’s cold outside you can always come in to The Poetry Section’s archives and soothe yourself with some nice warming poems. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“For all the assembly-line efficiency that the McDonald’s and Burger Kings of this world bring to the process of fast food cookery, they still have to rely on an army of minimum-wage workers to make their hamburgers. At San Francisco’s Momentum Machines, they’re betting on the idea that a machine can build a better burger than a high school sophomore who earns $8.43 an hour.”
 — Great, that will give all the kids more time to work on their tech start-ups! [Via]

“If I Did A Bag Of Lance Armstrong’s Blood, Could I Bike Up A Mountain?”

The Secret Location of New England’s Most Perfect Pancakes

by Elisabeth Donnelly

Fall is the prettiest, most life-affirming season in New England, a time when the weather is clear and crisp, the trees are changing color, the sky is that bottomless blue, and Mr. Autumn Man has his sweater on. Now that I don’t live in New England, kicked out like a Salem witch forced to swim in the pond, I spend my fall hours on the lookout for the greatest Fake New England things on offer, things that remind me of the platonic ideal of what is New England in my head: activities like watching “Gilmore Girls” repeats, going apple picking, eating cider donuts, and frolicking on hayrides. I look forward to the day that I can take a weird photo of a pumpkin-resembling toddler toddling amongst the pumpkins, Anne Geddes-style. Fake New England is a style that I aspire to; after all, real New England is filled with frosty Yankees who look at you askance if you’re from away.

(A short “Gilmore Girls” aside: Watching that show on repeat embodies the state of mind that is Fake New England, as Amy Sherman-Palladino’s girlie masterpiece offers the fantasy of a festival-throwing quirky community where everyone knows and cares about each other, and the sort of reference-spouting leads that imply a love of reading and learning endemic to the area. That show couldn’t be more New England-ish if it had cast Jonathan Richman as the town troubadour.)

But the greatest gift that fall has to offer is this: it’s the time of year where pancakes taste their best, and they taste their best when eaten in New England. Who knows why — Puritan historians, sound forth! But it is a truth. And in the past few years, I’ve been conducting my own tests of the best places to get pancakes in the region, hitting up diners from the Catskills to Vermont, and I’ve found the most glorious place to get pancakes in the history of New England: Elmer’s Store, of Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Elmer’s Store, like the best sort of discoveries, was a happy accident. It began when my boyfriend Stu saw a mention of Elmer’s in Yankee Magazine, category: Best Pancakes. Even better, Elmer’s Store was on the way to one of the other best places in the world: The Montague Bookmill in Montague, Massachusetts. So we made a day of it, taking the drive over to Ashfield, winding our way through the Berkshires and honing in on the small town.

Ashfield seems to be the size of one small block. Its population is a little under 2,000 — so just a few more people than the collected cast of “Gilmore Girls.” And it’s to say that it looks a little bit like that show’s Stars Hollow (or Stars Hollow looks a little bit like it), with its 1800s-era buildings advertising things like “hardware,” and its Ye Olde Fire Station, right next to the church. As you stroll around, it also becomes apparent that someone in Ashfield is the town “calligrapher” or sign-maker, since the signs all share the same looping script. It seems like the sort of community where everybody knows your name, and where every season is marked by a steady rotation of Events and Festivals, whether it’s the annual Fall Festival or the Film Festival, now in its sixth year, which, according to The Ashfield News, had winners like “The Recent Excitement in Ashfield,” “Cynthia Elbaum: A Life In Pictures,” “Al’s Thrifty Country Wisdom,” and “ABC Rap.” (Had this film been entered, it would likely have been a contender, too.)

Several doors down from the library and next to the fire station, Elmer’s Store is an old general store, established in 1835 (as the sign outside announces), with big picture windows that look out over a nice big porch. Walking inside, the place is bright and cheery, the walls painted a warm yellow and hanging with local art (so many horse portraits). A very nearly happy-looking take on “American Gothic” sits behind the counter. When we arrived, the proprietor, Nan Parati — a New Orleans transplant, and I have no doubt that’s part of the friendly magic of the place — was there, shuttling people to tables and checking in on her customers. Sitting down at a table, we watched as others shuffled in like old friends, chatting and saying hi. Farmers, some young with dirt-splattered pants, and some old with epic grey beards winding down their chest, stopped by to deliver goods to the general store, which takes up the back of the main room. It bills itself as an “old timey natural foods grocery,” and it’s got good like yogurt made from the cows in the next town over, local maple syrup, and a western Massachusetts brand of kombucha — you know the mix. It all looked pretty delicious. But what was most striking about it was the people in the place, a mix of tourists and locals, and the comfortable way they fell into conversations, about the weather and the Red Sox and what was going on in their lives.

It was as I was sitting there, observing this, that I first made the “Gilmore Girls” connection. Because that palpable feeling of community made me think that Elmer’s store is, basically, the Ashfield equivalent of Luke’s Diner. But instead of a diner-cum-hardware store, it’s a diner-cum-grocery/art gallery. It’s a lovely sort of mash-up of purposes.

But none of this would be worth mentioning if the pancakes weren’t killer. We had high expectations, as the folks at Yankee Magazine are clearly some discerning pancake eaters. There are pancakes throughout New England that get the job done, providing a fine base for butter and maple syrup. How much better could these be? Well, lots! Elmer’s pancakes are the platonic ideal of pancakes: effortlessly light and fluffy on the tongue. They are a good solid pinch-high in comparison to the average pancake, whipped together from some secret concoction of fresh and presumably local ingredients, with apples and pecans if you please. The buttermilk makes the pancakes sweet, the velvety texture means that they melt, pleasantly, in the mouth. They don’t hit you like a ton of bricks. They don’t even need fresh butter or maple syrup to be good. The pancakes are also — and this is crucial — the right size, taking up most, but not all, of the plate, the size of a small hand outstretched.

Whereas usually when you eat pancakes out, they can suffer from too much bulk. Four to five giant pancakes will arrive at your table stacked on a plate, tasting slightly like aluminum from baking soda so they need to be drowned in syrup and butter in order to be consumed. They leave you feeling like a glutton, belly poking out, sluggish and slow.

But it’s impossible to feel draggy upon leaving Elmer’s Store. Whether it’s the cheerful yellow walls with their horse portraits, the sense of community, the bottomless cup of coffee (strong and smooth and way better than any gross Dunkin’s coffee-esque water), it feels like a fever dream concocted from the Fake New England Fantasies that reside in all of us. Elmer’s Store is so successfully Fake New England it’s like I imagined it — or it burst, fully formed, out of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s head, curing her headache — even if it’s located in the oft-disappointing real New England. A visit there feels like proof that small-time homey community can thrive. I’m not afraid to blow up Elmer’s Store’s excellence in this case: it’s still a drive to get to, depending on where you are. However, it’s worth the drive, every bit of it — the hunt for a good pancake is the purest of road trip prompts. If you feel the need to see trees shake their golden leaves and pick up a bag of cider donuts this weekend, this is where to fortify yourself for the journey.

Elisabeth Donnelly was always #teamDaveRygalski.

In case you missed it, this is pretty great: “The short video captures young Gabriel deep in thought as he takes in some sage sisterly advice on the perils of spitting, fighting and disobeying one’s parents. Defying her own youth, Gabriel’s sister delivers a minute-long park bench lecture, telling him in no uncertain terms that he should ‘toughen up a bit’ before walking off and leaving the words ‘think about it, Gabriel’ ringing in her brother’s ears.”