Category: Arts & Letters

TRULY CORRESPONDENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

A while back, while reading a selection of letters by the itinerant Quaker minister Elias Hicks (1748-1830), I was impressed by the length and quality of some of the individual correspondence. These were pieces that could have been published essays, yet were addressed to a specific individual – pieces, I should add, from a farmer by trade.

I’m left wondering about the amount of time some Friends (and others, of course) spent daily or weekly in reading and writing as well as reflecting on the issues at hand.

Don’t tell me it was a slower era or that they had more time to employ – labor was more demanding and often tedious, after all. I think something else is at play here.

As I said, I’m impressed.

MAKING TIME FOR THE WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As I said at the time …

There’s no denying the importance for a writer to have a physical space where the work-in-progress can be left out in the open, safely behind a closed door, between sessions. Where there’s no lost time putting everything away, only to have to bring it out again in order to resume where one left off. This doesn’t have to be a dream space, either.

But making time for writing is even more crucial. Being able to get a thought or line down on paper, while it’s fresh. Of finding large blocks of time to engage in the interior dialogue of characters as they emerge amid your daily errands and nocturnal dreams. (Like babies or demons, they possess you.)

I’m not alone in finding my practice of writing becomes part of a larger juggling act, especially when I’m already working fifty-hour weeks as a professional whatever somewhere else. Especially when those hours are outside the “literary” field altogether. Then there are the needs of a home life to contend with, and, in my experience, a faith community, too. For instance, I’ve found that as long as I’m employed as a full-time journalist, my off-duty hours leave me only enough hours to (a) write and revise or (b) focus on submissions and correspondence or (c) attend and give readings and other public events; but there is no way to do two of the three (much less all three) in the same period.

On top of it all, the work takes as long as it needs. Or, like the old-house syndrome, every repair or renovation project will require at least three times more time and money than you budgeted.

JUST A ROLLING STONE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

Lately, thanks in part to a great yard-sale find, I’ve been revisiting a lot of Bob Dylan and realizing how many phrases that pass through my head originate in his lyrics. Or at least the ones that also have a musical line. I came to him in late ’62 or early ’63 and was a loyal fan until he went electrified and left the activist and folk scenes. Count me among the contingent that felt betrayed.

OK, I’ve come to recognize and even admire a lot of significant material he wrote in the years since. The man could turn a phrase, for certain, even when he was drawing heavily from others.

The line, “Like a Rolling Stone,” had me wondering about its relationship to the naming of the band and the rock magazine, all three products of the ’60s. Did the song prompt the other two?

Turns out the band was formed in ’62; the song, ’65; and the magazine, then a tabloid newspaper, November 9, ’67. But, in another twist, the band took its name from Muddy Waters’ 1950 “Rollin’ Stone.”

As for the popular phrase, “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” the line points to John Heywood’s 1546 translation of the Roman-era Pubilius Syrus. So it’s been rolling around for some time.

~*~

Also from the ’60s was my discovery of the common Pennsylvania road sign, “Beware of Rolling Rock,” along with the brew. I suppose looking at the connection between those two would be like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or even why the chicken crossed the road before or after.

 

PUBLIC MAGAZINE SWAP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

One of the most popular services at our local library is a small cart in the hallway where patrons leave magazines they subscribe to. The periodicals become free for the taking.

Considering the cutbacks in the library’s own subscriptions (accompanying the cuts in the hours the building’s staffed and open), it’s a major service.

We feel good leaving our now-read copies, and feel grateful when we pick up others for perusal.

It’s quite an impressive array still coming in the mail. Hip, hip, hooray!

OH, YES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

 As I said at the time … Eighth Month 24, 1997 

Dear M of the Warm Heart and Extraordinary Signature …

Thanks for giving those five poems a first home. I look forward to seeing what you’re doing with your ‘zine, being already intrigued by your sense of graphic design. (A lobster in the crest? Great touch, especially considering how many French-speaking kids in Maritime Canada used to go to school with lobster in their lunchboxes while their richer English classmates had roast beef. How times change.)

You have no way of knowing how much your letter meant to me. (So I guess I’ll have to try explaining, right?)

Here I was dragging home from another hellish Saturday at the newspaper office — the 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. drill — well into a mounting depression that has been building for the last several weeks. (In part from watching an ex-girlfriend slip into alcoholism and eating disorders, and also in part from going to contradances where we’ve been way short of women partners, as well as in part from the pleasures of adult orthodontics, and even in part from car trouble, blah-blah. You get the picture.) So there, amid the junk mail and a bill or two: your letter. Poetry acceptances are always nice, especially when an editor selects more than one. An entire batch, of course, is a winning scratch ticket. But a letter? Not just a form acceptance? I’m touched.

You pack a lot into a single page. Things that trigger emotional reactions within me, too. For starters, you write so well — with seeming ease, grace, intimacy, color and a varied vocabulary, joy, and encouragement. You leave me arguing with myself: Is she really 18? (Na, can’t be … way too insightful to be a kid.) (Yes, she is: Listen to the dreams. Listen to the inner connections. You don’t get that from university study.) (Nah, it could be a very studied imitation — somebody who would like to be 18, like your friend who decided 17 was the perfect age and then spent the next half century remaining 17.) (Yes, see how she leaps with playful touches — the “love and liquor” or “little blade of grass in the garden of literature.”)

So, M, which is it? How is it you apparently have so much going — plus the resourcefulness and skill to launch your own magazine? Tell me, do … I’m intrigued. (And why, by the way, were you home on a Friday night instead of out on the town. Especially a big town, like Chi’town?) Ah, life! Ah, mystery!

“Professional” writer? My dear, all writing is work — and sometimes, when we’re really blessed, it becomes intense prayer, no matter how that particular piece turns out. Writing is a process, with two muses, as Wendell Barry insists: one says you can do it, you really have to give it a try, before the other reminds us, it’s harder than you thought! For most journalists, it’s a trade, as in plumbing or meat-cutting. Since no poet today pays the rent or mortgage from royalties alone, my definition of a “professional poet” is anyone who gets pieces published while being employed to teach “creative writing.” That makes the rest of us “amateur poets” — amateur, as in one who loves. Of course, as an editor now, you are “professional” to whatever degree you want to accept — especially since you’re in position to endorse some of those creative-writing teachers through publication. (Feel the power yet?)

Literary masterpieces? Don’t worry about that, not for a long time, if ever. The important thing for you now — as well as those other “mostly manic, angst-ridden teenagers,” who, you acknowledge, “produce some fine work too” — is to ride the energy, recording as much of it as you can while everything is extraordinary, intense, and fresh. This — your “shit load of poems (from) the last several years” — is the Mother Lode you’ll be drawing on for the rest of your writing career. Lucky you! Thirty years from now, you’ll shriek: “A diamond in the muck! A turn of genius where I had seen nothing remarkable!” Trust me. And in the meantime, throw nothing away. I wish I had begun keeping a journal six years earlier I did. One detail can spring an entire movie from oblivion.

A theory: By the time most writers develop the craft to accomplish what they intend technically, they’ve lost the opening that compelled them in the first place. The result is dry, technical work.

Put another way: A critic on PBS remarked that no other visual artist has produced as much bad art as Picasso did, yet we need the nine bad pieces if we are to appreciate the genius of the tenth one. Ted Berrigan, in one of his taped teaching sessions, says much of the same in warning writers to be wary of the limitations success can put on their outpouring.

About my poems in your hands: Yes, these five are delicate, subtle, even dreamlike. Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how the conflicts within any relationship often form as much of the fabric of connecting as the basic erotic/romantic attraction does. Of course, either partner can really know only his or her half of the interaction, at best, so there are always these gaps and misunderstandings and expectations and — well, the kind of lacy texture I think you perceive. I’m trying to let the images themselves convey this energy, without limiting it by any editorial comment. Does this make sense to you? (By the way, a hambo — one of the images — is a wonderful pivoting dance for a couple: somewhat like a waltz or a polka, except that the woman really does seem to fly about five feet rather than five inches above the floor.)

So how ‘bout sending a big batch (copies, of course) of your writing my way? Not that I’m bored, mind you, but as I’ve said, intrigued. The whole point of writing is to share it. Enclosed check, too, is for past issues, future issues, a subscription if you have one.

Wish you were here to read to me. It’s a lovely, dry, cool New England Sunday afternoon. A great day to head to the beach or the mountains. Or even off to Boston, for whatever. Thanks for making up for being so mean to everyone that day by being nice to me. Your penance worked!

Cheerios and grins …

CLASSICS MADE IN THE USA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If classical music’s to find a fuller audience in America, the works of our own composers need to be presented. Especially those I call the Illuminists, after the great painters who finally have found widespread appreciation.

I love the orchestral works of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, MacDowell, Griffes … and no other composer spanned so much change within two decades as Charles Ives.

We know only the surface. Listen closely, and you’ll find none of them sounds truly German, despite the accusations. Even were it true, we need to remember (a) German was the standard for classical music, so much so that even Dvorak suffered, and (b) German was a central component of American culture at the time, anyway – it was even a required language in many major city high schools.

Acknowledging this puts Aaron Copland within a longer tradition, and all of those who follow.

Now, if our major orchestras would only live up to the challenge. Is it really to much to ask that they play a fourth of their repertoire from their home base?

A WORLD QUITE ALIEN TO MY OWN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

As we watched the movie (let’s withhold the title as being irrelevant to my point), I was struck that these were not characters I would – or could – ever draft. Even if I’d managed to conjure up the range of members of the extremely dysfunctional family, they wouldn’t be believable, arising as they do from a world quite alien to mine. (Not that my family didn’t have its, uh, dysfunctions.)

It’s an awareness I’m having with increasing frequency – or at least maybe it’s just a heightened recognition. It involves not just family dynamics, either, but extends to a perception of romantic attractions or destructive people in the workplace or political office and beyond.

In the case of this particular movie, each character was appalling in a distinctive way and played to perfection by a top-line cast, which only added to my admiration of the scriptwriter’s achievement, one author to another.

Could it be I’m simply becoming more and more aware of how wide and varied our world really is?

 

READERS, READERS, WHEREVER YOU ARE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Are there many readers outside New York City? When it comes to literary fiction, at least, the majority of the work often seems to be set in the City, and maybe that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I do love the fact that so many subway riders are also transit readers, though, and maybe that plays a big influence in the book reading populace. Ditto for taking the bus.

But I’m always baffled by the question, “Who are your readers?” I like to think they come from everywhere, and from all walks of life.

And just who are you?

The marketing crowd, of course, likes to peg a genre to a demographic. Chick Lit is a prime example, which in turn created Hen Lit for an over-29 female readership. Romances we can guess. Maybe even the many strands of Sci Fi.

But I still like to hold out hope for a more diverse core of readers for my own work, including the new books appearing at Smashwords. Am I just being naive?

Heavens, is it really Boomer Lit? I’d hope not to be so limited.

ESCAPE? OR ENCOUNTER?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

A comment by Aaron James a few days back in response to my post “The Novel as a Time Machine” has prompted me to rethink my own expectations of literature, both as a reader and a writer. It was one of those elephant-in-the-room moments, actually, in which the most obvious thing can sometimes be the hardest to see.

Quite simply, when he said “a lot of people like to read as a form of escapism,” an alarm was triggered, based on a deeply engrained value from my formative years, the one that derided escapism as, well, unhealthy at its core and essentially fluffy. Looking back, I suspect the message was that escapism had the social relevance of sugar overload or a wild drunken night on the town. You know, it just wasn’t serious enough.

At a deeper level, I suspect the reaction also touches on the lingering historic distrust of the arts from my dad’s Quaker and Dunker roots, perhaps even some from my mother’s mix of Calvinist traditions (never mind Sir Walter Scott), and that’s even before we get to Tertullian and his critique of the “pagan” arts during the formation of the early church itself. You know, it all begins with assuming a role of another’s identity, something that’s simply counterfeit and a lie. (My apologies for way oversimplifying a marvelous line of reasoning. And, for the record, many modern Quakers are fine writers, actors, and artists.)

Still, as I was reflecting on Aaron’s comment, I had to admit how much I enjoy work that crosses from “reality” into a magical realm, one of fantasy or surrealism. I like to be taken places – or, as he hints, be given a sense of travel where exploring and learning are part of the sensation of the trip.

Is that escapism? Or is it encounter?

My inclination is to argue the latter. But does that make for a more rugged route? It even has me thinking about the “diet” we allow ourselves when it comes to literature – do we go vegan, for instance, or kosher, or out-and-out hedonistic? What’s “good” and what’s “bad”? And what’s simply another guilty pleasure?

AMPLIFYING THE LIST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

When we were considering literature arising from the hippie experience a while back, one of the surprises came in the reader comments as we recognized the predominance of non-fiction rather than novels. (Who says literature must be exclusively fiction, anyway?)

Still, there are four novelists who recently resurfaced in my memory, and I think they deserve consideration for their efforts from the time:

  • Edward Abbey: The Monkey Wrench Gang, etc.
  • Ernest Callenbach: Ecotopia
  • John Nichols: The Milagro Beanfield War, etc.
  • Tom Robbins: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, etc.

Noticing that these are all male, and that three focus heavily on the socio-political aspects of the movement, I have a nagging suspicion that we’re overlooking a range of female authors weighing in on their side of the experience. Any more nominations?