Sunday’s Activities Include: track, lunch at Julie’s, horse, walk, block party

T. had track today.

We had lunch at Julie’s Place. Credit cards not working — I was one of only a few in the place that didn’t need to run to the ATM.

Both kids had the horse today. A. had lunch at McDonald’s. I had a nice convo with M. (at the horse). I also had a nice walk with M., my walking partner. We stopped at the block party at the beginning and the end. I got to see a bunch of very nice people, some of whom I already knew and some were new to me. I realized I now have two friends from Romania who do not appear to know each other. Perhaps I will introduce them to each other. But one of them has a surname that originates in Hungarian, and I have a friend from there, too. I love this town!

Recent Reading: two JAK retreads, more from _The Sacred and the Feminine_

After reading _The Adventurer_, I reread _Grand Passion_ and _Between the Lines_. I was reading some of _The Sacred and the Feminine: Toward a Theology of Housework_ by Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, and it got me thinking about how conceptions of home / houses change over time. I mean, the obvious thing is that gender roles change, but even that obvious thing is remarkably inaccurate when looked at in enough detail.

_Grand Passion_ has a heroine who runs a small inn (on the Washington coast, of course, next to a commune, of course, altho this one is run by women and notably is NOT evil). She is also a writer: she wrote one book of erotica under a pseudonym, and has also written a romantic suspense novel. She was befriended by a guest who became an employee, who then died of old age. His right hand man shows up at the inn to track down some paintings that the older gentleman left to him and said were at the inn, along with other things he was leaving to him.

The heroine also has tragic backstory: her parents died violently a few years earlier, and she doesn’t believe that dad killed mom and then himself. Because this is JAK,

SPOILERS!

Of course she is correct. Which is unfortunate, because it means there is someone out there potentially looking to finish her off, too.

_Grand Passion_ (originally 1994) is particularly interesting in the context of thinking about gendered ideas of what it means to come home. The heroine runs an inn, and has helped the commune rescue all kinds of women rendered without homes of their own because of domestic problems. The rescue entails working to be hospitable to the various people who show up and pay (or not) for their stay at the inn. But for every instance that seems to refit gendered norms (women keeping the hearth going), there are plenty of others that go the other direction (women fleeing their homes to live together in very unusual configurations, a man who has a remarkably beautiful home that is quite detailed in its decoration and maintenance — and who also ran a bunch of hotels and provided the hospitality in that manner as well).

_Between the Lines_ (originally 1986) is even weirder. Our heroine who does ad campaigns finds (this is backstory)

SPOILERS

Her race car boyfriend in bed with someone else and flees him and her job. She washes up at the Eastside home of a business consultant who works out of his home. He hires her as a temp office assistant, and keeps her around even tho she is a crappy typist. Ostensibly — and accurately — he values her business acumen, but he also really likes her and wants a permanent relationship in the home of an entirely different nature. All kinds of things that are problematic from a 2018 perspective, crossing professional / personal boundaries, and revolving around possessiveness. While she has an apartment between the time in California and when they get married and live in his home (and travel together to a resort and then a hotel), we never see it. They are usually at his house, either working, or doing something else there. Most of the on screen meals (all?) are in restaurants, but when there is a domestic moment of consumption, he’s usually handing her a beverage (tea, wine, cognac, etc.). Or taking it out of her hands to set it safely aside.

I don’t know if I did a particularly good job of identifying JAK novels that did interesting things with gendered ideas of coming home, or if you could find similar themes and motifs in any of her work (anyone else’s work, for that matter).

What had troubled me about Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi’s book — oh, where to start? Let’s just skip over the Freud and the Jung and the penis envy and her ideas about women and interiority (<— no, I spelled that right). Let’s just go straight to what happens when you identify women with SAH and men with going out to work. That was a dodgy proposition even in 1982, and it has not worn well. Then let’s zero in on the idea that because women work in the home and there aren’t “natural” boundaries on women’s work in the home, that therefore ... OK? See my problem? In 2018, everyone has side gigs, is working from home at least part of the time, and has terrible boundaries between work and the rest of one’s life. Perhaps we’ve all become women. Yay?

I’ll continue to think about this. I might possibly even finish reading _The Sacred and the Feminine_. OTOH, maybe I’ll just go poke around and reread a bunch of JAK again, because I’m really getting a kick out of how much of a dice roll it is which gender in a given novel is going to be better at the domestic shit.

#38 and #39