Columnists I like – another step towards the answer to why I blog

Gargoyle on the Burrard Bridge, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2006

Back in the early 80s, when I worked in the magazine and newspaper business, I used to eagerly await the next issue of Esquire magazine so I could read Harry Stein’s Ethics column. The first issue of Esquire I ever saw was, I think, in 1980, and the cover featured either a hand-tinted photo of the cowboy Ronald Reagan from one of his old movies, or a hyper-realistic portrait. Someone else took over the Ethics column after a few years, and it wasn’t quite the same. But for those three or four years when Harry was writing that column, it was the first thing I read in the magazine every month, regardless of who was on the cover.

In the late 70s or early 80s there was a Globe and Mail ‘he said, she said’ column. I can’t even remember who wrote it: Marni Jackson and M.T. Kelly? It was fun, partly because it predated the whole Venus/Mars thing. What Kelly lacked in wit was compensated by his sheer tenacity. And he was certainly outclassed on the wit front, but that was part of what made the column fun to read.

In the last couple of decades I have moved away from magazines, and I’m not quite sure why. I try to like The Walrus and I’ve subscribed, but it’s not working for me. I think it’s actually a design issue – there’s something wrong with the use of white space and while I am not a fan of the ‘nine parts photo, one part writing’ style of magazine (think People, US, any other sound-bite style of wide-circulation, determinedly anti-intellectual publication), a magazine is not a novel. I expect to see top notch photography and illustration incorporated with award-winning design as well as read award-calibre articles.

I’m still puzzling over the point of Vancouver’s latest entry into the magazine sweepstakes, Granville. A magazine about sustainability that doesn’t feel obliged to either define the term or to understand it is a bit of a puzzle to me, but it’s free and they’re spending some decent money on photography and illustrations, so I’ll look at their photos of what I can only describe as ‘salvage design’ (clothes made from or incorporating bits and pieces of pre-existing, sometimes vintage clothing) and try to find an article that’s actually worth reading.

For the most part, favourite columnists have been replaced for me by bloggers, who have pretty much the same editorial control of their subject matter as magazine and newspaper columnists – almost total. I can’t say, other than Patia Stephens’ wonderful blog, A Drivel Runs Through It (www.patiastephens.com), that I’ve developed a blogger loyalty that equates to my columnist loyalty to Harry Stein. I may yet, as I further refine the blog roll and get deeper into the blogging process. But obviously for me that is the incredible appeal of blogging: editorial control of my product. You don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to read it, but it is pure joy to be able to write about what I want to write about when I want to write it without any kind of filter (editor, publisher, outraged advertiser, employer) trying to impose his or her vision of how the story should go. It’s my story. I’ll tell it the way I choose to, thank you.

Recently though I have found myself drawn more and more to Heather Mallick’s writing, which I encounter on the CBC web site. I’ll be reading about how grateful Squamish is that something has finally been done to make the Sea to Sky Highway safer and then read the article on the latest Superbug taking hold in Vancouver and there’ll be a little box with a provocative headline that leads me to Heather Mallick’s latest column, and I just have to click on it. Today’s was no exception: “A house is a home, not an investment.” A woman after my own heart, obviously. For those of you who’d rather read her article than mine, here you go: www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_mallick/20080211.html

Perhaps it’s because she describes herself as having an ‘old fashioned MA in English literature’ or the fact that she calls herself a ‘full-time reader’ in the bio on her web site (www.heathermallick.ca). Her writing style has a lot to do with it though. She writes in a way that is accessible without being patronizing. She’s not dumbing it down for anyone, but she’s obviously a fan of the ‘don’t use a dollar word when a quarter word will do’ rule. Lovers of language and readers of literature (or at least this one) regard that as the inevitable sand trap of writing (this is probably the only golf metaphor you’re ever going to encounter on this blog), the temptation to use a big beautiful word because it sounds great and means exactly what you’re trying to express. Think ‘sycophant’ versus ‘yes man.’ Yes, sycophant has the advantage of being gender-neutral, although in my world it doesn’t need to be, since I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a ‘yes woman’ – that must be an experiential thing though, having grown up during the second wave of feminism.

The point is that pretty much everyone knows what a yes-man is, while sycophant is going to send a fair percentage of readers to the dictionary or just alienate them because they don’t know what it means. Naturally the context should supply incontrovertible clues to the word’s meaning, but it doesn’t always. I recall becoming incensed by a colleague’s persistent use of the word ‘matrix’ because I never really knew what the hell he was talking about. When I looked it up and discovered he meant chart, grid, point at which two things intersect, I wanted to slap him for being a professional communicator who valued his own ability to confound over plain speech. I will also confess that I would have to do the same research I’ve done about 40 times already to explain to you what is meant by the phrase ‘paradigm shift.’ It’s glib, it’s catchy, it does mean something important, but it’s a phrase I find immediately alienating and I have obviously developed a mental block about it.

More on this subject (the wilfully obscure school of language arts) at some unspecified future date.

I liked what Heather Mallick had to say in her article about housing. The phrase ‘starter home’ first came to my attention back in the mid ‘80s when I was living in Toronto and working for The Financial Post. One of the copy editors was looking to buy a house the year Toronto housing prices rose a spectacular 47%. Sadly I was looking for a place to live at the time, and had not yet adopted my best apartment-hunting strategy: find a building in which you want to live, put in an application and get approved, wait for a vacancy and move when there is one. I met a lot of people apartment hunting. The majority weren’t landlords, although I am still stunned when I remember the tiny and very imperfect space on offer in High Park for an exorbitant sum and the landlord’s wail that renting out three apartments in the house at these far-above-market-value prices would barely cover his mortgage. I am not sure whether I actually said to him, “Sucks to be a real estate speculator, don’t it?” or whether I just thought it. Even if I didn’t say it, my non-poker face no doubt conveyed precisely that message. One place we looked at had 75 applicants for a single, overpriced, not particularly charming apartment. A freelance editor and a jazz musician didn’t stand much of a chance of getting to the top of that heap.

And these are some of the issues Mallick addresses in her column. Yes, a house may well be the single biggest purchase most of us ever make in our lives. Yes, real estate has almost always been a good investment, and unless one buys at the very high end of a market cycle and then experiences rapidly rising interest rates without commensurate salary inflation, it is difficult to lose money buying a home. Of course there are other factors – neighbourhoods change and become more or less desirable depending on who and what moves in, failing to do any sort of upkeep at all will affect resale value, your quiet lane might suddenly become a major traffic avoidance route, etc.

But the real point is this: shelter is a basic and fundamental human need. When that need becomes perverted into a way to make money rather than satisfaction of that fundamental need, something huge is lost. We are already living, in the Western world, in unrooted times. Many of us live thousands of miles from our families and that support network. It’s highly unlikely my mother would have been able to continue working if my grandmother hadn’t lived in the same city and hadn’t been more than willing to look after me whenever I got a childhood disease. I missed almost six weeks of school the year before I had my tonsils out, with one strep throat and bout of tonsillitis after another culminating in scarlet fever (which was really exciting because I had to be quarantined and everyone in the house had to take penicillin along with me – this made me feel extraordinarily self important in an “I am the avenger and I carry death – or at least bad sickness – within me” kind of way). And there’s no way either of my parents could have afforded to take that much time off work to look after me while I was sick.

As the urbanization of populations continues, it is less and less likely that we will be able to live anywhere near where we grew up. There was a great article I read many years ago about how the creation of Silicon Valley meant that almost no one who had grown up in towns like Palo Alto or Mountain View, CA, would ever be able to buy a house there, even though their parents had done so with ease long before networking became a verb. Nor, unless they were only children, would they ever inherit a house or enough land on which to build their own. Like the second and third sons of the English gentry in Jane Austen’s time, alternatives would have to be created – we can’t all be squires and inherit the baronetcy – some of us will have to look to the army and the church for our careers and revenue streams. For those who grew up in what became Silicon Valley, the answer was a fairly massive exodus not only from the area but from the state itself to places like North and South Carolina where homes were still affordable.

Sadly, too, the global village and the cottage industries outlined by Marshall McLuhan aren’t happening as quickly as most of us would like, and it is still the rare individual who can work from home and make a decent living. I am beginning to think I should take up farming so no one thinks it’s strange that I want to work from home, a home in a rather remote location preferably (oh cabin in the woods, I continue to hear your siren song).

But a focus on what is affordable where and what, precisely, the fallout will be from the sub-prime mortgage mess misses the most important point in all of this. Current legislation designed to discourage real estate speculation is pretty toothless. In Ontario you have to own a house for a year before you can sell it or you are considered a speculator (I’m not sure what sort of penalty there is for this in law). In British Columbia, in the run-up to the Olympics, it’s only six months. Sure, there are some provisions to discourage landlords and property developers from buying houses on spec and flipping them in BC. Having to give tenants a month’s free rent when they’re evicted so a house can be renovated or demolished to build a monster home on the lot is one of those provisions. It’s not enough, however.

What is required is – ha – sorry I can’t resist – a paradigm shift in the way we look at shelter and at real estate. That paradigm shift will involve a return to the concept of houses as homes rather than as investments. It will also involve a commitment on our part to the concept of universal shelter for all that is similar to our commitment to the notion of universal health care. There was no mass exodus from Canada when our version of socialized medicine was introduced. And those stories about the ‘brain drain’ were also wild exaggerations in terms of number. We have experienced nothing like the exodus Great Britain saw during the Thatcher era. We have not lost a generation of our educated middle class to other countries. Most Canadians took a look at the pros versus the cons of higher American salaries and lower taxation and were able to do the math in our own heads: yes we pay much higher rates of taxation but we’re getting not only universal health care but almost-universal access to post-secondary education for those tax dollars. On the whole we’re pretty happy with the bargain we’ve made, I think. It is worth it.

Now if only we could wrap our heads around the need to ensure no one in this country is homeless. A huge part of that, I think, is refusing to participate in the commoditization of housing. Don’t do the bidding war thing. Don’t buy a house you don’t like as a ‘starter’ home just for the sake of ‘getting into the market.’ Don’t be one of those people who spend 70 per cent of your take-home income on housing (that would be most Vancouverites these days). Life is too short and mortgages are too long to live a half life in a house that isn’t a home in a neighbourhood you don’t like.

For another take on the housing crisis - and it is a crisis, one way or other, because as house prices rise, so do rents, here's Mary-Ellen Lang's recent article as well: www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_lang/20080208.html

P.S. Okay I just laughed aloud at the line in this column for The Guardian in which Heather Mallick announces there will never be a sex scandal involving a Canadian politician because, let’s face it, they’re all too unattractive. She obviously hasn’t met the charming and highly personable Vancouver-Fairview MLA Gregor Robertson http://thetyee.ca/News/2004/11/08/NDPNewFaceBusiness/. Not that he would ever do anything scandalous.

www.heathermallick.ca/guardian.co.uk-columns/top-quality-sleaze.html