Category: Arts & Letters

THE YEAR 1980

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The earth itself is set to erupt.

~*~

Thunder pealed again, and everybody packed up. Outside, Roddy and Erik danced in the eerie dusk. A soft drumming in trees sounded like drizzle, but instead of water, powder fell. Everyone appeared amazed, even elated. Weren’t we fortunate to have a volcano blow up in our face! Then Jaya recalled history: “Oh, Pompeii! Will guides conduct tours here, showing the world exactly how we victims perished? Is this the way our world will end?” Something gripped her, insisting they get home or die in the effort. She dragged Erik, protesting, to the car and raced through the grit. Autos in front of them were invisible, even their taillights, until Jaya was almost atop them. The ink blot overhead closed in on the far horizon, sealing off the last natural light. Plunging through this tar-paper snowfall on a route they knew so well, Jaya recalled the many times she had joked about being able to drive it blindfolded.

Promise~*~

To learn more about my novel, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

LITERATURE ACCOMPANYING THE HIPPIE EXPERIENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 25 Comments

A shelf of books was often part of the hippie scene, and I suppose many of the novelists and poets were technically beatniks, but they shaped our journey as well. I think, especially, of Richard Brautigan, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Richard Farina, and Gurney Norman, as well as the German Herman Hesse of an earlier era, and Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Test Acid Test. There were also many non-fiction works of influence, including the Whole Earth Catalog, and the Lama Foundation’s Be Here Now.

Which authors and volumes would you add to the shelf if you were trying to give a fuller picture of the experience?

I suspect there are some fine reads that need to be recovered, and blatant self-promotion is also welcome.

This book swap’s open!

HOMAGE TO THE BEST … AND BACK TO THE SCREENING ROOM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

We sometimes express a yearning for the return of the Renaissance Man – the individual who could be conversant on all fronts of intellectual inquiry – but the reality today is that it’s impossible even to stay abreast of the developments in one’s own field, much less other more widely shared interests.

Just ask folks who read if they’ve read your latest hot discovery, and you’ll likely get blank looks. It’s just a fact of life, even for works that are in the basic canon.

It extends to the other arts, too, and we won’t even raise the frontiers of science.

That reality hit home the other night when we sat down (finally!) to view Citizen Kane. I knew from my cinema studies (uh, 44 years ago) that the work was then considered one of the four greatest movies ever made, but somehow it had slipped through my viewing. Yes, I’d seen Birth of a Nation and the Battleship Potemkin and likely the fourth work on that tally, though I can’t remember what it was.

And now? I’m in the camp that considers Kane the most important movie ever made. Period. And, as my viewing companion said afterward, “I was ready to respect the movie, but I didn’t expect that I’d enjoy it as much as I did.” Which was immensely.

If you want to know how Orson Welles and his team changed the face of movie-making so utterly profoundly, go to the Wikipedia entry for the movie and then watch Peter Bogdanovich and Roger Ebert’s running commentaries, which are included on the Netflix DVD. Apart from the advent of color, there’s really nothing they didn’t revolutionize. (If you see something they missed, speak up.)

I’m glad we saw Kane after we’d watched The Grand Budapest Hotel. For all of Wes Anderson ‘s wonderful quirkiness, we could now appreciate the ways he and his team paid homage to Welles and the incredible cinematographer Gregg Toland at the head of that list.

We’re now going to have to watch both movies again.

HOW DID THEY AFFORD IT?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

Viewing several documentaries on the writing life in Manhattan in the 1950s leaves me wondering just how anyone could afford it. Yes, the world was quite different then and, if we can believe their arguments, the written word was king the way it would no longer be by the late ’60s.

Still, it’s hard for me to believe that writing would have paid that much more in the era than it did when I entered the profession. How many plum magazine assignments were there, anyway? Or how many lucrative book advances?

The argument that rents were low, especially in Greenwich Village, is hard to believe for anyone who tried to find a decent place upstate in the early ’70s, as I did. Even for a full-time journalist working for Gannett, the best the pay would cover was a slum where a heavy rain would leak on my typewriter.

And that was without the heavy drinking that we’re told was required of the New York literary set, as well as the psychotherapy, sometimes daily. Plus the heavy smoking. Did I add, all the men wore suits and ties. (And all of the writers and editors, it was emphasized, were males. Women were employed as “fact checkers.”)

Still, when I run the numbers, they don’t add up. Can anyone tell me what I’m missing?

 

PAPER-FREE DIGITAL ANXIETIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Do we read less closely online than we do on paper?

Do pieces get lost in the email and social media deluge of new material? (With paper, are we more likely to revisit a piece and ponder it? More likely to use it a springboard for response or action?)

Do we keep things in our inbox or mailbox folders? Or do we delete most of them once they’re read? (Or do we scan them, rather than reading?) Or just save them, “for later”?

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling flooded. There seems to be way too little time to keep up, and my mind is feeling like a sieve. Now, we’re all on to the next …

GOING PAPERLESS, TO SOME DEGREE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

It’s been a little over a year since I went largely paperless, as the high-tech crowd would put it. Not entirely by choice, but rather because my printer died and the one we have for the household no longer interacts with any of our three laptops. So much for technology. Alas.

Yes, it can be an annoyance, especially when I have a choral score to print out or my wife’s found some great coupons. But we’ve found ways to cope.

When my printer went kaput, I was already finding that most poetry journals were accepting submissions only online, and that included the printed quarterlies. Keeping duplicate files of online and printout versions was troublesome and led to several embarrassing duplicate acceptances. So I decided to go to online-submissions only, and had only a few instances where I had to decline an opportunity.

Blogging, of course, has allowed me to move many pieces straight to the Internet without using paper, so that’s cleaned up a corner of my studio.

The big breakthrough was the ebook publishing with Smashwords. There’s no more need for multiple printed manuscript copies or files of postal correspondence to cope with. It’s so clean!

Not that the piles of paper don’t continue. Rather, they’re smaller these days. I’ll still pay my bills with a check, thank you, and there are always paper notes for consideration. Admittedly, I used to jest that sorting papers was one of my hobbies. In a way, it still is.

The fact is I love the feel and look of paper when it’s used well – fine stock and good typography, especially, along with masterful photography or illustration. And I still have a lot of that to sort through, to say nothing of all my years of journaling, which I’ve done with fountain pens for nearly two decades now. The old-fashioned fountain pens I ordered the same time I bought a PC that’s long been out of commission. The pens that dance in my hands, unlike this keyboard.

THIS SECRET SOCIETY OF READERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

One of the more baffling questions for just about any author, I suspect, is the one that asks, “Who are your readers?”

Yes, I know about genres and their core audiences – Chick Lit, aimed at unmarried females in their 20s; Romance, middle-age women; Sci-Fi, geeky males; Young Adult, well, it’s self-explanatory. I even know that commercial radio programmers could target their listenership to hit an average, say, of 24.7-year-old women in the office.

For a poet, though, or the novelist working outside common genres, this question becomes more problematic. I can imagine those I hope will find the work appealing, but the reactions often turn up elsewhere. I’m thinking of a writer who hoped her work would speak to her friends, only to hear them say, “I don’t read books,” as if it’s a badge of honor. (Oh, for shame!)

What that suggests is that rather than expecting a boffo bestseller, we writers might envision a much smaller-scale enterprise – connecting with readers one-on-one, as an underground understanding. Let it be private and personal, then. Our own quiet conversation.

Whether my Hippie Trails novels find their appeal more for those who lived through the era or among younger readers undergoing similar searching is still taking shape. I would hope both. But I am enjoying the feedback I’m receiving, from wherever.

It’s not the big-business Manhattan operation I once dreamed of or the San Francisco counterculture success, either. But here we are, connecting, in our own little underground society. Little do the others know what they’re missing now, do they?

DEAREST MADAMOISELLE, LOVELY AND EVER CHARMING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time: Hey! Somewhere along the line, the Postal Service lost a letter, it seems. At any rate, I’ve been wondering about you, how you’re doing, whether you decided to run off to New Mexico or Arizona and start having babies one-two-three or whatever. Even whether I’d said something that offended terribly. (So much for self-esteem, right?)

At least, thanks to the wonders of Computer Era (or, too often, Computer Error) I be able (that, I’m told, reflects Chicago schooling regarding the conjugation of the verb to be) to resurrect my last letter to you. Is this the one you responded to, meaning I never got your last letter? Or did you not get this one? And the poems in the new Indigo, um,  are they the two you didn’t know you had or, surprise, are they the ones I sent in July? Mysteries, mysteries!

At any rate, I’m anxiously awaiting the new issue – and all the news – and maybe even the missing letter!

On this end, to update from what’s there: Am still waiting for the chapbook … the usual unexpected delays and complications; in this case, a near-fatal blood clot suffered by the editor’s wife.

As you can see, I’m in the midst of a major computer conversion – from a fourteen-year-old XPC II system and nearly 300 five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks (Word Perfect 4.1) to a 6.4-gigabyte Pentium II Windows 98 Word 97 unit with both HP scanner and inkjet printer. It’s taking much longer than I anticipated; am still not on-line (one step at a time!) It’s like household he-man repairs and remodeling: everything takes three times longer than you believe it will, should, or can. Just ask your Italian father: if he’s anything like my ex-father-in-law, the one I miss greatly, these jobs are just that. (One of Sam’s great lessons to me, by the way: be sure to leave something undone for tomorrow!)

So I built, from kits, a new credenza and hutch, plus a “utilities cart,” projects that proved the timing theory: the credenza that took the salesman two hours to assemble took me six or eight, in part because the instructions are written in three languages but proficient, from what I could determine, in none. Ditto for the printed illustrations. Then, when the electronic goodies came, there were all the boxes to unpack and the new wiring to figure out (and whatever you need for the big rebates seems to get lost with the trash). Guess I’ll never purchase again where there’s a rebate involved! Just give me the discount, now! To say nothing of the software to install, nearly wrecking my Windows 98 in the process. (A Sunday morning phone call to Hewlett Packard nearly averted that!) At least much of the software installation is so much easier than it was a decade ago! My computer guru, the one I’ve “hired” for a bottle of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels, has been a big help, dropping on me a stack of magazines that could be used instead as the coffee table; his real challenge is in rigging the system that will allow me to convert and transfer a dozen or so novels and tons of other writings from the old system to the new. All this must seem foreign to you, who appear so much at ease with stylish desktop publishing! (So when did you first delve into cyberland – and desktop and all of the great touches you display?)

Hmm, that’s interesting, the date on the page break and all. One more thing to figure out, eventually – modifying these damn templates to my own style! (Spent a couple of hours a few weeks ago trying to do that, only to finally learn I couldn’t do it – see now there are other ways to go about it, thanks to a $40 book that tells me what Microsoft’s can’t.)

Did get away for a week in a small cabin in the Maine woods – no heat and no glass in the windows, but there was a fireplace as well as sliding shutters across the screened windows: good thing, too, with the nights getting down to freezing! Snuggled in with a stack of novels to read, learned to canoe solo on the five-mile-long lake and winding river, and even drafted some decent poetry.

*   *   *

How long ago all that seems! Well, it does come from a few years before I acquired the barn and everything that’s gone with it … including a great wife and family. Which makes it ancient history, indeed, even without the computer updates.

ANOTHER PROMISCUOUS READER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

I had thought the phrase “promiscuous reader” originated with Virginia Woolf to describe someone who reads widely and passionately – even the sides of breakfast cereal boxes – but now fail to find it. (So much for relying on memory.) Instead, she left us The Common Reader, itself drawing on Dr. Samuel Johnson’s phrase in his “Life of Gray,” where he bellows, “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honors.” Woolf, of course, takes Johnson to task as she peruses her own wide range of literature, while Johnson, in that cruel twist of fate, exists almost exclusively in the realm of university English literature departments.

I think, too, of a girlfriend’s reaction the first time she entered my apartment and saw the rows of peach lugs displaying my collected books along one wall: “Wow, you’ve read all these?” Well, mostly, I probably replied, silently realizing there would be some serious differences here. Looking back, I see how many more volumes had slipped away – in the divorce, to other lovers – or simply been borrowed and never returned. (The lugs, by the way, were inspired by a description in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums – the orchard no longer used apple crates, but the wooden peach lugs were still available.)

On the other hand, you may be one of those who enters a home and immediately heads for the shelves to see what the host reads – or even plays on the CD or phonograph. As my ledger of readings demonstrates, the spines of the volumes can say a lot about a person. Besides, the paradox of books and magazines is that they dwell in our private experiences, yet also engage in a dialogue, often across decades or even centuries. Sometimes we even find others whose readings overlap and can speak together of our travels. At the moment, I’m beginning to feel like an open book.

All the same, here’s hoping you enjoy my shelves, such as they are. And thanks to those of you who have already weighed in.

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