rebeccakuder

Writing really bad stuff

If you want to write, you have to write some really bad stuff first. You have to sit down, get out paper or computer and put one word in front of the other, like walking, and if you’re lucky, it can be as unthinking, un-thought about, as walking…for stepping is something most adults who can walk rarely examine.

Gets you from one place to another.

While you’re getting from one place to another, the awful part is to be thinking, “This is all crap; I can’t believe how bad this is,” but that’s part of how to make things.

The stuff has to exist in its crap-like state before you can make it better.

I read once that Joy Williams rarely revises her work; it just comes out brilliantly. Lucky her! The rest of us just have to write lots of crap. I guess it’s good to be writing at all, even if it’s crap.

You have to keep knocking on that dark door…

rebeccakuder

To go skating on your name

158439I had a very interesting piece of news today that I can’t share yet, but will post here when I can. In looking for the proper celebratory music, Tom Waits’ Alice gleamed from the shelf, perfect. On it went.

(It will come as no surprise to you that I love that album.)

So many of these songs transport me to a sweet, innocent, clangy, maybe steampunky time, somewhere not quite here, but close. The title song tickles the edge of myself: letters, words, and meaning combining into a circling cut, through something frozen:

It’s dreamy weather we’re on
You wave your crooked wand
Along an icy pond
With a frozen moon
A murder of silhouette crows I saw
And the tears on my face
And the skates on the pond
They spell Alice

I’ll disappear in your name
But you must wait for me
Somewhere across the sea
There’s a wreck of a ship
Your hair is like meadow grass
On the tide
And the raindrops on my window
And the ice in my drink
Baby, all that I can think of
Is Alice

Arithmetic, Arithmetock
I turn the hands back on the clock
How does the ocean rock the boat
How did the razor find my throat
The only strings that hold me here
Are tangled up around the pier

And so a secret kiss
Brings madness with the bliss
And I will think of this
When I’m dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I’m lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice

And so a secret kiss
Brings madness with the bliss
And I will think of this
When I’m dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I’m lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice

That end bit, “And I must be insane/To go skating on your name/And by tracing it twice/I fell through the ice/Of Alice,” eluded me for a long time. Finally I realized that “the ice of Alice” meant the letters of the word…

But what’s really on my mind is “Kommienezuepadt.” Watch this weird little video of on youtube: “Kommienezuspadt.”

(Pretend German)
Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt

Sei punktlich
Sei punktlich
Sei punktlich

Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt
And we can’t be late
And we can’t be late

(Pretend German)
And we can’t be late
Kommiene, Kommiene
Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt

(Pretend German)
And we can’t be late
And we can’t be late
And we can’t be late
And we can’t be late
Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt

Sei punktlich
Sei punktlich
Sei punktlich

Kommienezuspadt
Kommienezuspadt

Ha, ha, ha, ha
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha
Ha, ha, ha, ha
Kommienezuspadt

(Pretend German)
And we can’t be late
And we can’t be late
And we can’t be late
Sei punktlich
Sei punktlich
Kommienezuspadt
Kommiene, kommiene, kommiene, kommiene
Kommienezuspadt

Soon as I can, I’ll say more.

rebeccakuder

I can smell it now…

My beautiful, brilliant friend Elaine Gale wrote this article for the Sacramento Bee about where some of their local coffee comes from…and the labor involved…here’s a sip:

Chaves wants consumers to know that every bean you drink comes from a timeline equivalent to the birth of a child: nine months from blooming to picking.

I am so glad to have a great local roasting company, Brother Bear’s Coffee, in Yellow Springs. Otherwise I would have to move out to Sacramento and shack up with Elaine, which, come to think of it, might be kind of fun.

rebeccakuder

The Freakies

Freakie
I like to be able to focus on one thing for extended periods of time, like writing, or knitting, or something even racier, but too often, my mind has an interesting way of zipping around untethered. As I’m sure others have written about, following the trails of the brain can be kind of like web surfing.

So when my husband mentioned some excellent type of Italian Nutella-esque thing he heard about today, I recalled that I’d seen a Nutella fan group on the dreaded Facebook. When I saw it before, I didn’t join. But tonight I decided that, in addition to Nutella and Fritos, I would search for Screaming Yellow Zonkers. I found a fan group. I joined. Junk food nostalgia night.

Then Screaming Yellow Zonkers brought the Freakies into my memory, for some zippy reason. Try explaining the Freakies to someone who never saw or ate them, and they would think you were nuts. It sounds like a dream, or a novel outline that was written post-glue sniff, but no, it was a breakfast cereal.

From the Freakies Wikipedia entry:

The Freakies were made up of seven creatures named Hamhose, Gargle, Cowmumble, Grumble, Goody-Goody, Snorkeldorf and the leader BossMoss. In the mythology of the Freakies, the seven went in search of the legendary Freakies Tree which grew the Freakies cereal. They found the Tree, realized the legend was true, and promptly took up residence in the Tree which then became the backdrop for all the TV spots and package back stories.

My novel, The Watery Girl, takes place in the early 1970s, so I’ve been cooing about that era lately, or more accurately, about my child-memory of it. I had many of the little toys and magnets that came with Freakies cereal. I know I could find them on eBay, I’ve actually looked, but they wouldn’t have been on whatever refrigerator we had back in 1975. The Freakies were bizarre along the lines of H.R. Puffinstuff (“puffinstuff”? really?) but even better, because you could eat them.

(p.s. None of these companies have paid me to endorse their products. If only!)

rebeccakuder

Obama: The candor and poetry of not (yet) being a president

As I consider Barack Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, which we are discussing in a class I’m teaching at Antioch University McGregor, a couple overarching things tug at me. I am going to try to leave current politics, approval ratings, and Nobel peace prizes out of this.

The first thing: Throughout, Obama writes with such candor. Having been elected president four years after the 2004 edition was published, I find it fascinating to read his thoughtful and (I assume) unvarnished critique of the power centers, and the role of president and government. The type of openness Obama presents in these pages is blankly missing in the speech and rhetoric of so many politicians. When he first wrote this book, before 1995, he couldn’t have dreamed how his life would unfold. Something in that is refreshing.

The second thing: There is a poet in the White House. In some ways, Obama seems like a frustrated poet, but so much of his writing is pure poetry, too much to note here. One that sticks out: the end of the passage on p. 315, talking about a waiter in Kenya:

“And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition.
A voice says to him yes, changes have come, the old ways lie broken, and you must find a way as fast as you can to feed your belly and stop the white man from laughing at you.
A voice says no, you will sooner burn the earth to the ground.”

The flow, and construction, to me, it’s simply poetry.

I keep thinking back to a speech I saw on C-SPAN when Obama was first running for president, where he talked about the importance of various subjects in school… “And poetry,” he added. At that moment, my husband (who is also a writer) and I agreed, “He’ll never get elected.” And yet…

In this book, his poetry is in his words, and his focus, the corners where he chooses to shine a light. So often, the book reads like a novel. So I keep thinking: what are the implications for us creative people, many of whom have spent careers feeling marginalized and invisible, to have someone who understands doing the job of the president?