Blogs as Literature of Domestic Chaos, Part Two: What We Write About When We Write Before Finishing the Dishes

On Pinning Together a Self with Humor

For years I’ve also operated under the assumption that when you define your desired occupation as “writer,” especially as “essayist,” then no days are entirely lost days. BECAUSE EVEN ON DAYS WHEN YOU ARE TOTALLY LAZY, AND DRINK TOO MUCH, AND SPEND ALL DAY EITHER SURFING THE NET OR RE-WATCHING EPISODES OF FIREFLY ON DVD, even on these days, you’re “exploring.” The “modern condition.” Of the “literate female.”

And if you can salvage wits enough at least to make lines about it in your diary… well then, you’re well on your way to having material for the kind of non-fictional study which begins:

When I was in my twenties, I succumbed to the boredom and ennui of modern life and spent five years doing nothing but drinking whiskey, tormenting the cat, and watching Firefly on DVD…

Or whatever. (Plus, you can pretend that when you are rewatching your favorite episodes -- “Out of Gas,” say -- you are really STUDYING, really LEARNING the conventions of writing-for-TV… such that if it ever happened that Joss Whedon called you up and needed you to help with a writing episodes for new series… well, you would be up to it.)

To sum, if you operate under the belief that your “real” occupation is “observer/writer” and that you take as your provenance “contemporary life,” really there’s an extra little fart of justification for any old lazy thing you might want to do.

This “extra justification” has extended, from the beginning, to blogging, both my reading of blogs and my (sometimes) writing of and on them. An interest in innovative fiction led me to an interest in hypertext fiction which led me ALL ALONG to a sense of blogs as texts, as something I might write a paper about someday. As RESEARCH.

***

In spring, a young wife's fancies turn to thoughts of how not only is her exam proposal due in like a week, but also now that she is a wife -- not a "grad school live in girlfriend"* -- maybe she really should get that crap off the floor of the office. And maybe try to resurrect her blog like the houseplants.

Already, you can see the dilemma. The young wife has a limited store of energy, and these are major tasks. How can she solve this problem?

One answer might be, to make these tasks as close together as possible. Whatever happens? Is what you write about. Here, again, the housewife-authors of previous generations have already thought of this solution. In Laura Shapiro's account, this dilemma led to the creation of a genre she calls "the literature of domestic chaos":

[T]he woman at the center of many tales of domestic delerium is a professional writer, constantly trying to get her work done amid the tumult of family life. Clearly, one reason women writers adapted this genre was that it really did offer a solution to the problem of how to combine home and work: Anything that happened in the course of a day could be mined for material.

Hmm, isn’t that what I said at the beginning of this post? And here's where I remind you about my obsession with quoting Dooce**:

The evening that the cyst exploded I asked Jon if he would like to take a look at the damage. Not surprisingly it was like I had just asked Chuck, “Chuck, wanna treat?” and before I know it he’s sliding across the hardwood kitchen floors so fast he ends up head first into the wall. Jon had on his headlamp within 10 seconds and was coming at me fast with cotton balls and a look of mad scientist/teenage boy who just got a Playboy subscription for Christmas in his eyes.

I was just as interested in the dissection of the primitive life form in the back of my knee, so I contorted my body in wholly impossible ways to see what was happening as he squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. I will spare you the details of the consistency and make-up and amount of foreign substance that leaked out of my knee, but what I won’t keep my lips shut about is the part where the pressure was so intense that it suddenly popped and hit Jon in the eye. It happened so fast that it looked like someone was living in the back of my knee and was so upset about the invasion that he took out a rifle and shot Jon’s eye out.

...So I did what any drugged patient would do and started laughing uncontrollably... Except, if you really think about it, it’s not funny if your eye is the eye being attacked by goo FROM SOMEONE ELSE’S INFECTED SORE. Yes, we may use the bathroom with the door open and share a bed and talk about poop, but the line has to be drawn somewhere AND THAT LINE IS GOO BEING SHOT FROM ONE PERSON’S KNEE INTO THE OTHER PERSON’S EYE.

Pithy. Funny. And with a sly comment on the psychodynamics of contemporary marriage. A noble transfiguration of pus to gold.

But then Shapiro goes on, about the writers of the literature of domestic chaos:

But the genre was fueled as well by the enthusiastic participation of beginners: women at home, with a sinkful of dishes and a vague yen to write. This subsection of homemeakers has always constituted a large and restless population…

Yikes: not quite as flattering. Look at me, little PhD student, with my brand-new husband, all my dirty dishes, and my “vague yen….”

Still, Shapiro's analysis strikes me as applicable to a lot of blogs on my roll:

Amateur or professional, the writers who chose home as their subject matter were creating a solution for themselves to a psychological problem that would resonate for everyone else into the next century. These women found they could reconcile—at least at the level of imagination—the clash of identities endemic to working mothers.

(For evidence of "the clash of identities" in blogs, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and a whole bunch of others.)

For Shapiro, Shirley Jackson was the inventor of the new genre, with its conventions of "rambunctious but witty children, laconic but witty husbands, and beset but witty houwewives," though Jackson herself (of "The Lottery" fame) revealed the dark underpinnings of housewifery, the sense that one is "barely fending off disaster." Then there's the sheer ephemerality of it all:

It’s as if the homemaker’s presence or absence is immaterial, as if all the work she pours into family life is destined to evaporate when day is done. That, of course, is the nature of housework: it evaporates and leaves no trace. [Note: unless you’ve written about it!] Jackson knew how easy it was for women to feel the same way about themselves, to fear that they, too, might disappear from their own lives without anybody’s noticing. The nameless narrator of her family stories uses humor to keep daily life pinned to its moorings, and herself secured within it.

So it turns out that housework is an existential problem, and the “housewife” a role worthy of psychological thriller. “It evaporates and leaves no trace” – UNLESS YOU WRITE ABOUT IT. By the same token, your presence as the doer of that evaporating work is secured BY WRITING IT.

(Which is another way of handling/obscuring the messiness of real life: I love Shapiro's account of Shirley Jackson, in her own essays this plucky homemaker, in reality “Overweight, sloppily dressed, a chronic smoker, heavy drinker, and terrible housekeeper… she served steak dyed blue and mashed potatoes dyed red, practiced a little witchcraft… and didn’t mind giving the kids a smack if they acted up.”)

To rig up a sense of self large and resilient enough to encompass both mother and professional, wife and money earner, homemaker and intellectual was an unwieldy emotional project, especially for a middle-class woman who could have afforded to stay home if she chose…

The purpose of this post is to suggest a larger--and, yes, political--context for blogging housework, kids, and departmental duties. Habermas wrote about the public sphere which was founded on the private sphere -- it's worth exploring what's up in the private sphere.

I'm not the only person who thinks so.

This is also why I find the “debate” over women’s blogging and politics, or rather, the "lowly" "boring" nature of domestic particulars over vast abstracts, annoying but so obviously built on incomplete reasoning to be barely worthy of noticing, like gnats. Somewhere in here someone said that women just wrote about tampons, but I can't find it now; maybe I made it up. [Edited to add: it's here; Thanks Dr. B! Its's even better than remembered, because while it's fake, it uses, multiple times, the word "douche."]

Don’t you know, Mr. Imagined Sir, that tampons – born from an industry, after all – are mere flotsam on a wider existential sea, the sea of wondering where subjectivity comes from, or what it amounts to, in a world where tampons are designed so you can continue to wear white pants so that you can go to the country club supper and then have the gals over for margaritas and canapes, nights when you don't serve the husband meatloaf?

Blogs about tampons: that’s where the REAL news of the world is.

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But anyway, humor***. The binding agent, apparently, for the “pin[ning] to its moorings” of daily life.

Is something similar going on in blogs? You know I think it’s fun to read funny, which is why I did this as an occasion to quote from some of my favorite funny folks.

But what about Shapiro's apparent suggestion that humor is a useful existential matrix? Is that going on, too, in these blogs?

Or is it as simple as the desire to make people love you, even when you burn something …

By virtue of her role as narrator, she was able to stand apart from the disasters roiling around her and comment on them, like a Greek chorus in a housedress. That ability to remain ever so slightly above the fray, thanks to a sharp sense of humor, gave her a great deal of charm and far more charisma than just about any other housewife in literature.

I may fall short. (Esp. since I haven’t done the dishes or taken my junk to the Salvation Army, and off it’s time to go to the bagel store.) But if I can charm you occasionally with the humor of my shortfalling ways, it’s a kind of justification. ESPECIALLY IF IN BECOMING CHARMED YOU WANT TO HIRE ME TO WRITE SOMETHING FOR MONEY, PREFERABLY A LOT OF MONEY, IN WHICH CASE LET ME REFER YOU TO MY E-MAIL ADDRESS OVER THERE ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF YOUR SCREEN.

Synchronicity. Two birds, one stone. I exist, and writing happens.


*True story. Cleaning out the office, I found an old Solstice card from (he who is temporarily still known as) CV, which read To B., you're the best non-telelological fuckbuddy ever! To be fair, he was quoting me.

**Who, GET OUT, graduated high school the same year as me.

***Yup, that's me: artiste of the graceless transition.