A Year to Let Happen

Life is a dance between making it happen and letting it happen

Dear Reader

We’re deep into summer in the subtropics. I am hating it.

It is raining all the time, and the humidity is intense. It feels the way experimental jazz sounds, when it is played really loud. Wild. Too wild.

Be warned, there is even more grizzling about this weather below…

But in the meantime. How was January for you¹? This year is my year of prioritising. I know a concept is important to me when as soon as I get interested in it, I immediately start seeing it everywhere. So, right after making it my New Year’s resolution I came across this quote from Naomi Klein that I really like in Doppleganger: "Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritise. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves." (As forecast, I just finished reading this book - it’s great).

I am developing the skill to surrender to things happening² and to find the calm in order to prioritise. It’s a very grown-up kind of resolution, isn’t it? Middle age has been a lot of working things out. It’s been difficult but immensely satisfying. I find myself almost too curious. I can barely keep up with my curiosities.

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Sometimes It Takes Me Years to Understand What I’ve Done

I don’t always know what I’m doing. I’m often lost and struggling through a process and a set of ideas and emotions that I don’t always understand. Sometimes it takes me years to really understand what I’ve done… That’s why I think it’s so important to really sort of get out of the way of the work… I simply know that I need to make something.. I need to realise something, grapple with something, and I do that.. allowing the work to be what it is… allowing the meaning to emerge as it emerges. And maybe five years from now I’ll see something in the work that I really didn’t know that I was after.

- Carrie Mae Weems

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Soundtrack for Now

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We Are All Hating Summer This Year

Personally, I hate summer in the subtropics every year. (The fact that the other seasons are pure magic in the subtropics sort of makes up for the summers here). But, it is quite nice to see everyone else joining me in hating summer this year.

For instance, I like Casey Joy’s Learn to Garden Instagram a lot - it’s super demystifying and joyful³, but even her posts are filled with what amounts to summer-hatred right now.

And, this is an amusing read from Rick Morton’s Nervous Laughter newsletter about summer in Queensland:

Let’s begin with my sister Lauryn and her four-week-old baby. Both are camping with her partner J’s extended family in north Queensland where the humidity has the density of a brick and the mosquitoes can airlift small children. Apparently little Hugh didn’t sleep well one night which didn’t seem at all surprising to me but then we received reports he was beginning to ‘acclimatise’. This is wrong. Nobody in Queensland ever acclimatises; they give up.

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A Book to Have on Pre-Order

I really enjoy experimental memoir writing⁴ so, I can’t wait to read Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries.

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More of My Psychoanalysis Obsession

I currently have such a crush on psychoanalyst, Orna Guralnik after watching Couples Therapy. She’s so damned clever, so evolved, so humble and, well, so gorgeous. The series is currently available for free on SBS on Demand if this also sounds like your cup of tea.

And, Guralnik isn’t just any psychoanalyst, she is also one interested in investigating the political dimension in people’s lives.

In the two decades since she’d left Atlanta, Guralnik had lost her grasp of the nuances of American life. “We would end up every evening coming back home and discussing American culture, trying to crack the code,” she said. “If they say, ‘Let’s meet for lunch,’ what do they mean? If you start a sentence with ‘No,’ the way every Israeli starts a sentence, why do they get offended?” In graduate school, Guralnik was working with patients suffering from severe mental illness, and learning to recognize the specific social forces that helped shape pathologies—“the way that poverty and race play here, which is so different from Israel.”

After her consulting stint, Guralnik entered the postdoc program at N.Y.U. There, she gravitated to an influential group of faculty known as the “gang of four”: Goldner, Adrienne Harris, Jessica Benjamin, and Muriel Dimen, women who had been instrumental in applying feminist theory to psychoanalysis. “People who do psychoanalysis, they’re not just interested in change,” Guralnik told me. “They’re interested in meaning, and making meaning. You’re always trying to listen to what hasn’t been said.” For years, the unsaid thing, in the field itself, had been the influence that culture has on the psyche. Particularly in postwar America, psychoanalysis had been hermetically focussed on the private, the interior—but wasn’t the interior indelibly marked by the exterior world? Members of the Frankfurt School had thought so, and so did Guralnik. Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Frantz Fanon, and Judith Butler became as important to her thinking as Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion.

In 2001, Guralnik met Stephen Hartman, who edits the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues, at a conference in Miami, where he was presenting a paper on psychoanalysis and social class. Hartman was a fellow Dimen acolyte, and Guralnik was thrilled to find someone whose interests rhymed with hers. Over time, they joined up with other like-minded peers to form their own gang of six, an intellectual family who now vacation together and discuss their writing in biweekly Zoom sessions, and who have become part of the psychoanalytical establishment. Some of them even appear on the show’s new season, as part of a diverse group of analysts who advise Guralnik, giving viewers a sense of psychoanalysis as a field that looks and sounds like the world it interprets. “Orna’s work has been really important for people who want to bring an awareness of the political world into the consulting room,” Hartman told me.

From Alexandra Schwartz’ “The Therapist Remaking Our Love Lives on TV” in The New Yorker.

Join me in my obsession.

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A Bit of Psychoanalysis of Tony Soprano

I was glad to read this, “The Sopranos is a Freudian Comedy” by Matt Feeney in UnHerd. Ahem, lots of spoilers ahead if you haven’t watched the show and want to - lord, what has taken you so long?

As I noted in a previous newsletter, I recently rewatched The Sopranos⁵. Among other things, I was intrigued to revisit the therapy scenes now that I am a good decade into my casual psychoanalysis obsession. I wasn’t convinced Tony was a sociopath, at all, and my husband, who provides counselling to teenagers, was pretty appalled by the way the therapist cut off treatment to Tony in the end, too. But, the show remains wonderful.

But Tony is not improved by therapy, brought into contact with a better version of himself over time, where, as both wife and psychoanalyst hope, his advancing self-awareness is finally incompatible with infidelity and killing. Instead, the pressures of therapeutic discussion make him more resourceful in his evasions, adding layers to his self-deception.

It’s tempting to read this depth of badness in Tony’s character and declare him a sociopath. Even within the show, Dr Kupferberg, psychoanalyst of Tony’s psychoanalyst Dr Melfi, warns her that she’s dealing with a sociopath. Sure, Tony checks several boxes for Anti-Social Personality Disorder, but much of what we see on the show contradicts the idea that he’s deeply, truly sociopathic. Were Tony a true sociopath, someone not just violent and manipulative but lacking empathy and remorse, then much of what he does would either make no sense or simply not happen. His comic displacements regarding animals, his guilty dreaming and brooding about killing Big Pussy, his sensitivity to his wife’s criticisms, his need to defend himself against them and his raging response when she hits a nerve, his consuming need to be loved by his disapproving shrink, his desire for her to know the other, better “Tony” that isn’t part of his bloody business life — all these betoken ample stores of moral yearning and intuition hiding inside Tony’s oversized person. Were he a true sociopath, he wouldn’t need to spend so much emotional energy trying to make sense of his life as a lying, violent thug of the bourgeoisie. To a true sociopath, it would already make sense.

And if Tony were a true sociopath, his relations with his children would be very different. The show actually gives us a parent whose ways resemble those of a sociopath, his mother, and as a parent he is nothing like her. She was systematically cruel, distant, manipulative and neglectful toward her children, while Tony delights in his children, whose love for him is unguarded by any wariness about a sociopathic father’s underhanded cruelty. He’s pretty lazy as a dad, but he’s eager to satisfy the emotional claims his kids make on him. And, were he a true sociopath, he would likely resent and undermine Meadow’s achievements in school, so far beyond his own, but he happily funds and facilitates them.

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A Version of Things

From Katherine Angel’s Something Nice is Coming newsletter and her post, “Chaos and the law: On watching Anatomy of a Fall”:

One scene has stayed with me the strongest: a psychotherapist’s testimony. Under questioning by the lawyer, the therapist makes the case that Samuel felt eclipsed and maligned by his wife; that she was in a sense an aggressor. He claims that Samuel couldn’t be honest with her, but in contrast was honest with him, the therapist. He claims he knows the truth about the husband; that his dialogues with Sam were the real thing, a window onto Sam’s real feelings.

Sandra replies (the trial is oddly conversational, almost chatty): how do you know that what he was telling you wasn’t just one version of the truth, one that is stacked in his favour, against her? How do you know Sam wasn’t plausibly telling the therapist what he himself wanted to believe? A version of things, in which he wanted to feel aggrieved by his wife, as a way to cover for his own fatal flaws and disappointments?

Sandra’s question here is about psychotherapy, and about the inevitable partiality of every conversation: how can a therapist remain alert to the possibility that he is being inculcated into a narrative which is partial, and often self-serving to the patient? How can a therapist see clearly what is happening? What can a therapist see, and how much? Can a therapist see that he might be colluding with the patient, letting the patient gloss over a more complex but more inconvenient truth? How much can one know about a person in isolation?

Have you seen Anatomy of a Fall? Such an interesting film. How a marriage defies definition, even to the people in it.

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Bleak But Not Too Bleak

In case you happened to be watching Boy Swallows Universe on Netflix, which is based on the very successful novel by Trent Dalton, you might be interested to know that the series (and book) are set in my city. The series is placed in the 80’s, but the people are all living in these houses from the 50’s, which emerged from a post-war development boom in this city, and is a housing aesthetic I love⁶. As the article below notes, many of these houses are vanishing now.

We needed something really raw that was untouched, sort of bleak but not too bleak…

Beenleigh is now under gentrification, and development is pretty aggressive here … All these iconic architectural features from the 60s, 70s and 80s — even the 90s — are going. We were really fortunate to find the locations we did. Had we waited another one or two years, I think [these places] just wouldn't be there."

They then found Eli's estranged father Robert's house in the north side suburb of Wavell Heights.

It was on a corner block, with this really beautiful Royal Poinciana tree out the front. It was of the right period, and had very little done to it, so it just had a really beautiful, homely, but run-down vibe to it.

From this article at ABC Entertainment.

Anyway, I met Trent Dalton last year at a writer’s festival where we were both speaking, and he was immediately lovely to me.

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I Just Lapped it Up

It was a movie about a middle-class kid who went home with his posh friend for summer vacation, slowly revealing himself to be a monster, and it was blatantly ridiculous. I loved watching it, feeling the sort of glee usually set off by a Skittles binge. As a devotee of two weird genres in particular — gothic campus yarns and “great house” tales — I just lapped it up. (So to speak.)

- Alissa Wilkinson’s “The Point of ‘Saltburn’ Isn’t What You Think It Is” in The New York Times.

Me, too. I loved this film - it’s my kind of catnip (I have long adored novels like Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History). I saw this film alone in the cinema over the Christmas break, where I could guffaw to my heart’s content.

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More Middle-Aged Motherhood Writing

Here’s a newsletter for you - Crone Sandwich. Catherine Newman, author of the memoir Waiting for Birdy has a newsletter about being menopausal, married and a mother of young adults.

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I Don’t Think I Ever Leave Any State Behind Because I Have Written About It

And would she say she is relieved to have left behind those years of early motherhood, now her daughters, Albertine and Jessye, are in their teens? "I don't think I ever leave any state behind," she says, "because I have written about it." As a woman, she sees herself as having moved away from feminism to a "more Lawrentian view of gender as having its own inherent beauty. My struggle has been that my femininity was unavailable to me." I can't help noticing how often DH Lawrence shows up in her thinking – as literary sidekick. "I would so love to have had him as my friend," she says.

- From Kate Kellaway’s interview with Rachel Cusk in The Guardian.

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in january

23
you think
its easy
opening doors 
in january

shit man

you think its easy
opening doors

- Diane di Prima

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Beautiful Ordinary

I wish I could own this painting, JEDZĄCE PSY.

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Everyone Wants Blogs Back

Lauren (from Feministe days) has started a Micro.blog. I will definitely be following it.

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My Birthday Has Been and Gone But Maybe Next Time

I love this cake.

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Eldest Daughters

Finally.

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I Find This Comforting

Your motherhood may have started with you, but it will continue on after you. In your traditions. In your quirky and sometimes imperfect ways. In your love. Your motherhood will outlive you and live inside your children forever.

- Emma Heaphy

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Your Mum Too

Atsuko Okatsuka is a fascinating storyteller (and comedian). This little anecdote about she and her partner discovering they both have mothers with schizophrenia is so charming.

Okatsuka is touring Australia at the moment, if you’re so inclined to see her.

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But look at all the things you did and look at your metamorphosis

My new song delight is this new one from Infinity Song. God, I love it.

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Recommended to Buy

Celeste Mountjoy describes being a young woman so incredibly well in her drawings. America and Canada, her book FILTHYRATBAG is now available for pre-order there. Much recommended by me.

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Finally

I keep quoting Virginia Woolf in my newsletters, but here I am again. Her 1931 New Year’s Resolution, in case you hadn’t found one yourself.

“ to be free & kindly with myself.. Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read. to go out, yes - but stay at home in spite of being asked. as for clothes, I think to buy good ones”.

1. I am sorry I skipped sending a newsletter in January. This year I had a LOT of work deadlines so I didn’t get any time for anything else.

2. Credit for the subtitle of this month’s newsletter - Arianna Huffington.

3. I love how followers of her Instagram are so often shocked by her gardening barefoot. It’s Australia, we are barefoot all the time.

4. It’s definitely quieter than experimental jazz.

5. And introduced the show to my husband. He did this weird thing in the past, before he met me, where he wouldn’t watch anything that was too hyped. Consequently, I’ve been taking him through a lot of my old favourites - Deadwood and The Wire - that were pretty much everyone’s favourites. He says about each one “this is as good as they said it was” when he has finished them.

6. My home is a mid-century butterfly house.