I read 150 books in 2011. Assume that I’ll live another 30 years, and say I get through another 100 books in each of those years. That’s only 3000 more books.

Shit. I have to read the rest of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.

I quite liked the Jennifer Egan and Allegra Goodman books, but fictionwise the discoveries of the year were Teju Cole, Sybille Bedford, Laurie Colwin and (is it really possibly I hadn’t read her before?) Lionel Shriver.

work trip to Seattle Jamey’s graduation party Ada sleepover Randall Museum riding lesson on Archie Cian playdate California Academy Heather’s birthday party *plonk*

1. Caviar sturgeon roe sea urchin chicken belly in a glass bowl with a mother of pearl spoon
Me: umami jewels
J: briny proteins!

Nicholas Feuillat champagne

2. Trout roe and a watercress leaf with dill, potato, shrimp
Me: one bite of creamy salad!
J: …not quite

CD: Music From When You Were In High School
Seriously not fucking kidding! The Eagles, Phil Collins, Thompson Twins, Men At Work!

3. Egg and cress sandwich with gold leaf
Me: that was good
J: REALLY good

Elton John, Benny and the Jets

4. Oyster with lemon verbena
Me: yum. You never get good oysters here
J: we should go to Sydney then

More Phil Collins! Billie don’t you lose my

5. Deconstructed and reassembled bluefin tuna with a rice poppadum
J: because nature didn’t make tuna tasty enough

6. Brassica is any cruciferous vegetable
Kale and broccoli chips in rye and barley with a quail egg in a bonita stock
Me: smells like home
J: roast chicken and kale

Invisible touch! Don’t stand so close to me!

Me: it’s my high school formal!

7. Lobster and turnip and Dungeness crab in a Meyer lemon cream
Me: if California were a soup it would be this soup

The Beatles. You Can Call Me Al!

Me: which Beatles song was it?
J: the one that goes plinky plinky I am tugging at your heartstrings

Wild Horses Couldn’t Drag Me Away

8. Tragic little exploded squid on a bed of its own risotto. Forgive me. It was delicious

OH: i really want succulents for our wedding. I want em in my bouquet

9. A liver dessert and beer. Seriously amazing
J: novel! All the other things were nice but this is remarkable!
Server: yes, the chef calls it foie toffee, with coffee beans

Every breath you take! Summer breeze!

10. 30 day aged pigeon with persimmon, orange, pressed pear, pomegrate and kalamatta olive

Narcisse Pinot noir

GONNA TAKE ME A LOT TO TAKE ME AWAY FROM YOU
IT’S NOTHIN THAT A HUNDRED MEN OR MORE COULD EVER DO
I FELT THE RAINS DOWN IN AFRICA

11. Brioche goat cheese course! So yummy

HOW DEEP IS YOUR LOVE AHAHAHAHA

12. When a lemon sorbet and a lemon meringue pie love each other very VERY MUCH

I WISH THAT I HAD JESSIE’S GIRL
WHERE CAN I FIND A WOMAN LIKE THAT

YOU CAN RELY ON THE OLD MAN’S MONEY
YOU CAN RELY ON THE OLD MAN’S MONEY

What is this more wine i don’t even

13. New Orleansean fantasia with TINY BEIGNETS

WHO’S GONNA PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR DREAMS
WHO’S GONNA PLUG YOUR EARS WHEN YOU SCREAM

EVERY LITTLE THING I DO IS MAGIC
EVERYTHING I DO JUST TURNS YOU ON

14. Popcorn ice cream

Disastrous date to the right of us: a sullen silence is still silence

Disastrous date to the left of us: PLEASE DON’T EVER ASK ME WHAT I MEAN

WHO CAN IT BE NOW?

PRIVATE EYES ARE WATCHING YOU
THEY SEE YOUR EVERY MOVE

Dear God I have to be on a plane at 7am. And so to bed.

I didn’t think she would really get out of bed, but at dawn Claire and I were indeed up on Bernal Heights, watching the lunar eclipse. Then this evening she pored over Jeremy’s copy of Full Moon. I love her so much.

Last Friday I rode Dudley, sweet Dudley, beautiful Dudley. He’s a thoroughbred-ish bay with a chewed-off half a tail (Jeremy: “Which half?”) and I have come to love him with a pure love. I have called him “Bella, only uphill” and “my favourite now.” It was a cold morning and he came out of the stall very short in front and stiff in the shoulder. He’s in his teens and arthritic – he was a perfect child’s hunter for years – so he’s entitled to be a little ouchy, but I am not yet a soft and giving enough rider to warm him up out of it properly, so Dez said “Let me get on him for a second.”

I love watching the trainers ride, and I had never seen Dudley under saddle before, and it was an eye-opener. I saw how still Dez kept her lower leg and how tactful but firm she was. Most of all I saw that when she asked Dudley to move off her leg and use his back and flex at the poll, he did it, and then she rode him around with almost no pressure on the reins, but his nose stayed down because he was working correctly. And behold, he was not sore. Behold, in fact, he was incredibly beautiful.

“He takes way more leg than you think,” said Dez when she gave him back, and this turned out to be the key insight.

I got back on determined to do better, and put my lower leg on and kept it on, and asked him for deep and round and low, and he gave it to me and was far happier. Dez was thrilled with me. Getting a horse on the bit is a vexed topic – look! I have written about it at absurd length already – but the critical point is to ask and not demand, to use tact and not force. If you pull the horse’s head in, it doesn’t count. On that ride on Dudley I felt how I could use that strong leg to move him forward into a steady contact from behind. (One of the things I like best about Dudley is that he lets me feel that I am in charge of where his hind legs go.)

And then I tried it with Louie, on Sunday morning, and he was a different horse, more responsive, less spooky. And then I tried it again on Bella this morning. You can’t haul Bella’s nose in when you first get on her anyway. She has too much self-esteem. That mare has nineteen dozen different ways of expressing the concept “Fuck you” with her back hooves. But when we came back from a canter I kept my leg on and held the outside rein and squeezed the inside rein. She did that “Seriously, screw you” thing she does with her neck and shoulders, and then, and then, she settled into a sweet round frame.

I kept asking and kept asking and we did two or three big circles, and for three or four strides on the last one I felt her move up into a little self-carriage, bending her whole body on the arc of the circle, arch-necked, so perfect, so beautiful.

(Dudley’s adorable and divine, but my favourite? Bella’s my favourite. Who else?)

I feel like I have taken myself apart – putting my heels down, strengthening my calves, unpinning my knees, rolling my thighs forward, sitting on my seatbones, keeping my hips elastic, half-halting from my abs, opening my shoulders, keeping my eyes tracking ahead, making my elbows soft, doing less and less and less with my hands. Concentrating on one of those things for two or three or four lessons at a time. Now, finally, I am strong and balanced enough to put it all together.

Because riding a horse is actually very easy. You think about all of those things all the time, and work really really hard to make your body relaxed and supple, and then you apply exquisitely correct aids.

Works every time!

Saturday was my best visit ever to the Dickens Fair. I found a bodice that almost exactly matches my silver-grey skirt, and wore them with a white peasant blouse and a black leather belt and high-heeled boots and a couple of strings of jet that used to be Mum’s. I looked adorably steampunk.

The kids are old enough now that I don’t panic as much when they are out of sight, mostly, and they don’t whine or need to be carried, as much. This has had an enormously positive effect on my wellbeing. It’s most noticeable with the things we do once a year. I started going to the Fair when Julia was a babe in arms, and two or three hours used to be a long visit for us. This year we were there when it opened and almost closed it down. I don’t get as tired or irritable, and I don’t get that terrible feeling of having heavy weights hanging off me all the time, so that my very skin aches. Small children are an unimaginable amount of work. But my children are not small any more. Vast relief, and of course also, great ruefulness and sentimentality.

We got to do many more things. We heard Rudyard Kipling read The Elephant’s Child, and sketched live models in a Pre-Raphaelite Salon. Burne-Jones was there, and William Morris. And I learned how to waltz! I’ve waltzed before, but I can’t turn my head fast enough. So my lovely partner said “Just look into my eyes,” and so I did and the camera swirled around us and the music soared and I laughed my fool head off, and he said “Yes! This is how Victorians got high!” and I said “I finally get why it was so scandalous!”

Foxhunting and waltzing and Jane Austen. The pommification is starting to take.

It’s a terrifying book. Austen only wrote horror stories. One is dumbfounded by the narrowness of their escape. Lizzy’s predicament is up in your face but I am acutely aware, this time, of Darcy’s. Magnificent estate schmagnificent schmestate. His chances of happiness are slimmer even than hers. Lizzy’s constant companion since earliest childhood? Jane. Darcy’s? That bastard Wickham.

Darcy was raised by wolves.

He’s so constrained. He is so alone. He is twenty-six years old and running the equivalent of a Fortune 100 company. He has hundreds of dependents. His mother and father are dead. Georgiana may turn out to be bright, and poor old Colonel Fitzwilliam is sadly underused, but Bingley and his sisters are not clever people (Caroline has rat-cunning but no real wit) and Lady Catherine de Burgh is a vicious fool.

Why does Darcy fall in love with Lizzy? Same reason anyone does. A person looks at you out of their eyes. Suddenly you are no longer the only person in the room.

IMG_20111125_113607.jpg, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

Now the hunter has become the hunted!

I’ve been riding at McIntosh long enough now to have a sense of the changing seasons. In summer, the poplars sparkle in the sunshine and we jump vast fences, laughing at danger. Then one day in October someone flips the switch and it’s winter. The horses have the wind under their tails and riders faceplant in the mud.

By November the outdoor arenas are knee-deep in wet and lessons are in the indoor, where the insane horse-traffic is punctuated by ponies having hysterics on the longe line, and where I cannot ride for toffee.

I’ve had three consecutive Tuesday evenings in the indoor on Louie, who it appears I have not introduced. Louie! Where to begin. He is a black Arabian gelding of extreme typiness. His head is very dished, his ears are small and point together, his eyes are like liquid planetoids melting with expression, his muzzle would fit in a teacup, his coat is velvet, his hoofs are porcelain, his tail is a silken black banner.

He’s the very incarnation of Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion, and when I was a child (and very pro-Arabian horse) I thought that kind of beauty would be an ALL SHALL LOVE HIM AND DESPAIR sort of experience. In fact, hunter/jumper barns consider exquisite black Arabian horses to be pretty much hilarious, and the standard reaction when people see him is more in the OOGLE WOOGLE OO IS AN ICKLE WICKLE PONY end of the spectrum.

I must say Louie doesn’t do much to undermine hunter/jumper stereotypes with respect to the Arabian horse. For the first few weeks he was here, every time he jumped a fence he would duck his head between his front legs so that he could glare at it as he went over to make sure that it didn’t move. He’s gained confidence since then, and his big schtick now is Being Alarmed By The Shadows, Being Alarmed By Creaky Sounds In The Roof, Being Alarmed By Those Fence Poles Stacked Over There, and Just Generally Being Alarmed. He bucks, he stands on his hind legs, he twirls. It’s not as scary as it sounds, because he’s probably only 15hh or 15.2 at most, and even my little short legs can wrap around him and stay on.

He makes me appreciate Bella and Dudley (who it appears I have not introduced.) Those guys are experts. When I give inexpert aids, they fill in the gaps. Louie’s not dumb (probably? A bit hard to tell. Excitable! Filled with glee!) but he was a parade horse; he has no very deep understanding of what it is we are trying to do. Bella and Dudley have theory. They can slice up courses and nail distances better than I can. Louie is always being surprised by poles. He hasn’t figured out yet that the poles are the point, the poles are part of a pattern, the pattern is the way people and horses play games and solve puzzles together. So I have to tell him more, explain things to him.

What’s really lovely about Louie is how responsive he is, how light my aids can be, how he does exactly what I tell him to do. What’s endlessly funny and humbling about him is that when he slams on all four brakes, snorting fire like a young and intemperate dragonlet, then Harrier Jump Jet vertically takes-off over A SINGLE POLE ON THE GROUND it’s because, oh God the shame, that’s exactly what I told him to do.

The way I know I love riding is that even when I am terrible, even when the horse is going backwards and sideways, even when I need three days of Ibuprofen to iron out the consequent kinks in my back, I still had more fun that I would have had doing almost anything else.

Trigger warning for: Wickham

Things you notice for the first time on the umptieth read through: the chronology is so exact you could set your watch by it.

Darcy wrote his letter to Elizabeth on Friday, April 10, 1812. In it, he says:

About a year ago, she was taken from school, and an establishment formed for her in London; and last summer she went with the lady who presided over it, to Ramsgate; and thither also went Mr. Wickham, undoubtedly by design…

So Wickham’s attempted rape of Georgiana took place after April 1811 but before, say, September of that year.

Bingley took possession of Netherfield “before Michaelmas”; ie, the quarter-day on which houses were traditionally let: September 29.

This explains something that had always puzzled me: why did Bingley and Darcy come to Hertfordshire anyway? Bingley was clutching at straws, hoping a change of scene might help. Help whom? Darcy, who was blaming himself for his sister’s near-catastrophe.

Proud? Prejudiced? Sure, but Darcy’s early scenes resonate even more if you read him as clinically depressed (my diagnosis) or suffering from PTSD (per Liz.)

Pobrecito. No sooner is he finding Elizabeth’s face rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression in her dark eyes, than (on Tuesday, November 20) he runs into her in the street in Meryton – being introduced to that rapey douchebag Wickham. Fun times, fun times.

So far ahead of his time. On institutional corruption:

While I was an undergraduate, I had regarded all these men merely as figures of fun, but when I became a Fellow and attended college meetings, I began to find that they were serious forces of evil. When the Junior Dean, a clergyman who raped his little daughter and became paralysed with syphilis, had to be got rid of in consequence, the Master went out of his way to state at College Meeting that those of us who did not attend chapel regularly had no idea how excellent this worthy’s sermons had been.

I hear Penn State is good at some kind of sportsball. And Australian journalists are currently apologizing for yet another abuser because he wrote with great sensitivity about cricket. ALL RIGHT THEN. Here is Russell on Keynes:

…it seems to be to be owing to him that Britain has not suffered from large-scale unemployment in recent years. I would go further and say that if his theories had been adopted by financial authorities throughout the world the great depression would not have occurred. There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for those occurrences does not rest with Providence.

I tweeted parts of that second quote through my work account, and an apparently-Randroid work contact pointed out that many books disagree, notably Friedman and Schwartz in their A Monetary History of the United States. Esprit d’escalier: I should have replied that I regard the current recession as an act of those who regard Friedman as God.

In the same tweet I called Russell Edwardian Cambridge’s Skud. Skud raised a virtual eyebrow, but I stand by it: I meant the lucid prose style and the ability to, for example, shed light on a bitter political struggle by examining a version control system.

Bella was fresh on Sunday morning. Maybe… maybe too fresh. We rode a bending line from a crossrail to a vertical, then we were supposed to roll back to an oxer. But I was over-focused on the vertical and forgot about the rollback until we had landed, at which point I asked Bella for a canter pirouette in front of the sunken lane and she responded with three sharp bucks. I have a distinct memory of hovering above her at the top of the parabola, still holding the reins, saying in conversational tones: “Oh. Shit,” before gravity took over and I plummeted to earth.

I landed on the broad plane of my pelvis and knocked the wind out of myself. I have spent the week with a cowboyish hitch in my gait and a large bottle of Ibuprofen to hand.

Sometimes I worry this blog will turn into Interesting Falls From My Horse.

A chocolate mouse, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

Claire is having her school friends round for a cat party. Have mercy upon me O Lord.

“Once there was an evil witch and she made a spell that looked like blueberry juice. The people loved blueberry juice so much they drank it all up and then they were under the spell! The evil witch cackled and cackled. One young girl did not drink the blueberry juice because she did not like blueberry juice. Her name was Bella. The evil witch disguised herself. But she loved apple juice. The witch made the spell look like apple juice and taste like apple juice as well. The girl drank it all up!

“Then the little girl followed her everywhere and the other people did as well. Then she noticed something. That she was following the evil witch! And she told everyone! It didn’t curse her at all. It half-cursed her. Then Bella’s big sister Calypso became the new evil witch. The witch drank the evil spell. But! Calypso wanted a partner and she chose Bella. And her friend as well. Her name is Julia. But! Julia saw Bella and she really really really wanted to be a witch. But then Julia saw the old witch. She became a member of the Witch Family.

“And Calypso wanted her as a partner as well. And a speeding cheetah came to the castle! And gave them a potion! But! They all four of them drank it up together and went to show everyone in the entire city that they were best friends! In the entire world! Everyone yelled “We love the new witch Calypso!””

Claire: “Mama, what do you think is the most dangerous part of a lion or a bear? Lemony Snicket says it is the stomach, because by then you are already torn up and eaten. But I say that by the time you get to the stomach you are already dead, and so Lemony Snicket is not reasonable.”

I expected to hate the place. I expected to lie low and conceal my politics and edge towards the exit. I was pre-alarmed by the non-ironic Stetsons.

I did not expect a city in Texas to make me catch my breath at its beauty. But for all the corporate touristy shit slathered on it, the San Antonio River Walk is bone-beautiful. Arching trees and ducks paddling on the dappled water, and the cafes nestled in cool grottos.

I didn’t expect it to be so Mexican. Or its Mexicanness to make me feel so at home.

But it was Texas. My taxi driver back to the airport, a gorgeous Hispanic grandfather, fielded a call from his wife, who was in tears. Their son’s childhood friend, Frank Garcia, had lost his last-minute appeal. His execution went ahead as scheduled.

Trigger warning for child abuse

My cheery holiday reading included this bleak account of the prosecution of seven Pitcairn Island men (of a population under fifty) for raping children. Amazingly, or not, one of their lines of defense was that they did not consider themselves part of the British Empire (this after decades of hanging the Queen’s portrait everywhere and welcoming the DoE and Lord Mountbatten as their own personal royalty in 1971) and that, consequently, they were unaware that forcing sex on pre-pubescent girls is wrong.

The “We aren’t British” defense was officially put down by Lord Hoffman, president of the Privy Council, in 2006: “I must confess that I have (ha ha), I mean (ha ha), seldom heard a more unrealistic argument (ha ha).” But it is also undermined at every point by the language of the defendants. It’s not only that they spoke English (as well as their own dialect, Pitkern.) It’s the English they used. A disabled man is nicknamed “Mento”. A coward is a “woos.”

That’s the English they speak where I grew up, in the arse-end of the British Empire. Matter of fact nearly everything about Pitcairn seemed familiar to me: the thongs and shorts and t-shirts, the bullying, the wives who invited all the journalists over in order to lecture them for three hours about their husbands’ innocence. And then never socialized with them again.

That’s how things were where I grew up. I got scolded by lots of wives exactly like those wives, for stumbling blindly towards the same kinds of socially unacceptable questions. I was bullied by men like the Pitcairn men. I wasn’t raped, lucky me, but I was groped.

I’ve fallen into the lazy habit of describing that Australia as a “bully culture,” one in which cruelty and meanness and dehumanizing behaviour were routine. Marks herself touches on something like this:

…a sense of inferiority, because they were from such a tiny, faraway place and felt sure that everyone else was better educated than them, and more sophisticated.

Australian exceptionalism is such a neat little just-so story, and it ties Rupert Murdoch up with a pink ribbon like a little gift, how festive! But it’s unfair to all the Australians who aren’t bullies, and don’t partake in that culture. And it conveniently lets me off the hook for all the ways in which I bullied other people.

And nice as it would be to think that I left the bullies behind when I got on a plane, it’s not remotely true. Geek Feminism exists because of the bullying that’s endemic to online culture. Dick Cheney is nothing if not the king of all fat complacent war-profiteering bullies who sleeps dreamlessly each night on impossibly-high-thread-count sheets. Murdoch may have grown up in Australia but his slavering toadies at News and Fox are drawn from the entire Anglosphere. So what am I talking about here? What is bully culture and where does it come from?

Robin Fox, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says “Just because it’s isolated, and people are stuck there, doesn’t mean you get that outcome. If a bunch of Tahitians had settled on Pitcairn voluntarily with their pigs and their women, they would have set up a recognizable Polynesian society, and it would have been a different story.”

But it wasn’t a bunch of Tahitians, it was a bunch of English-speaking Westerners, and so what they set up instead was a recognizable…

Oh.

Oh.

Oh, shit.

To get to Oz Farm you drive for a million years on 101 then turn left and drive for a billion years on the most beautiful twisty turny roads in the world. The good news: in the mumblety years since we first ventured up there, my driving has improved out of sight. The bad news: I have daughters now, who get carsick. When we finally reached the domes, down an unpaved road, along a riverbed, over a log bridge and up through a bit of Middle-earth, it was with armfuls of vomity laundry to wash in the bath.

The good news: Oz Farm is still the loveliest place on the planet. The domes sit above the river, beside a meadow, under a redwood forest. We’ve never had such spectacular weather this late in the year. We could pick apples off the trees and eat them, but it was hot enough to swim in the river. We saw Stellar’s blue jays and frogs and falcons and deer and garter snakes and the bat that lives inside the domes. We climbed the Point Arena lighthouse and saw seals and a kestrel and the exhalations of a whale.

Mostly I lay in the sun and read, or sat by the fire and read. I caught up on any amount of sleep debt. We had ravioli and rack of lamb. Carole made lemon mousse. We drew pictures and played Carcassonne and took a sleeping bag outside so we could lie on the deck and watch the stars. Both Claire and Julia fell asleep in my arms.