I love my husband and my marriage. We get to do this (my words in black, his in blue).
Work
Layers of organization, and life
Organizing my readings for fall classes, I picked a file folder from the stack I reuse at home. “Credit card info” was scratched out, and over it, written, in turquoise ink, “Tom Waits.” That’s what it did last time.
Some questions.
How was my life ever that simple? (And is it wrong to have a file folder entitled “Tom Waits”?)
(And what on earth did I file in that folder? Why can’t I remember?)
(To quote Joan Didion, “What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?”)
A found poem (for Jim Krusoe)
Here’s a found poem, found in that I found this written in my Antioch Writers’ Workshop notebook from July 12, 2010 for my graduate school mentor, the novelist Jim Krusoe. I wrote this almost-poem in a morning class three years ago, before I learned more about how people write poetry, but today something about it seems quaint, and worth reiterating, so I am posting it. Bad poetry, admittedly, but its DNA is true.
Editing (for Jim Krusoe)
You said,
“Start here,”
lopping several pages
from the front of my story
like a severed limb
I had muscled
and exercised,
polished, toned.The thing
(the now-partial body, I thought)
stood there.
I thought I saw blood–
not a Monty Python spurt,
but a trickle.But I was wrong.
There was no blood.
It was a good cut, the right cut;
the story stood stronger
without those pages.You were kind
and you were right.
No noose, please
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.
Oh, you beautiful mess
To have written, to have made order from chaos: to have written about messy life stuff that defaced three pages of legal pad, scratched, abbreviated, rounding corners, lines written above below obscuring other lines, arrows pointing everywhere but straight forward. To have made some sense of that snarl, of that juice. To have expressed my self.
To say: today I am a writer.
write
This will sound ridiculously small an act, but I’ve been doing this for years now (a decade?) and it seems to help. I have a Base-Lock Rubber Type kit with tiny letters (think linotype) and on one line I keep the word “write.” I keep a paper planner, and each year, at the start of the year, I get out the stamp pad (some years black, some years purple, with no apparent logic) and stamp that word on each square in the planner, so the word “write” accosts me every day. (It helps that this planner is the way I keep track of everything, and yes, I’m still wed to paper. And yes, I spilled water on it one year and it was sobering, but because I usually use pencil, it was not as devastating as it might have been.) Each day that I write something, I check off the word “write.” Each day that I don’t, I draw a line through it. There are plenty of lapses, days at a time when I haven’t checked off the word, but somehow this small practice keeps me accountable to myself. And when it happens, it feels really good to have a week with more checks than lines marked through. (For all of us, may there be many more such weeks, this year and beyond.)
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.
Ode to Jon Langford (and Interdisciplinary Aesthetics) Part 1
My soul has been itching to post about seeing Jon Langford in Cincinnati. Now, spring evaluations turned in and a writing deadline met (with almost 2 hours to spare) I can breathe in and out and recall that evening…
Jon Langford, artist, singer, songwriter, bandleader, troublemaker, anti-sellout punk rocker was putting on an art show at Clay Street Press and concert at MOTR Pub. My husband and I went down to the edge of Ohio to see and meet him. (Jon Langford of the Mekons, of the Waco Brothers, of the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, of the Wee Hairy Beasties. Jon Langford the generous, gregarious collaborator and instigator. Jon Langford who does stuff like this despite the cold in Madison, making me feel like I’m not doing enough to help the cause of the worker and humankind, but somehow it’s still useful to live, and try. Jon Langford of whom I am a newish fan, but I guess there’s still time to gush.)
I had a lovely conversation with Skull Orchard violinist Jean Cook, told her how my four-year-old daughter (beginning fiddler, who loves the music that swirls around Langford) is a big fan of hers. Jean Cook was kind, and wonderful to watch play. Langford is one of those people who surrounds himself with other great people, whose work fits into this fantasy I have about a group of creative humans converging to forge an exquisite tool that splits open the world, reconfiguring it into a place where people make instead of trash things, where the work people do brings honor, intrigue, and inspiration to the inside of the soul’s corners…
I just wanna be there.
Dream alert: This morning I had a dream. I was in Seattle, working at the Annex Theatre with some of the people who were there in the 1990s. (It’s notable that I worked there briefly in the real 1990s but never felt cool or connected to the core of the place, to its inner tribe.) In the dream, it was 45 minutes to curtain, and I kinda knew my lines, but wasn’t confident. I had a small role, and I decided I really didn’t care if I knew my lines–I’d wing it. (This is progress. Usually my theatre dreams center around having to go onstage in five minutes, having just gotten the script. Classic, clichéd performance anxiety dreams.) In this morning’s dream, as we were getting ready for the show, in the velvety backstage light, I put Langford’s Skull Orchard Revisited on the turntable and on came “Tom Jones’ Levitation.” I asked one of the Annex guys what he thought of the music. He dug it; everyone did. It was one of those peak moments where art meets heart and you really can fly, like Tom Jones. Someone gave me a bag of home-grown dried peppers. I asked if they would help me stop sweating and feel less nervous, or if they were the kind to have with chocolate. (Yeah, chocolate was the answer.) The moment was one of ensemble. Of generosity. We were doing our work, and all was well in this badly broken world.
Taking me back to Jon Langford. Watching, witnessing, meeting one of the remaining anti-sellouts fed my creative soul, swept out shadows, sweated out, through peppers and chocolate and dreams, the chaff, jettisoned all the gunk that stops me making stuff. Lifted me from the daily overwhelm, through silence and apathy, allowing me to write anything.
I think people who do stuff like this give others license to create.
Eternal gratitude to all who are even considering what we do, and make, and how we live.
“I’ve got a theory, it could be bunnies”
I’ve always loved that scene in the Buffy musical where Anya rocks out against bunnies. If you haven’t seen it, do. (Joss et al seem to have locked down movies I used to find on youtube, but you’ll get the idea.)
Because everyone in the land called Facebook seems to be posting something about rabbits today (why? I ask you) I’d like to share a snip from a story I’m writing called “Rabbit, Cat, Girl.” Here goes:
You want to know about the girl. I want to tell you. But I must begin with rabbits.
Here’s what I know: there have been rabbits since the start of the world, gnawing the sharp drygrass when there are no tender green spring shoots. They burrow into the bases of catalpa trees, and under bushes, hiding like vermin. Some people find rabbits endearing, benevolent like the smiling Easter Bunny, a chocolate charade, lurking beneath false rebirth of spring. Soft and so helpless, they hop like little innocents, and grow like armies, eating everything. Have you ever studied a rabbit’s teeth?
Who lost track past midnight at the Spurlock Munitions Factory, near-river, 1917?
A poem from a couple years ago, inspired by the novel I’m working on, working title of which is The Eight Mile Suspended Carvinal. This is the character Beede talking. I can’t do line breaks right in html, so I think the word “vast” was originally on the line above where it appears, but below it’s an orphan, which makes sense in the story of the novel at least.
Who lost track past midnight at the Spurlock Munitions Factory, near-river, 1917?
Oh yes Oh yes Oh yes
What you’re to see, boys, you dark, dirty skells, you
seen plenty spark here, what else, you’re thinking
you constitute yourselves of solids, you’re commanding
gentlemen, can take some things, maybe you’ve traveled, say
Illinois, Illinoise, farther, it does not take ambitious nature
to see the world, just a slick hand and some loose pocket. Rust is everywhere–
Davey knows my language. So you did time, who hasn’t, all we got is time in this vast
bum’s end of things, I’ve spit up wet gobs of coal, we’re all the same
just don’t get caught. Once saw a man dangling from a shagbark hickory, by the neck, all of it, tree bark and scales fallen from those eyes, all I can say is use the brain-pan,
don’t get caught
and you won’t end up with any fallen scales, don’t laugh back there, it wasn’t all
that amusing seeing that man up there, the weight of himself dead
meat. He didn’t have much luck.
But you’ve stepped up around here, all of you,
waiting on that kiss which makes us all breathe in, every crusted morning, for the long years we’ve got, a kiss humid and lovely like that mind-reader at the carnival,
she’s got curves, wait another day and maybe you’ll find that luck somewhere. Factory life got you groaning, you’re thinking anew, ready for this
fire? Let me take off my shirt now. The way I do it, you won’t even see the spark,
just watch. Lucien B. Dunavant will show you the light.
You count your breaths; I’ll count mine. That old sack granddaddy Spurlock
has not one thing on me.
Ready, boys?
Rebecca Kuder 