rebeccakuder

No noose, please

tom-waits
Tom Waits hanging out with a cat!

Today I have a headache, so I’m indulging in a short, cranky post.  (I know my five true blog fans have missed me!  Mama’s back!)

Today I heard spoken two expressions that, if I never hear them again, I will never miss.  Both were uttered on my local NPR station, one in a national report, another by a local personality.  To wit:

1) “(Just about anything)…comes into play.”  As in, “That’s when the –whatever idea,  trend, or phenomenon, which has nothing to do with a ball or birdie or other piece of sports equipment– comes into play.”  I don’t mind sports metaphors per se, but this one is more tired than I am.  I never need to hear it again; and

2) “To hang.” This was used thusly: “Hang with your friends…”  Call me old school (another once-cool, now-tired label, surely!) but I’d prefer to “hang out” with my friends.  I don’t want to simply hang with my friends or my enemies–I would rather not hang at all.  I am tired, but I am not so tired that I don’t have the energy to add the short “out” at the end of “hang.”  Otherwise, all I can think of is a noose/coming into play, which even on this headachey day has little enough appeal as to be nonexistent.

rebeccakuder

“the briar grows before the rose, and neither grows alone.”

Thinking about Jack Hardy today, this May Day.  (Here’s my homage to Jack.)  I can’t find a clip of him playing the song, but here are the lyrics, for your edification, on this fine first day of May…

May Day by Jack Hardy

it's not like pan to play his flute
for those who dance for fun
the fire flickers through poison roots
where chance is on the run

it's not elves to hide their gold
where fortune seekers dive
though pirate lore and island shore
yield only ransomed lives

(chorus:)
there's may day and may wine
and may i please come home
but the briar grows before the rose
and neither grows alone
we'll dance tonight 'til we faint in the light
of the dawn's sweet song of spring
'round the may pole like a day stole
like our feet are borne of wings

it's not sirens to sing their songs
for sailors with cautious ears
they lure no coward right or wrong
and trade not death for fear

it's not like kings to yield their wines
for hundreds of years of war
though drop by drop the ancient vine
paints blood on every door

(repeat chorus)

it's not like girls to give consent
to men of ragged prose
though poets sing of nursery rhymes
their cradles are filled with hope

it's not like me to give my heart
in these drowsy daffodil days
though dreams they douse the timid spark
where sleep presents its plays

(repeat chorus)

it's not like saints to tell their tales
of nights on windswept moors
where death defies the dreams of fate
to close the cellar door

it's not like shepherds to lay them down
when wolves are on the prowl
though songs they scare the waking town
an ill wind has no howl

(repeat chorus)
rebeccakuder

Review of Wexler’s In Springdale Town (ebook)

Here’s a great little review of In Springdale Town,  by Robert Freeman Wexler (who is also my husband).   The ebook “opens with an ostensible introduction from the author, purporting to tell us the origins of the tale, but he immediately raises our doubts…”

What a lovely finish for the review: “This is a fantastically idiosyncratic narrative that will stick with you long after you put it down. A must must must-read.”

Trent Walters, J’agree!

(p.s. You can read an interview with Robert here.)

rebeccakuder

The beautiful boxes that some people create, and how we breathe better

belafonte1
According to Chabon, the “Belafonte” could be Wes Anderson’s Cornell box.

Having just read this gorgeous essay by Michael Chabon, I had to share it with my loyal blog followers.  In the New York Review of Books essay, Chabon gets at precisely what itches my artistic soul and compels me toward interdisciplinary aesthetics.  Chabon gets at how artists (in this case, Wes Anderson, Joseph Cornell, and Vladimir Nabokov) can connect and transcend form.  Reading Chabon’s essay, I felt a sense of more oxygen getting into my lungs, filling my spirit.  Hoping it will give you the same creative uplift.

(I’ve blogged here and elsewhere about my fascination with Wes Anderson.  I haven’t seen Moonlight Kingdom, but it’s high on my list.)

rebeccakuder

“Children of the Sun” (Dead Can Dance)

Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance
Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance

There are days (or lifetimes) when it seems the only proper soundtrack that can, that should linger behind my thoughts will be something dreamed up by Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance.  (Here’s an interview with Lisa Gerrard about their now and their history.)  Last week, I heard Perry’s voice at Open Books in Yellow Springs (thanks, Miriam!) and remembered they had a new CD out, and I bought it.  To me, today, their music seems the only sound big enough to contain the shadows and the light, all of it, everything.  Want proof?  This is good enough for me.

rebeccakuder

Found objects

I’ve had little time for writing lately.  But the intention, and the work when time allows, is to return to the brain of my novel in progress.  At intervals, when I approach the stack of notes, outlines, and diagrams, I find scrabbly handwritten pages, still to be typed up.  Today, three such forgotten pages included intricate ramblings that I don’t remember writing.  But based on the single sheets on which the words are written (not in the notebook, not on yellow legal paper) I recall now rushing to my daughter’s creative movement class, realizing I brought no work to do, and finding scrap paper.  The words on the paper were extra crazy and weird, abstract and also specific, really just a spew of stuff about the textures and elements of this novel.  If the last novel was water and air, this one is earth, metal, fire–so this is what the windings on those found pages contain.

“Just make some shit up,” my husband and I often say about writing fiction, part joke, part true.  For now, when it’s hard to get back into the novel’s essence, I am grateful for these odd scrabbles to type up.  Because I can always type.  And I trust the Wexlerian principle of just putting it all in, pile it on, see what fits.

The junk yard of words is in no hurry, will wait for me.

rebeccakuder

Beasts of the Southern Wild

And I thought Buffy was a hero.

I used to see movies at the cinema all the time.  Since becoming a mother, I see a movie at a cinema once a year, on a good year.  Maybe.  The last movie I saw was “Black Swan” so it was actually a year and a half ago.  I’m not kidding.  The year before that, it was “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Tonight I saw “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”  My neighbor, who owns the Little Art Theatre, had said it was a film like nothing else.  Another friend, the writer Laraine Herring, told me I should see it because it features a child narrator (played by then five-year old Quvenzhané Wallis) in a magical, mythic world.

I’m not going to say much about the film.  Watching this film during yet another deluge on Louisiana was wrenching.  But considering how often I see a movie at the cinema, I’m glad it was this one.

It’s playing again tomorrow night at the Little Art Theatre.

(And when did we stop clapping after a movie?  Was it when we began to retreat into our VHS/DVD/internet bubbles for home viewing?  Every year or so, you will hear me clapping in a public cinema.  Feel free to join me.)

rebeccakuder

The ocean doesn’t want me today

Swimming beyond the breakers, being lifted gently, interpreting light and shadow on waves, a practice, being the human working and being carried by water and letting go of every possibility of knowing.

Feels like writing a novel.

In 2000, on my first trip to the beach with my then not-yet-husband, he and I went out swimming.  I kept trying to see if I could stand, kept trying to know where I was.  His advice: Don’t try to touch bottom.  It will only scare you if you can’t.  Just swim.  I am from inland, from clear chlorine pool swimming.  In that dark North Carolina water, full of who-knows-what, I learned about a certain kind of faith.  The kind of faith that teaches a body to trust that it will know what to do, that it will tend to survive.  Floating and swimming and rolling in those waves, I realized the novel I was beginning to write was like that.  Don’t try to touch bottom.  It will only scare you if you can’t.  Just swim.

This seems the only way of making something when you’re trying and there might be nothing there.  The cliched leap of faith, the answer to the question, “What else would I be doing with my life if not this?”

Twelve years later, still swimming, still trusting that a body will know what to do.

On the waves, writing another novel, still.

**

Or, says Tom Waits:

The ocean doesn’t want me today
But I’ll be back tomorrow to play
And the strangels will take me
Down deep in their brine
The mischievous braingels
Down into the endless blue wine
I’ll open my head and let out
All of my time
I’d love to go drowning
And to stay and to stay
But the ocean doesn’t want me today
I’ll go in up to here
It can’t possibly hurt
All they will find is my beer
And my shirt
A rip tide is raging
And the life guard is away
But the ocean doesn’t want me today
The ocean doesn’t want me today.