Dear Sony, if as you seem to imply your new Reader device is aimed at people who might otherwise be carrying around a bunch of hardbacks, don’t advertise it with an excerpt from the fucking Da Vinci Code. Constant readers do not agree on much, but one thing we do agree on is that that book blew mighty, gelatinous chunks. Even if the fucking Da Vinci Code (its correct name) didn’t have the worst dialogue, characterization and pacing of anything I have ever had the misfortune to gag at, I’d hate it because it ripped off – without attribution! – the merrily paranoid Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Go read that instead, because it DOESN’T SUCK.

To add irony to insult AND injury, I finally visited Rennes-le-Chateau – site of the putative conspiracy – the day my Auntie Ruth died, six years ago, only hours after my mother arrived at her bedside from Australia. Rennes has its own air of the uncanny, complete with Satanic sculptures, but it was compounded by my aching grief and by the sight of all the late-summer sunflowers (Ruth’s favourite) bowing their thirsty heads under a blazing blue sky. What gives the Grail story its power, I realized, is that every family’s blood is holy and royal, and every death is a crucifixion.

Right, and apparently I can’t write a single blog post this month without lighting seven-hundred-foot funeral pyres. Why would that be, d’you think? Jeremy flew from London today but is safe, safe opposite me as I write this. With all my heart I wish peace to everyone whose beloved isn’t safe and near. Peace to my friends and peace to my enemies. Peace to everyone. Peace on earth. Peace.

This is Burning Man really is the most amazing book about Burning Man; I was enjoying it hugely even before I got to the 1998-2003 section. But what that particular section describes is more than just interesting history to me. It was the focus of my life during those years. I know half the people and saw all the art that Doherty describes. Here’s my first year at the Burn, described down to the last detail by Charlie Smith (who went on to make the Hearth, maybe my favourite piece of all time):

“I see a big temple, all beautiful melted plastic, and then I see a giant Tesla coil… What the fuck is that about? You’re going across the desert and hear this crazy ripping sound and see lightning striking right near the ground – let’s go! … I take a tour down to Center Camp and see this huge copper tree shooting water; then I go by at night, and it’s all on fire and I’m thinking Woo, nice…” This was in 1998, the year the Man exploded. “I couldn’t believe the brightness of that fire…”

For all this evocative delight, Doherty to his great credit doesn’t shy from the Man’s power to fuck lives right up, suck money down a giant drainhole, destroy relationships and melt human flesh:

“I turned toward the Dice fire just in time to lock eyes with a burning man walking out of the fire and toward me. I will never forget the look in those eyes – eyes that were looking directly at me, eyes that said ‘What did I just do?’… This man before us, this melted man, he was not surviving the night.

“Someone cut Sinatra; people sprang to action. A man from the Death Guild eased the burned man down to the ground (no one knew where to set his melted skin down – a dusty piece of carpet, the bare playa, where? Was this really happening?) and talked to him gently, trying to calm him. ‘What you have, it’s like a really bad sunburn. Hell, I get horrible sunburns out here. You’ve probably got a third-degree sunburn, that’s all. Happens to all of us. I got sunburned real bad out here, earlier in the week…’ The burned man looked on with huge eyes… You could see deep into his body, where the fire had burned away the skin.” He was taken away from the playa, and he died. He had walked into the fire deliberately, for reasons no one will ever know.

[13:02] mizchalmers: we had an idea
[13:02] mizchalmers: at drinks on saturday night
[13:02] mizchalmers: no one wants mutts from the shelter, right? so we’re starting a new shelter
[13:02] mizchalmers: where people can adopt Hero Dogs
[13:02] otherwisermw: HERO DOGS
[13:03] otherwisermw: aww
[13:03] mizchalmers: every mutt will have dragged a baby out of a fire, or swum to the rescue
[13:03] mizchalmers: see?
[13:03] mizchalmers: genius
[13:03] otherwisermw: i want one and i am a cat person
[13:03] mizchalmers: we’ll have to imperil some babies to qualify our hero dogs, but you can’t make an omelette, etc

I accidentally wore my linen suit yesterday, having got the day of a meeting wrong; so I was a bit relieved today to wake up and find the city overcast, because it meant I wouldn’t feel quite so silly in black wool crepe.

But it isn’t overcast. As I drove over Bernal Hill I saw the sun floating huge and orange through the haze. It’s not cloud cover at all, but smoke from a huge wildfire 200 miles away, north of Truckee.

And Pavarotti is dead.

San Francisco isn’t supposed to be shrouded in smoke; Sydney is the city with the bushfires. As if it weren’t bad enough that Jeremy is away on his third long trip this year. The time is out of joint. Come home, beardie man.

Nobody told me Lytton Strachey was brilliant and funny. Well, okay, fine, plenty of people did tell me exactly that, but I never paid them any attention; he was just one of those overprivileged Bloomsbury Setters that made my abortive PhD on Virginia Woolf such an unbearable ordeal, from which I fled with considerable gratitude into the welcoming arms of Ireland and many many pints of Guinness with Jameson’s chasers.

Anyway, the wheel goes around, I become fascinated with British adventures in late-nineteenth-century Egypt, and I repent of my youthful idiocy. Of General Gordon, quietly occupying himself in England after his feats of derring-do in China, Strachey has this to say:

He was particularly fond of boys. Ragged street arabs and rough sailor-lads crowded about him… he helped them, found them employment, corresponded with them when they went out into the world. They were, he said, his Wangs.

The original Wangs were the rebel army Gordon fought in China, making this passage either less funny or much funnier than it sounds; I suspect the latter. Strachey is superb on Gladstone, the Grand Old Man and Murderer Of Gordon, summing up the gist of the entire (wonderful) Jenkins biography in this glimpse of the Eye of Sauron:

He adhered to some of his principles – that of the value of representative institutions, for instance – with a faith which was singularly literal; his views upon religion were uncritical to crudeness; he had no sense of humour… His very egoism was simple-minded: through all the labyrinth of his passions there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the thread might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only, with the last corner turned, the last step taken, the explorer might find that he was looking down into the gulf of a crater. The flame shot out on every side, scorching and brilliant; but in the midst there was a darkness.

Strachey is terrific, too, on Sir Evelyn Baring, the British consul-general in Cairo:

His views were long, and his patience was even longer. He progressed imperceptibly; he constantly withdrew; the art of giving way he practised with the refinement of a virtuoso.

The whole passage on Baring’s role as intermediary between Gordon in Khartoum and the Gladstone government is astonishing in its perceptiveness and subtlety:

Though, as a rule, he found it easy to despise those with whom he came into contact, he could not altogether despise General Gordon. If he could have, he would have disliked him less. He had gone as far as his caution had allowed him in trying to prevent the appointment; and then when it became clear that the Government was insistent, he yielded with a good grace. For a moment, he had imagined that all might be well; that he could impose himself, by the weight of his position and the force of his sagacity, upon his self-willed subordinate; that he could hold him in a leash at the end of the telegraph wire to Khartoum. Very soon he perceived that this was a miscalculation. To his disgust, he found that the telegraph wire, far from being an instrument of official discipline, had been converted by the agile strategist at the other end of it into a means of extending his own personality into the deliberations at Cairo. Every morning Sir Evelyn Baring would find upon his table a great pile of telegrams from Khartoum – twenty or thirty at least; and as the day went on, the pile would grow. When a sufficient number had accumulated, he would read them all through, with the greatest care. There upon the table, the whole soul of Gordon lay before him – in its incoherence, its eccentricity, its romance; the jokes, the slang, the appeals to the prophet Isaiah, the whirl of contradictory policies – Sir Evelyn Baring did not know which exasperated him most.

There is your Victorian Twitter. I have been both the loose cannon at the end of the Net link, and the frustrated functionary trying to interpret missives from said loose cannon into a coherent narrative for consumption by the vacillating institution behind us both. So for once I sympathize with monochromatic, clever, competent, frightening Baring, that chilling incarnation of the British Empire.

Gordon, in any case, comes through Strachey’s account as a dangerous lunatic who would be perfectly at home in the Bush Administration. Eminent Victorians was published in 1918, twelve years after Heart of Darkness; the resemblances between Kurtz and Strachey’s Gordon are hard to miss. Gordon dies on a spear and his head ends up on a pike, the eyes pecked out by hawks. In 1898 Kitchener retakes the Sudan.

At any rate, it had all ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.

As various anti-humanities snots have asked me over the years, whyever do I bother with these dusty old tomes? Where is the relevance to our lives today???

I read the entire Vorkosigan Saga in one delicious gulp, sneaking away from Jeremy and the girls and work and sleep in order to dwell in my Milesian idyll. SPOILERS COMMENCE HERE. I thought the last few novels were less than satisfactory, mostly for reasons similar to those outlined here. I’m perfectly happy with comic Heyerian mystery/love stories with well-done set pieces – they’re no space operas, but they’ll do – but I just never bought Ekaterin as any kind of match for Miles, primarily because she never challenged him in any way. In particular, there’s this big formal homage to Pride & Prejudice in Miles’s letter to Ekaterin, but where Darcy explains himself and then goes away and *does something about* Lizzie’s perfectly valid criticisms of his behaviour, Miles explains himself and then Ekaterin thinks “OH! Well that’s all right then.” Which is not the same thing at all.

Of course it’s a huge deal when Darcy goes off to London to give Wickham, of all people, a year’s income to persuade him to marry Lydia; but I’m almost equally touched by the earlier moment at Pemberley, when Darcy urges Mr Gardiner to come and fish in his lakes, offering to lend him all the necessary tackle. The Gardiners, don’t forget, are a perfectly ordinary mercantile couple from London, a step down even from the people Darcy was being bored to death by at Netherfield. His respectful kindness to Mr Gardiner is his way of showing Lizzie that she was right to chastize him; that a true gentleman is charming and hospitable to middle-class people too; in short, that he has listened to her and changed his haughty ways. Darcy is, of course, lovely in this scene, but loveliest of all is Miss Austen looking thoughtfully at her tall dark handsome rich hero and thinking “Hmm, how will he need to change to be good enough for Lizzie?”

Bujold doesn’t do this, and it’s a shame. L. Timmel Duchamp is good on another literary homage, the one to Sayers when Miles jokes with himself about writing a sonnet and then doesn’t bother. It’s a telling moment. Peter Wimsey’s sextet, completing Harriet Vane’s sonnet, is one of the best moments in their love affair, demonstrating how very well-matched they are in intelligence, education and imagination. The sonnet itself is about finding an uneasy peace in a tumultuous world, a feat only possible through the dynamic balance of opposites, through effort and the act of will. It’s a love offering to Harriet but also a challenge to her, and a promise. The sonnet is a working model of what their marriage might be.

Miles’ letter is just a letter. It’s a very nice letter, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. I never got the feeling Ekaterin could absorb the whole force of Miles’ personality. She’s a retread of Elena with even less to say for herself. There’s a fanfic niche dedicated to Miles/Gregor, and while it doesn’t really grab me it is a more realistic pairing, in that what Miles seems to really need is someone of extraordinary depth and subtlety and strength of character to tell him in no uncertain terms when to knock it off. Someone like – his mother! And that’s what’s so annoying about Miles/Ekaterin; it’s not a patch on Aral/Cordelia.

Probably my favourite moment in the whole saga is a glimpse of Miles at the beginning of Mirror Dance, when he’s coming back from a holiday on Escobar with the fabulous Elli Quinn, and they’re both enjoying the sidelong looks they’re getting from other people – “How did someone like *him* hook up with someone like *her?*” Of course it’s the ironic beginning of a slide into catastrophic military engagements and sudden death, but that only makes it more appealing. Miles is at the height of his powers, matched with a woman every bit as smart and kick-ass as he is. Ah, if only she’d married him.

Oh, and my favourite story of the whole lot was The Mountains of Mourning, a murder investigation of a baby with a facial deformity. Which makes a somewhat awkward segue into the next book I picked up, Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy. If you haven’t read Grealy’s masterpiece The Autobiography of a Face you should really stop reading this blog, follow that link and order it off Powells immediately. I’m saying this for your own good.

Patchett knew Grealy long before that masterpiece was published, and their friendship survived the famestorm that ensued. Patchett describes Grealy in the same precise but slightly sentimentalized way she describes music and terrorism in her somewhat overpraised novel Bel Canto, which is to say that she writes about Grealy slightly less well than Grealy wrote about herself. Grealy is funnier than Patchett, braver and more ambitious and darker, and she spills out of the sentences and over the paragraphs and off the page, right up until she snorts OxyContin. And then all her specificity and personhood gets swallowed up, and by the time she dies she has already left the building.

I was annoyed with Grealy for taking that way out, but not half as annoyed as I was with Diana, Princess of Wales. Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles is a guilty pleasure, a terrifically well-written and gossipy thriller that reads like non-fiction Jilly Cooper. It made me very grateful that I never followed through on my childhood dream of marrying Prince Edward. Brown makes the point that by the time we’re in our twenties most women have grown out of that particular delusion; Diana’s tragedy was to lose her mother in a very Pyrrhic custody battle and be raised by wolves straight from the pages of Nancy Mitford.

Being a young woman of unusual determination, she makes the best of a bad situation, exploits her aristocratic connections and lands herself a conflicted and no longer very young Prince Charles. At which point her good judgment seems to desert her entirely, if indeed it hadn’t already done so. There are harrowing – to me at least – scenes on the honeymoon, on the royal yacht Britannia, when Charles is reading Laurens van der Post and trying to discuss it with Diana. Diana, who loathes books that aren’t by Barbara Cartland, escapes and makes friends with the staff and crew below deck. You’re irked with Charles for being such a fussy old stick, of course, but you’re ten times as irritated with Diana for not even making the damn effort to engage.

It’s not really going too far to say that her life depended on it.

Anyway, I’d’ve quite liked to spend my honeymoon reading Laurens van der Post (it was actually Hemingway and Gertrude Stein), and I wouldn’t mind spending every August in Balmoral. I’d get Princess Anne to give me riding lessons. I like to think I would not have been such a colossal baby over Charles’ affection for Camilla. Camilla seems quite a jolly old stick to me. I don’t know, it’s easy to cast nasturtiums when you’re not walking a mile in another person’s four-inch heels, but for a woman so ridiculously endowed with beauty, money and fame, Diana certainly had a wretched life. It came across very clearly in that train-wreck of an interview slimy Martin Bashir did with her on Panorama. Without any kind of education, her native intelligence was channelled entirely into new-age claptrap, paranoid intrigue and street smarts. She had no perspective, no intellectual resources to speak of. Lucy Grealy made almost infinitely more of herself, starting with far less.

Oh, the things I have to teach my daughters, the things they will need to know! How to live with another human being; how to live without one. How to read the fine print on credit card applications, how to save, how to understand fixed versus variable interest rates, how to pay off the mortgage early. How to forgive – that’s a huge one. How to forgive themselves. How to be kind. As if I knew! How to learn, how to fake it till they make it, how to jump through bureaucratic hoops, when to tell the bureaucrats to take a running leap. How to be utterly disarming, how to defend themselves. That other people are real, living beings with their own needs and wants and inner lives. That other countries have their own currencies and customs. Oh my daughters and the delight of my lives, may you be women of character, may you keep your native integrity and grace; may you spend every spare minute with your noses in a book.

I missed the best thing that happened last night, because Julia had woken up crying as we crashed in from dinner and I was in the girls’ bedroom comforting her. What happened was that when Claire saw Big she whispered to Jeremy:

“Is that Uncle Bigman?”

…and when he nodded, she took a running leap into Big’s arms. Big was apparently very pleased about it.

We had dinner at Blue Plate – my appetizer was the highlight, duck meatballs with green figs and proscuitto, rich and sweet. Between the four of us (Big, Rach M., Jeremy and me) we put away two bottles of decent zin and a round of dessert wines as well. We caught up on all possible gossip and laughed a lot. Big and I had both quite unwittingly dyed our hair more or less the same shade of blue.

I went to bed drunk and had feverish dreams. Water was pouring through the cracks in the plaster ceiling and there weren’t enough buckets to catch it all. I went out into the street and found myself in a street full of brownstones in Brooklyn, calling desperately to Jeremy:

“I’m dreaming and I can’t wake up. You have to wake me up.”

I woke up and lay on the couch for a while, then went to bed with a big glass of water. Bebe knocked it onto the floor at dawn, and that was the end of a cursory night’s sleep for me. So I pulled on the running shoes and headed up the hill, because I have become that insufferable thirtysomething bitch for whom 5k with the iPod cranked is the perfect hangover cure.

Long, interesting brunch at Dog, successful piano lesson, then off in frocks to Renaissance Faire where we watched real jousting with real horses! A Belgian Draft and a Clydesdale and a massive jet-black Percheron, the joy of the world! And parrots and a dog pulling a cart and Milo, Jules and Claire chasing each other round and round on the green grass in the sun, squealing with delight! My face still aches from all the grinning.

Boy have my friends been getting bizz-ay. New cuteness, hurrah!

Compare and contrast.

Bob arrived at dinner in an extraordinary piece of technology, a boned *and* underwired bra that turned her boobage into two perfect, upthrust half-domes. This led to a wench-off, in which the assembled females tried to out-cleavage one another. One stray breast knocked over a wineglass and the wench-off paused to make way for the cleanup.

“What happened to the breasts?” whimpered Yoz.

Shards of glass removed, the wench-off resumed. Jeremy’s fish-eye was all over it.

“We’re colluding in our oppression!” I pointed out, to a chorus of cheers.

I should maybe blog, huh? The trouble is that everything happened at once, personally, professionally, immigrationally, you name it. It was like living through the denouement of a space opera. The upshot, actually, is that very little has changed. Jeremy remains splendid, the children are gorgeous and infuriating, my life is busy and amusing, my friends are awesome, redwoods are pretty, I like food, I sound like the monologue at the beginning of The Sarah Silverman Show. I’ve learned some very important lessons this week but it’s too soon to tell what they are. Let’s just stick to the basics shall we? Don’t just do something, stand there. Love, valour, compassion! Keep calm and carry on.

Sunday’s race brought my year total to 245.5km, or just over 152 miles. In Middle-earth terms, I’ve run from Hobbiton to just outside Bree. In California, that’s from Bernal Heights, where Julia was conceived, to Big Sur, where Claire was. In tiny little England, I’ve run from London to Manchester. In the real world – and now brace yourselves to be amused by my touchstone for the real world! – I have run from Frenchs Forest to Bathurst.

“Rock star guitar!
We know
rock star guitar!”

“Spider-man
saw Batman
and Mary Jane…
Yes he did, yes he did.
Oh baby, oh baby!
And then Spider-man
knocked Batman
out of the other movie…”

(sings an octave) “That’s the Mountain Song. It sounds like you’re climbing up a mountain.”

Woke up, lay in bed arguing with self about whether to go race. Lost argument, put on running gear and drove lickety-split to where I thought the starting line would be. Got lost. Decided to go for a run anyway. About half a mile in, found the runners under a huge tree, all ready to go.

“Am I too late?”

“No! But I have to let everyone else go, first.” So the race began, and then I registered and got my number, and off I went in pursuit. I picked off the competition one at a time; the eighty-year-old, the four-year-old, the hot blonde in the Genentech shirt. I figured she’d come after me, and sure enough, we paced each other along Chain of Lakes and up JFK.

My lateness blew what shred of a race plan I had out of the water, so I trotted, wheezing, and walked, fretting. I told myself that even if I made my worst time ever, at least I had shown up. I did notice that the race seemed much shorter than usual, the mile marks much closer together, and at one point I surprised the bejesus out of myself by thinking that running along a long slightly downhill stretch felt like resting.

God, Golden Gate Park is never more beautiful than in the morning, in the fog, its grass implausibly green, its trees implausibly imposing. I turned the corner into the Polo Fields and kept to the last shred of my race plan, which was to sprint into the finish. At first I couldn’t understand what the timer said when I crossed the line. I had to go back and check that I had, in fact, run a personal best. Despite taking a two-minute, quarter-mile handicap.

I have nothing but praise for this business of my metabolism working as advertised. Australia’s sporting culture, so brilliantly described in George Perec’s novel W, gave me an antagonistic relationship with my short-legged, short-sighted body. The first crack in the ice was having two glowing pregnancies and efficient, awesome births; Julia helping to demonstrate that Claire was not a fluke.

And now I have been running for six months, very slowly, but very consistently; and a little faster and a little further every time. I’ve lost weight but gained muscle; I still have a pot belly, but no one asks if I’m pregnant any more. I have far more energy and can walk a mile, uphill, without even noticing it, making 24th Street BART a lot more useful than it used to be. What really amazes me is that the dedicated sadists in the PE department at my high school have failed, in the end, to divorce me from my own flesh.

Got home, rounded up kids at some expense of spirit, walked over to Salome’s house for coffee (grownups) and playing (kids). Shannon called and I went downstairs to heartily approve the tiles she bought for our front step at the creative reuse warehouse down in the industrial district; a whole box for less than the cost of a single new tile retail.

When I got back upstairs Jamey and Rowan had arrived, and we all decided to catch the bus to Mission Playground. We took up two lengthways seats on the 49 Van Ness. Milo was squished between Salome in her Jackie O glasses and Jack in his green checked fedora. His solemn freckled two-year-old expression was the exact midpoint between their two faces.

We stopped in at Borderlands to admire Ripley and her half-brother Sly. When we got to the playground, tucked around the back of Valencia, far from the traffic, the trademark Mission sunshine was pouring out of a cloudless sky. Milo drove the playground train for an hour while the grownups sat in the shade and talked politics. And then we had lunch at Burger Joint, and then we caught the bus home, and now the girls are playing in a moderately friendly way with the toy trains, while Jeremy and I read the Internets.

Have I mentioned that I love it here? I love it here.

One of the things I desperately love about San Francisco is how normal I seem here, to the point that my vanilla-ness is a standing joke among most of my friends. I love it because I spent 25 years in Australia trying without success to explain myself, my jokes, the way I dressed, the books I read, the subjects I studied, the music and movies I liked, the way I wore my hair and every other perceptible feature of my personality to audiences ranging from the bored but antagonistic to the outright hostile. That blew.

Here, if for example I am mourning an owl, I can be reasonably sure my neighbors will also be mourning, and will throw a wake and bring candles and cookies and flowers to remember her by. Which is exactly what happened last night. It was as Bernal as could be, complete with communal hooting. Julia especially liked that part.

The fourth best news from the owl wake was that Bronwyn found and read a perfect Mary Oliver poem, but I can’t find it online. The third best news was that peregrine falcons are nesting on the hill! The second best news is that Great Horned Owls are nesting in Glen Park, and that they’ve hatched and are raising three chicks!!! Twenty four hours later I am still overjoyed about this.

The best news isn’t mine to share, but you can be sure that when owlets are only the second best news, it’s a pretty damn good party. Owl grief, owl joy. I kept thinking of that great line from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything: “Life wants to be. Life doesn’t want to be much. From time to time, life goes extinct. Life goes on.”

I usually put it like this: if my mother had been a man I would have had a British passport long ago. Of course if my mother had been a man there wouldn’t be any me. But it’s almost that raw: until 2002, British men could pass citizenship to their adult children, but British women could not. Now that the law has been changed I felt obligated to apply, just to underline the fact that my mother is a human being.

Ceremony was today. I dyed my hair blue and wore a skin-tight white t-shirt with a glittery Union Jack heart. I was not, perhaps, taking the occasion very seriously. Jeremy came for moral support, and to take lots of pics. The British Consulate is in One Sansome, a generic Financial District high-rise, with more laid-back security than most Manhattan fund managers. Thirteen of us filed into the Nova Albion room, where an absurdly flattering picture of Queen Elizabeth II fought for space with a full-sized polyester Union Jack.

I didn’t expect the consul-general to make me laugh (“Love making new Brits. Best part of the job. New taxpayers! Lovely.”); I really didn’t expect to find the whole thing so moving, or to feel such a wild sense of relief in the aftermath. Of course now I am English I am sentimental. I also like Doctor Who, talk funny and drink gallons of tea. So, no change whatsoever.

Watched Roving Mars, a documentary on the awesome Spirit and Opportunity missions which reaffirmed my long-standing crush on mission director Steve Squyres. He describes Spirit as the challenging but hardworking firstborn and Opportunity as Little Miss Perfect; thus giving Claire and Jules their newest nicknames. Rove babies rove! May you too exceed your mission objectives by some orders of magnitude.