Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
Does anyone else savor cornmeal mush?
It was a favorite breakfast when I was growing up in Ohio, but not an everyday offering.
First, it would be served as a hot cereal, and afterward, after hardening in bread pans, it would be fried in slices and served in melted butter and syrup.
I still remember the reaction when I was head chef (briefly) at the ashram and served it for brunch. It was vegetarian and fit into that part of our yoga practice. But half of the staff and guests were openly baffled. What is this stuff? It wasn’t anything like the buckwheat kasha they’d introduced me to. The other half, though, delighted in it.
It’s still not an everyday dish in my household, but I still relish the moments when it comes up.
My wife, of Southern roots, is more familiar with grits – a variant – and also the Italian polenta, which is much more expensive for no understandable reason.
The one place I’ve seen it on the menu is at the Bob Evans restaurants, where it’s deep fried and typically sells out early in the day.
Cornmeal does show up in my novel The Secret Side of Jaya and on many supermarket shelves, especially under the Hodgson Mill label, reflecting some distant relations of mine who went back to inserting the “g” into our surname.
So where, if at all, do you use or eat cornmeal? It was a basic foodstuff of much of early America.
Whale watching from shore
Looking down a wooded, snowy slope to a narrow, deep river – a steady stream/parade of sharks, tuna – big fish, almost minke size, all swimming in one direction silently, presumably upstream. Why? And why do I presume that? Me, watching – going off to get the kid, too.
Happy feeling … awe and mystery.
Revisiting an earlier dream site, I’m viewing whales from land as they frolic in the harbor beneath us.
I’ve since relocated to a small town where whales are, in fact, seen from the land. Just not many or often.
Later, my dreams returning to Ohio: Yellow Springs/Glen Helen (which now requires admission – imagine, trying to pay an admission fee in or even for a dream). Here the once-golden goddess becomes quite agitated and defensive when I mention my familiarity with whales.
Why is she even there?
Looking for sportswriters and editors who crossed over to the news side
Through much of my career, I never quite appreciated the sports staff. The sports desk was over there in its own corner or maybe even a separate room or suite. Unlike the cops beat or business or education or even the courts coverage that filled the “real” news.
But it did produce some of the best political writers and editors in the business.
Their perspective, facing two teams, essentially – especially baseball, with its daily games in season, and delivering on tight deadlines – provided a character-based focus in contrast to those of us who were more policy driven.
Its baseball angle for some fine writers first came to my attention in John Updike’s prose and later David Halberstam, though they didn’t have newspaper experience.
The drama of contests, strategies, determination, hard work, fairness, and a vision is central in their work, along with the reality that so much of the field is about losers who persist and sometimes come out on top or have lasting influence, especially within the realm of a hometown team. Not a bad paradigm.
These former sportswriters and editors were around me throughout my career, though I never kept a list and now wish I had. On the national scene in my time, though, I can point to Charles P. Pierce, Mike Lupica, Ward Just, and Mike McAlery as prime examples of those who broadened their game.
Curiously, I haven’t seen that crossover occurring much from a football foundation. Perhaps that game’s more like a weekly television series or shouting match than the realities of a daily grind.
I’ll let up for now before I’m playing out of my league. But I do want to hear more from others – players and fans alike.
We were awaiting the return of the Raold … and then Hurricane Lee thickened the plot
We were hoping the Norwegian expedition cruise ship would get better weather than it had last year on its inaugural port-of-call stop in town. It was greeted by a blustery deluge. The event planned for Friday was to be the ship’s first stop in the USA for the Pole-to-Pole, four- ocean cruise that originated in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Here’s how it looked last year in some really nasty wind and rain. Now I’m getting superstitious.
The trajectory of Hurricane Lee is increasingly looking like a landfall somewhere near us, and that had the Norwegians deciding to change course and bypass Eastport.
However, it’s also caused two other cruise ships to head for shelter here, both return visitors who appreciated their previous welcome.
We do hope our electrical power holds up in the coming storm and that Lee veers more toward the Nova Scotia side of the latest forecast.
As a matter of perspective in the headlines
Thank goodness, Biden’s not in our face every day.
Especially with another outrage, another assault on decency, like his predecessor.
Instead, he’s too busy doing the job.
And there are those who fault him for that.
As for his family loyalties, look in the mirror before speaking. Please.
America’s most celebrated wildlife artist was a Frenchman
Or more accurately, the bastard son of a Frenchman in Haiti.
Yet, despite the iconic honor given his name, few have seen his legendary work in its full glory.
I’m speaking, of course, of John James Audubon, in the anglicized version of his name.
While I had viewed his work behind glass framing in art museums, nothing prepared me for my hands-on encounter with the four folio print volumes. That happened in Indiana University’s rare book Lilly Library when a librarian interrupted to ask if I would help her return two of the volumes to the cart so she could take them by elevator back to the stacks.
Yes, they really did need two people to move. As I’m seeing now, the books measured about 29½ inches by 39½, otherwise known as double elephant paper, the 435 prints being the same size as the original drawings.
We decided to take a peek and were both blown away. It was as if the birds had been pressed full-size onto the plate. You could actually see the veins in each feather. And that was, it turns out, a copy of the original. Oh, yes, and each species was presented full size, with some favored vegetation.
As for the color? Unbelievable. You have no idea how much is lost through any glass.
We both admitted it was too much for a single viewing.
Now, for ten more facts.
- As an 18-year-old, Jean-Jacques Audubon was sent to Pennsylvania on a false passport to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s army.
- A feud originating during his research in Kentucky closed off American support for young Audubon’s work. Instead, his backing came from England, where subscribers underwrote the classic Birds of America.
- One bookseller claimed it would never succeed because the book took up an entire table to view and would render other volumes useless.
- A reduced-size two-volume collection, a gift from my younger daughter, has me appreciating the radical design and style of many of the images. There was no way, after all, to approximate the original color, yet any approximation opened other dimensions.
- He worked from actual specimens he had shot and killed, arranged in lifelike settings.
- He did create a controversy regarding the smell of turkey vultures, or what some of us call buzzards.
- Some of the birds he discovered remain a mystery.
- He’s known mostly by copies of copies or even additional copies, each time diluting the impact of the originals.
- He had nothing to do with the national Audubon Society or its Massachusetts and New Hampshire spinoffs.
- He’s buried in New York City.
I’ve really been fighting the urge to blast away politically
After all, my college degree is in political science and I spent a career in community journalism, meaning I had to stay bottled up and objectively neutral, but what’s been happening in national politics in the Trump era is so appalling that when I sit down to create new blog posts, so many are snide comments along the lines of bumper stickers of a FU nature directed at the idiots.
Not that you’d want to display one on your car without the risk of being shot in the neck. Yes, that’s where the level of civility has sunk in this country.
And then there’s the sense of the futility of building sand castles in the beach in advance of tides that will overrun them.
It ain’t been easy.
So for now, I keep holding my thoughts on all of it in reserve, not that I’ve found any of it easy. As I did in my last decade or so of editing the news.
A recent study suggesting that the party divide is ultimately about males, as in the white male, and everything else. Seriously, I read it in the New York Times.
Like Donald Trump is any role model to emulate in a meaningful relationship?
That’s how low we’ve fallen, friends.
Smoke on the lake
Autumn is already in the air.
Kinisi 174
backup
beepers
(so that takes care of one foot
Jnana's Red Barn 