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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The story of this crisis is the title essay in this collection, and an impressive piece of work, but in it Daum never quite manages to separate the wood floors with their Oriental rugs from a less dicor-driven notion of what she calls "intellectual New York bohemianism." The former may not be within her budget, but does that necessarily mean that the latter isn't? In the end, when she moves to Lincoln, Neb., where the rents are lower, it's not clear that she has chosen a path of greater "authenticity" or merely given up intellectual bohemianism for the sake of having affordable oak under her feet.
Daum is smart enough to know that she's pretty messed up in this department, but not, it seems, quite able to use her own confusion for fodder. "It's really shallow," she admits in her anti-carpet manifesto. "But I'm capable of being extremely shallow, far more superficial than I'm often given credit for." Perhaps attempting to appear deep saps Daum's energy, for easily the zingiest piece in this collection, "Music Is My Bag," remains mostly unencumbered by big thoughts.
"Music Is My Bag" is a gloriously articulated rejection of that particular species of middlebrow enthusiasm that expresses itself in such trinkets as piano-key-patterned scarves, "a deck of cards with the great composers on the back," musical note coasters, $300 wooden music stands and tote bags with the eponymous motto printed on them. (Other "Bags" include "Literature Is My Bag," indicated by a collection of silver bookmarks, and "perhaps most annoyingly, Where I Went to College Is My Bag.") "Having a Bag," Daum writes, "connotes the state of being overly interested in something, and yet, in a certain way, not interested enough. It has a hobbyish quality to it, a sense that the enthusiasm developed at a time when the enthusiast was lacking in some significant area of social or intellectual life."
Daum's own family was Music Is My Bag to the max, much to her chagrin. Extremes of annoyance can provoke writing that has the attentiveness of a lover's ode, and so Daum hilariously limns every nook and cranny of "Bagdom," including her mother's insistence on calling Daum's oboe a "horn." This lingo, Daum writes, is a prime example of "the overfamiliar stance that reveals a desperate need for subcultural affiliation, the musical equivalent of people in the magazine business who refer to publications like Glamour and Forbes as 'books.'"
Since the days when little Meghan sat fuming at the breakfast table over her mother's slangy bid for inclusion in classical-music subculture, she has sought to repudiate her earnest, geeky roots. That repudiation is often amusing, but it also seems to monopolize her attention; Daum doesn't show much aptitude for subjects beyond her own experience. "Inside the Tube," a reported feature on airline flight attendants, contains long, garbled sentences such as "But to say that air travel has infused itself into the human experience without leaving marks or building up potentially problematic immunities is to view technology in a Pollyana-like manner that may have gone out of fashion when applied to phenomena like the Internet and surveillance cameras but continues to thrive in the realm of travel." That sort of prose makes Daum come across like she's got a desperate need for subcultural affiliation with whatever type of highbrow (Susan Sontag?) she imagines writes in this way.
Worse is the second reported feature, "According to the Women I'm Fairly Pretty," an account of Daum's visit to Ravenheart, a group of people living in a remote California ranch who practice a kind of organized nonmonogamy called "polyamory." Daum dutifully records the goddess-worshiping members' labyrinthine personal histories and complicated sleeping and sex schedules, perfectly accepting, it seems, of all this systematic libertinage. (You have only to imagine the paroxysm of flummoxed disapproval Ally McBeal would suffer in meeting the same people to realize how differently this could have gone.)
Instead, what bothers Daum about the Ravenheart "family" is their allegiance to "the realm that has long elicited my deepest repulsions. I have stepped into the intersection of science fiction geeks and velvet-caped jousters." The piece ends with a stern, trumped-up disquisition to the effect that the Ravenhearts' purported open-minded inclusiveness is a big fraud -- because they only sleep with other people who like science fiction. In fact, "by being polyamorous, they are, in effect, giving themselves permission to sleep with other members of the science fiction club." Horrors! It would be a lot easier to credit Daum's conclusion, which sings the praises of "the unexpected elation that comes from falling in love with someone whose bookshelves hold none of the same books as your own," if it weren't coming from a woman who admits that she once broke up with "a great man" because he didn't mind wall-to-wall carpeting.
Of course, the thing about the Ravenhearts that really freaks out former high school band member Daum is their "desperate need to compensate for their adolescent nerdiness." In doing so, she tut-tuts, they fling themselves into "a subculture that is based around the premise of 'not fitting in,'" one that has gone so far as to "consumerize the idea of not fitting in." Hmm. You mean, sorta like New York intellectual bohemians? In that case, wouldn't the pagan tchotchkes and Robert Heinlein paperbacks that fill Daum with loathing be the Ravenheart equivalent of wooden floors? Naturally, the last thing she wants to recognize is how similar the Ravenhearts -- in their hankering to construct a more interesting life on the dull foundation of suburban childhood -- are to herself. Well, there is one big difference: They're not coming to her house to sniff at her bric-a-brac.
The final essay in "My Misspent Youth" is the savage "Variations on Grief," in which Daum lacerates herself for her inability to feel a genuine grief after a friend's freakish death and for entering into an elaborately artificial relationship with his parents afterward. The essay's rigorous honesty is a bit undermined by its lack of focus, but it packs a wallop nonetheless. And it's a sign that if Daum ever gets over the fact that, underneath it all, she'll always be a bit of a nerd, she'll find plenty of other subjects to write about.
