November 7, 2010
A Fuzzy Realm
The fact was that I struggled with Sheila Heti’s book, How Should a Person Be? About what it meant to call that book a novel, a novel that contains its author as a character, a book whose gratuitous sexuality I found more off-putting than titillating, a book that read like a punchline to a joke I’d missed hearing told. Though I engaged with the book on many levels, at various points jotting, “This is interesting…” in the margins, and throughout as I tried to understand what Heti’s project was.
Part of the problem, I think, was that Heti came from a point of departure that didn’t quite make sense to me. For instance, that the blow-job is the great art-form of our time, as the novel was to the 19th century. Or that “personality is just an invention of new media… characters exists from the outside alone”. I think I’d also have trouble with any protagonist who remarks, “It would have been so easy to count the ways I’d been betrayed by girls… It was not that way with men.” There are instances in the book where the protagonists’ all-knowingness is subtly undermined enough, however, that I wondered if the glibness was more wry than I gave it credit for, but I was never really sure.
Throughout the book, however, I kept thinking of Joan Didion, not because she and Heti are at all similar, but because Didion’s entire oeuvre seems to address a lot of the questions that Heti is posing. Didion who says that “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, with Heti eventually answering her own question with Didion’s backwards: “A person lives by telling stories.” Except that the stories Didion tells take her far outside herself, far from home. Whether through actual travel, engaging with different kinds of people, or other works of literature. Didion has this amazing way of telling other people’s stories, but still making herself the centre. A strange, self-effaced blurry centre, but still the point everything else revolves around. And it’s this blur that Heti will engage with.
In trying to answer, “How should a person be?”, I can’t help thinking that Sheila Heti should have just read Didion’s essay, “On self-respect.” The essay referencing a difficult time similar to that endured by Heti’s protagonist, when “[one loses] the conviction that lights would always turn green.” Says Didion, “Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.” And that self-respect stems from “character”, which Heti has determined is a societal construction (but maybe she’s being ironic? I don’t know). Joan Didion, however, has no truck with that: “character– the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s life.”
Self-respect, according to Didion, is a kind of investment. It’s not about never failing, never making mistakes, but rather knowing what you’re getting into, meaning what you say and the things that you do. And this kind of thinking, she writes, requires “discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth”– that there is no magic pill for it, then, or book with all the answers, or a drug that makes everything clear. Self-respect stems from knowing ourselves from the inside, keeps us from being “in thrall” to everything on the outside wherein, “At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt [for if we don’t respect ourselves, how do we respect those who associate with us?] we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.” Which is kind of the entire plot of How Should a Person Be?
Part of my problem with Heti’s book is that some of her questions did make me uncomfortable– what it means to think we’re important enough to be doing something important, or that any of us matter that much, and what that the stories we tell ourselves in order to live feature characters we’ve constructed with such tireless precision. Her honesty may have struck a nerve. But she places herself above reproach in a way that’s really a bit dishonest– in making her art so much about her, we can’t engage with it without engaging with her character, and as a reader, I’m not comfortable with the ethics of that. I’m not sure the material is so well served by existing a fuzzy realm somewhere between fact and fiction.
But maybe I’m missing the whole point– perhaps Sheila Heti never did really want to be the ideal of what a person should be. Perhaps in posing such a notion, she was really making a comment on our shallow, celebrity obsessed culture in which the blow-job is the ultimate art-form. And that in proclaiming the blow-job as the ultimate art-form, she is deriding a culture that might proclaim the blow-job to be the ultimate art-form, but I still don’t really understand what she means by that, so you can see why I’m a little bit lost.
November 4, 2010
Found things
1) Who knew metaphors were so useful? Who knew a box could be so poetic.
2) The very best postbox in our whole neighbourhood. Also has a delivered package waiting in the door. Coincidence?
3) We found Mabel Murple’s shoes abandoned on the sidewalk!
October 27, 2010
Do the Grandpa
Stuart was excited to discover the 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World, in particular “Iktsuarpok”, which is an Inuit word meaning, “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.” Iktsuarpok actually is translatable, at least into our family shorthand, in which “to go outside [or to the window] to check if anyone is coming” is to “Do the Grandpa”. Both of us remember pulling up to our grandparents’ as children, and seeing Grandpa appearing at the window because he’d been listening for our car. Which is to say that both our Grandfathers had either keen ears, or rather empty days, or maybe they had both sometimes, or traded one for another as their lives got longer. Or maybe it’s to say nothing in particular at all, because both of us from time to time find ourselves Doing the Grandpa too.
October 20, 2010
Harriet has a meta moment
Okay, I’ll admit to not being exactly capitivated by the plots, but 17 month old Harriet is absolutely obsessed with the Hello Baby Board Book series by Jorge Uzon. These books have only lived in our house for a very short period, but Harriet keeps taking them off the shelf and demanding they be read to her. When she isn’t demanding they be read to her, she is struggling to walk around the house holding all four books at the very same time. Clearly, Uzon has found an audience for his beautiful photography.
Our favourite part of all the books, however, is in Go Baby, Go! when the baby discovers another baby within the pages of his book. And the amazing thing about this is that he has discovered the Night Cars* baby! We love Night Cars, and pointing to the baby (who, when he finally falls asleep, has an adorable tendency to stick his bum into the air) is Harriet’s favourite part of the book (except for the fire truck). So to see the baby in her book pointing to the baby in her book, and then to point to that baby herself– I think Harriet is discovering that the bounds between fiction and reality are ever-blurry. Or maybe I’m just projecting.
*Do you know Night Cars? The absolutely gorgeous urban bedtime book by Teddy Jam, who was aka the late novelist Matt Cohen? I bought this book for Harriet when I was four months pregnant, and signed the inside cover “from Mommy and Daddy”, which was kind of amazing then. And still is. Its rhymes punctuate our days– “Garbage man, garbage man, careful near that dream. It could gobble up your garbage truck, and then where would you be?” Also notable for being a book about *Daddy*. And donuts.
Anyway, I didn’t know this book either until I heard Esta Spalding reading it as part of Seen Reading’s Readers Reading almost two years ago. And I am very glad I did.
October 5, 2010
Lionel Shriver and Carol Shields
I never plan to read Lionel Shriver and Carol Shields, one right after another, but it keeps happening, and every time it does, it underlines to me how much their work has in common. Not tone, of course– you don’t have to tell me twice. But they’re always writing about the same things, about intimacy, domesticity, about love, and marriage and relationships. The parallels are really uncanny– I think I read The Post-Birthday World and The Republic of Love together before, and the similarities blew me away. Now I’m rereading Small Ceremonies (Shields’ first novel, and stay tuned for me singing madly about just what a fantastic novel this is) after We Need to Talk About Kevin, and though two novels might never have been more different, they share many of the same pre-occupations. As demonstrated by the following two excerpts:
“My fantasy house would be old, Victorian. If it had to be big it would be high, three stories and an attic, full of nooks and crannies whose original purpose had grown obsolete– slave quarters and tackle rooms, root cellars and smokehouses, dumbwaiters and widow’s walks. As house that was falling to bits, that dripped history as it dropped slates,that cried out for fiddly Saturday repairs to its rickety balustrade, while the fragrant waft of pies cooling on counters drifted upstairs. I’d furnish it with secondhand sofas whose floral upholstery was faded and frayed, garage-sale drapes with tasselled tiebacks, ornate mahogany sideboards with speckled looking glass. Beside the porch swing, struggling geraniums would spindle out of an old tin milking pail. No one would frame our ragged quilts or auction them off as rare early American patterns worth thousands; we’d throw them on the bed and wear them out. Like wool gathering lint, the house would seem to accommodate junk of its own accord: a bicycle with worn brake shoes and a flat tire; straight-backs whose dowel rods need regluing; an old corner cabinet of good wood but painted a hideous bright blue, which I keep saying I’m going to strip down and never do.”
“The house that I once held half-shaped in my head was old, a nook-and-cranny house with turrets and lovely sensuous lips of gingerbread, a night before Christmas house, bought for a song and priceless on today’s market. Hung with the work of Quebec weavers, an eclectic composition of Swedish and Canadiana. Tasteful but offhand. A stufy, beamed, for Martin and a workroom, sunny, for me. Studious corners where children might sit and sip their souls in pools of filtered light. A garden drunk with roses, criss-crossed with paths, moist, shady, secret.”
September 30, 2010
On the loss of another great columnist
Dear Mr. Stackhouse [Editor of The Globe & Mail],
I wrote to your paper when you cut your books section down to nearly nothing, and I received a kind reply thanking me for my input. I am sure this message will elicit a similar message, if any, but please do allow me to say how saddened I am that Tabatha Southey will no longer be writing her vibrant, brilliant, relevant, smart and hilarious column in the Saturday Globe. Reading it aloud was a Saturday morning ritual in our family, and between the column’s absence and the now-tiny books section, it’s clear to me that you’re not that interested in me being one of your readers. Which is a shame, because I’ve been a devoted one, who understands the importance of a strong national newspaper, and relishes print for print’s sake. The whole thing makes me very sad, and I think we’re all going to look back on this time in journalism with a great deal of regret. I do already.
Sincerely,
Kerry Clare
[And seriously– no Tabatha Southey & Karen Von Hahn in The Globe, no Katrina Onstad in Chatelaine— these are publications that are killing themselves. It’s totally stupid.)
September 29, 2010
Things in the bag
The following is a list of things in the bag that Harriet carries around the house and cries when we take away from her:
1) Two plastic teacups
2) Belinda-Mona’s shoe
3) Harriet’s shoe
4) Whatever socks Harriet is meant to be wearing
5) A can of sardines
6) A plastic saucer
7) A small tin pie-plate
8) A coaster with a picture of the Sargeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover on it
9) A pink crayon
10) Conkers
September 18, 2010
Dear Graphic Designers
Dear Graphic Designers,
If you would like to buy your product solely based upon its packaging, please create a package that looks like the Clipper Tea tea box. I will buy it. I don’t care what you are selling, but I will buy it. And then I will bid you a “Well done” for creating a cardboard box that makes me feel like a better person for simply possessing it.
Love, Kerry
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).
