Don’t call them ‘starfish,’ OK?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Although they live underwater and are commonly called “starfish,” they are not true fish. Unlike fish, they do not have gills, scales, or fins.

Also, they move quite differently from fish, which have tails to propel themselves. Instead, sea stars use tiny tube feet for moving along.

Thus, since they are not classified as fish, scientists prefer to call them “sea stars.”

Now, for ten more points.

  1. They belong to the phylum Echinodermata, relating them to sand dollars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and sea lilies – about 7,000 species in all.
  2. Like many echinoderms, they have radial symmetry – their body parts are arranged around a central axis. Since many sea stars have five-point radial symmetry, ruling out an obvious left and right half, only a top side and a bottom side.
  3. Sea stars come in roughly 2,000 species ranging from tropical waters to the polar regions. Some dwell in the intertidal zone, while others live in the ocean depths.
  4. Not all sea stars have just five arms. Some species have many more, such as the sun star, which can have up to 40 arms.
  5. Most of their vital organs are housed in their arms. Some species can regenerate an entirely new sea star from just one arm and a portion of the star’s central disc, which is useful if a sea star is injured by a predator. It does, though, take about a year for an arm to grow back.
  6. Instead of blood, sea stars have a circulatory system made up primarily of seawater.
  7. Their appetite is bigger than their mouth, but no problem. A sea star’s mouth is on its underside, so when it catches food, the sea star will wrap its arms around the animal’s shell and pull it open just slightly. Then the sea star pushes its stomach through its mouth and into the bivalve’s shell, digests the animal, and slides its stomach back into its own body. This allows the sea star to eat larger prey than it would otherwise be able to fit into its tiny mouth.
  8. Sea stars do have eyes as a spot at the end of each arm. While a five-armed sea star has five eyes, the 40-armed sun star has 40. A sea star eye looks like a red spot. It doesn’t see much detail but it can sense light and dark.
  9. Rather than a brain, a sea star has a decentralized nervous system, with nerves extending into each arm, something that allows each arm to operate independently while coordinating with the others.
  10. Predators include birds, fish, and sea otters.

 

Maybe this will help place the biggest mountains

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

So many of my posts from the Pacific Northwest mention big, glacier-clad stratovolcanoes, or stratocones, that are found roughly every 50 miles from northern California to the Canadian border. Yakima is to the right (or east, under the word “Helens”) of Mount Adams, but Rainier was easier to access and explore.

Baker came into play during my trips to the North Cascades, and Hood on our trips to Portland, Oregon. The others in Oregon and California framed our one dash down to San Francisco.

 

With the harvest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Kitty’s new place: the smell, the copper drain ring in the kitchen sink, the freezer box suspended within the refrigerator all remind me of Gran’s second-floor apartment. All of those motionless Sunday afternoons hearing invisible traffic, bells, and wind.

Sign outside her window

FORD (blue
LINCOLN (white
MERCURY (red

just like our place in Prairie Depot, Ohio

~*~

A fine salad Kitty created tonight

Pieces of homegrown
watermelon
cantaloupe
peaches

~*~

One of every five commercial apples in the U.S. was grown in Yakima County. Peaches, pears, plums, apricots, and cherries were also valued fruit harvests. They play a major role in my Nearly Canaan novel.

Irrigation had come a long way from the ditches used in orchards in this circa 1913 Webster & Stevens glass negative photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Orchard labels from Yakima in a Chris Light photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Lithograph label from California Historical Society collection …

~*~

13:IX:77

Pickers began on the apples this morning

seis y media

first the Goldens: the reds come off later

man with a limp
carries the ladder

~*~

14:IX

Ordered new car yesterday, Subaru

Legs for Kitty’s loom finally arrived after a long wait: it’s now “grown up”

Mention of Kitty taking the Greyhound to Ellensburg …

~*~

Where did I hope to be at 30? And how close am I?

Where have I been? What dreams and teachings have I forgotten?

A dusty novel manuscript, an unopened violin case, a holy title I seldom use — and all of these chains to Maya

~*~

28:IX

apples, gone from the orchard
at least around the house
prop sticks stacked between the rows
ladders, folded
sweet smell of bins
awaiting the straddle buggy

She’s in a bummer today. Not a single good word till I got mad and screamed and left the house and mowed the lawn.

Our orchard shack cleaned, inside and out, everything back in place and straight. TV moved from the meditation room [living room] to the bedroom. Good vibes back, our home is home.

~*~

3:X:77

[Desert reality}:

How strange that dew should be a sign of autumn!

This ink has an odor I now associate with Mr. Weiner’s junior high school art classes and later with my high school art class wash room.

Overheard: Yeah, Fort Lewis is a wild place. Kids go in, find live grenades. Fort Carson, too — stretches almost from Colorado Springs to Boulder. They wanted to expand it but faced a vote.

~*~

10:X:77

Called Subaru, told our car’s on the way, probably off the boat on Friday. Last boatload, they couldn’t get our five-speed, though it was promised, per the salesman.

The mail had a letter to Mrs. James Hodson from Mom Moran …

~*~

Later in month:

Sharon P from Kitty’s Ohio Northern days showed up in the Central State art building, wants to be an actress, just got a divorce. Seems Kitty really dumped on my in her journal the night before, can’t figure out why we’re married, “Most people need each other but we don’t,” ignoring the joys of shared freedoms. So Sharon’s husband had come in and asked why not, I’d say they were never married. And now she’s coming to visit us in the orchard?

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Along more than artistic lines

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Canadian Opera’s Marriage of Figaro at the Capitol [theater in Yakima]: well done yet I’m perplexed by what makes a performance exciting and vital rather than merely competently technical …

I’m sure I enjoyed it all the same. It is one of my favorite operas.

~*~

By the way, in reviewing my journals, I see there were more musical performances in my life during those years than I’ve recalled.

 

Slices of life

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

An evening party in town, a political party fundraiser, after a rare rain had finally soaked the earth …

An old woman’s bathroom, ointments, creams, bottles of prescriptions, tweezers, scissors, lipsticks, perfumes, dirty towels, an unpleasant smell. Quotations taped to the wall.

Hamburgers on the grill. Why do none of their names stick for me? Why don’t I want to speak?

Two old women sit mysteriously behind their cigarettes, one in golfing attire, the other in a pink dress. Sometimes I don’t want a cocktail. I can’t find my friends. Who are these infants, crawling around my legs? Why did I find this place?

~*~

Don’t ever want to live again where I can’t see the Milky Way — Eternal Light — River of Light — our home in the universe.

[Not knowing there was a long dark period ahead.}

~*~

Kitty found an apartment in E’burg and is excited, a “place like Laura’s” or our “town house.” A bohemian dump. Maybe even my encampment on Mondays with a college library or movies and jaunts to the mountains … even courting her anew …

Dinner at New York Pagoda Café …

~*~

Picked up a hitchhiker on my way to work this afternoon. Seldom stop nowadays, did so today as an afterthought, his smile and the modesty of his destination: Union Gap. Fact was, he was walking, not standing; his big backpack barely fit in the Bug’s backseat. Turned out he’s a picker from Tempe, Arizona. Worked last five days on pears, $20 his best day’s pay. Got his check today. Getting cold, wished he hadn’t lent out his second sleeping bag to a friend with a job in town. He puts one inside the other. Once he’s home, he’ll play basketball, get a student ID, perhaps take an acting class.

“Oakland,” he says, “a lot of baseball players come from there.”

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

It has to be the story you’re drawn to

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If you’re dreaming of writing a book, here’s some perspective.

  1. “Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende
  2. “The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.” — Susan Sontag
  3. “Run your own race. Don’t worry about how fast someone else writes, how much another author makes, how many followers another author has. Write what makes you excited, and the enthusiasm will come through on the page.” — Christina Lauren
  4. “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Stephen King
  5. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
  6. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” — Madeleine L’Engle
  7. “I always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau, too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one’s head is particularly fresh. The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking while still in bed or during the walk.” — Leo Tolstoy
  8. “The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” — Gustave Flaubert
  9. “You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs
  10. “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep.” — Mark Twain

Some of them seem to think it has to be book-length. Short and sweet can be compelling, too.

 

Looking at the notebooks themselves, beyond their content

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

My journaling in college-style spiralbound notebooks would continue for another seven years before getting interspersed with hardbound sketchbooks. I wouldn’t move away from them altogether until mid-’87.

Some of the habit no doubt was reenforced by the fact the notebooks were cheap. Money was always tight for me. I also enjoyed picking them up casually in bookstores, especially in and around university campuses.

They’ve always been workbooks for me, something of the moment. Frankly, I never expected to live this long, and any posterity was intended for my published poems, fiction, histories, and essays.

Look at how some of mine opened in this period.

Vol. 49, 1 July 77 / day after the full moon: blue Western College Bookstore Association, 100 sheets, usual size

Vol. 43, Turns out to be the second a spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch 400 series, 9-by-12, 100 pp, fine arts paper. Cover in Cordoba Brown (First of three in series.) Entries in large, black, chancery-cursive script. Quite elegant.

Vol. 43, 1 Sept. 77, Orchard Shack. (Numbered out of order.)

 Vol. 42, 1:X:77 Orchard Shack. So this is really out of sequence! Covers just the month of October …

The first of my beloved longbooks was not from Cornell in ’71 ….

Now they morph into long unruled sketchbooks … or so but rather a spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch 400 series, 9-by-12, 100 pp, fine arts paper. Cover in Cordoba Brown (First of three in series.) Entries in large, black, chancery-cursive script. Quite elegant.

Vol. 44, 1 Nov. 77, Orchard Shack, the third of the Strathmore sketchbooks

Observing seasons
in one place

Note the impact on Hometown News, Nearly Canaan, and Secret Side of Jaya. Also the poetry, especially American Olympus …

Each journal volume somehow opens anew, yet usually fades off at the end.

~*~

I wonder how others approach the practice. I’ve heard of using loose-leaf pages and binders, to facilitate reordering of pages. An alternative is to have several volumes at a time, each devoted to a different subject.

Use of writing instruments can also be considered. Ballpoint pens gave way to felt-tips, for instance, and much later fountain pens. As for journaling exclusively on a laptop or smart phone? The plot thickens …

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.