Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

Why tribe? As a poet once asked … 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my novel What’s Left, she has every reason to proclaim:

Nobody breathes a word about hippie. We’re simply ever so hip.

She and her brothers and cousins had their own style and direction, apart from whatever their parents had done. And the quip didn’t survive into the final version of the text.

Still, though, if you look to the time of the pivotal Woodstock music festival , you might ask if we were trying to be neo-mountain men or newly converted Amerindians or spaced-out yogis or cool Victorians (without the inhibitions) or liberated urbanites or … ? Well, a huge stream of historic inspiration fed into the movement, and we were willing to play with just about any wild expressive fashion.

What’s easily overlooked is how huge the role of the Gypsy – or, more correctly, Roma – was.

The very term Boho or Bohemian – as in Puccini’s opera, La Boheme, dealing with starving underground artists in Paris – has far more to do with the Roma than with any geographic region of eastern Europe. Even Brahms’ famous Hungarian Rhapsodies are code words for Gypsy violin music. As for Spanish flamenco? Ditto. Play your guitar, if you will, or dance wildly.

So underground artists are …? You got it.

And here, drafting and revising my novel I found myself forced to ask:

Why are they so widely romanticized?

And why are they so widely reviled?

As Cassia investigates her father’s reasons for moving into the extended family where she’s grown up, she digs far beyond his counterculture inclinations.

Well, for a hint, here’s something else I cut from the final version:

The scandals, according to Nita? I’m not going there. Not that any of it was bad, on the contrary. There’s just too much to delve into now. And then, despite herself, she does.

~*~

Like Cassia’s father, I did live in a rundown farm where we all split the rent. And like him, I later lived in a monastic setting, where ours was based on yoga and its Hindu writings rather than Buddhism.

Not all hippies veered off in those directions.

Have you ever wanted to live in a Gypsy wagon? How about a tree house?

Ten things I don’t like about December

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
  1. Too dark. It’s not just waking up and going to bed in the dark. Where I live, it also means going to work in the dark and coming home in the same. And that’s coming from someone who’s officially retired.
  2. Too cold. Where I live, we’re just not used to it yet.
  3. Too many shoppers. That means long lines at the cash register everywhere.
  4. And all that shopper traffic. Parking lots are full. Traffic lights are backed up.
  5. Everybody’s snarly. Can’t blame them. So am I.
  6. Santa Claus ditties. They’re coming out of ceilings everywhere. They have nothing to do with the birth of the Christ Child.
  7. Lying to innocent children. These presents don’t come from a fat man in a red suit, for starters. He doesn’t come down a chimney anywhere in the world. And telling them all this blarmy undermines their trust in anything else we tell them, especially about Jesus.
  8. Guilt, paralysis, and panic. For guys, especially, this hits hard about three days before the big event, when we still haven’t figured out what to get anyone.
  9. Everything else stops. Do I really need to explain this?
  10. It’s all about the Holiday Season. Or more accurately, holiday shopping. Let’s be honest and admit that what’s happening has very little to do with what should be happening.

How about a few firsts?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday was not only the first day of December, it was also the first day of Advent.

(Make that Advent in the Western Christian calender, which runs between 21 and 27 days before Christmas, depending. The Eastern Orthodox faithful, in contrast, observe it as a 40-day fast that began November 15 this year.)

For us, our first snowfall of the year also began yesterday, and it’s already delivered seven inches, a bit under half of what’s expected by tomorrow morning.

My wife was pleased to have all of this also fall into the extended Thanksgiving Day weekend, a welcome break in what’s been a chaotic schedule.

How’s the month kicking off for you?

Snow’s piled up atop the thermometer on the tree trunk. Welcome to December where we live.

 

Antique farmers’ forks

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
As a child, I was so fond of a bone-handle fork at my grandparents’ that I always got to eat with it whenever I visited. Its design is simple, the metal something other than silver or stainless steel. I still find it elegant and rightly weighted in the hand. I imagine they came to western Ohio in a Conestoga wagon from Lancaster or York county, Pennsylvania.

A lingering insight on marital splits

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The Divorce Culture, by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 224 pages, $24) – reviewed by Jean E. Milofsky, The Colorado Review, fall 1997:

“Whatever else divorce is, it is fundamentally a loss. As a writer friend of mine once said, ‘It’s like death except no one says nice things about you.’ In divorce one loses not only the relationship with one’s spouse, but also one’s location in the social fabric. Friends fade away, and families are thrown into turmoil. Then there are the inevitable economic losses, which Barbara Dafoe Whitehead rightly claims fall disproportionately on women. Nowhere in her polemic against divorce, however, does Whitehead conceptualize divorce as a loss. Rather, with increasing insistence as the book goes on, she views it as an expression of individual freedom in a highly libertarian age.” …

“Whitehead’s concept of divorce as an expression of unfettered liberty ignores what every divorcing individual realizes – no choice is without consequence, no decision is without obligation or work, and adult freedom never really comes from throwing off chains.”

~*~

Counter with James Dobson’s insistence that “love at first sight” is really just infatuation and therefore selfish, while love is other-focused.

Tackling the family photos together

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In the final revision of my novel What’s Left, her aunt Nita becomes an active instigator of the project that leads the adolescent girl to closely examine her father’s photographs. Another change is that Cassia’s best friend and cousin, Sandra, joins in with second opinions.

Here are some passages that were no longer needed like this in that final edition:

What happens in that process flips our usual pattern of interacting.  Strengthens our bond. Forget Theos Barney and Theos Tito – they’re usually too busy to answer my inquiries, but after listening closely to Thea Nita, I have a sense they just don’t know as much detail as she does. Not just the Baba years, either. She’s filled me in on Ari and Perry and Athina and Dida and Ilias and Maria and Stavros and Bella. She knew them all, and was old enough to see much. Even so, she’s anxious to uncover as much about them as much as I do, which adds to our working together as a team.

~*~

She was particularly close to Dimitri, too. When they were apart, from college on, they corresponded in long weekly letters that often included newspaper clippings, and she’s promised to let me examine that collection when I’m ready. There’s so much on my plate already.

~*~

Bit by bit, the puzzles fit together enough to hint at the bigger picture, even around huge gaps that remain.

~*~

Always the news hound, Thea Nita confides to me the difficulty she’s had in digging up the few details she passes on, and, as she emphasizes, some of the conclusions remain conjectural. Add to that a few documents passed down in the family and some letters we still need to translate. A timeline takes shape.

~*~

So much of what I’m telling you comes down through Papou Ilias, Thea Nita tells me, explaining how many times they’d sit down together and his observations would flow on and on in response to her questions. As she says, he obviously admired Ari and Perry – and as a philosopher, he had to be true to the line of questioning, no matter how discomforting the conclusions may seem.

Oh, I’m so glad she stopped talking like this! In the final version, she’s pretty snippy.

~*~

In assembling these family pictures, then, Cassia comes to appreciate how important the word pictures are in giving life to the visual images. Both are essential for what she’s pursuing.

~*~

As a child, I never really understood the definitions of aunts, uncles, cousins, much less how we fit together. But we weren’t close, either, and had very little in common. Do you think Cassia’s loss make her more attentive to her family connections? Does she just know too much for her age?