Happy birthday Salome. Wendy, I still miss you. Wish you’d got to grow up and have adventures and babies too.

Dad asked the fair question of why I didn’t mention Dublin in my big England-confuses-me post. Thing is I don’t really associate Trinity with Oxbridge any more. It wasn’t a consolation prize and I can’t believe I ever thought it was. It was a miraculous escape and the beginning of my adult life. I learned vi there, for God’s sake! I spent the night of the Ireland-Norway world cup match reading the first copy of Wired magazine I had ever seen! Rathmines, the Long Room, Ha’penny Bridge, the Winding Stair, Ormond Quay, Newgrange: all mine. Ireland made me. I am listening to the Pogues as I write.

Spike counters, brilliantly, with Patrick White. To which Alex replies:

And for that matter, Jack White:

(Uptempo)

Oh well, they gonna make me king
Oh well they gonna make me king now
I pulled a sword out of a thing
They made me kiss the bishop’s ring
And now they gonna make me king now

So Lance is sleepin’ with the queen
My Lance is sleepin’ with the queen now
And though I think it kind of mean
I just don’t wanna make a scene
Cause I do love my wife the queen now

I wish that I could talk to Merlin
I wish that I could talk to Merlin
The night is dark, the world is whirlin’
My son the traitor’s flag’s unfurlin’
And I could really use you, Merlin

Me, I am working on Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Melbourne.

Email with Alex, reposted here for Spike and Francis:

My children are endlessly hilarious. Claire saw Jeremy reading my copy of T. H. White’s The Age of Scandal and asked “Is that the same author who wrote Stuart Little?” I said “That’s E. B. White but you know what? We’re going to keep you.”

It might have been interesting had they written each other’s books..

(from ‘Charlotte’s Web’ by T.H. White):

‘But how am I to be SOME PIG, Charlotte?’ asked Wilbur. ‘I don’t even think I’m much of a pig now.’

The spider rolled up her struggling prey, a small fruit fly, and meditatively injected it with paralysing venom.

‘You must root, Wilbur,’ she answered, her voice slightly muffled, as the fruit fly thrashed with decreasing vigour. ‘Root, dig and furrow, for it is in your nature to find the deepest and the most buried things. That, at least, is the wisdom as recorded by the best authorities. Spiders kill; pigs root. Excuse me just a moment.’

Charlotte dug her fangs into the fruit fly’s abdomen and sucked the liquefying flesh into her thorax. The fruit fly’s struggles ended, and its many-faceted eyes went a dull slate colour. Charlotte extracted her mandibles and smacked her lips.

‘Delicious,’ she said. ‘I always like a little snack before Vespers. In the meantime, however, I think we need a new word for you.’

‘I wish I could do that,’ said Wilbur wistfully, watching Charlotte dispose of the brittle husk of the fruit fly…

I would do a version of The Once and Future King as if by E.B. White but he’s just not imitable enough. Not by me, anyway.

Wart spent his long afternoons in the wood with his brother Kay, where they fished and fought and listened to the goshawks crying “Cree, cree!” and the frogs in the reeds remarking “Sweet, sweet interlude; sweet interlude.” For it is in the nature of boys in the summer to seek the earth and growing things; to watch the shoots unfurl as the manhood is unfurling within those bony chests. Such summers come but once and are soon over.

‘Well,’ said Templeton, twitching his whiskers, ‘sword or no sword, I’ll be gold-darned if HE’s gonna be king of England.’

Permission to blog this exchange?

Granted.

We went out onto Coe Fen, which is quite the loveliest part of Cambridge we’ve found so far, all birdsong and head-high wildflowers and fragrance. I ambled on as Claire and Julia, exploring in the verge, found a roly-poly, what I’d call a slater. Wikipedia calls it a woodlouse. Jeremy loaded it onto a piece of grass to bring it with us. The girls ran ahead, as its heralds.

When they caught up with me, the roly-poly was gone.

Claire collapsed with grief. She could not contain her sobbing. Julia stood stony-faced and sorrowful nearby; she could not be comforted. Jeremy was mostly amused but I remember what it was like to be that little and lose something you care about. I sat on the fen with Claire and told her about Sugar, my dog. I recited Sugar’s elegy and improvised one for the roly-poly:

We had a roly-poly,
he was on a piece of grass.
When we turned to look
he was gone, alas!
Roly-poly how we miss you.
When we see you next, we’ll kiss you.
Roly-poly we love you.
We would not make you into stew.

Claire’s weeping abated a little. I said: “There’s a cafe at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Shall we go and have hot chocolate? I think it’s what roly-poly would have wanted.” Jeremy snorted and I kicked him.

(Go give money to Burma and China. And then when you have compassion fatigue, come point and laugh at the non-disabled white girl who wants a pony.)

England confuses me. There are all these none-too-subtle reminders to Know Your Place, most recently when we went to Kings College Chapel for Evensong and a smiling Anglican person said “You are very welcome! Please sit in the antechapel in case the children need to leave in the middle of the service. I know it sounds horribly exclusionary but it’s not…” This after a fortnight of walking around the quite pretty public spaces in Cambridge looking through locked gates at the exquisite private spaces. It’s as if the class system here were set up intentionally to tweak my insecurities.

Oh.

And as it turned out the kids did need to leave early, Anglican liturgical music not being the overwhelming cultural touchstone for them that it is for me. Jeremy packed them off home and as I sat listening to the rest of the service I thought about the imaginary England of my childhood; the BBC and imported copies of Horse & Hound, Thelwell, Penguin Classics, Maree Suchting’s back copies of Punch and my grandmother’s Everyman Shakespeare and Kipling. Little wonder that everything in Australia seemed insubstantial and derivative. I was ignoring the dark sky and the thousand lost languages, and spending all my time in Edmund Blacket’s Main Quad and Christ Church St Laurence, explicitly modelled on the Perpendicular Gothic of Oxford and Cambridge.

Everything was a distant echo of the purported Real Thing, a black swan of trespass, &c. The unquestionably real and solid thing of my teens and twenties was my horse Alfie, the source of my obsession with Lady Anne and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Crabbet Arabians generally. Some of the best memories of my adolescence are dawn rides through Kur-ring-gai National Park. At least I was paying attention. Being in the place I was in. And when I thought about this, in Kings, it occurred to me that my malaise of the last few weeks might be attributable to my not being in the place I am in, and instead being bugged by my 21-year-old self who would cheerfully have killed to be here, albeit as a student, not as a townie wife.

So (here is my California stint for you) I went to sit down in the Christ Church choir stalls sixteen years ago with sad baby Rach. I said, Chin up old girl. You won’t believe me if I tell you how it turns out. You’re married to this extraordinary man! And oh my god, the children, you cannot imagine it, the way you love them makes you a better person. The members of your little family are all brilliant and hilarious and they smell good. And the place you live in! And what you do for a living! And oh my god, your friends!

As I did this (California is really getting to me, you can tell) I vividly remembered a moment that bitter February when I turned 22, with no clue what I was going to do. I sat in the choir stalls beside Moira, crying silently through the readings. And then I felt the ache in my chest ease a little, for no reason, as if someone had kindly patted my hand.

Here’s the thing. I knew nothing, really, about Oxford or Cambridge. I’d never been here and I still haven’t been to Oxford. I knew no one at any of the colleges. I asked Professor Riemer, the Grim Riemer, to write my academic references, and I’m pretty sure those references were bad. (Did he do me a favour there or not? Discuss.)

What I thought about Oxford was that I would get sort of promoted out of a life where I would have to scrabble and compete and use my wits, into a world of tenure, a world full of books. I saw myself sitting by a diamond-paned window, looking out on a lawn, reading a dusty tome. Life would effectively stop. These daydreams did not involve marriage or children or grocery shopping or going to the toilet. I would hover, I suppose. I would transcend.

Sixteen years’ hindsight makes it clear to me that this was a virginal death wish. (Incidentally I think I understand Sylvia Plath a lot more than I did two weeks ago.) What I wanted was not to have to grow up. I felt I needed tenure because otherwise I would certainly be fired. I needed the ivory tower because I couldn’t possibly cope out in the big world. I needed the imprimatur of Oxbridge because there was no other way I could avoid being exposed as the idiot I am.

Now I am presented with the unexpected option of not minding about any of this. Of thinking of Cambridge as a funny, beautiful old town full of posh (and not-posh) people, with some good colleges and some bad ones. Of thinking of class as a social construct, not a measure of worth. Of thinking of myself as just this person, you know? Yes, England confuses me.

My sense of humour has returned! The peanut gallery cries: How can you tell? It is raining in Cambridge which is far more appropriate, pathetic fallacy-wise, because I can stomp through puddles and properly enjoy my crankiness. Also my cousin has turned up after I was worried about her.

Cambridge is terribly suburban. The car rental places close at 1pm on a Saturday, for example, and the local theatre is showing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love. No link for you, hackmeister; not after the Venetian in Vegas, where Phantom of the Opera was playing in the lifts, on infinite loop.

I read Porterhouse Blue. What a vilely sexist, not-very-funny mess that was. Better books since, notably Our Horses In Egypt with its lovely breathless vernacular prose style rather like Mitford. I was especially pleased that author Rosalind Bulben credited the Anzacs with taking Damascus, and not that idiot Lawrence. Fighting words! But you know it’s true!

The flat we’re in is very nice, and one block from a gorgeous playground, and two blocks from the river and Jesus Green.

Inside the flat every room has a heavy fire door designed to close. The rental agency has provided little wedgy doorstops so you can prop them open.

So far these doorstops have been cellphones, templates for a family of paper people and, most recently, ice skates. We didn’t need to bring toys.

It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light at night to keep away the beasts.

With its Philip K. Dickian mirror-world and paranoia, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union has been the perfect choice of book for this weird and dislocated first week in Cambridge. Jewish Sitka, that frozen metropolis, has made me appreciate for the first time how many of the places I am homesick for never really existed. It’s also the perfect book to be reading on Mother’s Day when one’s useless cellphone will not connect one with one’s mother, except via text message.

The great blessing of this trip has been spending hours and hours with the godfathers, Grant and Chris. I’ve been a bit too wrecked to talk to them very coherently, but the girls have taken possession, showed off their best kung-fu moves and pieces of stick and leaf and are now perfectly comfortable swarming all over them. I do not know whether the godfathers are equally comfortable being swarmed over, but this is what they signed up for.

Cambridge is so very pretty, the colleges all jumbled up like Examples of European Architectural Styles, green space everywhere with spreading trees and daisies, people being hilariously drunk in punts. Such beautiful weather that I have a suntan. I’m finding it all very suspicious.

So we are in Cambridge! It didn’t help that we got here at the end of the week that started, for me, in Vegas; so what with the implausible Northern twilight and the pretty pretty greens and colleges so forth I have begun to think of this as just another themed casino. The Cantabrigian. With live shows called Tripos and Viva Voce! We punted on the Cam, which I insisted on spoonerizing, to my own hilarity and the resigned amusement of my entourage.

Anent which entourage Julia has jetlag which means that no one within earshot may rest. As a result Jeremy and I went for about six days with no more than four hours of sleep at a time. Jeremy coped with this better than I did; I was up at 5am yesterday, trying to help Claire in the bathroom, when I fainted. The flat has a wooden floor so I am sporting handsome bruises on my head and hip. It was extremely unpleasant but has had no alarming sequelae. I shall avoid recreating the circumstances.

Not suprisingly, my academic anxiety has been flickering on and off like a flaky Wifi signal. I had another good hard look at the MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, a course I’ve thought about doing before. Grace Hopper, maybe, or Unix as literature? But I couldn’t help thinking I already have a perfectly nice MPhil that I am extremely fond of, and that the books I dream of having written aren’t academic texts at all but novels. And you don’t need any degrees from anywhere to write novels.

This cheering thought had me working on the novella on the train to and from London today. It’s far from perfect but there’s some decent writing in there. That said, I think I’m going to have to smash it to bits and patch the bits together if I want to get it to the next stage. I think it’s publishable as is but that’s not really enough for me any more; I think I can do better. Guh! What’s happening to me? IS IT SOMETHING IN THE CAMBRIDGE WATER SUPPLY???

Hit my deadlines. Worked about seventy hours this week. Work, dinner, bedtime, sleep, work.

Why didn’t you all tell me about Cassandra at the Wedding? Which bit did you think I wouldn’t like? The Didion-ish voice? The debt to Patricia Highsmith? The fact that it is apparently source material for The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, best book about an insane bishop EVAR??? Come on, people! What have we been talking about all this time?

I’m in Vegas again. It sometimes feels like the entire ten years in America (ten years today!) has consisted of interstices between sojourns in Vegas.

It is impossible to say anything original about this place, the single most indefensible city on earth. I have a sneaking fondness for its excesses, the ship at Treasure Island that sinks every hour, the fountains at the Bellagio. Then I walk across a casino floor and see the ringwraiths chained to their slot machines. Everything here is paid for via punitive taxes on the very poor.

I’m staying in the Venetian, which is exactly like Venice if Venice were in Hell.

I miss the Fitzhusband and the little Fitzhardlinges.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Not actually a joke but honest confusion. And anosognosia, which I hadn’t realized there’s a word for. Ric’s in a steady state for now, so Jeremy is coming home.

It’s a bit hard to wrench Yatima back into its usual grooves, but I’ll try. Elizabeth Moon’s lovely, Le Guin-ish Remnant Population posits an alien society where the highest status is accorded to the nannies. A wonderful, stubborn, defiant, angry old woman of a book. When I finished it I got on the floor with the kids and we played crazy games until bedtime.

From Jeremy: “Better today. He spent the day sitting up in his chair. I arrived after lunch, and he asked if I was there to give my thoughts on Australia’s future.”

Even though the sun is shining, there’s a freezing cold wind blowing and rattling the house. YES, THANKS NATURE, I GET IT. Could you STOP NOW?

The girls are at their most splendid. In our wanderings around Baja Noe today I got stopped by three separate sets of strangers today to be told how completely lovely they are. Jules in a little pink dress with her shock of white candy-cotton hair, and those unsettling blue eyes. Claire in a hummingbird t-shirt and cords with a kicky new bob and indomitable scowl. They’re both being extra well behaved, and showering me with random affection. You’d think they were empathic.

Hard to read or write – can’t summon the attention span. Easier to attack long-procrastinated chores. The cat litter has never been cleaner, and the last hardy tomatoes on the terrace have been ruthlessly watered.

It is a rhetorical figure and a form of personification. In the strictest sense, delivering this fallacy should be done to render analogy.

…or as we learned it in my undergrad English classes, the pathetic fallacy occurs when the hero is sad and so it starts to rain. Or more accurately, it’s raining, so you know that the hero is sad. We had English in the Woolley building, not in the Main Quad; Archaeology was in the Quad and that’s why I love jacaranda trees. I was ambivalent about English, my forte, and passionately in love with Archaeology, which at times I barely passed. Nothing changes.

The only piece of actual Sydney Uni culture I ever picked up was that by the time the jacaranda is blooming, it’s too late to study. I didn’t study much, which may be why Archaeology gave me such a thrashing. I would sit underneath the jacaranda gazing at Danielle and her Mycenean golden hair, waiting for Alexander Cambitoglou to enlighten us on the techniques behind red figure vases, or Jean-Paul Descoeudres to blow my mind with his readings of the floor plans of Pompeiian villas.

I was a bit surprised to learn that jacarandas aren’t Australian natives (its placement in the Quad, of course, should have been a clue. Once you’re in the Quad you’re not supposed to be in Australia any more, you’re in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Oxford!) Anyway, I was pleased to find, on the day we moved in to our San Francisco home, that the street tree outside was a jac. With yellow-and-red roses growing at the foot of it, like the ones I carried at my wedding. I’ve been gazing into its upper branches for four years.

And for the last week or two I’ve been watching its leaves fade and fall.

Well, it’s a tough spot for any tree, on a slope with not a lot of direct light in the winter, and our jac got rootbound and has died. And it’s probably not worth trying to save the roses either. So I’m going to pull everything out and rebuild the tree well and replant something that might be able to cope with the rough conditions, and I am going to ignore the symbolism of it all because it’s just tacky and overdone, like how Nature has absolutely no taste when it comes to sunsets.

Ric’s not doing very well. Jeremy’s leaving in a few hours.

dsc_4618.jpg

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

Jeremy’s flying back to Australia tomorrow.

I’ve been having insanely great book luck of late, thanks to comments threads tenderly farmed by very good writers and editors. The first important find was Sarah Caudwell, who is one of those impossibly overdetermined Brits: her brothers are the journalists Alexander and Patrick Cockburn and her mother was the inspiration for Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Sarah Caudwell died in 2000 of stupid cancer. Cancer and I are not friends.

Caudwell wrote four novels. Thus Was Adonis Murdered tackles murder and tax avoidance in Venice; The Shortest Way to Hades examines the legal and tax implications of an inheritance, and a couple of consequent murders, in the Greek Isles. In The Sirens Sang of Murder a homicide investigation moves among several offshore tax havens, including the Channel Islands and the Bahamas, and The Sibyl in Her Grave… well, you get the idea. Caudwell was herself a tax lawyer and has the remarkable gift of making tax law seem almost as cozy and amusing as English murder mysteries.

Received wisdom on Caudwell is that she depends too much on letters and that her central characters are thin. I spit on received wisdom with more vehemence even than usual. Caudwell is a literary writer, as her elaborately classical titles might suggest; intertextual knowledge plays a key role in practically all of the books; and she revels in the epistolatory form almost as much as she loves a good last will and testament. As for her central characters, beautiful Ragwort, scatty Julia, honey-voiced Selena and trickster Cantrip who through no fault of his own attended Cambridge, it’s true that they do not Grow and Change and Have Epiphanies over the course of the novel in the approved American/MFA/Raymond Carver mode; in fact the women especially have lots of hot and inconsequential sex, and everyone drinks and smokes and gossips and skives off work and is just as delightful and irreverent at the end of the book as at the beginning.

The point is that they’re Greek gods, not people as such, a point underscored by the fact that the narrator Hilary Tamar, an Oxford don, is of indeterminate sex. Caudwell is perfectly capable of writing fully human characters. In fact the resolution of each of her quite fiercely difficult mysteries depends on people behaving in absolutely credible, bloody-minded and self-defeating human ways. Now not to brag or anything but I have read a lot of Golden Age detective fiction. I cut my teeth on Conan Doyle and was bored with Agatha Christie at thirteen. I didn’t stop with Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey but read all of Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh and their heirs, people like PD James and Kerry Greenwood. It’s very rare for me to get to the last third of a mystery – at least one that’s fair, with no Deus ex Machina, and Caudwell is scrupulously fair – without having solved the crime. Caudwell beat me, four for four; my best showing in the last two books was to get to her penultimate red herring. Yet she always gets there in a plausible way. It is a feat!

There’s such pleasure in being in skilled and confident hands. There’s the subversive thrill of Caudwell’s unabashed snobbery – Hilary can barely understand Cantrip, because of his impenetrable Cambridge dialect. There’s the light yet beautifully sustained humour. Yet the books never become vengeful or sadistic, as it’s so easy for even a great practitioner like Sayers to do, because Caudwell is a humanist to the bone. She is interested in people: what they do, how they behave. There’s a letter at the end of Sibyl that I won’t spoil for you, because of course you’re all going to rush out and read all four, but it is at once a complete surprise and yet absolutely right, the only possible denouement; and almost unbearably sad.

These books are perfect of their kind. I wish very much that there were more.

I was expecting a very bad time of it after Caudwell – there is not much worse than going cold turkey after the death of a beloved author – but I was lucky enough to follow her up with Bridge of Birds, Ha’penny and Bad Magic. None quite reached Caudwell’s heights – I had figured out the end of Bridge half way through – but all gave great character, especially Ha’penny with its host of crypto-Mitfords. And so to bed.

[10:27] skud11111: morning!
[10:27] mizchalmers: mmm
[10:27] mizchalmers: i sneezy
[10:27] skud11111: oh noes
[10:27] skud11111: i itchy
[10:29] skud11111: can’t figure out if it’s allergies, just dry skin, or whether i’m imagining it.
[10:29] mizchalmers: i think it’s allergies
[10:29] mizchalmers: i get nosebleeds
[10:29] mizchalmers: and this feeling like an el alamein fountain of pain in my sinuses
[10:30] mizchalmers: sinii?
[10:30] skud11111: ow
[10:30] skud11111: sinupodes
[10:30] mizchalmers: stupid sexy pollen
[10:30] skud11111: arboreal bukkake
[10:30] skud11111: i had to explain arboreal bukkake to chris at the gym the other day
[10:30] skud11111: or more to the point, i had to explain bukkake
[10:30] skud11111: had to.
[10:30] skud11111: in the middle of a set of squats
[10:30] skud11111: you know how it is.
[10:31] mizchalmers: permission to blog?
[10:31] skud11111: go ahead.