September 9, 2010
Style, substance, and that something: on the Mad Men conundrum
When I began watching Mad Men earlier this year, my assessment was similar to Karen Von Hahn’s of the show being “all style, no substance”. This was partly because I’d been biased already by the review of Mad Men Season 1 in the London Review of Books, in which the show’s chief attraction was summed up as our own superiority at watching pregnant women smoke while their children played with dry cleaner bags. Mad Men is good, because at least we get to feel like we’ve come along why, which undermines the fact that we most certainly haven’t.
I enjoyed the first few episodes of season 1, though not as much as I’d anticipated– I wondered if my expectations had been made too high. Soon I’d decided that I’d finish watching the first season, but probably not pursue it beyond that. And I’m not sure what the turning point was, but somewhere along the line not pursuing the rest of Mad Men was not remotely a possibility.
I’m now just about at the end of Season Three. I’m in no hurry to get to Season Four. Though of course I am, but you understand how tragic it would be to one day have no more Mad Men before me. Because I love Mad Men, I do. I love its style, I love when it shocks me (the lawnmower, Betty and the shotgun), I love how I am desperate to find sympathy for these characters who do nothing to deserve it, that I have so much invested in the disaster that is Don and Betty, but mostly I just really love Don Draper. In a way I have never loved anybody, except for Dylan McKay and my high school math teacher. Impossible, lustful, agonizing loves, where you’re fortunate to run into them once in a while in early morning dreams.
It’s not just that he’s good looking– Jon Hamm on 30 Rock really didn’t do it for me, which was sort of the point of that endeavour, but I don’t think we can write it all down to Hamm being such a great actor. It could very well be the suits and the haircut. Or what I’m after might be the elusive Don Draper something that makes him such a magnet on the show. How he’s unpindownable. And when he’s good, he’s not even that good, but I cling to straws– “at least he’s a better parent than Betty”, which isn’t even technically true and wouldn’t be an achievement even if it were. But when he defended Bobby, and when he cooked for Sally in the middle of the night, and when he bought Betty the necklace, and when he demanded that guy remove his hat in the elevator. That he kept Sal’s secret. Fundamentally, he’s a man of integrity.
And when he goes and does something abhorrent, which is usually, somehow I’m convinced that he’s just not himself. That perhaps what he’s really lacking, what he’s calling out for in the dark, is someone to love him properly and that someone would be me. I sometimes wonder what Don Draper could do to have me finally not forgive him. More than he’s cultivated his own self, have I merely cultivated a self for him? Is that what everybody around him has done as well? Is he the projection of our fantasies (and mine happens to be a good dad, and a kind husband)? Is the point of Don Draper that we want to believe in beautiful people? That we fling our sympathy upon them? Does his charisma come from him being fundamentally empty, and therefore a vessel for anything? Is he all style and no substance, and the entire show is this self-aware?
It’s curious though, the inconsistencies of his character. Of everybody’s character on that show, and it was one of my problems with it when I first started watching. The characters were different people in each episode, not just in a mildly interesting way, but in a way that made me wonder if the show had too many writers. I get the whole “Don Draper is an enigma” thing, but it has crossed my mind from time to time that that hole who is he might just be a clever way of badly constructing a character. And that the other characters who weren’t hatched out of nothing have no such excuse for being wildly fluctuating from one thing to another. Except Pete Campbell. I have determined he’s a psychopath.
I experience Mad Men the way I experience novels, by which I mean that there are often whole passages I don’t understand. And I love this about the show, that there’s more going on than I’m ever supposing, but sometimes I wonder if the problem is not so much that I’ve missed something as much as that that something just doesn’t make any sense. Mad Men is either brilliant or terrible, and I’m really not sure which, but it’s brilliant certainly in that I don’t care regardless.
September 6, 2010
Authors' Ghosts by Muriel Spark
I think that authors’ ghosts creep back
Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves
And find the books they wrote.
Those authors put final, semi-final touches,
Sometimes whole paragraphs.
Whole pages are added, re-written, revised,
So deeply by night those authors employ
Themselves with those old books of theirs.
How otherwise
Explain the fact that maybe after years
have passed, the reader
Picks up the book – But was it like that?
I don’t remember this . . . Where
Did this ending come from?
I recall quite another.
Oh yes, it has been tampered with
No doubt about it –
The author’s very touch is here, there and there,
Where it wasn’t before, and
What’s more, something’s missing –
I could have sworn . . .
(Text taken from here. Poem discovered via Ali Smith’s introduction to The Comforters).
September 1, 2010
The world is a Pymian place
I discovered The Barbara Pym Society before I’d even discovered Barbara Pym, in 2007 when I read this wonderful article on the CBC Arts site. This article was mostly the reason I ended up reading my first Pym book last fall, which was Excellent Women (though I think I was also inspired by a reference in Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing.) And that book was the way I fell in love with Barbara Pym, and how convenient that she had her own society that I could join. They hold annual conferences in Massachusetts and Oxford, both of which are just a bit too far out of my way, but I had a dream of one day getting there, and indulging in a bit of Pym talk with like-minded individuals.
It was to my great joy that I received a letter in July from Judy, a local Pym Society member who was looking for a meet-up. Turns out there are only a few of us in Canada– one in Montreal, three in the GTA, and four in Victoria (which makes it a veritable hotbed, no?). Judy orchestrated a get-together for those of us nearby, was gracious enough to move the venue to my house (as travelling alone with Harriet is less than fun), and we were thrilled to have our third member RSVP, and were pleased that she was to bring her daughter. Because, she and her daughter had visited Barbara Pym’s cottage during a trip to England in 2009, and they even met Barbara Pym’s sister. (Pym herself died in 1980).
And truly the world is a delightful place, because this group of strangers got together and there was immediately a kinship. We ranged in age (including Harriet) from 1-85, and we entertained one another with stories of how we’d found Barbara Pym, and what she meant to us. How her work is so deceptively simple, and how she invests the ordinary with meaning. Tea was served, scones were eaten (as this was my house, after all). At this point, Harriet left the room, and then returned wearing a hat and carrying a handbag. It was 40 degrees outside and we were sweltering in spite of the fan, but even still, the time went too quick and good conversation flowed. We wondered if Pym had ever fathomed that groups such as ours’ would be discussing her work (with such passion) thirty years after her death. Having recently read her biography, I suspected probably not, but I really wish I could have told her. Someone suggested that one couldn’t channel a spirit anymore than we were doing just then, and she was probably right.
It was a wonderful gathering, and we’re going to do it again, and I think I might have been the luckiest one there because I’ve still got unread Pyms before me. The others were inspired to reread. We said goodbye with enthusiastic hugs, and after everyone had left, I opened the hostess gift that Judy had brought me, and how thrilled I was to discover (wrapped in William Morris paper, of course) a jar of Ovaltine.
The world is a Pymian place.
August 20, 2010
If all else fails
So it turns out that I have a motto after all, because surely I’ve been saying this for years, but then Barbara Pym had been saying it for longer, so I read in her collected letters and diaries. The motto is (and it’s a good one, I think): “…if all else fails, we can always start a teashop.” Indeed.
August 19, 2010
Sometimes just laziness
Hmm. I’ve written before about how much I love recurring secondary characters throughout an author’s works, which creates the sense of a self-contained universe with millions of tiny whirling lives that I’m privy to glimpses of– in books by Margaret Drabble, and Barbara Pym. But how interesting then to read in a letter from Pym to Philip Larkin: “With me it’s sometimes just laziness– if I need a casual clergyman or anthropologist I just take one from an earlier book. Perhaps really one should take such a very minor character that only the author recognises it, like a kind of superstition or a charm.”
August 16, 2010
On Literary Maps
Some books I’ve finished lately (Galore anybody?), I put down and think, “My god, if only the text had come with an accompanying map.” Now granted, an author should set the scene so vividly that the map is drawn with words, but for me, there is something so mesmerizing about actual maps in books. As a child, I would actually play with them, imagining characters’ ways along rivers and roads. As an adult reader, I just find them beautiful, and appreciate the extra layer of experience they add to the book. I am also a bit obsessed with fiction with appendices, as a postmodern quirk.
I perused my library tonight to select some books with maps inside. The House at Pooh Corner was an obvious choice, with the “100 Aker Wood” map, which includes (of course), “the place where the wozzle wasn’t”. This was one of the fictional maps that Joan Bodger and family attempted locate in reality in How the Heather Looks, along with the map from Swallows and Amazons.
My lovely Snowbooks edition of Virginia Woolf’s The London Scene has a charming map of London in the front endpapers, with drawings of all the landmarks noted by Woolf in her essays. The back endpapers is London on a different scale, with Woolf’s own residences noted (22 Hyde Park Gate!).
Will Ferguson’s Hokkaido Highway Blues has a somewhat unremarkable map on Japan just inside the cover, but without it we wouldn’t quite get the weight of the fact that Ferguson travelled the country from tip-to-tip. I bought this book just before we moved in Japan in 2004, to the city of Himeji, which made the sub-map on page 148 very remarkable, because the map shows that Ferguson made Himeji a stop along his way. “At Himeji Castle, the flowers were in full bloom and everywhere there was activity and laughter.”
Hobart 8 wears its map on its cover. I bought it at City Lights Books in 2008 because it was beautiful and contained a story by 
Stephany Aulenback, and I have a vivid memory of reading the whole thing on the green grass of Dolores Park (in February!). The southernmost half of the issue is American writers, North is Canadian whose lineup was pretty much unknown to me at the time but they’re writers who’ve been pretty much everywhere since– Heather Birrell, Craig Davidson, Zsuzsi Gartner, Lee Henderson, and Mark Anthony Jarman. I saw them here first. Map is by Robert Waters.
Patricia Storms’ The Pirate and the Penguin is delightful all over, but my favourite corners are the maps on her endpapers. “Map of the really boring (and cold!) South Pole” on the first endpapers, with such landmarks as Chilly Cove and Yawny Yogaland. “Map of the hot and itchy Caribbean” is on the back, with “Drives Me Coconuts Island” and a chest of “Boring Treasure”. Love it.
Though the first literary map I gave my heart to was in The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh. A map of Water Mill, where Harriet Welch is spending the summer with Beth Ellen, I was totally obsessed with this one, and I’m sure why because it’s pretty sparsely detailed, but I suspect the particular hand of Fitzhugh herself may have something to do with it.
My copy of Andrea Barrett’s story collection Servants of the Map is chock-full of images, and it’s unsurprising that a map would be one of them (along with gorgeous drawings of wildlife and taxonomic classifications). The title story is illustrated with “Sketch Map to accompany the Geological Notice of Kashmir”.
A map in a poetry collection! I was thrilled to find a vintage guide map to Los Alamos in Michael Lista’s Bloom.
And finally, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood has for its endpapers “Pittsburgh about 1800”, even though Dillard’s book is about Pittsburgh in the mid-twentieth century, but Annie Dillard is always tricky, isn’t she?
Though I can’t finish without a mention of the map in Janice Kulyk Keefer’s The Ladies’ Lending Library. Which doesn’t even exist, but I was convinced it did, and leafed through the book about five times tonight looking for it. And that I haven’t read the story for a few years, but its managed to leave a map emblazoned upon my mind is really quite a testament to Kulyk Keefer’s depiction of place.
July 28, 2010
You've got to court delight
You’ve got to court delight, I think. By which I mean that things don’t just turn up in the post. You’ve got to send small gifts across the country to get a thank-you note in return, and subscribe to literary journals and magazines, and have a friend who lives in Antarctica who sends a postcard from time to time. Or rather, you have to go out of your way to buy a red teapot so that you can be a person who has a red teapot (unless you’re a particular fortunate person for whom red teapots arrive in the post).
Anyway, the point is that I received two letters in the post today upon whose envelopes my name was inscribed by hand. (And it wasn’t even that deceptively handwriting-like font that Bell Canada puts on all their envelopes when they send missives begging for the return of my custom.) Two handwritten envelopes is practically unheard of! I tore them open in a hurry and was not the least bit disappointed by what I found inside.
But let me backtrack. I joined The Barbara Pym Society earlier this year, because it seemed a strange, funny and Pymian thing to do. (I was inspired by this article.) And I also made friends with a brilliant writer/almost birdwatcher, and had her over for tea last week. As a result of these two things, I today received a lovely letter from a fellow Pym Society member who is looking for a Canadian meet-up*, and an absolutely beautiful thank you note from my birder-writer friend (who is truly as master of the form). Both of which made me exquisitely happy.
So you do have to court delight, I think. Though there’s also the point that if you wish to be perpetually delighted, just look for the pleasure of tiny, wonderful things. (Or perhaps I need to get out more…)
*Fascinatingly enough, the Pym Society member had sent me this letter unknowing that we’d corresponded in the past! Three years ago, she published a beautiful essay in The Globe, and sent me a note after I’d mentioned it on my blog. And now we find ourselves two of the very small population of Canadian Barbara Pym Society members! How marvelously tiny the world truly is…
July 27, 2010
Grains of salt
Sometimes, when I really want to die a little bit inside, I sit back and take stock of all the bad advice that I’ve given out in creative writing workshops. Like when someone referred to a “bird of paradise” in a story, and I wrote: “Be more specific. What KIND of bird? How is it paradiscial? SHOW ME!”. When I told the (now published, very successful) poet who knew exactly what it was she did, “You’ve sort of written yourself into a rut. Why not try something different? PROSE???” Every time I thought that me not understanding a term or concept was a reason the writer should think about changing it.
The very first story Rebecca Rosenblum workshopped in our Masters program had a reference to a baby “squalling.” Never having heard this term beyond the snowstorm variety, I wrote, “Wrong word. Do you mean ‘wailing’?” Rebecca is now my dear friend, and we’ve never talked about this, mostly because I’m still absolutely embarrassed.
It’s amazing, the kind of authority I’ve assumed in these sorts of situations. And all the things, and words, I never knew, and never even knew I was missing. There certainly is a reason why a grain of salt or two should go with everything, in particular if that everything is a bit of advice from me.
July 22, 2010
One more thing about Still Life…
At some point in Still Life With Woodpecker, someone pulls out that old chestnut of a statistic: 60% of all marriages end in divorce. And of course, there’s usual up side in the 40% of marriages that don’t. But I thought also of the fact that Still Life… was published in 1980, which means that 40% marital success rate has been holding steady for 30 years. Kind of amazing, and the opposite of everything we’ve been led to expect. Imagine if– giambrones notwithstanding– we’re not all going to hell in a handbasket after all?
