Valentine to a Novel: Sixth Grade Secrets

This is another in a series of love letters to favorite books.

For the most part, when I read the standard-issue advice to writers I despair: “Show, don’t tell”, or “Murder your darlings”, etc.  Because this advice seems custom-made to eliminate everything that I love best in books.  I like writing that calls attention to itself.  I like long authorly digressions.  I like abrupt shifts in the point-of-view.  I like books where keeping the plot moving is the very last concern.  I even love adverbs!

I’m also not a fan of Aristotle’s theories, if that’s the word, about tragedy, at least not in the form that they’ve been corrupted and passed down in every discussion of plot from high school onwards.  (For one thing, they don’t fit a single Greek tragedy that I know of, not even the supposedly illustrative Oedipus Rex.  What’s his tragic flaw supposed to be?  You’ve got to really, really stretch to make the case for hubris–what causes his downfall is nothing about him, just his circumstances.)  His followers’ advice too: the “rising action-climax-falling action” diagram, for example.  Fairy tales follow none of these “rules”, and obviously very many of them are completely satisfying and great.  Rapunzel meeting the blinded prince in the desert is pure coincidence, and nothing has “established” that her tears will heal his eyes; but no one complains about it, unless maybe they’ve been reading a bit too much discussion of plotting.

All that said, there’s certainly something incredibly satisfying about a good plot, a perfectly constructed machine that fits together just right.*  That’s what I love about this book, Sixth Grade Secrets by Louis Sachar.  If there ever was a story which fit the high school English class description of a Greek tragedy, it’s this one: all the action and trouble flows directly and logically out of the hubris of the main character, who comes to a recognition of herself after an apocalyptic downfall which brings great catharsis to me at least.  And it’s a silly, funny kids’ book about dueling secret clubs in grade school.

If it is a Greek tragedy then it’s a lighthearted one, with no sadness to be found; none of the melancholy that Sachar put in Holes, another perfectly-plotted book.  As far as the “dignity and importance” part of the definition, there isn’t much to be found.  But everything runs like clockwork in such a way that you say, “of course, of course it happened that way.”  I especially like how certain things become important simply through the silly non-sequiturs of kids under stress–like one character says “bacon and eggs” instead of “bacon and ham” when prank-calling, and for the rest of the book, eggs are a major part of the war between the clubs, because obviously they couldn’t admit to blowing their lines!  Sachar really gets how kids’ minds work–or at least, I recognize myself and my friends, at that age, in the way that the kids in his books think.

If the idea of Sixth Grade Secrets as tragedy seems strange, well, there is another form of play, which requires perfect plotting, and is about as applicable: farce.  In a farce there is a single crucial misunderstanding or misrepresentation which leads to all the ridiculous situations that follow.  Just like in a 19th Century play, the plot of Sixth Grade Secrets depends on a letter gone wrong, and if the characters would just sit down and talk openly and honestly to each other for a moment, they wouldn’t end up covered in mustard, forced to eat a raw egg, humiliated in front of the entire school, or any of it.  But of course that would be no fun.  And tragedy or not, fun is what this book is all about.

*Probably my favorite movie moment of the past couple years was the literal deus ex machina towards the end of Toy Story 3: it so perfectly brought together things set up in all three movies, while being a joke on the term itself, while also being a perfectly timed and edited moment which, both times I saw it, caused the entire theater to burst into applause.

Valentine to All My Books

If you click and go to Flickr, you can learn how they’re organized.

Valentine to a Novel: Jacob’s Room

Kat suggests that in February we write some love letters to books we’ve loved over the years.  I thought that was a great idea.  I have trouble coming up with reviews for Goodreads,  because that implies a level of objectivity that is hard to muster; but a love letter I can certainly do.

The reason I read Jacob’s Room, the first book by Virginia Woolf I ever read, was because I liked the cover design of the edition we had, pictured here.  I wanted something “summery”, I remember, and this book, which had both Jacob’s Room and The Waves in it, appeared to fit the bill.  I’m not sure how summery I actually found it, but I’m glad I judged this particular book by its cover, because otherwise I might not have discovered my single favorite author (if I was forced to choose.)

I had pretty much no idea what I was getting into; although we’d read A Room of One’s Own in high school, I’m not sure I even remembered that Woolf was the author of it, and in any case I’m sure I didn’t know what era she lived in or what kind of writer she was supposed to be.  I’m a slowish reader, and I remember laboring a bit through the beginning, not knowing what kind of book it was going to be, not sure it had been such a good idea to read it, until I got to the end of the first chapter, and then I was in love:

Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in the early hours of the morning.  The aster was beaten to the earth.  The child’s bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying again and again.

Jacob’s Room has one of my favorite things in a novel: an omniscient narrator with a personality.  This kind of beautiful little lyric image is one of her trademarks, as is passing over large portions of event and conversation by presenting a few telling details.  She will directly accost the reader: “Now let us consider letters,” or “As for the beauty of women,” and present little mini-essays.  She has some of that cruel Virginia Woolf wit.  I love it all, and I will take it over a thousand “well-made plots” written in “transparent prose” that “gets out of the way of the story”.

Another thing about this book is that it is so angry.  It’s pulsating below the surface, but it’s furious.  Jacob is seen almost entirely through the eyes of women, who will never have his privileges and possibilities; Woolf is often unsparing towards these women, whose constrained world has made them conventional and insipid: “But Mr. Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries.  Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday.”  But she’s even more unsparing towards Jacob and Timmy and by extension, well-educated young men in general: self-absorbed, sexist, shallow, pretentious.  “‘Probably,’ said Jacob, ‘we are the only people in the world who know what the Greeks meant.’”  But despite this deep resentment towards these young men, the whole book is kind of a cry of rage against the systems, “men in clubs and Cabinets,” which have killed them, so pointlessly, in World War I: “With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together.  Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops, reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, through field-glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match-stick.” Through all the beauty and humor and observation there is this kind of scream, why do you give them everything, and then destroy it all?

A Pair of Christmas Presents

This Christmas, so I wouldn’t go crazy, I decided to only make two presents by hand, one for each of my nieces.  For my 6-year-old niece A., I decided to just ask her what kind of dress she would like.  For ease of communication I thought the best thing would be if she just drew the design herself, which she did very seriously.

A.'s design for her Christmas dress.

When she was done she decided she didn’t want an orange circle in the center but rather a red star, so she wrote that big NO so I would remember.  She explained to me in no uncertain terms that she wanted the orange lines on the bodice to continue as purple lines on the skirt, and that the green things were supposed to be feathers. She was a pretty demanding client, immediately noticing everything that was not what she wanted at each fitting. But when it was finished, she was quite happy with the result!

Recreating the pose of her picture in real life.

Once she’d worn it awhile she decided the feathers weren’t really working for her and we took them off. I personally think I could have gotten that crinoline a bit more voluminous, but she didn’t seem to mind. Anyway, as a collaboration, I think we did a pretty great job! I like the colors, especially. It was a good lesson in interpreting a design drawing, too.

A. taking a bow and being adorable as always.

My other niece, K., is a big fan of the Rune Factory series of games, so for Christmas I decided to make her a real-life version of the hat her character has in Rune Factory Frontier. It’s a hat that looks like the cute sheep-like monster in the games called a wooly. Here’s my version.

The Wooly Hat

For reference, here’s what a wooly looks like:

A wooly from Rune Factory

I don’t really know how to embroider so I just used the zigzag on my machine to make some cheap “embroidery”, but I think it looks OK. Once it was on I realized it was probably too silly for a teenager to wear, but who knows. Maybe she’ll wear it to a video game competition or something someday.  The pattern was interesting and challenging to make, it came out sort of looking like a flower. I think if I did it again I would include some kind of padding to hopefully make it hold its shape a little better.

The lovely model

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately!

The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages by Helen Waddell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of the hardest books to describe that I’ve ever read. The only comparison I can think of is to Carlyle’s French Revolution, which is style-wise very different. But both books are nonfiction about a very interesting topic, filled with vivid anecdotes, and yet the reason to read them is not the information but the writing itself. Both seem to assume the reader’s prior familiarity with the subject (there is even plenty of untranslated Latin, among other languages, strewn about the book), and weave an allusive, poetic web of words around the topic rather than directly and clearly narrate. It reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s distinction between learners and readers: this book is definitely for readers.

The book is an overview of the poets who wrote in Latin from the end of the Western Roman Empire until the beginnings of the Renaissance, mostly rowdy clerical students who seem exactly like the university students of today: constantly poor, constantly drunk, playing pranks and making music. Waddell describes them and their writing in brief flashes of illumination, not letting the light shine long enough for you to get the full picture, but giving enough of an impression to fascinate. She seems to have an enormous breadth of learning to draw from for purposes of comparison, and not just about Latin, medieval history, or even Western literature: when she says “There is something Chinese about Ausonius,” it’s not an Orientalist cliche she’s invoking. She was born in Tokyo, daughter of a scholar of Chinese, and has a volume of poems she translated from the Chinese. The book is stuffed with allusions and quotations, and I think unless you are Waddell herself, it’s impossible to be conversant with everything she references; so it passes like a dream, partly understood and imperfectly remembered, but beautiful. Here is a representative quote, which I have opened to completely at random: “It is not to say that every thirteenth-century sculptor, every down-at-heel goliard poet, had read the De Universitate any more than the ‘rakehelly rout of ragged rhymers’ in Elizabethan England had read Giordano Bruno. But these things are in the air. Provençal poetry demands no other intellectual background than that of its century, a May morning, the far-off singing of birds, a hawthorn tree in blossom, a Crusade for the Holy Sepulchre. It is the Middle Ages in the medium of a dream.”

I find this book extremely hard to recommend, because if I say “you should read this book about wandering scholars in the middle ages” it sounds like the interest is in the topic. But on the other hand I can’t say “the subject matter isn’t interesting, the writing is,” because the subject matter is interesting, and the anecdotes are eminently re-tellable. But I do recommend it, to anyone who loves reading the supersonic ranging of an amazingly learned and nimble mind, who clearly adores her subject and wants to convey the essence of it, rather than mummify it in objective, neutral prose.

View all my reviews

More Grunge Blogging: My Favorite Drummer of the 90s

Patty Schemel of Hole, #2 pencil on paper, c.1995

This is a picture I drew in probably 1995, when I was 16, of my #1 musician-crush at the time: Patty Schemel, the drummer from Hole.  Classic high-schooler art, in that unmistakeable high-school-art style: slightly disproportionate but gently shaded #2 pencil drawing after a photo of a celebrity in a magazine; invested with deep, fierce teenage love.  It’s from a sketchbook which is full of various doodles, some weirdly-proportioned sketches from life (why did I always draw legs so short?), cartoons and comics, and occasional other drawings from photographs; but this is the one which I seem to have taken the most time over.

I saw her, as I recall, focussed on briefly in footage from a Hole live show, and though it was a brief glimpse, there was just something about the way she moved, playing those drums.  It may seem like a pretty random celebrity crush to have, even for a kid, but she was badass and beautiful behind the kit and adorable in photos and interviews.  (I never understood why it was Melissa Auf Der Maur that everybody I knew, boy or girl, had the hots for; she seemed kind of boring to me. )  I would strain my eyes peering at MTV, waiting for the half-seconds she would appear in Hole videos; I clipped out every picture of the band with her in them and put them on my wall; I used the fledgling Internet to download every interview and picture of her I could find, back when jpegs would download in stages, slowly resolving from big ugly blocks into a washed-out, still-pixelly picture over the course of five minutes. I was totally smitten, with this faraway obscurely famous lesbian who was 12 years older than me.

Now she’s got a movie coming out, about her life in Hole and doing drugs and fucking up and getting back on her feet, I guess, and having just watched the clips on YouTube, I can say I am still totally smitten by this faraway obscurely famous lesbian who is 12 years older than me.  Maybe thanks to those anti-commercial alterna-punk years, I always feel kind of weird about promoting products by people I don’t know, but fuck it, it’s my blog and I love Patty Schemel and I can’t wait to see her movie and you should go see it too.

pretty much the only solo photoshoot she was ever in

Funnily enough, my #1 musician-crush of nowadays is Pikacyu, from the sadly ended Afrirampo.  Drummers, man!

Things happen somehow

Yesterday, I had finally typed out my script for this toy theater project I’ve been working on, that I’ve posted about, and suddenly I felt very down and worried about it.  The pieces seemed to be more or less in place, but I didn’t know how I was going to put it all together and actually perform/record it.  I don’t really know anything about puppeteering, or making videos, or if I needed to get rights to music for just this little experiment; I didn’t know how I was going to do it all by myself or who I should ask for help.  I even had a classic anxiety dream, where my sister was forcing me to perform Kabuki in front of an audience, and as she was putting on my wig and makeup I was thinking oh god I don’t know how to do any of this Kabuki stuff!  This is going to be a disaster!

 

Today, my best friend, who has experience working with puppets, is always down to help me with everything, and who knows a lot of people, suddenly showed up after living out in the woods in Colorado for a few weeks.  We took a walk and he introduced me to a friend of his who lives near me, who is a musician and who has an interest in Noh, who perhaps can help with the music issue.  And another friend of mine, who I was reluctant to talk about this project with because she makes real, very elaborate puppets while I am just making pictures on sticks, told me she’s teaching a class in toy theater next semester and wanted to see my project and talk about it.  Amazing!  I really do think sometimes that there is a god or something out there who likes theater and wants the show to go on, and arranges things to somehow make problems work out, one way or another.

Unrelatedly, but seeing as how I am making one of my too-rare appearances on my blog, everyone should go read Kat’s post on female celebrities eating in magazine articles.  It’s amazing.

Bummer.

Kurt’s Sweater, Blake’s Sweater

Kurt in his iconic sweater

This year being Nirvana Nostalgia Season, I’ve been thinking about one of the most iconic pieces of clothing of my youth: Kurt Cobain’s enormous, red-and-black Fred Krueger-style striped sweater, as pictured above.  Greasy blonde hair and this sweater say “Kurt” as much as a moptop and a collarless jacket say “Beatle”.  As a nerdy, fashion-fearing teen in the grunge 90s this sweater was everything I wished my clothes could be, a perfect example of Kurt’s effortless cool.  I was way too self-conscious and shy to actually emulate him (plus, like a dope, I took to heart that 90s alterna-bullshit about not being a poseur), but I studied pictures of Kurt, how he dressed, wondering how I could recreate that alchemy in myself.  I thought about this sweater.  It was one of those “aspirational pieces”, as I think they’re called in Vogue, which I thought about every time I went shopping.

So when I saw Gus Van Sant’s Last Days I was, despite myself, a bit disappointed.  Don’t get me wrong: I think Last Days is a really beautiful, amazing film, and to me one of the great costume movies.  Michelle Matland and her team did an amazing job recreating iconic Cobain looks for Michael Pitt in the character of Blake, a sort of poetic alternate-dimension version of Kurt.  Here’s Blake in his version of the Freddy Krueger sweater:

The version of the sweater in Last Days

The difference, and to me it’s a huge difference, is that Blake’s sweater is entirely intact.  Kurt’s, on the other hand, is absolutely disintegrating.  Unforunately I haven’t been able to find many good pictures of the sweater online, but rest assured, I spent enough time looking at it, thinking about it, to know.  Enormous holes had opened up at the elbows and the left shoulder; the end of the left sleeve was in unravelled tatters.  These were like heiroglyphics to me, each bit of damage recording some event–a dive into the drums, a trip through the mosh pit, drunken high jinks of one kind or another.  The damage was why I could never have Kurt’s sweater: even if I found the very same sweater, from the very same company, the very same assembly line, it wouldn’t have all this fascinating history encoded in it.  That sweater was unique, haute couture; the couturier was Kurt’s wild rock-and-roll life.

I’m in the position in life where I’m both obliged and able to usually repair my clothes if they get damaged.  But I always think long and hard before I do it.  How does this hole look?  Does it make this sweater more interesting?  Do I want to forget that this happened because someone grabbed me during my friend Danny’s concert and threw me into a puddle of beer?  I think the value of clothes does not necessarily decrease with cosmetic damage, the way it does with a car.  Sentimental value is, after all, true value.  Pants that wear out at the knees, or get stretched out by your belly, or get spattered with paint, what are they doing but becoming more yours?  Each imperfection is like an in-joke, ratifying the relationship between you and your clothes.  I think it’s beautiful.

Sci-fi fans love to tout the smoothness with which masters of the genre incorporate exposition into their plots.  What could be more subtle than these little signs of life as it was lived before the story begins?  The costumers of Last Days certainly knew the implicit-exposition value of such distressed clothes–I really love the fact that those plastic shades he’s wearing up there have been broken and taped back together–but for whatever reason, they decided to leave the sweater unscathed.  Maybe it just goes to show the irreproducible nature of such a specific, well-beloved piece of clothing.

The broken and repaired plastic sunglasses clearly visible in the poster.

Nue: The Nue

The Nue's true form: a monkey-headed, snake-tailed tiger monster.

This is the star of the show, the monster the play is named after: the Nue.  A creature from Japanese folklore, the Nue has the head of a monkey, the body of a tiger, and the tail of a snake.  As this is the shite or main character (the true form of the boatman), and a supernatural creature, I wanted to make him more colorful and stylized than the rest of the cast.  Somehow I knew from the very first that I wanted him to be wearing green.  I’m afraid the scan is particularly inaccurate as regards color this time.

This was one of those drawings where the rough sketch I made had a certain something which I found very hard to recapture, especially in the head and face.  I was afraid I was going to erase through the paper, I drew and redrew the face of the monster so many times.  And I still think the doodle is better.  Influenced by the prints of Tsukioka Kogyo, Kaneko Kazuma, and Dr. Zaius.

As this completes the cast I won’t be updating as much, I think, but I’ll be working on the set/backdrop pieces and variant puppets for the characters.  I’m pretty happy with these puppets, but they’re the easy part really, just costume drawings more or less.  The rest of it I feel less confident about.  I hope I can pull this off!