Ted, Ted, Ted

…was a blast as expected. Laura was annoyed at the liberties taken with the plot, but I was too busy soaking up the Terry Gilliam silliness to notice. Evil minions in funny hats, fisheye lenses, the whole thing — it reminded my suddenly how long it’s been since Brazil, and what an impact that movie had on the way I watch movies. The bears, which loom large in the physical world of the book, are even more impressive on screen. They are an animation slam-dunk. The animators let a little fuzzy-and-cute slip into the bear characters and if anything it adds to the overall towering monsters effect. The screenwriters mostly dropped the author’s anti-church broadsides, but the usual suspects are getting upset about it, which is all to the good.

My dad’s dad passed away in November at 95. He became a Lutheran minister in 1935 and served in about 10 churches, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. Laura and I joined the family for the funeral in Minneapolis, where Opa had lived in retirement. Then we all drove to Madison and had another service at the church where Opa had served his longest tenure. It was good to see everybody, and it was good to know Opa went out a pretty satisfied guy. He was a connoisseur of church music — he booked the organist for his funeral himself, a couple of years ago, and the man was indeed the best organist I’ve ever heard live. I was picturing Opa lying there listening with that sly little smile he used to get when he heard something he really liked.

Laura’s report on her new middle school.  Bottom line: doesn’t seem to mind it too much. She is playing the saxophone in the band and practicing to try out for the basketball team. Her “elective” class is a peer-support program where she helps other kids with homework and school issues. I’m still not a fan of uniforms on kids, but if that’s my worst complaint, I think we’re doing pretty good.

Here is a small sample of the reams of material Laura has been supplying to the Artemis Fowl fan community. And here’s another.

She has been putting in a lot of time at this the last couple of months, and it shows. Her dialogue gets better every time I look at it. She has as good an ear for speech as for melody, maybe better. She seems pretty excited about going to writer’s camp for three weeks this summer. My only worry is that she might come out of it a threat to my job. Losing work to India is the least of my concerns. Running into better writers: that’s a real problem.

I guess the biggest difference between Laura’s literary activity and mine at that age is the instant feedback she gets from the Web. The sites she frequents are all about reviews and rankings and there’s a constant flow of chatter among the writers. When I was learning to write, it seemed like a more solitary pursuit. It took a long time to get better. With the commentary Laura gets — sometimes in pretty sharp terms — she knows exactly what to fix right away, and she does.

Laura has started using Librarything to track her reading list, so that anyone interested can follow along. She’s on a tear right now, downing about two books a week the last time I checked her records. We’ve been talking about the different levels of reading — reading for pure pleasure, reading for knowledge, reading closely to learn how authors do what they do, and so on. She loves writing almost as much as reading (see below), which makes sense in that writing is really just an especially active form of reading, and boy does she read actively.

I don’t think Laura reads this site, so maybe she won’t notice that I’m putting up a link to her work. She has been contributing heavily to fangathering.com and fanfiction.net in the last few weeks. She has written someone resembling herself into one story (no hints, you find it), and also tried some interesting mash-ups between work by Fowl author Eoin Colfer and work by some other writers, including some guy named Shakespeare. I especially enjoy the way her command of the language advances week over week, sometimes day over day. Armed with only a few basics, like “show don’t tell,” which I laid on her in a particularly pedantic mood one evening, she has done some remarkable stuff. I think the weakest point is that her excitement with plot can lead her to rush to publish before a story is fully baked, and the reader ends up having to mentally fill in transitions and details that the real Eoin Colfer, who probably works at a more leisurely pace, might have provided. Time and practice, of course. She has built some strong fundamental skills and I can’t wait to see where she takes this.

Laura gave a presentation about the Chinese language for a 7th grade class at her cousin Adam’s school today. She was a little nervous, but she got through it, and her turtle joke went over well. Mary took a couple of severe, Salgado-like pictures to capture the atmosphere at St. Bede’s.

Laura has been uploading her own fiction to the Artemis Fowl fan site at fangathering.com. Take a look. There’s more on the way. She writes it out longhand and then types it in, editing as she goes. I like the level of detail that goes into her scene descriptions, and her dialogue can be kind of snappy.

When I got back from India, Mary and Laura picked me up at the airport and we hauled ass to the Playmates preschool harvest festival, where Laura and I were booked to do some pickin’ and grinnin’ with our friends Breck and Stanley. We played a few tunes and had a blast, even though I was mostly asleep and in a bit of pain from 24 hours as a sardine. Playmates is on the short list of my favorite places on earth, and it’s always great to be there doing something fun.

Laura’s web site is up and running. It has a comments area, which she invites everyone to use, and will soon have some of her awesome art. This weekend she graduated from MS Paint to Paint Shop Pro and has already been producing some impressive stuff. Stay tuned.

I should say something about the concert we saw last weekend. Mary, Laura and I went over to Berkeley to see the New Lost City Ramblers, who have been collecting and performing old-time, mostly Appalachian music since well before I was born. The leader is Mike Seeger, who is brother to Peggy Seeger and half-brother to Pete. (American royalty.) This was part of an annual old-time music festival that’s been getting bigger and bigger lately; it appears that this is another of those out-of-the-way genres that’s been due for a revival.

The atmosphere was that of a homecoming. These guys could do no wrong with this audience, and they didn’t. In demeanor they remind you a bit of some of those old-time Afro-Cuban players like Guaracheros de Oriente: the material is so powerful and the performance style so calm, almost casual, that you’re surprised when your heart has suddenly been torn out and shredded by what you thought was just a three-minute folk song. They sneak up on you that way.

An autoharp, when played by someone who knows how, can be the most beautiful thing you ever heard. Mike Seeger knows how.

The next day I went back with Laura and Lilly for the outdoor concert part of the festival. There were lots of string bands playing on the grass and we got to see some smoking banjo players (clawhammer style only — I felt like a turncoat for practicing Scruggs picking the way I do), plus a real live gut-bucket. We agreed to try to make one of our own as soon as we could figure out where to get one of those big galvanized washtubs.

I’ve always got an eye open for musical role models that Laura might like. She has pronounced likes and dislikes already, but she hasn’t heard all that much. (She digs Arlo Guthrie enormously, and she’s been liking the very impressive Abigail Washburn CD we got recently, to give you an idea of how her tastes run. Dislike: “bubblegum.” She knows it when she hears it.)

I’d been vaguely meaning to get her a copy of the Dixie Chicks‘ new CD, just to do my little part to piss off the war nuts who hate them so much. But it’s been looking like my help isn’t needed, since the CD is breaking sales records. So instead I picked up their penultimate one, Home, just because the cover art looked more inviting to me, and because it had a song by Tim O’Brien, a bluegrass guy I’ve been getting to like.

I suppose it is a measure of my yuppie snobbery that I’d always assumed the Dixie Chicks were another of those Monkee-like country-pop acts like Tim McGraw or Faith Hill. I take that back. They genuinely rock. They have a banjo player to make your hair stand up, and a fine fiddler too. One more prejudice blown away.

Catching up on some of the summer activities: In the middle of August, on an impulse, we grabbed the last empty spot at the Henry Cowell campground up in the hills above Santa Cruz. We spent the weekend there hiking and goofing off, and then descended on the beach boardwalk on Monday for some intensive gut-wrenching. My cast-iron stomach has corroded badly in my old age, but I was able to keep up with Laura almost ride-for-ride.

On the way to the boardwalk, we stopped for a stroll on the UC Santa Cruz campus, which turns out to be just downhill from the campground. We saw a young deer browsing with its mom in the beautiful outdoor ampitheater there. I’m hoping this will have helped dispose the girls favorably toward going to school there, when the time comes.

On Thursday we took an easy (for some people, maybe, not for me) two-mile hike from Emerald Bay up to Eagle Lake. Here’s that, plus the remainder of the pics I came home with.
(Click the picture to see the rest of them.)

Laura loved that long hike. I’m told there was no whining the whole day, even though much of the walking was straight up or straight down. There was a gorgeous lake at the end of the trail. She and the rest of the kids were so wiped out afterwards, they didn’t even have the strength to object to taking their showers. We sat around most of the next day just recovering, except for some mini-golf.

We are up in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe for the week, staying in a big house we rented with three other families we know from preschool. I have pictures, but I sent my camera out with Laura this morning on an all-day hike, so the pics will come later. One of the dads is a scout troop leader and knows exactly where to take kids in the mountains around here.

It’s been magnificent so far. The weather couldn’t be any perfecter. The lake, which can be ice-cold, has had all summer to warm up (at least the top 3 feet or so) to an almost swimmable temperature. Yesterday we took an inner-tube ride down a few miles of the Truckee river, which drains Lake Tahoe out into Nevada. Some of the kids saw a river otter. There are two other kids in Lilly’s age group and four in Laura’s, so no one is sitting around with nothing to do.

My excuse for missing the hike today was that I had to drop Mary off at the train station in Truckee so she could get back to San Francisco in time for work. Teachers and staff are supposed to show up tomorrow to get things ready for school to start next week. I’m sneaking a bit of time at a coffee shop in Truckee to catch up on the chaos at work, which hasn’t died down just because I’m not there.

Mary has been away at one of those professional training things since Friday (the 11th) and it’s not going so badly here, considering. Lilly got a little querulous a couple of times in the first 48 hours, but seems to believe me when I tell her Mom’s return is closer and closer. I think six months ago she would have been inconsolable; there’s been some growth going on.

I’ve had an interesting logistical challenge in getting both of them to their appointed activities at 8 am and retrieving them both at 5 pm. I’ve been enforcing punctuality for Laura’s dropoff in the morning, so that I can get Lilly in before 8:30. Being late is OK with her because she doesn’t like the breakfast they serve at her summer camp anyway, but I want her to get at least some of her RDA of runaround time in. In the afternoon I’ve reversed the order and picked up Lilly around 4 and got to Laura just a little before 5.

It would be a lot harder to pull this off during the school year, when adults seem to get all picky about kids showing up on time for things. Summer is the forgiving season.

Here’s a fine picture of Laura and Lilly taken by Mary. She has this knack for getting pretty pictures from unusual natural lighting.

First day of horse camp for Laura. This is the high point of her summer. She’s extra-motivated to bump her skills up a level or two, because we’re going to Tahoe next week and there’s likely to be lots of trail riding going on.