Guest Ann Rivera talks about Housekeeping in the first Secondhand Books conversation.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 3 - Good Housekeeping.mp3
(upbeat music) - Welcome to episode three of the second season of The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and for the first time, you won't have to hear me ramble on for the entire podcast. That's right, I finally manage to wrangle someone in for my first interview, or conversation, or whatever you want to call it. There'll be more on that in a minute. Now today's music comes from the soundtrack for Henry in June. I never watched the movie, but an old girlfriend and I tried once and we ended up making out and never quite getting back to it. But that's either here nor there. The thing is, I've been a big Henry Miller mark for decades now, which is funny 'cause when you get down to it, I've only actually finished one of Miller's books, but I've read it an awful lot. That's Tropic of Cancer. In fact, I wrote my senior thesis on George Orwell's fantastic essay about Tropic, called Inside the Whale. And because I went to Hampshire College, I was able to convince my professors that it was better for me to write a novella about the time Miller and Orwell met in Paris before the war rather than, you know, a coherent piece of writing that delved into anything of substance about Miller or Orwell. But anyway, it was Hampshire, what can I say? That meeting between Orwell and Miller probably would make for a pretty neat play if I was, you know, Tom Stopper. There's a certain comfort I get in revisiting books. It's kind of touchstone quality for the ones that I've had a decade long relationship with. In this instance, I used to be really into Miller's take on the nature of art and all these grand lyrical passages about the end of time and the way the world was ending, but this time I found myself so much more attentive to the relationships between some of the characters as well as Miller's bits about just the fit of clothing and the operations of business around him, like the way the newspaper worked when he was a copywriter there. I mean, sure, the lyrical sections about the end of the world were still amazingly beautiful, but I found myself caught up in these quotidian matters too. It's kind of like the way I've revisited the watchmen over the 25 years since that came out. And for those of you not in the know, that's a comic book written by Alan Moore, ushered in a really terrible era of superhero comics. When I was a teenager reading the watchmen in serial format, I found I identified most with a character, Rorschach, this Randy in vigilante with his black and white vision of the world. I was bitter and a dream, so it sort of appealed to me. And my hippie-trippy college years, when I was all mystical and such, I was much more entranced by that Dr. Manhattan and his all-time is simultaneous perspective. I kind of stayed away from the watchmen for years, but when I returned to it in my early 30s, I was surprised to find that I felt a lot more sympathy for the night owl. This middle-aged, paunchy guy whose life is kind of empty without his secret identity, like all his glory days are passed. Nowadays, I'm not sure which character I'd most sympathize with. I mean, for the most part, all I do is sit around in my secret Antarctic lair and flood myself with information and TV and the internet while three Asian man-servants do my bidding. I don't know where I'd go from there, but anyway, that brings me sort of back to the subject of this podcast. See, for a while now, I've wanted to interview people about this kind of quirky literary subject that evolves revisiting our old books. This all goes back 10 years. To the end of 2002, I was in New Orleans for a trade show, which always sounds like a great location for a trade show, but in reality, it's really tough to do business when everyone's hung over. That's not as bad as a trade show in Vegas, but it's pretty close. Anyway, when I was there, I met up with this Palomine from the one semester that I attended Tulane back when I was 18 and didn't drink. Don't ask. Anyway, his name's Paul Longstreth, and he's a jazz pianist in New Orleans. We had a great time catching up during that visit, but there was a horrifying moment for me late in the evening. See, Paul said, "You know, man, you gave me a list of books that I should read back when we were at Tulane, and I still have them all. I haven't gotten to many, but I'm gonna read 'em, I swear." And I blanched and told him, "Throw them out. Don't tell me what they were. I'll send you a new list. I'll even buy you the books. Just do not tell me what I thought was important to read back when we were 18. We've all got our aesthetic embarrassments. I mean, they can be books or music or movies. Regardless, we all have work that we can't believe we held in such high regard once upon a time. It's sort of like my identification with Rorschach, but rather than focus on those embarrassments and humiliations, I thought I'd flip the script. I decided I wanna interview people about books or authors whom they once hated, but now absolutely adore, rather than the things we're all embarrassed about once loving. I'm trying to avoid books that were assigned in school, but I may have to just make that a high school cut off 'cause college is a pretty formative time for a lot of people, and it's sort of when we build up a lot of these important opinions that we end up dashing as we start to live in a day-to-day world. And what I'm hoping to learn about this through these conversations is that process of how we grow into certain books and what it says about how we become who we are. But for the moment, Segment's gonna be called Second Hand Books unless one of you can come up with a better title for it. (upbeat music) I met Anne Rivera at Hampshire College in 1991 over there abouts she and her boyfriend, now husband, big fans at 11 Rockets comic, and we bonded over that and a bazillion other things. I asked her to write an introduction for the Second Hand Books interview, and here's what she sent. Anne Rivera is currently head wrangler in her house of chaos, which contains two children, one with Asperger's and the other a force of nature, a lot of Lego Star Wars books, many princess costumes, her sometimes musician husband, and a bunny-eating dog. At any given moment, you may find her explaining why Lego pieces don't go in the toilet, wearing a crown, discussing the finer points of the dark side of the force and making perfunctory stabs at cleaning the house. She also happens to have a PhD in early American literature and teaches as an adjunct professor in the city of no illusions, a.k.a. Buffalo. And now, without further ado, let's welcome the very first guest of the Virtual Memories Show. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - My guest today is Anne Rivera, Mae Anne Kessler, whom I met more than 20 years ago at Hampshire College in a class on Melville and Dickens, Representative Men. It was an interesting experience. But Anne, what book do you bring today? What do you have as the book that you've come back to that you once reviled, essentially? - Actually, it's "Housekeeping" by Marilyn Robinson. - Oh, okay. - When did you first read it? - I actually first read it in grad school. So I know the role is not so much with school, except when you do a PhD in literature, it's kind of all school, so you're stuck with that. But I read it first and thought, yeah, yeah, the domestic life, it's disintegrating. We're attacking domesticity. It's essentially a plotless book as well. Characters float in and out and even as they disintegrate. So what you have is two characters raised by their aunt, Sylvie, who is essentially a vagamond. And one of the girls decides to choose domesticity while the other chooses to become a transient. And what happens with the book as it goes along is that you get a mirroring of the disintegration of the transient life and the literal disintegration of the family home. So you have housekeeping, right? What happens when it fails? What happens when domesticity fails women? And at the time-- - What pissed you off about it? - There was two things I was just gonna get to that. One, it felt like a knee-jerk feminist reaction. Two, domesticity, it felt uncomplicated. It felt like a direct attack about what women should be and not upset me. But two, it felt personal because I had an investment in domesticity. And it bothered me when it came apart. And it bothered me because I just had had a new baby. Things were very chaotic in my own household and it disturbed me on a level because it pointed to some of the chaos in my own life. And what's gonna happen to you at the end? I mean, literally everything comes apart at the end in this book. And that was terrifying. It's not that everything could come apart for me. - What brought you to revisit it? - I actually had to teach it. - Yeah. - So I came back to it and I had to teach it. I reread it and then I reread it again to teach it. And some of it, when you teach a book, you have to delve into it in a way that you don't when you're a student. You're supposed to when you're a student. You don't necessarily, until you have to get in to find the classroom and actually take people through it. But more importantly, when I reread it, I couldn't put it down. It was really interesting to me. And precisely what disturbed me the most about the book in the first reading, the chaos, the disintegration of the home fascinated me the most this time. Because what I missed on the first reading is that the home floats away. But there becomes a core stability within the characters themselves. They keep their own houses, their own spiritual houses. It's within themselves. And I had come through a lot of chaos in my own life. My son got very sick. Things were very up in the air for me to a place where it didn't get more stable. But I learned to accept the kind of chaotic way that things would go and learn that there's something there's something that gives back in the middle of fragmentation, in the middle of chaos and facing the fear of that nameless something whirling around you. You do tend to stoke your own spiritual fires. You do tend to look inward. And while I wouldn't wish it on anybody, it gives back in an interesting way. And about how long was the gap for you between the first experience and the follow-up? It was a bit six years. Do you still have the addition you read back then? I do, with all my little post-it-note flags. That was my next question. Because embarrassing marginalia is the biggest fear that I have that my biographers will someday, you know, or the criminologists. Whoever has to go through my library will find all these terrible doubts. Did you find anything that show how far you've advanced as a reader and a teacher? There were incredibly pedestrian comments pointing out characters not being able to keep track of plot details, totally wrong analysis in several places. And I think the spirit marginalia is probably common with anybody who does any kind of literary history because we read other people's marginalia. I rollingly bad marginalia. And there was a lot of mundane commentary. I was attacking a bunch of the characters for things. When I was speaking about stoking the internal spiritual fire, I'd miss that completely. I leveled criticisms at the author in a couple different places that were definitely unkind. Have you read her follow-up books? I've read Gilead, but I haven't read Housekeeping nor the one that came after. And I shipped them on a few years ago. No, actually I haven't read her follow-up books. The idea of sort of aging into a book, do you feel that, again, the years of domesticity as they developed for you, sort of, as you reified into this domestic life, which again, you seem to have already been invested in, as you said before. Absolutely. What was that maturation process like, I guess, is what I'm asking. And what point do you grow into a book like that in particular? That's a good question. I think you grow into a book like this in particular. Hi, I'm my mom. And there's my Domus Disney. That's Domus Disney for you. It's Angry Babies. I think you grow into a book like this as you become more comfortable in your own skin. I don't know if this is true for most young women or just for me, but I always felt like I had competing interests of the artist, the writer, the reader, and what interested me about being domestic. And my world's never quite meshed with the two. It's one or the other. You can be professional or you can be domestic. Because there's the student flavor idea of what domesticity entails. As you get older, I think some of the concerns about how other people reuse starts to fall away. At least it did for me. And then some intensely personal stuff started happening. I had a son diagnosed with autism. And when you're a person who cares a lot about what other people think, having a kid on the autism spectrum, you have to learn really fast not to care. He's deeply embarrassed me in several places without meeting too. And it didn't matter. He brought his own chaos into the household. And then when I had another baby, there was even more. But it can be kind of fruitful. And I think it fell away. As I gained my own professional toe hold and things, once I got my PhD, I felt more comfortable with myself. And also, I just lived it all that time. And you realize that social strictures or social commentary on how you live doesn't actually signify in the way you live in your actual life. It doesn't have as much recursion as you think. It actually brings a question of the environment where you and I first met, which was Hampshire College, as I said, which when you get down to it, that idea of feminine domesticity was thrown out the window to begin with. In that respect, I mean, you were always joking before this that you had that den mother vibe among your dorm mates. And I learned a lot about people's lives that I just didn't want to know. Yeah, Hampshire was the center of TMI. And it was everybody discovering themselves in a lot of respect. How did that work, I guess, as a contrast in your life? Again, that idea of being a fountain of stability, I guess, around people who are absolutely bananas. And how does that prepare you for where you were going both professionally and personally? It was actually a good preparation. It was comfortable in a weird way because I grew up in a household that was very chaotic. And so I started as a den mother because I have a sister 10 years younger than me. And so I sought stability because I've had enough chaos in my life. It was enough. I didn't need more. I liked stability. And if you look at all of the choices I've made, that's where I went almost unerringly. But there was always that tension with it that somehow I was too den mothery. I didn't let go enough. And that, therefore, there was some depths missing in me. As I started doing my own work, as I got into graduate school, as I started teaching more, going to more conferences, talking to other people in my field, I realized chaos does not mean depth. Chaos does not be an artistic proliferation. And two, one of the things I noticed is that the most chaotic creators, the people who waited for inspiration to strike before they could produce art or music or writing, they never made it. A lot of times they burned down completely, whereas I never did. - They told me, oh. - Okay. - Well, on that note, we'll pause for a while. With Ann's younger kid needing a little snack, we took a break. Ann Federer, while I loaded the princess and the frog on my iPad for her. And once Allie was settled in, we got back to the conversation. - All right, so we're back. Tell me about domesticity and what you learned from that book and how it was taught to you and the context of that class. - What's interesting about domesticity and how it was taught in that class is that it was taught as the anti-domesticity, was paired up with 19th century women writers, Jane Adams, a bunch of talking about what domesticity is, the femme covert, the angel in the house, the notion that women function within the domestic sphere as a corrective to the marketplace. So a very Victorian notion of what it means to be domestic. And Robinson was placed as the antithesis of that, that this is not domestic anymore. It's domesticity gone awry somehow. And what's interesting to me when I read it later is that that's not really true. This book is actually about domesticity in its various facets because to me as a reader, the way people live is endlessly fascinating. If I thought I could get away with it socially, I poke through people's cabinets to see what they put where because it's interesting how people order their lives, how they live their lives and almost universally in any kind of theoretical or critical dimension. When we talk about domesticity in any kind of positive light, it's considered to be fluff, lightweight, not having any kind of real depth to it, which is what I was starting to get at when we were talking about the artistic temperament, the notion that inspirations should strike you as an artist, as a writer, particularly an instructor, inspiration should strike you and living within the chaos is productive, it can be, but also living within the domestic can be very productive as well. Prolific writers, really prolific writers, wrote steadily as a part of their entire life, their entire domestic situation. - In the sense of it being work ultimately as opposed to, again, this high-falutin idea of art striking you from above. - And the domesticus work, although it's not necessarily oppressive work, that's often how it's shown, we live with this 19th century legacy where the domestic was oppressive work in a lot of ways, because it was used as an excuse to keep women from working in the various arenas that they wanted to. But it's not domesticity itself that is oppressive, it's how it's used. - Interesting. - It's one of those notions, I guess, of how we represent who we are through our day-to-day lives, which, again, contemporary art really doesn't like to show, both in a commercial sense and in the literary sphere, which I think was part of why Robinson seemed to have been misread over the years that she was coming from this Midwestern world and not coming from this hip urban MFA type of program. - That's right. One of my dogs wandering through the scene right now, sorry. - It's a very appropriate topic of conversation. - But he has that notion of how you find magic within day-to-day life, I guess, as opposed to the Parisian garret, et cetera, just trying to find some spark out of the day-to-day world, which, as we talked about earlier, off interview, one of my idols for this is Mike Judge, who I think just mails what it means to live and work in our day-to-day world, better than pretty much any storyteller out there nowadays, between the Beavis and Butthead, which we also bonded over back when it debuted, I think we're called Frog Baseball. Yes, we both saw it remotely and just just, did you see that? And we have to assume he was from New Jersey and not Texas, but-- - No, there's some similarities. Having visited Texas several times now. Between that King of the Hill extract office space, of course, again, it seems as though you can make rewarding and a greater idea of art out of the day-to-day world in a way that most writers seem to treat with disdain. - It's hard to invest in the day-to-day world. Less happens. - Yeah. - There's fewer high points to it. You need to invest in characters and the depths of characters and the depths of how we live. It's quieter. And since it's day-to-day, there's a tendency to discount it as important. And so it's harder to write about it. It's harder to mount the argument within your writing that look this is important. The way that we live, the way we order our lives is very important. One of my most favorite writers is Laurie Colwin, who writes about the domestic life in so many ways. And she writes about happiness and does so beautifully. I'm not saying that all fiction needs to be happy. There are people who compulsively pursue it that is all that they will read is about the happy ending. But I think so often we overlook the value of writing and thinking about what it means to be happy within our situations. - Now, if we flip the question of this segment that I'm trying to put together for this podcast, instead of the book that you've come to love that you once hated, the obvious direction to take it is to go for the book that you once adored, but now absolutely hate, or at least embarrassed about once adoring. Do you have anything within your adult sphere? Not a teenage years book, but anything you look back on for the last 10 or 15 years that you just can't imagine you held in such high regard? - There are so many, there are so many. - PhD will do that. - A PhD will do that to you. You have to, one of the things you have to fight is keeping the separation from your enjoy, reading for enjoyment and reading for work. And so try and keep them separate. It's easier for me because I study early American literature so there's less joining. When you study modern literature, that gets really difficult. The slides get completely blurred. So I have to think about this though, 'cause you exclude teenage years. 'Cause we all have our embarrassing teenage loves. - There's several books I read now that I definitely don't like to admit that I read this stuff. - But you're enjoying those. - Still. - We're talking about ones you enjoyed once upon a time and look back at, or that you, you know. - And you can't believe you thought was really, really good. - That you put in the hall of fame, which again is sort of the genesis of this was to pursue that idea and then flip it over into the things we once hated, but now love. - Absolutely. So far too many in the other direction, things that I'm embarrassed about once praising. - I don't think I hate it, but I don't see what I saw in it the first time around where I really loved, and I'm not bashing her. - No, no, feel free. - Please, please. - She'll never know. - Don't email me on this one, but I really loved Eudora Welty in the beginning. I loved her, loved her, especially Delta Wedding. And then I reread it, and I thought, it wasn't, it didn't go off like a type of charge. It didn't feel as important. It's not unimportant, but it didn't, it didn't speak to me in the same way. - And what do you think changed in you or the book over time? - I think I was looking for more complexity in my reading. As if I minded as that sounds, it's obnoxious. - That's where we're doing a podcast about people's literary habits. So I can't imagine even worry about being pretentious from not just in the slightest replay. - But stuff that I was actually embarrassed that I loved, I think I'm not actually embarrassed about stuff that I used to love, because I still read, stuff that people make fun of me constantly for. I read murder mysteries. - There's nothing wrong with genre. - And it's so funny too, because people will back up and be like, "Nothing wrong with that. That's your kind of thing." - Most of my heavy-duty reading pals have that as their release valve, I guess. - Well, that's one, science fiction is another. There are more weird personalities in science fiction, especially the old stuff. - We were talking to a man who published "Amule Delaney" once upon a time, and he says, "Where does they come?" - I don't think I'm actually embarrassed by any of it. There's stuff that doesn't mean this much. There's things that I will catch themes in that I didn't catch, again, the first time. I guess that's more my embarrassment, is that there are many books that I've read the first time around that I didn't catch enough in. - Sure. - And when I read, it's more my marginalia. When I go back and I read what I thought was such a deep commentary. - That's why I burned all my old copies of Thomas Pinchin, in fact. - That's probably good idea. - Yeah, I've bought new ones, or just ignored the recent ones. But yeah, looking back at who you were in the notes, it's lots of naive day, lots of misreading, lots of thinking I was very important. So analytical comments, making very false connections, saying things like, this is a very important statement for our modern times. Yeah, that says a lot. (laughing) - We all have to go through that learning process. - I think that's more of what I'm embarrassed about more than anything else. The books that have marginal notes littered throughout the entire text. So clearly I didn't know what was important in that work. Yeah, that's the stuff that I'll just, I'll get rid of. - Thank you ever shared any of that with students that you had? Or do you just use it as a guide post to avoid? - No, I got over it and I shared it with them. So when I try and do, I teach a lot of composition and early reading and writing kind of, so I have a lot of freshmen and sophomores that are just getting into this. And one of the things that I really work with is effective note-taking. So I will bring in some of that stuff and show them all the little flags and flip it. All the way through and say, does it look like anyone I was talking about? No, don't do this. This is what you don't want to do. - See, this is why I do it all on the Kindle now and just just highlight passages but not actually put any notes attached to them. Just figuring out, go back to it and figure it meant something to me once upon a time. - Well, that's actually good because then if it doesn't mean anything to you, then it's not worthwhile, you can just get rid of it. - And again, I won't embarrass myself posthumously in front of my biographers, which is absolutely critical to me, except for the posthumous part. - Yeah, you won't care at that point. - Yeah, it's like that achieving immortality by not dying thing, but anyway. So I want to thank you for your time and thanks for being my very first guest on Virtual Memories Radio. - It's my pleasure, thank you for having me. (upbeat music) - And that's the show. Thanks for sticking around this long. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you've got a second hand book or author like Anne's experience with housekeeping, drop me a line so we could set up a time for an interview. Until next time, I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you've been listening to the Virtual Memories Show. 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