May 5, 2010
House Post 3: Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House by Meghan Daum
Meghan Daum is Joan Didion, if Joan Didion had grown up in New Jersey instead of Sacramento, and was self-deprecating instead of self-effacing. Daum writes with Didion’s rhythm, with her cadences, and she is similarly preoccupied with nostalgia. She is also a bit David Sedaris, if he were Joan Didion. I picked up her essay collection My Misspent Life last year, and bunked off work to read it in a day (true story), and this week I devoured her latest book with just as much relish.
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the story of Daum’s relationship with domiciles, beginning with her childhood home, to too many trips with a futon up long flights of stairs in university, the New York apartment of her dreams, when she became too old for roommates, her famous flight to Lincoln, Nebraska (which was mostly due to a lifelong obsession with Little House on the Prairie). In Nebraska, Daum flirted with the idea of buying a farm, cohabited with her boyfriend, became too fond of screen-door slams, and then ran away to California. Once she was there, living in an apartment at the top of a canyon, she decided to once again buy a farm in Nebraska. This very nearly happened, except it didn’t, and then she came back to Los Angeles and finally bought a house there. The house was not without its quirks. And proved crowded once Daum had the “supreme good fortune” of finding “a good, smart, sane man”, and they decided to opt out of “nohabitation” (a Daum neologism, when a couple lives proper at neither one person’s abode nor the other’s).
I have missed a few cottages and apartments. Daum was epically of no fixed address during her twenties and early-thirties, perpetually read to pull up stakes and move on. Eternally seeking the perfect place to live, she was able to avoid properly committing to anything. Moreover, her relationship to where she lived was tied up with her sense of self; she would have to learn how to be at home, which would require her to learn how to be.
In many ways, Daum’s experience is a hyperbolic version of what happens to everyone– how the places we’ve lived are the stories of who we’ve been. There is much familiar here for anyone who has lived with roommates, who has lived in dodgy apartments, who has house-sat and been a a stand-in in somebody else’s unfortunate life. Daum’s relationship with buying real-estate in particular will strike a pretty universal chord– realtor relationships, the house that got away, the heartbreak of wanting and not getting, the pressure, how you start boring friends with real-estate talk, and eventually finding and buying a house (with all its compromises) and the adventure of home-ownership begins.
A book about such first-world problems is the kind some readers will love to hate, citing its solipsism, but Daum is an engaging prose stylist and writes with admirable candour. Her book avoids quarter-life-crisis-y angst by looking back from far-away enough that such angst appears appropriately idiotic, and she has honed a fine sense of the ridiculous. As Joan Didion wrote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and (as I wrote) in order to make something else of the messes we’ve made. So it’s a book like this, and it’s laughter, and an ending that is bittersweet.
May 4, 2010
House Post 2
I’d been thinking about houses anyway, on account of Meghan Daum’s wonderful book, when I found this book at a yard sale for 50 cents on Saturday. A House is a House for Me by Mary Ann Hoberman and illustrated by Betty Fraser was published in 1978, and I can’t decide whether I like the text or pictures better. Never mind, they’re perfectly complementary.
The book starts off fairly tamely– a hill is a house for an ant, a hive a house for a bee, webs for 
spiders, and nests for birds, and then the refrain, “and a house is a house for me.” The story continues through various other abodes, returning to that house for me– which might be a treehouse, a fort under a tablecloth, a snow fort, or a huge cardboard box. But then things get a little bit crazy: “Perhaps I have started farfetching, perhaps I am stretching things some…”. Because a carton is a house for a cracker, a sandwich is a house for ham, a hat a house for a head. Because “once you get started in thinking, you think and you think and you think. How pockets are houses for pennies, And pens can be house for ink.”
The illustrations are to get lost in, managing to be both exploding and detailled at the very same time. Full of secrets, jokes, and delightful things, and flowing right off of the page. I love the be-spectacled duchess, in bed with her knitting, her books and her banjo. And yes, the tea page, which was created with the sole purpose of thrilling me, I think.
“A box is a house for a teabag. A teapot’s a house for some tea. If you pour me a cup and I drink it all up, Then the teahouse will turn into me.”
May 3, 2010
House Post 1
I just finished reading Megan Daum’s new book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, which I’ll 
be reviewing later this week. I wanted to read Daum’s book because I adored her collection of essays My Misspent Youth when I read it last year, but also because she was writing about houses– the ones she loved, the ones she’s loathed, the ones that got away. She writes about roommates, renting, renovations and running away. About MLS obsession, unfortunate apartments, and the experience if purchasing a 
home of her own. I’m obsessed with this stuff, and always have been, and just so you don’t think I’m jumping on the Meghan Daum obsessed with real-estate bandwagon, I offer you the contents of the journal I kept for school in grade 1. Keep in mind that this is most of the entire book, which means that my range of subject matter was awfully limited.
I’ve always loved drawing houses. This is significant because I’ve never much loved drawing anything else, but the basic details of a house were so well within my poor artistic grasp– square windows the t-frames, a door (with maybe a window for a garnish?), obligatory chimney and triangle roof. The possibilities for variation are limitless– curtains, shubbery, smoke in the 
chimney, shutters, a garage, curving path from the door. I loved illustrations of houses 
too in the books I read, particularly those of the whole house at work with the fourth wall removed, and you could see the staircases connecting all the floors, and each room fulfilling its own specific purpose, the life going on within it. (For some reason, the most fascinating houses were those in trees– I remember Brambley Hedge, and the Berenstein Bears in particular, and how I could stare at the cross section drawings of these tree houses and actually “play” with them for hours).
Houses in television are so important– I remain obsessed with the exterior shots of houses that always preceded any 1980s/1990s’ sitcom’s return from commercial break. These houses’ interiors too, and the ways in which they didn’t match the outsides, and the rooms we rarely saw (like the Keatons’ elusive dining room), and how the Facts of Life set was as familiar to me as my own living room. How none of these houses ever had actual foyers, and how staircases and such would get moved around between 
seasons and we just weren’t supposed to notice. Whole TV shows based around domicles– Melrose Place! And houses as extensions of their characters– Casa Walsh, and Dylan’s house (because he lived alone), and Kelly Taylor’s ultra modern nightmare. The layout of the Salingers’ house from Party of Five is indelibly etched upon my mind, and clearly, yes, I spent my teenage years watching terrible television. But still, I wouldn’t turn my nose up at Monica’s apartment from Friends.
But it’s houses in books in particular, which I had to imagine up all by myself. How LM Montgomery wrote about houses– Lantern Hill, Silverbush, Green Gables, Ingleside, New Moon. The English houses– Thornfield Manor, Wuthering Heights, Manderlay, Wildfell Hall. The house Isabel Archer came from in America, with no windows that faced the street, and the Ramsays’ house in To the Lighthouse, Gatsby’s 
house, Dora Rare’s in The Birth House, Howards End (which was ALL about real estate), Rose’s childhood home in Who Do You Think You Are?, Daisy Stone Goodwill’s house in Ottawa where she raised her family in The Stone Diaries.
Unlike Meghan Daum, however, I don’t own my own home. This is partly because paying a mortgage would necessitate me having a job (heaven forbid), but also because I wouldn’t live in my house anymore. Because I really love my house. Daum writes about the struggle of learning to be at home, to live where are you rather than always looking at where to go next. She thinks ownership is necessary to achieve this, but we’ve managed it without a mortgage. The house is home, and we love it because of and in spite of. The neighbourhood, redolent with blooms at this times of year and trees overhead. The tiles in the kitchen, and the how the sun comes through the kitchen door at lunch time, and how you can only run the washer OR the dryer if you don’t want to blow a fuse, and how 
the sun comes into the bedroom in late afternoon, and we can see the CN Tower in the winter (though the summer hides it with trees full of leaves), and my wonderful attic bedroom (which makes me sad only because I know every bedroom I ever have after this one will be a disappointment), and the trees and the breeze that keep us cool in the summer, and the huge living room windows, and how Harriet’s door doesn’t shut, and the backwards kitchen taps, and our en-suite that doesn’t have a door, and the deck and our fire escape, and the fireplace, and the wide hallway, the squirrels in the attic and the mice under the floor. I used to think that I wanted to buy a house, but then realized what I really wanted was a new apartment, and after two years in this one, I’ve still got no urge to go.
May 2, 2010
Girl Crazy by Russell Smith
Russell Smith’s latest novel 
Girl Crazy is an exercise in downward spiral, beginning with Justin Harrison arriving at a park that’s a pit in an attempt to go swimming in a pool that’s closed. Weaving in and out of traffic reminds him of rickshaws and Bombay, except now it’s Mumbai, and Justin experiments with the sound of his voice: “Mumbai”. And then he says it again, because he’s fascinated by the unfamiliar syllables and by the sound of his voice, and he’s fascinated by the latter because he’s unsure of it.
Justin is connected to nothing, except the internet, though he also maintains a steady relationship with a video game called Sandstorm III (Shiek Assassin). From these two, he’s provided with outlets for sex and violence, respectively, and otherwise his life is empty. His ex-girlfriend Genevieve purports to care about him, though these days she’s just a voice on the phone and her intentions are questionable. He no longer relates to his friends from university, who are obsessed with their careers, status, and restaurants Justin can’t afford to eat at. He’s the victim of a liberal-arts education: entitled, ubiquitous and underemployed. He teaches at a community c0llege, classes like “Business English” and “Email Etiquette”, with students who are only there to get their qualification and not actually to learn. The only thing he knows how to cook is pasta, with sauce from a jar. He is 32 years old, he’s been drinking in the same bars for a decade, and there’s no sign of change on the horizon.
On the Mumbai day, however, he meets a girl in the park who’s wearing sexy sweatpants. This is significant for two reasons, the first that we actually do live in an age where sweatpants are sexy, raising the possibility that nothing is sacred. The second reason being that Justin Harrison would find any item of clothing sexy, actually. If the girl in the park had been wearing a barrel, he would have fantisized about the way the rim dug into the flesh on her upper arms, and then gone home to masturbate.
The girl is wearing sexy sweatpants though, and very little else, and she’s swearing into a payphone in a state of distress. Justin goes out of his way to help her out, she takes his number, and a few days later they meet up for a drink.
Jenna comes from a different background than Justin, which is a polite way of saying her clothes are cheap, she looks like a stripper and hasn’t got to and too straight. Justin, of course, finds all this quite a turn-on, and Jenna is happy to play along– turns out she needs a place to stay, anyway, and there are some people she owes some money to, and any chance Justin could spot her the cash in the meantime?
The downward spiral is irreversible by this point, and Justin finds himself experimenting with a new life the same way he’d once tried out “Mumbai”. The results are illuminating– the respect he garners by walking a pit-bull, by walking down the street beside a girl who looked like Jenna. He becomes involved with drug dealers, illegal gambling, and becomes invested in a definition of manhood that he’d only ever been bystander to before. The spiral perhaps goes on too long, but the book is funny, smart, and devourable.
Justin’s objectification of women was surprisingly tolerable to me, even interesting. It made sense within the context of the novel and of his character, as opposed to seeming like an extension of a lecherous writer’s fantasies (which is all too common). As a feminst reader, it made me uncomfortable, but its gratuitousness was not gratitutious. The point is that Justin is not at all empowered by these experiences, that he’s even disempowered (though the argument goes that the women he watches are the ones that hold the power, and though I’m not convinced by this, it’s worth considering).
The best thing about the novel for me was Jenna though, and not just because she bore an uncanny likeness to my former basement-neighbour who used to beat up her boyfriend because he didn’t “have her back” and because his mother judged her. Jenna is the kind of girl who doesn’t get along with girls because girls are catty. Smith pulls no punches with her character, she’s completely psycho, and it’s almost refreshing not have to feel sympathy for her, that Smith hasn’t concocted some sobby backstory– sympathy is not the point. Jenna is manipulative, amoral, dishonest and awful, and she makes for a wonderous explosion on the page.
Justin is transformed by his experience with Jenna, his own narrative by the end of the novel taking on “the perspective in a video game”. The novel’s ending is ambiguous, suggesting that Justin has finally taken his experiment in hypermasculinity too far, but also offering the possibility of redemption.
April 29, 2010
"Durum wheat" by Lisa Martin-DeMoor
Durum wheat
Memory at its finest lacks corroboration
—no photographs, no diaries—
nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.
Just because you’ve got this idea
of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads
of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires—
just because somewhere in your memory
there’s a rust-coloured pulse
taking its place among canola yellow
and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—
just because you want to
doesn’t mean you can
build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.
Someone tells you you’ve imagined it,
that gash across the ripe belly of summer,
and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.
Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,
to escape the heat, out the Pontiac’s backseat window—
you just remembered it that way
because you preferred the better version.
Someone tells you this.
But what can they know of faith?
To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.
This innocence that can’t be proved: what the child saw
of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.
You have to go there while there’s still time.
Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in wind.
While you’re still young enough to remember
a flame planted along a road. While you’re still
seeing more than there is to see.
–Lisa Martin-DeMoor
April 28, 2010
One Crow Sorrow by Lisa Martin-DeMoor
Lisa Martin-DeMoor’s One Crow Sorrow, poetry winner of the 2009 Alberta Literary Awards, is an intensely personal collection. Each piece seems rooted in experience, focused on immediate details rather than zooming out to capture their wider, more universal implications. There is no place carved out for the reader here, in the intimate address between the poet and who she refers to as just “Mom”, and so the reader is interloper, a position by turns privileged and disquieting.
“I am almost never home, now,/ no matter where I am” writes Martin-DeMoor in “One last time, in our old kitchen.” The collection deals with her mother’s illness and death from cancer, also touching upon her father’s early death many years before, and the cycle and rituals of grief. And other stories, family reference points: “Colleen, I can still hear the stranger at the door…” The tales that bind us.
These poems are prime territory for birdwatching– we get magnificent glimpses of magpies, crows, sparrows, herons, “songbirds are secrets/ substantiated at dawn and knowing”. The wide living world turns around this small story of death and dying– gardens tended and untended, boreal forests and prairie fields: “Admitting the season is over is one way/ of facing up to grief.” The natural references stitch the poems to the earth, but with stitches so loose that some words fly like spirit, and the rest is contained in the space in between.
The poems resonated for me in particular on second reading– first was a bit like wandering in a dimly lit room, but then the shapes became familiar and I could make out the details around me enough to know what I was seeing. To find my away through the spaces in between the poems as well, to consider the white space and line breaks and the weight of these things. To consider the quiet. Because these are delicate poems, I think, to be looked at before they touched, and then their solidity becomes unmistakable.
April 27, 2010
Be sure to die near water
We went to the ROM today, which was an amazing experience, because Harriet is now 11 months old and therefore big enough to get something out of the Kids’ Gallery, and the museum was quiet enough on a Tuesday afternoon for an 11 month-old to play there with abandon. Her favourite part of the under-six area was a toy with a variety of cranks she could turn, and mine was the exhibit of children’s and minature tea sets. Elsewhere, I learned that fossils are seven times heavier than bones (and therefore the dinosaur exhbit’s floors are specially enforced) and that if you wish to be fossilized, be sure to die near water.
April 26, 2010
In which a poem is dispensed from a vending machine
Because we live in a wonderful city, the highlight of this afternoon was visiting the poetry vending machine at This Ain’t the Rosedale Public Library, as installed by the Toronto Poetry Vendors. 
Like all the best vending machines, this one jammed a little bit once I’d put in my twoonie and turned the crank, so I had to stick my hand up the chute to get my poem out, and (imagine if I’d gotten stuck? And they’d had to call the fire department? Because I’d gotten my hand stuck in a poetry vending machine? Now, there‘s a story, if only it weren’t fiction, because) my purchase slipped out easily. My luck of the draw was a poem called “Rhyme Scheme (for Condo Country)” by Jacob McArthur Mooney, and now it’s hanging on my fridge.
And, because I was in a bookstore, I picked up Joy Is So Exhausting by Susan Holbrook, as pitched by Julie Wilson today for Keeping Toronto Reading. (Hear Susan read her collection at Seen Reading; I recommend the poem “Nursery” [second from the end] in particular, mainly because the world needs more breastfeeding lit. and the poem is joyous).
April 25, 2010
More on "Domestic fiction", which, turns out, doesn't exist.
First, I want to point out that Twitter has become a lot more worthwhile since I started following Washington Post book critic Ron Charles. And it was his review of Sue Miller’s The Lake Shore Limited that made me realize that I’d become derailed with my “domestic fiction” epiphany (which was that it was not just the stuff of women’s fiction, that it’s universal. That the realm may not be as divided as I’d supposed). Ron Charles writes that Miller:
“might be the best poster child for the poison condescension bestowed by the term “women’s literature.” She didn’t publish her first novel, “The Good Mother” (1986), until she was in her 40s, but since then she’s been prolific and popular (another mark against her), writing about families and marriages, infidelity and divorce — what we call “literary fiction” when men write about those things. Last year, a grudging review of “The Senator’s Wife” in That Other East Coast Newspaper claimed that Miller’s novels “feature soap-opera plots,” a mischaracterization broad enough to apply to any story that doesn’t involve space travel or machine guns.”
You know, I really meant “women’s fiction” all along, which (the surprise is) is also often written by men. Except, yes, it’s “literary fiction” then. This all reminds me of Julianna Baggot’s piece from last winter (via SWB) that posited: “Women… are supposed to be experts on emotion. I’ve never heard anyone remark that they were surprised that a book of psychological depth was written by a woman. So men get points for simply showing up on the page with a literary effort.” I don’t know if the last point is completely true, but I do think that “psychological fiction” is something of a woman’s domain these days. That psychological fiction and what we call women’s fiction are often one and the same.
I am still bothered by Alex Good’s review of Lisa Moore’s novel February, which suggested that the novel’s most “gendered” elements were “so transparently the stuff of commercial fiction”. I continue to not understand what this means, exactly, but it seems similar to the “soap-opera plot” accusation thrown at Sue Miller (and in fact, Good bemoans the lack of a “fast-paced, and forward-moving plot” [space travel and machine guns?]). I continue also to still think that February was a stunning novel. Could a man have written it? Does it matter? Would it have been judged any differently if a man had written it?
It seems that for many critics, “women’s fiction” is a polite way of saying “bad fiction” (and that “bad fiction” is an impolite way of saying “women’s fiction”), but I’m not sure that judgment is entirely fair. In fact, yes, to bring this around to what I was talking about in the preceding paragraph, I know the judgment isn’t fair when women are writing some of the best fiction out there. And that when the men are writing it, then it’s “literary fiction”, as noted by Ron Charles.
So I don’t know what to think now: my revelation continues to be that fiction is not as gendered as I’d previously suspected, but that there might still be such a thing as “women’s writing”. Though it might just be a construct, a gap manufactured by critics who find it easier to catagorize things simply. It might also be a misunderstanding, women’s writing being judged by its lowest common denominator (Maeve Binchy, as opposed to Virginia Woolf, for example). Because there is truly some seriously shitty “women’s writing” out there, but we could say the same about the men. Or are women writing books which are restrictive in their readership? Might the fault be with the readers though, who are prejudiced about what “Great Works” are constituted of? And then here’s the really complicating factor– what about discerning readers who thought that February was crap, full stop (and I’ ve met them. I think they’re crazy, but I’ve met them). Truly, me responding with, “You wouldn’t get it. You’re a man” is a pretty unfair response. And doesn’t say much for February, because shouldn’t great literature speak to everyone? (Though I really don’t understand why this great book wouldn’t.)
