Something Different to Growth

Small spreads on tables, for instance

Dear Reader

These past few months have been very stressful for me. I find myself seeking not so much joy as something more modest than that, something more attainable. Something like going ok, it’s enough, momentary calm, a pause, one step, and less..

This month’s newsletter reflects that, both in content and style. So, yes, it’s all links and snippets this time.

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History of Pleasure

I walked by myself to the market

past ruins with broken

bodies of stone, where even

a fragment of a man could undo me.

I bought herbs wrapped in paper.

Light shone through the glass of our apartment.

You had been showering,

the smell of mint invaded the room, your hair was wet.

- Richie Hofmann, 2022

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How My Son Prepares for Having Other 14 Year Olds Over

1. Changes outfit three times.

2. Turns over our ‘Got Wine?’ doormat¹ at the front door.

3. Complains about my Sarah Maple piece hanging in the sitting room. Him: “I can’t bear it when every kid comes in here and reads ‘Have you wanked over me yet?”². Me: “Put the lamp in front of her”. Him: “Ok”.

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Leave It the Fastest Way You Can

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.

~Beryl Markham, West with the Night

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Economics is Turning its Back on GDP, When Will Politics?

This is Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta in a nice little clip, which goes for just under six minutes³, where he explains the basis behind his work, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. His thesis is that we need to rapidly get to a point where the demands made on nature equal its ability to supply, where we move away from GDP and replace it with a balance sheet measure that includes the assets (and depletion) of nature, and where we transform our financial and educational institutions to be aligned with furthering the common good.

In this clip has intrigued you, then there’s a more fulsome explanation here at the University of Cambridge website, with Sir David Attenborough’s endorsement:

“Economics is a discipline that shapes decisions of the utmost consequence, and so matters to us all. The Dasgupta Review at last puts biodiversity at its core,” said Attenborough.

“This comprehensive and immensely important report shows us how by bringing economics and ecology face to face, we can help to save the natural world and in doing so save ourselves.”

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Public Transport

I think this essay, “A Circle Married to a Line” by Elias Greg in the Sydney Review of Books is my favourite thing I have read this year.

The first conscious association of motion and travel with calm I can remember is driving with my father on the Bald Hills road, between Hernani and Deervale, Gumbaynggirr Country, at the far eastern limits of the Northern Tablelands. My father, emotionally volatile and occasionally violent, was always at his best on this drive, his perpetual restlessness and existential discomfort matched and soothed by the miles, the starkness of the ravaged pastoral landscape, the extremities of wind and light. Here we saw eagles perched on fenceposts and flying overhead, and Hereford cattle, with their strange death’s head masks, marching in solemn procession, coming down from the hills they’d fattened on to the yards and the trucks that would take them away – red cows wearing red tracks in the red earth. Finishing the circuit, turning home with the failing light, my father’s mood would darken as the distance closed, as the wheels slowed and he returned to consequence – to what he’d done to us and his life.

When my mother left the first time, she took us with her. I was in my third year of school, and the novelty of having her arrive in the car, looking strained but elated, made my heart leap up. We drove to Urunga, left the car at the station, and took the XPT, the rural passenger train service that ran and still runs the vast distances between Sydney and Brisbane, south as far as Melbourne, west through Armidale, Dubbo, Narrabri, Moree – beachheads, port cities, regional centres, inroads, inrails – enclosing and disciplining the earth. Pulled up at the concrete station flanked by coral trees, snub-nosed diesel engine struggling to be heard over the shrieks of the lorikeets, gleaming silver trimmed with white and two shades of blue, it was every bit of it an emblem of an analogue future already past – as anachronistic a piece of social democratic decency as the still-working phone box glowing orange across the street. Ghosts of a public service past, both the train and the phone box were the reserve of those who needed such things, or were habituated to their use – the old, the young, the vulnerable, the poor.

In my family we called the XPT the Welfare Express – because we were on welfare and we used it, and because by some residual, probably Whitlamite, ordinance, anyone in receipt of Commonwealth support – pensioners, single mothers, students, the disabled – was entitled to a certain number of free trips per year. For our extended and several times broken, mended, and re-broken family scattered up and down the north-east coast, the train was a temporal and physical link to Sydney, tracing and retracing familial lines of flight, the migratory paths of the white working class..

You know, until reading this essay, I had forgotten about the free travel train trip we used to receive annually, when as a child I lived with my siblings and mother on her single parent pension.

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La Dolce Vita

I love Bologna.

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Some Days

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

- Salvador Dali

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How Middle Age Changes the Way You Dress

Slowly I’ve started to adapt my older daughter’s attitude to my own clothes: What’s interesting but still fits within the boundaries of what I already like? What bends those boundaries a little? Moving from LA to a smaller town throws another layer into the picture. Now I don’t just ask Does this work? I also ask What might make people say to themselves, ‘What the fuck is her problem?’

The boots with the coral rubber soles fall firmly into this category. They don’t look quite right with anything else – they don’t match, they don’t fit in, they make zero sense. These are qualities I embrace now. Wearing one thing that’s jarring and wrong relaxes me. It’s not that people stare at me or my clothes – I mean who the fuck cares, really? It’s that odd fashion choices remind me of how little I care about what other people think. Or maybe I’m a tiny bit invested in disapproval. I look down at my boots and think, “These are so absurd. They look weird with this outfit and they don’t belong on this errand.”

And then I feel happy.

From Heather Havrilesky’s Slay post.

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The Nude Woman As Seen From Her Perspective

Secret Spaces⁴.

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Who are You?

This is a fascinating piece on self-narration by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker.

If we could see our childish selves more clearly, we might have a better sense of the course and the character of our lives. Are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we change substantially through time? Is the fix already in, or will our stories have surprising twists and turns?

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Captivating

By shooting people in their residences, he was flouting a convention that allows urban dwellers to coexist in tight proximity with the shared illusion of personal privacy.

A piece on Arne Svenson’s art series, Neighbors. I can’t help but love his photos.

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Proceed With Caution

If you’ve recently divorced yourself from an ideology or a belief system, proceed with caution. We have a powerful need to belong, and without our old ideas for comfort, it’s easy to become desperate for something to fill the void of our old views. We wonder, “where do I belong if not here?”

In this state we are vulnerable, and anyone who expresses a dash of what we consider to be reasonable can have us gushing in support, excited at the prospect of having found ‘community’. Be careful though, just because you’ve arrived at the same conclusions as others doesn’t mean you’re coming from the same source.

- Ayishat Akanbi

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The Wandering Teenager

The results suggest that late adolescence is peak wander time, but 18 to 20 is older than I expected, compared with Holden Caulfield and me. Another result may help explain why. It turns out that among the younger teenagers, roaming entropy correlated with risk-taking in other forms, good and bad, from bungee-jumping and rock climbing to trying drugs and getting into fights. In contemporary life we are notoriously unwilling to let adolescents take risks, so parents may be curtailing exploration for younger teenagers or just making sure they’re too busy doing homework and after-school activities to wander. By contrast, the 18- to 20-year-olds were freer to follow their roaming instincts.

But the second Hartley paper is one of many studies suggesting that for young people, exploration, social connection and risk-taking all go together and link to exuberance and joy. Exploring lets you learn more about the physical and social world, even if that can be risky when you’re young. More street-haunting might be good for us all, but especially for our teenagers.

From Alison Gopnik’s article in The Wall Street Journal.

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The Punishment of Poor Mothers

Parenting, Eloise reflected, is “the first thing I’ve ever felt that I was kind of good at”.

What kind of welfare system takes someone succeeding like this and undermines her confidence as a mother so thoroughly?

However, a consistent theme in research into this system is that the coercive work case managers do, in emphasising and enforcing compliance through computerised systems, is more keenly felt and perceived than the supportive work they do. Further, those working these roles in the conditional, privatised welfare system increasingly view their “clients” negatively, seeing them as individually responsible for their circumstances.

Systems that intersect with women’s lives need to be especially good at understanding the realities of and contributions arising from care work. Anything else is pure misogyny.

The essay linked to above is a must read and it is by Eve Vincent in The Conversation.

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That Impossible Acceleration

I find myself thinking back to the early days of Covid. There were weeks when it was clear that lockdowns were coming, that the world was tilting into crisis, and yet normalcy reigned, and you sounded like a loon telling your family to stock up on toilet paper. There was the difficulty of living in exponential time, the impossible task of speeding policy and social change to match the rate of viral replication. I suspect that some of the political and social damage we still carry from the pandemic reflects that impossible acceleration. There is a natural pace to human deliberation. A lot breaks when we are denied the luxury of time.

From Ezra Klein’s “This Changes Everything” in The New York Times.

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Let’s Discuss Film

I missed Tár at the cinema so I am waiting for it to stream, and because I haven’t seen the film yet I have not read this article by Somtow Sucharitkul, but I am recommending it anyway, on the basis of the conversation it sparked on a friend’s Facebook page. Go forth if spoilers are not a problem for you.

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No Feeling Lasts Forever

Wave of sorrow,

Do not drown me now:

I see the island

Still ahead somehow,

I see the island

And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,

Take me there.

- Langston Hughes, Island

Finally

1. Having parents who drink wine is embarrassing?

2. Feminist art about sexual objectification, man.

3. We can do this with our short little spans of attention.

4. This is safe to click on. It is a painting in the Tate.