Summer, But Recomposed

November is a time of overwhelm so this month it's all links and quotes.

Dear Reader

This month’s newsletter is all a bit random. I hope you enjoy.

Short Talk on Walking Backwards

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

- Anne Carson, 2015.

.

Where Upon One Learns One’s Strengths as a Parent are Apparently Not One’s Stability and Caution

I came across a note written to me by my son when he was eight years old reads - “Things I love my mummy for. I love the way my mummy is crazy and out there”.

(Now he is thirteen years old and apparently, loves my calm).

.

On Being a Grandmother

I drove the thirteen-year-old to his football match at Sanctuary Lakes, an outer suburb unknown to us. On the freeway I became confused. Me: “Shit, man. I think we’re lost.” Him (calmly, with the street directory open on his scrawny bare thighs): “Oh well. It’s not as if I’m the most valued member of the team.” He looks at me slyly. We laugh so much I almost have to pull off the road.

From “I So Love Being Old and Not Married” by Helen Garner in The Paris Review.

I am becoming curious about the idea that one day I may be a grandmother. What will grandparenting be like for my generation? This generation of women, who always worked outside the home.

.

Unanchored

I really recommend this piece by Damon Young in The Washington Post. It is about everything that is wrong with the cause and interpretation of Internet controversies. Wonderful.

There’s no shame in not knowing things. Both the universe and our lack of knowledge about it is infinite. The problem is the refusal to do something that the smartest people always do, and that’s humble yourself when receiving new information. Maybe you haven’t finished that book, but someone else has. Maybe you don’t get why that one thing is a problem, but somebody else does. Maybe the Earth’s curvature is a difficult concept for you to grasp, but it has been studied for hundreds of years and there are scientists who can explain it to you, if you allow them to.

The arrogance Irving has shown, when questioned about some of these beliefs, is magnified by his basketball prowess. Compared with other NBA players, he’s not a freak-of-nature athlete, and at 6-foot-2 he’s a relatively normal-sized human. His otherworldliness is mostly due to his work ethic and his brain just processing information, angles and body calculus … differently. I’m tempted to say that he hoops in cursive. But my handwriting has always been bad, so that’s not much of a compliment from me. Instead, the way he plays reminds me of what Kiese Laymon once said about revisiting and revising your writing: “Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every God ever asked of believers.”

.

On the Importance of Women Friends

She is a friend of mind.

she gather me, man.

The pieces I am,

she gather them and give

them back to me

in all the right order.

It’s good, you know,

when you got a woman

who is a friend of your mind.

- Toni Morrison, Beloved.

.

On Middle Age Contentment - Maybe One Candle for Atmosphere

Lately is the exact opposite of that; things are a well-lit (lovely lamps, no overheads, maybe one candle for atmosphere) room, clean, orderly, with me calm and serene and doing everything “right.” Nice and boring. And it doesn’t feel cyclical either; past-me would probably have had a strong urge to wreck the health/responsibility/mindfulness streak with dumb behavior, whether that took the form of Substances, performative/fake friendships, or even just flirting with how little I can care about work without becoming fired. But now I feel like I’M GOOD JUST THE WAY I AM what the fuck is this maturity?

From mimi smartypants in ‘she’s unreal’. Did you know that mimi still blogs? She is, by now, writing about middle aged ‘empty nesting’. Also, as well as her child being newly grown up, they are also trans and so, if you are parenting in a similar space then this might be particularly nice reading for you.

.

Brutal Truth

1. Gather lots of makeup. However much makeup you think it will take to achieve the no-makeup look, it will take far more makeup than that. Go to any social media site, and find a how-to video on applying no-makeup makeup.

2. Get a lighted mirror with at least 15X magnification. Confronting the brutal truth of your skin at this age will be frightening, but you are a middle-aged woman, and lately, you seem to delight in brutal truth to the degree that it is becoming uncomfortable for those around you.

From Jennie Young’s How to Apply ‘No-Makeup’ Makeup: A Guide for Mature Women” in McSweeneys.

.

Is Mother Trying to Kill Us?

Ange Lavoipierre on the threat of reality collapsing, at the ABC. (Note: it includes images of horror).

.

The Importance of Play

Art is a public-health concern because it keeps you from killing yourself and others. [Laughs.] It’s not going to work for everyone. I’ve thought about that person we imagined who might look down on adults playing, and the truth is the person I thought of was Trump and how much he loves the song “Memory” from “Cats.” Apparently when he was losing his mind one of his staff would put it on.

That blows my mind. That guy, who I think is outside the human sphere a little bit — still, “Cats” can get to him. But I don’t think art has any saving qualities for people who don’t need it. It’s like, some people can’t digest milk, you know? But a lot of people can.

From an interview with Lynda Barry by David Marchese in The New York Times.

Honestly, is anyone still fooled by billionaires anymore? File them in the same list with personality tests and nudge theory economics¹. Whatever was worthwhile in the category has long been overtaken by charlatans.

.

Same

“I’m huge on museum gift shops” - Martha Plimpton. Oh me too, Martha.

.

You Serve Men

We really enjoyed House of the Dragon so, I wish I’d found Leslie McLemore’s weekly recaps a little sooner, because they’re so witty.

Rhaenys called out Alicents 53% of yt women voted for Trump logic with that “you serve men” line.

Me talking to Babymomma: “This n*a done killed his first wife, watch his second burn like Otto should’ve been burned and choked the daylight out of his third wife and watch yo fellow women call him their Toxic King.”

And he does my favourite kind of pop cultural discussion, which is one that references politics. McLemore writes for Black With No Chaser and not just about television, for example there is this piece on the fatal attraction Kanye West has with (white) capitalism.

.

Keep Walking

I chatted with one of our companions about the conceptual trick at the core of The Lightning Field. Here we were, happy to spend hours ambling around a rectangle of grassland not so different from tens of thousands of other such rectangles extending outward in all directions. Precisely measured and visually borderless, The Lightning Field presents a conundrum about the source of its marvel. In hundreds of hours driving through the Southwest, I hadn’t ever stopped to revel in the land’s vastness in the same way, pacing out most of a square mile, toggling between ground and horizon. Either De Maria put one over on us, we reasoned, or his sculpture’s power lay in its function as an observational device, like a pair of binoculars parceling out the infinite for our self-centered and perennially distracted selves.

This is from Rowan Moore Gerety’s piece on the The Lightning Field artwork in The Atlantic.

I am a very big fan of the purposeless walk. It’s one of the reasons why I think dog ownership is useful. But like Moore Gerety, I am frustrated by artworks that impose a lot of rules on you. I could get that from everyday life, thanks.

.

To All Things Made Up

This glorious poem, The Hand-Carved Loon by Robert Adamson has been in my mind a lot with the news that we are losing Adamson. (Thank you for the online friendship).

.

And there are

Two birds

In this poem

A loon

Hand-carved

From balsa

And a snakebird

On the tide

Of the river

The oily head

Of a water bird

Cuts surface

And glides

Along by

Tarred wooden

Racks

Ideograms

Oyster farms

Low on the tide

Lower than

The hand-carved

Loon it looks

Hardly buoyant

A bird

From two

Worlds it knows

The murk

On the bottom

And waves

Crinkled by sun

It swims

As well

As a black trevally

Sleek and fast

A challenge to

Handcrafted birds

To all things made up

.

On a Different Kind of Grief

The grief of watching your kid struggle with their mental health is a unique one, surpassed only by that one worse grief, the one I must whisper: suicide. Depression’s companion. It lurks, threatening, in the corner.

My kid cannot get out of bed. It has not just been days, but weeks, months, years. It started the year they turned 14 and continues now, four-and-a-half years later. The tide of darkness is usually broken in the evening by a smile, a joke, a willingness to help out around the house – only to engulf them once more when the sun rises.

²From “The grief of watching your child struggle” by an anonymous author (and friend of mine) in SBS.

.

Joyful Tales of Single Motherhood

Children are supposed to be the death of freedom. But that hasn’t been my experience exactly. The death of free time, certainly, but not of free thought. It was my marriage that took that from me. I could be myself and be a mother. I got divorced because I could not be myself and a wife.

Getting married was expected; all I had to do was say yes. But I’ve come to realize that I’ve really only chosen two things in my life: motherhood and divorce. Children are supposed to make divorce much harder. For me, they made it easier.

I know that this sounds strange, that it makes people angry. People I know, people I don’t know. Probably my children themselves will feel angry about it someday, and sometimes they already do—about the 50–50 back-and-forth and the two apartments and the juggling act that is now our family. I can see a man reading this, and it’s late at night, and his face is all the colors of the internet. He thinks I’ve made some very poor choices. He thinks, because I left my marriage, that I’m not a good mother.

From Honor Jones’ “The Only Two Choices I’ve Ever Made” in The Atlantic.

.

Joyful Tales of Young Single Motherhood

My son and I moved into a flat where he rode his scooter in the car park while I rollerskated beside him. My friend from Adelaide moved in, and slept on a mattress (which I'd rescued from hard rubbish) at the foot of my son's cot. One afternoon, my friend and I spent a day making a train out of boxes and alfoil, for my son and his stuffed toys.

Every day, I would walk my son along Merri Creek in his stroller, stopping at playgrounds, or to poke at the brown water. We would walk for hours. I was anxious and unmoored, and the walks soothed my buzzing brain. I sometimes felt guilty, because I enjoyed the quiet stretches where my son dozed in his stroller.

Now, I wish I could tell that 23-year-old, with her cargo pants and overstretched T-shirts, that she was doing a good job. That those walks, though designed for her, were also great for her son.

Lovely piece from Jo Case, another friend of mine, on young single motherhood in ABC’s EveryDay.

.

Death is in the Air

White Noise is one of my favourite novels and in that book is one of my favourite quotes:

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive.

And, I will have to see the film, which is about to be released, because I love that book so much. I don’t know if the film adaptation will be any good - I hope it is - but isn’t now the perfect time to revisit White Noise? And, doesn’t this quote from Adam Driver, in this piece on Noah Baumbach and making ‘White Noise’ in The New York Times Magazine, just describe right now?

“There’s this constant rumble of dread, a constant motion,” Driver said, “a constant anxiety that they’re not dealing with, and it’s coming out in all this weird behavior.”

.

On Raising Teenage Boys

3. Love them for sleeping late. The only other option is to not love them for sleeping late, since the sleeping late is itself a given. They’re creating many inches of new human flesh a day, and it’s exhausting! (Remember pregnancy?) When they stagger out at 2 p.m. with their man-sized arms and legs and their sleep-creased baby faces, you can just say, “Did you have a good sleep, my love?” instead of “Good AFTERNOON,” like all of our own passive-aggressive parents did. And you might be treated to a languid smile, a comfortable stretch, and the simple pleasure of the words, “I did.”

From Catherine Newman in Cup of Jo.

.

them boys

them boys deserved love

them boys deserved education, land

them boys deserved bikes, joy

them boys deserved freedom, autonomy

them boys deserved a life free of fear

them boys deserved to be left alone

them boys deserved breath in their lungs

them boys deserved more than what

you're willing to give, give up

our boys deserved to be alive, today

- dominic eliseo

I want to acknowledge this moment in Australia when we are all thinking of that sweet-faced, joyful looking boy with the beautiful name, Cassius. A Noongar Aboriginal child, not much older than my boy, who was allegedly beaten to death on his walk home from school in a racially motivated attack.

.

Recommend Buying Book/Poetry/Art

The teenager I mentored this year gave me a copy of Celeste Mountjoy’s book, What the Fuck is This as a thank you gift. Break a feminist mama’s heart, why don’t you? It’s brilliant.

I read a review saying the semi-autobiographical comic book lacked a sense of resolution. Rubbish. Young women are forever being underestimated. Her insights are complex. But also, there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a young woman figure out the deal with predatory older men. Sing it.

.

Recommend Looking at Photographs

Jim Mortram is one of the most humanising photographers I have seen doing social documentary portraits. And he is always looking at ways of contributing more ethically. Follow him here.

.

Recommend Studying Writing

Ariel Gore’s book, The Wayward Writer is on writing your book and liberating yourself from capitalism. Buy her book here.

1. Forgive me, behavioural economists. It’s not you, it’s your fans.

2. I include this link because if this is your experience of parenting then I am guessing your experience is lonely as hell, and I want you to see someone else talking about it.