My grandmother’s not the biggest fan of Ralph Stanley. But it’s not Ralph’s fault. “Bill use to follow him around every weekend. Playing music. He’d leave me at home.” Bill’s her husband. Bill is Pa.

My mom talks about another Bill. How he was always “around” when she was young. How, other than his height and his big white hat, she never knew there was anything exceptional about him. Me, I remember being five or six years old and shrugging a big “So What?” to my same-age cousin when he pointed to his daddy and the tall, white-hatted man singing and playing music together back in the mountains. “Why that’s Bill Monroe girl! Don’t you know nothin’?”

The truth was, I didn’t know much. Not when it came to that high lonesome sound. But I’ve been trying to remedy this. Last night The Euro (Who loves Bluegrass. Who can’t abide Country.) and I were invited to go along with S & J to hear J’s 83 year old grandfather.

They get together on Friday nights. A group of what my own grandfather likes to call old timey musicians. In a little use-to be-country store with old coca-cola signs hanging on the walls and a pot bellied stove in the corner.

People drop in and pick up fiddles and mandolins and whatever else may be laying around or stashed, conveniently in their car. One fellow walked in with a base twice his size, sat in down in front of the door and just started in playing. Without a word. A lady stopped by, to just say hi, grabbed a hundred year old fiddle and…good grief she was good.

Socratic, romantic, nihilistic. Post modern. Honestly. Is there any wonder?

An Oxford professor once put it to me simply: Man invents wheel. Wheel rolls over man. Man dies. That’s irony. Not Alanis Morrisette.

Americans may not understand irony – Lord knows that’s the general European consensus, one I have pointed out to me on a daily basis – but I’m convinced those of us who don’t have never made an effort to do so in the first place. Either that, or we’re just way too optimistic. But that’s neither here nor there, really.

Me, I’m a polemical irony girl myself. Everything else is a shoddy imitation.

“Austen uses irony as a means of being understated. Swift, by contrast, uses irony for polemical purposes, conjuring grotesque images ironically (babies being eaten, mankind enslaved to the morally superior horse) in order to state his case (that the Irish were starving, that humanity was going to the dogs) ever more forcefully.” The Guardian

In 1946 George Orwell outlined his four great motives for writing in the essay “Why I Write”. He believed these motives exist, in different degrees, in every writer. I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t right. For me, it’s mostly about Aesthetic Enthusiasm. It’s also about a kind of peace that comes over me when I’m under no pressure to get it right. Or when I’ve finally pushed that boulder up the hill. I’d like to think I’m not as egocentric as Orwell but every writer has to have a little bit of ego going for her. Why else would she think her words important enough to preserve?

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In Orwell’s own words. Why he writes:

Sheer Egoism – Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.

Aesthetic Enthusiasm – Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.

Historical Impulse – Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Political Purpose – Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

No Country for Old Men. Cheerful by comparison. Never watch P.S. I Love You unless you plan on feeling like you’ve just bottomed out. Do, however, watch Lars and the Real Girl. There are no words for Ryan Gosling and his awesome talent.

Long story short, I feed the starving writer that is me by designing albums. I wont have time for much else over the next few weeks but I do plan on reading Stephanie’s new memoir, “Moose”, from cover to cover when it’s released on the 27th. More therapeutic than my actual therapist. She’s an amazing woman and a fabulous writer.

It’s hard for me to give over to that kind of cheesy admiration but it’s true. Haters, step aside. Everyone else check out what Newsweek has to say about Stephanie and go preorder “Moose. A Memoir” by Stephanie Klein.

Starting at age 13 Stephanie Klein went to three different fat camps over five summers. In “Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp” (William Morrow) she writes about how she lost 30 pounds over one of those summers (among other things). It’s hard to imagine that the sexy author of the memoir “Straight Up and Dirty”-the tale of her jump into single life after her first marriage ended in divorce-was ever overweight. But she was-emphasis on the past tense. Newsweek

I get to see my sister soon; and I’m pretty darn stoked about it. Her husband’s leaving the country on business for a day or so and I’m going in to laugh at her toes. She has these tiny little toes that look like they’ve walked through a hornet’s nest. Those are my brother’s words, not mine. I wouldn’t say such things because, like my other brother, I have Hobbit Feet. My peep toes hate them.

Anyway. Last week I get this email from her (See previous post). She’s talking about her six year old. I keep saying “You should really do a Mommy Blog” and she keeps saying “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

I plan on making the Euro take some decent photos – because I only have two of she and me together where we’re not ten years old and in our bathing suits, holding watermelons in one hand and shot guns in the other.

I am not joking.

And this is exactly why we’ve been approached to write a screen play. But I’ll tell you about that later.

Buffy,
You know how Tonya takes ‘G’ (6 years old) to dance class on Tuesday nights. Well, last night this was the conversation:

Tonya: ‘G’, would you like to come back to our house and go for a walk with us?

G: I would like to but I’m not sure if mommy and daddy would like that……can you call my mommy?

Tonya: I can’t call mommy because she is in class, but I can call daddy (who was at home).

G: I don’t think my daddy can give me permission, my mommy is the boss.

I love her!!

Yours,
C.

“There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.”

- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

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Iaeger, West Virginia. Nineteen seventy nine. The old bus terminal that use to sit somewhere along the river bank. Maybe next to Sears & Roebuck? Maybe not. Maybe Sears & Roebuck came after it was already gone? I can’t remember. But I do remember the terminal; the diner it held. And it’s a memory from this diner that’s running away from me.

I keep trying to get my head around it. To see all the things I can already hear and smell and taste. But all I see is a plate. White. With a blue racing stripe around its edge.

The room smells of beef. The real kind. And of lettuce. It sounds like my grandfather. Loud and laughing. He’s sitting beside me. Telling a story. To men or to the air. I can’t see him; all I see is the plate. But he’s there. Just like the sun. Breaking through the windows, fracturing over hands and faces, lighting up the room.

My grandmother tells me to put my legs together. I’m in a dress. It’s Sunday. The day her husband doesn’t work. Church is over. She doesn’t use words, but I feel her hands on my knees and I know what they mean. They say things, my grandma’s hands. Like…

“Always be a lady; but be a smart one.”
“Men will fool you; but they will love you too.”
“Do and become; because I could not.”

Open up your mind to the possibility that 1+1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell your autobiography with facts, such as “I am in sixth grade. I am a boy. I live in Owatonna. I have a mother and father.” Tell me who you really are: “I am the frost on the window, the cry of a young wolf, the thin blade of grass.”

– Natalie Goldberg

“Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum…I’ve never given up. I’ve always kept going. I don’t feel that I could afford to give up.”

- Joyce Carol Oates

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This has helped tremendously today. I feel like I’ve got a boulder on my back. My knees are about to buckle. I have to spend every ounce of energy I have in an effort to breathe – forget about being able to create.

It’s a hypothetical boulder, of course. Life is good and I’ve no real burden to bear. But the phrase ‘squeezing blood out of a stone’ keeps coming to mind every time I sit down to write. It’s been this way for three days. I grow weary.