rebeccakuder

Jack Hardy (household icon)

Jack Hardy playing at my wedding

When Jack Hardy and his band played the Studebaker Family Reunion in 2001, he and the band stayed at our house.  I came back from work that Saturday afternoon to a kitchen full of fiddles and song; they were warming up for the evening’s gig.  Five years later, he came back with a band that included his bright-glowing daughter, Morgan.  I haven’t met his other family, but was so impressed with Morgan.  She seemed wise and mature for her years, and full of talent.

Jack Hardy sang and played at my wedding.  Jack’s presence filled whatever space he inhabited, no matter the scale and scope.  His songs seep into my soul.

My daughter might be his most fervent three-year-old fan.  She loves and sings so many of his songs.  “The moon is full, it’s just not hungry anymore,” she sings, looking up at the moon.  When the recent ice storm truncated our willow tree, she wanted to play Jack’s Willow Song.  (She looked out the window, told the tree to listen as we played it inside.)  In the mornings when we make oatmeal, first she has to pick up the 1 cup metal measuring cup–it’s her telephone–and call Jack Hardy to tell him to come over and play “Blackberry Pie” or “Sheila” or her recent favorite, “Willie Goggins’ Hat.”  My husband and I had been saying we should call him on the actual phone, and let the girl talk to him for real.  I wish we hadn’t waited so long.

His ways of knowing and telling about nature and human nature will help form hers.  Jack Hardy is part of her landscape and her narrative, and she will never get to hear him play his music in person.  I ache when I think about what his children and family are going through.  But the hardest thing for me to release at the news of his passing is that Merida won’t be able to hear him play live.

There’s a hole in the world now.  True of anyone’s passing, but the gap Jack leaves here is so large, and will echo, as do the strains of his music, through time and space.

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Cutting, that fragile balance

Spring cleaning.

Having gained sufficient time and distance from the sentences in my novel, I’m cutting.  Many sentences have too many words.  Some need words rearranged, the most important word relocated to the end of the sentence, emphasizing the point.  There is something so refreshing about this process of paring down, pruning to make a thing flourish.  The trick is  balance: how to tell when you’re tinkering to tinker, when the first way was better.  Breathing with each sentence, the comfort of making them stronger, the comfort of those moments when I know I’ve made them better.

Delicious, rewarding, nerdy.  Yes.

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A proud moment

This morning, completely unprompted, my daughter said, “Filitino Box Spring Hog,” then further clarified to say,  “Cookin’ up a Filitino Box Spring Hog!”  (Naturally, I made her repeat it for the camera.)

Indoctrinating her into the world of cultish/semi-obscure music is working.  I’m so proud!  (Can “Chocolate Jesus” be far behind?)

And here they are, the lyrics of Tom Waits’ “Filipino Box Spring Hog” pasted below, thieved (along with the photo of Little Red’s Recovery Room) from Tom Waits Library.  And here’s a live video. Boy do I wish I’d seen that Mule Variations tour!

Filipino Box Spring Hog

(Mule Variations studio version, 1999)

Well I hung on to Mary’s stump
I danced with a soldier’s glee
With a Rum Soaked Crook(2) and a big fat laugh
I spent my last dollar on thee
I saw Bill Bones, gave him a yell
Kehoe spiked the nog
With a chain link fence and a scrap iron jaw
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog

Spider rolled in from Hollister Burn(3)
with a one-eyed stolen mare
Donned himself with chicken fat
Sawin’ on a jaw bone violin there
Kathleen was sittin’ down in Little Red’s Recovery Room(4)
in her criminal underwear bra
I was naked to the waist with my fierce black hound
And I’m cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog

Dig a big pit in a dirt alley road
Fill it with madrone and bay
Stinks like hell and the neighbors complain
Don’t give a hoot what they say
Gotta slap that hog
Roll em over twice
Gotta baste him with a sweeping broom
You gotta swat them flies and chain up the dogs
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog

Rattle snake piccata with grapes and figs
Old brown Betty(5) with a yellow wig
Tain’t the mince meat(6) filagree
And it ain’t the turkey neck stew(8)
And it ain’t them bruleed okra seeds
though she made them especially for you
Worse won a prize for her bottom black pie
The beans got thrown to the dogs

Jaheseus Christ, I can always make room
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog
Cookin’ up a Filipino Box Spring Hog

rebeccakuder

The alpha and the omega

Something emerging...

I got this trick via Jim Krusoe, who attributes it to Carol Emshwiller.  (Thanks, Jim and Carol!)

Writers of fiction: Take the first and last words of a piece, then put them together.  The idea is that the resulting phrase might somehow relate to the whole.  Here are mine.

The Watery Girl: “Something emerging.”

The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival (which is rough and will surely change): “Mim hands.”

Both, weirdly, work.

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Avena con leche y miel by any other name…

One locale, in Merida Mexico, to get avena con leche y miel.

(Another post about what I eat for breakfast!  Possible boredom ahead!)

I love Mark Bittman.  I was sad when I learned of his stepping away from the Minimalist column, but he’s still around, and freer to opine.  I’m loving him even more.  Take, for instance, his opinionator blog post about McDonald’s oatmeal, from which I excerpt the following:

Others will argue that the McDonald’s version is more “convenient.” This is nonsense; in the time it takes to go into a McDonald’s, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher.

(Thanks, by the way, to Jennifer New at Mothers of Invention for sharing Bittman’s post, which I might have missed.)  Bittman’s comment made me laugh, but it’s also kinda creepy because I think he’s been surveilling my home.  This describes most mornings in my house, except that he didn’t mention the three-year-old on the step ladder, helping make the “avena con leche y miel” which is what we call it, or “avena,” which was one of the first Spanish words my child learned.  (I’ll explain why another time.)

Anyway, yeah, what Bittman said.  Oatmeal has gotten a bad rap, and it’s easy to make, and good for you.  Eat it!  You can even throw in a handful of cooked brown rice for extra chewy texture.  Mmm, oatmeal!

rebeccakuder

Writing in books

I just read an interesting article in the NY Times about marginalia.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “reading as a writer” and what that means, how interactive and not passive it can/should be… yet I have trouble writing in books, myself.  So I take a lot of notes, recopy passages, and do my work that way.  Maybe I need to rethink this, and break the water of the pristine book.

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Happy Valentine’s Day

Tom Waits, an icon and inspiration

Today’s beautiful song…  As much as Tom Waits was (and is still) a balladeer, it seems somehow accidental that he wrote and sang this song.  I love the 1970s introspection, like he’s talking to himself…  I wish I could have that time machine and go back and sit next to the piano for this one.

I love the way this song makes me feel.  I am so glad not to be lonely.  Hoping that anyone who’s lonely today will feel less lonely listening to this gorgeous little dream.

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Perspective, the global and the mundane

The only good TV is...?

Tonight, my three-year-old daughter, who almost never watches TV, stared at the celebrations in Egypt on a big screen TV at a restaurant, sound muted, with Thai karaoke music playing in the background.  In Fairborn, Ohio.  At the restaurant owned by the Malaysian couple who catered her parents’ wedding.

I was busy eating curry laksa, chatting with my mother and stepfather, impressed with how still my daughter was–eating a spring roll, sitting across the table from me.  Usually it’s hard for her to sit very long at a restaurant.  Then I turned around and saw what she was watching.  I asked my mother (who was sitting next to her) if the images were disturbing.  No.  Just a lot of people jumping, talking passionately, but  in this room, strangely silent, except for the ever-present crawl.

(Disclaimer: For many years, I had cable TV and watched plenty of junk.  I did plenty of surfing.  Now I just don’t have time for it.  I do still watch movies, and “Top Chef,” and various other high and low brow items I can find on DVD or iTunes, but canceling cable was much less painful than I anticipated.  From what I read about TV and kids, it seemed wise to have my daughter avoid TV for the first years.  It has been a somewhat exhausting choice.  I’m not judging how other parents handle this issue.  Like everything about life, these decisions need to make sense and work for the people involved, and the choices are very personal.  Missing TV, I’ve also missed a whole lot of the visual imagery of our moment in time.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.)

Then my daughter said, “Look, there’s somebody with a cat!”  It was an advertisement for catfood.  I am proud and ambivalent that she doesn’t really know what an ad is.  But I suppose the idea of “cat” is much more relevant to her life at this point than Hosni Mubarak resigning his presidency in Egypt.  (And as I type this, my newest cat mewling offstage, my view might be similarly small, focussed on whether she will wake my child, or whether she’s caught a mouse.  Meanwhile, a grandeur I can’t fully appreciate emerges across the world.)

Next on TV came Obama, again mute, and stately.  My daughter might have recognized him, because she has a hand-me-down teeshirt from a friend with his image, and the slogan, “Yes We Did.”

But the thing she mentioned was the cat.

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“They flash like little diamonds,” he said.

Since Biology class in high school, I’ve had a periodic fascination with fruit flies.  Even the name, Drosophilia melongaster, is poetic.  See how the letters lilt and unroll from the words… Discovering the elegance in their genetic logic, for whatever reason, a sort of reverence for the fruit fly stuck with me.  Mmm, I can still smell the ether in the jars, still recall putting them to sleep…

The other day I read about a previously unseen characteristics of their wings.  Far from clear, they are iridescent and gloriously hued.  There’s a good lesson here about a simple change in perspective, and what doors that change can open.  From the article:

“You hold the wing up against the light, so you can see the veins,” said study co-author Daniel Janzen, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you’re looking through a microscope, you try to get a clear view behind the wing. It’s the antithesis of getting wing color.”

The researchers studied wings under microscopes, against black backgrounds. But once Janzen, who breeds wasps for his research on caterpillar-parasite symbioses, started to look, colors could be seen by the naked eye as wings passed over insects’ black bodies.

“They flash like little diamonds,” he said.

So now: how to take that new, open view and apply it to writing, to life?  How to see the hidden colors, unveil the glory of what is in front of me?

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Maybe that’s it.

What you cannot recreate

(The following might be the final paragraph of The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival.   It will make no sense without the novel that comes before it.  It might not even make sense with the novel that comes before it.  But what the heck.  It’s my blog, I can post if I want to.)

Ladies and gentlemen.  Jettison what you can recreate.  Take the essentials: bolts, wire, rope.  Other parts can be found elsewhere.  Take what you most need.  Take the things you can use: arms, hands, legs, and sometimes other parts.  Hands.