My favorite smaller cities and towns

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Being a college town really makes a difference. My selections are definitely skewered by the stretch of the country I’ve lived in.

Here goes:

  1. Dover, New Hampshire (population 32,191): Yes, my provenance for two decades and the source for much of the material here at the Red Barn.
  2. Portsmouth, New Hampshire (21,927): Just a dozen or so miles down the road from us, the Port City is wealthier and more tourist oriented, especially around the photogenic harbor. With a strong Colonial flavor, thanks to its array of mansions, it’s a prime example of a New England seaport, a category that could easily lead to its own Tendrils entry.
  3. Portland, Maine (66,215/metro area of a half million): A hour up the Interstate from Dover, the Forest City is the center of a third of the state’s population, as counted in the metro area. The Old Port District is especially charming and pedestrian friendly.
  4. Brunswick, Maine (20,278): A bit further on is the home of Bowdoin College and a fun-to-explore downtown. I love its Vietnamese restaurant.
  5. Eastport, Maine (1,331): And much further up the coast is this much shrunken city that’s fighting for survival. No college, though. No Laundromat, either, or pizza parlor. Its saving grace is an spunky arts scene and the ocean, including a really deep-water port. As you’re seeing, it’s won our hearts … enough to lure us from Dover.
  6. Port Townsend, Washington (9,704): Jumping to the other side of the continent, this artsy community on the Olympic Peninsula relies on ferry service across Puget Sound for access to about everything other than the mountains and forests at its back. It’s also home to a state park dedicated to the arts.
  7. Ellensburg, Washington (21,111): Situated in the desert east of Seattle, this small college town blends Wild West atmosphere with outdoors opportunities, including the Yakima Canyon. You may have seen it in the TV series “Northern Exposure.”
  8. Yellow Springs, Ohio (3,487): Returning back across the heartland, I thought about adding Iowa City or Madison, Wisconsin, but don’t know enough about either to speak fluently. Yellow Springs, long the home of bohemian Antioch College, fills the bill for me with its small-town New England touches and the Glen Helen Nature Preserve.
  9. Bloomington, Indiana (85,000): Set in a wooded, rolling landscape, it’s the home of Big Ten Indiana University and its plethora of cultural opportunities. It also bears a passing resemblance to Daffodil in a few of my novels.
  10. Burlington, Vermont (42,417): Look, it’s the biggest city in the Green Mountain State and has Lake Champlain at its foot and great views of the Adirondacks beyond. It’s also about as hippie crunchy as you can get, though it helps if your grandparents set you up with a trust fund or two. You might consider Middlebury as an alternative.

~*~

I can think of some suburban Boston communities, but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

Your turn to weigh in with worthy nominations!

 

More than the bottom line

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Even though I cut this from the final version of my novel What’s Left, it’s still true:

What people need, and this is essential to a proper approach to labor, is balance.

~*~

Two things are going on here, one inside the other, but I’d like to be less confusing.

The first, quite simply, is my belief in what we Quakers call centering. We find our stopping all outwork activity for a time of deep meditation and reflection helps bring us perspective on the other parts of our lives. Add to that moderation and simplicity or focus all leading to a healthy balance of individuality, home, career, community, faith, and so on.

The second touches on attitudes toward labor itself, which quite frankly has been demeaned in modern society. What makes the concept of leisure so exalted? The danger, I suspect, is in overworking — often sucking any joy out of the project at hand.

Think of your job. What could management do to make it more human?

~*~

Classic. Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside Boston.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, what do I know? Like I’m an expert on anything?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Through the period of my life right after college, I kept relocating every year-and-a-half to a new job and location. The shock provided more grist for my writing than I would have anticipated, but not the time to digest it.  Each round, I was just getting settled when I was interrupted and uprooted. That set me in four different states over six years at the beginning, followed by three more over the next ten. Altogether, that added up to 11 mailing addresses in seven states before I packed pack up for New England. No matter how adventurous I might find adjusting to the new environments, it was ultimately stressful. There were days I hardly knew where I was waking up. More emotionally difficult has been the way friendships fade over such distances.

As a writer who was also tackling the demands of a new job, I had little time to digest the fresh material, much less revise it, either as poetry or prose, especially if I wanted to dig beneath the surface.

As for my love life?

It’s a wonder I didn’t go loco.

What do you know about apples?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

Maybe Jaya and Joshua took apples for granted when they moved into an orchard in my novel Nearly Canaan. That ignorance didn’t last long.

Here are a few of the things they may have discovered.

  1. Apples are a member of the rose family. (Good thing they don’t have thorns!)
  2. Apples have to be picked by hand.
  3. The trees require four or five years to produce their first fruit. Some trees grow to be 100.
  4. Apples account for half of the world’s deciduous fruit tree production. China, by the way, grows more apples than any other country.
  5. They come in sizes ranging from as small as a cherry to as big as a grapefruit – and can weigh up to three pounds.
  6. More than 2,500 varieties are grown in the U.S. but only the crabapple is native. Globally, more than 7,500 varieties are raised.
  7. The first apple tree in North America was planted by the Pilgrims.
  8. The harvest from an average tree can fill 20 bushels or boxes each weighing 42 pounds.
  9. About 36 apples go into a gallon of cider.
  10. Upstate New York used to be a big producer until acid rain from Midwestern coal-powered plants led to serious blight.

~*~

And, yes, as far as that apple a day doctor thing goes, the fruit has no sodium, cholesterol, or fat but is rich in fiber.

What can you add to the list?

Beware, the Romantic Cult of the Artist

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Yes, we’ve admired madmen, especially those of a tragic sort via what I see as often incestuous works of art. You know, celebrations of other works of art or, especially, their creators.

In effect, there’s a question. Other works based on mythology, classical or Nordic, typically, face immortals who are still caught in some dimension of time – how else could they spawn children?

Turning the focus from flawed gods to the Immortal Artist, then, implicitly asks: Are madmen closer to God? Or filled with demons to be cast out, perhaps as artworks?

You know, the cliché history of poet suicides or pianist-composers who die at an early age or libertine actresses, that sort of tragedy, not always as a consequence of defying the gods, either. Think of all the poets in the core opera librettos – a shorthand for the librettist himself or the social commentator – as well as the composers or singers. It’s a long list.

Remember, too, in many Native cultures, there’s a special place for the madman as gateway to ancient wisdom or healing or a netherworld.

Admired madmen but also feared them. Just don’t get too close, even with a morbid curiosity.

Like the artist, they exist at the fringe of the village.

It’s implicit even in hymns about hymns and the raising of voices.

And also my speaking here as a fellow poet and novelist.

~*~

It’s hard to look beyond our own boundaries and explore the greater world beyond.

This is crucial, if we’re to engage others, in light of murder, rape, warfare, and other oppression and injustice around us. Is art really far from fostering imitation in life itself? Or is it rather for escape from any reality? Do we desire encounter or flight?

Earlier, I admired dazzling tricks and outward style, derring-do, and jests with fancy footwork. Shining surfaces and surreal images.

Over time, that’s changed.

My heroes have become more human and flawed, as well.

~*~

Throughout much of Friends’ history, many of the fine arts were offensive to the faithful; most painting, drawing, sculpture, fiction, theater, music, and opera were seen as superfluous vanities, engagements that took our attention away from worship. “We Quakers only read true things” is how one Friend expressed the matter when returning an unread novel to a neighbor. For a people who refused even gravestones, worldly adornments detracted from loving a heavenly Father with all their heart, mind, and soul, as well as loving one another as Christ had loved his/its followers.

Tertullian issued a related warning, in De Spectaculis, Latin circa 200 CE. 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)

As was recognized in Zen some centuries ago, when people started writing and singing and painting and acting from their spiritual practice, the flowering is already past its zenith. Nonetheless, we also know the power of the Zen-suffused works as they extended on to pottery, architecture, tea ceremony, even martial arts.

When I view Japanese and Chinese art, the Zen/Chan pieces jump out in their freshness from the well-schooled stream of traditional art.

Thus, with poetry or musical performance that knows living silence: a whole higher dimension. Necessity for revolution here. Transformation. Transfiguration. Transcendence. Transparency, too.

Is this a matter of like recognizing like spirit?

~*~

My real distrust of the celebration of the artist as a demigod comes in a plea for greater humility.

Yes, we work – as the poem Toltecatl, translated as “The Artist” by Denise Leverov details lovingly before countering with “The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people, / makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of things, / works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.”

The contrast is telling.

We’re hardly alone in work. Plumbers work, paying the price in their knees. Farmers work. Teachers work. Mothers, especially, work. Go on down the line, and admire all who do so with developed skill and intelligence and service. Who can say one field is truly superior the others?

~*~

I’m left wondering about a crossover identity of artist and priest, an expectation that the artist is expected to guide others into love or even the natural wonder around us.

It’s a fine line, between being a priest and a demigod. An inflated ego is a constant temptation, among others.

Still, how can I not love the movie “Amadeus”?

Who do you look to for inspiration?