R (reading from a wholesome book): “I’ve dreamed of being an artist ever since I was a small girl.” What do you two want to be when you grow up?

Ada: I want to be a horsy farmer.

Claire: I dreamed I had a horsy and it died.

Grown-up dinner with Uncles Barney and Rob. I had steamed asparagus with parmesan and a delectable truffle emulsion; roast duck breast with corn crepes and fat tart raspberries; and warm chocolate pudding. Jeremy had cauliflower soup with curry oil, venison with juniper berries and a selection of fine cheesestuffs. We split a bottle of Sandhill 2001 cabernet sauvignon, and finished up with macchiatos. Everything was excellent.

Obligatory baby in sunglasses shot

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens.

…yeah, you know the rest.

C: I’m very brave. I want to hit the world. I want to hit it, and talk to it. The world is a boy.

Rach—-thinks she is better than—>Matthew Barney

“Oh no, poor me! I am a wealthy white man! I was on the high school football team, went to Yale and worked for a time as a J Crew model! My life is so incredibly privileged that I must impose external constraints in order to create my art! LOOK AT MY BEAUTIFUL TESTICLES!”

Grad school flashback! I bored Jeremy and Danny by reading at length from The Man in the High Castle:

“A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And – how many of us do know it? …

“It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing…

“It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life…

“And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness…

“What they do not comprehend is man’s helplessness.”

R: Dick’s so-called psychotic episodes? I think he was just telepathically watching TV in 2006.

D: He actually thought he was in Ancient Rome.

R: Same deal. Caligula, Nero.

D: Quinn doesn’t like Dick. She thinks he’s a misogynist.

R: Ha! Not like the golden-agers. Jerry Pournelle! Robert Heinlein! Although I still have a sneaking fondness for Heinlein.

D: What! Why?

R: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

J: But it was awful!

R: Yeah, but it was my awful. I must have been all of ten when I read it.(2)

D: Quinn has a good Jerry Pournelle story – the upshot is that he may be a bad man, but at least he’s no Harlan Ellison.

R: Do you think Harlan thinks he’s better than L. Ron? We really need a reverse hierarchy of SF authors!

D: Absolutely! With arrows marked “Thinks he is better than…”

R: Do you remember that when you were little, you called shoes patos?

C: Yes, because Blanca says zapatos. I said pato.

R: That’s right.

C: Pato! Quack!

C: Do you like slugs?

A: Yes.

C: And snails?

A: Yes.

C: Slugs and snails are bugs.

A: I have two houses. One house is here, that’s on earth. And one house is far away. It’s on Saturn.

C: You have two daddies.

A: Yes. I have Gilbert Daddy and I have Danny Daddy.

C: And you have one mummy.

A: Yes, only one mommy for me. Just one mommy. It’s sad.

C: I have one mummy and one daddy and one baby. And one cat!

A: I have a cat too!

Peter the Rocket Scientist called!

R: You’re here!

P: Better than that! I’ve moved back!

Claire has almost grown out of announcing her entrance with the words “Here am I am!” or declining a request with the explanation: “Because I don’t want for to.” This is very sad, but as Claire herself would say: “I’m big now, actually.”

C: When I was little I would say zed. Now I am big I say zee!

R: Australians say zed. Americans say zee.

C: I am American.

R: A part of me just died.

C (kindly): I’m Australian too.

Julia has silver eyes. She’s the most amiable and enigmatic of children, absurdly patient with Claire, endlessly curious. She climbs up the bedhead and over the sides of the sofa. She crawls at high speed. She walks, holding Blanca’s hands, laughing her baby head off.

Jeremy and I are having a secret affair. On Monday we snuck off to see a movie – The Illusionist. Ed Norton was sexy, but it failed the Mo Movie Measure, so caveat emptor. Also in the Department of Voices from the Other Side, I’m reading Out of Place on the J-Church trolley car, and having a long and passionate conversation with Edward Said in my head.

Listing…

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens.

At Camp Watanda. The hollow hull is filling with water; moments later, the boat capsized. I squealed and ran to help. A real photographer (like Quinn) would have kept clicking.

Q: I’m not sure that makes me a good person.

R: It makes you a bloody good photographer.

Housebound

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens.

This is the box Claire’s new chest of drawers came in. Jeremy carved windows, a door in the shape of Claire herself and even a little cat door for Bebe.

Met extraordinary people. Had ideas. Waved hands in air. Came home, collapsed exhausted on couch.

Nursed baby. Nursed baby. Nursed baby. I think she’s planning to double in size again.

I am in my tent at Foo Camp. It’s what Burning Man would be like if you held it in an office complex. This morning over bagels, I got to thank Kevin Kelly for starting Wired and changing my life.

It’s five to eleven. I can hear the contractually obligated drum circle (for it is written that, whenever two or three Californians come together, they will form a drum circle.) Julia is peacefully asleep. The only light comes from the screen of my iBook.

Ubiquitous Wifi is da bomb.

Four cheers for off-price department stores! I found black, square-toed, chunky-mid-heeled dress shoes by Prada for $99. They are the awesome! Also topical, as Kathy and I took the little ones to see The Devil Wears Prada in Japantown on the weekend. Julia and Martha, world’s most splendid babies, slept all the way through. San Francisco must be the best place in the world to see that film: when Meryl said “Everyone wants to be us!” the entire audience burst out in honest mirth.

Other recent treats: Chez Panisse with the Richardson-Harihareswaras (crostini, egg drop soup, souffle, figs); An African In Greenland.

…Jeremy’s plane has begun its descent into San Francisco. How do I know? I have had a Java applet open on my desktop all day, tracking his progress across Greenland and Canada.

I am lame.

ETA: I called him just as he turned his phone on. So there you have it. My husband survived the great hair-gel aviation disaster of 2006.

[15:29] mizchalmers: do you think if tolkien were alive today, hobbits would live in the unitary authority?
[15:30] phatfish50: they would be at war with the wombles
[15:30] mizchalmers: LOL
[15:30] phatfish50: madame cholet would be galadriel
[15:30] mizchalmers: great uncle bulgaria and gandalf face off
[15:30] mizchalmers: tobermory would kneecap legolas
[15:31] phatfish50: right. its got blockbuster written all over it

Jeremy survived his flight. I know, shock. Now he’s only facing the usual risks of a traveler in Cambridgeshire: quicksand, offal, disgruntled undergraduates.

Extreme tiredness has prompted a phase of reading first fantasy (some Kage Baker, some Emma Bull) then several old favourites. The latter inspired me to write my novel in the style of each. When I picked up Gertrude Stein the other day, I decided Anne’s voice would be all run-on sentences in lower case. Pnin rebuilt my plot in short-story blocks. Now I have my hot paws on Jessica Mitford’s Hons & Rebels, I’m working on a brittle aristocratic comedy of manners.

Yet another reason I love living in San Francisco: my copy of Hons & Rebels is inscribed to “Randy” from “Decca”, which was Mitford’s nickname. She lived and died in Oakland, so it’s almost certainly her handwriting. Took my breath away.

I gave up on both Crystal Fire (so badly written I couldn’t bear it) and The End of Faith (tweaked my anxiety over Jeremy’s flight). A History of Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, was a big success. The author Madawi al-Rasheed is descended from the Rashids, the only emirate that seriously challenged the Saud-Wahhabi hegemony in the Nejd, so the book is that rara avis, history told by someone other than the victors.

The chapters on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped me sort out the dramatis personae and their shifting alliances – Rashids, Sauds and Hashemites all playing off the Ottomans and the British for an edge in local politics. Social fissures everywhere – between oasis and tribes, town and countryside, Sunni and Shia, religious and political authorities, emirates and empires – presented substantial opportunities to the ambitious young man.

As the Ottoman Empire crumbled, Britain sent guns and money but opted for a hands-off managerial style. Eventually Ibn Saud took a haphazardly-federated Arabia (Najd, Hijaz, Hasa, Asir) while the Hashemite sons Abdullah and Faisal got the freshly-minted, largely fictional nations of Transjordan and Iraq.

Al-Rasheed made a very good point about the Shia farming community in Hasa, despised by the bedouin for being Shiites and fellahin and for not knowing their tribal genealogies. She argues that loss of genealogy does not necessarily indicate a foreign or non-Arab origin: it may be just another consequence of sedentarism, settled people tending to lose their stories. This ties nicely into the pictures Anne and Thesiger tend to paint of nomads wrangling amicably for hours over the lineage of their cousin or camel.