This made me swoon:

But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.

Stopping now, I promise! I only just figured out where Amazon keeps my Kindle highlights, so I worked through a little backlog there :)

Marr is Australia’s best journalist right now, as far as I can gather. He is acute on both what makes us different…

David Malouf has a wonderful theory that it’s the English we carried in our baggage that makes America and Australia such different places. In the early seventeenth century, settlers took to America a language of abstractions: “Passionately evangelical and utopian, deeply imbued with the religious fanaticism and radical violence of the time, this was the language of … dissenters … who left England to found a new society that would be free, as they saw it, of authoritarian government by Church and Crown.” Malouf argues that by the time Australia was colonised, the language had changed. What the First Fleet brought here “was the language of the English and Scottish Enlightenment: sober, unemphatic, good-humoured; a very sociable and moderate language; modern in a way that even we would recognise, and supremely rational and down to earth”.

…and what makes us boringly the same as everyone else.

Wherever the Tampa tactics lead Australia in the years to come, those of us in the City Recital Hall yesterday will remember the sight and the sound of a white, prosperous audience baying for border protection. They know it’s the winning ticket and John Howard has found it for them. He is a genius of sorts: he looks this country in the face and sees us not as we wish we were, not as one day we might be, but exactly as we are. The political assessment is ruthlessly realistic. Only the language is coy. But who has ever admitted to playing the race card?

So great, I had to go back and read the whole series in one go.

…the psychological impact of inherited wealth, the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang on to it; the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire; the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich, generating their characteristic disguises: the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation in perfect taste; the defeated, the idle, and the frivolous, and their opponents, the standard-bearers, all living in a world that the dense glitter of alternatives made it hard for love and work to penetrate. If these values were in themselves sterile, they looked all the more ridiculous after two generations of disinheritance.

Right now I am reading Tad Friend’s Cheerful Money, which is At Last’s transatlantic twin.

You can see tragedy coming from a considerable distance when you are older, but when you are young tragedy does not pertain to you and certainly never catches up to you.

The best book I have ever read about death.

When the blowup rose out of Mann Gulch and its smoke merged with the jet stream, it looked much like an atomic explosion in Nevada on its cancerous way to Utah.

I’ve had some discouraging rides lately, feeling like I will never not suck, etc. Remember how Colin asked us to rethink cadence, and I forgot how to ride, and then I realized that Bella just needs a bigger canter to get over bigger fences? What I elide with a neat little narrative like that one is that the epiphany itself is almost beside the point. The stories I tell in my blog, like the running commentary in my head, are post-facto rationalizations of choices my body had already made. And muscle memory doesn’t have epiphanies, not really. You get a feeling, then you lose it, then you struggle to get it again, and you get a little worse, and you beat yourself up for sucking and being lame (which are sexist and ableist slurs, so… don’t do that, anyway.)

But you keep trying, if you’re me, in your half-arsed, forty-something, adult amateur way, as if riding ever so slightly better, not hanging on the reins, not squashing the movement with your stiffness, not blocking on one side – as if those things had some kind of moral weight, or any meaning beyond just exactly what they are. More rationalization, I guess. The truth is I want to ride because I just, I just want to ride, I always have. It’s beyond wanting to jump classes or overcome obstacles or transcend my earthbound whatever, although it is all those things as well. What it fundamentally is is having glimpsed something very good – that feeling, very occasionally, that I am moving with Bella, helping not hindering, that the two of us together are something more than the sum of its parts. And being unable to forget, or to effectively reproduce that singing moment, that plain canter with the horse moving straight under me, outside hind to inside fore, and nothing in me stopping that, my body like water, like light, like part of her body.

I had that, in glimmers, last week, and on Friday. Today we rode with Colin again and the thing about Colin is that he puts the jumps higher for us than any of the other trainers do: that’s his privilege, because it’s his name above the door. He was actually pulling them down because Toni had been jumping Coneli at a solid 4’6″, but even taken down they were 3′ or so, and the oxers were wide, and there was a hogsback.

I looked at them and knew that I could be afraid and let the fear stop me, but I could feel Bells sound as a bell underneath me, and I knew that Colin wouldn’t overface me, so I did that thing where I pretend to be the rider they think I am, and I felt the tension ebb away. That “chill the fuck out, I got this” feeling. We jumped the massive course and all I thought about was Bella’s rhythm and my line. I made mistakes but I fixed them. There was a huge oxer I thought would be a problem but when we rounded the corner to it I saw my distance and showed it to Bella and she jumped it. And then there was a white vertical five strides before the hogsback, and I turned her to it and saw the five and we jumped through it all forward, on the lightest possible contact; and it was very good.

“She goes well for you,” said Colin. “Cranky old mare.”

We stayed up to watch the landing. Claire crashed out but Jules was with us when we jumped up and down and screamed and cried a little bit. I hope she remembers this for ever: the helpless fear, the perfect landing, the grainy pictures beamed back from another world.

You will not be tested on this material.

Showjumping is the sport I do, but eventing is the sport I follow. Eventing has a narrative: there are teams, and there are three phases (dressage, cross-country, showjumping) such that after three days of competition everything can hang on whether a horse taps a rail with a hind foot or not, and if so, whether that rail falls. It’s VERREH EXCITINGE. I’ve been enmeshed in its DRAMZ since reading KM Peyton’s glorious books about it at an impressionable age, and it’s why Princess Anne is my favourite Royal, because she rode on the British team in Montreal.

This year’s Olympic eventing offers up maybe the dramiest dramz in, oh, ever. Let’s see: the US coach ran off with his mistress, who he had made the showjumping coach. Scandal! The US coach is also the father of a member of the British team, which member is also the daughter of the abovementioned Princess Anne and therefore the granddaughter of the Queen. The dad says he might watch his daughter ride, if he can find the time. For these and other reasons, the dad is widely thought of in eventing circles as a gigantic tool. Two members of his US team are former Australian Olympians who have switched sides, leaving Australia to scramble for other riders. Those Australian-Americans rescued one of the Olympic horses from a burning barn last year, by dint of punching out the fire chief who was trying to prevent them from running into the flames.

It’s a Jilly Cooper novel COME TO LIFE. Me, I will be rooting for Ingrid Klimke, for sentimental reasons as her father Reiner Klimke is still my favourite equestrian ever; Mary King, a marvellous English rider who is best thought of as Helen Mirren on horseback; Boyd Martin, a punk kid who is one of the heroes of the barn fire; and Hawley Bennett, a Canadian who is based in California, because I saw her ride at Woodside last year and she was awesome.

Most of all, though, I’ll be hoping that everyone gets around with no injuries whatsoever, not even a loose shoe. Eventing has a filthy little secret: it’s sometimes fatal. So that’s my Olympic dream: that just this once, everybody lives.

ETA: Gold medal: German team, including Ingrid Klimke. Silver medal: British team, including Mary King. BOO YAH.

…these ones gun- and bomb- and massacre-related, and resulting in me waking up and staring at the ceiling thinking “What am I doing having kids in a world like this?”

And then today, a music festival in a local park, beautiful bands and perfect weather and duck and mango tacos and iced chai.

Impossible to reconcile all the different Americas. Love and fear and love.

We spent the fourth of July in the Sierras with two families from the kids’ school. There were some pretty epic treats: CatHaven, Boyden Cavern, my first wild bear, a juvenile, walking through a sunny glade by a lake. But the lake had Christian camps all around it and was unexpectedly upsetting. Claire is reaching the age I was when I joined the unpleasant church, and I lost an entire night to nightmares about the past invading the present.

I keep coming back to something helpful the wife said a few weeks ago. I said I didn’t know why I let it get to me so much, given that I was not myself one of the victims. She said that I am allowed to mourn my own losses. That got me thinking about what those losses were.

I spent the years from ages 9 to 21 in an institution where everyone with any kind of authority lied routinely about everything that was important. I was praised for my worst behaviour and attacked unmercifully for all the things I like about myself. Black was white, up was down, right was wrong. I was predisposed to depression, obviously, but what I learned at the church was that I could neither trust myself nor anyone else.

Nothing remarkable about that. Institutions rot. Here’s to fluid overlays, begun with the enthusiastic consent of all parties and subject to strict term limits.

I read Leonard’s book and identified completely with his crunchy Granola post-scarcity, zero-coercion aliens and their fluid overlays for getting things done. I said to Danny: “I think I may be becoming an anarchist,” and Danny, because he is perfect, ran off to find a pamphlet to push into my willing hands.

The pamphlet is perfect. It is Kevin Carson’s “Resilient Communities: Society After State Capitalism.” The first essay talks about local economies, including farmers’ markets and barter systems. The second essay talks about the historical roots of such local economies: Pompeiian villas and labor cooperatives.

I started to realize that I have been a practising anarchist for quite some time. Consider! I like: credit unions, hackerspaces, Mechanics’ Institutes, small-press books, community gardens and California commune and other DIY architecture. I dislike: large banks, surveillance, inequality, institutional racism and sexism and the police state.

I’ve been thinking a lot about money, both professionally and politically. Despite the overwhelming centrality of venture capital to the technology industry, my standard (good) advice to engineer-entrepreneurs is: “bootstrap. Run off revenues. Never sign a term sheet.” The more I read Keynes, the less I think of money as stored value. Money is something else.

This is important. Carson brings up Schumpeter, who distinguishes between “the money theory of credit” and “the credit theory of money.” We live in a world ruled by the money theory of credit. That is, when you borrow money from a bank or VC, it is assumed that loan comes out of a pile of cash placed in the bank or fund by account holders or limited partners. The credit – the loan or investment – is funded by the money, which exists. Right?

Wrong. Schumpeter’s credit theory of money turns that logic on its head. “It is much more realistic to say that the banks ‘create credit…’ than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted to them.” What does it mean to create credit? Think about what “credit” actually means. It is a measure of trust in a relationship. Money flows from the social contract.

That’s why Keynesianism worked, especially after WW2: people were too afraid of the consequences of not trusting one another, and so they credited one another with enough goodwill to build the Interstate Highway System and the National Health. It worked right up until Reagan and Thatcher made hate fashionable again.

Carson takes up the argument:

“Capital” is a term for a right of property in organizing and disposing of this present labor. The same basic cooperative functions could be carried out just as easily by the workers themselves, through mutual credit. Under the present system, the capitalist monopolizes those cooperative functions, and thus appropriates the productivity gains from the social division of labor.”

Far from “storing” “value” in the form of “money”, banks and venture capitalists subtract credit from the social contract by adding (mostly worthless) extra layers of abstraction between individual actors. The mortgage crisis began with liar loans and banks selling off mortgages: anything to distance themselves from the consequences of what they had done.

Vast wealth is hoarded money, stagnant credit. It is more disgusting and a bigger threat to mental and public health and aesthetics than the hoarding of physical goods.

So that’s where I am. Still supporting Obama because of Affordable Care, but adamantly opposed to extraordinary rendition and detention without trial. Not exactly soured on electoral politics, but empowered to say A Plague On Both Your Houses! because finally able to imagine an alternative: a society in which we help each other, listen to one another and share what we have. In short, I am an anarchist.

Claire and I were driving home from lunch at Taco Los Altos (burritos, Kanye West, the Supreme Court and Sigmund Freud). We were just turning into Eugenia when the car parked next door to Colin’s house jumped the curb, accelerated across the street and T-boned Colin’s truck. It sat there revving and revving, smoke pouring off its tires, about fifteen feet in front of us, while I stared at it, dumbfounded.

I had to back out into Mission and drive around the block. We parked and walked back down to talk to Colin. “I am so glad it hit my truck,” he said. “The little boy was in there and the engine was running. He likes to play in the front seat, and he put his foot on the accelerator. If he hadn’t hit my truck he could have been killed.”

Colin asked us all to rethink cadence and I forgot how to ride.

I can see Matador’s cadence. He is an Argentinian Warmblood and he bounces around the jumps like a ping pong ball. I can see Ruth’s cadence: she is a huge hunter and her flat-kneed stride is about a hundred feet long. She is so scopy that she would rather jump out of a long spot than add.

What’s Bella’s cadence though? Sometimes she tranters, conjuring an extra footfall from thin air. And sometimes she seems to swoosh from jump to jump. She can jump out of any old stupid spot I drop her in, but how do I find the rhythmic canter that she can jump out of without constant emergencies?

We had a lesson where Val asked us to jump the five to five, do a more-than-rollback and come back up the panels to the oxer. We got the five to five but Bella bucked like a banshee as I tried to haul her around the corner, and I stopped her and realized that my hands were shaking and I was scared.

We ended that lesson jumping six-inch crossrails. I flew to Boston on business and brooded on my troubles. I realized how much of my recent good body image comes from the knowledge that I can ride better than I used to, because that good body image abandoned me with the worry over my riding.

We came back and I remembered that Bella wants me to let go of her head so she can use her front end, and to sit in the saddle so she knows I am not going to come off her. We rode around another huge (three foot!) course in the Grand Prix arena and I checked in with my seatbones three strides out from every fence, letting her jump out of her rhythm.

There’s her cadence. It’s just that at the height we’re jumping now, it’s faster than I am comfortable with. And when I’m scared I go fetal and come out of the saddle and hang on the reins. And then she bucks, because, what the hell, Rach.

I have to sit back and let go and hurtle forward at vast speed and let her take the fence in her own way. It feels like dying, but it is correct.

This, for the record, is what I ride to learn.

We had babysitters last night but it was a perfect storm of Working Mamahood: a stressful meeting, a race home to be in time to pay Julia’s tutor and drop off a BBQ chicken for the girls’ dinner, then sweatily retracing my steps to find that the place I had planned on meeting Jeremy was closed for renovations.

I had a glass of wine two doors away. J arrived and I glowered at him until I remembered that this place exists and was in fact just around the corner. We had a fricken celestial meal. The highlight was the salmon tartare, which came in a white dome of frozen horseradish that melted on your tongue like angels singing.

We sat at the bar watching the kitchen prep: liquid nitrogen to keep the horseradish domes crisp and to freeze the popcorn; the cherry sorbet served in champagne coupes with a little lime soda. Commonwealth is run by San Francisco hippies and $10 from every tasting menu goes to local non-profits, hence the name. J got tipsy. I had to pack for a business trip when we got home, but then we curled up on the couch and watched Thor, which was extheedingly thilly.

I know I was rude about the SMH just a fortnight ago, but it really was my first window into the adult world, and for many years the name Fairfax held for me the ring of integrity. I’m gutted at the layoffs. The innocent are punished while the guilty walk free.

Jeremy and I have been watching Altogether Too Much Archer, with the result that every now and then one of us will shout:

“DANGERZONE!!!”

Yesterday before camp, Julia piled all the cushions and blankets on the living room floor and rolled around on them, crying: “I am in the comfy zone!”

I said: “You’re going to have to get out of your comfort zone.”

Claire said: “And into the DANGERZONE!!!”

What is up the NY Times’ butt? Another breathtakingly sexist review, this one by Francine Prose:

“But Gina doesn’t seem to have a heart — or, for that matter, a conscience. Nor is she particularly intelligent…”

Compare with Hermione Lee in the Grauniad, who at least seems to have read the same book I did:

A 34-year-old married woman – sexy, energetic and independent-minded…

Or more damningly, compare with Lydia Millet’s NYT review of Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask:

Milo Burke, a deeply cynical academic development officer, earnest binger on doughnuts, avid consumer of Internet porn, and devoted father and husband…

Or even Michiko on Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story:

insecurities manifested in Lenny’s self-deprecating humor, his compulsive need to try to make others like him…

Awful male characters are complex. Awful female characters have no redeeming features. Got it?

SIGH. Anyway, I enjoyed Waltz as I did not particularly enjoy Lipsyte or Shteyngart, and I had fun being drunk and envious in suburban Dublin again. Like most Anne Enright, this reads as the lovechild of Emma Donoghue and Lionel Shriver. Mmm.

Here are a couple of unicorn chasers.

Tintin author Herge was a super-problematic dude in many ways, but he was exemplary in at least this one: he made friends with a Chinese scholar and he listened to his friend and he let that friendship change him and his work. That’s all you can ask of anyone, really, so: props.

This conversation between two Asian-American foodies about cultural appropriation is a privilege to overhear, and also contains these handy hints on not being racist:

Danny Bowien is a guy who NAILS it in terms of messaging. He does funky hybrid party Chinese food that I think we’re all honored to be the inspiration for. Danny hit me on twitter today wanting to put my Hainan Lobster Rice on the menu, do it! I love that people like Danny and Kareem Abdul Jabbar are interested in our culture in an inquisitive and honest way.

Danny’s the chef at my new favourite brunch place, so: yay.

I do get that it’s totally my fault for reading the Sydney Morning Herald (which I remember from my childhood as a fun, sophis window into the adult world, but which today (possibly without its even having changed!) reads as a gross crawly-bumlick to wealth and power, as unrepresentative of most of Australia as Fox News and the NY Times are of most of America.)

Nevertheless!

When St Pauls College (last seen waving a flag for rape!) holds a party at which the white guests are served by Indian waiters in colourful dress in celebration of the “colonial” theme, the appropriate headline is not: “Was this uni Raj night racist?” The appropriate headline is “Fire everyone responsible for racist uni Raj night.”

And! If you are the principal of one of the major private schools, and you say aggressively racist shit like this:

Dr Paul Burgis, the principal of PLC Sydney, where 34 per cent of students are from other cultural backgrounds, said there was a huge level of exposure to, and acceptance of, other cultures at the school.
”It would almost be offensive if I, as a principal, was to talk about it: ‘Why do you have to raise it as an issue? We’re past that now, we’re just friends’,” he said.
”At a school like PLC it’s almost an invisible question.”

…your racist ass should be fired, rehired only to write an essay explaining exactly why making cultural difference “an invisible question” is itself part of a set of racist strategies, promoting whiteness as the cultural default and problematizing any person or experience that deviates from that racist-ass norm, and then you should be fired again, with no pension.

You know what’s offensive? What’s offensive is that people like Paul Burgis are awarded doctorates and given influential jobs in education when they exhibit ignorance of the most basic facts about institutional racism or systems of oppression or the cultural transmission vectors for all of the above. How do you even wade self-importantly into a discussion of race and privilege in Australian classrooms and throw around a word like “invisible” with no apparent awareness of its, you know, meaning?

To be fair Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, a book about the racist use of invisibility, is ONLY SIXTY YEARS OLD AND NEWS OF IT MAY NOT HAVE CROSSED THE PACIFIC YET.

DEAR AUSTRALIAN JOURNALISTS, NEWSPAPER EDITORS AND PRIVATE SCHOOL PRINCIPALS: YOU MIGHT WANT TO READ THAT BOOK, IF YOU GET A MOMENT.

IN CLOSING: AARGH.

This is an awfully nice illustration of what I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. Jeremy took the first picture; the composition’s not ideal but you can see my position, which is the point of this exercise. You can see my thigh muscle, such as it is, just sort of sitting there like a lamb roast, with my lower leg dangling off it in a pendulumish fashion. You can see how hunched my shoulders are and how I have tipped forward ahead of Bella’s motion. As a result she is jumping very flat. You can’t imagine her getting over anything bigger in this sort of form. Luckily, this picture was taken almost two years ago.

This next shot is a couple of weeks old. Not to brag or nothing, but check out how much rounder and more athletic Bella looks. That’s because I am not riding her quite so much like a bag of puddings.

aIMG_6644, a photo by k0re on Flickr.

Much remains to be done! My ankles are still deplorably weak, especially the left one, which I broke, and I still need a stronger core and to sit more quietly. My hands need to be a hair lower to make the line from my elbow to the bit perfectly straight. But I have improved a heap. This makes me quite unreasonably happy. Living out your childhood fantasies: I recommend it.