Postparting experiment

Hallo! This is likely to be a disaster given the state of my short term memory at the moment (upsettingly non-existent, like a missing mental muscle-set. I reach for what I was about to say, or what I knew I was meaning to do, and it’s just a blank. This is the main symptom of the ongoing broken sleep. I’m probably getting more or less enough hours of sleep, just never in stretches of more than about 2.5 hours. Babies must have terrible short term memories - constantly crawling into rooms and wondering why they came in).

Anyway, I could read the top of the last paragraph and prompt myself to carry on the sentence by back-engineering what I thought would be a disaster, which is that I said in one salon that I should write up the salons post-hoc, for the people who can’t come or don’t want to or aren’t sure. I fight a constant battle of ambivalence about having levels and paywalls in any of my work (yes, including selling tickets to shows), and this might go some way towards making things accessible.

That said, if I try to remember what we talked about in the salon that just finished, I’m unlikely to do it justice. At worst it’ll seem like reading one of those write ups of a club celebration you see in newsletters sometimes, where it’s full of self indulgent shorthand and in-jokes and references: “Misso did a classic pope-leap, while the chicken gang applauded, and Czar Danny swept home with the honours after skulling a bottle of Passion Pop under the disapproving gaze of Matron”.

Also, because of the said gappiness of the ole memory, I can’t guarantee I’d not leave someone important out. When forced to watch speeches in awards ceremonies, it’s fun to think there’s one person in Hollywood who’s helped like… everyone and just gets left out of every speech by accident. Just one Nora who is constantly getting texts from Dame Judy Dench going “shit! I am soooo sorry! I really really meant to thank you!”

That said, I don’t know if she’d mind that much - public thanks are all well and good but “you know who you are” is also true, and I say that as someone who got left out of her own twin brother’s wedding speech. (I mean, I wasn’t happy about it, but it’s sometimes a privilege to be so much part of someone’s life that your personhood becomes invisible. Sometimes).

Which brings me to the third part of why this could be a disaster - writing up the salons, if you’ve forgotten - which is that I get distracted. So I would go off on a tangent instead of talking about the fabulous people in the fabulous salon and our fun chat, which did include (among other things, Nora!):

• the ways in which class systems recruit the people at the bottom of the heap to police their own low status (including as against the upper classes - keeping them up, and protecting their own oppression)
• Moreover, how comedy and power relate to the idea that all governments, however tyrannical sort of, at least a little bit, govern with the consent of the people.
• John Stewart and how comedy can disrupt the status quo, or disrupt the resistance against the status quo by providing to the culture (wittingly or unwittingly) a false sense that a snappy punchline is an effective response to outrage or injustice.
• How comedy often gets pulled out of scripts despite how useful it is as a format for exposition in serious writing and how it is actually really a good way to establish a grounded realism in superhero/fantasy/sci-fi.
• How to maintain and administer friend groups without an enormous and artificial feeling amount of work. (The answer was Tea With Alice Salons).
• What the emotional landscape of branding cattle is like, which ended up being a brief discussion of masculinity and code-switching as it applies to my dad’s experience Jackaroo-ing in far North Queensland in his youth.

There was more than that, and I’ll immediately remember it or think of better ways to formulate it when I hit send, but I’ve just (!) remembered the thought that prompted me to finally make this haphazard attempt of writing up the weekly salon (I forgot it three more times while writing this paragraph but I have it dot pointed below as I type this right now).

It is that we power through an enormous amount of interesting conversation in less than an hour, which I realise when I relate it to anyone who asks. I think it’s because the explicit purpose of the salon is interesting conversation so (apart from my regular tangential self indulgence) we skip social grease talk. Not that social grease talk isn’t important and useful as a way of establishing mutual rhythms and tone and trust in normal conversation (small talk is functional!), but that we have this environment of… implied consent to plunge into big talk in the salons, to take what would in other contexts be conversational risks and it’s bloody delightful.

I really appreciate this little community. Lurkers, chatters, commenters, from a distance watchers, eager beavers, quiet supporters, nervous contributors, kind hearts all. Not to be sappy, but you’re all great and I’m very grateful.

Xx

A