Sadness is not making me a nicer person.

Actually three weeks ago but Jeremy only just uploaded it.

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Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

Tyrannosaurus!
Tyrannosaurus Rex!
He was the king!
But then he had a breast.

Tyrannosaurus!
Oh, no! A meteor!
Tyrannosaurus!
Oh, no! A leaf-eator!

Milo: I think that I will never ever write another song.

Me: Because this one is so perfect?

Milo: Yes.

Item the first: When I fell off Bella I landed on the point of my hip. I was kinda stiff for a few days but mostly okay, and even had a riding lesson in the midst of it; but then I had an evening lesson with Dez and Dez was eeeeville; no-stirrups, trot over a crossbar and canter out from it evil. I could not do it. I can half-ass most things on a horse, but this felt like there was a pointy bit of metal jammed into my hip joint, so I had to opt out. Mehness, and likewise mehitude! I was actively limping all weekend, which suhuhuhucked, because that weekend we went to China Camp with the camping gang, who are all great fun and who love to hike. My hip was so hurty Saturday night that it took me forever to get to sleep, even in our lovely tent under the lovely trees.

Lucky J and I had dug some old Burning Man camping armchairs outta the attic, because I jammed myself into one of those Sunday morning and read books for a couple of hours while the able-bodied – including, humiliatingly, my four-year-old – circumnavigated Turtle Back Hill. This was follow-the-sun sloth, because I had to keep dragging my chair into new sunbeams in the woods at our campsite. Eventually the chair had little tracks behind it, as do rocks on Racetrack Playa. Anyway, enough rest and being lazy and I started to get the circulation back in my toes, and on Tuesday night I had a decentish ride on Omni, the big handsome black off-the-track Thoroughbred I have been riding lately.

Omni is item the second. He’s way dumber than lovely Bella but he’s brave and strong and gentle and wouldn’t harm a fly. He reminds me a little bit of Scottie in that you talk to him through his cadence, lengthening and shortening the rhythm of his stride. But Scottie was a big chicken, and Omni’s not afraid of anything. I am, you’ll be relieved to hear, not getting attached to him at all; when I secretly think of him as Black Beauty I am merely being ironic. The other day, when the message I was passing along the reins to him was “I love you, I love you, I love you,” was an inexplicable error for which the management apologizes; the relevant brain centres have been summarily fired.

Item the third is maps. One reason I adore China Camp is because it is surrounded by wetlands, so that the map of it always reminds me of the awesome map in Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water:

What made it even awesomer this time was reading Secret Water to Claire. We’ve been having a revival of Swallows & Amazons fever ever since Liz moved into a houseboat and Danny bought Daisy. I see that Liz has been doing some cartography of her own.

Item the Fourth: glory but I have been having a brilliant run of books lately. I can especially recommend The Little Stranger and The Haunting of Hill House, two basically perfect Gothic horror stories; The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, which succeeded in making me even more upset about the DPRK, which is quite a feat; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the first book of popular science to reduce me to incoherent sobs three times – it encompasses the whole spectrum of what I think of as My America, from Wired to The Wire; everything by Peter Hessler, whose books are an excellent complement to that awesome Yellow Gorges documentary we saw, Up the Yangtze; The Marketplace of Ideas, which I think lingered in the back of my mind all through this Cambridge jaunt until I had the first glimmering, a couple of weeks ago, of insight into the way the Oxbridge experience was intentionally watered-down and exported throughout the English-speaking world, so that what I was given was not a classical education in that sense but a colonial simulacrum of one, the University of Sydney as a branch of the Scouts or Pony Club – not a new insight at the intellectual level (sidere mens eadem mutato, after all) but actually *felt* this time around, and now having to be processed; and on an entirely different note, a novel that has stayed with me ever since I read it much earlier this year, Michelle Huneven’s remarkable Blame.

Blame got me interested in AA, which turns out to have been heavily influenced by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a copy of which is also on my nightstand waiting to be read, which is not altogether surprising as both the Huneven and the James were recommendations from Jessa Crispin, whose taste is sometimes enigmatic but never dull. Oh! I am so very fond of books, and of the San Francisco Public Library, and I am so lucky to have them.

Item the Fifth: I want to tell you about two awesome things that Claire said; forgive me. On the second-last morning in London we took McKenze out for a large and stodgy English breakfast. McKenze was amused at having overheard Julia describe her as “bossy”; we laughed, and asked the children whether McKenze was bossy or nice. Julia stubbornly stuck to “bossy”, but Claire said with what was to me quite surprising judiciousness: “bossy and nice.”

Later she came up with an idea for an art project for this year’s Balsa Man. I said that this year we could stay back from the fire, so she wouldn’t have to be scared about getting burned, and she said something that absolutely floored me:

“I wasn’t scared I would get burned. I was scared for some of the other people, who were being silly.”

She’s only seven. She was six when this happened, and she got in such a right state about it that I had assumed for a year without even thinking about it that she was terrified on her own behalf. I’d no idea she had such complex modelling of and empathy for complete strangers in place already. Some days I think maybe I am doing a few things right. But really I can’t take much credit for her remarkable and complicated self; it is, after all, her self.

I guess I did have a lot to say, and didn’t need the artificial constraint of Five Things Make A Post after all! Let me go back and rewrite the segues! Nah, bugrit. You know I love you, right?

Fred Clark, as ever, cuts to the heart of a recent debate between the Krugman/Delong alliance and Everybody Else. Krugman and Delong say we should spend government money to help the 10% of Americans who can’t find work, find work. The Grown Ups say we can’t do this obviously compassionate and necessary thing, because Bad Things Would Happen. The Bad Things are cloaked in jargon or, more commonly, left unspecified. Hands are waved. Arguments like this one really, really tweak my always-trigger-happy class resentment like woah. It’s becoming increasingly hard for me to see conservative ideology – and, indeed, much of modern capitalism – as anything other than a figleaf protecting the brass balls of the superrich.

We’re chimpanzees. We confabulate madly to justify decisions already made before we knew we had made them. We’re engrossed in power and dominance games. The White House press room is a great example (oh, Helen Thomas, no.) Those reporters cannot come out and write the obvious, necessary things – the things Fred Clark, for example, writes – because they fear they will lose Access to Important People, and their chimpanzee balls and ovaries shrivel at the prospect. Judith Miller could not simply point out that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that his (secular) Ba’ath party had no connection whatever with the (religious) al Qaeda and that Congress was being very thoroughly lied to in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Those of us who did point these things out until we were blue in the face – and I claim no special insight here, there were ten million of us on the streets that Saturday – weren’t listened to, of course, because we had no Access. You had to be at least that deluded to ride that ride. Chimpanzees that fell in line with the dominant narrative of the day got plum embedded assignments and Halliburton contracts and, what was it? Nine billion US dollars in cash, in steel containers, “lost” somewhere in Iraq? Yeah. Everyone was lying, but it is in the nature of chimpanzees to go along to get along.

I do it too, God knows, the most corporate and compromised person in any of my personal circles. I have baby chimpanzees and an eye on the prize and I want some of that river of lost cash so my kids can go to good colleges (for-profit institutions engaged in the sale of privilege) and thus obtain precious precious Access. I listen and retell stories in my own bit of the great chimpanzee collective confabulation, our great work, our oral Wikipedia, the first draft of a bullshit history that is itself trying to defend the victors from their victims. I try to tell the good, useful software from the cynical rip-off, smart decent CEOs from sleazy embezzlers. I try to inject a laudably Fred-like note of clarity and sanity into the proceedings. But I can’t unchimp myself, can’t not want to be liked and accepted, can’t not want to keep what I have and maybe get some more for the kids. So, moral weakling that I am, I have to pay attention to where I am slipping, to the gross things I let myself off so lightly for (I fly too much, I eat meat, I drive a car, I speak politely to bankers.) I see the master narrative working away at my weak spots, singing its siren songs, tempting me.

Jan has a stack of newspapers – the arts and culture sections of the FT and the Times – and try as I might to simply read them as if I were chatting to Grant about books, I can’t separate the cheerful gossipy absorbed enthusiast’s conversation about stories from the dreary vuvuzuela of Capitalism Victorious. I can’t see the World Cup or Wimbledon as anything but huge cynical spectacles arranged to distract people from the fact that we are ruled by thieves. This is, of course, my own fault thanks to my massive ignorance and lack of engagement with sport – I do see that football and tennis can be beautiful – but I also see their utility to a malign elite. Say one urban black kid in a million gets to be a college basketball or football star, gets to be rich (and have his brain pounded to jelly, in the case of football); the others might just shut the fuck up, toe the line like good beta and gamma and delta chimpanzees in case the magical hand in the sky – the A&R guy, the reality TV audition, the lottery, the Dragon’s Den – comes down and chooses them next time. Bread and circuses. Retirees in Reno and Vegas feeding their Social Security through slot machines, and voting Republican in case they hit the jackpot.

God forgive me, I do find this intensely interesting. A huge part of what makes Hilary Mantel sing on the page – and Patrick O’Brien too, come to that, and Vikram Seth and Jane Austen – is the acute ear for these negotiations and confrontations, the lie told so often it starts to sound true, the master narrative nudged towards Reformation or Revolution by daily repetition and recapitulation (hahahaha, see what I did there?) I saw this in my Master’s thesis too, reading the mid-nineteenth-century Irish journalists who wrote The Nation when there was no nation, who created The United Irishman when Ireland was not united. Those men – John Mitchel, Charles Gavan Duffy, William Smith O’Brien – wrote the Republic of Ireland into being. A thing has to be thought before it stops being unthinkable.

This is what we are going to have to do. We have to dream up a good world for our grandchildren (it took the Young Irelanders seventy-odd years, it will take us at least that long.) We have to dream up sustainable and carbon-neutral societies, civil rights, human rights, equity for the poor world. We have to tear down the walls that keep the poor people out, because a walled garden whose only function is to exclude is not paradise. It is a fortress and a prison. (McKenze was a child when the Berlin wall came down; last night I tried to explain to her what it was like for us, growing up in the Cold War, thinking that the world would probably end in nuclear war before we were thirty, then finding in the space of six months that all our atlases had become obsolete. I said, it was as if Palestinians and Israelis were hugging in the streets. As if the two Koreas were reunited.)

Because Fred is right. The unemployed people are not an economic problem; they are our friends. The people in the poor world are our brothers and sisters. The Foxconn suicides, the war in Congo are embedded in this MacBook on which I write; my whole lovely happy life is predicated on exploitation and poverty. It’s not okay. Activism has to become a habit with me, prosaic, wonkish activism: pressure on Apple and other manufacturers to examine their supply chains; pressure on Arizona and the federal government to reform immigration and education, and to create jobs and provide more opportunities for working-class kids than the military or a football concussion; pressure on the press corps to stop telling so many transparent and idiotic lies. We can’t make a paradise on earth, we can’t extricate ourselves from accommodations that are also deals with the devil, we can’t ever make things perfect or pure because to do so is to build walls that keep people out. And also because we are chimpanzees and weak. We can’t, in fact, win – this is the long defeat, life ends in death. But we can be on the right side, sticking up for the truth and against bullies. We can say the things *we* want to have happen until they drown out the idiocies of macroeconomics and neoconservatism, and become the new Overton Window. It’s not just about walking away from Omelas; it’s about going back with an EMT team, breaking the kid out of that cage and sending her to college.

Our flat this time is a different address but the same management company, and they use the same rather pungent bathroom cleaner. So every time I walk into the bathroom I am vividly reminded – of being in the bathroom in Cambridge, which is where I am.

Some time before dawn I walked down to his stable. My boots crunched in the sand. The dark pressed my eyes. I ducked between the bars of his fence, careful not to skin my back on the top bar. He came out of his shed merry and glad to see me. I put my arms around his neck and breathed his mane. We fit together, a young woman and her horse; we leaned into each other like parts of a whole. I knew I’d been away for a long time and tried to calculate how long it had been, but the number I came up with – twenty-odd years? – was preposterous. I knew I could always come back. I knew he would always be glad to see me.

When the sun leaked through I saw his ribs, and the dull hide taut over his knife-sharp hips.

I used to think that his death had been some kind of instructive episode, as in My Friend Flicka or The Red Pony; that it had made me a better or at least more compassionate and empathic person. Now I am not so sure. I am not, after all, a particularly compassionate or empathic person. I don’t know that grief teaches you anything much except that grief never ends. I love my dead as fiercely and needily as I ever loved them when they were alive, but without hope.

“Bad dreams,” I told Jeremy when I woke up.

“What about?”

“Alfie.”

“Was he a demon horse, risen from the grave?”

“No. He had cancer and he was going to die.”

It would be really nice if anyone who ever supported the unjust occupation of Iraq would kindly STFU about the deficit. Unless it is to say: “We are very sorry. We were wrong.”

Happy birthday to me! Against all likelihood I have turned out to be a happy and useful sort of person; who would have thought? Mad props are obviously due to my mum:

Down through the years my sweet mother never failed me
Held me close to her heart as she taught me to aim high
Lifted me up so I could reach and attain sky
And changed my lucky star from what it was to what it is
Never enough time to give praise for what she gives

Words of wisdom she grants as natural as life’s breath
Things to remember when day turns and only night’s left
Words like: “Always give thanks for the greatest of men is grateful”
And: “Pride can never reach where humility can take you”

Sweet mother! I’ll never forget you!

Q: But can the iPad handle my Wii?

A: Depends.

yarnivore: your trip to calistoga sounded so wonderful
yatima: it was just redonkulous
yatima: we sang all the way home
yatima: “the fitzhardinges… went to the hot pools…
yatima: “and then… they saw the geyser…
yatima: “and it was very fun”
yatima: “yes it was”
9:55 PM
yarnivore: you’re making it up
yarnivore: there aren’t families that happy

Instead of please she says “Mees?”

Instead of adios she says “A-JOS!”

Instead of Claire she says “Lair” or “Lur.”

Instead of I love you mama she says “I, you, mama,” as if in her case, love is axiomatic.

Which it is.

Bryan called first thing in the year to invite us to brunch at Castle O’Sullivan, but I declined with thanks:

“We have a plan!”

It’s so unlike us. To have a plan. And to decline brunch, for that matter. Yet without undue shouting or sarcasm I had both daughters, one husband, a freshly synched iPod and an Ikea bag full of swimsuits loaded into Hedwig the silver Jetta by half past ten. And then we drove and drove and drove, to Ritual for coffee and then onto I-80, past Berkeley and Golden Gate Fields, through Albany and left at Vallejo and right towards Napa and on and on through Yountville and St Helena while the girls snoozed in the back. And we arrived in Calistoga and parked the car.

It was brilliantly sunny but cold, and as we changed I doubted the wisdom of my crazy scheme. But the hot springs were just as hot and sweet as I remembered, and we lolled around for an hour and a half while the girls splashed and played. I swam laps in the coolest pool – I am too ashamed to tell you how few laps – and my shoulders and arms cried out for mercy; but a dip in the hottest pool was enough to shut them up. We oozed out of the baths and into our clothes just absurdly happy and relaxed.

Lunch at a place on the main drag then on impulse we drove around to the Old Faithful Geyser, a Calistoga roadside attraction that features regularly scheduled geothermal eruptions and fainting goats. Why fainting goats? Why are you asking me? As we waited for the geyser to, um, geyse, a goatherd alarmed the goats for us, demonstrating their not-unimpressive fainting chops.

We waited about forty minutes. The geyser sent up two disappointing squibs, both of which Claire missed. We were about to pack up and go, with Claire on the verge of tears, when the GEYSER SHOT UP SEVENTY FEET INTO THE AIR WITH THE STEAM AND THE SULFUR AND WE SCREAMED AND SHOUTED AND APPLAUDED IN OUR JOY!

As we left I scratched the head of a friendly four-horned ovine gentleman, who smelled pleasantly of lanoline.

“He’s rambunctious,” I said as he cantered away.

“He’s on a spree,” said Jeremy.

“No,” I said; “a rampage.”

It was pretty much the best day ever.

We saw Atonement at one. I just wanted to point that out. I had read the book but had only vague memories of it; I was much more taken with Saturday. This film is intelligent, gorgeous to look at and so sad that even a tiny spoonful of it in your local reservoir would make your entire neighbourhood melancholy for a week. Consider yourself warned.

Keira Knightley is a revelation. She’s been beautiful since Bend It Like Beckham and interesting since Pride and Prejudice (by the same director, as a matter of fact); here she becomes the anchor of the film.

Everyone is mentioning the amazing scene on the beach at Dunkirk so I’ll add my voice to the choir. It looked like the end of the world, which, for a lot of people, is what Dunkirk was. The shot reminded me of some of the street scenes in Children of Men, a film I adored.

Jeremy claims there is a sibling incest subtext, but he read The Secret History at an impressionable age, so make of that what you will.

We’ve had a lucky run recently; I can also highly recommend Juno and The Water Horse.

Today we went with the Murgisteads to SFMOMA see Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson. I went in without any expectations or context at all, a state of unspoiled grace I shall now deny to you, my beloved readers.

We walked out of the lifts into Room for one colour, a lobby lit with yellow lights, the effect of which was to turn everyone greyscale. It was eerie and awesome, like living and talking to each other in newspaper photographs or sepia prints.

“We’re in the past!” I told Jack. I looked down at my beloved brown leather bag and my brain almost refused to see that the colour had been leached out of it. The kids looked especially startling, as they had all been dressed in pink and orange and purple and blue and green the instant before. When we walked out of this room my eyes remained grateful for colour for minutes and minutes afterwards, and everything looked vivid.

Next came Yellow versus purple, a room with a white spotlight shining at a large transparent disk so that it projected yellow and reflected blue lights onto opposite walls. After that was Model room, absolutely crammed with miniatures for larger projects. Didn’t get to look at these much because the children towed me into 360 degree room for all colours in which a circular, translucent wall had been built in an almost complete circle about eight feet high. You stood inside the circle and the colours slowly shifted and changed. We started out white so everyone looked like the subjects in an Elsa Dorfman portrait. Then the colours shifted to blush and lavender and lime and sky, so the vividness of that light was superimposed on the existing-vividness of the kids and their clothes. Abundance.

Even more beautiful was a brand-new site-specific piece called One way colour tunnel, built over the bridge that crosses SFMOMA’s atrium. This had triangular glass panels in sunset colours – blue, royal purple, pink, apricot and gold – offset against each other in a black steel frame. As you walked through the tunnel you got the kaleidoscope effect of the changing lights, plus your own reflection multiplied many times and idealized by the softening and flattering effect of the colours.

I missed a bunch of stuff when Julia escaped and had to be pursued through three installations. We reconvened in Notion motion, a darkened room with a screen on which was projected the surface of a hidden pool of water. If you bounced on certain floorboards you could make ripples in the water, but the effect was subtle and obscure. Which made it insanely fun to turn a couple of corners and find the water pool and the light and the back of the screen, with the mechanism all laid bare.

Multiple grotto deserves a better name, looking as it does like a twelve-foot, three-dimensional Star of Bethlehem or similarly menacing Doomsday Device. It’s designed as a sphere made of kaleidoscopes; you stand inside it and the shiny inner surfaces of the projecting triangular prisms reflect the light of the gallery outside. The walls here were lined with Eliasson’s very disciplined photographs of Icelandic landscapes; horizons, waterfalls, islands, a single valley over the course of a day. Their formal beauty reminded me a lot of some of Jeremy’s photographs of urban and natural patterns; that probably makes me sound excessively fond, but there it is.

Next was Moss wall, exactly what it sounds like, an entire gallery wall of reindeer moss; then Space reversal, two windows, one projecting out of SFMOMA and the other inside its walls, and when you stepped or peered into the window mirrors reflected you to infinity in every direction.

My preference for interactive, witty, Burning Man-style art over the smug dreck that’s sold at auction these days is a matter of historical record. What I particularly loved about this exhibition was its combination of funny, playful installations that the kids could fully grok, with a formal and technical mastery you don’t often see in the desert but would kind of like to be able to expect from your major artists. This is a generous, insightful and profound body of work, and it runs through February 24. If I were Bjork I would totally be dating this guy instead.

This is not a top ten, because that would be LAME. Just some posts you may have missed, from Yatima: the early years.

They fight crime!

Quick, give her some moral guidance.

Count your blessings.

The big fierce predators are coming back.

Two three!

Peepee-you is a baby chicken.

More to the point, it loves Claire.

We really are nerds, huh.

I thought you said you were fragrant!

She is given food.

Sung by a chorus of astronauts:

“I am the king
So blue and bright.
When worlds collide
It’s so good and right.

“He wrote both of those
In Spanish and English too.
Whenever he went with both of those letters
The water horse came too.
He named him ‘Hat’
Which wasn’t that good.

“He got down his keyboard
Which had two switches
An off switch and an on switch as well
You
can
have
those
on your computer, your toy computer.

“And everyone had to
Do
Some
Thing.”

Lunch and dinner for eighteen or so, plus a midnight snack for me and Mister J. And enough left over for at least a week of poulterer’s pie.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Yoz: Hi, I’ve brought the casserole!

Me (arrested beside rug, on which is displayed a dead Mouse): EEK!

Yoz: Have I startled you?

Me: No! Bebe the cat has startled me!

Jeremy: How?

Me: With a gift! Mr Squeakums! Or should I say the late, Mr Squeakums!

Yoz: Eek!

Me: Not a creature is stirring! Not even a mouse!