rebeccakuder

Doing beautiful things

Michelle Trachtenberg and Hinton Battle in the Buffy musical, "Once More With Feeling"

This evening, my daughter, who is almost four, said that next Halloween, she’s going to be a “real” princess.   As my blog followers may be aware, she’s thus far been kept away from full-on Disney princess mania.  But she loves dressing up as a princess.  This usually involves wearing one of several tutus–more ballerina, really, than princess.  She knows, from books, and from princess parties, that princesses usually wear fancy things (though I’ve also assured her that princesses can wear whatever they want, and introduced Princess Grace Kelly as an example of a princess who didn’t exclusively wear long and meretricious satin gowns).  When she told me a doll of hers must be a princess because it has long hair, I assured her that princesses can also have short hair.  She didn’t argue.  She recently informed me, however, one thing she knows with certainty about princesses: “Princesses do beautiful things.”  I’m not sure what she means by this, but it sounds really good.

This evening, when she told me about her plan for next Halloween, I reminded her that there is a big movie coming out next summer, and the princess in it is named “Merida,” which is my daughter’s name.

“Does she do beautiful things?” she asked.

I don’t know more than the trailer depicts about Princess Merida in “Brave,” but I told my Merida that the princess in the movie does indeed do beautiful things: she rides horses, and she is an archer.  I explained what archers do.  I reminded her about the strong and triumphant Violetta in Princess Knight.

If I’m indoctrinating my daughter in any way, it’s to be more like a vampire slayer than princess.  But let’s say she doesn’t totally rebel, and loves Buffy: who am I to tell her what to be?  Or to define what “doing beautiful things” might mean?  There are so many beautiful things to do, many more than I can imagine.  Wearing something fabulous might count.   Or doing something completely silly, and making one person smile!  Or staking a vampire, if done in that earthy, balletic style of Buffy.

Luckily I have a good teacher who is almost four years old.  I hope she will enlighten me.

rebeccakuder

Alarming punctuation (!)

Hacking them out of my prose today, I am seeing a direct correlation between a writer’s use of exclamation points and how much she/he trusts the reader.  Trust the reader to get what you mean.  There’s no need to shout about it, assuming the rest of the sentence and the work is doing its job, I tell myself.

The writer Lee K. Abbott gave a talk at Antioch Los Angeles when I was in school there.  I recall him saying that every writer is allowed ONE exclamation point per career.  “And it better be a fire,” he said.  Though I hope I am allowed more than one, I often recall that idea, and try to use them sparingly.

(Search, replace…)

rebeccakuder

Excerpt from an essay I’m writing

In college drawing class, I learned about negative space.  If you look long enough at something, a shape forms around it: the thing where its object isn’t.  So I look and look at nothing, pining for the past, wanting to yank back that day when we planted the live Christmas tree in the yard, or that other day when the circus was in the park next door, and my parents collected elephant poop to fertilize our garden.  Elephants gone, dung gone too, no remnants now left.  I want back so many other days.  Memory provides only edges.  Pinning decrepit butterflies to velvet, I smell the dust, turn around, look back, and find another disintegrating wing of the few things I can recall.  I set out to order it all, by chronology, or theme; I make another list, “things that happened to my body,” such as falling down sixteen steps, such as running through the glass door.  Anything that helps me contain the mess.  But this story disobeys my desire for dramatic unity.  It won’t sit still.  Memory doesn’t fix itself close enough to truth, doesn’t allow our trust; the interior record is fuzzy, ephemeral.  I call the county office to gather facts.

I’d like to know, for instance, when my house was burned down, when it began its exquisite disappearance.