What NOT to buy (Look for Corolle Mini Calins instead)
Here’s a video introducing “My First Princess” baby dolls by Disney. I saw some of these dolls at Target today. Oy vey! I don’t even know where to start! What’s next? A Disney partnership with pharmaceuticial to develop and manufacture shots for each girl fetus in utero, ensuring her first word will be “Belle”?
Though my daughter loves her “babies,” Cinderella will not eat my daughter. I just hope Merida doesn’t see these creatures at the store.
And if you want a really cute baby for little kids, find a Corolle Mini Calin. I think Corolle doesn’t make them anymore, but you can find them in various skin colors on eBay or other online shops. They are machine washable and very sweet, perfect for small hands and imaginations. Uneeda makes cute little babies, too.
A poem from a couple years ago, inspired by the novel I’m working on, working title of which is The Eight Mile Suspended Carvinal. This is the character Beede talking. I can’t do line breaks right in html, so I think the word “vast” was originally on the line above where it appears, but below it’s an orphan, which makes sense in the story of the novel at least.
Who lost track past midnight at the Spurlock Munitions Factory, near-river, 1917?
Oh yes Oh yes Oh yes
What you’re to see, boys, you dark, dirty skells, you
seen plenty spark here, what else, you’re thinking
you constitute yourselves of solids, you’re commanding
gentlemen, can take some things, maybe you’ve traveled, say
Illinois, Illinoise, farther, it does not take ambitious nature
to see the world, just a slick hand and some loose pocket. Rust is everywhere–
Davey knows my language. So you did time, who hasn’t, all we got is time in this vast
bum’s end of things, I’ve spit up wet gobs of coal, we’re all the same
just don’t get caught. Once saw a man dangling from a shagbark hickory, by the neck, all of it, tree bark and scales fallen from those eyes, all I can say is use the brain-pan,
don’t get caught
and you won’t end up with any fallen scales, don’t laugh back there, it wasn’t all
that amusing seeing that man up there, the weight of himself dead
meat. He didn’t have much luck.
But you’ve stepped up around here, all of you,
waiting on that kiss which makes us all breathe in, every crusted morning, for the long years we’ve got, a kiss humid and lovely like that mind-reader at the carnival,
she’s got curves, wait another day and maybe you’ll find that luck somewhere. Factory life got you groaning, you’re thinking anew, ready for this
fire? Let me take off my shirt now. The way I do it, you won’t even see the spark,
just watch. Lucien B. Dunavant will show you the light.
You count your breaths; I’ll count mine. That old sack granddaddy Spurlock
has not one thing on me.
So I’ve been working on this terribly overwritten draft of my novel in progress. Gone through the printed pages carefully, cutting, pruning, taking out piles of adjectives and phrases. The typed pages are a mess now, not unlike this other mess from a previous project. I keep thinking, “Which gremlin scribbled all over these neat pages here that I now have to type up?” though the gremlin is me. This novel I have been writing since 2004. Part of its problem is uneven terrain: while I was figuring out what it was, I was writing along, letting time pass in the story, and the story emerged like sourdough bread (a terrible metaphor!) that, 100 or so pages into it, actually begins to take shape. So now as I comb through the years of words on these pages, I see where things need to be built up, and where torn down. With this project, I pushed language and narrative beyond anything I’d ever done. On purpose. Because I could! Here I gave myself license to write a really bad first draft, and use all the purple colorful clang I heard in my head. (Knowing I would cut later.)
Too many adjectives! Oy vey! Too many phrases strung together that unwound from my mind and at one moment in time made sense but now hang like random junkyard decoration. Get that egg beater out of there! What did I just step on? Is that stench overripe banana? And so on.
Get it out of here!
I realize at least two things about this draft, both of which were essential to my authority in telling the story. I needed both:
1) The self-indulgent “let everything be in there” messiness. As author and creator of this world, I had to see how dingy and dusty and clangy and rotten the nouns were. I had to see the layers of adjective like paint on an old carnival sign, repainted over crack and crumble. How else would I know the patina of this place? And;
2) The excessive phrases that are stage directions: “She put the scissors on the round table to the left of the door” and so on. If it’s even important that she put the scissors down (question everything!) does it matter where? She put them down. Fine. But the writer, again, to establish authority, must see the whole thing happening like a play, must know and track where the scissors are put down. In case someone else needs to bob her hair! And so on like that.
If I know this world I’m writing is dusty and clangy and I know where the scissors are, I don’t have to tell you (unless it’s important to the story). If I am doing my job well enough, the reader will trust me. She will thank me for sparing her unnecessary words. Doing so will leave me more room for the things that really need to be there. It’s like all the doing of research that doesn’t end up in the novel. Having those things, knowing them, seeing and breathing them, is what allows me to tell the story in a way that will keep people reading.
“Give me something to sing about,” sang Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the excellent Joss Whedon musical, “Once More, With Feeling.” (From which the title of this post was mis-appropriated.) Buffy had died and gone, probably, to heaven, but her friends wanted her back home. So they re-animated her. Buffy was kinda bummed.
I just read that Whitney Houston died. My first thought was, “Wait, Whitney Houston DIED?” Shit. My second thought was a song, an earworm from my 1990s, before the term earworm, before the song became an earworm for me.
(Rewind.)
FADE TO: Somewhere in Los Angeles, a city where I did not live. Sometime in the early 90s. Just before Valentine’s Day. Visiting a man. (I am choosing vagueness. Some people I know will be glad.) I was fairly smitten with this guy, despite the miles that separated us, and many other differences. He was sweet, and fun. His life seemed big, glamorous. I lived in Seattle. (Same time zone, one thing in our favor.) We’d gone to see a movie. Memory is funny: I went down to LA several times while we were involved, and he came to Seattle several times–and our visits start to blur, but I’ll say that we saw a movie the night before Valentine’s Day; I’ll say the movie was “The Crying Game.” Late that night, he said something that made me feel our time together was almost over, that he didn’t want to continue a long distance relationship. Despite my own misgivings about how long it could last, I was young and romantic and sad when I heard him say whatever it was he said. Though these years later I know it was best to let go, back then, I wasn’t ready. There were things I thought ours might have been.
Early the next morning, and I mean really early, something like 7am on a Sunday morning LA time, Valentine’s Day, someone in his apartment complex decided to turn up the radio really loud. The radio was blaring a song.
You know the song.
First, in the origami that was folding in my heart (expect and hope for something, then have it change too many times until it can never be the shape you thought you wanted) the song’s refrain was an irony at my expense. Later, every time I heard that song, it was a reminder of that salty moment, that sadness which felt like emptiness. (I didn’t learn until years later that Dolly Parton wrote the song, a fact which now makes the song more okay, especially when it’s Dolly and not Whitney singing. More personal origami, this just in: As research for two novels, I’m reading a book about the April 1974 tornados that scoured the middle U.S., and according to King Wikipedia, that’s the exact month when Dolly Parton released that song.)
“AND I-I-I-” (HOW LONG CAN SHE HOLD THAT “I”???) “WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOUUUUUUUU-U-U-U” Whitney Houston sang on that early Valentine’s morning, from a stereo I would never see, volume cranked past 10 to 11 by someone I would never meet, some random person living near a man I had hoped to spend a lot more time with. (Maybe that person played the song that morning extra loud for a valentine. Maybe that person still loves that valentine. Maybe there is an “always” somewhere. For: I am happily married and have a wonderful child. The man who lived in LA is married and has children, too, and I hope he’s happy.) At that moment, though, even Whitney sounded sad, her sadness spilled out, sad for the sad little me, lost in that anonymous LA apartment complex, so early on Valentine’s morning.
So now you, too, know what I heard, actually, when I “heard” the news tonight about Whitney Houston.
It’s awful that another talented and tortured soul died early. I wish people going through her kind of pain could get better, could live to be happy and really old and then die of natural causes. I have other things I could write about Whitney Houston, but this memory, this earworm, floated to the top.
(“Don’t give me songs…don’t give me songs…give me something to sing about,” Buffy said.)
Rebecca Kuder 