That’s Moose Island Contras Etc., a very fine traditional country dance band with a very fine caller. We do have fun around here.
Hard to believe, but it’s really happening
With a sense of despair regarding the roof project and our lack of a contractor on the horizon, we went ahead and set about erecting raised garden beds for what would be my third summer of dwelling here. We would try to leave some space for a contractor to get at the house, should we ever, ever, find someone.
During one of the inevitable conversations with passers-by while installing the garden and its fencing, a trusted neighbor mentioned that she had just had some carpentry done by a former student, someone who had returned home after living and working away. She gave us his name and phone number, and an introductory conversation followed.
Yes, he could do the project, and he thought in could start at the end of August. I was startled when he said that was the upcoming August, not a year off. Could it truly be?
Naturally, there were delays while he wrapped up some other commitments, but we did find ourselves in a stunned state of disbelief when work finally began in earnest at the beginning of this past October. We finally had a contractor who not only showed up on the morning he promised, but also on the dot of the hour.
He hit the ground running, methodically, precisely.
At the heart of our big project is a new roof on the house. Not just the asphalt shingling, which itself has needed replacement – we could have found someone to do that – but the actual shape of the supporting rafters themselves. To gain much-needed interior space, the walls on the second floor are being raised. That structural work’s the complication. And how, as you’ll see.
When we were considering making an offer on the house, we were told to check out the rafters for signs of charring, a consequence of the 1886 fire that destroyed the canneries, wharves, and downtown. Sure enough, ours was one of the homes suffering damage though left standing.
A few weeks before starting on the renovation, our contractor stopped by with his mentor slash consultant for a closer look. More concerning, from their point of view, was the lack of a ridge beam. The rafters from each side were simply mitered together. In addition, they were further apart than current coding would permit.
Our project would be taking place in two phases – the back half of the roof last fall and the front half in the spring. Without a ridge pole, there was nothing to hold up the remaining half and nothing to support the new raised framing.
You’ll discover where that leads.
It’s been what you might call a zig-zag path
My professional life didn’t follow the conventional course, where the goal was to land on a major metropolitan daily. If not the New York Times, then the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, or the down the line from there. What were also called “destination” newspapers, with decent pay and more focused work in contrast to the sweatshops in smaller communities, or what are now called markets.
I had some near misses, but my route instead led me into places that remain largely unexplored, at least as far as literature or public awareness are concerned.
In my case?
- Binghamton, New York, along the Susquehanna River and the Southern Tier of the Allegheny foothills. What I encountered there appears in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks and, with a heavy New York City connection, Subway Visions.
- The Poconos of Pennsylvania, when I took off for a few years in a monastic setting based on yoga practice and back-to-the-earth community. This is the foundation of Yoga Bootcamp as well as portions of Subway Visions.
- Fostoria, a railroad crossing in the flat but very fertile farmland of northwest Ohio. Gives rise to Prairie Depot in Nearly Canaan and to the opening novella in the Secret Side of Jaya. And, personally, the bride in my first marriage.
- Back to Bloomington, this time not as a student but as a public policy research associate make that social sciences editor at Indiana University. My experiences as an undergraduate frame Daffodil Uprising and What’s Left, while those as college staff feed into Nearly Canaan and the middle novella of the Secret Side of Jaya, both extrapolated to the Ozarks in Arkansas.
- Yakima, Washington. It’s the Promised Land in Nearly Canaan and the final novella in the Secret Side of Jaya.
- Dubuque, Iowa, along the Upper Mississippi. Adds some detail to Daffodil and What’s Left. Personally and professionally, it was a disaster.
- Warren, Ohio, in the Rust Belt. Hometown News. And how!
- Baltimore, Maryland, my base as a field representative for the Chicago Tribune’s media syndicate. More detail for Hometown News.
- Manchester, New Hampshire, and later commuting from Dover an hour to the east. Revisions to the manuscripts and earlier versions.
- And now, Eastport, Maine, in supposed retirement.
Curiously, my professional locations before Baltimore all infuse my fiction. Strangely, I’ve never written about Dayton, where I grew up, or the places later, at least as fiction. Poetry is another matter altogether.
As we’re seeing today
No man is allowed to be the judge of his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.
James Madison in Federalist No. 10
Forced bulbs are a welcome tradition
This time of year, the fresh green is as welcome as the eventual flowers.
Vincent Katz and my little red journal
When I set about planning and packing for a week on the water last year, I knew I wouldn’t be bringing my laptop. The electrical power on the schooner was mostly from some powerful batteries and two small solar panels. We could charge our cell phones and had small lights in our cabins, but that was about it.
I did pack a Paris Review and a Harper’s magazine, should I feel like indulging in reading, but the heart of my “literary” life focused on a small red journal I had picked up a year or so earlier plus a few printouts of Vincent Katz poems that set a direction that has intrigued me.
Katz, like his father, the American painter Alex Katz, can look at mundane things in a seemingly flat tone that feels seminal.
Consider the line, “I wish I lived here but I do live here,” from “Francis Bacon.” It’s a feeling I know.
As he says in “Back on 8th Ave.”:
The job of the poet is not easy:
be utterly observant, tracking,
and to note down, in plain language,
with minimal emotional distortion,
what s/he sees.
For me, it had been ages since I’d sat down before a blank page and started off without any idea of where the words would be going. My usual journaling at least has a calendar full of events to catch up on, plus notes I’ve scribbled out, maybe even emails. And my more public writing has been things like this, with a purpose.
My goal was to fill the little notebook in a week. Quality or substance was not the measure. Just look and listen and try to be very much in the present moment.
It was a harder assignment than you might think. But it did provide much of the text for many of the posts you’ll be seeing this year.
Here are a few samples of what I entered:
looking for the obvious can be a challenge
~*~
Yellow house
behind a brown one
on a hill
flagpole and staircase
down to a wharf
the dreadful verses
you attempted
page after page
of aspiring youth
reached and fell
that stuff now is flatter
but more secure
likely no more profound
or less
don’t worry, Jnana, nothing’s happening
you’d think I could fill this small notebook with drivel in a week
but I’m halfway short
I did end the entries
[to be continued]
Hopefully, on an upcoming cruise in late summer.
A few thoughts spinning around Scripture
- Even if Biblical Scripture is essentially the “men’s minutes” of divine history, the women therein generally come off much better than the men – and whenever the women are named, there is growth in the church: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, etc.
- Because the male gender language has been inclusive, representing the universal, there is no English way for men to refer to themselves in the particularity of being male – no way, in other words, that we can distinctly represent the specifics of being male only. So just who has been more impoverished by this defect?
- When I get away from my emotions, I’m also far from my God … (God is love).
- Argument: It’s possible to do religion without faith, but impossible to maintain a mutually loving connection without faith i.e. trust. Thus, positive relationship exists with the Divine.
- Hosanna and Alleluia as universal expressions of awe and ecstasy.
- Hashem = “the unnamable name” = neutral.
- Adoni = lord = male.
- Elohim = breast = female.
- The idea of “casting spells” is that you can order God/the gods/spirits to do your bidding rather than the other way around.
- Zionism originated to save a language. That is, a language needs a place where it lives.
Paper bags star
Those were lunch bags.
Acid test poet: Anne Waldman (1945- )
Perhaps best known as a cofounder of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan as well as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics each summer at the Tibetan Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado, Waldman has worked with many of the famed Beat poets a generation older in a life of experimental writing and social activism.
In preparing this post, I was surprised to find she’s only a few years old than me. She’s often seemed to be that much further ahead in the history of contemporary literature.
She first impressed me with a few poems in Disembodied Poetics, an annual review she co-edited. I liked the way the disparate elements danced, something in common with much of what I’ve written. Later, in her collected works, I was taken with the ways she employed repetition, something I had avoided as, well, redundant. My Preludes & Fugues, especially, are beholden to her on that front.
Jnana's Red Barn 