Category: Arts & Letters

BEYOND DRESSING FOR SUCCESS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Waiting in an airport lounge for their flight to arrive and begin boarding, a wife was describing to her husband the computer she had ordered (not just any computer, mind you) and then detailing the renovations required for the room they were upgrading, or perhaps it was a wing they were adding. He nodded in thoughtful agreement throughout. They appeared to be comfortably retired, and she was resolved that this was what she needed to sit down and begin writing her first novel.

Somehow, it all felt wrong.

Not the writing, but the matter of appearances, as though one begins the volume by posing for the back cover color photograph – tweed for the men, a tasteful blazer for the women. As though writing depends on the workspace itself. As though you just plump down in a picture-perfect setting and turn out a critically acclaimed bestseller. Or at least a hefty advance. It is echoed in the group photographs of famous authors one comes across in Vanity Fair, the half-dozen or more serious novelists arrayed in a two-story private library or a publisher’s corner suite overlooking Manhattan, the happily ever after with afternoon cocktails. Leather and brass.

I’ve long pondered the airport scene, attempting to nail down what has struck such a loud discordant note. Listen to published authors discuss their workspace and you often hear it comes down to a concrete block cell or a corner of an attic or even, thanks to laptops and wi-fi, a booth at McDonald’s – not an interior designer’s photo spread. We write wherever we can – sometimes, as I prefer, in solitude, or other times, as daily papers’ newsrooms, in a large office crowded with shared computers and telephones augmented by TV screens and police radio scanners. They write, I would hope, out of some urgency – some sense each one has something unique to explore and present to the world. It’s what Bukowksi called his daily “butt time.” It’s what you put in to be a writer, the dues you pay, the actual effort rather than any posturing.

This is not a matter of comfort. The best writing, I will argue, comes with discomfort. It’s hard, after all, doing good work. Finishing the first draft is just the beginning, leading into multiple revisions and a pile of correspondence (much of it unanswered, even when the obligatory SASEs are included) attempting to connect with an agent and publisher before embarking on the marketing of the finished work – one of the five hundred or so novels published that week.

Did the retired beginner actually complete a first draft? Or did she find excuses along the way? Did her health hold up? (Writing demands more physical strength than one imagines – especially in maintaining the mental concentration of developing the characters and plot turns.) Did she have a storehouse of memories and exotic experiences to draw upon or a long gestated outline to quickly fill in? Had she done her homework in devising a story fitting a tightly defined marketing niche – one that would easily sell? Had she filled suitcases with letters, notes, and snapshots to prompt specific details or sketched in a lifetime of personal journals? Did she possess crucial contacts who would come to bear on publication?

There’s more to writing than looking like an Author – whatever that is. Maybe in the ensuing years she succeeded. But at the airport gateway, she gave no awareness of the actual struggle ahead. I, for one, cannot wait for the perfect space to appear. Rather, I’ve settled in to work where I could and then plugged away, between sleeping and the commute to my paying job.

THE RELIGIOUS TWIST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While my personal struggle bobbled between practicality and art for its own sake, the yoga and Quaker teachings introduced new tensions. Consider:

Creativity? No, God creates. Man discovers. Man cultivates and brings culture and learning, nurtures, softens, establishes coherence. This is the difference between the artist who submits to a greater power and the one who tries to use it for his own ends. The first desires to serve God, by whatever name or description; the second, his or her own ego.

Which leads to: Problems of the ego. Gertie Stein: Every writer wants to be told how good he is, how good he is, how good he is. Insecurities!

Yet in yoga, all for God: the sacrifice, the labor gifted to generate good karma. (As if your boss is another deity, rather than bottom-line motivated and conscious. Here’s a letter of commendation plus your pink slip.)

Early church father Tertullian warned, in De Spectaculis, Latin circa 200 C.E. Essentially: “The Author of truth loves no falsehood: all that is feigned is adultery in His sight. The man who counterfeits voice, sex or age, who makes a show of false love, anger, sighs and tears He will not approve, for He condemns all hypocrisy. . . . Why should it be lawful to see what it is a crime to do?” (Translation by Kenneth Morse).

These are hard charges, along with the seduction of “preaching for sin,” as George Fox warned.

So to examine the multiplicity of personality / goals / desires. Just who am I? Who are you? Empathy. Anger. Bliss. All the rest.

Honesty. Our dark sides. Do we really express our weakest aspect in our art? (In vocal ministry, how often the message comes from that area of our current conflict!)

Versus becoming so rarified we lose all sense of joy and delight. The danger of Plainness or strictness, that it suffocates personality, makes us so humbled we cannot move forward in the Holy Spirit to perform bold action. Crushes or stifles the imagination.

So how do we make a living without violating our beliefs? (Military-industrial extensive penetration of all facets of American society: not even the universities immune.)

Or how do you practice your art to the fullest, without undue restraint, while still being faithful?

 

NEWSPRINT, PAPERBACKS, AND HARDBOUND VOLUMES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

My entire life I’ve harbored a bias regarding quality in the world of writing. Even though I’ve long been a front-line journalist, I’ve believed the text in a hardbound, academic or commercially published book must somehow be superior to what’s presented in a newspaper.

For that matter, magazines were, in that measure, a degree above newspapers, but a step or two below either paperback or hardbound volumes.

In the past few years, though, that misconception has been shattered, in part because of conversations I have with one of America’s top literary voices and in part because of encounters with a host of other living authors of more mundane accomplishments.

Yes, we have every right to expect a work that requires a year or two to draft to be superior to reports written on the fly, but in some ways, that long work often turns out to be little more than a series of daily reports strung together. What turns up can be as formulaic as any pyramid-style news dispatch, and filled with more cliche and unchallenged bombast. Read carefully and you might notice a higher standard of editing in your daily paper.

What I now realize is that I had expected the books to be eternal monuments that would sit forever on public and private library shelves. I never expected them to be commodities with their own precariously short shelf life, with rare exceptions. Even public collections have only so much space and so much patience. Rarely do I find there a recommended piece I desire.

What this all comes down to is that reality that good writing is good writing, no matter the place it appears. That, in itself, is cause for celebration.

Now, for more on the newspaper dimension, there’s my Hometown News novel. Adding a further twist to this plot, though, is the fact it’s available only as an ebook.

Hometown News

MAX RUDOLF (AND JAMES LEVINE)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

The cult of celebrity continues to baffle me. The mass-media fascination with people who are famous for being famous draws none of my interest except, maybe, for a few who are simply breathtakingly gorgeous – the ones, I should add, whose words and actions aren’t completely repugnant. As you might guess, the photos are worth far more than any accompanying text.

OK, I’ll push the blame away from mass media and on to the audience that prefers celebrities to real reality. (Not to be confused with “reality television.”)

To see this outlook at work, we can extend the People magazine and supermarket tabloid spotlight beyond the realms of Hollywood and Nashville, high-level fashion models and designers, professional athletes, monarchy, and rock stars.

In the publishing industry, for instance, we have “bestselling author.” At least there’s an accomplishment to back up the fame, regardless of quality. The recognition level, let’s be honest, will be lower than in the aforesaid big-money glamor fields. But my guess is that these aren’t the writers who are high up on your own list of favorites, either. For that matter, few who make it to the bestseller list ever gain that widespread recognition. No, we are far from the days of Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Mitchner, Sandberg, or Frost in the eyes of the general public.

Likewise, in classical music or opera, where fame is a crucial component of box-office appeal, we’re far from the era when having “Sol Hurok presents” as part of an artist’s credentials spelled a degree of celebrity. Hurok was an artist manager who handled all of the big names, or so he made the world believe. But the cult of celebrity still plays a role, as Yo-Yo Ma, Renee Fleming, and Lang Lang demonstrate. (Note, though, that by now we need both first and last names.) And, we should acknowledge, you don’t get there without talent.

All of this, though, is by way of introducing my favorite conductor ever: Max Rudolf (1902-1995).

As another former Metropolitan Opera conductor once told me, “Rudolf could have been as famous as Leonard Bernstein, if he had wanted it.” Obviously, he didn’t.

What impressed me – and continues to impress – is that what he really wanted was to make music of the very highest level and to nurture that tradition. This could follow a much different route than mere celebrity, even in the arts.

At the time, Rudolf was music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, which he headed for 13 years.

To be honest, the first time I heard the ensemble, I was not impressed. It was on a road trip to Dayton, and Rudolf was pushing for rhythmic precision at a time when I wanted plush sonic, well, uprisings of bombast. Only later did I comprehend what he was instilling – a unity of perfection of structure and meaning.

He offered his players precise, expressive, often restrained gestures and obtained “maximum results with minimal effort,” as I think one critic observed. Unlike the over-the-top dramatic Bernstein, I should add. What I now see is that the gravity of playing was somewhere back in the orchestra, rather than focused on the podium. In other words, despite all of his Germanic authoritarian roots, something organic was happening. And, as I would see, they played as one – more than some of the famed soloists I’ve heard.

His lineage runs back to the opera at Prague, where he worked under George Szell, and ran to the Metropolitan Opera, where he wound up as administrative assistant to Rudolf Bing. (Two abrasive personalities, from all we’ve heard.)

When he accepted the Cincinnati post, others had cautioned him not to go. “You’re making a name for yourself here in New York. You’ll give that up if you leave.”

Thankfully, he followed his heart, and classical music has been all the richer.

One of the things I remember is the amber sound he developed, not just in Cincinnati but in some of his other recordings as well – the Metropolitan Opera and even Italy.

As one of this first-chair players once told me, his mantra was, “First it must be in time.” And then the rest could follow. The trills, for example, as miniature roller coasters rather than flutters.

The former first cellist told me he received eight coaching sessions a week as a young player. How remarkable!

Even in the recordings, I still marvel at the entire ensemble playing with more unity than some soloists I’ve heard. If the Cleveland Orchestra was the Rolls-Royce, then Cincinnati was a Ferrari … fast, tight cornering.

He once lamented to a reporter that, at the time, the Cincinnati audience did not appreciate Mozart. He was one of the greatest Mozart conductors, ever.

And then there were his discoveries, beginning with Erich Kunzel and James Levine, who achieves some of the sound I associate with Rudolf.

There is, after all, a theory that your ideal orchestral sound is the one of the first great orchestra you heard. For me – and I believe, Levine – that’s Cincinnati.

Unfortunately, Rudolf came down with hepatitis, blamed on seafood during his summer in Maine, and that cut short one season and more. In his place came the Michigan native Thomas Schippers, assuming his first and, lamentably, only orchestral leadership post. As Time magazine lamented, the operatic master Schippers could not take over the Metropolitan Opera when the opening occurred because he was tied down in Cincinnati. And then, all too early, both Schippers (an addicted smoker) and his wife died of cancer. He was 47.

I can only assume Rudolf had been somewhere in the background pushing for Schippers’ appointment, and no doubt did the same in getting the young James Levine a position in Cleveland under Szell.

Rudolf went on, in part at his friend Rudolf Serkin’s urging, to create an opera program at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and then a conductor’s program there. Among his prodigies on the podium are Robert Spano, Michael Stern, and Paavo Jarvi, who later spent a decade at the helm in Cincinnati.

~*~

Back now to James Levine, who went on to the top of the conducting world. The story I want to hear is what role Rudolf had behind the scenes. In Levine’s music-making, I hear Rudolf as well – the sound of the musicians making music together (a center of gravity back in the band, not simply at the podium). And the warmth, that amber sound in the strings I so admire.

Levine more or less moved into Rudolf’s earlier role at the Met, but then he expanded it all into his own. Aficionados can argue all they want, but both Rudolf and Levine will probably wind up in the top two dozen opera conductors ever.

Just as Rudolf did in Cincinnati, Levine later restored the Boston Symphony to its glory. Its sister band, the Boston Pops, had its own Rudolf legacy – Keith Lockhart, who came by way of Kunzel, that former Rudolf assistant.

I hate to think what might have been lost if Rudolf had followed the advice not to go to Ohio. Could he have exerted the same influence in Manhattan? I doubt anyone could.

ORCHESTRAL POPS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

While symphony orchestras continue their tradition of playing symphonies, concertos, and overtures, American ensembles have their own unique tradition of the pops repertoire.

It can be traced to what Arthur Fiedler did in Boston as he pushed the light classics repertoire into a blend all his own. Or it can be traced to John Philip Sousa’s work a generation earlier with the concert band.

Either way, something remarkable happened in the aftermath.

First, while Fiedler was still busy in Boston, Max Rudolf asked his young associate conductor Erich Kunzel to take over the Eight O’Clock series in Cincinnati. He told Kunzel there were a thousand young conductors who aspired to Mahler, but here was a repertoire begging for leadership – and Rudolf was overwhelmed as it was.

The rest is musical history.

Just look at the recordings – and that’s just the tip of an iceberg that includes performances with Tina Turner (when she could really use them) and local bluegrass bands and, well, anything that was music. Kunzel was also big on extending local connections.

Somebody could probably do a doctoral dissertation on the way Kunzel built a spider web of concert themes. You can look to his fabulous Telarc recordings to build the connections. The Hollywood albums, of course. Plus Mancini. There were all the Star Wars/Star Trek albums, each leading to the next. The Roundup album led to Happy Trails and Down on the Farm. The light classics discs soon focus on American orchestral selections leading to the piano and orchestra masterpieces as well as the Gershwin series. Well, they radiate outward, each one rising on something earlier.

The Cincinnati trustees quickly established Kunzel’s Pops ensemble as a separate brand, one that played throughout the year, unlike Boston, where the pops band is a late spring/early summer staple.

Each to his own.

So second, I should point out that when the flamboyant Kunzel was passed over in Boston after Fiedler’s demise, the film composer John Williams instilled another repertoire, giving film music an esteemed place.

I should add that the two become big fans of each other, rather than seeing themselves as rivals.

Now that’s music-making!

There’s much more, I sense, in that range between popular (commercial) music and traditional orchestral fare that could be explored – a third stream, more adventurous than most pops programming and, dare I say, than most classical scheduling these days.

As I hope will yet happen.

As for a connection between these two cities? Kunzel’s assistant, Keith Lockhart, took Williams’ place on the podium in Boston. Seems like just yesterday, though it’s been … I don’t want to count!

NO LONGER MUSICAL RARITIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Looking at yet another recording of Vivaldi’s now ubiquitous Four Seasons reminds me of the first time I encountered the work. Two of our local FM stations each had an hour of classical music each night, and there it was, taking up the entire program, or at least most of it.

At the end of the piece, the announcer came on, leaving me to exclaim, “Who was that? Never heard of him.” A nobody composer, then. (Actually, I think my reaction was more graphic. In those days, I wanted BIG NAMES.)

A month later, the same thing.

And a month after that, the reaction continued.

I must have been a sophomore in high school. By my senior year, Vivaldi had gained enough traction to have one of the Four Seasons concertos be included in a Cincinnati May Festival concert I attended (Robert Shaw conducting), and even Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic had recorded an all-Vivaldi album that was a mainstay of my budding collection.

How times have changed.

I remember, too, discovering Mahler through a Boston Symphony recording under Erich Leinsdorf, probably about the same time. By my senior year of college, Mahler had gained enough visibility that I heard two live performances of his Fifth Symphony, one by an Indiana University orchestra and the other by the Cincinnatians under Max Rudolf – and that was within a span of one month.

Now that Mahler and Vivaldi are regulars in the repertoire, I keep hoping for a similar discovery of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, and their American Romantic-era colleagues.

Yes, times and tastes can change. There’s so much more to discover and embrace.

TEN HIPPIE MOVIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

We’ve already looked at music and literature from the hippie era, but now I’m wondering about movies. Yes, there were some that played straight into the stereotypes. Peter Sellars’ The Guru would head my list there.

But there were also others that took the issues and era seriously, even when they were comedies. Not all of them, I should emphasize, come from the ’60s or ’70s.

For a starter Top Ten list, let me propose:

  • Alice’s Restaurant
  • Putney Swope
  • I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
  • Yellow Submarine
  • Brother Sun, Sister Moon
  • Godspell
  • Hair
  • Jesus Christ Superstar
  • Love Story
  • Zabriske Point

Maybe The Graduate, Swept Away, 10, or Hippie Masala belong on the list. But it’s your turn to weigh in, savvy viewers that you are. What other nominees do you propose?

LISTENING TO A POETRY READING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Sometimes as I listen during an open mic, especially (and oh how I hate that spelling!), I find myself focusing on a particular reader’s moralizing and editorializing or cliche or heavy reliance on simile rather than metaphor, and that soon sends me into a disturbing zone.

What happens is that I begin editing heavily with an imaginary thick black marker, striking through all of the offending words and phrases, and pretty soon I’m tuning into only to the blackened blocks in the air and tuning out everything else.

Admittedly, I edit myself heavily, and this is a central step in the creation of many of my own works. Admittedly, too, I’m projecting myself onto the poor writer onstage. Admittedly, in particular, I’m forgetting to be humble and open here, star that I might imagine myself to be.

Does anyone else experience anything similar?

FACING THE TECHNOLOGY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Shifting to the world of epublishing has stimulated a gentle learning curve for me. Maybe because my to-do list has always been much longer than I can manage or maybe because I felt I already had too much detailed work at hand, I’ve tried to avoid becoming a computer geek who spends all his time in the technical minutia. Actually, it’s the same way with my cars – I don’t want to spend my mornings, afternoons, or weekends under the hood or on my back under the chassis; I just want to get in and drive. As for high tech, I’ll wait for all the bugs to get worked out before I buy the updated version, thank you, especially since I’ve always been on a very limited budget. And for the record, I hate Windows 8, which is always interrupting my work by blowing its apps in my face or requiring me to log on again throughout the day.

On the other hand, keyboarding on a computer has been a vast improvement over a typewriter, at least for klutzes like me, and the ability to correct and revise as I go or rewrite and edit later is, well, divine. Sometimes progress really is progress.

And sometimes it isn’t, as we seemed to discover at the office each time we moved on to a new system whether we wanted to or were instead forced to when our current equipment was declared obsolete. (I’ll let others relate those nights of terror when they pulled the plug on what was finally working as promised.)

Participating in the small-press literary scene has been another matter. When I first ventured into email, thanks largely to my now-wife, well, let’s say broadband’s been a huge improvement over those telephone connections and leave it at that. Still, cutting and pasting poems into the email and having them accepted within hours rather than be rejected months later was quite an eye-opener. These days, with most of the liveliest literary action happening in online journals, the process has taken leaps forward; typically, you use a submissions program, upload your file, insert your cover letter, and follow the pieces through the editorial process, if you wish. For a long time, I tried to maintain two sets of files – one for journals that still used, or even required, submissions via the Postal Service, and those that took them online. This year, finding that too complicated, I decided to drop the postal-only journals altogether. (That move, let me add, was hastened by problems with our computer printer as much as the much higher rejection rate on the envelope entries.)

The 2005 publication of my second novel, Ashram, as an ebook was another eye-opener. I was surprised by how easy its preparation was, how quickly it went from acceptance to general availability, and how pleasurable reading a long work on my computer screen could be (even if the work was issued only in PDF format). Unfortunately, we were also a bit ahead of the ebook reading trend and many would-be readers told me of their difficulties in downloading the volume. The other snag was getting the work reviewed at all – even online critics stuck solely to paper editions.

Blogging has revolutionized much of this world, probably more than we realize. For me, avowed neo-Luddite that I am, WordPress has been heavenly. It’s allowed me to take a model “out of the box” and run with it without modification, even if I do admire the customized tweaks many of the rest of you add apparently without hassle. The Blogs That I Follow, searching by topical tags, and Freshly Pressed streams have introduced me to many wonderful voices around the globe for my daily perusal. In fact, I’m still struck that in its first year, the Red Barn had readers in 72 countries. Amazing.

These days I’m learning again. The opportunity to publish my novels to be distributed across a variety of platforms (as they say) has meant following a new set of directions to strip out all the hidden codes (we hope; some of mine go back to the first versions on WordPerfect4.0) and set up the work to flow smoothly in a reading device. (I started to say “reader,” but for me, that will always be a person, not a machine.) I’ll admit that adjusting to the concept of considering a long work as a continuous text, rather than pages, has been major, as has the matter of inserting hyperlinks. Remember, I’m someone who loves the art of printing from its very origins. (How many Gutenberg Bibles have you seen?)

Even so, I’m excited by the new opportunities and the new visual dimensions.

Here we go, again.

SHOOTING THE SAME SPOT AGAIN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

We could be considering writing or painting and drawing as much as the photography that prompts today’s line of thinking. Specifically, I’m reflecting on the tension between trying to capture everything I see everywhere versus the reality that one needs limits.

For starters, I reach a point in shooting where I begin to weary. Push hard enough and everyone hits a wall. When it comes to photography, I just stop seeing images of interest. When I’m writing, my words go flat. Folks in other endeavors can relate their own versions.

A second fact of life comes in trying to arrange and manage what I already have. Accumulate too much and I’ll never find anything when I want or need it.

I find a similar tension in a writing project, where I can hope for a tightly focused, crystalline work even as it begins to expand into a complex baroque construction. Or the other way around.

As I’ve been shooting over the course of the Red Barn, I’ve found myself increasingly resisting an urge to range more widely from my base in Dover. I’m sticking more and more to what’s at hand here and in a few other familiar places like Sandwich, to the north, and Fort Foster in Kittery Point, Maine. We’ll see how that evolves in the future.

For now, what fascinates is seeing how much new keeps appearing to me in our yard or while I’m walking to meeting for worship on Sunday. Perhaps that’s why working on pieces in a series hold so much appeal as more and more keeps surfacing from the depths.

The other aspect of the series is the desire that somewhere in there is the one iconic piece that rises above the rest, can stand on its own, deserves its own place.

Oh, what would Monet say to all this? Or Matisse? Or any of a host of others!

The Cocheco River viewed from the footbridge on the community trail has become a favorite spot for my camera. Here's part of the scene as I was walking to meeting for worship on Sunday morning.
The Cocheco River viewed from the footbridge on the community trail has become a favorite spot for my camera. Here’s part of the scene as I was walking to meeting for worship one Sunday morning.