…you have to stop working from a place that is about making some invisible teacher happy.

…nothing humans do is real, and the trees don’t care, and we are all here together in dirt. This feels to me somehow like the opposite of despair.

So. Space settlements. Have we really thought this through?

Tenoxtitlan is unshakable, she said, but we are only passing through.

In current traffic conditions, a taxi from JFK takes about seven years to get to Lower Manhattan. It gave me a lot of time to think. The phrase I thought about was structural violence. The soaring new condos with their empty billionaire penthouses are panopticon eyes glaring at the property values below. While as a queer theatre kid I am contractually obligated to love New York, Succession and the art of Diamanda Galas and Basquiat and the memoirs of ballerinas and the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton have always kept its icy, Gothic nature in sharp focus.

That’s incomplete, as anything about the city must necessarily be. We visited the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. It’s extraordinary, an entire subway station filled with buses and old carriages, their period advertisements intact. The surveyors and engineers and miners who built the subway challenge your gaze in exquisite photographs taken during construction. The contributions of immigrant and Black workers, and the way the political machines divided and exploited them, are carefully described.

It’s a terrific museum and I love museums, even the bad ones. I’m still thinking about an hour I spent last year at the museum of Las Vegas, New Mexico. It dwelt on Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, cowboys he recruited as cavalry whose exceedingly brief (and horseless) campaign in Cuba formed the mythos for his presidential bid. The Rough Riders took their name from Buffalo Bill Cody’s stage show, and included Ivy League athletes and glee club singers as well as frontiersmen. The white version of the Wild West is a PR campaign designed to erase the Black and indigenous history of these lands.

The Rough Riders met to celebrate their weeks-long active service every year for the next seventy years. In her book The White Possessive, Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes:

It takes a great deal of work to maintain Canada, the United States, Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Australia as white possessions.

Since I read that I haven’t been able to stop seeing the work, in everything from high-end residential architecture to little museums. What if we just… stopped?

A sense of my own mediocrity, a general lack of courage, particularly when it comes to writing.

…in the years 1985 and 1986 the City of San Francisco’s AIDS budget exceeded the federal government’s.

“If someone took my baby away from me, I would have done a lot more than get a haircut. I would have burned the city to the ground.”

The horror is so persistent, it’s almost banal.

i lunch with a mover and a shaker

Cynicism and nihilism will make you dry up, like soil compacted by neglect and abuse. But soil holds the memory of life, and with some water and a garden fork, you might be able to bring it back. It helps to remember that you’re not alone. Look around. Is it really true that everyone sees time as money?

To act in a way that is both sexist and racist, to maintain one’s class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.

The old monks: “Sit in thy cell and thy cell will teach thee all things.” Helps if you’ve got a cell in the middle of downtown San Francisco.

After a brutal flight (migraine all the way across the Pacific) I walked off the jetbridge into a familiar wall of humidity, stepping around a giant crushed cockroach in the arrivals hall. Our AirBnB is a tiny cottage with five bedrooms, a miracle of small-space design. We are sitting in the carport-turned-patio. Above us are rainbow lorikeets and sulfur-crested cockatoos and the rain falling on the corrugated polycarbonate roof.

I need to set myself small side quests. I’d like to find a copy of Shady Acres: Power and Vested Interests in the Government of New South Wales and the Shaping of Sydney. I’d like to eat a really good sausage roll. I’d like to eat a really good vanilla slice.

…a quote from John Waters—“True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.”

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

Okay, maybe “love” isn’t exactly the right word for this one. Caroline Elkins is a fucking badass whose archival research helped secure reparations for 5,228 Kenyan Kikiyu people who survived British gulags during the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau movement. It’s quite the story:

When Elkins’s book came out, her findings – partly based on the testimony of Kikuyu survivors – were widely dismissed as, at best, exaggerations by a generation of historians wedded to stubborn ideas of Britain’s “enlightened” and “benign empire”. Her history was dramatically vindicated, however, when an unknown cache of 240,000 top secret colonial files, removed from Nairobi at the time of Kenyan independence in 1963, were disclosed on the eve of the 2011 trial. The files had been stored in a high security foreign office depository at Hanslope Park, near Northampton. At the time of that high court victory, Elkins noted that she had for years put on hold a wider inquiry into the methods of British colonial governance in the years after the second world war, in order to substantiate the survivors’ case, research that would now be illuminated by the fact that the secret document store also held “lost” records from 37 other former colonies. She was both vindicated and outraged by the discovery: “After all these years of being roasted over the coals, they’ve been sitting on the evidence? Are you frickin’ kidding me? This almost destroyed my career.”

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins review – the brutal truth about Britain’s past

It’s taken me most of a year to get through the audiobook version, not only because it’s 31 hours long but because it’s heavy, heavy work. It draws connections between stories I know well, like British lies and cruelty during the Troubles in Ireland; stories I know less well but that have become hideously topical, like British cynicism and racism during Mandatory Palestine; and stories that to my shame I barely know at all, like British duplicity and violence in the Malayan Emergency. It describes, in painful detail, the contents of those “lost” records, including suppressed evidence of multiple extrajudicial murders by British officers.

And it’s my legacy. My grandfather is somewhere in these pages, in Mandatory Papua New Guinea after the war, with his wife and their children, my aunt and uncle and father. Not, I hope, committing the most egregious crimes, but certainly acting as a tool of Empire.

Despite all this, this book deserves its place as the most important thing I read in 2023. It may join Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity on the short list of books I think about almost every day.

Prophet

On a much cheerier note, the amazing Helen MacDonald of H is for Hawk spent the early part of the pandemic (how is this a cheerier note, Rachel) collaborating with Sin Blache on this irresistable book. As I said to my secret coven, imagine late Douglas Adams and mid-career William Gibson writing a scaldingly hot queer love story together. Get it in your eyes posthaste.

Ghosts of the Tsunami and San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History

Feels like cheating to include Beth Winegarner’s exquisitely researched investigation into the graveyards on which the City was built, given that I read it in draft and am thanked in the acknowledgments, but it would be equally dishonest to leave this one out. It’s even better than her Sacred Sonoma, and was written for the same reason: to try to understand and navigate the spiritual geography of place, its holy places and corpse roads. Parry’s book is an effort to do the same for the devastated landscape of the 2011 Japan earthquake.

My archaeology professor Alexander Cambitoglou impressed on me that we measure civilizations by how they dispose of their dead. Hit middle age and you realize every house is haunted; you realize that you yourself are a haunted house. We channel the voices of our dead for our children, because we knew and loved them when they were alive. Just as safety regulations are written in blood, institutional memory is a set of ghost stories, and that’s if you are very, very lucky.

(I forgot my best story about Beth’s book: she wound up her launch events with a Halloween reading at the Neptune Society’s beautiful Columbarium in the Richmond. I’d never been and it was atmospheric enough even before the quite strong tremor that rattled the stained glass windows and interrupted Beth making a very cogent and spooky point. Memento mori much?)

System Collapse

The latest Murderbot would be a shoo-in for the list even if it had not come out on the birthday shared by my younger kid and the Guide Dog puppy I’m currently raising. The younger kid was equally thrilled, having fallen for this series as hard as I did, with the delightful result that we can use deep cuts to communicate, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra-style, about our neurodivergence and misanthropy. Beloved author Martha Wells is responding well to cancer treatment; long may it be so.

Honorable mentions (because otherwise this post is getting too long)

The Animators and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – charming and engaging litfic about love and creativity

The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy – I texted my friend Danny, who had recommended it, to say Why don’t I heed your recommendations all the time? To which he responded You should! Another that reminds me of The Dawn of Everything

When We Cease to Understand the World – this year’s Vita Nostra, an entirely unexpected and mind-bending delight

So. Space settlements. Have we really thought this through?

The city is strange and gorgeous at the dark end of the year. Summer lingers into September, and then on October first, as if someone had flipped a switch, it’s suddenly and irrevocably fall. You crave soup and pie. By November you are riding your bike to yoga in a dry sunlit cold that makes your bones ache.

Last week Lenny and I had a private lesson with the boss trainer to work on our canter depart. I’ve been riding for forty years but this program demands absolute correctness, and it’s fiendishly difficult. To canter, you sort of pick the entire horse up with your thighs and put him back down on his outside hind leg. Oh, and you sit perfectly still while you are doing it. Sound impossible? It is.

And then Lenny and I came around a corner and I saw where our canter depart should be, and I showed Lenny, and he stepped into it, soft and round and through. For a blinding instant I felt superpowered. We have yet to reproduce our feat.

On the drive home the marine layer rolled in with the early sunset. 280 was a freeway through giant trees – not mere redwoods, but dense black trees so huge they blotted out half the sky. 21st century cars zooming through a primeval forest, the landscape of the reptile brain.

Riding – not even bothering to compete, just riding for its own sake – is the most ephemeral of arts, there and gone almost before you can acknowledge its presence. Like the city circling the sun as the planet spins on its axis, that scrubbed-clean sky, those ghosts of monstrous dawn sequoias; I write them down because memory is the only trace they leave. As John Darnielle sings, “All of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” To live is to bear witness.

If you’d had the right kind of microphone, scientists say, you could have heard the trees screaming.

My auntie Barb has died. My Dad’s older sister. Sharp as a needle, funny and profoundly kind. Maybe my first role model and a person who saw me and loved me as I am from when I was a chaotic disaster youth all the way to middle age. She made 93. A life well lived. I will miss her always.