FastLittleArticle

Travel writing falls into two distinct categories. The first, ably represented by Paul Theroux, treats travel as a kind of war-is-hell story. Even if the worst thing ever to have happened to you en route is that the airline lost your luggage on the way back from Orlando, you can sympathize with Theroux’s sardonic xenophobia. One gets the impression that Theroux doesn’t like to travel at all; he is driven to travel, the way some are driven to climb mountains. Likely Theroux, and similar but gentler souls like Bill Bryson, have done less for the tourism industry than the second kind of travel writing, which puts restlessness next to Godliness. But if you scratch a little deeper into this second genre, it often isn’t about travel at all. It’s about staying put. These are the books about buying an ancient farmhouse in southern Europe, renovating it, and then entertaining all your hometown friends at sumptuous meals made from indigenous ingredients, supplemented by vast quantities of indigenous wine.

Cutting the travel out of travel lit has several advantages for the writers. For one thing, their encounters with foreign bureaucracies are limited to their real estate transactions and to setting up utilities. No mean undertaking, but in many ways preferable to the unending hassles of securing visas and train tickets. It’s not really travel lit at all, although publishers and bookstores classify it as such. It has more in common with Gourmet and Architectural Digest than it does with the accounts of more mobile writers. Renovation-Foodie lit, we could call it.

The book that launched this genre as a publishing phenom was Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1991). Only a few years earlier, the films Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (based on the novels of Marcel Pagnol) had met with international acclaim, leaving many people hungry for more accounts of life in the French countryside. Mayle’s story of his first year as a permanent resident in Provence is weak on the reno side of things, although it has its share of adventures in masonry. But it’s very strong on the foodie side. Much of the book is a gluttonous and detailed account of the meals he prepared and consumed. Food is an integral part of travel lit – the Theroux school prefers to describe offal, the weirder, the better. But the Mayle school is more like an affectionate restaurant review:

“The main course arrived – rosy slices of lamb cooked with whole cloves of garlic, young green beans, and a golden potato-and-onion galette. The Châteauneuf-du-Pape was poured, dark and heady, “a wine with shoulders,” as Maurice had said…
“The cheese was from Banon, moist in its wrapping of vine leaves, and then came the triple flavors and textures of the desserts – lemon sorbet, chocolate tart, and crème anglaise all sharing a plate. Coffee. A glass of marc from Gigondas. A sigh of contentment.” (96)

Apparently, Mayle spent fifteen years in the advertising business before he turned to writing.

A Year in Provence has a prematurely aged feel; there is something muffled about it and the books that followed. Compare it to Lillian Beckwith’s accounts of her life as a foreign Englishwoman in the Hebrides in the 1940s and 50s. Beckwith’s stories, though gentle, have an immediacy that Mayle’s lack. Rumour has it that Beckwith didn’t disguise her characters well enough, and her neighbours grew – understandably – to resent being figures of mild fun. She eventually left the Hebrides for the Isle of Man. Mayle also left Provence for a few years, and although he returned, he now lives in “an undisclosed location.” This is said to be the result of busloads of literary tourists coming up the driveway to his first house, but I have to wonder if the locals started giving him the cold shoulder as well.

Mayle’s characters are highly mannered. Some of them are actually named Fanny and Marius, the names of the title characters in Marcel Pagnol’s plays first staged some 75 years ago. They play boules. They speak in a mixture of French and English that makes them permanently foreign, although it is their country. The homage to Pagnol is somehow stodgy and stuffy. I was surprised to turn to the author photo on the back to find a youngish-looking man, reminiscent of John Denver in the 1980s. He wears an open-necked shirt, and his hair has been bleached by the sun. Or maybe it’s gray – it’s a black-and-white photo, so you can’t really tell. A website devoted to his work reports that he was born in 1939, which would make him 52 at the time of publication. Not a young man then, but still much younger-looking than the authorial voice suggests. (Here’s a similar picture.) Little wonder that when the BBC dramatized the books, they cast the distinguished and snowy-headed John Thaw in the main role. Because the only thing that’s really fresh in these books is the produce.

Maybe I’m just grouchy from having binged on all this northerner-moves-to-
the-Mediterranean lit, because turning to James Chatto’s memoir of his time as a young man in Greece, The Greek for Love (2005), didn’t improve my mood. Chatto’s story of new love set against the charming scenery of Corfú is sweet – it’s touching that he wants to preserve the early years with the woman who became his wife. But he ricochets from cliché to cliché while doing so. The couple even buy a house and renovate it, according to strict principles of authenticity and accuracy that bemuse the locals. But it is in the descriptions of food that this book either really shines or really grates, depending on your perspective:

“More food arrived. Three souvlakia each, a tower of thickly hewn bread and two plates of fried potatoes, golden, salty, and piping hot. We made space on the table for a salad bowl filled with cool, moist chunks of cucumber, crunchy green peppers and crimson tomatoes so ripe that their sweet juice became a dressing that we soon enhanced with mellow, coral-coloured vinegar and yellow oil from the two small bottles that Georgie’s wife brought. On separate dishes were more slices of feta dressed with oil and dried oregano flowers, and very small, firm black olives, slightly pointed at one end and without much flesh on their pits, that tasted sweeter and nuttier than any olives I had ever eaten.
“‘This is so delicious,’ I gasped between bites.
“‘Of course,’ confirmed Ilias. ‘Georgie’s wife grows everything herself. It’s much easier.’”(27)

If I had been there, I might have been able to ask the obvious question: easier for whom? But Chatto is a food and wine writer by usual trade, and no doubt his regular readers expected a generous serving of moist cucumber, crunchy peppers, and crimson tomatoes when they bought his book. (The rest of us just order a small Greek salad and are done with it.)

Mr. Mayle and Mr. Chatto, don’t take this carping too seriously. It’s really all Frances Mayes’s fault. Hers was the first of these Mediterranean pilgrimages that I read, and as a result all your sweet local ruminant’s milk curdles instantly in my mouth. Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) is the most successful book of this genre, if we use a fat movie contract as the standard for success. The movie has flaws, but we’ll stick with the book here, which is plenty irritating in its own right.

Mayes is a poet and a professor of creative writing. The latter must pay better than the former does, because the book is a particularly intense version of reno-foodie lit, replete with hilarious episodes with the plumbing and the quaint ways of the locals.

“New peas pop right out of the crisp pods. I thought shelling them was a meditative act until I saw a woman in town sitting outside her doorway with her cat sleeping at her ankles. She was shelling an immense pile of peas and had already filled a large dishpan. She looked up and said something rapidly in Italian and I smiled, only to realize as I walked on that she’d said, ‘It shouldn’t happen to a dog.’” (128).

The recipe that follows contains fresh-shelled peas. That’s funny. I think that Mayes thinks it is funny, too, but her too-sweet, overripe imagery is so overwhelming that any vinegar she adds at this point is utterly lost.

Mayes has a poet’s fascination with words, including those that describe the house project:

“Restoration. I like the word. The house, the land, perhaps ourselves. But restored to what? Our lives are full. It’s our zeal for all this work that amazes me. Is it only that once into the project, what it all means doesn’t come up? Or that excitement and belief reject questions?” (85)

This is the closest she ever seems to come to any kind of sustained reflection. Why is life in San Francisco – also widely considered paradise – not satisfying enough, that she needs to secure a second place where the climate is gentle and the food delicious? What is the purpose of ownership and renovation? I’ve heard that you can rent Tuscan villas. It’s even possible that you can buy houses that have already been renovated. What is it about leaving your mark on another place? Why is it that reno lit writers always report a greater respect for historical authenticity than any of the locals have? Reno-foodie lit can be a pleasant diversion, I suppose, but most of it would be richer with a healthy dose of self-awareness and self-examination. Mayes seems to be exactly the kind of person Barry Unsworth skewered so effectively in After Hannibal (1997), his novel about outsiders buying villas in Umbria. (Chalk one up for Unsworth’s self-awareness; he’s a foreigner in Umbria himself.)

Mayes is wrong. This is not a literature of restoration; it’s a literature of attempted transformation. The transformation of the house from wreck to beauty stands for the transformation of self that northerners (San Francisco just barely counts) seek from the Mediterranean sun. This is why a new or rejuvenated sex life makes shy appearances in nearly all these books. (Even Patricia Atkinson, whose account of running a vineyard in France is a model of discretion, meets a new fella in her second book.) It also explains the prevalence of middle-aged writers, or writers who sound middle-aged. Most young people would not have the time or financial resources to take on a foreign renovation, but there is also a difference in psychology. The work of youth is establishment. The work of middle age is transformation.

Versions of the northern pilgrimage from early in the twentieth century made the Mediterranean a place of sexual awakening for the young: E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), or Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (1922). But the story of young people freeing themselves from sexual repression doesn’t have much zing for contemporary readers – that kind of literature has shifted to looking at the recovery from divorce, or middle-aged life in general.

A film that captures all the contradictions inherent in the transformative pilgrimage is François Ozon’s The Swimming Pool (2003). Here, the hot sun of rural France is associated with youth, and only comes to change the middle-aged protagonist in a very unexpected way. (I’m not going to spoil the movie for you here. I highly recommend it.) When James Chatto swims naked in the sea off Corfú, it is a kind of baptism, and therefore a transformation. The pool in Ozon’s movie is considerably more ambiguous, but manages to effect a transformation without any of the usual pallid sacraments of eating flavourful local vegetables or warm, golden olive oil – let alone restoring centuries-old plaster.

The Georgia Straight, the local entertainment weekly that stays true to its hippie-underground roots by including a longer researched piece each issue, obliged me by putting daycare on its cover this week. This is not something I have any personal experience with, due to a pig-headed and possibly self-defeating refusal to participate in the mainstream job market. (Actually, it’s more complicated than that – I’m not sure I’d have even the slightest idea how to get a normal job at this point.) But daycare was a prominent part of the recent election in Canada. Columnists tried to arouse our indignation with stories of high income earners who use Quebec’s famous $7 a day daycare program. Or they tried to stir our sympathy with stories of ordinary folks – you know, people like you – struggling to find adequate and affordable care.

The Straight‘s article is unusual in that it raises (and then dismisses) the possibility that the difficulty of finding childcare is behind our low birth rates. The mothers interviewed all say they would consider having more children if more quality child care were available. But pro-natalist policies have had no measurable effect on birth rates anywhere they have been introduced. Common wisdom has it that we have smaller families because we are more financially secure. David Baxter, of Vancouver’s Urban Futures Institute, told the Straight, “As soon as a country has a pension plan, you don’t need kids anymore. Societies have high birth rates where people need the next generation of workers, where kids will look after you when you’re old.” This is too pat an explanation for such a profound social change. Family size has been declining for a century (or more, in some places), with the obvious exception of the postwar baby boom. This decline predates the pension, the entry of large numbers of women into the labour force, and the social acceptability of contraception. What it is coincident with is the sharp increase in life expectancy in the wealthier parts of the world. People have stopped having large families because they can reasonably expect two healthy pregnancies to lead to two healthy grown children. It is in the parts of the world where the future is far less assured that birth rates tend to be high (Russia is a notable exception). Since those in the more fortunate parts of the world expect to live until their eighties, there is no particular reason to begin having babies until they are in their late 20s or 30s, which puts a further constraint on family size.

As smaller families become more common, larger families are left first to the rural, and then to the poor, aboriginals on reserve, and religious conservatives. This in turn will reinforce the decision of the middle class to limit family size (or not to have children at all). It is only among a more upscale demographic that three kids seems to be more ordinary, or even (as I recently heard), “four is the new three.” Nevertheless, birth rates are at near record lows. (You only think there’s a baby boom because a very rapid fashion cycle and steadily decreasing retail costs has resulted in the aggressive expansion of maternity shops.)

But even as we have fewer children, we have greater expectations for them, and daycare is a frequent topic of public discussion despite a smaller number of small people. With the election of a minority Conservative government, Canadians with children under the age of six can expect a cheque for $1200 per child per year. This would cover (at typical city prices) something like six weeks of daycare. It is also taxable in the hands of the lower-income parent. (Hey, that’s me! That might double my income!) This is widely taken as proof of Conservative hypocrisy: it is not to help parents who need daycare, but rather an attempt to answer a long-standing dissatisfaction of the social conservatives who have supported Prime Minister Harper. They have repeatedly argued that the tax deductibility of child care expenses leaves them doubly disadvantaged – they give up one income to keep mama with the kiddos, and they receive no encouragement to do so through the tax code.

Careful – we’re entering the mother wars here, a nasty internecine conflict which holds that any misstep stamps on your child’s forehead: FUTURE POET – BASICALLY UNEMPLOYABLE. I have often wondered why we even bother having a debate over publicly-funded daycare. The territory is so pocked with land mines like private choice (the women in the Straight article cite the high cost of buying a house in Vancouver as a critical part of their decisions to keep working) and public benefit (who’s going to pay your pension if we don’t secure the next generation’s future?) that it would be best if we could just ditch the whole debate.

Why don’t we just put these kids in school? Start with junior kindergarten, as Ontario has done (with interruptions), and move back from there. It’s unlikely that we would start sending six-month-olds to school, but even schooling beginning at three would be an enormous improvement on the current situation. No pointless bickering over selfish mothers who work to pay for a fancier house or yearly tropical vacations, since no one (apart from the homeschooling minority) argues that children are better off with their mothers than in school.

Private daycare will never be sufficient to meet demand, because we will never have enough people willing to work for the low wages necessary to make daycare inexpensive enough for people to use it in exchange for a moderate income. (Think daycare is expensive now? Try paying for it when professionally trained caregivers start demanding more than $22 000 a year.)

Of course, education is an area of provincial jurisdiction. The federal government has a history – especially recently – of muscling in on provincial territory, grabbing what glory and power it can. But this doesn’t explain why lobbyists have concentrated their efforts at the national level, particularly given that the provinces are responsible for daycare standards and licensing. Why not lobby for junior kindergarten? Public education is an existing universal delivery system. Why the blind spot?

According to Abbie Gordon Klein, in The Debate Over Child Care, 1969-1990, this blindness has its source in the “age-old rift between the social welfare profession with its predominant social service function and the education profession with its social role as mass educator.” Contemporary daycare evolved from the day nurseries of the early 20th century, which were more like charities than they were like schools. In a history of Canadian daycare, Donna Varga writes, “All the nurseries operated in the poorest districts of their cities, their purpose being the care of children whose mothers had to engage in paid labour in order for their families to survive.” Daycares expanded with the entry of large numbers of middle class women into the workforce, but they remained institutionally separate from the public schools.

The attempts of daycares to play up their educational role (the certification programs are in Early Childhood Education, or ECE) have not been successful. Although we all agree that small children need quality care, we do not call daycare schooling – we call it daycare. The word itself emphasizes the idea that institutional care for these children is a private choice, unlike schooling, which is mandatory.

Kindergartens began as private institutions, but with a couple of important differences: they were originally a luxury for the well-off, much like prestigious preschools are today, and they always presented themselves as educational institutions, with a definite curriculum. Daycare, by contrast, remains a patchwork system, and thus is much more difficult to graft onto public schools. However, it’s certainly not impossible. In many parts of the world, children may enter school at the age of three.

Hey, lobbyists: your arguments are tiresome, and they have been unsuccessful for more than thirty years now. Let’s just skip the boring argument about where women (and it’s always women) should be while their children are young. Put those kids in school. “But what do I do before they are 3?” you ask. “And what can the feds take credit for?” I hear from the national policy wonks. How about this: Canada has an excellent parental leave program (it is unavailable to the self-employed, but never mind – I get to take advantage of it vicariously). How about we extend that legislation from one year of public benefits (topped up at your employer’s sometimes cheapskated discretion) to allow an extra year of unpaid leave. Your job would be safe. (Your mortgage payments in Vancouver might be a problem, as for the women interviewed in the Straight, but it is not the government’s job to help you out here any more than the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation already does.) Now you have to deal with a year on your own. Or maybe you’ve got another child on the way. In any case, it’s a whole lot better than what we have now, so kwitcher whining about having to deal with a single year of daycare. It was your choice to have kids, wasn’t it? Whoops – pardon me, that’s not the kind of thing I usually say. Reading what others have had to say about daycare must have left me vulnerable to the contagion of treating life as a series of consumer decisions. I promise it won’t happen again.

In retrospect, it ought to have been easily predictable – or what philosophers like to call overdetermined – but one of the consequences of having a child is that I watch a lot of children’s television. I know several parents of young children who prevented this by banning the box. This tells you something about the social circles I move in, and perhaps I’ll take a closer look at the history of that impulse another time. But getting rid of the TV feels false to me, too deliberately countercultural. At the other extreme, we’ve all heard that bad and lazy parents leave their children to learn the world according to PBS preschool programming. What I want to know is how they keep them there, in front of the TV, instead of badgering their mothers for toys, apple juice, and to play on the computer. I’d be happy enough to leave my child in the secure glowing embrace of the TV so that I could, say, brush my hair, or tend to this website. But he wants me to watch with him. So we sit on the couch, and I try to hold up a magazine, and wonder if a wireless internet connection and a laptop would be compatible with a lap full of toddler. Magazines are no defense against the onslaught of moral instruction issuing from the TV.

My favourite is Arthur (or it was until I learned about Peep and the Big Wide World, narrated by the excellent Joan Cusack). Arthur looks nothing like the aardvark he is supposed to be. Are aardvarks too phallic? Who knows? The animals in children’s literature and television are rarely much like their natural counterparts. They are fuzzy stand-ins for the children themselves. (This is fitting; children often seem to be a species apart.) Arthur wears its moral philosophy lightly, and the relationships between the kids show an unusual degree of faith in actual childhood as the source material for children’s entertainment. Arthur’s little sister D.W., for example, sees a deer on a family camping trip, and imagines how she will be innocent and good enough to attract the animal as her friend, crossing whatever sort of species boundary that might be. The deer will sleep in her bed and let her ride on its back. What child hasn’t had a similar fantasy about a foreign creature who can confirm how special she is? Of course, D.W. drives her parents crazy in her pursuit of this fantasy, which is the other reason I like the show. The parents are not fonts of wisdom. They roll their eyes and drop the kids off with grandma in complete exasperation. They seem to have – or at least want – a life apart from their demanding offspring.

Arthur is not free of moral lessons – one of its more subtle and constant ones is that Dad is a caterer and Mom is an accountant – but these don’t generally get in the way of the characters or storylines. And it gets bonus points for its Ziggy Marley theme song. There’s a lot of music and singing on kiddie TV, and much of it is pretty annoying to adult ears. Ziggy is a brief respite.

What is the effect of all these sounds and images on our children’s aesthetic development? Children are supposed to prefer simple sounds just as they are attracted to primary colours. But how much of this is because that’s all they ever hear and see? My husband and I each have programs that irritate us enough to hunt for the remote, switch the channel, turn off the TV, search for some other diversion. Interestingly, they are not the same programs. He will always switch from Hi-5 to Dragon Tales if he catches the impossibly perky hosts of the first show chirping away. He has a point – but I find Dragon Tales almost as annoying, and I will sacrifice my son’s aesthetic development to just about anything if it means I get to finish my coffee.

Hi-5 is the American version of a successful Australian show, filmed on the Australian set with an American cast. The cast is sparkly of eye and bleached of tooth and has been hygienically sealed for your protection. I found at first that it was impossible not to watch their song-and-dance without imagining all those bright faces with their progressive double-barrelled surnames in seedy after-hours clubs, disappearing into dark corners with strangers, wrapping rubber bands around their arms in preparation for the next heroin injection, or, like Doogie Howser in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, snorting coke off a prostitute’s pretty rear end. But the cast bios spoiled this bit of fun. It seems that the happyhappy cast are just musical theatre geeks. (Not that musical theatre geeks can’t get into trouble or be dangerously competitive – see the film Camp if you’re not familiar with this subspecies from high school.) The Hi-5 bios also list favourite foods, movies, and other likes and dislikes. It’s the same genre as the personal ad, and perhaps has the same purpose – to get strangers to like them. As clichéd as they are (Kimmee loves “PASTA! PASTA! PASTA!”), they make me more inclined to take the show’s frantic good will at face value.

More disturbing is the uncanny mimicry of the child studio audience. The girls, particularly, none of whom seem to be over the age of six, can execute every shoulder move and hip shimmy with perfection, as they sing the words, “Cover your eyes/Whisper my name/Join in my mystical game” (from the song “Three Wishes”). What looks like a well-meaning exaggeration of childhood on the part of the performers looks creepy and weird when done by actual children.

However, at least they manage to fill the studio, or film it so that the studio looks full. The early episodes of the execrable Canadian show The Doodlebops were never quite able to accomplish that, and it was impossible not to notice the vast numbers of empty seats and the number of times particular audience shots repeated themselves. This likely won’t be a problem in the future. Just like it is for the best Japanese girl groups, the publicity machine is now fully cranked up for the cartoonish trio, with a cross-Canada tour and mainstream press coverage. And so far, their audiences seem to be blessedly free of rhythm and ability.

The worst shows, of course, are the heavy-handed moralizers that my son loves. Poko, for instance, according to the show’s website, “is a stop-motion animation preschool show that will have young children glued to their seats and laughing out loud, while at the same time learning simple strategies to help them cope with everyday childhood frustrations and mishaps.” Poko, who seems to come from forward-thinking multi-racial parents (although they are never in evidence), learns to count to ten and perform other little exercises until his anger dissipates. Then the narrator (who sounds a great deal like Hal from the movie 2001) says to Poko, “Good, Poko, you’re not angry anymore. Now what do you think you should do to solve the problem?” The narrator is the superego, squashing the id’s urge to just throw the frustrating toy out the window, forcing the ego to behave morally. It’s a pretty straightforward exercise in popular Freudianism, this show, and makes me appreciate a little more Maurice Sendak’s beloved Where the Wild Things Are. (Although that’s another book that I have trouble reading in any kind of uncomplicated way. Have you read it as an adult? You should.)

The overall lessons that come from these shows – driven home with all the subtlety of a jackhammer – is that (1) you need to be nice to others, and (2) if you believe in yourself you can do anything. There is a subset of (1) that is especially apparent in the shows that are based on the children’s books from my own childhood, like Little Bear or The Berenstain Bears, which is that Parents Know All. The grinding repetition of this is especially apparent in The Berenstain Bears. I don’t remember this from my own childhood, but my mother assures me that the Berenstain Bear books (there are now more than 240 of them) were always big on various lessons in self-control and self-reliance. There are issues they don’t cover. In an interview with CBS news in 2002, Stan Berenstain said that they weren’t going to do a book about divorce: “Who’s going to get divorced? Mama and Papa Bear can’t get divorced, or we’d be out of business. I guess the neighbors could get divorced, but one of the things kids respond to is that the bears are just like us and they’re funny. It would be pretty hard to do a funny book about divorce.” Well, actually, I think you could write a funny book about divorce fairly easily, but doing that for children might tread on any number of feelings and sensibilities. In any case, there’s no shortage of heartfelt and tedious children’s books on divorce out there, and perhaps I should find the Bears’ moral world bracingly old-fashioned. But Junk Food is Bad and Exercise is Good are neither time-tested nor especially interesting.

Everyone makes fun of the Baby Einstein videos (no doubt because the name implies the kind of striving that we simultaneously practice and scorn), but I am a convert. (Yes, I made fun of them before I had children. They are also owned by the evil Disney empire. And I’m sorry to have to tell you that calling them ‘baby crack’ is not especially original.) It’s the looseness of their narrative structure and the lack of moral to the story that allow them shelf space in my house. The background music – classical music played straight but on toy instruments – is rather pleasant, and not at all like the disco “Hooked on Classics” that I had feared. Sometimes it’s funny, too. The colour purple, for instance, is introduced with Ravel’s Bolero. Of course, the normative lessons are still there. Martha Stewart Living doesn’t have a patch on the idyll and nostalgia that suffuses the footage of the kitchens and bedrooms in “Baby Wordsworth,” which introduces words around the house.

But the majority of children’s television can’t shake itself from the idea that it must teach children to be good and productive. Most troubling is this idea that if you believe in yourself you can do anything. Why do we teach this to our children? Vicarious hopes? It is the most frequent lesson in children’s television, and it is probably the one that we question the least. Obviously, telling kids that they are bound by ability, geography, and parental income is needlessly cruel. But just what is at stake for the grown-ups in repeating this little falsehood over and over? Perhaps it salves our collective conscience, makes us feel that we’ve done something. Disseminate the message and turn control of their lives over to these small ones. It’s not our fault that your school is shockingly poor. Don’t you know that you can do anything if you believe in yourself? Or maybe it is important that we repeat this lesson to the most vulnerable children, who perhaps badly need to hear it from an authoritative voice. But it needs to be coupled with something practical – school funding, summer camps – in order for it ever to have any kind of real effect. You weren’t able to do what you wanted? Well, kiddo, you just didn’t believe in yourself enough.

What a striking contrast these pastel pieties are with Peter Rabbit, whose father was turned into a charmingly illustrated pie, or with Mother Goose:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side.

On Friday, March 24, the CBC’s flagship newscast broadcast a piece on Newfoundlanders making the trip to Calgary to earn a fortune in construction work.

This is not uncommon, and it may be that two-thirds of Newfoundland’s male population has taken up temporary residence in Alberta. It is exactly what is predicted by classical economics: people will move to where the jobs are, provided the rewards are great enough that they outweigh the costs of moving. Behavioural economics might tell us that if the rewards are really spectacular, people will move despite the emotional cost of leaving ancestral home and family.

The report followed a handful of men who went to Calgary to earn big bucks to provide a better life for their families. They and their wives had worked in a fish-processing plant that had shut down, and the opportunities at home weren’t nearly as lucrative as a stint in Calgary construction. Harbour Breton, a town of about 2000, claims to be enjoying economic growth, but the examples listed on the town’s website are “an increased number of residents becoming self-employed in a variety of ventures from photography and lawn care to sewing shops and sawmills.”

Didn’t I grow up hearing exactly this report? It was with a strong sense of deja vu that I listened to the report of dying towns in Newfoundland, Alberta riches, price and wage controls – oh, wait, that last hasn’t come up again. But the broad outlines of the report sure brought me back to a 70s childhood. One of the irritating things about historians is that they are always telling you that something very similar already happened. And one of the irritating things to historians about most public discourse is that its historical sense is so shallow you can barely splash around in it.

The 1970 film Goin’ Down the Road is not about Newfoundlanders, but the plot is much the same. Two buddies leave Cape Breton to seek their fortune on the mean streets of Toronto. The film shows urban life at its most desolate, as the men struggle with the demands of jobs, new girlfriends, and a strong sense that they will never belong. Pop culture encyclopedia Mondo Canuck says that the movie “established the Canadian male as one of the most persistently impotent and unappealing characters in world cinema – a trait which endures to this very day, and which has probably taken an incalculable toll on the collective national ideal of masculinity.” The more recent film waydowntown emasculates Calgary office workers, though it’s hard to imagine this movie being made now. It was a product of Alberta’s bust years, and while its grim satirical mood may return to Calgary, it sure doesn’t look like that will be any time soon.

What was offensive about the National’s report was its insensitive attempts to stuff the Newfoundlanders into a crude version of Goin’ Down the Road characterizations. They were rubes – gawking up at the tall city buildings. (At least the reporter noted the vast distance between Calgary and Newfoundland when he said that none of them had ever been so far from home: Ireland is closer to Newfoundland than Calgary is.) Of course, the footage of the men glancing up at the tall buildings was easily obtained, since the reporter had asked them to meet him at the Calgary Tower. I’d look up at the top of the tower, too, if I were headed to that tourist attraction.

The report also showed the six men in their 2-bedroom apartment. This was presented as a mild hardship – who among us more sophisticated folk would choose to live that way? – but all they wanted was a place to eat and sleep. Why not double or triple up, and save as much money as possible?

Funny that the report never mentioned anything specific about money. Maybe that’s considered crass in television reporting. At any rate, a 50-hour week in construction in Calgary, combined with minimal living expenses, sounds like a recipe for making a very satisfying amount of money in the shortest time possible.

But money is never mentioned in any of these reports on rural East Coasters. Lobster fishermen do pretty well, I understand, but when they were being interviewed on CBC a few months ago, their funny accents and fishing boots were a distraction, and we never learned how much money these small business owners typically earn. It’s an unexamined part of the Canadian mythscape – the poor, rural, working-class East Coast male, unable to take his place among his proud ancestors who provided for their families for centuries. It’s not that this is entirely false, but it’s very difficult to find a person beneath the layers of expectation and stereotype.

The men’s wives had all worked at the fish plant, too, but we heard very little of their stories. They were the ones left behind, to raise children and keep up the home while their husbands were away earning money.

And this is one thing that is odd about this entire story of Newfoundlanders seeking riches in Alberta, both in its contemporary and 1970s versions: these fish plant workers were the beneficiaries of an earlier resource boom – an abundance of fish that lasted for centuries, and drew people to live in a starkly beautiful but often unforgiving part of the world.

After a decade away from Vancouver, I’ve come back. We all know that you can’t go home again, but that expression is supposed to capture the tension between the memory of a place and its disappointing present. In Vancouver, this tension has a different source: it is the gap between reality and the apparent self-perception of the city, the constant hype from the gaping maw of its publicity machine. I find the city baffling and irritating by turns, reactions I am going to try to put to methodological advantage. In any case, there is relatively little good writing about this city. It is still young and not yet big enough. What good writing there is comes from people who have lived here for a long time. Lance Berelowitz, author of the recent Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination, has made his home here for years. Douglas Coupland may have found Vancouver unworthy for the setting for Generation X, but to remove Vancouver from his literary landscape now would be like taking Margaret Atwood out of Toronto.

And why would anyone leave, once they were here? People tend to view living in Vancouver as an achievement. Perhaps this is because, in the Canadian imagination, the city exercises a powerful hold as a goal. The comfortably retired come here in droves, and tell themselves that it’s the best place on earth. A mild climate, public medicine, and (for those in the suburbs just south of the city) only a quick drive across the border for cheap(er) gas. Surely, if ever there was evidence of intelligent design, it is this happy arrangement.

What is odd about the city is that beyond these advantages, it is a vaguely defined paradise. It seems that Vancouver’s main advantage is that it can pretend to be anywhere, fulfill any desire. Over on the west side, which sits in quiet contemplation of its own magnificent splendour, the older houses are of two types: the craftsman bungalow, borrowed from northern California, and the peaked and gabled storybook houses, which are almost indecent in their anglophilia. These houses do not look like anything in the actual UK, and I’d bet money that their original builders and buyers knew of England only what their parents had told them, and that the climate is dismayingly similar. These houses are inspired by a storybook England, a certain conception of Englishness that fought the Hun with cozy stuffed sitting rooms and pots of strong tea. (There are also country manse version of these houses, close to the University of B.C. Campus, that are straight out of a Ralph Lauren ad.)

The built environment is also littered with pink stucco, now mildewed and stained, a reminder – in case you’ve forgotten the leaky condo crisis – that Vancouver is not southern California. But the most famous of the buildings continually at odds with the environment is Library Square. It is an excellent public library, and it’s a pleasant building to work in. When it came time to build a new main library branch, Vancouver put the design possibilities to a public referendum, and this design, modelled on the Colliseum, won the contest handily. Vancouver as the new Rome: who the hell do these people think they are? Best not to read too much into it. Vancouver has always had a prediliction for whimsy.

This unsettling lack of specificity is supposed to be one of the city’s advantages as a film location, but surely that is only because the natural landscape is covered in cloud for two-thirds of the year. The mountains are a powerful part of the city’s self-image, and when they are visible, it is obvious that the city certainly cannot stand in for Anytown, USA. Even so, much of the time, its place on the imaginary map is ill-defined. If you are determined enough, you can grow palm and banana trees here. The only possible reason I can think of for this utter defiance of climate and geography is that these plants are visible reminders of the paradise people believe they inhabit. And – at least since the time that Gaugin abandoned his wife and children for Tahiti – paradise is supposed to be tropical. There’s something very disturbing about the fierce attachment to a city while ignoring the very idea of place.

But perhaps Vancouverites have always been able to ignore what doesn’t suit them. The downtown eastside is well known as Canada’s worst neighbourhood. I live near it, and pass through it regularly. People tell me it has improved. True, there are interesting boutiques on its edges, but so few outsiders spend any time in the centre of it that it’s possible people know only the constant assurances of the 2010 Olympics organizers that Everything Will Be OK. (We heard this song before Expo 86, too. How’d it work out that time?)

At the moment, there is much hope pinned to a new condo project. (Vancouver’s cure for all urban ills is to build condos and hope for the best.) But this might be far too late. The downtown eastside is everything that makes a neighbourhood robust, and nothing that makes it desirable. Residents have their choice of places to live (Powell Street is lined with residential hotels and government housing), a place to work or at least get some cash (recycling facilities and pawn shops), a place to socialize and to pick up or use your intoxicant of choice (just about anywhere, including the infamous safe injection site), and, naturally, dozens of missions that will cater to your spiritual needs. Why would anyone leave? People in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the heady days of the late 1990s, liked to brag about their “vertically integrated economy.” The downtown eastside is the dystopic equivalent.

The safe injection site was the final step in making this neighbourhood permanent. (I’ve often wondered how effective the television show Da Vinci’s Inquest was in making this idea acceptable to Vancouver’s bourgeoisie.) The safe injection site may save individual lives, but it makes the ghetto permanent in order to achieve that. It will take more than a large condo project to turn this neighbourhood. I’m not sure that current sensibilities would tolerate the kind of cruel and brutal rezoning necessary to change it. Once the condo project is complete and the Olympics are over, we will likely go back to accepting the downtown eastside for what it is: an unsolvable problem. In an excellent article in the spring 2005 Vancouver Review, Paul Delaney suggested that “regular citizens complain about the Downtown Eastside, but they would be in open revolt if the action moved to their neighbourhood. Can we say ‘safety valve’? ‘Necessary evil’?”

The downtown eastside is an extreme example, but Vancouver is full of social boundaries dividing desirable from undesirable neighbourhoods. When I was looking for a place to live, I knew I could draw a line straight down the middle of the city marking affordable from unaffordable and (not coincidentally) Nice from Not So Nice. I can’t think of any other place where the line is so crude, where the geometry of status is so simple.

But north of half a million dollars for a tear-down in an undesirable neighbourhood is worth it, isn’t it? To live here in this jewel, this Canadian Babylon, this Vancouver? In these gentle and nourishing rains?

Ah, climate! That’s the reason we’re all here, isn’t it? “At least it’s not snowing. At least you don’t have to shovel rain. You can always drive to the snow if you want it.” No wonder Vancouver throws its allegiance behind palm and banana trees. If it’s not snowing, it must be the tropics. It is difficult to avoid cliches of climate anywhere, I suppose. Maybe all beliefs about local climate are flimsy – after all, you can’t do anything about it. It is Vancouver’s claim that it has a desirable climate that is difficult to accept. Certainly that, along with a general suspicion of anything French, is what cleaves Vancouver psychically from the idea of Canada. Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver!

Vancouver’s suspicion of French does not extend to France, which enjoys a fine reputation. The west side (naturally) is dotted with French bakeries (some very good) and stores selling expensive children’s toys and clothes with French text on them. (How the French got a monopoly on the idea of a wholesome childhood, I don’t know.) The purchase of French goods secures our idealization of ourselves as wordly sophisticates. It seems to say that if you can’t live in Vancouver, the only other tolerable place to live is Paris. I don’t fully understand the sources of this particular variety of francophilia, but I’ve observed that New Yorkers suffer from the same disease. Of course, they just might have a leg up in the worldly sophistication department.

But as for North American French, there is a widespread and irritatingly ignorant belief in its cultural and linguistic inferiority. It is a position that shows up with discouraging frequency on the Discover Vancouver boards. If I understand these people correctly, rural France is populated by earthy and jolly folks who love a glass of wine and a good meal, but rural Quebec is just incomprehensible – linguistically, socially, and politically. The threat of separation has offended British Columbians deeply, though relatively few of them have bothered to understand its history or its historic effectiveness as a political position. Meanwhile, Vancouverites would rather go to Paris than to Montreal (the perverse laws of airline pricing mean it is nearly always cheaper), and then complain that their Canadian French wasn’t understood. (Perhaps it would soothe them a little to remember that Parisians think that they are culturally and linguistically superior to everybody.)

These criticisms are not meant to cast Vancouver as a dull or ugly city. The surroundings are beautiful, and the architecture – well, it’s less offensive than it used to be. There is a thriving social scene, to judge from the paparazzi photos in the local rah-rah magazines, and a nascent cultural and intellectual life. It’s the extreme self-satisfaction in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary that makes life here a source of annoyance. The problem with Vancouver is that it’s like seeing a movie that everybody raved about. And it was a good movie, but disappointing because it could never live up to the hype. Vancouver is a nice city. But it will take years, and the development of a dissatisfied restlessness, before it can live up to its current press.

Since I’m in the throes of my third move of 2005 (banner year!), it will be a few weeks before I can post anything new here. Thanks to my readers (both of you) for your understanding.

When our son was five months old, we took a month-long trip through Russia and the Baltic countries. We wanted the baby to meet his Latvian family, and we also wanted to take advantage of a generous parental leave program that gave us an unusually long break from the working world. Travel – at least the kind of low-budget, schlep-your-own-bags, one-bare-step-above-youth-hostel travel that I tend to do – is always less glamourous than it sounds. Add seventeen pounds of teething baby and the glamour quotient drops even further. Why bother? Our guide in St. Petersburg, who was amused by the one she called her “smallest tourist,” said she couldn’t imagine her own parents travelling with small children. They would have parked the kids with the grandparents. But today, she said, people prefer to keep their children close. Today’s grandparents might not even be free to take the kids for a week or two – maybe they still work, or have moved to one of those desirable, inaccessible retirement spots. Maybe they just wouldn’t want two weeks of disruption.

What happened to the children’s table? I’m just young enough that there were relatively few of them when I was a child, and my generation of parents has strengthened this trend. The kiddie table is so rare that it’s an aberration. I was surprised recently when I was asked to take a turn at the children’s table at a gathering. It’s not my idea of a good time – I come prepared only to look after my own little savage. But the hosts did not have children of their own, which may have been the reason for the unusual generational separation.

The disappearance of the kiddie table is reflective of the peculiarly intense child-rearing that we’ve been practising for a few decades now. Take the bicycle helmet, which popular sociologists have made a powerful icon for contemporary parental responsibility. When pressed, most of us will agree that the proliferation of safety equipment is a little silly. And having survived a childhood without helmets, we may subscribe to the vulgar darwinian idea that we’re better for having made it to adulthood bareheaded. It’s better for kids to experiment and hurt themselves, isn’t it? Then again, why take the risk when you could avoid it with a $25 helmet? Do you want to sacrifice your kid on the altar of your fearless self-image? Shouldn’t you give your kid the best chance you can? Hey, maybe you should hire a math tutor. Or register for a French class. Maybe the local public school just isn’t the best you can do. Thus, the bicycle helmet has come to stand for everything from the overscheduled, overachieving child, to the stressed-out, careerist university undergraduate. No wonder we are so ambivalent about it.

There’s an interesting dialectic to the ideas of what is acceptable risk and responsibility for a child. Early in the twentieth century, children were free to fall out of trees and walk to school by themselves, but they were also expected to pick up the meat from the butcher. Sending a nine-year-old on a similar errand today is at best eccentric, and at worst, negligent. Traffic is likely heavier, sure, but we also believe that children need constant supervision. And even as we are protecting our children from accident and misfortune, we are sizing them up on the basis of their adult potential, dispassionately assessing their future chances in the job market.

The chatterati are much less ambivalent about another aspect of contemporary childhood: the birthday party. I have never been invited to any of the parties that – if the newspapers and magazines are to be believed – are a social necessity for the K to 6 set, and involve expenditures to rival the worst of 1990s corporate excess. The only children’s birthday parties I’ve been to were modest, in one case with homemade cake (although I suppose that could be considered an example of ostentatious maternal involvement, if you were really spoiling for a fight). However, I have yet to be at a birthday party without parents. Presumably the parents are left off the invitation list eventually, at the sleepover stage, say, if not earlier. But inviting all of the parents of a four- or five-year-old to a birthday party, while prudent, is also very Generation Now.

While everyone was busy tsk-tsking the children’s party, another social form emerged: the adult birthday party, which increasingly apes the rituals of childhood. At one time, adult birthday parties were restricted to celebrating major decades or advanced age. But the annual party has been taken over by the grown-ups. There is something a little unseemly about this. Remember the Thin Man movies? Nora didn’t throw Nick a birthday party (she did throw one for Nicky, Jr., however). She didn’t need to, since the gin was always flowing and someone was playing the piano and you could smoke anywhere you wanted to. But we live in squeaky-clean times. Even if the kids aren’t invited, these parties look more like children’s parties than they used to. Childhood and adulthood have begun to converge.

Historian Philippe de Ariès famously proposed that the idea of childhood was an invention of the early modern era. Scholars have since quarrelled with the details of his thesis. But the idea that the intense bond between parent and child is a bourgeois luxury fits neatly with the very recent history of the family. Ariès linked the rise of this intensity to concern for the child’s health (which might explain the saliency of the bike helmet). The modern family, he wrote, “cuts itself off from the world and opposes to society the isolated groups of parents and children. All the energy of the group is expended on helping the children to rise in the world, individually and without any collective ambition: the children rather than the family.”

The modern family’s aspect is interior rather than exterior. The kiddie table has perhaps always been an anachronism. It had to disappear eventually.

Here’s an idea for all you boundary-transgressing, iconoclastic young women out there, if there are any of you left this far into the century’s turn: wear a wedding gown around for the day. There are always a few frothy white dresses in the thrift shops. They’re a bit more expensive than the housewife shifts you usually buy, but don’t you think the Hollywood-fuelled vintage clothing craze has spoiled the appeal of mid-century clothing? Instead, dress up as a bride for the day. Talk to your bank teller, bus driver, and dry cleaner about the patriarchy, marriage, and lipstick feminism. You might need to do this before you’re actually engaged, however. Once you’ve decided to get married, the dress will have you under its spell.

Wedding season is long over now, which gives us a little quiet time to reflect. Why is it that in a culture that takes superficial pleasure in sacrilege, the bride remains largely untouched? Television broadcasts of spoiled Bridezillas only emphasize the point: these selfish women do not deserve to be brides. Nor is contemporary feminism an amulet against the power of the dress: Gloria Steinem may have married in ordinary clothing, but third-wave feminism has always treated the feminine as a role that comes with a fun costume, which means that the white wedding dress is OK.

Steinem’s choice of dress is a reflection of an older stage of feminism (fish without bicycles), good taste (the long white gown looks best on a woman who can still pass herself off as an innocent), and generation. In the late sixties and seventies, weddings were the perfect occasion to shock the squares and mock the institution of marriage at the same time. Brides chose cotton Mexican wedding dresses, dashikis, and in extreme cases, nudity. Often they just went with very short skirts. (The best example I know of a short-skirted bride was a family friend married in 1970, who wore not only a very, very short white dress, but black over-the-knee boots.) The cultural shift back to a more bourgeois sensibility left its mark on weddings, too. Since the 1980s, we have believed that weddings are supposed to look like – well, weddings. Prince Charles and Diana Spencer set the standard for the lavish wedding, and a quarter of a century later, weddings are still variations on the basic elements of that ill-fated occasion. Vintage cars, probably, instead of a horse and carriage, and perhaps a more manageable train on that floor-length gown.

In my own circle, the overwhelming majority of brides have elected a standard wedding. (I didn’t, and I’ve been puzzling over the appeal of the contemporary wedding ever since.) It has its roots in the Victorian age, but became widely practiced only in the postwar era. And from the 1980s on, the requirements have steadily proliferated and become more expensive. It is so entrenched as a rite of passage that many lesbians, who want the legal protection and societal sanction of marriage, also want a big white wedding. It’s possible that social conservatives, who have argued for civil unions with protections identical to marriage, are less offended by the idea of two women promising to stay together than they are by the burlesque of a pair of brides. If it were my gay wedding, I’d be checking out decidedly unweddingy things from Philippe Dubuc or Marie St. Pierre. Maybe Armani. Hey, you’re only doing this once, right?

The dress, having performed its role in the weddng, remains a sacred object. Dry cleaners will clean and pack the dress to archival standards. It will go in a box with a little cellophane window, so that you can visit it without exposing it to the vicissitudes of the oxygen in your bedroom. How symbolically unpleasant it would be to watch that whiter-than-white turn sepia and ochre! The only other artefact in contemporary life to receive this museum-quality veneration are the wedding photographs.

The big wedding has attracted the (mostly negative) attention of cultural observers over the years, but they haven’t paid much attention to the photographs. Odd, since photography is one of the most expensive line items in suggested wedding budgets (about 10 per cent of the total), and a wedding ranks as the only occasion when normal people hire a professional to photograph a family event. As Lili Corbus Bezner points out in one of the rare scholarly treatments of wedding photography, the photos progress from shots of the bride alone, often with her unconscious reflection in a mirror, through the wedding itself, and finally to the public reception. Brides are liminal creatures, undergoing the transformation from maiden to wife, and the photos attempt to capture that. “Despite social change,” Bezner writes, “most engaged couples still demand the creation of a visual ideal for their wedding day.” The recent rise of the photojournalistic style – candid black-and-white shots – ensures that we continue to take this ideal seriously.

This imagery shows why we want weddings to look like weddings, and why the dress only increases in appeal. (Many couples write their own vows, but the imagery of the wedding is largely unquestioned. So much for theories of logocentrism.) Weddings mark a profound intersection of the public and the private, and the gown signifies a public event in a way that another dress would not. This is why brides used to change their clothes before leaving the reception – they didn’t want strangers to know they were newly married, to wink indulgently or leer at what everyone knew came next. The contemporary bride has nothing to fear from this invasion of her privacy. The vows are the climactic moment in her wedding, when she makes a very personal promise in public. But she might just wear the dress as she leaves the reception. Why not try to make the magic last as long as she can?

Ideally, this magic will remain constrained by the boundaries of good taste. Weddings, after all, are a chance to display your taste to a crowd. The off-Broadway production Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding or the hit movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) show what happens when when working-class ethnics get their hands on a wedding. It might be entertaining, but it cannot set an aesthetic standard. Far better to examine the weddings that punctuated the storylines of the lily-white sitcom Friends. Ross’s wedding to Emily in season four hits a serious snag when it turns out that the chapel is already half-demolished, but the ruin of the building becomes a romantic and picturesque contrast to the sumptuous bridal gown. Viewers knew the marriage was doomed, but the wedding sure was pretty. Phoebe and Mike’s wedding was in danger of being cancelled due to snow, but instead she pulls on a beautifully embellished coat that she had the foresight to buy along with the dress, and marries her man in a snow-covered street. Like the photojournalistic style of wedding photography, these weddings share an aesthetic of the real and the authentic. The streetscape grounds the bride’s loveliness. She may look like a fairy princess, but she intends to live in this world.

Ultimately, this may be why the wedding gown remains so popular in an era in which couples feel comfortable writing their own vows: images matter more to us than words. We demand that it look like a wedding in order to be a real wedding.

You know what this neighbourhood looks like, even though you’ve never been here, even though the rich coastal climate means that the gardens look wild and ancient next to these new houses. They are so new they almost steam in the cool fall air. They are like soufflés – puffed and risen and somehow temporary-looking. But of course they aren’t meant to be temporary, and aren’t meant to represent temporariness to their owners, despite the widespread criticism of this style of construction. The owners may not envision handing down these houses parent to child to grandchild, but they expect the house to outlive their own long tenure. But no one expects these houses to stand for a thousand years.

You know these single family detached homes as McMansions, or perhaps faux chateaux. When they began to replace postwar bungalows in the 1980s, they were also called monster homes, a term that in Vancouver crackled with electric anxiety about race and class. At the time, they were usually the houses of rich immigrants from Hong Kong, in neighbourhoods unused to conspicuous displays of wealth.

Although much new housing in the urban core continues to be designed to appeal to particular ethnic groups (including that favourite of upscale white folks, the reproduction craftsman), the suburban McMansion is more democratic. As long as you can buy – and sustained low interest rates and a mania for ownership at all costs have encouraged people to buy as much house as they can – you are welcome. It helps that certain jobs have increased in status. Restaurant owners and interior designers might even feel superior to the doctors and lawyers and business executives that Malvina Reynolds sang about in Little Boxes in 1962, and they might have the paycheques to match. Still, it’s a pleasant surprise to learn how much variety in background, ethnicity, and stage of life there is behind those double doors.

However, it cannot have escaped the notice of the owners that their large houses are constantly criticized. The McMansion, along with the SUV and fast food, is an example of everything that is supposed to be wrong about contemporary life. The very term McMansion derides not only the crass efficiency of their assembly-line construction, but that they are supersized. Four thousand square feet, six thousand, nine thousand – how much space do people need? Susan Susanka tapped this vein of discontent in her very successful 1999 book, The Not So Big House. The title means just what it says – the houses she designs are not small houses, nor are they inexpensive. But they are houses that take into account how we really use space. Better to have a big kitchen, for instance, than a 450 square foot bedroom. The interior furnishings of the not-so-big houses, presumably all chosen by the owners independently of the architect, are as consistent as any Ikea showroom – bookshelves and woven rugs and representations of third-world authenticity. You can’t quite see the stacks of old Utne Readers, but you know they’re there.

The Not So Big House is a popular architecture book, but its implicit critique of typical suburban living is part of a long tradition. As long as there have been suburbs, there have been intellectuals criticizing them. The life of the mind is more often lived in the city. (Well, sure. Thinking and writing don’t take up much space, but they are activities that demand frequent trips to bookstores, cafés, and pubs. And on the money I’ll be making writing this, I can count on renting small apartments in iffy neighbourhoods for the rest of my life.) Our entire understanding of North American suburbanization has been shaped by this critique, rather than by lived experience. Chances are, you think of the suburb you grew up in as dull and repressive, a place where alcoholic housewives had empty affairs in between waxing the floors and ironing the shirts. Why? A thousand magazine articles, novels, and films have told you it’s this way. It’s Only Temporary (1950). The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit (novel, 1955; movie, 1956). The Crack in the Picture Window (1956). John Cheever’s “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” (1958). The fifties were full of this stuff; it was suburbia’s finest hour. The Feminine Mystique (1963). It got a little cartoonish as time wore on: The Stepford Wives (1975), Valley Girl (1983). Asphalt Nation (1997) was a call-to-arms against the suburbs. And then things got bleak: The Ice Storm (1997), American Beauty (1999), Columbine High School (1999). And we’re now back to camp with the series Desperate Housewives.

But those who can afford them have not rejected McMansions or the suburbs, at least not in sufficient numbers that they show any signs of disappearing from the landscape. Citigroup Smith Barney recently recommended Toll Brothers, a publicly-traded American company notorious for its sprawling houses on small suburban lots, as a recession-proof buy for those looking to pick up some stock. Never mind that residential real estate looks like it’s peaked in the U.S., that plenty of people are shorting the hell out of Toll’s stock, and ignore the possibility that high energy prices make these places expensive to heat and commute from. The people will not be swayed from their desire for five bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms (handy if there’s an outbreak of food poisoning), and a half-dozen recreational rooms.

The McMansion may be criticized mainly for its size, but it is in the complaints about its construction that things get interesting. Toll Brothers builds its houses to code, but that might be about it, according to a 2001 article in Phillymag. The article makes the irresistible comparison to William Levitt, who successfully applied the lessons of mass production to house the parents of the baby boomers. And while they may have been only a fraction of the size of today’s suburban house, much of the criticism directed at Levitt’s developments (cookie-cutter houses lacking craftsmanship) was the same. At the heart of the matter is the vexed question of taste. While McMansions may have every luxurious finishing, from oversized walk-in showers to the inevitable granite countertops, it is their sameness and predictability that offends their critics. Luxury is often a little clownish when it is taken up by the masses, from the automotive fins of the 1950s to today’s SUV.

This does not bode well for today’s antisuburban dwelling, the urban loft. Lofts may have begun as a reclamation of industrial space, but they have become nothing more than small apartments with high ceilings and not enough walls. A new loft development in Vancouver smugly proclaims, “No white picket fences. No PTA meetings.” This might as well say, “No kids,” but that alone wouldn’t capture the strength of the antisuburban ethos of the young hipsters who are supposed to be buying these things. In their search for urban difference, hipsters want many of the same features that characterize the McMansion: granite countertops and cavernous ceilings. And suburban taste has in turn borrowed from the urban industrial aesthetic, to the point where every mainstream furniture store carries a full line of stainless steel appliances.

Since the loft no longer conveys authenticity, the restless must move on. Dwell magazine, now five years old, has consistently sung the virtues of prefab and modular houses. They look very different from Levitt’s Cape Cods and Toll’s chateaux. These are the mid-century mod squad, all glass and wood, and they appeal to a different and increasingly popular aesthetic. As mass-produced architect-designed houses, they are part of an explosion of low-priced design that has propelled stores like Ikea and (more recently) Target to prominence. Prefab takes what is objectionable about the McMansion – that part signified by the prefix “Mc” – and makes it a virtue. The design cognoscenti are interested in these houses because of their manufacturing process. They aren’t just mid-century modern houses; they are shorthand for the wonders of contemporary sourcing, production, transport, and democratization. It seems likely that if they take off in a big way (apparently Ikea is getting into them), prefab will be next to feel the acid sting of criticism.

Each succeeding generation of intellectuals and wannabe bohemians has discovered and rejected the suburbs not so much because they have thoroughly examined the quality of its built life, but because we distinguish ourselves by displays of taste. New housing developments make that difficult, although they lose their homogeneity as time goes on. Meanwhile, since everyone has granite countertops, they signify not rocky permanence, only sameness. Or worse, striving to display good taste.

But they are durable, and I don’t know what we’ll do with all the granite that is doomed to be ripped out of dated kitchens in thirty years’ time. Landscape with it? If you put granite up against that other common symbol of durability and achievement, the diamond engagement ring, the countertops win. As reported in Rocks and Minerals magazine: “Granite may be, however, unforgiving on your diamond if you happen to accidentally knock the stone in your ring against the countertop; even if it is not granite but one of the dozens of other countertop stones, your diamond may not survive.” What a richly dramatic passage that is! The kitchens of the McMansions may be reviled, but they will outlast all your dreams of suburban wedded bliss.

Someone has to be the last girl in the suburbs to get low-rise jeans. Long after more fashion-conscious girls have moved on, after all their belly-baring denim has been buried at the back of the closet, some poor girl must buy the last pair from one of those loud, brightly-lit stores that are in every mall in the nation.

I am that girl. Not with the jeans – mass market fashion is not one of my things. But I’ve spent several months now trying to explain what I’m doing with this site. By late summer, they would ask, “Is it a blog?” Hipsters asked this with a sneer; little old ladies asked with sincere interest.

FastLittleArticle is a forum for cultural analysis and criticism, exploring the rituals of consumer society, and what I like to call pop phenomenology. At the moment, the articles tend to focus on rites of passage and domestica. But (so far) it’s just me here, looking a lot like everyone else chronicling the minutae of their lives in blogs and zines.

There are three reasons I’ve been reluctant to call this a blog. First, this is not a diary. The essays here take their inspiration from broader phenomena than the personal, and fresh material will appear here less frequently – every couple of weeks, unless someone gives me some paid work, in which case there might be a short hiatus. Second, I am interested in arguments, or at least proto-arguments. Although postings will be less frequent than on most blogs, they will be longer and in more complete form. And finally, who wants to be the last girl in the suburbs to buy low-rise jeans?

I would like to hear from you. If you have an idea that you would like me to explore, or something you would like to publish here, drop me a line. Come here to discuss things, have an argument, try out a theory. And if you have paid work for me, I’d really like to hear from you.

This blogging thing. I think it’s going to be big.

But this is not a blog.