I was intending on writing a follow up piece to last week’s theoretical deconstruction of DFO, but that’s going to have to wait until another day, as something terribly exciting has happened this weekend.
I’ve moved into my very own apartment. All by myself. (Ok, with the help of mamaK and papaK and some fantastic removalists for the heavy stuff, but it’s just me living there).
Long story short, I was intending to move later on in the year. Circumstances conspired to make me more than willing to make the financial commitment of paying double rent for 6 weeks to get into my own place sooner. Luckily, the fact that I speak fluent real estate meant that I had an offer made within 24 hours of viewing an apartment that I truly loved. (If you ever need to know the secrets to this strange dialect of sales speak, inbox me and we can liaise – that’s real estate speak for talk, FYI).
This weekend just passed was moving weekend, and those of you who know me well, or can deduce my interests from this blog, would appreciate that moving all my books, clothes and kitchenware down and then up three flights of stairs was no mean feat. But it’s done, and, with the exception of my bedroom and a few other bits and pieces, my new place is ready for me to spend the first night there later this week.
What’s really thrilling slash eerie slash awesome about this new apartment is that it has more space to call my own than I’ve ever had in my whole life. Both the family homes I grew up in, in Sydney and Canberra, were quite little for the amount of people we had living in them. I can remember being awed when I went to other people’s houses and they had spare rooms, rooms that existed entirely surplus to requirements, with pretty floral bedspreads and a mildew smell from disuse. Or rumpus rooms: a room entirely for kids to do kid stuff in. Wicked, but a totally foreign concept at my place, where every space had double or triple functions.
When I moved out of home in 2009 and into various share houses, the same applied – I had my room, but all other spaces were shared, which resulted in some pretty super hilarious fun times. But again, I found myself wondering what it would be like to sleep in a room that didn’t serve as a workspace, lounge room, dining room and laundry all at once.
This week, I’m going to find out what that’s like, because my new place has two bedrooms : a bedroom for me, and an actual spare room slash study slash extra place to store my clothes. In my spare room there’s a futon for when Merry Helliwell, Kitty Gilfeather, Clementine Kemp or Katriona Winston-Stanley come and stay for a visit. My grandfather’s writing desk sits in a corner, waiting for me to write that novel, the novel that’s nipping steadily at my heels with more than a little encouragement from Mimi Goss and Zsuzannah Verona.
My bedroom, now just a bedroom, is now a space freed up for dreaming about all these possibilities. And, of course, for storing my clothes in the obscenely large built in wardrobe.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
Theorising DFO Part One: Barthes
Roland Barthes was a French cultural theorist who, like most theorists, had a lot of interesting things to say. Sadly, understanding Barthes is like sawing through steak with the lid of a Tupperware container. You know that there is a reward for persevering, but your perceptual equipment isn’t sharp enough. His writing, too, poses some challenges. It’s like an over-pastryed sausage roll. A tasty sausage of knowledge is hiding for you beneath a thick, crusty, flaky layer of wordiness, which you have to eat your way through.
Which is why I feel it’s best to start with the familiar when exploring difficult theoretical ground. So let’s head to DFO.
(Incidentally, two meat related analogies in the one paragraph could perhaps indicate an iron deficiency on the part of the author. Or it could herald the start of summer barbeque season…)
DFO (Direct Factory Outlet, for the uninitiated) is located in Fyshwick. I have written before about my great love of this maligned Eastern suburb of Canberra, and the conspicuous presence of DFO is a significant part of why Fyshwick and I are goin’ steady. DFO is a large warehouse, with outlets of many, many, many different companies and stores. It’s loud, because the building isn’t properly insulated (it literally is a warehouse) and each of the poorly partitioned stores dials up the volume on the sound system to compete for aural dominance. There are also spruikers – terrifying people with microphones enticing you into their store with the promise of bargains, bargains, bargains.
What, might you ask, does DFO have to do with Roland Barthes? Well, quite a lot.
Barthes postulated in his discussion of literature that, broadly, you could divide texts into two different sorts: readerly texts, where the author’s intent was clearly conveyed and there was little ambiguity, and writerly texts, where the author’s intent was unclear and a high degree of ambiguity existed. Barthes argued that writerly texts extended an invitation to the reader to participate in interpreting the meaning of the text, and, as such, created a dialogue. Readerly texts, on the other hand, presented a sealed, closed off narrative, to be read, enjoyed, and absorbed, but ultimately untempered with.
DFO is the shopping world’s equivalent of a writerly text. It’s rough around the edges. You don’t know what’s going on a lot of the time, and any assumptions you bring to the text/DFO will be thrown out the moment you step through the doors. Don’t try and approach a writerly text with a firm idea of what you wish to get out of it. Guaranteed your quest for pencil skirts or nude wedge heels will result in failure. You may, on your exit, emerge without skirts or shoes, but with a Sheridan quilt cover for $20. Multiple layers of meaning, and multiple R&B soundtracks, fight for dominance in the one cultural space. Clothes, shoes, home wares are presented in a haphazard way – piled onto racks, crammed together, piled on benches, disorganised, chaotic. Stock can be anywhere from up to the minute to three seasons (or more!) old, and is often climatically inappropriate. Staff are too busy unloading stock to provide you with a helpful narration through this quagmire. You, the shopper, are presented with a delicious invitation: here are the goods. Make of them what you will.
Of course, the DFO experience, like a writerly text, can be exhausting. Sometimes there is no way of making sense of the disorder. Sometimes you want to be taken by the hand and be guided by a reliable narrator through Alana Hill’s Spring collection. Sometimes you want your ideas, your dresses, shoes, and jeans, presented clearly and in isolation, sorted by size and price.
Yet sometimes, the order and prescription of shopping at, say, the Canberra Centre’s Veronika Maine store leaves me cold. Beautiful dresses on mannequins beg to be ruffled. Neat racks, salesgirls who can tell you in an instant what stock is available out the back should you require a size down, the hermetic seal of up-to-the-minute trends, make me long for having to work a little harder, dig a little deeper through the piles of 6’s and 8’s for that elusive size 14. For the challenge of creating meanings and great outfits of my own, as I go about my shopping at DFO.
And of course, for the bargains, bargains, bargains.
Which is why I feel it’s best to start with the familiar when exploring difficult theoretical ground. So let’s head to DFO.
(Incidentally, two meat related analogies in the one paragraph could perhaps indicate an iron deficiency on the part of the author. Or it could herald the start of summer barbeque season…)
DFO (Direct Factory Outlet, for the uninitiated) is located in Fyshwick. I have written before about my great love of this maligned Eastern suburb of Canberra, and the conspicuous presence of DFO is a significant part of why Fyshwick and I are goin’ steady. DFO is a large warehouse, with outlets of many, many, many different companies and stores. It’s loud, because the building isn’t properly insulated (it literally is a warehouse) and each of the poorly partitioned stores dials up the volume on the sound system to compete for aural dominance. There are also spruikers – terrifying people with microphones enticing you into their store with the promise of bargains, bargains, bargains.
What, might you ask, does DFO have to do with Roland Barthes? Well, quite a lot.
Barthes postulated in his discussion of literature that, broadly, you could divide texts into two different sorts: readerly texts, where the author’s intent was clearly conveyed and there was little ambiguity, and writerly texts, where the author’s intent was unclear and a high degree of ambiguity existed. Barthes argued that writerly texts extended an invitation to the reader to participate in interpreting the meaning of the text, and, as such, created a dialogue. Readerly texts, on the other hand, presented a sealed, closed off narrative, to be read, enjoyed, and absorbed, but ultimately untempered with.
DFO is the shopping world’s equivalent of a writerly text. It’s rough around the edges. You don’t know what’s going on a lot of the time, and any assumptions you bring to the text/DFO will be thrown out the moment you step through the doors. Don’t try and approach a writerly text with a firm idea of what you wish to get out of it. Guaranteed your quest for pencil skirts or nude wedge heels will result in failure. You may, on your exit, emerge without skirts or shoes, but with a Sheridan quilt cover for $20. Multiple layers of meaning, and multiple R&B soundtracks, fight for dominance in the one cultural space. Clothes, shoes, home wares are presented in a haphazard way – piled onto racks, crammed together, piled on benches, disorganised, chaotic. Stock can be anywhere from up to the minute to three seasons (or more!) old, and is often climatically inappropriate. Staff are too busy unloading stock to provide you with a helpful narration through this quagmire. You, the shopper, are presented with a delicious invitation: here are the goods. Make of them what you will.
Of course, the DFO experience, like a writerly text, can be exhausting. Sometimes there is no way of making sense of the disorder. Sometimes you want to be taken by the hand and be guided by a reliable narrator through Alana Hill’s Spring collection. Sometimes you want your ideas, your dresses, shoes, and jeans, presented clearly and in isolation, sorted by size and price.
Yet sometimes, the order and prescription of shopping at, say, the Canberra Centre’s Veronika Maine store leaves me cold. Beautiful dresses on mannequins beg to be ruffled. Neat racks, salesgirls who can tell you in an instant what stock is available out the back should you require a size down, the hermetic seal of up-to-the-minute trends, make me long for having to work a little harder, dig a little deeper through the piles of 6’s and 8’s for that elusive size 14. For the challenge of creating meanings and great outfits of my own, as I go about my shopping at DFO.
And of course, for the bargains, bargains, bargains.
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