rebeccakuder

How children learn that there are people called authors

Image stolen from pearlblossomhighway.blogspot.com

Reading to my daughter tonight, as usual, she chose the books.  First, she chose one called Reading Makes You Feel Good by Todd Parr.  “I really like books by Todd Parr,” she said.  She’d already been reading it to one of her babies when I came in.  [My daughter has a lot of babies.  Often, when I tell her the name of an author or illustrator, she says, “I have a baby named” (fill in the blank).]

In the rush of the day, it would be easy to just get to the meat and read the book, rather than taking a few seconds to name the author and illustrator.  Some books we have (and some she picks from the library) are so ugly, cheesy, and poorly written that I don’t feel like elevating the schmucks who created them by giving them name.  Meow.  (Though those schmucks are probably making a living at what they do, so I should refrain from sneering, at least from that whole “making a living by writing books” angle.)  But even with these stinky books, each time, when I read the title, then “written by…” and “illustrated by…” the child comes to know that there are people behind each book.

My daughter lives with two parents who are writers.  As she grows up, she’ll know a lot–maybe too much–about what it means to be a writer.  So many writers bemoan the current state of publishing…it’s a sad time for books, some say.  But we could do a lot to improve the morale of writers if we do this simple act: when reading a book to a child, include the name of the writer and illustrator.  Every time.  Every book.

If we do, maybe that lucky child who doesn’t know any writers personally will come to know that someone sat and thought about the book, someone chose words and painted images to tell the story that lulls her to sleep.

rebeccakuder

Somebody please give me the keys…

Behold the new boss of the world!

Because if I were boss of the world, I would:

1) Outlaw tobacco companies, and train all their employees to work for new, innovative companies that promote smoking cessation and preventive health facilities.  Don’t worry, they would all still have jobs: the CEOs could clean the bathrooms.

2) Invent something that would make texting (and talking non-hands-free on a cell phone) impossible while driving.  Maybe it would involve an electronic force field that makes cars immune to the technology.  I might make something where people could speak text messages, but we’ll see.

3) Invent something that would disallow anyone from using cell phones or text messages until they were mature enough to understand that the person you are sitting with LIVE is more important than whoever just sent you the following zeros and ones: “sup?”

4) Manufacture bikes, good walking shoes, and gardens that could feed towns and make things all pretty and easy and better for the planet.  I’d get everyone some new comfy shoes, like Kevin Klein’s character did in “The Big Chill.”  Happy boxes.

Like Nick Cave (Grinderman) said in the fabulous ditty called “Get It On”:

“I’ve got some words of wisdom!”

Oh yeah, I’ve got lots more where those came from.

Where are my keys?

rebeccakuder

Writing is good

Today I needed to write about a memory from a minor character (Anton the Younger).  As houses, and the image and idea of house, tend to haunt me, I decided the character used to live (or actually work) in Casa Calvet in Barcelona.  I focussed on this staircase.

I love writing fiction, because there’s so often room to saturate the story in the tea of the writer’s obsessions.  Whether this particular scene is going to stay or not, the process was fruitful.

Writing is good.

rebeccakuder

Gogol Bordello (Do your thing!)

My, oh my, I saw Gogol Bordello last night.  Excellent Brazilian expatriates Forro in the Dark opened.  Though I didn’t say for the whole GB show (being a tired parent, too far from home for a late night drive), all that I saw and felt was incendiary.  See them if you can.

There is something about being with people who are doing their thing.  Clearly, these folks were at it.  I remember a boy in high school who threw discus for the track team.  There was a photograph of him with discus in the yearbook: elemental, he was doing his thing.  My high school boyfriend had the same look when he was playing his guitar.

My husband looks that way when he reads his fiction aloud.  It’s hypnotic.

My daughter is part of a Montessori toddler preschool.  They sing a song that goes through all the kids by turns, “Go on Merida, do your thing, do your thing, do your thing, go on Merida, do your thing, do your thing and stop.”  At home, she sings through all the children’s names.  They take turns.

Last night was Gogol Bordello’s turn.

The planet needs more people out, doing their thing.  It will make us all happier.  We can take turns.

I’m going to go back to doing my thing and write this novel now.

rebeccakuder

Life is good. (What about death?)

You’ve probably seen those “Life is good” tee-shirts.  Maybe some of you own one.  A dear friend of mine abhors them, and I think her abhorrence has to do with 1) the ridiculously overly simplified message 2) the faded, pseudo “weathered” quality and bad cut of the tee-shirt, and 3) the bad font and design used.  (I’ll add the evidence to my left as an exhibit for the prosecution.)

But let’s stick with the watered down and nearly meaningless phrase, “Life is good” for a moment longer.  Most people I know would say that Life is a lot of things.  Kind of like soul, perhaps?   George Clinton knew how complicated soul was, when he wrote,  “What is soul?  I don’t know.  Soul is a  ham hock in your corn flakes.” Soul is a lot of things, apparently, some unexpected, perhaps tasty, and surely poetic.

And now let us turn in our dusty lunatics hymnal to John Dee Graham, another musical scholar, about another related overused and vapid expression (“It’s all good”).  John Dee Graham says, “Anyone who tells you that it’s all good is either an idiot or a liar. Because it’s not all good.” (John Dee Graham is the lovable crank who ad libs, in a live performance of a song of his that was used for that firefighter movie with John Travolta, “Cheer up Travolta!”  But that recording was before Travolta’s son died, so I don’t know if JDG would say the same thing so glibly today.  Still, I doubt he’d say, “Life is good.”)

Life is complicated.  Even that is an empty platitude, because now the word “complicated” has been simplified and watered down by that other phrase that’s all over the fracking place, “It’s complicated.” I see it most often posted under relationship status on Facebook.  Yeah, life is complicated.  Relationships are complicated.  Sudoku puzzles (for me) are complicated.  Folding an origami crane is complicated.

But for fun, let’s presume for a moment that Life is good.  Does that mean that Death is bad?  (Is death the opposite of life?)  Isn’t it all really a big circle, a wheel, or something round, that continues, like Ouroboros (I had to do a google search for that name), the snake eating its own tail, forever and ever?  When we can unattach enough to be detached, isn’t that a more complicated and also more accurate way of looking at it all?

To quote another musician on possibly related topics, or at least the recycling of carbon (and life):

“Come down from the cross, we can use the wood.”

“We’re all gonna be just dirt in the ground.”

I’ve been around a lot of death this year.  I don’t know the answer to these questions.  I know about the deer body we saw decomposing across the street in the Clifton Gorge park.  It melted pretty fast.  The other day, I wondered if my precious Houdini, who we buried in 2007, is more than bones now.

What about death?   I want a tee-shirt.

rebeccakuder

I believe

Oh, novel.  I’m to page 182, near the end, surely, and sure, and not sure, how it ends.  Looking into the less cloudy abyss. How not to rush, how to give it the time it needs? Stevie Wonder sings, in cafe background, “I believe (when I fall in love it will be forever)…” How many times does he repeat that line, I can’t count, but enough times until I start to believe in its incantation, and the love becomes the writing…and then…

rebeccakuder

Swashbuckling, parkour, or something else?

"Peter sometimes came and played his pipes" from J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, illustration by Mabel Lucie Attwell

Several weeks ago, I asked my daughter, who is almost three, if she would like to dress up for Halloween.  She said yes, that she wants to be a pirate.  (I think she was inspired by the Charley character in Lucy Cousins’ Maisy books, because several of the books feature him dressed as a pirate.)  I don’t think we’ll go pillaging for candy anywhere, unless it’s early enough to be before her bedtime, but I do think we’ll dress up and go out walking in our small town.  (Last year, she had a lovely time at pizza dinner with a dear old friend and her daughter–the daughter is a year older than mine, and was dressed as Sleeping Beauty, in gorgeous shiny regalia.  My daughter’s all purple ensemble: eggplant hat, fuzzy purple coat, shirt, pants, and purple Robeeze boots were cute but as a costume, it was a little abstract.  I admit to putting very little thought into it.  She was two!)  But this year, pirate.

How to build a pirate costume for a toddler?  I’m not going to rush out and buy a bunch of junk.  We’ll use stuff from home: bandana, some shirt and pants, boots, jewelry, and a stuffed parrot from the toy box.  I have no idea what a pirate mama should wear, but in my last-minute urge to be creative, I recalled a dream I had earlier this week.

So indulge me writing about a dream again.  (It’s my blog!)

I was at a writing convention, in a big hotel, or maybe it was a cruise liner.  Someone I used to work with at a regional theatre ages ago (who is not a writer) was there, and there was some craziness about him throwing a party that he invited me to but I didn’t have time to see the invitation, being too busy taking care of a sick toddler, but then later I saw him and some other men from his hallway dressed as women.  (If you knew the man I’m talking about, this would be a very amusing sight.  So we have a Halloween theme begun…)  Later in the dream, I was delightedly climbing, scaling really, the outside of what had now become a beautiful, very old, stone building (apparently now not a cruise liner, but still the writing convention).  Climbing the stone was exhilarating and effortless.  I was the opposite of afraid.  It was maybe as good a feeling as dreams of flying.  Someone inside the building asked what I was doing.  “SWASHBUCKLING!” I yelled.  It was how I imagine those parkour people feel when they are doing their amazing yet completely natural movements.

And then (just now) I remembered Peter Pan and the pirates in Neverland, Smee  and Hook and the gang.  I’ve long been obsessed with those characters, so took a nostalgic stroll through the images I used in grad school for a seminar on J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, where I found the image above.  (Not Disney.  No.  No.  Read Peter and Wendy.  Even if you are a grownup with no kids.  It’s beautiful.  If you have the time or money, look at the edition with illustrations by Mabel Lucie Attwell.  They are transcendent.)

So yeah, I am going to be a pirate this year.

rebeccakuder

Song for my new year

Yesterday, I listened to Dead Can Dance “Toward the Within” because, happily, it’s Dead Can Dance season again, and their music always helps me into the right moody mood for autumn.  This song, “Cantara,” struck me as the proper anthem for my new year.    The sort of warrior voice that echoes through this song, in Lisa Gerrard’s language, seem just what I need.  I don’t usually choose battle metaphors, but this notion, the idea of preparing for battle, seems right for some reason.   (Contradictory for a Libra, maybe.)

At the end of the video, Lisa Gerrard mentions her child’s pre-verbal state, and how the child sings, unfettered by the bounds of language.  Maybe my war is with language, and I need to sing without words.

And I’ve been fascinated with death lately, fascinated with the full process that it is, and all that it implies.  After listening to Gerrard and Brendan Perry, it seems like this song is my right anthem for now.

rebeccakuder

More trees dying for nothing (waste of a Waste Management, or get Uncle Junior in here!)

I usually love living in the “sticks,” but the other day, Waste Management left a message telling me they no longer provide curbside recycling at my home.  They said they would be picking up the red bin within five business days and could I please leave it by the curb.

There’s no place for them to take and dump the recycling anymore, apparently.  Yeah, in 2010.  It’s got my blood pressure up!  Especially after spending many minutes today on hold because I wanted to find out WHY, and being subjected to their creepy propaganda recordings (in a smooth, perhaps even comforting female voice) about all the great things Waste Management does for the environment.  I wish I had had a tape recorder.  The recording said that if I was looking for something to do while I was on hold, I should go to a website called “Think Green From Home.”  (I can THINK about recycling, apparently, but can’t actually DO it.)  One line was something like, “Recycling has always been a noble idea, but do you know how many trees blah blah blah Waste Management saved last year? Blah blah blah, So take a deep breath and RECYCLE!”  It actually said that.  You can’t make this stuff up.  Reminded me of that ridiculous dismissal so many years ago, you know, back when we could have actually halted the hell we’re headed into with our current environmental situation, Dick Cheney talking about how sure, it could be considered “virtuous” to conserve fuel, but Americans need to drive their cars.  (Caveat: I have a sedan, and yes, I drive it.)

When I was waiting on hold to find out why the bleep they don’t provide curbside recycling in my area anymore.  The phone rep. said, “This is the first I’m hearing about it…”

To quote Miss Clavel, “Something is not right!”  I want to call Uncle Joon.  I’m sure he or Tony or one of the boys could do something, no?  Does anyone have Junior’s phone number?

rebeccakuder

The river of lost words

Trying to recreate words lost in the recent death of my hard drive (and overly old backup files).  Writers beware: back up your data.  (Or risk having to recreate.  I think the following might be better than what I had, but there was too much angst in the process of loss.)

Years before, opportunity had stolen most of the trees.  Bend, snap, cut went the rhythm of thieves.  Wood mill.  Trees sometimes fall naturally into water, storms come and leave their messes behind, but these logs were felled too fast, unnatural, and shipped down the river, money to be made.  They’d grow back, some said, but forgot to plant seedlings, no thought beyond the next greed-meal.  Just along the river, a few bushes remained in the thin trickle of lush.