Heather Cromarty on Masha Tupitsyn’s Love Dog
Love Dog, Masha Tupitsyn. Penny-Ante Editions, 2013.
by Heather Cromarty
In the past year I’ve read several female-penned books that began life online. Female personal writing takes place more and more in the open conversation of the Internet, and then if it’s “successful,” converted to a more elite print medium. Kate Zambreno’s Heroines was a work that was born from her blogging practice. Marie Calloway’s what purpose did I serve in your life was a sensation for its sexual content, but what was more interesting to me was her integration of the online. A book that also began as a blog, what purpose included, for example, screengrabs of Facebook conversations and hate comments. Like Calloway, Masha Tupitsyn’s Love Dog is ostensibly a memoir, a full-on dated diary, pulling the immediate of a blog—a digital update of a diary—into print. Tupitsyn goes further, making Love Dog as close to Tumblr as a book can be, with original text, quotations, photos, and (links to) videos (though unlike most of Tumblr, all is attributed). She proposes that the reader listen to the linked clips as they read: “This book is polyphonic. It should be read, listened to, and watched.” It’s an interesting proposition, and initially an intriguing one. There’s something about music that’s integral to pinpointing an emotion in time. For myself, some songs are evocative forever, attached to the feelings of a particular moment, and it takes a cataclysm to shake them onto something else. With the request to listen to the clips, Tupitsyn says: here I am.
Tupitsyn’s body of work largely focuses on the culture of the cinematic, so it’s sensible and admirable for her to try and use the old codex in conjunction with the relatively new ease in which a reader can look up a video or film clip. I began to follow along. I listened to the Bjork song, the Clash song. But as time went on I resisted, and then resented being tied to a device and to an Internet connection; I just wanted to read. (It’s ironic that I felt resentful of being stuck to the computer; so often it distracts me from reading books.) So I abandoned the songs and clips, for this first, close reading. I know, however, that I failed Love Dog (and Tupitsyn) somewhat by not participating in its central commandment. However, I think I’ve come to a way to reconcile the structure of Love Dog and my reading habits—more on this idea later.
The catalyst for Love Dog is a man called X, now gone. “You, X., have become a book. The person for whom I read everything now and will write this year, making the ‘you’ into a world (the you that came into mine)—an Event” (20). There’s no real thread or narrative to follow in Love Dog. It is simply a diary of her thoughts, loosely tied to the central theme of love. One entry is an essay on feminism in television; the next could possibly be a memory of childhood or travel; now maybe a lengthy quote from Nietzsche, Anne Carson, Jeanette Winterson, or Freud; then, say, a response to reading Sarah Schulman… and this is merely a small portion of examples. There are emails and Facebook threads. She prints a series of Tweets she made. (Tupitsyn’s 2011 book, LACONIA: 1200 Tweets on Film is entirely composed of Tweets, also written over the course of a year.) Love Dog got out of the yard and runs all over the neighbourhood.
Tupitsyn’s feminism, as represented in Love Dog, doesn’t break any new ground. Rather her essays and ruminations on the subject serve to show the reader where she roots herself, and why she’s seen as “difficult,” why people tell her to behave appropriately because she doesn’t, and ultimately why, as (someone who reads as) a straight woman, it’s hard to keep a relationship alive. “I have always chosen love, feminism, and friendship with women over male approval, and this has not led to lasting love” (229). Few men find it easy to love a woman who refuses to play into patriarchal mind games. Yet she—indeed most—will continue to want love, remember love, blindly pant for love, like a dog, and follow it until she dies. Tupitsyn is what some would dismissively call a romantic. Yet she should certainly not be dismissed. “’You’re too much,’ everyone always says, and there is nothing I can do to hide it” (121).
“This is the way Love Dog is composed,” Tupitsyn writes, quoting Stevie Knicks in a conversation from 2012, “’They may not like everything on your album, but they’re going to like some of it, so they’re going to listen to all of it. And maybe they might fall in love with the whole thing’”(237). But here’s the thing: with modern technology you can skip the bits you don’t like and don’t want, and you can shuffle. For a book that relies on tech to exist, the idea that you put a record on and listen all the way through is anachronistic. So I propose to approach the book the same modern way. Remix. Randomize. Play one piece at a time. Refuse linear.
My proposition for reading Love Dog first germinated from Tupitsyn’s frequent mentions of tarot card readings (again, shuffle, as in the deck of cards). It caught my interest because tarot is coming up among the bookish girls lately, and I thought what if you could take a passage of Love Dog, randomly, once a day, or when you had a question? Use it as a more philosophical form of bibliomancy. Given how little narrative there is, there’s no need to read Love Dog front to back. Tupitsyn often places the word “radical” in front of things: “radical listening,” “radical heartache,” “radical fulfillment.” What I’m suggesting is possibly a radical reading. Not that I expect Love Dog to solve anyone’s problems, but then again, that’s not really the point of Tarot either. Rather, it’s all just a starting point for your own rumination.
This way of reading, too, solves one of my issues with Love Dog, namely the time needed to listen to the clips (since I can read a page a good deal faster than it takes to play a New Order song). Taken one piece at a time, the commitment is less onerous. I definitely admit the irony in being unable to commit here, but I’m also attempting a compromise with Love Dog that works for both parties in this relationship.
Tupitsyn does believe in a kind of magic. She quotes an email she wrote to her close friend, Elaine Castillo: “Writers as sorcerers. Two powerful girls. Making magic together” (133). Of X, she wrote early on, “The you I am dreaming of. Calling forth.” (20) Later she plays with pronouns and memory. “Sometimes three different yous in a you. Sometimes you is a dedication. Sometimes a summoning. Sometimes a séance. How many times and I going to raise you—all of you—from the dead?” (87). There are passages like this, some that go on for much longer, that feel like nothing less than incantations. What if you, too, believed in Tupitsyn’s magic, her sorcery?
Funnily enough, just as I think of the bibliomancy method, I read: “I picked up my old copy of Stendhal’s On Love, which caught my eye, as I spotted it sitting on the bookshelf across from my bed. I opened the book to random page…” (251). The reader needn’t consume Love Dog in a gulp, but should rather live with it for a while, in the same way Tupitsyn goes back to the works she admires. I think it’s worthy of that.
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Hear “Ever Since this World Began” From Love Dog.
Heather Cromarty received her B.A. in English from the University of Calgary and promptly moved to Toronto, where she’s lived for over a decade. She is a reviewer and critic for Lemon Hound, Quill and Quire, and The Globe and Mail, among others.