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?

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.