I picked up a copy of Kit Dobson’s Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada because I’m interviewing him for a Walk-Listen-Create event in a couple of weeks (details about this event are here). Our conversation will focus on his book Field Notes on Listening (which I’ve blogged about here), but I wanted to prepare more thoroughly by reading some of Dobson’s other books. That’s not a simple task, because he’s a prolific scholar, creative-nonfiction writer, and most recently novelist (check out his daunting faculty profile at the University of Calgary, where he’s taught since 2021), and I don’t have time to read everything he’s written, even if my instincts and training tell me that level of research is required. But Field Notes on Listening is a book about place, I told myself, and malls are places, so maybe there’s enough overlap to make Malled worth reading.
And it is, even though it’s almost 10 years old now, and the world of retail has changed, especially since the pandemic. That’s not a criticism; in fact, the book notes how shopping endlessly reinvents itself. Malled is my favourite kind of scholarly writing. It is reflective. Dobson thinks about his relationship to malls (and shopping more generally), and adjusts some of his thinking about them. Like many of us, at the outset he’s suspicious (to say the least) about the ecological and social effects of shopping, but his investigation takes him to a somewhat more nuanced place. As the book ends, he’s still concerned about those impacts—as someone at the Walmart in Whitehorse tells him, the stuff we buy is only making a temporary stop with us on its way to the landfill—but he acknowledges the possibility that malls contain possibilities for community and even for resistance. Watching someone reconsider their ideas is a rarity; most writers stay wedded to a thesis. That reconsideration, that degree of reflection and acknowledgment that other possible interpretations exist, is refreshing. That’s what this book provides.
It also introduced me to writers and artists I didn’t know or had forgotten about: Heather Spears’s poetry about the West Edmonton Mall and Roy Miki’s Mannequin Rising in the former category, Gary Burns’s film waydowntown in the latter. It also brought me up to date about places I used to know, like Toronto, while making me curious about places I don’t know much about, like that Walmart in Whitehorse or the mall in the old Montreal Forum. I was also struck by the argument that as private spaces, shopping malls are an extension of the enclosure movements of previous centuries, through which public lands were privatized. That makes sense to me.
I started reading Malled while staying on the southern edge of Red Deer, Alberta, in a hotel squeezed between a freeway and a massive series of power centres, the new form of retail design that seems to be replacing malls, partly because they enable consumers to avoid walking anywhere. I wonder what Dobson would say about that. Maybe I’ll ask him on September 2nd.
Next, I’m going to reread Field Notes on Listening. I’m eager to see what I think about it this time around, partly because I’ve read Malled. It’ll be the third or fourth time I’ve read it, but in my experience, every rereading of any text brings something new. I’m also wondering what Dobson’s other writing is like. Maybe I’ll find out.