Walking the tightrope … to where? Deadline after deadline

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As the new year opened, I had been in Yakima as long as any of my other locations since graduating from college. There was no sense that this would be “it” for the rest of my life, but there was a sense that I was on the right track for a big move within a few years, likely to Seattle, the Queen City not just of Washington state but the entire Northwest.

I was still enthralled by the wilderness at hand and my explorations on trails or logging roads. Our Quaker worship group kept the spiritual flame alive that had been nurtured through the ashram, but this time with a peace and social justice awareness that the yoga center strictly avoided. My poems were finding publication in small-press periodicals, the way writers build their reputations. My wife was back on track toward earning her college degree, no matter the larger questions regarding our marriage. Despite its primitive condition, our shack in the orchard was a better fit for us than the quasi-suburban style of our previous duplex, and our landlords, Ivar and Phyllis, and their two sons also served as family.

All in all, I had much to feel excited about.

The key to all this, admittedly, was my income from the newspaper. Still low, compared to other professions, but higher than what I’d earned elsewhere. Credit the Newspaper Guild union for that, even if I was on a management track.

Quite simply 1978 would be a huge year for me as a journalist.

~*~

Soon after New Year’s, Kent posted Day News Editor spot for application, now that Maury had retired.

As I noted, Gil says from within, Kent’s leaning but not committed to me. My element of independence is a complication.

Feel myself in limbo again. By working as a cutting edge, have I cut myself and ended my usefulness here?

Am I just tired, tired of being “asst.” — desiring, perhaps, to just ride rim and rest yet also afraid to stop, afraid of destroying “my career.”

“Go after it aggressively,” Gil’s advice — letter, plan, etc.

What would it have been like working, say, as a plumber for my dad, knowing that someday the business would be mine? Fitting pipes together rather than lines of poems … Would their church have been sufficient?

~*~

In the end, I landed the position but had to keep it under wraps for a while. The biggest gain for me would be having four weeks of vacation a year, rather than two. I could still bank holidays and paid personal days, as I had previously, for getaways. And, yes, there was a bump up in salary.

~*~

Friday, watching Gayman [Frank was our Night News Editor, a step up from me] and Kent size up our new man — an expensive dinner at T’bird [I hadn’t gotten that royal treatment]. Earlier, announcement of staff changes was posted: Belcher reacted, “I think I’ll send flowers to Tippet.” Snickers in the newsroom, no congratulations from anyone except city editor Jim Wallace on my promotion.

3 May: Gayman off on vacation, two rough weeks for me as I filled in for him … 10 extra hours at the office last week …

Indian fishing platforms at Union Gap … salmon dip-netting seen during my commute to and from the office.

Another rough week: Gayman and the Spulers (Phyllis and Dean) all off. Whiz, Macknicki, Kent, Wallace, [Rob] Tucker, and me — downcast, our publisher on Kent’s back over irrational matters … [see in his obituary he had dropped out of school at 15 and later lied to get into the Navy WWII … later earned a BA in business, University of Washington].

Tippet, noting an active Mormon friend’s remark that when a couple marries at the temple, they must consummate the marriage before assembled church elders. Is it true?

The AP dispatch of Donny Osmond’s wedding mentioned that Mormon’s are forbidden from discussing what occurs in the temple but the couple did come out smiling. (Read what you want between the lines.)

Phil Spuler, remarking on a story we did about local official George Eastman: “A lot of people in this town won’t believe he’s had threats on his life. They think this is a friendly town. It’s not.”

And I thought of Fostoria, “home of hospitality,” yet a strange place, as I came to see.

Phil said Eastman’s quotes sounded familiar; many people coming here have said the same. Then Kent said he’d felt the same things, both as a top editor and as a parochial school board member.

“Swami Jnana sez it’s hard to be both a newsman and a poet.”

17 June: I’ve been a full-time professional journalist ten years now — how long ago and faraway that summer internship at the Journal Herald seems now. Met Nikki ten years ago this coming December. Gran has been dead and Kay gone from my life, too. The searching and suffering intensified — God, how did I survive that?

Five years now, out of the ashram. Or the Shankaracharya Pitham, as it’s now known.

Work today frustrating. Farm mag dummies late, then a two-hour meeting telling us we’re coding wrong (the codes keep changing). Me angry over Perth’s “There’s only one person around here dumber than Kent and that’s Hodson.” Let him sweat the copy flow Wednesday night (tomorrow) …

Vacations are hitting the news desk and all these damn computer shutdowns. I spent 7 a.m. till midnight Friday at the office, then noon till 7 Saturday. Still so far behind.

Anything to make the 5-star edition easier on me, so that I can address my other sections.

JMack handles the shop’s interruptions so well, as well as Purdy’s foot-dragging, when it occurs.

5 Aug, a Saturday: Company picnic tomorrow, “strongly recommended”

Completely exhausted, damn office, I’m trying to cover for three vacations without any assistance, and it’s simply too much.

Carol and Phil will have new responsibilities when they get back. I’m cutting Home, Entertainment, and the TV mag free …

Another 10-hour workday — still trying to get weddings etc. in the tube — 20 done today, 20 to go …

12 Aug, Saturday: Workt at office yesterday from 7:15 a.m. till 9 p.m., exhausted, ready for Marriott to be back on Tuesday (will give her the TV and Entertainment sections to dummy, and put more controls on Femme).

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Noah only had to take them two-by-two via an ark  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the struggles I had as a writer was in trying to keep abreast of the riches presented me in my wider world despite the upheavals of my professional life. Just as I would be getting centered into one landscape, I was yanked into another, as if being dropped into yet one more planet. The sources of inspiration kept changing faster than I could record them in any depth. It’s a wonder I didn’t drown.

Among the drafts I’ve uncovered in my journals review, the ones now available as free PDF downloads at my Thistle Finch digital bookstore, please consider these Chronicles: Buddha Notes, Endless Prairie, and Thunder Cloud.

Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.

 

Just what makes a region distinctive? It does get deeply personal

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Also from the Yakima library, at the time a volume that became influential in my emerging thinking in poetry and fiction and even spirituality: Regional Perspectives: An Examination of America’s Literary Heritage, edited by John Gordon Burke.

From the chapter, “Crossing the Midwest” by John Knoepfle:

The mind wants to entertain the notion that the further west the frontier the more primitive the life. But that is not so, and that is why the Midwest is so puzzling … And great rafts of hardwood timber were floated down the Ohio River to Cincinnati and Louisville as late as the First World War. … There is room for a native literature in German that remains to be translated … cultures that are supposedly dormant or provincial have a way of flickering into life and proving themselves dramatically related to the contemporary mind. …

Another characteristic of the mid-continental mind is its very hazy sense of itself … But their [cities’] distances from one another help them to maintain life styles that are distinct. … Where is Dodge City? [little awareness of the religious sects and traditions] … (something about a Midwestern ragtime that cannot be explained except in terms of German right-hand piano technique and Black left-hand chord progression arrangements) …

This was all a revelation to me, as would the radical element of the Midwest that Kenneth Rexroth remembered from his youth in Indiana and Chicago.

Had I stayed in the Midwest, where would any of this have shown up in my writing? Or did it, in the exile after Yakima? I would certainly find some of it in my genealogy research that would begin a half-dozen years later and, beyond that, on my mother’s side in Missouri, which technically isn’t Midwest but in my case, definitely German, in part. In discussions of blogging, I would be surprised to see that a tag of Midwest or Midwestern had no impact.

Where does  the book Anti-California show up in all of this?

I thought I was free of the Midwest, in a progression my novel Nearly Canaan explores, but cruel fate would prove otherwise.

Remember, my ashram training had taught me to be aware of vibes and the fact that different places had their own vibrations. My, did Yakima and the surrounding lands!

Or, “If it’s got sugar in it, it’s cake; if it doesn’t, it’s bread,” as someone local said of William O. Douglas’ new book at the time. [The blatantly liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice had returned for his summer home in the Cascades, upriver near Mount Rainier.]

I was still trying to digest previous places I had dwelled in or otherwise experienced.

Remind me that not everyone has lofty ambitions.

~*~

As I noted:

Subway Hitchhikers?
Network of the Heart

Canary folded
= Teletype writer =
Canyon hopper

~*~

My, I was moving up in life! This journaling was getting Serious.

Trying to make sense of my work schedule at this point. “Time for a break = 4 days off, a schedule switch, my last week’s Monday off is today, then my normal Sunday-Monday off days followed by my Labor Day = a well-earned rest. I’m too tired to go to the mountains. Instead, I’m off to the laundromat.” [Good luck if you can follow that. Commiseration if it sounds familiar.]

By mid-October: Using the tape player to rework poems, a strangest joy, back to voice and recognizing what remains incomplete or experimental forms that contain more than I had thought. Also journal notes that need no revision to become poems.

~*~

18:X:77: Our photographer Whiz’s birthday (he was turning 24 to my 29): Snyder’s essays in Old Ways confirms I’ve been on the right track after all, seeking relationships of people to unique landscapes/environments/cultures … [a half century later, what happens when the land itself changes as a consequence of climate upheavals?] …

~*~

19:X, in checkout line at the library, taking a midmorning break from the office, met a pipe-smoking bearded fellow my age or so, Barry Grimes, checking out Allan Tate, Ed Koch, etc. Got his contact info. He and a buddy are editing a new journal along the lines of Paterson. I’m welcome to submit.

Wait, pipe-smoking in the public library???

[A later note in the journal proclaims the tabloid newsprint publication that resulted.]

Comparing [George] Szell’s early and late recordings of Beethoven’s Eroica against Max Rudolf’s; as always, I was amazed by the vitality and clarity / discipline Max obtained, as demonstrated in Cincinnati. The constant daring in each line, each phrasing having a stressed note. (Suppose the stress is largely spontaneous, varying from performance to performance: the players’ improvisation?) Yet the trills together (where Szell gets flutters). The amber warm clarity of tone. Structure revealed. The pivotal balance of conflicting possibilities: a disciplined wildness, savage elegance.

[And this was a period of my life with few live classical performances.]

Georgia O’Keeffe … demanded solitude as a painter … wouldn’t allow Stieglitz to enter the studio when she was painting …

As for Lake George? “Too much green.”

Not that I contested that later, in the vicinity. Green, it was.

~*~

12:XII: Conversation with Barry Grimes and Jim Bodeen: “I wouldn’t think you’d have any trouble getting published anywhere.”

My new longpoem more like Basho’s journeys — commentary linking poems rather than most English poetry.

Recitative and Aria
Potential for something there

Be clear or be clever?

Tribe: Neah Bay is our land because we spilled our blood for it,
a basket woven of snakes.

Symbols shaping the way we react to the land. [Wish I had more on that.]

~*~

25:X midnight

Acceptance of three poems from Roger and Dick (always surprising what editors choose, even when you know them) … with a note, “I like what you are doing. Your style is much harder and clearer. Keep to it.”

~*~

27:X

Among lingering impressions from Regional Perspectives ….

The belief that something remains intact in the backcountry, whether that be Vermont (and not Boston or Cambridge also as New England) or “upcountry” South (versus Atlanta or Nashville) …

How many respected but generally unknown writers are mentioned in passing?

There are great differences within each region …

Emotionally, the suffocation I’ve felt, even in Daffodil …

~*~

6:XII

… what my work lacks so much is the female (universal) element: softening, enveloping, making wet, warm …

Is all love-making feminine?

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

 

Can we categorize gallerygoers and the like?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Fine art is, after all, an extension of religion. Just look at museums, concert halls, theaters, even arenas as temples.

That said, here goes:

Proprietors: Middle-class or desiring to move up, the kulcher-seekers. Subcategories those seeking familiarity with the old, beside those with “taste,” a little knowledge of “masters.”

Those dragged through: Spouses, dates, children.

Those seeking Experience: Usually modernists with “taste” but possibly those seeking play within art, qualities antithetical to where art must be “serious.”

Fellow practitioners: Usually too poor to collect new work except by trading, but also the most critical and appreciative, depending.

Now, for atheists and agnostics?

After drafting this, I see parallels to dining out for fine cuisine or attending concerts, live theater, even cinema.

Care to add to the list?

 

Mobility issues, mostly

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Halloween (1977): 22 inches of new snow in Cayuse Pass, 4 in Snoqualmie Pass, two of our routes to Seattle … winter was already closing in.

The kid wrecked the Capri while trying to use the CB he had received for his birthday the night before. Had he been in the Triumph, he’d be dead.

From loose letters, carbon copy, Nov. 28, a now obsolete form of address: “Sirs:” Even “Sir” becomes questionable.

windy night
gusts to 55 mph
highway speed

not feeling well
as Kitty smelled on my breath

~*~

6 Nov, Wednesday, new car arrived today. Feels solid, runs beautifully.

Looking back, I’m surprised that we went with Subaru, at the time a new entry into the U.S. market. I draw a blank at trying to remember the process of signing all the papers or how I even picked up the car, considering that we (make that Kitty) decided we’d keep our VW Bug which had no trade-in value. 

That night, I surprised Kitty by driving up to E’Burg.. She loves the new car, its size and color. Took her to dinner.

Back at her apartment, a knock at the door. Two officers checking a strange odor in the hallway, fearing it might be more than rotting garbage. Inquiring about the neighbors. Any elderly? How long the smell? (A week.) Have you seen them recently? (Later she said her neighbor had been crying the day before. She almost offered her a ride to cheer her.) (Wait? In what?) On my drive home, I wondered: Did her neighbor kill the boyfriend she was kicking out? Is Kitty safe? She wouldn’t have answered the door if I weren’t there. Did the officer parked behind my car take down my license plate number? What was he radioing so long? They said a sheriff’s deputy reported the smell, but what was he doing in the building in the first place? Intrigue and foreboding, I presume …

Small-town cops, I’d say now, or perhaps federal ICE agents.

~*~

Mid-November

Snow flurries,
large flakes
briefly at noon

Nancy and Len’s visit all the way to our shack near Wapato, south of Yakima … [surprised to see they did that, though she had parents in the Seattle area … wish I had more!] Sleeping bags on our floor? She was a fine bubbly presence in our Indiana University endeavor.

Kitty’s been asked to place two of her sculptures in a Central [State University] show this spring — it’s by invitation only. Any reassurance she finds will quickly fade …

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

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.