” … New York / Where I am now; which is a logarithm / Of other cities. Our landscape / Is alive with filiations, shuttlings; / Business is carried on by look, gesture / Hearsay …”
From “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery, 1974
In the early 1970s, John Ashbery, in all his hunky glory, was in New York. As hard as I try to maintain a certain hunkiness, I am no longer in New York. The city shows up rarely in my essays and poems, unlike say San Francisco, which features prominently in four of the poems I plan to include in my upcoming book American River, and one in my 2022 chapbook The Adored Garden. I have never lived in San Francisco. I lived in New York City for the better part of nine deeply formative years, from 1994 to 2003. This was not some mistake.
I suspect my silence about New York, even as a poet and a writer about cities, contains some kind of personal meaning not connected to the obvious fact that I am a West Coast person by birth, choice, and disposition. There is a place in my soul that still feels like a New Yorker, and I think the silence comes from an instinct that I have hard-to-articulate unfinished business in New York. But then again, the city has changed. Maybe my unfinished business is with an early 2000’s New York that no longer exists.
In any case, this week I feel like my reticence to write about New York City may finally be fading. I have been loving Ashbery’s brilliant riff on the mannerist painter Parmigianino, which while not explicitly about New York City (except for in a couple of passages) nonetheless strikes me as very much about the poet’s experience of New York. In the quote above he calls New York a logarithm, which as you may recall is a power to which a fixed base must be raised to produce a given number. Ashbery, then, seems to be saying in his typical indirect way that New York is an exponent, a place that rapidly modifies or amplifies experience.
Which is true of course, though it is also true that New York is a distinct ground to itself. Ashbery wrote Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror in the early 1970s, an especially edgy time in the city’s history and contemporaneous with the 2017 HBO series The Deuce, which I am seeing for the first time with the kids now grown and out of the house. The series, as you may recall, depicts a floating world alive with what might certainly be called “filiations, shuttlings.” The first episodes depict buckets of sordid business carried on “by look, gesture.” The 70’s New York of The Deuce is gaudy and dirty, thrilling and terrifying, a place where old rules seem to have disappeared, for both good and sometimes very bad. I recommend the series, in which Maggie Ghyllenhal and James Franco are excellent. I also recommend Ashbery’s brilliant and challenging long poem.
On Paid Parental Leave
Opening an essay with an extended riff disconnected from its primary topic is probably not a strategy blessed by most English teachers. But maybe my excuse is this: the policy topic I have set for myself as the latest in the “bakers’ dozen” policy and social issues connected to families and kids is so damn easy that there’s not a lot to say about it. The topic is paid parental leave. The message is that the US needs to get on the ball.
I have a very personal take on why this is true. In the late summer of 2004, roughly a year after I left New York and just after the State introduced an innovative new paid parental leave program, I walked away from a job with a bully of a boss. Encouraged by my sister, I filed for unemployment insurance on the correct basis that my ex-boss had intentionally hounded me out of the job, and won my case with an administrative law judge. The combined parental leave and UI benefits that came during this dark time right after the birth of our younger son allowed my wife and me to save our house. As a white guy with an Ivy League degree who had spent time studying programs like UI and Paid Parental Leave working at small think tanks, I can say that while I always supported such programs, I had never truly imagined using them myself. I was wrong, and now I can at least say that I have a more grounded, visceral sense for how important social insurance programs can be to people’s lives.
The paid family leave issue is also personal for me in a different way, simply as a patriotic American. It’s a national embarrassment that the US is the only developed OECD country without a paid parental leave law. This brief from the Bipartisan Policy Center provides a great lens on the different flavors of such laws, at least as of 2022. Many countries—including the UK, Ireland, Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Australia, Hungary, Turkey, Israel, and Greece have highly gendered policies focused entirely or almost entirely on mothers. A number of other countries—Canada and Germany are prominent examples—reserve some leave explicitly for mothers, and a larger duration of leave to be split between mothers and other parents as the family decides. A small group of countries like South Korea and France appear, according to the graph from the Bipartisan Policy center, to have gender-balanced parental leave laws, with equal amounts of time reserved for both mothers and fathers. Japan is an outlier in reservering more parental leave for fathers than mothers. I can only speculate, but perhaps this is an attempt to persuade more Japanese salarymen to spend a hot minute with their families at home.
I was curious about France, which would appear from the Bipartisan Policy Center graph to stand as an outlier in terms of its progressiveness on child leave. But this outlier status turns out to be a bit of a mirage. The graph over-generously implies that a special policy for parents of children with severe illnesses or disabilities, who can take up to three years paid leave each, is the French norm. More typically, according to the European Commission, French mothers up until this summer received comprehensive free maternity insurance and 16 weeks of leave, with six of these intended for use prior to childbirth. Fathers, meanwhile, got 25 days leave. France increased these benefits just months ago in response to a steep decline in French birth rates over the past two years, a worrying result for the French government given that France had previously enjoyed a higher birth rate than many other developed countries.
More broadly, even these limited details about France show that broad brush international comparisons are instructive but partial. Policy implementation matters, and it’s not a trivial research question to know how laws actually function on the ground in, say, Estonia or Mexico or New Zealand. But even so, one thing is apparent. The US stands out at the very bottom of any list related to parental leave as a result of our steadfast, bizarre refusal to adopt any national leave policy at all.
There are, of course, state programs like the one my family and I benefited from in California. The federal government has a paid parental leave program, as do some corporations. Parents can take unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act. But parental leave benefits, as with most US social insurance programs, are spotty at best and are most likely to benefit families who already have stable incomes. The system is piecemeal, inadequate, and unjust. I’m grateful, of course, for the benefits my family received two decades ago. But if my family had lived in a different state, we wouldn’t have received the benefits. As a nation, we need to do better .
Given the obvious importance of paid parental leave, it’s a bit odd that this topic doesn’t rise closer to the top of the national social policy agenda. Unlike child tax credits, the topic of last month’s post, or changing definitions of family, the topic of next month’s post, or child care, the topic of the post planned after that, paid parental leave just isn’t a very sexy issue. It’s too bad, because developing a system that encourages parents to be at home and care for their young children in as unstressed a way as humanly possible is an obvious and crucial cornerstone of prosperity for families in cities and towns everywhere in America. Few investments would be as effective and immediate as a means to secure the physical and mental health of both children and parents.