Imagine that! Again I am thinking about self-doubt as fuel for writing. (I blogged about that idea here.)
In that way that interdisciplinary aesthetics happens inside a (my) human body, I was thinking of self-doubt as seemingly insurmountable…music came to me…as Funkadelic used to say, “so high, you can’t get over it…so low, you can’t get under it…” and here I go, dreaming up some funk to play for the dance breaks I’m planning for the advanced creative writing course I’ll teach next term at Antioch College…and thinking about Lynda Barry’s Two Questions (“Is this good?” “Does this suck?”) thinking about all the things we must surmount to be the “keepers of the groove”:
The groove is so mysterious. We’re born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all. —Lynda Barry, One! Hundred! Demons!
I wrote this in 2012, about Earlham College art professor, Mike Thiedeman. At the time, I meant to post it on my blog, but forgot. Recently I started re-reading a book that I read back then, and realized my omission. I post this now because it’s never to late to express gratitude. (Thanks, Mike!)
I graduated from Earlham with a Theatre Arts major in 1988. While at EC, I took a painting class and a drawing class with Mike Thiedeman. I wasn’t majoring in visual art, and I felt intimidated but welcomed into the rigorous studio environment—in part because Mike was so respectful. I recall painting a still life featuring a red enamel teapot with a black handle. The painting I did was up close so that most of the canvas paper was full of redness. It’s hanging in my kitchen now. It looks very little like that actual teapot (which I still remember well). At the time, Mike admired the painting, and offered to trade one of his ceramic pieces for it. I declined the trade, which I regret now, but I think I declined because his valuing of my painting made it have more value for me. In this simple act, he made me see that what I made had meaning. Mike had a real respect for students, and this came through in his teaching. As a teacher in a graduate creative writing program, I know how important it is to balance support and challenge, but above all, to do everything so that you don’t kill the creative spirit. Mike was an early guide to me in how to be collaborative and treat the student artist with respect. These years later, I still think about those classes and some of the principles I learned: that the artist has choices about how to frame the work, not only literally, but in terms of where the borders are, what to include and exclude from the narrative of the piece. For some reason, I became really fascinated with a certain kind of close focus, and also with its (possible) contrast: white space. I still am haunted (in a good way) by those kinds of considerations. One charcoal portrait I drew of a friend who was also taking the drawing class had almost all white space in on the page, with the line of his arm and inner elbow on the left side of the paper. This kind of seeing, this kind of visual meaning making, was something I had never considered before taking Mike’s classes. My own creative focus has taken the form of writing fiction and personal essay. In some ineffable way, that idea, that way of examining perspective and how to play with it to make meaning, translates to my words on the page, and I see it in most good writing: what we leave in, what we leave out. Absence as presence. I’ve continued to be fascinated with how each of the arts can inspire the other, this idea of interdisciplinary aesthetics. Though creativity in its many forms has been a core of who I am since childhood, I think the start of this conversation—of the finding of words to articulate these inklings—began during my time at Earlham. Mike Thiedeman’s teaching and aesthetic was a formative essential.
Two of my short pieces (a story and an essay) that will be published within the year include lyrics from Jack Hardy’s songs. (Read some posts about Jack here.) In my response to his family’s granting permission for me to use his words, I wrote:
His music has been (and continues to be) the tea in which my soul steeps, often, almost without thought, which must be why the lyrics make their way into my writing. I know that part of what he intended with his songs was that they be incantatory. I hope that in immortalizing them in these short pieces, his incantations will ripple outward…
This is how life works. And what glorious tea in which to steep!
(What are you steeping in right now? How does your life-tea suit you?)
September 2013: Snuck back into the Earlham College makeup room, where I used to get into character…
I just wrote a note to one of my students, and thought it blog-worthy. I don’t think you need any back story, except that my student is writing a novel and the protagonist has some things in common with the writer, both having lost a beloved. Here’s what I wrote:
If you are comfortable with it (or maybe even if you’re a bit uncomfortable–stretching is really important!), spend some time reflecting on paper about your experience and how it might shape your approach to the protagonist’s loss. I think acknowledging this will be a way to make the protagonist’s story deeper and more authentic. (Do you know about method acting? It’s the parallel that comes to mind right now–where an actor accesses past experiences and emotions to help portray a character. In a weird way, this is similar. I think about this a lot as a writer, and do it fairly often, sometimes without realizing that’s what I’m doing.) I would really like to see this in your proposal. This linking who we are as humans to who we are as writers is the kind of reaching and growing that seems very appropriate in a graduate level writing program.
If you were to sort of skirt around it or not really “own” it, it might not get to the richness that is possible by owning it.
Joan Didion gets at a related something in her essay, “On Keeping A Notebook.” Didion writes, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not.” Otherwise, as she goes on, these former selves tend to haunt us.
Daniel Knox opening for Langford et al at Southgate House Revival
Before I saw Jon Langford a couple weeks ago at the Southgate House Revival, I had read that Daniel Knox was going to open the evening. I went to Knox’s website to orient myself, but as often happens, I was interrupted before I could listen to anything. The night of the show, I wasn’t paying attention when an unassuming guy walked onstage and sat at the keyboard. I didn’t even notice until he began to sing. His gorgeous, haunting voice rippled among the waves of his musical score, working the tension between fancy croon and despair. Daniel Knox has alarming range in his voice. I don’t know what type of person I would expect to have brought those musical bones to the stage, but the contrast between the guy I saw and the revelation of his music added to the wonder. It was one of those moments of discovery when I learn there’s another entire world that has just casually walked into the room.
His set in Newport included the keyboard, supported by four overturned milk crates, and himself. After he played, I stumbled over some compliment to Mr. Knox at the merchandize table and bought his CD Evryman For Himself. On the ride home, I read the CD liner notes: Ralph Carney and others play with Knox. (“Ralph Carney?” I said to my husband. I know Carney from his work with Tom Waits, icon.)
The sound of Daniel Knox is theatrical, so I was not surprised to see he has collaborated on stage productions. Some of his songs make me think of Kurt Weill, some of Fiona Apple (Extraordinary Machine is her album I’m most familiar with, but Knox and Apple also seem to share a certain strain of hopeful bitterness), and there’s certainly some Waitsian sounds involved, too. Knox is another of these fabulous interdisciplinary aestheticians, whom, if I were hiring, I would invite to join the IA dream department. After finishing each song, he would toss the pages of music (which I suspect might have been props) to the floor behind him, a floor salad of inspiration.
Maybe because I had no idea what to expect, the milk crates supporting the keyboard added a layer of secrecy to the moment. It was a little like sitting in a basement in college, listening while a friend reads from her journal, finding perfectly-formed gems of humanity inside each line. Knox’s songs are like little sad 70s movies, minimal but complete stories with haunting soundtracks. His work is raw and fragile, but also strong like a metal building, an eternally-surviving frame surrounding a tiny, exquisite flower of pain. I scribbled some of these notes in the semi-dark as I listened, and one thing I wrote (my memory between the moment of going to his website weeks before and being interrupted and that evening at the church was so blurry), was, “and I don’t even know his name—I sat through the whole set not knowing his name!”
There was once a humble Vietnamese restaurant nearby our town. I used to like to get the noodle bowls there. On the menu, with the listing of choices, there was a note: For 50 cents extra, you could order “more interesting vegetables.” I always ordered more interesting vegetables, and although I can’t now recall which specific vegetables came for that half-dollar splurge, the term became shorthand in my house for more interesting anything, usually to do with books or movies or art or people.
Daniel Knox is one of those who deals in more interesting vegetables.
On April 9, I had the pleasure of seeing Jon Langford and Skull Orchard rock the stained glass out of Newport, Kentucky’s Southgate House Revival. (Okay, I’m exaggerating. The windows are still there, or they were when I left the church/club, as evidenced by this photo.)
Jon Langford and Skull Orchard at Southgate House Revival
While waiting for the bill at a pizza place nearby, I worried that by the time we got to the club, it would be packed. When my husband and I got to the church (on time, after all), Langford was in the bar, and we had a moment to say hello and chat. I’ve met him before, and it’s always a treat. Langford is irreverent, generous, and funny, full of the best of what humanity can be.
As an artist, Langford knows about layers. His paintings echo memories of musical icons, ragged images full of heart. Ragged like most adult humans, beneath the veneer. Langford knows there is a crack in everything, and he knows that’s how the light gets in. Doing a Waco Brothers song that night, they were “walking on hell’s roof, looking at the flowers” in a former church, adding layer upon layer. I blogged about Jon Langford and his work another time over here. That night’s was a “small perfectly formed” audience, Langford said. I guess for a weeknight, it wasn’t shocking that the place wasn’t full to the choir loft, but I wish the world were different and I wish that a guy who makes stuff like Langford makes would be valued over, say, (—insert manufactured popular music icon of your choice here—).
It might have been my ears which have been recently more attuned to how we cheat and don’t cheat death, but Langford tapped into something that keeps haunting me lately: We don’t have much time. Do something now. Do something you care about, something you can live with. Drain all the juice, stop equivocating (okay, he didn’t say all that, but he showed it), go. No point saving the good china for good. (I might be imposing ideas from other sources I’m colliding with right now. Like how you see a specific number everywhere, once you start to notice its importance.)
Stained glass window, reflecting.
But it does seem that Jon Langford’s songs are about how to be alive. How we decide to be, while we’re living. They are all about waking us up.
The Newport lineup included Bill Anderson, who I know from The Horsies, which was cool because, well, you can go watch The Horsies here. The cumulative power of the musicians in Newport (Langford, Anderson, Jean Cook, Joe Camarillo, and Ryan Hembrey) created something complicated and rich and decadent and shhh, secretly fragile, because it’s so rare. Whatever you want to call it, it was perfect, the air between those stained glass windows. And we of the small, perfectly formed audience were treated to a kick-ass set, uncensored stories, and other hijinks, perhaps because it was the final show on this part of the tour. The band were like ridiculously talented children, up on stage, playing for sheer fun.
That night felt like the best kind of party, celebrating sound, story, and full-on-why-go-halfwayism, and it’s just the kind of party that spring needs, and that I need, to blow out the cobwebs of winter and remind me that
I
am
alive.
p.s. Daniel Knox opened for Langford & Skull Orchard. The experience of seeing Daniel Knox is another story, which I will write about soon as I can.
This morning, with my daughter’s school I went to hear the Dayton Philharmonic concert perform several stories, including Peter and The Wolf. I was sleep-deprived, having worried overnight about a very scary situation a friend was going through–a reminder that we don’t get out of here alive. The strains of Peter and the Wolf hurled me back to childhood, and left me tearful…the music (as music will sometimes do) approached me from other human hearts (composer, musicians), reached into my body, held my wrung-out heart, exposing that red and tender mess to music’s melodic touch. Of course I cried.
At the end of the story of Peter and the Wolf, the characters parade to take the trapped wolf to the zoo. “What if Peter hadn’t caught the wolf? What then?” asks Peter’s grandfather.
I cried while I watched the story today in part because a friend from college, the roommate of my college boyfriend, went to the hospital last Christmas day because his stomach hurt. It was stomach cancer. Two weeks ago, despite the ever-youthful impish angel energy he carried with him so beautifully through the decades, after how many rounds of chemo and thousands of people circling him with love and support, he died. (The wolf was not caught. But my friend the imp-angel, in his final months, due to his loving, kind spirit, pulled back together a circle of friends whom I’d missed for years. One bright fact in this horrible loss, the light he shone on us.)
This morning I learned that last night’s freshest reminder of our damned mortality, my friend who I worried about while I did not sleep, might have cheated death awhile longer. This morning I pled in my journal , “Please let him be okay,” covered the page with scrawled hearts, as I often do when I’m wishing, but I might as well have written, more bluntly: “Please let him cheat death awhile longer.”
Each breath cheats death, doesn’t it? As I write this and as you read it, look at the two of us: just a couple of lucky, breathing cheaters.
As a child, the wolf was a scary dark force, who always slinked up at the same point in the symphony, on cue. This morning, watching the Dayton Philharmonic and the Dayton Ballet School amid an audience of school children, my adult mind was able to see a crucial nuance: The wolf is hungry.
The wolf is always hungry.
So hungry, in fact, that she swallows the duck whole. (If you listen closely, you can still hear the duck’s song. That’s called memory, children.)
But what if Peter hadn’t caught the wolf? What then?
When I was in graduate school, I gave a seminar on J.M. Barrie‘s Peter Pan. It’s one of my favorite books, in fact it’s maybe my favorite book, and reveling in the novel’s story and history was a joy. I’ve been waiting until I could read it to my daughter, suggesting it often, but she repeatedly refused. Wasn’t ready, or I was trying too hard. Then someone loaned us an audio book of Tinkerbell stories and I told Merida that we have to read Peter Pan (the original!) before she could listen to it. So a few days ago, she finally relented and we began The Great Book. Now she’s begging me to read more whenever we have time. After I read this passage from Chapter One, we had a funny conversation.
“Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.”
My daughter leaned over to me and said, “Do you do that?”
“By tracing it twice, I fell through the ice of Alice…” –Tom Waits
Today, I went ice skating for the fourth time in my life. The first time was in my late teens, and despite back then being a passable roller skater, my recollection of ice skating was that it was somewhat of a disaster. (After mostly falling, I had no urge to try it again.) Last autumn, when my daughter’s school had an ice skating field trip planned, they needed drivers. I signed up. I was anxious, but thought I would try skating again.
(It was fun! And who knew I’d have the opportunity, at age 47, to revise my long-believed story that I couldn’t ice skate?) I went on a second school skating trip last week, and again, had fun. Both times my daughter skated, she grew more and more comfortable on the ice, as children tend to do when they are learning. (It was odd but also fun to be learning alongside her.) I fell once and hurt my wrist, but not so badly that it scared me off that cold frozen ground.
When a friend suggested we take our kids skating today, I thought, Sure! (Ice skating twice in one week! And with bruises to prove it! I’m starting to feel like a jock.) Today, again it was fun, but alarming (and annoying) how many people had stopped in the flow on the ice, tossing up human obstacles in the way of us beginners. Why had they stopped? Posing for photos or taking photos.
On the ice.
As a novice, ice skating is an activity that forces me to focus on what I am doing at each moment. The present. (Remember that old friend, the present?) On the ice, if I start to have a conversation, or think about something else for more than a moment, if my focus is on anything other than my body and my balance, that’s when I tend to fall. (“To go skating on your name…and by tracing it twice…” sang Tom Waits, about to fall through. More about that song here.)
I love taking pictures; I understand the urge. Like skating, it’s fun. But there’s a balance to be found, especially as a parent. Accumulating roll after roll of photographs, as a new parent I realized I can either take pictures, or I can participate in my life. (Today I wanted to say to the posers and clickers, “Enough with the smart phones and selfies. Enough. Stop documenting and live your life.” But I was polite, and just said, “Excuse me,” as I skated around them.)
Maybe it’s time for a new bumper sticker: Hang up and skate.
Rebecca Kuder 