Common Place No. 31

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NOTES IN THE MIDST OF A PANDEMIC COMMON PLACE NO. 31 | WINTER 2021

In Berkeley, it began in earnest in the first half of March 2020. My oldest son underscored its presence by insisting that I stop going to the grocery store, which he saw as a hotbed of contagion. I was following the blog posts of a friend in Shanghai who had flown back there from Taipei after the holidays, quarantined herself, and then was caught in that city's lockdown. Taipei did better than Shanghai, but Shanghai did better than us, and we did better than many other parts of the country. It unfolded in slow motion. The incompetence of the Trump administration—an incompetence centered in its communications—arguably led to its defeat in November. Despite ongoing deprecation, federal expertise held and delivered. As one who is vulnerable to Covid-19, I lay low and got a lot of writing done. There's some precedent for that. These notes reflect on what arose for me in the course of the pandemic, written in media res. The painting on the wall is by Patricia Sonnino, a favorite artist whose work I've collected since the '90s.

NOTES IN THE MIDST OF A PANDEMIC 1. The nature of friendship

We entertained in small groups when the weather was good. As cold weather set in, a few close friends ate with us indoors. At Thanksgiving, two households shared food but split the guests. Christmas is likely to be similar. My wife walks with her friends, but I've used Zoom to have conversations with them. I referred to it as conjoined rooms, because one friend and I both talk in our respective writing rooms and they pair naturally. Some people shield their private space with digital backdrops or real ones that reveal little, but others are content to share real places that speak to the range of their interests. I learned that one friend plays the bass viol, the electric bass (of which she has several), and the piano (electronic). Another friend lives in a small apartment that, conjoined, feels expansive. Calligraphy and artwork surround her. This friend and I correspond. She also leaves strings of brief recorded messages when the screen gets to her. These strings can be 20 or 30 minutes long by the time I hear them all. I save them, but I haven't gone back to them, as they stay with me and I write one or two replies, sometimes more, in response to things she raises or mentions. On Zoom, I recently read three poems that I sent in to Poetry Birmingham, a regional journal in the English Midlands. I rarely read my poems aloud. Later, I sent them along. Correspondence has long been how friendships are maintained and nurtured. Some friendships are marked by exchanges of Christmas letters, usually with a cover note or something jotted on the card. But others get real letters, written at wildly different paces. As a correspondent, my tendency is to reply at once and sometimes send postscripts or appended thoughts. I treat email like the post, with the exception of the Christmas letters I just mailed out, feeling that something tangible was warranted in this season. My correspondents reply slowly and some invariably apologize for this, although I assure them each time that I'm grateful for their letters when they come. My sense of time in its undisturbed state benefits from my associative memory, which makes it easy for me to pick up the thread. In its disturbed state, a symptom of ego tearing, it was quite the other way. That happened once, a drawn-out process that I regret. It taught me something about friendship, though—that you can't mix it with some other states of interaction. I proposed to my wife by letter. When I say this, the reactions suggest that I'm seen as a romantic or from another era (or planet, maybe). In reality, it was the simplest way to ask. And I was urged to write the letter by my wife's middle sister, who believed—rightly, as it proved—that she'd accept me. So, in this sense, an arranged marriage. But this is more about the nature of correspondence than of friendship. I raise it though to make the point that a letter can sustain a friendship across considerable distance in time and/or space, and also across the local divisions that a pandemic creates, shifting what would have been conversations over lunch to other media, including words on a page or screen. Friendships cross media. That's part of their interest. They make room for each one's favored means of expression. If there's a boundary, it's the one mentioned before—the mixing that brings telos into the friendship, expectation. This is only an issue in close friendships between the sexes. When you reach my age, experience has finally taught you not to act on desire. The reality of my age makes the idea ridiculous, but there are men who ignore this and father children in their seventies and later. Alan Clark, the political diarist, made it almost a leitmotif, despite being, by his own admission, happily married. "Starting again" was the impulse. Close friendships, like marriages, start where they are. They share a connection that accrues. My sense though is that accrual varies significantly or perhaps it just gets derailed when expectations aren't met. It's odd but I think true that marriage's telos becomes steadily more open-ended as mutual acceptance grows. There are certain formalities related to marriage's dynastic nature, but as you age, the known unknowns take the edge off expectation. "God wiling" is more often on your lips. It's not exactly starting where you are, but accommodating what unfolds. Close friendships do this, too, but differently. They accommodate other sorts of changes, too, that shift the ebb and flow of interaction. Correspondence is ideal for this. <

2. The house as gallery

Clockwise from left, the work in one corner my upstairs writing room's east wall is by Patricia Sonnino, Leigh Wells, and Sonnino again. Her two were painted while in residence for a month in Wyoming— something I followed on Instagram. Along the bottom is a photo of the shed, my other writing place, before it was renovated, a self-satirizing Christmas card I made for my colleagues, talismans from the big temple in Asakusa in Tokyo that I sometimes visit, and a photo my daughter took and mounted. We started collecting art when were in Paris in 1977. We stayed at the Hotel Louisiana and there were galleries nearby. We bought a signed Zodiacal calendar spread by Eugene Grasset, and several posters. The poster is to the right of the paintings above; the calendar is at stair landing, along with a painting by Bob Newhall. (We also have a watercolor by him.) We have a mix of older work, Austrian, Japanese, and Italian prints, a pastel by Jenny Michels, a relative by marriage who was a model for and the last student of Matisse, and work in several media by Sonnino, Vivienne Flesher and her husband, Ward Schumaker, Lisa Esherick, Sue Bender and her husband Richard, Russell Case, and Karen Legault. There are other Legault paintings in the kitchen and upstairs, along with work by Sonnino, Wells, Schumaker, Henrk Drescher, Wu Wing Yee, Nellie King Solomon, Patricia Bruning, James Monday, Laura Hartman, Biliana Stremska, my grandfather, Georg Parmann, II, and another Norwegian whose name I can't read. Museums have admirably sought to stay connected with their visitors and supporters. The nearest, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, streams films and convenes lectures. I've taken less advantage of this than I should, but I've steeped myself in my own collection in a way that's analogous to how I've experienced the house, the writing shed (three pieces in ink brush by Peiting Li on one of its walls), the back garden, the neighborhood, and the several walks I take uphill and down. Late in life, the painter Duncan Grant, living at the country house, Charleston, he and Vanessa Bell shared, painted it close up. I've always loved these paintings, which reflect in the truest sense what a painter sees. <

3. Trump deflates, as my wife predicted

"He won't win," my wife said, several months before the election. I held my breath. After Biden won by a considerable plurality, the raging Trump initially raised my doubts—could he possibly pull it off? It is a tribute to the endless barrage of headlines (and the parallel campaign to raise money for politicians) that I worried. But then it unfolded: the risible lawyers, the unfounded lawsuits, the would-be brownshirts—it all came to nothing. As this happened, Trump began deflating. He tweets on, but fewer pay heed. < 4. The several versions of social media

I make fairly active use of social media. That it would supplant email was predicted, but texting has done that, at least with the young. My daughter confessed that she reads email less frequently, so I text her now if I send her something. She posts occasionally to Instagram—photos and artwork. Instagram is useful to keep visual track of family, friends, and acquaintances—their marriages, children, pets, households, trips. I started an Instagram account when I noticed that my younger cousins in Norway were off Facebook. I'm still on it. To me, it's like a small town that I share with certain friends and many journalists. Some of the latter are now on LinkedIn, which is increasingly Facebook-like. Recently, something I posted there was trolled, a new experience. Lately, I've been posting things on LinkedIn aimed at liberal artists. Professionals are often interested in cultural topics, but there's not much on LinkedIn that caters to it. Tumblr, a site that draws an unusual number of poets, is not precisely social media. Until Yahoo bought it, it had some outré users, although their visual posts were often fodder for my photo-collages. Instagram these days is often a better source, but Tumblr is one site I'll never abandon. Medium, meant for long-form pieces, is another site that straddles the social media line. I like both because they're easy to use and readily accept visual media. But I follow people on Tumblr more than I follow them on Medium. In the heat of 2020's political season, Facebook and Twitter became running subtexts. Twitter is more consistently political, but the politics one finds there are often local or grounded in very specific issues and in positions of which those tweeting are sometimes inordinately convinced. The tendency is to lead with a diss. When I have replied calmly, the diss sometimes dies down. Because the tweeters are immersed in their issues, there's an abbreviated, inside-baseball character to their tweets, with assertions they believe are self-evident. They react to anything they perceive as questioning their positions with a hair-trigger. Facebook is less prone to this, in part because the parties doing the posting know each other or have friends in common. One of my cousins is occasionally politically incorrect and others have wondered aloud why I put up with him. "He's my cousin," I explain, defending his right to hold views that aren't theirs. Another benefit of social media is that it draws attention to content I would likely miss. I imagine some of what I post has this benefit for others. I read relatively widely, but the extent of content now is such that it's impossible to keep up. Also, I'm a generalist at heart, whereas some of the journalists and writers I follow on social media are specialists, and I rely on their expertise. I don't read all of what they post, but I'm glad to have the possibility. They also introduce me to outlets I wouldn't encounter otherwise. Academia and ResearchGate aren't really social media sites, but—like LinkedIn, too, which began as a CV repository—they're slowly developing social media-like attributes in an effort to foster discussion and networking across their communities. Both would benefit from having more of this. I've used them to find scholarly articles that are blocked to non-academics on the journal websites. (Actually, they're gated, but their terms even to read an article are extortionary. This part of publishing seems ripe for disruption.) All this said, social media's most important attribute is that it keeps people in touch. It simplifies this by prompting birthday and anniversary greetings, noting other career and life events, and enabling the tacked-on comments that tell others you're still on the planet and interested in their lives, as perhaps they are of yours. Like social life in general, it depends on reciprocity of many different sorts, each with its own value. Unlike social life in particular, it builds in a certain buffer from unintended slights. <

5. Publishing and self-publishing: their merits

Above is a box of periodicals belonging to a friend, Gary Strang—it's his photo. Design Book Review is among them, a quarterly that my sister-in-law and I founded and published, sometimes with others, from 1983 until 1999, when we gave it to California College of the Arts (CCA), which did three more issues. The last managing editor, Bill Littman, who teaches architectural history at CCA, fetched these from Strang and shipped them, along with copies of other issues from me, to George Smart in North Carolina to make a second digital archive, better scanned than the one Google put together. In my writing shed in the back garden is a complete set and spares, even including those CCA published. When you publish a print journal, copies of it will accrue. My friend Bill Stout, who went into book published at one point, has a warehouse in Richmond, California, to contend with the output (along with other books he sells). In 2008, visiting my daughter in rural Spain, I wrote something that drew on reviews I was reading in copies of the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement I brought along. When I got back to Berkeley, I wondered what to do with it. I turned it into a first number of a personal journal that my sister named Common Place, recognizing that what I'd written had that form. This is number 31. At some point in 2019, I discovered that Blurb.com, a short-run digital printer, had a magazine format that accepted Common Place numbers as PDFs. The minimum page length exceeds the journal's 16 pages, but some of the issue run longer. I've printed them in small batches to give to friends. There's something nice about print—its tangibility, especially this year, when everything has felt more ephemeral than usual. But the numbers are still digital documents, readily revised, corrected, and expanded. A new hosting site makes this simple, which is fortunate, as—being an editor—I often find reasons to update the texts. The Common Place site (complace.j2parman.com) alludes to Denis Diderot's habit of circulating manuscripts, but my impulse to self-publish also emulates Virginia Woolf's desire to shepherd her own writing, as opposed to the writing that others commissioned. I've worked with some very good editors, like Erin Kendig and Joceyln Beausire at ARCADE, and Martin Pedersen at Common Edge, but my own writing is intentionally a work in progress for which no claims are made: working out loud. From time to time, I go back through it and bring forward things that seem to work. Every year, I gather all the poems I've written and produce a compendium issue that's more or less unedited, but then I select from it. The prose pieces are harder to excerpt, but I did so in number 16. The prose is a combination of memoir, quasi-essay, sets of pieces on a nominal theme, collections of articles, and outright miscellany. As at least one online journal to which I contributed vanished entirely, I'm glad I collected it. That's a peril of online publishing—if you're not paying for its storage, it can evaporate. It's one reason I made volumes of Common Place, although individual numbers have changed sufficiently that I need to do this again. <

6. Understanding what constitutes my work

I made an 18-month transition from fulltime work to retirement. Toward the end of it, I took on three paid assignments—small, medium, and large, so to speak. The small one didn't work at all. The middle one worked better, but made me realize that I missed the way an in-house editorial and design team works. The large one worked the best, because the subject matter and the client matched my expertise exactly. But it also showed me how interacting with a large organization inevitably pulled me into its orbit. A retainer was offered, but I didn't want it. When an opening appeared to dodge a face-to-face, out-of-town meeting, just prior to the closing down of business travel, I took it. When you retire from working for others, you find yourself with a lot of time in a daily sense and less and less time in a cosmic sense, assuming that you retire at the end of your career as I did. The transition from work's structure has to be worked through. I was lucky that the pandemic arrived soon after I'd figured it out. It halted the two paid projects that in theory might have gone forward, and made it easier to beg off from two others that didn't feel like a fit. I took on several new projects based on personal ties— no fees involved, just my own interest—and I began to write. My own work finally got real attention. In the summer of 2018, I became an editorial advisor to ARCADE, the Seattle design and culture mag, invited by its previous editor, Kelly Rodriguez. I'd been a contributor to it since 2012, mainly writing book reviews. In the fall of 2018, I made a trip to Seattle to attend a meeting of the editors and designers. In time, Kelly left and the mag wobbled. A new editor came and left, but slowly a mostly new cohort took over—there were a few holdovers, including me. The pandemic shifted the team's meetings to Zoom and I was finally able to participate actively. I saw immediately that I was back in my element—women and men with complementary skills and backgrounds, committed to a publication we believed in. This was my third outing on that premise. My roles changed each time, but in every case, even when I paid the bills, my aim was to make things happen by helping the team do its best work. That can involve speaking up for the work itself, supporting others' good ideas, working as hard as them to do it well and meet the deadlines. My ARCADE colleagues—Lauren Gallow, Jocelyn Beausire, and Sean Woolcott especially—remind me of the core team in my studio that I grew to love, not just to respect immensely, for everything they did. This is the difference between a team's collegiality and affection, on the one hand, and life with the gods. The gods are like weather. With ARCADE, the constraints and possibilities are theirs directly. I would say "ours," but my role is advisory. In their case, I don't mind at all being pulled into their orbit. My own work, the work I make time to do, is done for the sake of seeing what I can do, as well as for others who might appreciate it. I was struck by Stendhal's reference to such readers in the margins of a manuscript—his sense that an audience would appear "in 150 years, when I'm better understood." I have a few known readers. Beyond them, it's hard to know. When submissions are invited, I send things to a few journals I admire. It took four tries to get a poem published in one of them. That poem isn't one I would have chosen, and I almost left it out. That's true, actually, of the other poem that found publication. Making one's own choices is one reason to self-publish, for better or for worse, but I think a more important reason is that having something to show for it is a crucial part of work. In Plain and Simple, her book about the Amish, Sue Bender makes this point in reference to canning peas. The Amish farmers value raising the peas, but the cans of peas also matter. They are unabashedly the producers, artisans, of their own works. The line between art and craft is inexact, but they need to touch and interact, and the spirit of what's produced needs to reflect the devotion to the outcome that they have in common. When you retire, you face the essential truth that life is unpredictably finite. In a broad sense you can work for or against yourself, but the whole thing is inexact, even when the doctors tell you the end is near. My departed father's list of ailments was considerable, yet, as his doctor observed, for someone as fucked up as he was, he was in pretty good health. One way or another, he was a functioning human almost to the end, never less than lucid, and aware of his day-to-day endurance, despite all. Hence the attraction to me of E.M. Forster's credo, which I sometimes quote: "Work as if immortal." You might as well. <

7. Solitude is one half of one of my several balancing acts

The portion is closer to two-thirds or even three-quarters, but definitely not more. I learn this when I travel and when I'm alone in the house for an extended period. In both cases, I have an upper limit, past which solitude gets to me. If, on the other hand, I'm deprived of solitude, I get cranky and even immobile. I need solitude first of all to recover from society, and secondly to absorb its impressions. Creativity and receptivity, routinely and oppositely gendered, also require balance. I lean heavily toward the receptive, but my receptivity is tied to solitude as gestation. (The analogy is imprecise as the process is nonlinear.) The print above, by the way, is by the nameless Norwegian I mentioned previously. It's hanging on the wall behind where I'm writing this. I bought it from my cousin Turid Parmann's Galerie Oz in Âs, a coastal town near Bergen. It could be Charon on the Styx, but let's go with it as a metaphor for solitude as I understand it—a state in which the solitary individual is in some sense still visible, still attached to a shore and a pier, a landing place in sight probably of a house with others or another who keep an eye out. It is therefore a partial solitude, even if the rower feels he's apart from it, not part of it. Or feels he's both. Gender, by the way, involves a similar sleight of hand. What's interesting is that everyone plays along. Gender is a crowdsourced deception in which we fail to see the complexity of the other or we discount it, taking seriously the various conventions even when the other mixes them up. We go with the dominant pattern. If the man wears a dress, we go along with that decision. Women can wear men's clothes without changing gender, but their demeanor can affect a shift. We read gender through the senses. The assertion that gender is constructed is true in this sense. It breaks down when we're most human—overcome with grief, with fear, or with desire: we lay our armor down and are our naked, original, complex selves. < 8. I haven't missed traveling and yet it still figures

Whenever I travel, I invariably dread going a few days before, wishing I could call the trip off. I've done this on occasion for the sheer pleasure of giving in to the impulse. Once I launch myself into it, of course, the dread falls away, although I'm prone to depression on the road and have to organize things to avoid it. The pandemic took all of this off the table. The farthest I've gone is out to the coast on daytrips, visiting the ridge house my oldest son is restoring. My dreams, though, are redolent with elsewhere. And my dreamt elsewhere is sometimes flamboyant and even beautiful, but more often just an amalgam. <

9. My daughter texts about identity and privacy

This relates to note 7. During the summer, I went back to Community and Privacy by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander. I read it when it appeared, and was interested to discover how different it was from my memory of it, in the same family as books from that era by Marshall McLuhan. I picked up the book because I want to write about density in relation to context—the topic I proposed to take up when I applied for a second term as a visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley. Since then, I've written about current and recent housing legislation in California, much of which is focused on the question of who decides about density. The arguments around this legislation are fraught, I found, and—to go back to note 4—I stirred up several hornets' nests, especially when I described the legislation as neoliberal. My daughter's text brought me back to the tension that exists—has always existed—between the self and others, especially if the self is categorized by others and then judged fallaciously from this viewpoint. Both the categorization and the resulting judgement aim to close off discussion. In the case of the housing legislation, its advocates regard themselves as progressive and morally correct. Agreement is assumed and dissent is met with disbelief and hostility. Raising questions, let alone examining data and assumptions, is viewed as apostasy. A narrative is invoked to overwhelm criticism. The consensus view is an item of faith. I remember about two decades ago believing that marriage, by definition, was between a man and a woman. When Gavin Newsom briefly made it possible for men to marry men and women to women at San Francisco City Hall, the sight of the aged couples who emerged to marry convinced me that marriage is not about procreation—even the Church acknowledges this, by asking heterosexual couples if they will welcome children, as having children is not assured, married or not. No, it's about the commitment that two people make to each other, and potentially it could be more than two. Meanwhile, our society has rid itself of legal impediments to love among the sexes. Now it confronts the blurring and crossing of gender. All prejudice seems rooted in these collisions between the selves and others, and our tendency to put others who aren't us into categories. I once asked a friend in Tokyo to describe the local pecking order. Tokyo natives came first, followed by the Japanese in general (although he didn't say this explicitly), and then—interestingly—the Jews. They rank high in Tokyo. There's also an untouchable class, associated with trades that were taboo to Shinto. My friend has told me several times that this prejudice persists, and that there are artists from that class who achieved fame abroad and were excepted when they came back. Needless to say, we have our own versions of this, each with its deep and unfortunate history. Exceptions are made in the same way they were for the Algerian French when France won the World Cup some years ago—briefly, they were French, but nothing changed for the category. When this happens, strife follows. Identity is part of the dichotomy of privacy and community. Identity is imposition, self-expression, belonging, rejection, and transcendence, among other things. It's both an innately personal thing and a communal source of controversy. Identifying as something can draw criticism from others who identify similarly and decline to accept you as a member of the club. I watched a colleague come out as gay late in his career, divorcing his wife at great personal expense, and finding little acceptance from gay colleagues, I intuited, despite the real anguish he experienced making the transition. (I thought he had cancer.) They might argue they were being consistent and he was deluded to think it would make a difference to them. A high-school friend who came out when we were in our late thirties also made a thing of his identity. Then he died within a year of AIDS, which struck me as a cruel fate that was essentially accidental. What strikes me about "community" in this sense is that it's so often the false party in relation to individuals who are just trying to work out who they are. Perhaps we should call them "group identities" or just "gangs" or "cliques" that get off on their power to lord it over others, to decide who gets to be them, to hurl insults, to talk their patois and breathe in their own shit. Lord help us when they seize the mic or make laws. "Privacy" can be a cover for untoward behavior, of course, but don't throw the eccentric baby out with the malevolent bathwater. The balance should always lean toward self-expression (and selfpossession) and the freedom individuals claim to change their minds, and then change them again. <

10. The recurring word "bittersweet"

The postcard above was purchased and a note written on the back of it in Shanghai, where the writer was living. She put a stamp on it, but it was never mailed, as the address wasn't at hand. Last week, it arrived, left by her on my front porch. Seeing and reading it made me think about that time, for her and for me. At one point she visited and my daughter and I went with her to In the Mood for Love, the most bittersweet film I know. I thought at the time, and said to her later, that if I'd been her, I couldn't have sat through it. She did, though, and perhaps it had homeopathic qualities. When I think of the word "bittersweet," what comes to mind is herbal, a remedy of some kind. In a letter I wrote long before this, I used the word as an adjective to describe the year previous. The recipient took umbrage. That period was terrible for me, and its terrors spilled over. I was the author of my misery, and "bittersweet" may have suggested to her that she had something to do with it. But I used the word in the sense above—that the year had medicinal qualities. Homeopathy asserts that minute quantities of the healing substance can effect a cure. What was the substance? The film the postcard's writer watched with us is about stillborn love—not unrequited, but insufficient to find the life it needs. The writer suffered from one version of it, what might be described as an alchemical imbalance. I think that the recipient and I suffered another. As the word "imbalance" suggests, the effect too is unequal. I had a dream a few years ago that balanced things between me and the recipient by providing a proper farewell. This must have been part of the cure. < 11. Life is as long as it needs to be

Another correspondent used the phrase "life is short" and I countered. Our default preference is to live indefinitely, but we discount the wear and tear. Once, waiting for Monday with an abscessed tooth, I understood how people could have their teeth pulled with nothing more than a shot of whiskey, or find blowing their brains out an attractive option. But lately, more conscious that another day is a gift, I've also felt that something should be done with it to justify being given another. This necessitates an accounting: things done or neglected, and the actual value of the time spent. Plans are made and abandoned in favor of something else. Was this justified? And what if time runs out? The question is no longer trivial. On Sundays, usually, I make a plan for the coming week. It begins with the plan of the week before, deciding what stays and what's struck off because it happened or was done or won't be. I hang this from a book on a bookshelf to my right (where I'm writing this) and sometimes glance at it to confirm a call. My life has slowed—the calls are few and the things to done stretch out indeterminately. Thus, the reckoning each evening is like a bell that brings me back to myself, or like a buoy encountered in the fog. <

12. On the desire to organize and cull

Thrown back on my extensive and dispersed library, I'm constantly reminded of its disorganization, its limited capacity for growth, and the futile nature, at this point, of adding to it when subtracting from it would be far more appropriate. At an earlier point, before the shed in the back garden was renovated, I had a spatial sense of the books it houses, but this was lost, even as some memory of it misleads me when I look for specific books—a process that can take several days and sometimes much longer. This had led me to consider inventorying the books in situ—what shelves contain what books, and are they in or out, as most of my shelves now have two rows of books in order to fit them all in. In doing this, I imagine that some would go. Whenever I glance at a shelf, I see possible candidates. But disposing of books is harder now than it was. I don't have a worked-out plan for how to do this. I have occasionally put books out for passersby to take, but I've found that others come and add their own discards. I could ruthlessly toss any remainder into recycling, but any book that has found its way into my library has earned some affection. One solution might be put some of the books in the ridge house, as summer or winter reading. There are some books there already, so this would broaden the selection. But they would have to be curated. I like that word better than culled, but culling is still part of it. Readers give a certain minimum value to a book by virtue of its having found its way into print, but books have a shelf life. Disposal is justified. The main thing is to give some order to the library so I can make better use of it. I was asked recently to write an introduction to a collection of drawings by an old friend. I have most of his books in my library, but my first pass at finding them was unsuccessful. I also thought to write an appreciate of another friend who died. I found one of his books, but not the others. These forays are frustrating. But an inventory is no small task. It would probably take me a month's worth of time stretched out across a quarter year or so. In a sense, it's an ideal task for a pandemic, part of what's also been going on inside the house. As note 2 also records, living intimately with the spaces we inhabit makes us more aware of them, and this leads to changes—rearrangements of the downstairs rooms that "perfect" some initial moves, and alterations on walls and along credenzas to place or compose artwork and artifacts more sympathetically. We become like Mr. Barnes and his collection, considering and reconsidering it, and working in new acquisitions. Books are similar. However much I tell myself my library is complete, new books are bought. Ironically, new books are often read ahead of others that were bought previously with an eye toward their priority. Life is unfair, books could justifiably think. Yet sometimes they are rediscovered, set aside long enough to be new again. (Related to this, I have famously bought the same book twice and even thrice.) < 13. Why I want my daughter to have my cameras

When my sister was sorting out our late parents' house, she told me that our father left 10,000 slides. This number probably overstates the case, but he was an inveterate photographer (and filmmaker, at one point) and what he left was voluminous. Luckily, the University of Oregon deemed his slides of anthropological interest, so they have them. I have a considerable memory of projected images, but also of my father with his several cameras. The high point of my own photographic life was in high school, when I bought a 35mm Japanese knock off with a fast lens. I had a remarkably steady hand, so I could shoot long exposures without a tripod. I was also good at composition. (I also used my father's square-format, 120-mm Rollei.) But I never took it up with my father's dedication until I realized that my tiny iPod had a camera. This led, across a series of iPhones with successively better cameras, to the revival of my interest in photography. I recognize the superiority of real cameras, whether film or digital, and I own several of both, but the iPhone has the advantages that it slips into a pocket and can be used unobtrusively. When I questioned the validity of using it to a friend who's a professional photographer, he said, "The best camera is the one you have with you." I can only agree. My daughter is into film photography and very good at it. It's time she took these cameras over, because it's clear that she'll make real use of them and I won't. <

14. Having a garden or two proves to be essential

In the spring, my wife planted beans and tomatoes in a small garden behind her late mother's five-unit apartment building across the street. She planted the raised vegetable boxes in our back garden with two kinds of tomatoes and various greens. The photo above shows the last crop, brought inside to ripen because it finally cooled off and began to rain. My wife is the gardener, but I pay attention to the plants and am better at watering them. (The other garden isn't irrigated and I left watering it up to her.) A friend who lives nearby makes a point of visiting her parents to help harvest their persimmons. She's attached to her parents, but also to their garden. Gardens, whatever their size, have a gravitational pull. In the summer, I read E.M. Forster's Commonplace Book, which alludes his mother's house's grounds. He took a role in it, working with the gardener, if that's the right word for the man who looked after them. In Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel Lolly Willowes, which I'm reading, the grounds of her family's house, of the church and cemetery where her family is buried, and other cultivated and less cultivated places figure. In my library is a book on garden design that describes a garden as one or more outdoor rooms. This is why a balcony or a porch with plants is also a garden, as are allotments. In good weather, with the need to socialize out of doors, gardens give their households breathing room. But they also produce food. When she brought in the last tomatoes from her garden across the street, my wife noted that for much of the summer into early autumn, we'd eaten our own exclusively. This season we also had grapes—planted along the south fence the year before, they took off and gave us bunches of them, small and sweet. At the ridge house, which has an extensive terraced garden waiting to be revived, there's talk of planting grapes and making wine. I read that the coastal air and local terroir is ideal for whites. We speculate about a micro-appellation. Will this happen? The first step is to repair or replace the irrigation system the original owner put in and then decide how much to irrigate across the long arid season. That I'm even thinking about this is a tribute to the attention I've paid to the garden in which I've spent inordinate time since it warmed up in the spring. My writing shed looks out on it, and sitting at its round glass table to have afternoon tea or a glass of wine in the early evening makes it a room indeed. Houses with yards have made a comeback. This happened in parallel with efforts here to legislate higher densities and impose multi-unit housing typologies on places that, if they had them already, had the pre-war variety. The legislation would supplant back gardens transform former residential parcels into the apartment buildings the market offers. The exceptions prioritize outdoor settings large enough and well enough designed that residents can make them part of their everyday lives. These aren't amenities in the real estate market sense; they make the housing a home, not just something owned or rented. Instead of condemning the traditional housing many people still want, we need to get beyond the multi-unit housing "products" the market currently produces. Reinforcing their inadequacies legislatively is a mistake. <

15. It turns out that institutional competence matters

Owing to the way it was reported, those of us lucky enough to have open access to the press saw in real time how different constituencies did managing the pandemic. Trump's incompetence and duplicity are probably the most important reason he lost, because the pandemic both undermined what he claimed to have accomplished and revealed the damage he did by eroding and deriding the relevant institutions. He seemed to resent their competence as somehow reflecting badly on his constantly made-up approach to the crisis. When it came out that he knew full well in February how bad it was, but underplayed this for what he gauged to be his political advantage, he lost older voters and suburban mothers, among others. Although he garnered more votes than someone as venal and incompetent as him should have, the postelection debacle has whittled down that support to the true believers who still hang on his every tweet. This suggests that competence is important politically and incompetence is a hazard. In Berkeley, incompetence is judged by evidence of crime, homelessness, potholes, and the response to crises like the pandemic and fire season. If there's an actual fire or, as long predicted, a major earthquake, a whole new order of incompetence will be revealed. As it stands, local management of the pandemic has varied. It accentuated the idiosyncrasies of how the city and the county divide their responsibilities and quibble over money and prerogatives. It showed how the city's public schools reflect state regulations, the teachers' union, and a political climate that works against the quality of education and the mobility of the students. The public schools' situation models the state's vision for the public realm in general: local subservience to state mandates and policy biases, without adequate state funding: locally, the worst of all possible worlds. That we need a new social compact is evident. What form might it take? We typically think of it in terms of the individual and the state, but we might better begin with the relationships among different constituencies and their institutions. Currently they overlap in ways that deplete resources or shunt them into pointlessly redundant administration, making accountability harder to establish. At every level, we see inefficiency and ineffectiveness, at considerable cost. So, a new social compact has to be refocused on efficiency and effectiveness with an economy of means—economy, not austerity. This means in turn that we have ask ourselves what the aims are. At every level, what are the purposes of public education? These questions extend to the rest of the public realm: What do we want from it? What's its cost-to-value? The pandemic revealed that health is too important to leave the marketplace. If private equity owns a hospital, it can close it, and this isn't in the public interest. This isn't to argue for a public monopoly on healthcare, but for the stronger assertion of the public interest, reinforced locally and from above. As with education, housing, infrastructure, public safety, and transit, the private sector stays in the picture but doesn't threaten the "floor" of public goods and services that constitute the public realm. It is undeniably frayed, weighed down by the distortions of taxation, public sector employment and benefits, and the way public institutions often lag state-of-the-art benchmarks due to long-term inertia and underinvestment. Some see this. The Green New Deal, still just a back-of-the-envelope policy sketch, suggests the wholesale nature of needed reforms and, in its allusion to New Deal, the actual scale of the problem. Where do you start? The question often hinders people from starting at all, but we have to start now. The election spared us four more years of Trump. It also showed those across the planet laboring under authoritarian know-it-alls that our democracy held and, his denials notwithstanding, he lost. For all the talk of our democracy being fatally injured, here it is and it ran well—one thing at least that did. It was almost like everyone Trump ever vilified made a point of competently doing their part. Every threat that Trump made was seen off. And the pandemic, too, is now moving in the right direction as the institutions involved build on their wins and finally get credit for persevering in the face of mixed signals, bad leaders, and a constant barrage of taunts and denials. They should be awarded a collective Medal of Honor. <

16. The everyday shrank. How will it expand again?

A local restaurant, Corso, a family favorite, shut down recently. Chez Panisse, closer and more venerable, looks safe, but the neighborhood benefited from several of quality, along with cafĂŠs and other meeting places that were part of the warp and woof of its street life. As the pandemic gripped, particularly for my cohort, walking became an exercise in polite avoidance. Going to old haunts meant encountering men, mostly, without masks. So, I went much less, a pattern that continues. Walking itself, detached now from these quotidian destinations, has become something to be done rather than part of normal life. There's less of it, in consequence. The house is magnified by living with it so closely, and the urge to photograph it arises as a kind of painterly impulse, struck again by the pleasure of experiencing it. When the pandemic ends, the places we visited will gradually return and the house will be more of a haven than a world. < 17. Whatever I write, I have the desire to send it out

When I read a poem or a short essay again, I sometimes feel another might want to read it. In my head, there's a short list of these possible readers. Sometimes I ask and get no reply. Typically for me, I ask twice and then give up. Occasionally, a reply comes after a long while. The impulse is similar to or even part of correspondence: everyone on my list is also a correspondent. Not every correspondent is interested in what else I might write. Moreover, when I send a letter, I have no real expectation of when a reply will come. Asking to send something written is to say that it's not a letter. A letter can be answered with barely any reference to it. Some correspondents scrupulously address some of the points raised, but many don't. They write about what's happening to them. I do the same. I set their letter next to me, glance at it from time and time, and start writing. There's usually a bit of connection. In the case of poems or brief essays, I can't and don't expect a reply, but one sometimes comes. If I have a list at all, it's because of this. < 18. Nearer my God: how a pandemic is like a plane

Two cousins weave their religious convictions into their Christmas letters. When I wrote mine this year, the phrase "God willing" appeared at least twice. And I would remiss not to acknowledge that I pray at night to have another day, owing to the Hayward Fault as well as the pandemic. But my conversation with God also asks for others to be safe. When I flew and the plane hit turbulence or something else untoward, I was not above asking to be spared. The request has to be followed by a reckoning, as mentioned in note 11: What use will I make of it? The question rehearses the Last Judgement, asking us to decide for ourselves yet again what has life and what doesn't—and then conduct our lives accordingly. <

19. Upheaval changes things, and the task is to respond

I was always struck when the economy tanked and boatloads of colleagues were laid off how the falling off of their apparently productive working lives was like the way a tree sheds leaves in the winter, closing in on itself and then reviving. I wasn't really at the heart of the tree, but it felt that way. The work in those periods of downturn was more intense and meaningful because we were doing more with less, and also because the huge distractions of a crowded workplace were gone. We had our work, our handful of colleagues, and an inner necessity to see the thing through. The gods too were more visibly engaged. The pandemic has stressed the economy and put a lot of people out of work, but those still working are part of a huge experiment in how work is organized. Many truisms that reinforced the old order turn out to be untrue or perhaps not true enough to justify the employer's cost of physical gathering places and the employee's cost of going back and forth to them instead of working where she is. These are not binary choices—it seems likely that dispersed work settings will augment those at home, and that even non-office work will collocate with available workers more than it did before the pandemic. For a lot of people, the idea of spending two hours navigating ridesharing or transit is now unappealing. The office will persist, but its purposes will change; that could make offices in smaller and less the center of employees' lives. What I think is happening is that the balance is shifting toward individual employees and their work. The task of an organization is to keep the work flowing, but the work itself will stay mainly at the level of its doing, with teams forming around it that cross old boundaries to get things done on time and well. By working virtually, the teams' need to cross those boundaries is accelerating things. The platforms that host teams make the projects the focus, not the organization, even if an organization nominally controls it. That's always been a stumbling block in the physical workplace. My old firm's downtown San Francisco offices are designed to encourage interaction, but unless you work there, even getting to the main mixing space requires an appointment. The digital platforms are also gated, but easier to access and more fluid. The falling away of commuting has added time that used to be figured in but unpaid—the price of working for companies in locations they chose because they were proximate to other companies. Clusters still exist, but what defines them now is the talent they attract in a regional sense. As the pandemic shows, the regions are broadly defined. It might be better to think of them as the orbits of particular metropolises. How this talent is engaged, especially if projects become the focus, may change as time zones and linkages become more important than actual proximity. Proximity will continue to be meaningful for people whose work involves physical activity, but mental activity is a different story. Mobilizing talent and bringing it to bear on projects that need it will be a primary role. I'm not sure who will provide it. It could be companies with huge networks, or it could be network-savvy intermediaries who assemble teams and support them. On the individual and family end, the pandemic gave us a quick, comparative course in the pluses and minuses of given locales—the places where people live, for example, and the ready availability of supports and services to balance work needs and individual/family needs. As with the workplace, things sprung up to fill in gaps, but gaps also appeared for which there's no obvious filler. The way supports and services are divided among different providers caused problems that were often exacerbated by regulations closing some down while letting others continue in a half-assed manner. This may be unavoidable in a pandemic, but what we've learned should be kept in mind as we come out of it. The word "resilience" is applicable. The pandemic forced us to confront what exactly keeps life going and what, if missing, really impedes it. "Resilience," note 15's "floor," is a societally acceptable minimum. The pandemic showed how we've let ours slip below it. The problems we see so visibly reflect what we shortchange, leave to the market, or treat as externalities. We're a tiered society whose tiers struggle for ascendancy. Worse, some see it as a zero-sum game. The pandemic is worse for us and for the UK because of this. "We either hang together or hang separately," Ben Franklin told his fellow revolutionaries. We're at that point again. By defeating Trump, we began moving toward solidarity. We need to up the pace, take the challenge seriously. Resilience isn't just global warming, it's everything. That's the real lesson of the pandemic. <

Common Place | Š 2021 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com

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