Author: Jnana Hodson

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

ONLY THE BEST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Often, the lessons appear when least expected.

One my thoughts returns frequently to a conversation I overheard on a Saturday afternoon in Baltimore’s Little Italy. A couple, recently back from New York City, was trying to impress the restaurant owner that everyone they had talked to was raving about the establishment, saying it was clearly the best in Little Italy. Finally, the owner was able to thank them, with this rejoinder: “Anyone who doesn’t think he’s the best in this neighborhood shouldn’t be down here.”

I admire that sense of upholding your own pursuit of excellence. No excuses. And I admire that esteem for the standards of others doing the same. Rivals. And yet colleagues.

I don’t want to hear a salesman slam the competition, or a priest short selling another denomination or congregation, except in this light.

My work is the best. And so is yours! And, yes, we can both do better!

Humbly yours, forever.

GRAPHING OURSELVES IN THE ECONOMICS CROSSHAIRS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I said at the time: Golly, I hadn’t thought in terms of “lower middle class” in ages, though that’s where I’ve been most of my adult life – even as management. According to government statistics, at least, and thanks to my union card, we made it up to median income, although in reality, considering the cost of housing in New England, we were never quite there. Before the housing market decline (our property had more than doubled in price in a half-dozen years), my wife saw the assessment and cried out, “I never thought I’d live in a quarter-million dollar house – and it’s still a dump!” Yup.

What is amazing is what can be accomplished when we focus our resources and set priorities. The secret is that you can’t have it all. My wife would love to travel, but then we managed for her to not have to be employed, which in turn allowed her to return to college and to chair the local charter high school (a full-time, unpaid job) while taking care of both her mother and the girls. Maybe we’ll get around to travel, but for now, there are too many other demands – on our time, especially. I was able to carve out blocks to draft/revise large sections of work, although in doing so, I wasn’t submitting much anywhere – that would come later, probably in retirement. So I hoped.

One of our favorite writers, Wendell Barry, points out that a divorced family is, on paper, far more economically viable because it has to pay for two households, hold down two jobs, maintain two cars, and so on, each point adding to the cash flow, which can be measured. Of course, that fails to calculate a lot of other, more meaningful values. Keeping my mother-in-law in her own little apartment in the barn, for instance, allows her some independence while still getting some family care – none of it showing up in the gross national product, or whatever we call that calculation these days.

VILLAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As humans, each of us assumes a cluster of identities – some of them chosen and changeable, others immutable. My grandfather, for example, proclaimed himself Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber, invoking a host of other identities as well: Mason, Protestant, middle class, married. I don’t think “grandfather” was high up in his awareness. Being male or female or teenaged or elderly, on the other hand, are simply givens. And the history of what we’ve done or failed to do cannot be altered, except in our own perceptions and retelling.

The range of identities is astounding. They include but are not limited to race, religion, nationality and locality, occupation, family (household and near kin to genealogy itself), education and educational institutions, athletics, hobbies and interests, actions and emotions, even other individuals we admire, from actors and authors to athletes, politicians, and historic figures. They soon extend to the people we associate with – family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. And, pointedly, our phobias and possessions.

Curiously, it becomes easier to say what we are not than what we are specifically. That is, set out to define yourself in the positive and you’ll find the list rapidly dwindling, while an inexplicable core remains untouched. Turn to the oppositions, however, and the list becomes endless. I am not, for instance, a monkey. Sometimes, moreover, a specified negative becomes truly revealing: “I am not a crook,” for instance, as the classic revelation.

Behind the masks of public life – our occupations, religious affiliations, social status, economic positions, family connections, educational accomplishments, and so on – each of us engages in another struggle, an attempt to find inner balance and direction for our own life. As we do so, we soon face a plethora of interior and exterior forces that must be reconciled. We get glimmers into this struggle – both within ourselves and within others – in statements that begin “I am” and “I am not,” as well as “I have been,” which recognizes the history and habits we accumulate and carry with us. There are also the voices – “he remembers” or “she insists” – that also recur in our lives, defining and redefining ourselves both within, as conscience or the angel or devil on our shoulders, and without, as any of a host of authority figures and friends or family members.

When I turned to this is a series of poems, I found myself identifying many of the subjects by occupation, even though their confessions or interior monolog typically reflected the more intimate concerns of their lives – relationships, activities, even the weather. The resulting poems are, then, overheard snippets more than public proclamations.

What began as an exercise in self-definition breaks out nonetheless into an entire spectrum of personalities. Do we know any of these people? Or are they somehow eluding us, masked by the bits that are revealed? Those we recognize, moreover, happen by accident – none of the portraits are of known individuals, but rather the inventions of the poet’s craft and imagination.

Listen carefully – especially when others talk of their romantic problems or other troubles – and another portion of a mosaic appears. My collection builds on such moments, constructing a cross-section of community like a web of each one of its members. Sometimes, a place appears; sometimes, a contradiction; sometimes, a flavor or sound or color. Even so, in this crossfire, then, we may be more alike than any of us wishes to admit. We may be more like the part we deny, as well. Our defenses wither. Our commonality, and our essential loneliness, are revealed.

In the end, I’d say I have a Village of Gargoyles.

BOTTLE FARM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Among those dim memories from childhood are Sunday afternoon drives, including one on a dull rainy day as we approached Farmersville. As Dad slowed the car, I heard an eerie panorama of tinkling glass and looked out over a seeming junkyard with large, black figures shaped from roofing tin, I suppose – witches, Indians on horseback, perhaps cowboys and the like – and many poles “like cornstalks,” as some have described, but with bottles instead of leaves. Plus, as I’ve read, a number of old church bells mounted somewhere, in addition to the bells of grazing sheep.

Yes, it was the chorus of sound that lingered strongest in my mind.

By the time we got a chance to go back, it had all been razed, declared a public health hazard, I remember hearing, because of the broken glass caused by vandals. Other stories suggested the orgies of motorcycle gangs instead.

One history I’d heard, that this was a relative of the late comedian Jonathan Winters, proved erroneous. The owner’s name was not Zero Winters, but Winter Zellar (Zero) Swartsel (1876-1953), an eccentric who turned his 22 acres into artwork fashioned from discards such as old bedframes and twisted wire. What I retain from that one day is far more cluttered than the clean photographs taken by Edward Weston.

It’s all lost, of course. How much it could have been an installation in some gallery will forever remain conjectural, but Winter was way ahead of his time on his multi-sensual approach to creation.

PARTISAN PERSPECTIVES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time, a question raised in a Quaker Life letter-to-the-editor a while back keeps nagging at me (the magazine, not the cereal). It said, essentially, that in light of all he keeps hearing and reading, he wonders if there’s still a place for a Republican like himself in the Society of Friends. (Obviously, he hasn’t seen the bumper sticker, either: Real Friends don’t let Friends vote for Republicans.)

It’s troubling on many fronts. For all of our claims of “seeing that of God in all people,” we can be pretty one-sided in our public views. Ditto for our proclamations of “inclusiveness” – we do carry a number of exclusionary issues, often subtle, and not just political. And we do know that many Friends are  involved in party politics – to the best of my knowledge, all on one side of the political spectrum. In support of the letter writer, let me point out that Friends were instrumental in founding the Republican Party, and I believe the last two Quakers in Congress were GOP members. In addition, the Friends Committee on National Legislation makes an effort to cite individuals on both sides of the aisle when their votes coincide with Quaker values – for the record, you’ll see New Hampshire’s congressional members sometimes named there. I certainly don’t want us to be blind to the fact that saints and sinners can be found in all parties. To say nothing of the principle of the separation of church and state.

Besides, I’ve heard it said – not just of my Meeting – “I know what they believe in politically. I just don’t know what they believe in” – meaning religiously. That part really troubles me. I would hope that our faith experience is guiding our individual social activism, rather than being limited within it. Maybe we need to be more vocal about our spiritual roots and motivation in our witness, too. I would also like to hear more from the letter writer for his reasons for deciding to stand where he does.

I also keeping remembering a newspaper column a while back that argued an apocalyptic faith – one that believes in the immediacy of Christ – demands social activism. Thy kingdom come, as the prayer goes. And peace on earth. In these little newsletter essays, I’ve tried to steer clear of straight-out theology, but sometimes there’s no way of avoiding it. I really do believe ours is an apocalyptic faith, no matter how we define our individual religious convictions. Maybe the real reason that “politics and religion” are so avoided in polite conversation is because they are so intertwined and so vital, tapping into some of our deepest emotions. How many of our own hot buttons have been pushed already in this brief discourse? Maybe the letter writer also hints that the Republican Party needs more Friends, as witnesses or agents of change. Hey, has anybody noticed I got all the way down to this point without using the word Democrat?

ALL THOSE TRAINS

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With the exception of a small spur to our south, all of the railroad traffic to and from Maine goes within a few blocks of our house.

The first year or so we were here, our youngest complained of the noise through the night – turns out it was gravel and sand headed to Boston for the Big Dig construction. At least that’s died down.

During the day, though, we have the Amtrak Downeaster’s five runs south, to Boston, and back, to Brunswick, Maine, plus the usual freight traffic.

But is it healthy to have so much dependent on such a tiny point of transit? At least as a point of homeland security, I’d argue not.

EVEN FOR A BUCK OR LESS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Going through our bookshelves the other day, I was struck by how many of my first paperbacks were picked up for under a buck, new. How many, in fact, came in at under a half-buck. These were serious literature, mind you.

Yes, gasoline cost about a quarter a gallon, too, but just compare the impact of inflation over that period. While regular gas now runs up to $4, those fifty-cent paperback titles are now listing around $16, plus – more than twice as much inflation, relatively speaking.

Newspaper and magazine prices have also spiked, for a variety of reasons beginning with the cost of paper itself and distribution.

My concern as both a reader and a writer is that the figures for traditional publishing have simply become too prohibitive to take risks on unknown talent. For instance, I’m very unlikely to shell out $25 for a hardback novel, yet if that title doesn’t sell sufficiently, we’re unlikely to see the trade paperback, which can still be borderline prohibitive for modest incomes.

Public library budgets, meanwhile, keep getting shaved, forcing reductions in both new acquisitions and the staffing and open hours.

All of this means you’re less likely to find a new voice you find personally exciting. It’s all about blockbuster sales for one title rather than a wide offering catering to quirky interests and pleasures. And it’s not just commercial publishing.

Not long ago an official of an academic press related the painful decision they’d made regarding an important history manuscript that would not sell more than 400 copies, according to their marketing research. And so, in the absence of a major subsidy (such as an underwriting grant), the volume would not appear.

Since much of my own fiction falls in the category of “experimental” literature, the response I’ve received from some literary agents and presses has been that the work deserves publication but that it’s not “economically viable.”

The threshold for economically viable, I should point out, has been rising steadily through the four decades I’m reviewing.

I remember hearing the novelist Wright Morris in a televised interview where he said how lucky he was to have a niche following where a press run of eight-thousand copies was sufficient to support him. That’s hardly the case today, especially when the field has been consolidated into two publishing houses handling the bulk of American fiction.

*   *   *

Even so, hundreds of new novels appear every week, many of them from small presses run as a labor of love. Few of the authors will get any notice, even though some, as I’ve found over the years, are a fine alternative to the cookie-cutter work typically found in commercial fiction. At least the Internet is opening new opportunities to be heard and discovered – and even for readers to pick up a fresh writer for a few bucks once again.

So who are you reading these days you feel speaks directly to you? Or whose style bristles in ways you find delightful? And how did you come across this author in the first place?

Maybe his or her successful niche following is around the corner if we all talk about literature as if it counts in our time. Just maybe.

DANCING IN THE WORK

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In his volume of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall draws distinctions among jobs, chores, and work. The first is done for the pay, the second because it must, while the third arises as a passion, a calling, often an avocation – and is ultimately energizing and life-affirming. Lucky, he says, is the person whose work is also a paying job. So for income, where do we turn? Retreat into farming? Farmers aren’t surviving.

Wendell Berry speaks of two Muses. In Standing by Words, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983, highly recommended, he writes: “There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form.

“The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap energy civilization, in which `economic health’ depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”

Here, then, is yet another slant on work from an unabashedly Christian poet and essayist.

Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Certainly for the revision.

And revision. And revision. His estimate, it seems, is quite optimistic.

In the practice, I keep asking: Are my facts right? Is this the most appropriate detail? How will the piece open and what structure will it assume? What is unique and most meaningful here? For whom? Does it boogie?

All of this to guard against shoddy workmanship; anything lazy, even deceitful; the artiste and the counterfeit.