Some thoughts about the notebooks themselves …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As you’ve noticed, I fell into the practice of journaling rather haphazardly. At times compulsively, even. I started to say the “habit” of journaling, but it was rarely that effortless,

I was still in spiralbound volumes — eight years before a stretch of using hardbound sketchbooks followed by a return to spiralbounds before the hardbounds took hold a dozen years after the journal at hand.

No. 45, for those keeping track, was the first of the 8-by-12½-inch books I’ve truly appreciated. The added inch-and-a-half of length fit my hand and pen well, though not the bookshelves or the milk crates that generally wound up holding my journals.

Eventually, there were 17 of those in all, plus three fat softcover sketchbooks, 15 black-cover spiral sketchbooks, and three bargain thin hardbound journals nearly that tall. Thirty-eight in all, out of 200-plus. Why did that shape vanish from the market? Probably because I preferred them. I have long run contrarian to the marketplace, not exclusively involving my tall, skinny clothing size.

Somehow, I had thought that my legal-size notebooks started at the Cornell bookstore, but it now looks like my first ones were bought in Bloomington.

In looking up what’s called “legal pads” (as if the others are clandestine?), I find most today have shrunk to 11¾ inches height, though at least one exists at 8½ by 14 for those willing to pay a premium. And that’s not bound. As for filing those in storage cabinets? I’m not a lawyer nor a legal secretary. It no doubt requires special filing furniture.

~*~

The first third of the volume covered our final month-and-a-half in Bloomington, aka Daffodil, followed by my flight to the Pacific Northwest.

As I look ahead, I see pages that were used to draft and refine poems that found publication as well as other entries that more or less became fiction in my novel Nearly Canaan and the third novella in The Secret Side of Jaya.

I’ll skip over those in this series and instead look for the unexpected.

 

Despite all attempts at professional neutrality

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a professional journalist, recording the corruption of the American political system was excruciating. We strived to be objective in presenting two sides, but were smeared for attempting to do so from the side of doing the destruction. If corporate journalism is “leftist” or “liberal,” as we were charged, it’s time to insist it was more likely to reflect truth than the biased alternative. These poetry rants, inspired by Allen Ginsberg, were observations and reactions I didn’t dare utter at the time, but history is proving their insights tragically real. I stand by them.

Now is your best chance to check out the poetry collection, Trumpet of the Coming Storm, and download it for FREE at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale. The collection is at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1564758.

But act fast. The deal ends soon.

A few old newsroom notes

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Reporter Jerry Handte, someone I saw as a grizzled old-timer. Threw the word “hardscrabble” at me in a story, one I didn’t know. Changed my perception of him.

AP’s middle-class conformity.

Contrived news stories, with formulated sentimental reactions: hippie story, Agnew story, dog or handicapped child story, medical/scientific breakthroughs, etc.

“Chimes,” the Evansville Courier’s wrap-up of church activities.

The Press won’t hire anyone else as long as it can slide by as it is.

~*~

The tug toward middle-class: security: keep job, get a degree, build retirement, home, house, and family. It’s gonna be so hard telling Mom and Dad I’m splitting.

I’m becoming like them: Don’t rock boat, don’t do deep fixes on stories, let it slide, why bother with better headlines and layouts, etc.

Lost and found in the woods of Lampkins Ridge

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

VO showing the grave sites of two infants at the edge of his ravine: one stone left, the other one, dating to early 1800s, stolen …

~*~

I see now, 50-some years later, there’s actually a public-access trail around there.

~*~

Further to the east was Brown County, with its rugged geology, state and national forests, and a large state park, making it Indiana’s outdoors destination. It definitely feels like stepping back in time. I have memories of hiking and camping there as a Boy Scout, even before my explorations during the time covered in my return to the university.

Hiking trail photograph by Kgirischandra  via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Panorama views by Elizabeth Nicodemus via Wikipedia Commons.

I had friends who lived in log cabins, which remain in widespread use in the southern part of the state.

 

 

 

No question, my Indiana years were special

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve been seeing in this sweep through my journals, not all of my experiences in Bloomington wound up in my poetry and fiction.

Back when I switched my college major from journalism to “something that would expand my mind,” as one influential editor advised me, I chose political science because so much news coverage focuses on government and its impact. Somehow, I fell under the spell of Vincent Ostrom, especially his federalist perspectives of a compound republic and ground-upward rather than top-down action. My earlier posts reflect how this turned into a personal relationship, even before I was invited to join what’s now known at IU as the Ostrom Workshop.

His wife Elinor, better known to us as Lynn, was just beginning to teach at IU when I was an undergrad and I didn’t find the opportunity to enroll in her courses. (The fact the department scheduled her classes at 7:30 am was an additional problem for night-owl me, as I was as the time.) Despite obstacles erected because of her gender, she soon became a popular teacher and by the time I returned to campus, was a rising star. What I saw on my return was how naturally she functioned as the central figure in running our collaborative workshop, and how utterly amazing she was all around. It should be no surprise that she became not only the first woman but also the first political scientist to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Yes, the dismal science.

While I have never run for political office or served in a governmental role — I’m of the camp that believes doing so would compromise the neutrality or objectivity at the heart of serious journalism — I have carried many of the lessons from that training through the remainder of my life.

One is the ability to critically read a text, period. It serves well in literature, theology, proposing a course of action, as well as editing. A corresponding step then asks which assumptions can be relaxed or even removed from the paper under examination.

Another lesson involves management and associative structures. Many similarities exist in operating public, for-profit, and non-profit organizations. They are what make a civilization function. They were especially helpful when I was navigating the steps in the management ladder of corporate journalism in my moves to come.

The next question regarding any field of organization, of course, is how do we make it work better?

~*~

In this review of the experience, I’m surprised to see a parallel in the youthful enthusiastic personnel at the Workshop to the idealistic newsroom staff in my novel Hometown News.  Most of the events shaping that book, be warned, come in the years ahead.

~*~

As I look back, I see how crucial this year-and-a-half became in my life.

My evolution from yogi to Quaker began, for one thing, though an overlap would continue for another year or two.

Through a circle headed by three very fine poets, my personal voice in that vein took shape, accompanied by appearances in literary reviews across the nation.

Kat and I settled into a life that was largely pleasurable and fulfilling. I’ll leave the details for you to decipher in my novel Nearly Canaan. The middle novella in The Secret Side of Jaya, “Miller at the spring,” was also inspired by this period but written 40-some years later and recast in the Ozarks.

There was a curious semester when Nicki and Kat were enrolled in the same weaving class in the art department. Did my ex-lover know my wife was a classmate? Eventually, they became acquainted and that led to a face-to-face of the three of us, allowing me some resolution to the past.

And I felt freer to move forward.

~*~

Vincent had grown up on a mink farm near Mount Baker in Washington state, and he was quite encouraging in our move to the Northwest. Living in the interior desert, I would finally understand the intricacies of water legislation and management, which had been one of his specialties. Another arose from being a writer of the Alaska state constitution, a place that also had close connections to Washington state.

After packing up and moving westward, I never returned to Indiana, apart from the brief drive crossing on the toll road in the north on our return to Ohio after the Pacific Northwest.

I’d say the book was closed, yet the writing and revision were actually still ahead.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

 

Think of it as a wild underground ride

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Coming from an industrial city in the American Midwest, subway systems — most notably New York — were a terrifying, exciting, mystifying, and ultimately enlightening ride for me. Let’s throw in a little Tibetan Buddhism and a slew of graffiti along the way and it makes for a colorfully surreal ride. For me, they’re an essential dimension of truly major cities, though the jury’s still out for the newest ones, mostly in China.

That said, now is your best chance to find my novel, Subway Visions, available for FREE at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale. To discover the book and download it, go to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/833902.

But act fast. The offer ends soon.

Along the tubes to nirvana

(For those of you who aren’t ebook, readers, the novel is available at regular price in a print edition at Amazon.)

Is a job search always a tribulation?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After reviewing old clippings: “How close my writing has come to greatness … or to babble.”

At the RT, how much our photography carried us, especially considering how thin, until the end, our local coverage was – how important our Saturday front-page feature was in setting us apart and giving the staff a fairer schedule. .

Morning on long-distance calls to Bordner, Aldrich, Swaisgood, L. Nighswander.

Other fronts, Russ called back, said Larry Hale expected an “editor’s position” in several weeks … So much confusion, would I really want to go back there?

And the letter from Tacoma, $20,000 arts and entertainment, if they get the opening … What do I make of this? McClatchy upswing versus Gannett versus a fighting crew at the foot of Pike’s Peak?

 

So what about Colorado?

Imagination still reeling with thoughts of the Rockies. A place to be at peace? Low pay may be an incentive to freelance or grow.

The West may spur a novel. I’m too boxed in here.

On the brink of Colorado. A time of despair, anxiety, and waiting through the layoff.

Early May, Colorado Springs, round-trip ticket, $189.

On flight out: half of southern Indiana is forest. Region defined the sudden shift to farmland where the hills give way to flatness.

Contrasting smoothness of disked fields next to rougher plowed.

Strip-mine lakes outside Terre Haute.

~*~

Colorado Springs Sun: Don’t feel there’s much I can do here – to many “trained incompetencies,” exhausting and routine-work hours. B.B. [the editor who was to hire me] is leaving for Detroit after eight months here.

No local color in the paper. Newsroom looks and smells like RT. Computer (VDT) may help – question is, how much?

Upon seeing first UPI lead, realized how clear, precise, and simple my own style has become. Newspaper work may destroy that – at least, I feel it slipping away.

No sense of nuance, of grace, of individual voice – that is, true style – in this news writing, which exists as stilted and artificial as any literary style. It is divorced from the human voice and from American speech.

 

Another Far West facet

All along during my stint as a research associate, I was reading technical material on Indigenous artwork. Here are some sample entries from my Bloomington journaling.

 

 

 

 

~*~

Back from the Rockies

Indiana feels too thick, too green and wet in contrast. My sinuses are acting up again. I’m out-of-place in America.

Horoscope says a month or two before big change. We’ll see.

Looking at the cons: long hours (nine to ten hours a day), ending at 2 or 3 am; low pay, publisher interference, no investigative reporting, and someone named Dana …

I’m having to admit that not getting that job was a blessing. I would have been engulfed. The trip was, though, at my own expense, devouring half of our savings. 

 

Just where might I be heading?

Doubts about “where I want to go.” Should we make the plunge into NYC? Find an agent yet? (I’d rather wait two more years.) I feel the necessity of steady income, yet also feel “duty to yourself” calling. Turned down music critic position at Herald Telephone. Hard for me to say No to any job, even with low pay. ($10/review; negotiate on features, say $50/page.) Don’t think I really want newspaper work. That’s hard to admit.

Copy editors are a kind of janitor and paid accordingly. Hence, I should concentrate on power-writing. (Like advertising?)

My own failings coming home as nobody wants to hire me, not yet, free me from the damn suspense/suspension with half of our goods packed in crates and warping corrugated boxes, the general feelings of inutility accented by this ungodly heat and humidity

Late June, returned yesterday from two days [of housesitting] at Dietz’ … and found a letter waiting from Yakima. Very exciting prospect, work split between copy editing and general assignment reporting. A nice balance, good pay, exactly where I’d like to be – the dry side of the mountains. And Kat’s very excited. Hope everything works out. (Received a formal job application to fill out and return.) Getting anxious to get the address situation straightened out and new pieces into the mail. …

Wherever we wind up, I’d like to publish a few chapbooks of my work, for free distribution to friends and critics (and some for sale). Would also like to get a typist to do final drafts of potential freelance pieces. Will need to arrange more office-type space … we need Kat’s extra income …

Already, we’re anticipating spending that extra income … new car, furniture (that’s her idea), new clothes, bigger place, airfares …

A call today from Center for Law and Poverty in Indianapolis, a job I’m not too crazy about but one that might be the springboard for the southern Indiana magazine/tabloid I’ve been pondering.

Other calls to/from Yakima, which sounds better and better but less and less likely, like an impossible dream.

Nancy Neubert saying Yakima is a very nice, good place: agricultural, wealthy, conservative, hydroelectric cheap electricity, good produce abundant and cheap, Spanish and English …

The m.e., there since March, Steve Kent, from Albany, New York, thus appreciated my Binghamton angle. A good phone conversation.

Located Snyder’s lookout towers on the map, though Sourdough was not shown. Some of the other sites he relates, though, were.

Spicer: “West Coast is something nobody with sense would understand.”

Good place to end this journal. 10:20 pm, night of new moon, unseen through the haze

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.