Wednesday's for Kids XXII -- KIPLING and an "A IS FOR ALPHABET"

Since we're reading a novel by Rudyard Kipling right now (Kim, which, by the way, is surprisingly more difficult than I thought it would be), I figured it not inappropriate, particularly as Kipling was so otherwise skilled at stuff so pointedly for kids, to feature a story from his so well-known Just So Stories.  If you're not familiar with these tales of origin (and Tolkien, by the way, was not the first Briton to invent a mythology, though Kipling's takes place "abroad" rather than in Britain, as Tolkien so intended his tales), they include answers to such life questions as "How Leopard Got His Spots" (the most famous of them, really, as this story is read and modeled to the point of "hackney-fication" by grade- and middle-schoolers across the English-speaking world), "The Beginning of the Armadillos," and "How the Whale Got His Throat."  While these stories are all so just fine, there are two that are perhaps so much more appropriate to the blog, here: "How the First Letter Was Written" and "How the Alphabet Was Made."

the alphabet necklace

All of these stories are brilliant, wonderfully simplistic little tales, and particularly perfect for narration (and so I think more appropriately so through oral retellings, fairytale-style, rather than straight readings) to kids.  Considering "How the Alphabet Was Made," I expect that an ambitious (more accurately read perhaps as "desperate" or "creative," depending) parent would even be able to generate such a discussion with his/her kid[s] and create their own alphabet, illustrations and all, just like the father/daughter duo of the story's Neolithic cave.

My favorite part of this particular story is Kipling's acrostic (sort of) poem (less sort of) and illustration:

ONE of the first things that Tegumai Bopsulai did after Taffy and he had made the Alphabet was to make a magic Alphabet-necklace of all the letters, so that it could be put in the Temple of Tegumai and kept for ever and ever. All the Tribe of Tegumai brought their most precious beads and beautiful things, and Taffy and Tegumai spent five whole years getting the necklace in order. This is a picture of the magic Alphabet-necklace. The string was made of the finest and strongest reindeer-sinew, bound round with thin copper wire.

Beginning at the top, the first bead is an old silver one that belonged to the Head Priest of the Tribe of Tegumai; then came three black mussel-pearls; next is a clay bead (blue and gray); next a nubbly gold bead sent as a present by a tribe who got it from Africa (but it must have been Indian really); the next is a long flat-sided glass bead from Africa (the Tribe of Tegumai took it in a fight); then come two clay beads (white and green), with dots on one, and dots and bands on the other; next are three rather chipped amber beads; then three clay beads (red and white), two with dots, and the big one in the middle with a toothed pattern. Then the letters begin, and between each letter is a little whitish clay bead with the letter repeated small. Here are the letters—

A is scratched an a tooth—an elk-tusk I think.

B is the Sacred Beaver of Tegumai on a bit of old glory.

C is a pearly oyster-shell—inside front.

D must be a sort of mussel shell—outside front.

E is a twist of silver wire.

F is broken, but what remains of it is a bit of stag's horn.

G is painted black on a piece of wood. (The bead after G is a small shell, and not a clay bead. I don't know why they did that.)

H is a kind of a big brown cowie-shell.

I is the inside part of a long shell ground down by hand. (It took Tegumai three months to grind it down.)

J is a fish hook in mother-of-pearl.

L is the broken spear in silver. (K aught to follow J of course, but the necklace was broken once and they mended it wrong.)

K is a thin slice of bone scratched and rubbed in black.

M is on a pale gray shell.

N is a piece of what is called porphyry with a nose scratched on it. (Tegumai spent five months polishing this stone.)

O is a piece of oyster-shell with a hole in the middle.

P and Q are missing. They were lost, a long time ago, in a great war, and the tribe mended the necklace with the dried rattles of a rattlesnake, but no one ever found P and Q. That is how the saying began, 'You must mind your P's. and Q's.'

R is, of course, just a shark's tooth.

S is a little silver snake.

T is the end of a small bone, polished brown and shiny.

U is another piece of oyster-shell.

W is a twisty piece of mother-of-pearl that they found inside a big mother-of-pearl shell, and sawed off with a wire dipped in sand and water. It took Taffy a month and a half to polish it and drill the holes.

X is silver wire joined in the middle with a raw garnet. (Taffy found the garnet.)

Y is the carp's tail in ivory.

Z is a bell-shaped piece of agate marked with Z-shaped stripes. They made the Z-snake out of one of the stripes by picking out the soft stone and rubbing in red sand and bee's-wax. Just in the mouth of the bell you see the clay bead repeating the Z-letter.

These are all the letters.

The next bead is a small round greeny lump of copper ore; the next is a lump of rough turquoise; the next is a rough gold nuggct (what they call water-gold); the next is a melon-shaped clay bead (white with green spots). Then come four flat ivory pieces, with dots on them rather like dominoes; then come three stone beads, very badly worn; then two soft iron beads with rust-holes at the edges (they must have been magic, because they look very common); and last is a very very old African bead, like glass--blue, red, white, black, and yellow. Then comes the loop to slip over the big silver button at the other end, and that is all.

I have copied the necklace very carefully. It weighs one pound seven and a half ounces. The black squiggle behind is only put in to make the beads and things look better.

"All the Pretty Horses," McCarthy, and my [lack of] Confidence as a Writer

There are writers whom I admire, whom I emulate, and who inspire me to be better; then there are those writers--not many--who just make me depressed, simply because they are such unapproachable masters.  Among these authors, each of whom fit somewhere among this list, are Michael Chabon, who is likely the closest thing to which I aspire; Tolkein, whom I admire immensely and who awes me; Steinbeck, who seems to provide me with inspiration for all kinds of things, not just writing (or at least his characters and his words do); and then there's Cormac McCarthy. 

Of the author a critic from the New York Times Book Review writes, responding to All the Pretty Horses, that McCarthy "puts most other American writers to shame."  As I endeavor (in word count, pathetically) to accomplish my first NaNoWriMo goal, and having read the scathing review of the enterprise by Laura Miller of Salon.com (much of which I highly agree with), I wonder, for realzies, if I should even bother.  I've got a book STILL in the final reviewing stages at a publishing house (IT'S TAKING SO LONG; and how great can it be if they're STILL deliberating!), I've got two books underway, and I still love to write and will always do so anyway, but is it really worth bothering with or stressing over getting published?  Is it really a valuable use of my time and little-available emotions?

I don't know, but I am nothing if not an optimistic person.

I've read a lot of books.  I would even venture to claim that I have read thousands of books, many of which I've read more than once (yes, I am a re-reader, and I highly recommend that you become one as well, if you're not already).  That said, I have not read a lot of McCarthy.  Shame on me.  I know.  He has passively climbed, via the transmission of just over one hundred pages, to the tippy top of my list.  Bar none.  Well, unless Chabon comes out with a new one.

I read The Road.  I loved it.  I read it twice.  I taught it once.  Haven't read it?  READ IT!  It's fast, it's easy, it's tragic, it's flipping amazing (lexically speaking it's easy; emoitionally speaking, it will bowl you over like a glacier), it won the National Book Award, for crying out loud, and yet it is not as good as All the Pretty Horses, which I'm not even halfway through yet.

How does McCarthy write?  Unconventionally.  At first glace, even lazily.  I don't get it!  He writes like he doesn't give a crap about the English language, and yet he pracitcally DEFINES what the English language is in the U.S. of A. in the first place!  The man doesn't punctuate.  Period.  Except for the period, I mean.  He practically doesn't use adjectives or adverbs at all (and I use way too many, especially "especially" and "particularly" and "certainly" (yes, I'm self-aware, and even of my overuse of punctuation, which use I generally defend, but which, in McCarthy's shadow, embarrasses me)).  He is so supremely confident and so lazer-focused in his writing that he does just what he wants, exactly how he wants, and it works so well it's heart-breaking and crushing and spectacular, and all these only after you remember that you're reading a book in the first place.  He's like a black hole.  You don't see a black hole.  You know it's there because you see what it does to everything around it.  Cormac McCarthy writes a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book, and he only tells you THIS MUCH (imagine my thumb and forefinger just barely not touching), yet you know three, four, five times more than anything he tells you about his characters, his setting, his plot, his intentions for guiding your thoughts and your heart.  He is the minimalist, imagist writer of prose that Hulme and Pound and Williams are of poetry.  I don't think I can give a higher compliment.

Within two pages, the man has made me laugh my guts out, while being simultaneously awed (not about the writing, though I was, but about the situation and characters) and then finding the briefest piece of equine-metaphor and philosophy the likes of which might be found in the finest Steinbeck passage, yet told so much more briefly and at least as profoundly.  (Maybe we'll eventually read this book here (if I have any guts left), and I'll pose the questions to you that it brought to me.)

Here's the crux of the issue once again: when I read these authors who just blow my brains right out the back of my head (think symbolically of Vincent D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket), I want to be just like them.  Imagine the hopelessly ambitious--and hopeless--eighth grade boy claiming he's going to be a professional basketball player when he grows up.  That's me with these guys.  Except I'm 33.  I read McCarthy and I want to go back and rewrite all ten thousand words of my NaNoWriMo attempt, because I think it will work better if I do it like McCarthy.  If I'm reading Steinbeck (which I'm doing right now, too, so imagine the bizarre combination and conflict of ambitions here!), I want to go back and insert philosophy and enrichen my characters with more words.  If I'm reading Chabon, I wonder why I can't arrange my words just right to make them spring off the page like Disney "Real-D," which HIS WORDS ACTUALLY--and, I swear, they PHYSICALLY--DO (I don't know how he does it; it undefinable; he, like, uses them just SO, that a single word is suddenly more than it ever was or could be out of your own fingers).  Each of these guys' styles are so THEM (not to mention someone like Saramago or Barthelme or any of my other five million literary idols), and I want to be just SO ME, just like they are so them.

Am I?  Does it matter?  Will anyone care if I am?  Well, not if I don't get published.  Not if I don't keep it up!

And yeah, yeah, I know, there's room for all kinds of writers and there are all kinds of audiences and there are countless chances, especially since I'm just going to keep doing it anyway, because I love it, right?

I'm not looking for consolation.  I'm not looking for compliments (unless you're a publisher and want to read my books!).  I want to be great.  I mean, GREAT.  I want to be a McCarthy, a Chabon, a Tolkein, or a Steinbeck.  I want someone to read something I write and be inspired.  Okay, so maybe I don't want to be McCarthy then, because he makes me want to shrivel up and die and stop telling students that I know what I'm doing or talking about when I say "this is how you should write."

So, I write.  I practice.  And I have four thousand words to slog through to catch up with my NaNoWriMo schedule, in a book that, so far, is exactly all the crap that NaNoWriMo professes it should be.  (And thank goodness, right?  Less pressure that way, right?)

I suppose I can take some consolation in the fact that each of the guys listed didn't just explode onto the scene out of nowhere when they were twenty-one years old or whatever and somehow gain the staying power that holds them yet in the literary eye after all these years (well, okay, Chabon did).  Maybe there's hope yet for this somewhat and ever aging "young" man tapping away at a fairly worthless blog entry that practically no one will read.

So on to NaNoWriMo.

Tally-ho!