…these ones gun- and bomb- and massacre-related, and resulting in me waking up and staring at the ceiling thinking “What am I doing having kids in a world like this?”
And then today, a music festival in a local park, beautiful bands and perfect weather and duck and mango tacos and iced chai.
Impossible to reconcile all the different Americas. Love and fear and love.
We spent the fourth of July in the Sierras with two families from the kids’ school. There were some pretty epic treats: CatHaven, Boyden Cavern, my first wild bear, a juvenile, walking through a sunny glade by a lake. But the lake had Christian camps all around it and was unexpectedly upsetting. Claire is reaching the age I was when I joined the unpleasant church, and I lost an entire night to nightmares about the past invading the present.
I keep coming back to something helpful the wife said a few weeks ago. I said I didn’t know why I let it get to me so much, given that I was not myself one of the victims. She said that I am allowed to mourn my own losses. That got me thinking about what those losses were.
I spent the years from ages 9 to 21 in an institution where everyone with any kind of authority lied routinely about everything that was important. I was praised for my worst behaviour and attacked unmercifully for all the things I like about myself. Black was white, up was down, right was wrong. I was predisposed to depression, obviously, but what I learned at the church was that I could neither trust myself nor anyone else.
Nothing remarkable about that. Institutions rot. Here’s to fluid overlays, begun with the enthusiastic consent of all parties and subject to strict term limits.
I read Leonard’s book and identified completely with his crunchy Granola post-scarcity, zero-coercion aliens and their fluid overlays for getting things done. I said to Danny: “I think I may be becoming an anarchist,” and Danny, because he is perfect, ran off to find a pamphlet to push into my willing hands.
The pamphlet is perfect. It is Kevin Carson’s “Resilient Communities: Society After State Capitalism.” The first essay talks about local economies, including farmers’ markets and barter systems. The second essay talks about the historical roots of such local economies: Pompeiian villas and labor cooperatives.
I started to realize that I have been a practising anarchist for quite some time. Consider! I like: credit unions, hackerspaces, Mechanics’ Institutes, small-press books, community gardens and California commune and other DIY architecture. I dislike: large banks, surveillance, inequality, institutional racism and sexism and the police state.
I’ve been thinking a lot about money, both professionally and politically. Despite the overwhelming centrality of venture capital to the technology industry, my standard (good) advice to engineer-entrepreneurs is: “bootstrap. Run off revenues. Never sign a term sheet.” The more I read Keynes, the less I think of money as stored value. Money is something else.
This is important. Carson brings up Schumpeter, who distinguishes between “the money theory of credit” and “the credit theory of money.” We live in a world ruled by the money theory of credit. That is, when you borrow money from a bank or VC, it is assumed that loan comes out of a pile of cash placed in the bank or fund by account holders or limited partners. The credit – the loan or investment – is funded by the money, which exists. Right?
Wrong. Schumpeter’s credit theory of money turns that logic on its head. “It is much more realistic to say that the banks ‘create credit…’ than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted to them.” What does it mean to create credit? Think about what “credit” actually means. It is a measure of trust in a relationship. Money flows from the social contract.
That’s why Keynesianism worked, especially after WW2: people were too afraid of the consequences of not trusting one another, and so they credited one another with enough goodwill to build the Interstate Highway System and the National Health. It worked right up until Reagan and Thatcher made hate fashionable again.
Carson takes up the argument:
“Capital” is a term for a right of property in organizing and disposing of this present labor. The same basic cooperative functions could be carried out just as easily by the workers themselves, through mutual credit. Under the present system, the capitalist monopolizes those cooperative functions, and thus appropriates the productivity gains from the social division of labor.”
Far from “storing” “value” in the form of “money”, banks and venture capitalists subtract credit from the social contract by adding (mostly worthless) extra layers of abstraction between individual actors. The mortgage crisis began with liar loans and banks selling off mortgages: anything to distance themselves from the consequences of what they had done.
Vast wealth is hoarded money, stagnant credit. It is more disgusting and a bigger threat to mental and public health and aesthetics than the hoarding of physical goods.
So that’s where I am. Still supporting Obama because of Affordable Care, but adamantly opposed to extraordinary rendition and detention without trial. Not exactly soured on electoral politics, but empowered to say A Plague On Both Your Houses! because finally able to imagine an alternative: a society in which we help each other, listen to one another and share what we have. In short, I am an anarchist.
Claire and I were driving home from lunch at Taco Los Altos (burritos, Kanye West, the Supreme Court and Sigmund Freud). We were just turning into Eugenia when the car parked next door to Colin’s house jumped the curb, accelerated across the street and T-boned Colin’s truck. It sat there revving and revving, smoke pouring off its tires, about fifteen feet in front of us, while I stared at it, dumbfounded.
I had to back out into Mission and drive around the block. We parked and walked back down to talk to Colin. “I am so glad it hit my truck,” he said. “The little boy was in there and the engine was running. He likes to play in the front seat, and he put his foot on the accelerator. If he hadn’t hit my truck he could have been killed.”
Colin asked us all to rethink cadence and I forgot how to ride.
I can see Matador’s cadence. He is an Argentinian Warmblood and he bounces around the jumps like a ping pong ball. I can see Ruth’s cadence: she is a huge hunter and her flat-kneed stride is about a hundred feet long. She is so scopy that she would rather jump out of a long spot than add.
What’s Bella’s cadence though? Sometimes she tranters, conjuring an extra footfall from thin air. And sometimes she seems to swoosh from jump to jump. She can jump out of any old stupid spot I drop her in, but how do I find the rhythmic canter that she can jump out of without constant emergencies?
We had a lesson where Val asked us to jump the five to five, do a more-than-rollback and come back up the panels to the oxer. We got the five to five but Bella bucked like a banshee as I tried to haul her around the corner, and I stopped her and realized that my hands were shaking and I was scared.
We ended that lesson jumping six-inch crossrails. I flew to Boston on business and brooded on my troubles. I realized how much of my recent good body image comes from the knowledge that I can ride better than I used to, because that good body image abandoned me with the worry over my riding.
We came back and I remembered that Bella wants me to let go of her head so she can use her front end, and to sit in the saddle so she knows I am not going to come off her. We rode around another huge (three foot!) course in the Grand Prix arena and I checked in with my seatbones three strides out from every fence, letting her jump out of her rhythm.
There’s her cadence. It’s just that at the height we’re jumping now, it’s faster than I am comfortable with. And when I’m scared I go fetal and come out of the saddle and hang on the reins. And then she bucks, because, what the hell, Rach.
I have to sit back and let go and hurtle forward at vast speed and let her take the fence in her own way. It feels like dying, but it is correct.
This, for the record, is what I ride to learn.
We had babysitters last night but it was a perfect storm of Working Mamahood: a stressful meeting, a race home to be in time to pay Julia’s tutor and drop off a BBQ chicken for the girls’ dinner, then sweatily retracing my steps to find that the place I had planned on meeting Jeremy was closed for renovations.
I had a glass of wine two doors away. J arrived and I glowered at him until I remembered that this place exists and was in fact just around the corner. We had a fricken celestial meal. The highlight was the salmon tartare, which came in a white dome of frozen horseradish that melted on your tongue like angels singing.
We sat at the bar watching the kitchen prep: liquid nitrogen to keep the horseradish domes crisp and to freeze the popcorn; the cherry sorbet served in champagne coupes with a little lime soda. Commonwealth is run by San Francisco hippies and $10 from every tasting menu goes to local non-profits, hence the name. J got tipsy. I had to pack for a business trip when we got home, but then we curled up on the couch and watched Thor, which was extheedingly thilly.
I know I was rude about the SMH just a fortnight ago, but it really was my first window into the adult world, and for many years the name Fairfax held for me the ring of integrity. I’m gutted at the layoffs. The innocent are punished while the guilty walk free.
Jeremy and I have been watching Altogether Too Much Archer, with the result that every now and then one of us will shout:
Yesterday before camp, Julia piled all the cushions and blankets on the living room floor and rolled around on them, crying: “I am in the comfy zone!”
I said: “You’re going to have to get out of your comfort zone.”
Claire said: “And into the DANGERZONE!!!”
What is up the NY Times’ butt? Another breathtakingly sexist review, this one by Francine Prose:
“But Gina doesn’t seem to have a heart — or, for that matter, a conscience. Nor is she particularly intelligent…”
Compare with Hermione Lee in the Grauniad, who at least seems to have read the same book I did:
A 34-year-old married woman – sexy, energetic and independent-minded…
Or more damningly, compare with Lydia Millet’s NYT review of Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask:
Milo Burke, a deeply cynical academic development officer, earnest binger on doughnuts, avid consumer of Internet porn, and devoted father and husband…
Or even Michiko on Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story:
insecurities manifested in Lenny’s self-deprecating humor, his compulsive need to try to make others like him…
Awful male characters are complex. Awful female characters have no redeeming features. Got it?
SIGH. Anyway, I enjoyed Waltz as I did not particularly enjoy Lipsyte or Shteyngart, and I had fun being drunk and envious in suburban Dublin again. Like most Anne Enright, this reads as the lovechild of Emma Donoghue and Lionel Shriver. Mmm.
Here are a couple of unicorn chasers.
Tintin author Herge was a super-problematic dude in many ways, but he was exemplary in at least this one: he made friends with a Chinese scholar and he listened to his friend and he let that friendship change him and his work. That’s all you can ask of anyone, really, so: props.
This conversation between two Asian-American foodies about cultural appropriation is a privilege to overhear, and also contains these handy hints on not being racist:
Danny Bowien is a guy who NAILS it in terms of messaging. He does funky hybrid party Chinese food that I think we’re all honored to be the inspiration for. Danny hit me on twitter today wanting to put my Hainan Lobster Rice on the menu, do it! I love that people like Danny and Kareem Abdul Jabbar are interested in our culture in an inquisitive and honest way.
Danny’s the chef at my new favourite brunch place, so: yay.
I do get that it’s totally my fault for reading the Sydney Morning Herald (which I remember from my childhood as a fun, sophis window into the adult world, but which today (possibly without its even having changed!) reads as a gross crawly-bumlick to wealth and power, as unrepresentative of most of Australia as Fox News and the NY Times are of most of America.)
Nevertheless!
When St Pauls College (last seen waving a flag for rape!) holds a party at which the white guests are served by Indian waiters in colourful dress in celebration of the “colonial” theme, the appropriate headline is not: “Was this uni Raj night racist?” The appropriate headline is “Fire everyone responsible for racist uni Raj night.”
And! If you are the principal of one of the major private schools, and you say aggressively racist shit like this:
Dr Paul Burgis, the principal of PLC Sydney, where 34 per cent of students are from other cultural backgrounds, said there was a huge level of exposure to, and acceptance of, other cultures at the school.
”It would almost be offensive if I, as a principal, was to talk about it: ‘Why do you have to raise it as an issue? We’re past that now, we’re just friends’,” he said.
”At a school like PLC it’s almost an invisible question.”
…your racist ass should be fired, rehired only to write an essay explaining exactly why making cultural difference “an invisible question” is itself part of a set of racist strategies, promoting whiteness as the cultural default and problematizing any person or experience that deviates from that racist-ass norm, and then you should be fired again, with no pension.
You know what’s offensive? What’s offensive is that people like Paul Burgis are awarded doctorates and given influential jobs in education when they exhibit ignorance of the most basic facts about institutional racism or systems of oppression or the cultural transmission vectors for all of the above. How do you even wade self-importantly into a discussion of race and privilege in Australian classrooms and throw around a word like “invisible” with no apparent awareness of its, you know, meaning?
To be fair Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, a book about the racist use of invisibility, is ONLY SIXTY YEARS OLD AND NEWS OF IT MAY NOT HAVE CROSSED THE PACIFIC YET.
DEAR AUSTRALIAN JOURNALISTS, NEWSPAPER EDITORS AND PRIVATE SCHOOL PRINCIPALS: YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THAT BOOK, IF YOU GET A MOMENT.
IN CLOSING: AARGH.
This is an awfully nice illustration of what I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. Jeremy took the first picture; the composition’s not ideal but you can see my position, which is the point of this exercise. You can see my thigh muscle, such as it is, just sort of sitting there like a lamb roast, with my lower leg dangling off it in a pendulumish fashion. You can see how hunched my shoulders are and how I have tipped forward ahead of Bella’s motion. As a result she is jumping very flat. You can’t imagine her getting over anything bigger in this sort of form. Luckily, this picture was taken almost two years ago.
This next shot is a couple of weeks old. Not to brag or nothing, but check out how much rounder and more athletic Bella looks. That’s because I am not riding her quite so much like a bag of puddings.
Much remains to be done! My ankles are still deplorably weak, especially the left one, which I broke, and I still need a stronger core and to sit more quietly. My hands need to be a hair lower to make the line from my elbow to the bit perfectly straight. But I have improved a heap. This makes me quite unreasonably happy. Living out your childhood fantasies: I recommend it.
Yes, they are both meditative middle-aged memoirs by great lesbian writers. Both dramatize the writer’s complicated relationship with her mother and both name-drop Woolf and Winnicott all over the damn place. And YES YOU HAVE TO READ THEM BOTH. I don’t care. Cancel your calls.
Henry James did no good when he said that Jane Austen wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. These things made me angry.
I love them at least in part because the NY Times gave Bechdel a shitty review that boils down to “These women! How dare they think their inner lives are interesting?” Therefore reading these books is exactly the same as jabbing a burnt stick into the eyes of the Four Boresmen of the Aborecalypse (Mailer, Bellow, Roth and Updike. Could those guys HAVE more cockish names?) And if that doesn’t make you want to read them I don’t know what will.
I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.
I remember curling up in Books Upstairs in Dublin, right outside the gates of Trinity College, and reading Dykes to Watch Out For like it was going to save my life. I can’t have been in Ireland for more than a week. And I never connected with Winterson in the same way; I’ve never even seen Oranges. But this book! This book. It took me apart.
I know these are ways of surviving, but maybe a refusal, any refusal, to be broken lets in enough light and air to keep believing in the world – a dream of escape.
Me: “Those people totally had it coming. I was within my rights to kill them with my laser beam eyes.”
Jeremy: “Uh huh.”
Me: “If God didn’t want me to kill people with my laser beam eyes, he wouldn’t have given me laser beam eyes.”
Jeremy: “Do you have laser beam eyes?”
Me: “…no.”
I booked the hotel months ago, but I realized on Friday night I never got around to buying eclipse glasses. By Friday night they seemed sold out throughout Northern California. Tears and recriminations ensued. On the bright side, during the make-up family hug, Claire said: “I took it out on Julia but I was actually mad at you,” which is a pretty sophisticated bit of emotional insight for a 9yo. The next morning I called Scope City as soon as they opened, and before I said hello the man on the other end said “We have a shipment of eclipse glasses arriving at 11.30am.” I laughed and said “We’ll be there,” and we were.
Christmas saved, we drove to Chico to see Tina and JD. Chico has dammed its river and built a swimming area around it.
There are so many storybook-style houses, it looks like the freakin Shire. It’s gorgeous. My daydream now is to be writer-in-residence at Chico State.
In Redding we saw the Sundial Bridge. What can I say? I’ve wanted to see it ever since I knew it existed. It sits on a bend in the Sacramento, with the snow-streaked Cascades to the north and trees all around. It’s a cantilever spar cable-stayed bridge, so its modernity stabs you with its sharp gnomon. What I didn’t know is that it also has Spanish ceramic mosaic all around the dial and down into the plaza at its base, so it feels like Parc Guell had a love baby with a James Turrell earthwork.
There’s a big science museum right there, too, so we got to watch the animal show with an iguana and a black vulture and a turkey vulture and a red-tailed hawk and a Stellar’s jay and a porcupine called Spike and a raccoon and a grey fox and a barn owl called Cricket and two cockatoos. Claire was the audience volunteer for the Stellar’s jay. She was given a hat with antlers and the jay perched on her head!
And then we hung out in the plaza under the bridge until the moon ate the sun, and we watched it through our eclipse glasses.
And it was epic. At totality, everyone clapped and cheered.
We drove all the way back. We had dinner in Williams, which is literally a cowtown. Our restaurant prides itself on cutting its own sides of beef, and is decorated with the brands – as in branding-iron brands – of local cattle ranches. The garlic bread was a mountain of garlic and butter on a baguette. J and I still smell of garlic 24 hours later.
I am so not Hollywood’s demographic any more. A good way to annoy me is to pretend to blow up the Very Large Array and Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library. I’ve had enough explosions in Manhattan to last several lifetimes, thanks. But there was a fun ragtag-band-of-misfits story in there somewhere. Thor is adorable – I keep calling Jeremy to say in my best baritone “DO I LOOK TO BE IN A GAMING MOOD” – and I could have watched three hours of Tony/Bruce and Clint/Natasha casually invading one another’s personal space. To me there is more jeopardy in an exchange of looks than in a nuclear missile. I am so not Hollywood’s demographic any more.
preoccupations
