It is a rhetorical figure and a form of personification. In the strictest sense, delivering this fallacy should be done to render analogy.

…or as we learned it in my undergrad English classes, the pathetic fallacy occurs when the hero is sad and so it starts to rain. Or more accurately, it’s raining, so you know that the hero is sad. We had English in the Woolley building, not in the Main Quad; Archaeology was in the Quad and that’s why I love jacaranda trees. I was ambivalent about English, my forte, and passionately in love with Archaeology, which at times I barely passed. Nothing changes.

The only piece of actual Sydney Uni culture I ever picked up was that by the time the jacaranda is blooming, it’s too late to study. I didn’t study much, which may be why Archaeology gave me such a thrashing. I would sit underneath the jacaranda gazing at Danielle and her Mycenean golden hair, waiting for Alexander Cambitoglou to enlighten us on the techniques behind red figure vases, or Jean-Paul Descoeudres to blow my mind with his readings of the floor plans of Pompeiian villas.

I was a bit surprised to learn that jacarandas aren’t Australian natives (its placement in the Quad, of course, should have been a clue. Once you’re in the Quad you’re not supposed to be in Australia any more, you’re in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Oxford!) Anyway, I was pleased to find, on the day we moved in to our San Francisco home, that the street tree outside was a jac. With yellow-and-red roses growing at the foot of it, like the ones I carried at my wedding. I’ve been gazing into its upper branches for four years.

And for the last week or two I’ve been watching its leaves fade and fall.

Well, it’s a tough spot for any tree, on a slope with not a lot of direct light in the winter, and our jac got rootbound and has died. And it’s probably not worth trying to save the roses either. So I’m going to pull everything out and rebuild the tree well and replant something that might be able to cope with the rough conditions, and I am going to ignore the symbolism of it all because it’s just tacky and overdone, like how Nature has absolutely no taste when it comes to sunsets.

Ric’s not doing very well. Jeremy’s leaving in a few hours.

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Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

Jeremy’s flying back to Australia tomorrow.

I’ve been having insanely great book luck of late, thanks to comments threads tenderly farmed by very good writers and editors. The first important find was Sarah Caudwell, who is one of those impossibly overdetermined Brits: her brothers are the journalists Alexander and Patrick Cockburn and her mother was the inspiration for Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Sarah Caudwell died in 2000 of stupid cancer. Cancer and I are not friends.

Caudwell wrote four novels. Thus Was Adonis Murdered tackles murder and tax avoidance in Venice; The Shortest Way to Hades examines the legal and tax implications of an inheritance, and a couple of consequent murders, in the Greek Isles. In The Sirens Sang of Murder a homicide investigation moves among several offshore tax havens, including the Channel Islands and the Bahamas, and The Sibyl in Her Grave… well, you get the idea. Caudwell was herself a tax lawyer and has the remarkable gift of making tax law seem almost as cozy and amusing as English murder mysteries.

Received wisdom on Caudwell is that she depends too much on letters and that her central characters are thin. I spit on received wisdom with more vehemence even than usual. Caudwell is a literary writer, as her elaborately classical titles might suggest; intertextual knowledge plays a key role in practically all of the books; and she revels in the epistolatory form almost as much as she loves a good last will and testament. As for her central characters, beautiful Ragwort, scatty Julia, honey-voiced Selena and trickster Cantrip who through no fault of his own attended Cambridge, it’s true that they do not Grow and Change and Have Epiphanies over the course of the novel in the approved American/MFA/Raymond Carver mode; in fact the women especially have lots of hot and inconsequential sex, and everyone drinks and smokes and gossips and skives off work and is just as delightful and irreverent at the end of the book as at the beginning.

The point is that they’re Greek gods, not people as such, a point underscored by the fact that the narrator Hilary Tamar, an Oxford don, is of indeterminate sex. Caudwell is perfectly capable of writing fully human characters. In fact the resolution of each of her quite fiercely difficult mysteries depends on people behaving in absolutely credible, bloody-minded and self-defeating human ways. Now not to brag or anything but I have read a lot of Golden Age detective fiction. I cut my teeth on Conan Doyle and was bored with Agatha Christie at thirteen. I didn’t stop with Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey but read all of Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh and their heirs, people like PD James and Kerry Greenwood. It’s very rare for me to get to the last third of a mystery – at least one that’s fair, with no Deus ex Machina, and Caudwell is scrupulously fair – without having solved the crime. Caudwell beat me, four for four; my best showing in the last two books was to get to her penultimate red herring. Yet she always gets there in a plausible way. It is a feat!

There’s such pleasure in being in skilled and confident hands. There’s the subversive thrill of Caudwell’s unabashed snobbery – Hilary can barely understand Cantrip, because of his impenetrable Cambridge dialect. There’s the light yet beautifully sustained humour. Yet the books never become vengeful or sadistic, as it’s so easy for even a great practitioner like Sayers to do, because Caudwell is a humanist to the bone. She is interested in people: what they do, how they behave. There’s a letter at the end of Sibyl that I won’t spoil for you, because of course you’re all going to rush out and read all four, but it is at once a complete surprise and yet absolutely right, the only possible denouement; and almost unbearably sad.

These books are perfect of their kind. I wish very much that there were more.

I was expecting a very bad time of it after Caudwell – there is not much worse than going cold turkey after the death of a beloved author – but I was lucky enough to follow her up with Bridge of Birds, Ha’penny and Bad Magic. None quite reached Caudwell’s heights – I had figured out the end of Bridge half way through – but all gave great character, especially Ha’penny with its host of crypto-Mitfords. And so to bed.

[10:27] skud11111: morning!
[10:27] mizchalmers: mmm
[10:27] mizchalmers: i sneezy
[10:27] skud11111: oh noes
[10:27] skud11111: i itchy
[10:29] skud11111: can’t figure out if it’s allergies, just dry skin, or whether i’m imagining it.
[10:29] mizchalmers: i think it’s allergies
[10:29] mizchalmers: i get nosebleeds
[10:29] mizchalmers: and this feeling like an el alamein fountain of pain in my sinuses
[10:30] mizchalmers: sinii?
[10:30] skud11111: ow
[10:30] skud11111: sinupodes
[10:30] mizchalmers: stupid sexy pollen
[10:30] skud11111: arboreal bukkake
[10:30] skud11111: i had to explain arboreal bukkake to chris at the gym the other day
[10:30] skud11111: or more to the point, i had to explain bukkake
[10:30] skud11111: had to.
[10:30] skud11111: in the middle of a set of squats
[10:30] skud11111: you know how it is.
[10:31] mizchalmers: permission to blog?
[10:31] skud11111: go ahead.

Ja: Mummy what’s that?

R: A big nasty pimple.

Ja: Mummy got owie?

R: Yes, it does hurt.

Ja: Owie?

R: Yup.

Ja: Julia kiss.

She takes my face in her hands and kisses my zit as if it were a dimple.

J: I read Overclocked.

R: Mmm?

J: Really liked it except for one story.

R: “When Sysadmins.”

J: Exactly.

R: I had to stop reading it after the baby died.

In unison: I wonder if he could write it now?

LATER. In a tacqueria. There are TACOS. R beats J for no apparent reason.

J: Ow.

R: My ovaries hurt.

J: And?

R: It’s your fault.

J: How?

R: You are the patriarchy. If it weren’t for you we’d all be living in the woods in a big happy lesbian commune, and my ovaries wouldn’t hurt. Isn’t that right, Jamey?

Jamey: Your ovaries would still hurt, but we’d have a drum circle about it.

WE ALL start to DRUM on the tacqueria table. JULIA stares for a moment, then DANCES.

I just learned that the first writer in recorded history was a woman who wrote political poetry: her name is Enheduanna. I thought her hymn to Inana seemed very fresh, so I had a go at translating it into the vernacular:

The good ole boy, the maverick, holding his own in the Beltway set and a world leader, son of 41, darling of the Grand Old Party, the consummate politician who has transformed the executive branch in ways even Reagan would admire, is President, and the buck stops with him. Congress grovels at his feet. He does whatever he wants. He’s got political capital and he intends to spend it. He’s got the country on a leash.

He is the War on Terror and he is the Terror. We’re all scared shitless down here, I can tell you. Everything he says frightens the crap out of us. There’s no accountability, and God knows what’s going to happen. Who can stand up to him? Meanwhile fire and death rain on New York, and New Orleans drowns in a sewer.

Something about him makes the Democrats unable to tie their own shoes. Pratfalls galore, but it isn’t funny. People burn and drown and he arrives in a very nice suit with spin doctors and cameras and a crack security detail, for a press conference. Wherever he holds a press conference, there is despair. He believes in his own virtue, which makes him more evil than we could ever have imagined. Compassionate conservatism! Remember that? Anyone, Bueller?

He has been the single worst catastrophe of this last tormented decade. Yet to oppose him is to invite censure! Those who speak up for the suffering and the dead are scorned as vicious fools. He does not lack for toadies.

In his mouth language turns to lies. When he speaks of life he means death. When he promises tax cuts he means that the poor will pay for the greed and stupidity of the rich. In the face of defeat he says, Mission Accomplished. He baptises the nation’s children with blood, and looks at what he has done, and says that it is good.

Across the wide and bewildered nation, his deeds blot out the sun. He turns midday into darkness. Brothers turn on their sisters, and parents attack their children. His words frighten not only his own people, but everyone on earth. This man rules the only superpower in a unipolar world! People from every nation look at Iraq and think: Are we next? He leaves no bad deed undone. The Grand Old Party is filled with pride.

Can we impeach Cheney now? Please? What’s it going to take?

I wore high heels two days in a row. I ran from Glen Park BART to the YMCA in them yesterday to pick Claire up in time for her martial arts class; this was unwise. I have huge blisters on my arches. So today was fun.

What society expects of women! We have to do everything Fred Astaire does, but backwards and in high heels.

Luckily it looks like Claire’s going to be good at martial arts. Forgive me intertubes for I have sinned: I had impure thoughts about her teacher. He’s very anime-hero in looks, but much more attractive: he treats the children like people. A man who doesn’t infantilize kids probably doesn’t infantilize women either.

I’m down on the patriarchy today, what?

Approved on April Fool’s Day. We started the process when Claire was six weeks old. She’s five and a half. For those of you keeping score, yes, this does mean I got European citizenship, US residency and a good public school for my daughter, all in the space of about six months. I know what you’re thinking: bitch. And fair enough.

(I’d been waiting till I got my green card to unleash hell’s fury on the DHS, but now it’s here I find myself thinking warmly of the hardworking individuals who approved it.)

In other news, Julia found my secret stash of Lindor truffles this morning. There were two. She gave me one.

“Yours.”

And held up the other, saying shyly:

“Mine?”

So we started the day with chocolate. Why not? It’s cold and Mr Jeremy is away; we need to indulge ourselves a little.

The children are being delightful, suggesting that Jeremy is in fact a bad influence. (Joke.) I read Horton Hears a Who to Julia, who heard me out and then asked politely to be put in bed, curled up and went to sleep. Claire carefully washed her toothbrush:

“If you don’t wash it properly the bristles get stiff. That’s what Ada told me.”

I dreamed last night that I got pregnant again, not that I really want to, I think, but that the bewildering vastness of my love for my daughters remains almost impossible to believe. Dreaming about pregnancy is like running my hands through heaps of gold. Mine!

A cup of hot tea next to me when I woke up. The same tea, cooler, when I woke up again after a peaceful doze. The cat snuggling into me. The children behaving delightfully. Our Spanish class, always excellent fun. Milo’s third birthday party. A pinata in the park. A visit from Jamey, Rowan and Cian. A run on the hill, where the California poppies are rioting. A hot shower. A cup of hot tea next to me as I write this. Being three-quarters of the way through an excellent book (Bridge of Birds.) My lovely Mr Jeremy sitting in one of our handsome new, thriftily Craigsourced armchairs. Plans for a sushi dinner.

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My best investments, let me show you them.

Great newses! First up, massive man-love between my Viable Paradise crushees Cory and Leonard. Second, much-wanted and hoped-for twins, born on April Fool’s! Small siblings to big sister born on Halloween! It is all very cheering.

ETA: BABY OWLS.

Well, that was a crappy day at the end of a rough week at the end of a challenging and exhausting three months.

So I got home from work and changed and went running up on the hill. Haven’t run in ages but I figured I couldn’t feel much worse, and sure enough the sun and the music and the California poppies did their job, and soon I felt a little bit better.

And we just watched an old episode of Spaced that made me cry with happiness.

And that is how I will choose to remember this day.

I don’t know why I even make these promises when I can’t keep them. Pathetic gestures in the direction of follow-through:

• I have always greatly admired Robert Hughes for his awesome and world-shaking The Fatal Shore. Sundry folks will attest that it is the book I recommend to anyone who is curious about Australia; besides, you know you’re doing something right when Patrick O’Brien thanks you in the acknowledgements to The Nutmeg of Consolation. But Hughes wrote Shore when he was about twelve, so my adoration was greatly mixed with terror and humility. Things I Didn’t Know is the book that makes me get over that, like Hughes very much and wish I could buy him a bottle of excellent red. A recommendation from Grant, who is seldom wrong about these things.

  Things is very touching on the dilemma of Australianness; you stay or leave, and both options are awkward and involve loss.

• I read The Human Stain after having several conversations about passing, and here’s a concept I lack the sociological skillzors to be able to unpack. You have to realize that while Australia has race politics of its own, and even its own lamentable history of slave trading, it’s all very different from the African American experience so I’m coming at this stuff pretty raw. I’m not sure Roth helped much. While I greatly admire both his techniques and what he is trying to pull off, I don’t like him much as a writer.

  Stain does a lot of things I find impressive. It brings multiple voices to life and gives them all internal consistency and dignity. But they are all given these monologues that go on for pages and pages and there’s something about, I’m ashamed to say it but it’s the diction, that rings false to me. They all say plausible things but they all sound like a celebrated establishment novelist while they’re saying them. (Larry’s Party, another recommendation from Grant, has something of the same artificial, po-faced inner voice. Where’s the irreverence? Where are the jokes?)

  Bound to be more my fault than Roth’s. Stain did have one very striking effect on me: I read Flash For Freedom! shortly after it; it’s the Flash book about slaving. The stuff about the crossing is well-researched and accurate and didn’t upset me too badly except, you know, in its substance, but when Flashy starts mucking about with a woman trying to escape up the Underground Railroad it made me physically ill, and I had to skim ahead to make sure she escaped. I always start Flashy books loving him for his, yes, irreverence and wit, and loathing him at the end for being, well, Flashy.

• Shadow Unit is what the plain people of fandom like to call cracktastic: that is, a completely addictive treat, with chewy well-realized characters and thoroughly angstig, wholly-believable jeopardy. It’s a sort of made-up fandom that skips the boring TV series part and cuts straight to the brilliant stuff people make up about it on the Net. It’s gotten me hooked on a fictional Livejournal, for the love of ponies. Mad props to evil genii Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, Sarah Monette and Will Shetterly.

Okay, I guess that wasn’t as half-hearted as I thought it was going to be. No more promises though, I’ll just come out and SAY that Connie Willis and Sarah Caudwell are now on my all-time top ten list, and that I am very very annoyed with Sarah Caudwell for dying young. I guess I get to read the rest of her books in heaven, too.

A cosmology, in the car on the way home:

“In the first fifty years of life, robbers discovered a kind of dust, which was smoke dust. And they put it into playgrounds so it would get in childrens’ eyes and noses and mouths and penises and baginas. Robbers are not very nice! But they were sorry! Because the smoke dust got in THEIR eyes and noses and mouths and penises and baginas! That is what happened in the first fifty years. I know the story.”

Homeschooling Julia:

“What colour is this? No, this is green. What colour is this? No, this is blue. Now then, Julia, here is a toothbrush. Can you say semicircle? Good! Can you say diamond? Very good! All right. My Book of Easy Mazes. And this is where we’re up to today. Aww, your hands are so cute.”

In the worlds before Monkey, primal chaos reigned. Heaven sought order, but the phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown.

Julia has been having very vivid and disturbing night terrors, usually only once a week or so but last night over and over again. She thrashes and kicks and cries “No no no no no,” and though her eyes are half-open she can’t really see and isn’t really awake and can’t be consoled. It’s horrible. And loud. And by the time she’d had her fifth night terror early this morning – and then gone on to do a huge poo and wake up quite happily and settle down on the sofa for a Dora marathon – her father and I were as ringwraiths, mere hollowed-out shadows of our former vibrant selves.

Which seems as good a time as any to mention how utterly I love her. She’s well into her two-year-old explosion in theory of mind, and has developed a massive crush on her Spanish teacher Susy. She is also greatly attached to her bear Bess and likes to gesture with her to make a point. She likes it when I get pedicures:

“Want see prilly toes!”

She calls Bebe “Killy” and showers her with affection. That vicious little cat’s eyes go wide:

“How DARE you…” And then she half-closes her eyes and starts to purr.

Jules gives the best hugs, solar plexus to solar plexus, her entire body glommed onto you like a starfish. If you won’t get down to her eye level to receive one of these in the approved fashion, she’ll improvise by glomming onto your legs.

She is a point source of happiness.

This morning I asked her: “Are you my Julia?”

“No,” she said. “I MY Julia.”

The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!

(What does it say about my misspent youth that I can accurately date that clip based on Pigsy’s prosthetics?)

We got Claire’s school assignment! We didn’t get our first two choices, the adorable schools that are within walking distance.

We got our third choice. It’s a short bus ride away. It has a great campus, with all the kinder and first grade classrooms opening off a library, and an organic garden out the back. The principal is a woman about our age, totally kickass (and parenthetically, hawt!) Claire got into Spanish immersion but there’s also a Chinese bilingual stream and English general education, so the school is a veritable crazy quilt of cultures. The kids all do Carnavale and Chinese New Year.

It’s so ridiculously charming and San Franciscan that I have taken to calling it Armistead Maupin Elementary.

Because this is me here, and I am incapable of doing anything in a gracious and straightforward manner, I have had moments of eating my heart out over my first choice school, especially as two of Claire’s close friends got into it. And yesterday, ambivalently, I dropped off an application to get on the waitlist for that school.

Ambivalently, because Armistead Maupin is actually a better school in several respects. There’s that library! And the test scores are higher, not that I care about test scores, which usually just measure white middle-classness, but Maupin is the very opposite of a white middle-class school so high test scores mean it is doing something surprisingly right. And as Jeremy points out, there are significant advantages to having school friends and then other friends who do not go to the same school as you. For example, you have more friends.

What’s more, we were lucky to get ANY of our choices: about a fifth of families went zero for seven in the first round. My first and second choice schools both saw triple-digit growth in demand this year, and demand for Maupin itself was up double digits. (I never think about my second choice school, oddly enough, which suggests that it should have been my third choice.) (In fact our little cohort was ridiculously lucky. All four families got fourth choice or better, and we all got Spanish immersion. Holidays in Sayulita, anyone?)

It’s not very likely that we’ll get into our first choice school off the waitlist. I’m actually pretty okay with this now, as I get more and more attached to the thought of Claire attending Maupin. The surprising thing about this is that a few years ago, my first choice school was underenrolled, meaning if you made it your first choice you were bound to get in.

In other words, demand is going up, and this is because more parents are applying to public schools, and this is because the schools themselves are getting better. Which means? That crazy terrifying Diversity Lottery, the one that makes it impossible for us Type A moms to control exactly where our precious darlings will go to kindergarten, is doing precisely what it was intended to do: mixing things up, challenging everyone to improve all the schools, and helping give all the kids in San Francisco a better education.

None of which is any comfort to the families who went zero for seven. My heart goes out to them, and I wish them every bit of luck in Round Two. And to the parents who have yet to go through the whole messy process, I say what wise parents from (the awesome, the essential) PPS kept saying to me: Yeah, it sucks and is labour-intensive and stressful and startlingly painful. But we ended up with a great school where our kids can thrive.

For an incredibly funny and reassuring perspective on the whole mess, go read Sandra Tsing Loh.

Passages from Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World that made me want to scrawl in the margin of the library book the words “IT’S SO TRUE!” (but I did not):

“He cared (though not crucially) about the opinion of his colleagues and acquaintances, and would send out a stream of self-castigation in order, he hoped, to nip their condemnation in the bud. His intention was to arrive at his own condemnation fast and first. It was a kind of exculpation. No one condemned him; no one paid much attention. My father had, as far as I could see, no friends.”

(Oh and Dad, that’s true of me, not you.)

“I had dreamt of Gothic arches and the worn flagstones of old libraries – where such a grand yearning came from, I hardly knew. Unaccountably, my heart was set on Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr; I imagined afternoon teas, and white gloves, and burning lips (mine, perhaps) murmuring out of a book. But that was all wistfulness – there was no money for such romantic hopes…”

(Me again…)

“My suitcases held only the sparest handful of the books I valued, since it had always been my habit – privately I felt it to be an ecstasy – to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself … had cradled and cherished. In my mind – I suppose in my isolation – I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me – as phantom companions and secret friends.”

(Aaand me.)