One of the sensations in watching a full solar eclipse comes as the light seems to become more focused before going into twilight. I skip the discussion of optics and physics. Here’s how it looked in the trees around us in the April 2024 event here in Maine. Something similar happened with shadows.
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
The dope on soap
Yes, one more thing we take for granted. Or, as I used to think, “granite.”
So here a ten things to consider.
- Soap goes way back in antiquity, starting with the boiling of fats with ashes and water, though the Latin word for it originates with “clay.”
- It’s been a mark of civilized people and sometimes the upper classes, from Babylon and Rome on.
- Over the years, olive, palm, and vegetable oils gave rise to other varieties, including Castille soap.
- Today, soap comes either in solid form, liquid, or powdered form, based on their use of sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. Liquid is considered easiest to use.
- Bar soaps have a lower environmental impact, according to one study.
- It’s sold in a number of specialty applications, including hand, face, shaving, body, dish, laundry, or floor-cleaning applications. Don’t overlook antibacterial, either, although it carries some long-term health concerns. Or the wide range of scents that can be infused.
- Ivory, first marketed in 1879, was the first soap that floated. Yeah, and it was 99 and 44/100s percent pure, according to the company’s claims.
- Modern synthetics, appearing around 1940 with Tide, also prevented the growth of germs.
- Soap can also be used to ease zippers or lubricate squeaky hinges, threading needles, and screws.
- The bubbles are incredibly thin and sometimes so much fun. Or even romantic, in a deep bathtub.
Maybe that’s what I’ll be giving everyone this Christmas.
Another round of Proust as a prompt
I recently deleted a file full of personal questions.
Personally, most of them didn’t fit, and besides, now that I’m no longer submitting writing to quarterlies and reviews for publication, I have no need for my own contributor’s notes.
Still, I found these responses from working other sets of questions. I am curious how you’d answer.
- CREATIVE WORK ENVIRONMENT: Solitary.
- WHAT COLOR IS YOUR BEDROOM? Pure white with Japanese blue accents
- OH HAPPY DAY: Sitting in the warm silence after Quaker meeting for worship has settled. Especially when the aches and pains stay away at this age.
- Or a summer afternoon along our pocket beach of the North Atlantic.
- Or dining together on our deck in warm weather or sitting beside a wood fire in winter.
- SPACE JAM: Coming upon the wild rhododendrons in full bloom atop Roan High Knob in North Carolina after a wild of arduous backpacking on the Appalachian Trail as an awakening adolescent.
- RECENT INSPIRATION: Choral singing.
- DREAM SUBJECTS: Eagles, osprey, whales, time under sail on the water.
- DREAM ASSIGNMENTS: The fine arts, spiritual community.
- WHOLE NEW WORLDS: The many dimensions of life my college girlfriend introduced to me, the life-changing experiences of the ashram, living in the desert orchard in Washington state, New England with the amazing woman in my life.
- FIRST BRUSH WITH FAME: Sessions with any of the cartoonists and columnists I served as a newspaper syndicate field representative, or was it …
- WHAT WOULD YOU BE IF YOU WEREN’T A WRITER? Really retired. At this point, the question is better recast, “What would you have been?” – something I never could quite figure out.
- WHAT COLOR AUTOMATICALLY LIFTS YOUR SPIRITS? Cobalt, indigo, or electric blue.
- THANKFUL FOR: The three incredible divas in my life, even though they don’t sing, as well as Cobscook Friends Meeting.
- FLOWERS: Daffodils, rhododendron, lilacs, sunflowers.
- DESSERT: Crème brule or rich vanilla ice cream.
- SNACK: Cashews, grilled cheese sandwiches, popcorn.
- GADGET: A corkscrew, branch loppers, charcoal grill ignition tower.
- CURRENT HOBBYHORSE: American Illuminist composers, as I term the Romantic-era masters.
- Also, Quaker Light/Seed/Truth.
- CLOTHING & DECOR STYLE: Yard sales, touch of Amish. Unpretentious and comfortable.
- DOMINANT COLOR IN MY WARDROBE: Shades of gray.
- PROFESSIONAL PEAK (SO FAR): Publication of the novels.
- MUSICAL THERAPY: A cappella part-singing
- RECENT TRIPS: Cruising in the historic schooner Lewis R. French on Penobscot Bay.
- FAVORITE MOMENT: Sliding into bed next to my wife.
- MY CARD: The usual MC or Visa.
- WORST GUILT TRIP: Ahem. (Things I’ve said, over the years.)
- WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CRUSH? Both Lutherans, one a year older than me and now deceased.
- WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST LOVE? Kay, after high school
- WHAT’S YOUR MOST FEMININE QUALITY? Tears, on the rare occasions when they come.
- WHAT WOMAN IS YOUR GUILTY FANTASY? Freckles.
- IS THERE ANYTHING YOU MISS ABOUT BEING UNATTACHED? Well, there was discretionary income.
- WITH SO MUCH COMPETITION, HOW DO YOU SIZE UP? I’ve largely moved solo, to my own beat, in out-of-the-mainstream circles.
- YOU ALWAYS NEED MORE: Time. Or is that compassion?
- EVERYONE COULD ALWAYS DO WITH LESS: Self-absorption.
- WHY I DO WHAT I DO: To remember, to discover where I’ve been, to look closer at my experience of life, to map the trail of my life, especially when it reflects others.
- BONA FIDES: BA in political science, Indiana University, working with Vincent Ostrom; extended residency in the Poconos Ashram, Swami Lakshmy-Devi’s hermitage; two published novels
- GOLD-STAR EXCELLENCE: Eagle Scout in sixth-grade, yes siree
- AMBITIONS: To develop a widespread readership; to rebuild the Society of Friends.
- FAVORITE SPOTS: The Bold Coast of Downeast Maine, the sub-Alpine range of Mount Rainier, Music Hall in Cincinnati.
- WOULD LOVE TO HAVE DINNER WITH: My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Hodgson, to confirm the pirate attack in crossing to America and learn the details, including the names of his parents and siblings and his relationship with Moses Harland, whom I presume to be his uncle.
- YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY: True friends.
- ONE DAY I HAD HOPED TO: Be influential and famous.
- FAVORITE DISCOVERY: The early Quaker understanding and practice of Light/Seed/Truth.
- NECESSARY EXTRAVAGANCE: Owning an old house.
- FAVORITE CHARITY: Dover Friends Meeting. Also, local arts organizations, public radio, American Friends Service Committee, Friends Committee on National Legislation.
- CAR: An old Chevy Sonic, but my favorite was a very used canary-color BMW 1600 coupe.
- COCKTAIL: very dry martini (Bombay sapphire, with olives).
- CREATIVE WORK ENVIRONMENT: solitary at the keyboard beside the north window, with or without classical music.
- PROFESSIONAL PEAK (AS A JOURNALIST): East Coast field representative for Tribune Media Services newspaper syndicate
- MOST UNUSUAL GIFT: A slice of rubber Swiss cheese in the mail; blown-glass Galileo weather globes; a bottle of dishwashing detergent and two towels as a wedding present.
- MOST INTERESTING SOUVENIR: Cow skull and elk vertebrae from the Yakima Valley.
- WHAT IS YOUR MOST MASCULINE QUALITY? Snoring. Aversion to shopping. Fire-building skills. Sense of direction. Love of the wild outdoors. Immersion in single projects from start to finish. Closing doors, turning off lights. Trapping and transporting squirrels. A readiness to catch bugs and crush them with my fingers.
- WHAT’S THE ONE THING IN YOUR MEDICINE CABINET YOU WOULDN’T WANT OTHERS TO KNOW ABOUT? All the bottles that have long passed their expiration date.
- WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT PROJECT? All of this blogging. And cleaning up some earlier collections.
- BREAKTHROUGH MOMENT: When diagramming sentences began to make sense. Enrolling in my first course with Vincent Ostrom. Taking up yoga. Moving to Yakima. Moving to Baltimore. Undergoing psychotherapy. Moving to New England.
- THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: Returning to the ashram, when Swami demanded. Dropping my partner before the wedding or in Yakima. Going to work at the Detroit Free Press. Admitting there was no future with the cellist and thus moving directly to New England, rather than Baltimore. Plainness, along the lines of dairy farming in the valley.
Revisiting these exercises, I’m struck by how many other desires not included here have been fulfilled or are no longer applicable. Consider CAN’T WRITE WITHOUT: caffeine. Today my mug’s filled with decaf, per doctor’s orders. Caffeine counteracts one of my meds.
Kinisi 287
X
RAY
TED
A moment in the life
Late afternoon at the former West Quoddy Coast Guard lifesaving station. The boathouse, lower right, sits at the edge of Lubec Channel, with Campolbello Island, New Brunswick running above it. A bridge, barely visible here, connects Canada to the United States, with the town of Lubec continuing along the water. You may even detect the “sparkplug” lighthouse sitting in the water. The city of Eastport, where we live, can be seen beyond the bridge.
We’re still looking forward to a transformed kitchen and a lot more
Under other conditions, this is where we would have started our renovations.
The kitchen, in our firmament, is the heart of a home. The one in our historic house needed some serious attention. Let me amend that, needs extensive remodeling.
The electric Montgomery Ward stovetop we inherited has a dead burner. If you’re too young to know about Monkey Wards, it was a major Chicago-based retail chain and mail-order empire that went bankrupt and out of business before Sears Roebuck. If I need to explain Sears and its Kenmore brand appliances, you really do need a history lesson. I’ll let you give me one in current pop culture in exchange. Back to the kitchen, for now. There’s no oven, other than the small tabletop convection unit we brought up with us. It’s definitely not big enough for a Thanksgiving turkey or a boneless beef prime rib, as was my birthday tradition in Dover, or even full trays of cookies for Christmas. A dishwasher is a necessity in today’s ideal world, especially when you consider my dishwashing skills, frankly, as falling short. The lack of decent electrical lighting over the sink doesn’t help. As for that lighting or additional electrical outlets? The list quickly grows. We weren’t expecting our redo to be as extensive as the one we undertook in Dover; do note, we also gleaned valuable insights from that. Or at least one of us had, the one whose opinion counts most.
Next to the kitchen was the mudroom, uninsulated and without electricity. We needed someplace to put a big freezer to augment the kitchen, garden, and marked-down grocery jackpots. The existing roof there was funky at best and leaking, along with exterior rot. New windows could point to space for new shelving, too. OK, we’ve addressed half of the mudroom checklist, for now.
The front door of the house, as previously noted, needs replacing, along with the downstairs windows and most of their sills. Anything to cut the heating bill, right?
At this point, we’ve decided to defer work on the downstairs bathroom aka the water closet.
Ditto for the emerging dining room slash crafts room with a butler’s pantry. The room which was my headquarters in the universe for five years.
And then, as for gutters? Or window dressings? Or new furnishings?
The bottom line in all of this has shifted but remains exciting, all the same.
Yet, when you’re married to one of the world’s great cooks, the state of the kitchen is a major consideration.
She and her elder daughter have some great ideas and dreams.
I, in turn, reap the benefits as these happen.
Addressing the dissemination of ideas in a changing world
Rifling through my remaining files, I recently came across an informal working paper I had drafted 50 years ago while working for the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington. At the time, I was employed as a social sciences editor but beginning to get really hooked on being a poet on the side, along with the entire small-press literary scene. This came in a break in my newspaper journalism career, which also figures into the considerations.
One of my challenges at the workshop involved getting our field research findings out to a diverse audience of researchers, public officials, and politicians. Traditional publishing avenues were becoming prohibitively expensive for our enterprise.
What I saw as the challenges in a changing publishing world at the time seems truly prescient now as well as often naïve. The paper, “Thinking Thru the Future of the Realm of Publishing,” has been greatly eclipsed by the Internet, which wasn’t even on the horizon, as far as we knew.
Some of the problems, such as lack of compensation for intellectual property and vulnerability to piracy, seem larger than ever.
And there are still the challenges of establishing a readership and the related costs.
~*~
As I wrote:
There seems to be, at least as far as newspapers are concerned, a kind of decreasing level of literacy. This seems to be reflected in the declining reading scores reported over the ‘60s & early ‘70s in the SAT exams & other measures of reading abilities.
Perhaps this is nothing new, but in practical terms, as a measure the American adult illiterate — that is, incapable of reading the comics or Ann Landers with any degree of understanding or skill – it remains a challenge. Perhaps insurmountable.
On the other hand, the knowledge explosion is leading increasingly to the phenomenon Ortega y Gasset dubbed “the learned ignoramus” — the situation where individuals may be very deeply & narrowly trained in a field of technical specialization, but may also be very ignorant of other disciplines.
As an example of this phenomenon at work today, we can consider this: That two decades ago, a broadly-trained baccalaureate degree could be the threshold of the generalist — the PhD, the mark of the specialist. Today, the PhD is the threshold of the specialist, & the realm of research may lie far beyond his vision or understanding. In other words, perhaps, the minuteness of scholarly research today is so diverse & specialized that little of it fits into broad, theoretical concepts.
Are we at a point in which our investigations resemble a plant that has been given too much light, too much water, & too much food? Such a plant becomes weak & spindly, & collapses.
While that comparison may seem too strong, consider the problems of trying to keep abreast in one’s own field. There are far more journals in the social sciences, or in even political science or economics, than any researcher or scholar could possibly keep abreast of. How many journals are there on administration, urban problems, and police, that would affect even our own area of investigation?
I raise these two points because they do interact: the broadly- based, literate range of media would appear to be shrinking:
- a) The range of specialized knowledge gets further & further away from their abilities to report;
- b) The time required of specialists to keep abreast of their own specialties would decrease the time they have to spend with the more generalized, & hence more interdisciplinary, range of publications;
- c) The increasing costs of publication & distribution would weed out the more marginal, but still significant, publications in this range. (The real money in periodicals publication in the last decade has specialized mags, focusing, for example, on skiing or coin collecting — areas with a potentially specialized market for advertisers.)
~*~
The costs, especially of labor & paper, have escalated sharply in recent years, resulting in outrageously expensive book costs (at least in the traditionally published & distributed volumes): journal costs for libraries & institutions are something that a number of Workshop personnel have commented upon. The situation of hard-bound volumes & high-priced journals facing libraries is one of “rip off.”
[As for individuals?]
~*~
Simultaneously, libraries have been forced to install photo-copying machines as a means to prevent the mutilation of their collections by users with razors & other means of lifting pages for home use.
The entire library system is based upon user cooperation & consideration, which appears to be breaking down in many situations. In other words, if the theft rate & volume loss rate of some collections continues unabated, the library as a source of photocopy material may be in danger.
~*~
On the other hand, the existence of photocopying equipment introduces a threat to authors, editors, & publishers. Authors have faced readers who proudly proclaim that they have the writer’s work – in Xerox form. The author, of course, receives no royalty from these readers, despite the reader’s praise.
~*~
My, those photocopiers seem so benign compared to so much of the Internet!
Stay tuned for next week’s continuation.
~*~
That said, you can find my works in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain them.
He said, she said
He would have said alert but she’d counter twitchy
He would have said observant but she’d counter oblivious
He would have said free-thinking but she’d counter too serious
He would have said independent but she’d counter aloof
He would have said sensitive but she’d counter nervous
He would have said inquisitive but she’d say he rarely asks questions
He would have said accepting but she’d counter indecisive
He would have said nurturing but she’d counter cold
He would have said serious but she’d counter silent
He would have said playful but she’d counter negative
He would have said witty but she’d counter legalistic
He would have said intelligent but she’d counter uptight
He would have said slightly bent but she’d counter insecure
He would have said self-sufficient but she’d counter evasive
He would have said caring but she’d counter mean
He would have said spiritual but she’d ask how that makes him a better person
He would have said spirited but she’d counter lazy
He would have said somewhat reserved but she’d counter socially deficient
He would have said somewhat shy but she’d counter loner
He would have said elitist in quest of excellence and quality but she’d counter self-centered
He would have said egalitarian in opportunity and expectation but she’d counter workaholic
He would have said outdoorsy but she’d counter escapist
He would have said rainbow chaser but she’d counter impractical
He would have said aging but she’d agree
He would have said youthful but she’d counter bald
He would have said honest, direct but she’d counter defensive
He would have said exploring but she’d counter unemotional
He would have said hedonist but she’d counter lazy
He would have said ascetic but she’d counter dull
He would have said a bit gallant but she’d counter straight-laced
He would have said organized but she’d notice he rarely dusts furniture
He would have said self-starter but she’d counter with a list of projects
He would have said visionary but she’d counter icy
He would have said original but she’d counter quirky
He would have said inventive but she’d counter weird
He would have said creative but she’d counter unrealistic
He would have said hopeful but she’d counter inexpressive
He would have said responsive but she’d counter boring
He would have said kind, gentle but she’d counter too serious
He would have said frugal but she’d counter tight-fisted or fiscally irresponsible
He would have said financially marginal
but she would have countered too willing to pay full price
Now, for her side of the dialogue?
Another perspective on this life
After throwing myself into business crusades and tumultuous romantic relationships, I consider myself a survivor.
That’s even before we get to politics.
How about you?
Traveling across time
As they skirted New York City, they texted me this, not just to update their progress in traveling south but also knowing the memories it would trigger.
Back in my early days after college, this was in my circuit, even though Interstate 86 was still in the future.
Jnana's Red Barn 