All the World's Before Me

So many ways to learn

Dear Reader

This picture, like all my newsletter pictures, is from my Instagram¹. This month is about the meaning of this time of year.

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Harm²

I'm a sea foam woman rising from the spray

And I'm coming to do you harm

- Nick Cave’s White Elephant

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Holiday Feeling

I felt luxuriously involved in an unsolvable mystery, my favorite way to feel.

- Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company.

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Holiday Recipe

I am talking with the same friend I mentioned in this newsletter. He is ‘made good’, he is working class geezer, he is a lover of fashion, he is loud and lively, and he is, secretly, terribly observant. He is observant in that way that people are when they were children who learned very young to be sensitive to the tiniest of changes in their parents. My husband is like this, too.

Whenever he sees my daughter and me, he insists on a “family hug”. The three of us, laughing and embracing and giving in. Teenagers being what they are, sometimes when he does this, my daughter and I haven’t hugged in weeks and I wonder can he tell, is this his gift to me? Then he signed off by telling us:

Go to your local chippie and order your chips extra crispy.

Put leftover curry on the chips.

Council estate delicacy, that is.

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Holiday Fun

Bring a live tree inside. Deify it. When it drops pine needles, feel annoyed, but clean them up ritualistically. This is your chance to remember that we are too disconnected from the outdoors.

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The Right Christmas Carol for Where You are At This Year

Carol for crying your eyes out:

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Frank Sinatra

Carol for pagans doing witchcraft:

Walking in the Air - Aled Jones

Carol for bad shit is going down this year at the family lunch:

Carol of the Bells - Libera

Carol for missing Australia:

How to Make the Gravy - Paul Kelly

Carol for surviving something hard this year:

Silent Night (Long Version) - Sinead O’Connor

Carol for feeling horny:

Santa Baby - Eartha Kitt

Carol for being in love with a hot feminist (yes, this song is feminist):

Baby, It’s Cold Outside - Dean Martin

Carol for missing someone:

Blue Christmas - Elvis Presley and Martina McBride (this music video, showing that though Elvis is not particularly my type, he was made for the female gaze)

Carol for unexpectedly loving suburbia, because you are driving around looking at people's Christmas light displays and thinking about the beauty of positive externalities and the creative spirit, wherever people may find it in themselves:

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas - Bing Crosby

Carol for the ache of spirituality:

Miserere Mei, Deus - King’s College, Cambridge (all this elitism is good for something, and it’s their choirs)

Carol for making a second cocktail for yourself:

Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow! - Dean Martin

Carol for melancholy:

River - Joni Mitchell

Carol for having to work over Christmas:

7 O’Clock News/Silent Night - Simon & Garfunkel

Carol for preparing a Christmas dish (it goes for 20 minutes, so you will have all the vegetables chopped by then, and will Danny manage to score for Christmas?)

The Junky’s Christmas - William S Burroughs (spoken word)

Carol for the tenderness of re-connection:

Tapu Te Pō (O Holy Night) - Marlon Williams and the Dhungala Children’s Choir

Have I missed anything else perfect for such moments?

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We are Saved

The world is violent and mercurial - it will have its way with you. We are saved only be love - love for each other and the love that we pour into each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

- Tennessee Williams

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How to Do Better as Progressive Organisations

This is a brilliant essay by Maurice Mitchell in The Forge on what is going wrong in the social justice movement and how to fix progressive spaces. And no, it is not more purity politics. It’s essential reading for anyone working in public policy, too.

Here he lists the problems of individualist identity, tests of alignment, anti-leadership and anti-institutional sentiment, cherry-picking arguments, glass houses, focusing on individual tensions over larger power dynamics, unanchored care and poor boundaries, disproportionality and more.

But importantly, Mitchell also outlines how to inoculate organisations against these dynamics, and they include collective bargaining, transparent decision-making frameworks, more intentional leadership, less bureaucratic hurdles, diversity, life-long political education, training stakeholders on the hypotheses operating underneath the strategy, investing time in presenting the full and complex strategic landscape to junior and newer members, centering connection and belonging, recruiting for emotional maturity in teams, and making more emotionally dynamic spaces.

So many of his conclusions resonate with me. I have spent much of the last year thinking about how to build better public policy-making teams and I reached a couple of these same understandings.

The path ahead requires perspective and humility.

We are closer than we think to such a reality. We must go through a humbling but necessary period of change to achieve it. We must learn how to synthesize lessons from the past and observations in the present. That means sitting in an awkward both/and place. We must call out fallacies that weaken us, even when it’s hard and we face criticism for it. And we must meet our problems with grounded solutions that are drawn from a sober assessment of the larger time, place, and conditions we find ourselves in.

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Birds are Our Closest Connection to Wildness

I loved this article by Margaret Roach in The New York Times on taking up amateur ethology in your life, with the help of drawing, paying attention and meditations on ordinary beauty, for pursuing this ‘slower’ type of bird watching.

“But many decades ago, I realized that birds were the way to teach concepts in animal behavior,” she said. “I always wanted my students to experience the joy of discovery.”

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Stones

I am writing a memo

Things to Remember

For Tuesday

How everything grounds me

How I am looking for lighter things

Information is good, in way of distraction:

Meadowgrass can reach down

Twenty feet

And some animals were found with

stones

Inside their rib cage

To crush whatever

Bitter pills they swallowed

Although some ingest the stones for

ballast

To better keep themselves

From returning to the surface -

These animals

I know

- A Sleep That is Not Our Sleep by E.C. Belli

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Art as Omens

Any TV series telling a story about the importance of art in describing our lives back to us has won me. And, so, I really enjoyed The White Lotus season 2³. What a great study in sexual jealousy, wealth and danger.

From the series’ creator, Mike White:

Throughout the season, there's a lot of sense of the potential for male violence against women. This idea that heterosexual men and women are in a kind of perpetual state of friction, and that there's like this eternal power struggle and the idea that gay guys are potentially a solace or refuge from that drama. So I just thought—especially in Sicily where it's such a machismo culture and this idea of men and The Godfather—and so I just was like it'd be kind of a fresh thing that if

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(Spoiler Alert)

the actual villains are the flamboyant gay guys who are trying to decorate their houses, and it's not coming from any of those more kind of classic cliched sources of violence against women.

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(Spoiler Free)

But, what I loved most was all the use of art as symbolism in this TV series. That, and all the Itaaaaaaaly, baby.

There’s a really interesting, but spoiler-filled piece in The Conversation, by Sara Oscar and Cherine Fahd, on the multiple ways that art is used in The White Lotus season 2 that I recommend reading, too.

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When Grown Men Call Strangers Love

I feel I am home.

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Things I Heard My Husband Say

To the old man about to walk out on to the road in front of a car:

Hey up!⁴

To the cat coming up to us in bed for a pat:

You have to move, cat, because now I can’t see boobs from here⁵.

To me, in response to me saying that my view of Nick Cave was often obscured by taller people at the concert, but that I loved seeing him lean over into the crowd and my husband carrying him by the shoulders overhead:

All us tall people, holding him away from the short people⁶.

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Still

It shouldn’t be this hard, my therapist says to me when I am trying to force⁷ something with that relentless optimism. Like that T.S. Eliot poem, Wait Without Hope.

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Merry Christmas to Me

Season 2 of I Hate Suzie is coming out for Christmas. (I wrote about loving I Hate Suzie and that women’s midlife crises are as interesting as men’s here).

The production of the series is promising it will be even darker than the first season. Good.

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A Few of My Favourite Australian Artists

My absolute favourite Vernon Ah Kee piece, Gaze.

My absolute favourite Haley Millar Baker piece, I’m the Captain Now.

My absolute favourite Tony Albert piece, Visible.

And anytime you get a chance to see a Gordon Bennett piece, do it, he’s amazing.

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On Ambivalence, Again

Speaking of wonderfully bleak, I am still thinking about the savagery of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s film, Loveless.

Why do films about ambivalence in motherhood tend to be thrillers? As I wrote previously here, ambivalence of this nature horrifies us. You’ll hate the mother in Loveless until you meet her mother in the film, and then you suspect this is family trauma of some kind. And you’ll hate all the parents in the film, until you realise it is really a metaphor for Russia.

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How to Be a Grandmother

My Grandmother wants me to get married like her and have ingrates for children and grandchildren who hang up on her.

- Eve Babitz

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Fifty-Fifty

Christmas is a good time to talk about more equal parenting.

Anyone who's spent any time with me since my divorce has probably heard me say, "Everyone should coparent like they have 50/50 custody."  It comes off as a little outrageous, I know. What mother would admit to not wanting to be 100% devoted to her children 100% of the time? But that's exactly the entire point. After the newborn and toddler stages, when you literally are keeping them alive every second, no kid needs a parent who's 100% focused on them and only them. (Trust me, I've dated men who were raised that way, and the outcomes are not good.) I love my children 100% of the time, and I also have other things I want to do with my life, like write my novels and do my work, and I want my kids to grow up knowing mothers can love their kids and also work and make art and have lives of their own... you know? 

From Cindy DiTiberio’s excellent The Mother Lode, here with an interview with Amy Shearn.

As someone who was once a single mother, I agree with pretty much everything being said here about the possibilities of fifty-fifty. But I think we have to be careful not to push this concept too far, because it relies on something I almost never see acknowledged, and that is, an equally functional co-parent to share parenting with. Many women, and it is predominantly women, split up with men precisely because of their dysfunction - substance abuse, violence and aggression, volatility, untended depression, habitual dishonesty, extreme work attitudes etc. A child spending half their time in the undiluted presence of a dysfunctional parent is not a great outcome. I worry about a conversation that shifts cultural expectations of care arrangements - those things stick in family law courts - without also identifying the increased capability it requires in fathering.

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Pipe Down, there are Ladies at Lunch

A song in case you need to make an entrance at some Christmas do.

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Psychosis as Politics, Politics as Psychosis

I love this as a description of the times we live in - life as caricature. (I find Ganz’s newsletters fun; he says things like épater les normies).

John Ganz’s “What is Even Happening? Post-Historical Daze”:

“It feels like the whole country has taken LSD.” It’s true. There has been something hallucinatory and psychotic about the past half decade or so: a sense of reality melting and a stomach-churning, vertiginous glimpse into the abyss. It’s not exactly an everyday thing, some periods of time feel normal, but every month or so the psycho-dimension breaks through. People like to talk about the “epistemological crisis” brought about by the Internet, but sometimes it feels more like an ontological crisis, a rend in the very fabric of being itself, as if we are on the verge of entering a Who Framed Roger Rabbit-world where cartoons will walk among us. A game-show host billionaire president beloved by Nazis living in a dark tower with his name stamped on it in Midtown? A Black rapper turned Hitler-lover? An army of electronic trolls” that use frogs and toads as their ensign? It’s all getting so stylized as to approach caricature.

This is how you end up with some people thinking Musk is a genius, when he is clearly quite ridiculous. Speaking of..

Paul Krugman’s “Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World”:

That’s why I’m not shocked by the spectacle of Elon Musk’s reputational self-immolation. Fascinated, yes; who isn’t? But when an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.

And, as I have mentioned before, the strong boss is a disaster and thank goodness for Elon Musk demonstrating that to the last remaining holdouts of managerial gobbledygook. Here’s what I think you get in a team full of people desperate or empty enough to respond to a call for “extreme work” demands - a bunch of very emotionally dysregulated people. And to be frank, bad bosses rely on being able to emotionally regulate themselves off their poor teams. So, if you lack emotionally mature people in the team, absolutely no one stays calm. Enjoy those short-term gains though, bro, with everyone working through Christmas.

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You Hear What You’re Saying Out Loud?

This is a little NSFW. Kevin Hart ad libbing in conversation is the best of Kevin Hart’s comedy, and this conversation on The Pivot Podcast, where he wonders about the lack of boundaries in a story being shared with him, gave me such a good laugh. (And, I’m no prude but I agree with Hart, not every dirty thought needs to be expressed).

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Put More Portraits on Your Walls

If I had a lot of money I would be buying one of Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux’s paintings. I mean, wow.

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On Christmas Night I Will Be Watching

This year I am going to re-watch Withnail and I on Christmas night in honour of meeting Richard E Grant last month and convincing him to inscribe his memoir to me with “Scrubbers⁸”.

But, do you need reminding what the best film to watch at Christmas is? (Of course, if you are feeling a little nihilistic at Christmas then you could try Silent Night instead. (Not relevant sidenote: look at the beautiful colours inside that house!))

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In Need of Some Protection this Christmas? Spells You Can Cast⁹

1. Keep Frizzle Hens. Coincidentally, my ex-father-in-law gave my children two of these hens for me a little while ago. I hated these hens, at first, because they ruined the uniformity of my sleek little black hens. But, apparently, they will scratch up any hexes thrown your way. If you wanted another argument for keeping backyard hens, this is your sign.

2. Wash the floors of your home’s entrance thresholds with a mixture of vinegar, hot salted water and a few drops of menstrual blood.

3. Can’t do hens or blood? You can also grind sea salt and black pepper together and then sprinkle it around your home in doorways or corners. Nothing wrong with low maintenance witchcraft.

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Something to Listen to While Catching Your Breath

And I fucked up, but I shall continue. (Words to live by).

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Recommend

I have two free one-month gift subscriptions available for the weekly celebrity gossip/pop culture newsletter, Hung Up by Hunter Harris. Comment below to indicate if you’d like one of them to try her newsletter. She’s whip-smart and funny.

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Finally

I am wishing you a sense of peace and wonder, wherever this time of year finds you. Much love and thank you for being here.

A step taken, and all the world’s before me. 

The night’s so clear 

stars hang in the low branches, 

small fires riding through the waves of a thin atmosphere, 

islands parting tides as meteors burn the air.

- From The River by Robert Adamson¹⁰

1. Yes, one of those wretched A.I. bots made this picture of me. The future has eaten us alive.

2. Because Christmas isn’t necessarily benign. You need a little witchcraft, just in case.

3. I have skipped White Lotus Season 1, so far. But if you are after more Mike White can I recommend the very under-appreciated Enlightened TV series (2011) by him?

4. Northern English.

5. His relaxed sexual desire for me is one of the things I appreciate most about him.

6. We tease each other a lot.

7. Wu-wei - “you have to be able to realise that you don’t know what you really want, until you are very quiet, and it tells you” (Alan Watts).

8. Slang for ‘sluts’.

9. There is no better time to get into witchcraft than Christmas. It used to be Winter Solstice, after all.

10. Rest in peace to one of Australia’s best poets. 1943-2022.