rebeccakuder

Fear

Gary Perkins survived the 1974 Xenia tornado by hiding under a desk.

In 1974, I lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio, ten miles from Xenia.  One of the worst tornadoes on record hit Xenia that spring.  I remember only a few things about that day: hiding under a heavy blanket in my bathtub; a hail-ball the size of a softball (maybe smaller: I was a kid) that kept for a long time in my freezer; the way Xenia looked like a clearcut forest for years afterwards.  Even as they recreated buildings, they couldn’t rebuilt trees.

I still live about ten miles from Xenia, a town that has traditionally been  plagued by tornadoes.  I’ve been processing my fear of tornadoes ever since 1974.  They haunt my dreams and fiction.  Last summer I wrote a poem (or something that might some day be a poem) about those springs of childhood, memories of many green skies.   So, knowing there’d be “weather” tonight, upon hearing a continuous tornado warning siren, I interrupted bedtime reading to take my daughter, who hadn’t napped, down to the basement.  I took the flashlight and phone, and my laptop, which is the only source of live information (live streaming TV station audio, as we don’t have cable) and explained calmly why we had to go down there, trying not to scare her.  Within a few moments, she said, “I’m afraid!”  She seemed to be trying on the costume of “afraid” more than feeling real fear.  The storm passed (three-inch hail through Xenia, in fact) and we went back upstairs.

I imagine my fear of “weather” is something like what children of the Cold War grew up with: the duck and cover mentality.  (You want to see something interesting, go here.)  I need to work it out, find a way to let go of the freak-out while keeping myself and my family sanely safe.  I don’t want to be alarmist about green skies.  Just because I have a visceral memory of that time, I don’t want to pass it along to my daughter.

But how?

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The alpha and the omega

Something emerging...

I got this trick via Jim Krusoe, who attributes it to Carol Emshwiller.  (Thanks, Jim and Carol!)

Writers of fiction: Take the first and last words of a piece, then put them together.  The idea is that the resulting phrase might somehow relate to the whole.  Here are mine.

The Watery Girl: “Something emerging.”

The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival (which is rough and will surely change): “Mim hands.”

Both, weirdly, work.

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Maybe that’s it.

What you cannot recreate

(The following might be the final paragraph of The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival.   It will make no sense without the novel that comes before it.  It might not even make sense with the novel that comes before it.  But what the heck.  It’s my blog, I can post if I want to.)

Ladies and gentlemen.  Jettison what you can recreate.  Take the essentials: bolts, wire, rope.  Other parts can be found elsewhere.  Take what you most need.  Take the things you can use: arms, hands, legs, and sometimes other parts.  Hands.

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Funny, I don’t feel any different.

The storm inside, the storm outside

What a day.  What a lilting, bourgeois opera, but I have yet to write the libretto.  The highlight:

1) I finished my novel today.  The ice storm helped, offering time at home, and sound effects.  That crackle of ice on limb on wind opened something and let me let it be done.  The end of the story was very simple.  Ends are weird, and I don’t know if this is the right one, but it came clear and natural, so I will let it be for now.  There’s still a passel of work to do, but I got to the end of the story!  This novel took me ages, what feel like lifetimes, to finish–the first note I have with the germ of idea is from 2001, and I’ve been writing it since 2004.  But for now I’m done.  In a way.

To celebrate, I opened the week-and-a-half-old bottle of wine from the fridge (a very good wine that my friend Kurt, owner of Emporium, recommended) and put on The Black Rider by Tom Waits.  (Sounds from Tom Waits have been partially to blame for the novel.)  My husband celebrated with me; my daughter said she didn’t like the music but didn’t insist I turn it off.

After dinner, I noticed the dripping from the picture window (a leak, we need to figure out why, and have it fixed) was tap tap tapping with a tad more force than it had been this afternoon into the yogurt containers there to catch the drips…still is, but now fortified by towels, and other vessels to catch the water…saw a thin line of shine, so just in case, I emptied the cabinet below of myriad cups, saucers, tea, cocoa, and other important detritus…all dry…so for now, all I can do it sit back and wait to see if this really is the storm of the season, and see if the power will go out.

And probably best to eat some ice cream, which is still frozen.  That’s the most obvious bourgeois bit, the ice cream.  Because I’m not trapped in an ice-covered wonderland without it.

But I just heard a really creaky sound outside…

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Productive procrastination (the dreams of others)

"Michel Leiris faisant une libation ; à droite, la mambo Lorgina Delorge"

Today, I sit at the precipice of WHAT HAPPENS NEXT in the plot of my novel, and have to write some new stuff, in other words, I’m looking into the abyss.  Which means I need inspiration.

I have this interesting book of dreams of Michel Leiris.  It’s from the Eridanos Library, whose books I’ve found at various used book shops through the years, and every one I’ve read has been completely worth the time.  They have these quiet, considered covers that jump off the shelf because they are not screaming orange, twirling batons, and otherwise displaying excessive narcissism.  This book in particular is a wonder to open at random.  It’s a collection of short entries, thirty-seven years of a person’s dreams.  Leiris hung out with the Surrealists, and this book is rich with imagery and the ineffable.  (Clearly someone whose dreams should be considered.)  Here’s what I found today, on p. 56, from an undated dream, probably sometime between 1926 and 1929:

“I am going on a trip, so I have to move all the books in my library from one room to another.

Since the occasion calls for me to show one of my manuscripts to some of my friends, I go down to the street, rip what appears to be streetcar tracks from the pavement, and go back up to the apartment, dragging meters of rails behind me that bang on the stairs with every step I take.  I then realize that this load is in fact made up of a series of large glass objects similar to those coasters that used to be placed under the feet of pianos in middle-class living rooms to protect the carpet or the floor.  Because this is indeed my manuscript, I am fairly annoyed.  But I manage to console myself, given the fact that my arrival provokes the following comments: ‘He’s quite something, that Leiris!  You as him for a manuscript, and he drags the rails up from the street.’  On the other hand, though, these objects finally reveal themselves to be melting ice, and although the chain quickly dissolves, I hope I will be able to reconstitute some of its elements.”

What a dream!  What an image!  I post this not only to procrastinate (a noble end in itself) but because I love typing up words from other writers.  It’s a way of getting inside the artist’s soul, physically.  (I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s different, because I’m typing on a laptop, while Leiris, for instance, was probably writing by hand, so maybe I’m having a closer experience to getting inside the typesetter’s hand, in 1987, but if I ponder this question too long, my brain will fold into an origami crane and I will never get anything done.)

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Sixty thousand words (plus or minus a few)

My novel is now past 60,000 words.
Image stolen from http://www.opacity.us/ephemera/post/royal_land/

Microsoft Word is now showing my novel has 60,437 words. It has been such slow progress; I am not going to tell when I started writing this thing.  But now it feels like it’s going to be a real novel some day. I’m close to the end (of the plot) so how not to rush, how to stay slow enough that I don’t skimp on the things that this mess-in-progress deserves?   Its allure and complex grime keep calling me back to previous scenes, unanswered questions, pieces of the puzzle that now make sense, or don’t. How to twist things into the right shape, how to fortify what needs strength, how to obliterate the coy, the unnecessary, the overly precious junk?

In my distractions, I do a google search for images, “decrepit carnival,” and find this about a place called Royal Land, which was a sort of recycled carnival that did not travel.  My carnival is a non-traveling carnival, so finding this link (and image, which I love) today, I’m renewed–the serendipity cherubim at google hooked me up.  I love conducting this type of non-scholarly research.  It’s one of the great things about writing fiction, the freedom to make things up, but make things up that are also underpinned with some real things, somehow held together with real wire and string, but not so precisely tethered to the mundane.

Back to work now, as Tom Waits would say, “Hoist that rag.”

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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.

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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

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…