rebeccakuder

Using fountain pens

hand_penAs a writing nerd who uses my (large) collection of fountain pens, I recommend that others who want to write try using good equipment. I know some people don’t use the the “good” china, but keep it for special occasions. But I ask: What are you saving it for? Enjoy life now. For me, using good pens and notebooks makes the tactile experience of what I do so much more lovely. It’s like a treat, even when it’s drudgery.

A (possibly superficial) parallel might be: practice dressing for the job you WANT, if it’s not the job you have. When I use my great fountain pens, I feel more like a writer.

I know plenty of writers for whom the instruments are not that precious–and some who actively use more pedestrian tools on purpose, so they feel okay making bad first draft. Everyone is different. Good.

rebeccakuder

Being a nostalgic hippie kid

old_hippie_bilder_allerlei_hippiebus

Although I have more pressing things to do, I decided to make a jeans skirt from a pair of jeans that fit me not that well, but are cool looking. I want to make something like this. I am convinced it will not be flattering, but I need to make it.

This might be inspired by a recent de-junking rampage (though I haven’t gone far enough, clearly, because my office is still full of excess stuff) or the fact that my sewing machine (at which I am a complete novice–I only bought it to make sock monkeys faster) is languishing, unused.

Or maybe it’s a yearning to recapture something of my childhood, which was a tame version of the hippie experience. My family didn’t go to Woodstock, for instance, but we went to the Rainbow Family Gathering.

I’ve also been re-reading Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery, and so the beloved unwashed masses, birthing back on the Farm, the type of people who were around during my youth, are on my mind.

If you haven’t read Spiritual Midwifery, and you are at all interested in hippies, the 1960s and 1970s, or natural birth, read it. The stories are amazing.

If I actually make this skirt, I will post photos.

rebeccakuder

Some of the sexiest music I’ve heard in a long time

images(Oh no, she’s writing about music again…this photo is of Serge Gainsbourg, who is not my husband.)

Recently, my husband stumbled (not literally) onto a really cool CD. It’s called Histoire de Melodie Nelson, by Serge Gainsbourg. He can’t remember how he knew how to look for it (maybe it was a dream from a past life) but it might have been a review in The Week, our favorite magazine, and the only print magazine I read regularly. (Having to tend to this blog, a small child, a job for which I have a lot of reading to do, and oh yeah, that writing thing, means that I don’t get thing called leisure. Some day, some day, but meanwhile, we have The Week.)

So this album. It’s hard to categorize, but it compels me to listen. This morning, I listened to it twice in a row. It is one of those things, like a discovery of T. Rex in my late 30s, that sort of makes me cry, because it sounds so real and inventive and strangely fresh, despite being just a little younger than I am. It’s like a soundtrack–it is a concept album, afterall–but so much better, sexier, and I don’t know what words to use, maybe there are French words to describe it… for any of my French readers who have heard it, please let us know how we should describe it. The textures of sound are rich and yummy.

You should hear it.

rebeccakuder

Necessary Dreams

Several years ago, my friend Nancy Jane Moore recommended a book that I keep coming back to. It’s called Necessary Dreams, by Anna Fels. The subtitle is “Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives” but less than ambition, what keeps recurring in my thoughts is our need for recognition. After I read the book, I was fired up, and decided to ask my boss for a raise. I worked in an all-male department, and while there was no duplication in job descriptions, I sensed that I was the lowest paid (which was probably not because I was a woman, but the idea was in my head). My boss was supportive, and the organization was not in the red, so I got a raise. Not as much as I asked for, but generous even so. It was very validating.

I often recommend Necessary Dreams to women who are grappling with what they want to do with their lives, or having mixed feelings about doing the work of raising children or taking care of life at home–a job that is often invisible, and certainly undervalued in larger society. It’s such important work, but if a person is a good parent (and not a bad one) it often goes unrecognized.

While I have lots of support from my immediate people, I have been yearning for broader recognition, both as a new parent and a writer. So maybe it is ambition, or “sheer egotism” (as Orwell said in his essay, “Why I Write”) that makes me want to finish my birth story and get it published.

Anyway, for anyone interested in these issues, I recommend Necessary Dreams. If you read it, let me know what you think.

rebeccakuder

The hardest things to write about

As a writer, the story of my baby’s birth is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. The fact of the birth is alive; any any words I can arrange to convey what happened, inside my heart, soul, body, inside the room where Merida was born, inside my family, are limbless, lifeless. What I write should be as perfect and amazing as what happened. (Impossible.) What I write will never match the experience. The space between facts and feelings and any paltry words I can summon to convey them is too huge, so as someone who is a dedicated recorder of things into words, I am in worse shape than a non-writer. The words to tell my story become too precious, have too much weight, so it’s difficult to write them. They come out too detached, like clinical records, too tame and devoid of color: how can any sentence convey, capture, hold my experience? Many writers face this with life events and experiences. But every sentence I write tastes like weak tea. It only makes you have to pee. No flavor, no lift. This feels impossible to write.

Horace Mann, education reformer and founder of Antioch College, admonished the graduates in 1859, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” This banner sometimes feels like an unattainable burden, and becomes a curse. As a 41-year-old first time mother, within the current medical climate, being able to have my breech birth naturally felt like a victory of which Mann might be proud. And yet, women’s bodies are made to birth babies, even breech babies. So the paradox: my story should not be so unusual.

And I keep working on the draft of the story of her birth…

rebeccakuder

Girl cooties! (or, Mary Shelley rocks)

461px-Frontispiece_to_Frankenstein_1831I just read John Scalzi’s post where he takes issue with a current blogoversy about girls infiltrating the boyish world of science fiction literature. I adore what John Scalzi has to say about it, so wanted to spread his good news.

I have to make two notes here. 1) Although I run with (and am married to) a boy who knows a hell of a lot more than I do, from first-hand experience, about science fiction literature, most of my direct experience with it is with film and TV. However, 2) I have read Frankenstein several times, and I love that novel. Novel. Not qualified and ghettoized, it turns out, as genre fiction.

It’s a great novel. You should all read it.

rebeccakuder

Could there be a dumber burglar?

I read about this guy who broke into someone’s house and stole a couple of diamond rings. But before he left, he used the victim’s computer to log into Facebook. Unfortunately, he forgot to log out. (D’OH!) Not that you have to be smart to break into a house, but really. This is amazing.

Read more about the burglary here.

Then there are the girls who got trapped in a stormwater drain, and WITH THEIR CELL PHONE updated their Facebook status before it occurred to them to call the Australian equivalent of 911.

I am worried about the world. I sort of want to lobby against computers, but of course, it’s not the computers, it’s the people. I’m starting to think that we’re headed for Idiocracy, as Mike Judge predicts…

rebeccakuder

More strange lullabies…

After having recently ranted about overly personal blog posts, here I go, posting more personal stuff.

(Is it personal to divulge the music with which one puts their babies to sleep?)
AlejandroEscovedo
Tonight, it was Alejandro Escovedo. He’s a major player in our house, majorly played, and often at bedtime. Tonight was a bootleg from a few years ago… not from this show, but here’s a sample of his greatness. Ironically, I was at that Black Swamp Arts show (pictured in the youtube video) with my babe in utero. Alejandro was great, but the sound was horrible, and I was paranoid that her developing eardrums would be damaged, so clutched my purse to my belly, trying to buffer the sound. Eventually my husband and I left early. (We have seen him many times before, and I must say, his pre-Chuck Profitt albums are much better than Alejandro’s collaborations with CP.)

Despite that concert, the baby’s hearing is, luckily, fine. And she loves the music of “Hano,” as she calls him. All’s well that ends well, as the saying goes.