Every Three Years, Sometimes Seven

You change

Dear Reader

Have you noticed that every so often you go through a great upheaval?

I think you’re best not to try to stop it. Just experience however it is that you and your life are being smashed about. Give yourself the freedom to change, to be altered, to reconsider.

At this time, I find myself acutely aware of this great shifting and flipping of my life, again. And, it doesn’t worry me. I am enjoying changing¹.

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Every Few Years

We go through changes roughly every three years, sometimes seven, where our colour palette changes and how we feel changes.. the aroma or the textures.. the lightness or darkness around us shifts.

- Björk

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Sometimes you’re doing really well, then, after three or four years, everything inexplicably crashes like a house of cards, and you have to rebuild it. It’s not like you get to a point where you’re all right for the rest of your life.

- Patti Smith

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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

- Simone de Beauvoir

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[Dated only 1957]

What do I believe?

      In the private life
      In holding up culture
      In music, Shakespeare, old buildings

What do I enjoy?

     Music
     Being in love
     Children
     Sleeping
     Meat

My faults

     Never on time
     Lying, talking too much
     Laziness
     No volition for refusal

- Susan Sontag

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This openness to involuntary developments

Here’s my favourite recent article… Lydia Davis²’ “Demanding Pleasures: On the art of observation” in Harper’s Magazine.

The whole thing is mesmerizing.

I am not making something up myself, out of myself. Something outside me is being given or offered to me, by chance. I then concentrate on it, give it shape, and in the process open myself to developments in the material that seem to come of their own volition.

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Answering Back

To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

- Viggo Mortensen.

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Quietly Waiting

Now I am quietly waiting for the 
catastrophe of my personality to seem 
beautiful again.

- Frank O'Hara, Mayakovsky

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Notes on Family Life

I accidentally recorded us on my phone and also, accidentally sent the recording to my husband. Oh, technology!

In the recording you can hear my teenage son irritably saying: “.. deductive reasoning?” And then, I reply, “Because that way I can put a wash on”.

I sound terribly patient.

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My twenty-year old daughter is talking to her friend. He is saying he finds travelling with his father frustrating. I can’t relate, she responds. My mother is wonderful to travel with.

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That’s what I remember about you guys, you always have music on. I still listen to stuff you recommended, our guest says.

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Worrying about my son and then finding him asleep in his bed. He must have come home from the party quietly and I didn’t wake.

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I’m so appreciative, I tell my husband.

How appreciative, he asks, suggestively.

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My husband pulls me across the bed by my hips and cradles me against his body.

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I hate the feeling of being hurried along.

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I am always waiting for you, my husband tells me. I love his patience. I love his desire.

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Notes on Witchcraft

I can hear my long dead grandfather upstairs talking to my son in his bedroom. I hear his cadence, how he pauses to collect his thoughts, and how he lets out a whistle through his teeth as he speaks.

I stop to listen more closely. He is not just talking, he is telling my son stories of his life. It is then that I realise my son has found the online archival interview tapes at the War Museum.

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Protection Spells in the House:

1. witch’s bells

2. evil eye amulets

3. Hecate deity

4. tiny china horses, tiny mother and daughter dolls

5. vintage Virgin Mary statue

6. an actual black cat

7. pentagrams

8. numbers on doors

9. round mirrors

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Protection Spells in the Garden:

1. growing lavender

2. growing nasturtiums

3. growing yarrow

4. growing rosemary

5. growing corn flowers

6. growing aloe vera

7. growing a lemon tree

8. growing olive trees

9. growing pomegranate

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I saw your message before you thought better of it. You revealed yourself.

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The little black shadows have begun to appear in our bedroom. I don’t know what it means. But, I am not scared.

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Almost everything I do is a little spell to bring you back.

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I keep dreaming of babies. In my dreams I am not anxious about the unpredictability of it all.

In one, my son has just begun university and already has a baby. I love the baby. In another dream, my husband and I have a baby, and I am carrying the little boy on my hip. I love this baby, too.

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[Evil Eye]

I dreamt one of his exes was stalking us. She had been doing it for months before I discovered. She knew everything about us by then. She had been following us everywhere - standing outside our windows at night, listening to us talk, argue, fuck, organise our lives.

Is this a dream about writing a newsletter?

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[Evil Eye]

I dreamt I was being bullied by an ex. He was taking my new car. I was trying to manage the unreasonableness.

Then I suddenly remembered we have nothing to do with one another anymore.

A message to remind oneself of one’s power.

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She borrowed my jacket and was pricked in the chest by something. She worked something carefully out of the pocket with her fingers and held it up for us to see - a pin!

Like a curse, I said, surprised.

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If I light a candle for Hecate she begins to pull you free again. But you won’t come near me, such is your resistance.

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My husband said of the moment - the devil revealed himself.

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Have You Made an Impact in Your Life?

Marc Maron on not being liked.

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Get A Little Bit Carried Away

Mark Cameron on making things better.

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An Ode to the Freedom of Bicycle Riding

Cycling demands your attention; there's a built-in risk that’s significantly reduced by staying aware, and I appreciate anything that pulls me back into the moment.

What I love most, though, is how cycling transforms your relationship with your surroundings. On a bike, you notice things differently. Your field of vision expands. You're more likely to look up, take a different route, and rediscover familiar places with fresh eyes. If you ever feel like you’re falling out of love with where you live, try experiencing it on a bike. It really does change things.

There’s also something nostalgic about it. For many of us, cycling was our first real taste of freedom as kids. That feeling doesn’t fade with age, if anything, it deepens.

Even in the chaos of London traffic, cycling is cathartic. My favourite time to ride is early in the morning. I realised this after cycling home from a DJ set in Shepherd’s Bush to Bow at 1am — pure bliss.

This, in Tokyo Bike is incredibly lovely with photos and videos and an interview with Ayishat Akanbi.

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The Problems with Regulatory Policy

Here’s some good thoughts on being the creators of regulatory policy. It’s written by my clever friend, Melissa McEwen at Conversations in the Wrong Corridors.

Across my career, I have seen a number of different approaches to closing the circle between regulatory policy and implementation. At one extreme, when asked to implement a new government program with no new resources, I have seen an agency attempt to twist the design of a program to fit an existing IT system to allow a commitment to be delivered with little more than a name change and a tweak of requirements. I have also seen processes where those trying to implement requirements were constantly having to go back to a no longer existing committee to try and interpret what they meant in order to translate the ideas to practical regulations. There is the challenge that new regulatory requirements are often required to be delivered a lot faster than it is possible to deliver new systems (or even get a second pass business case approved), so generally there will always be half measures and patches and dodgied up approaches to try and make things work – sometimes for years. Misunderstandings of how legislation can be applied can arise when these approaches are used and practice can creep to resemble what is easily possible and practical through systems, rather than what is actually required by law.

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The Problems with Overtourism

Here’s some very interesting thoughts (albeit, sad ones) about the impact of tourists on local food, by the very clever Alicia Kennedy. I am currently watching the beige wash-out happening to a community near me as it gets discovered by weekend tourists and I’m kind of stunned.

We had become regulars at this place, to an extent, and it didn’t really help, because of the employee turnover and the fact that they experience so much of a transient clientele—and because I do notice that tourists and many locals alike do not tip properly. There’s simply no reason for anyone working in service to care unless they’ve served you before, and because most hospitality workers can’t afford to live in the neighborhood and have to schlep themselves to these jobs, they don’t see us as neighbors. That wasn’t the case when I first moved here: I’d say hi to someone in the streets while walking Benny, and later I’d see them at their job when I stopped in for a drink or a bite.

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Time to Begin/Recommence Your Lesbian Phase?³

Corinne Low is an economist who, after her divorce, considered the data on household relationships and gender and then decided to date women instead of men. Here’s an article on her in The Cut.

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And following on with this theme, there is also an article in The New York Times on a tiny-house village in Texas started by retired women who don’t want to live with men anymore, called "11 Women, 9 Dogs, Not Much Drama (and No Guys)”.

I was sitting with her and her neighbors in “the kitchen” at The Bird’s Nest, which is not a kitchen at all but a large, open-air portico that functions as a community lounge. Strung with twinkle lights and dangling with ceiling fans and painted signs - “Like a Band of Gypsies We Go Down the Highway” - it’s where the women gather to eat, chat and play cards late into the night. Nearby, raised vegetable beds were bursting with zucchini.

Honestly, everyone needs more fairy lights and nights outside playing cards. I love that kind of night.

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Wallowing In It Selfishly

I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now.

- Tennessee Williams.

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Play Your Part

This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today… You must play your part and sing a song, one of your best.

- Hermann Hesse

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The Secret to Mothering Adult Children

Julia Lois-Dreyfus and Michelle Obama on how to get your adult children to come back for visits.

I practice this too (with my 20 year old) - the attractive nuisance - cooking their favourite meals, even cooking the favourite meals of their friends’, making the guest room the prettiest bedroom in the house, coddling their dogs.

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Community

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two, and I know it’s true.

- Toni Morrison

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Parents, Don’t Give Up

Kevin Fredericks on sixteen years.

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Hungry

To become a mother is to enter a mystery zone. We think we’re choosing motherhood, but in some ways, motherhood chooses us. And it is always hungry.

- Deborah Levy

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Therapy Speak

I find it strange that we think this is freeing, this brutal knowing. That this self-surveillance is the liberated way to live. That we are somehow less repressed, being boxed in by medical labels. There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads. We underestimate it, this miserable business of understanding ourselves.

From Freya India’s “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore”.

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Letting Go

From an excerpt from Ariel Gore’s Rehearsals for Dying.

She was a fighter by nature, and a stoner by lifestyle, existing in the often-stressful push-and-pull between exacting expectations and a desire to relax.

What might she want her final days to look like? It seemed like a reasonable question, with the terminal diagnosis, but it wasn’t a question any of her doctors had the nerve to ask, and not one she herself wanted to face.

Deena didn’t end up getting the mastectomies that surgeon was trying to sell her on, but we didn’t go wait it out on a black-sand beach, either. Instead, Deena opted for the long series of oral chemos, radiation, immunotherapy, and finally intravenous chemos her oncologists recommended. My ethos was always “her body, her choice,” so I mostly stayed quiet, even when I thought the treatments were making her sicker with no payoff.

A metastatic breast cancer diagnosis is universally terminal. We both understood that in the beginning. But as the months and years and “treatment plans” pressed on, Deena’s thinking became—understandably—more magical.

The oncologists encouraged that.

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A Strange Presence

At the end of my second marriage, which was a time of great emotional distress and strain, a strange presence would sometimes manifest itself behind me—­I would feel something in the room, hovering behind my back. I suppose some people would think it was a crack-­up that I was going through. I used to call it—­to myself—the Mighty Force, because I felt that it was tremendously powerful but also benign. I knew that if I turned around and looked at it, if I acknowledged it, I’d have to go down on my knees and bow to it, and I was too scared to do that, and too proud. After a while it stopped coming. You know that poem by D. H. Lawrence about the snake at the water-trough? The speaker sees its beauty but he’s frightened of it, so he throws a lump of wood at it and it makes an undignified retreat into its hole. At the end of the poem he writes, “I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of life.”

That was a time that now feels very distant and strange. My daughter was in high school, and after my husband left, I got two more people into the house to help me pay the rent. One of them was a guy in the hot stage of becoming a born-­again Christian. Everything he thought and did came through that evangelical filter. We argued, we yelled at each other. I look back now and see what a fruitful time it was—­but he drove me insane with his big black Bible on the table.

Helen Garner in The Paris Review being interviewed by Thessaly La Force.

And, here’s a little snippet from an interview with Helen Garner by Dua Lipa. They are discussing one of my favourite books of Garner’s, This House of Grief and the shock of empathy.

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Secret Truth

Sometimes the truest sentence is the one you almost delete. - Mary Gaitskill

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The thing you’re scared to admit is the thing people will read twice. - Rachel Cusk

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I write what I live, and I live what I write. - Etel Adnan

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Longing

I desperately want this painting by Muyaka Shitanda. (Also, sighthounds in art. Also, specifically my Italian Greyhound in art).

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You Need More Australian Footballers/Farmers in Your Book Club

Here’s Luke Bateman talking about why it is absolutely critical that boys read novels.

Do you love his beautiful Australian drawl? That’s from Toowoomba, near my part of the world.

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Mid-Century Houses

Here’s a great little site at the State Library Queensland with a bunch of photos of Queensland homes from the 1960s and 70s to explore. They are from Frank and Eunice Corley’s collection. And, I love it.

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Strange Rituals

This is so wonderfully kooky. Tina Barney’s photos in “A rarefied world of privilege: lives of the New England upper class in pictures” in The Guardian.

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Too Good

Here, I bring you more of Australia’s best t-shirts.

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Bewitching

Look! This amazing photo by Hoda Afshar, which just won the National Photographic Portrait Prize. The picture was taken in collaboration with a group of First Nations young women in Far North Queensland who are also the subject of the photo.

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Transcendence

I have almost finished reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s The Third Realm and I will miss reading it in the evenings in bed when it is gone.

In interviews, Knausgård exhibits a heady mixture of grandiosity and humility, and the two come together here revealingly. The book, with its disquisitions on death and eternity, is extremely grandiose. But it’s also pervaded by the feeling of failure that permeates My Struggle. Knausgård has said that he laboriously follows his characters on to buses and into supermarkets not because he wants to make the mundane interesting, but because he doesn’t know how to fast forward the action. The prose here bears witness to this. Here’s Jarle arriving to test the brain of a patient in a coma. “The taxi slid with a hum through the rain that was already gushing through the gutters, occasionally flooding at the roadsides. The area in front of the hospital was deserted but the car park was almost full.” With his more desperately humdrum passages, Knausgård seems to suggest that his credentials for interrogating the nature of being and eternity are not that he knows everything but that he knows nothing. He’s engaged in a kind of cosmic yet earthly experiment, as Jarle himself is. If he can record the ordinary lives of enough people faced with the extraordinary presence of the star, perhaps he will, as if inadvertently, reveal something about the nature of our limited present and its relationship to a more credulous and therefore possibly more enlightened past.

From a review in The Guardian.

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The Metaphysical Age

When you’re 85, you’re an old person… But at 95, you enter into a metaphysical time which gives you a new way of thinking. You don’t need to be logical, I can tell you things that soon won’t be in human history. That’s why I think I’m an interesting animal. I am no longer the same animal I used to be.

- Isabella Ducrot in Ocula Magazine.

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Half in the Dreaming

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Recommended

A People’s History of American Music is deeply eccentric and very insightful. We saw Eric Isaacson (founder of Mississippi Record label) last week with this show at one of our favourite little bars, and loved it. Also, he was selling rare vinyls afterwards.

Sydney and Melbourne (Cinema Nova), move quickly if you want tickets!

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Finally

i am a dead woman
sometimes
buried
aboveground
in a thunderstorm
with all my things
and i lie there wondering
with my face all wet
can i go home now

- Nikky Finney

Wherever you are, dear reader, I hope you are able to go home now.

1. I am doing a lot of shadow work, particularly in my tarot.

2. Have you read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis? Ah-mazing.

3. If you’ve been lesbian the whole time then aren’t you the clever one?