Serious about lobstering
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
Random notes keep springing up in no particular order
Here are a few more.
- Attempting to bridge many unanticipated combinations.
- Classical music is a connection to history of social thought and imagination.
- In the face of Covid-19, are we facing the death of dining out? And face-to-face shopping?
- You treated fame the way you treated me, which may explain everything.
- I didn’t really want to be a swami. Now, now I see, I wanted to be a rabbi!
- The misapplication of “culture” to be norm rather than higher learning and other downfalls, as in “classic rock”
- Cool beans, eazy-peezy.
- Chickens in the garden.
- What we transplanted last week looks happy, and the rats are gone.
- Practice & Devotion. In either order.
~*~
See how my mind and heart work? Really?
Looking today, it’s hard to envision this as a center of shipbuilding
A third-generation shipbuilder, C.S. Huston at one point owned four shipyards on Shackford Cove – his father’s, on the south side of the water, and the William H. Hall and Jacob Shackford yards on its north side, as well as Aymar’s spar shop at the South End bridge, which has long since been filled in.
As an innovative entrepreneur, he early on erected a steam capstan to haul boats out of the water, along with a 600-foot marine railway made of thick beams set up as interlocking boxes filled with stones.
Huston lived in a Second Empire style house overlooking the yards, which he purchased from Hall in the late 1850s.
The shift to ships built of steel rather than wood changed everything. Maine had seemingly endless lumber at hand, but not steel. That also allowed for bigger vessels, meaning fewer could suffice for shipping. Finally, with the advent of the automobile, passengers stopped relying on steamships and that, too, ceased at the corner of this cove. But not before the world’s largest sardine cannery extended from its shore – a building 250 feet long.
It seems so quiet today.
‘Congratulations! You are qualified to get better services and a better rate.’
This is what I got in the mail from our cable company, a month or so after it had hiked our broadband fees by 30 percent. He they were now, returning with a pitch to cut the monthly bill to $5 under what we were paying earlier but with television channels included.
The first problem? We don’t have TV and don’t want it!
“Redeem your upgrade today.”
Who are they kidding? You can bet that a year from now that monthly bill will skyrocket. Trying to scale that back to where we were would be with just the broadband becomes the second, and bigger, problem.
Of course, the third problem overshadowing all of this is the inefficiency of unchecked monopoly. Where are the Teddy Roosevelt Republicans when we need them?
How do these companies justify their rates, anyway?
Kinisi 103
warm odor of a log cabin
somewhere back in my childhood
fix this, fix that
while wondering how things might have been different
Truly, he is risen!
For Eastern Orthodox Christians around the world, today is Pascha, or Easter. Having already celebrated at midnight and into the wee hours of the morning, the faithful return for a late-morning vespers service where the Gospel reading is from John 20:24-28, the story of the disciple Thomas, “the Twin.”
Rather than relying on second-hand rumors, he demands first-hand knowledge.
Wisdom, arise!
I thought somebody had left the lights on
But I knew nobody was home. Instead, the illumination was only the reflection of another brilliant dawn and blazing sunrise.
Within a sixteen-bar chorus
down for weeks on our heels constantly, commiserate how those children realize the glee of self-deception having lives of their own or a loving minute of introduction four-part cappella singing “Jesus Loves Me” at the reform school and then winter meeting in Fort Lauderdale lunch with Rukeyser and flew off to Chicago in windy subzero January the weekend the Los Angeles Rams stayed at our hotel before being trounced by the Bears and the city went ecstatic seemed appropriate to be flying out of town in that kind of hoopla for I was in new love, Praise the Lord, really, kiddos
Take a sneak peek at my next book’s cover
For several months now, you’ve been getting tastes of my upcoming book, but I have kept much of project under wraps, including the title.
The curtain goes up on that right now.
So roll the drums, please, and take a deep breath of anticipation. Here’s what I’m rolling out:
Do the title and image intrigue you? Pique your curiosity? Hold you for more than a split-second?
As I’ve discussed in previous posts, book covers – and magazines, too – are a specialized design challenge.
The ebook version has to work as a postage stamp, sizewise.
Print editions often get cluttered with pitches of all sorts, just in case one hooks a reader.
An effective title, of course, is a huge consideration, but not the only one.
~*~
Creating a compelling image that matches the content has been especially difficult in this case. The book spans more than 400 years, and I couldn’t find anything that quite reflected the place or its people, now or then, or that extended an appropriate emotional appeal.
A seismograph didn’t do it, though several geometric zig-zag patterns looked cool.
One design that excited me featured a portrait of John Greenleaf Whittier’s mother, but others saw her as forbidding. What I saw calm and collected they viewed as sorrowful and inhibited. Oh, well.
But then, while going through my own photos, I came across a late-autumn photo of the Cochecho River, scene of much of the action. I loved its timeless mystery and beauty and the fact it didn’t look generic to just about anywhere else in the world.
One of my earlier posts pointed out that the cover should promise the reader something rather than mirror the story. It’s a matter of eliciting a gut-level attraction.
Somehow, I hope you feel this cover leads backward into time, with the drama of a storm on the way. Just what is around that bend, anyway?
~*~
Please stay tuned for the release details in the days ahead.
Imagine what Marx would have said about Putin
Or even Stalin.
The revolution was supposed to be about liberating the people, not obliterating them. Well, we have seen more than a few of them run amuck. The guillotine was one example.
As for wealth being the cause of war and class oppression?
It’s time for a devoted Marxist to stand up and expose the old spymaster. I was going to say “from the left,” but that distinction loses all meaning in our time. He’s going to brush off any criticism from capitalist countries, in part because of his Communist roots.
The tyrant’s grounding and career, let’s be clear, were largely party-line Communist, which claimed to be based on the teachings of Karl Marx. So somewhere in that philosopher’s matrix imprinted in Putin’s mindset may be the key to turning him around. Maybe even call him to repentance.
Just what manifesto is today’s czar wannabe following, anyhoo? Does anyone want to remind him what happened to the last one?
Jnana's Red Barn 