WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Even in the face of the outrages over the corrupting clout of the superrich investment in partisan politics, a fresh insight can prove haunting. And let’s not dignify that as “donations.” That’s my reaction to a passage from David Cole’s review of Burt Neuborne’s new book, Madison’s Music: On Reading the First Amendment.

It’s not just at the highest levels, either. When the infusion of cash hits smaller races, the whole system gets bought.

As Cole’s “Free Speech, Big Money, Bad Elections” (New York Review of Books, November 5) points out:

… increasingly sophisticated gerrymandering has ensured that many elected offices are sinecures for one of the two major parties. In the House of Representatives, only about forty seats, or less than 10 percent of the chamber, are filled in genuinely contested general elections. The results can be perverse.

I happen to live in one of those seats that’s become contested, after decades of being a Republican stronghold. Cole, however, presses his case that many of the general elections are rigged in favor of one side or another:

In North Carolina in 2012, the popular vote for House members was 51 percent Democratic and 49 percent Republican. Yet North Carolina’s delegation to the House consisted of nine Republicans and four Democrats. North Carolina’s state legislature had packed Democratic voters into four districts, ensuring that Republicans would win the other nine. …

So who’s really representing the people? And who are the winning officeholders really representing? It’s not just North Carolina, either, as Cole notes:

Democrats received more than half of the House votes in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2012, and did not get a majority of House seats in any of them. In what sense can such outcomes be called democratic?

Considering the low turnout rates in general elections – a consequence, as Cole details, of a sense of futility for many would-be voters or outright obstacles put in their path – an observer can wonder how much of the public the winners really do represent. That is, if 49 percent of a 40 percent turnout can win 247 seats in the House (this is a theoretical model, mind you), one could argue that the majority of the House of Representatives represents just 20 percent of the public. And if the Freedom Caucus, about 20 percent of that party, insists on dictating its ideology on the rest of the nation, that could be a mere 4 percent trying to run the country. In some places, that would be considered a coup.

Yes, I know the numbers wouldn’t all fall that neatly in one direction or the other. But it’s scary, all the same.

IS THE PRESIDENCY TOO VAST FOR A MERE HUMAN TO FILL?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Henry Kissinger once admitted that the realities of being Secretary of State overturned his expectations of the position. Before taking office, he saw the role as akin to being Zeus on Mount Olympus – the divine expanse of time and perspective to make wise decisions of long-lasting statesmanship. Instead, in the turmoil of relentless global crises, what he encountered was more like being an NFL quarterback on a Sunday afternoon in autumn. You had to do something fast and hope for the best before you got clobbered. Talk about high pressure? Lives were often at stake.

That insight comes back to my mind each round of presidential primaries where I live. Remember, the State Department is only one Cabinet position reporting to the White House. And it’s puny compared to the Pentagon.

Whoever wins in November 2016 will have to be able to find people who can fill these positions, and then find the time to manage their work. How can anyone possibly touch base with them even once a week, much less act with sufficient knowledge? Well, a quarterback has both the rest of the team and the coaches – plus a week to prepare and a lot of time on the sidelines, if his defense is doing its job. Not so the President, with rounds of dinners and photo ops and having to make public announcements on seemingly every news development as it happens …

I’ve seen reports on the time demands on the Chief Executive and how many of our recent examples have lived with no more than four hours of sleep a night. That’s inhuman. Period. Here’s one point where those arguing for smaller government could build their case. I’m listening.

THE DESIRE FOR DOCUMENTATION … OR AT LEAST CONFIRMATION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

My career of editing newspapers often introduced a tension between trying to be the first to present important developments to our readers (that is, news) and their desire to have us run the olds – photos and lists of names from activities days or even weeks previous. My feeling was that their club and church items were usually of interest only to those who already knew about them – hardly the stuff of urgent news – and rarely added to our paid circulation. I’d met enough people who wanted others to read their publicity far more than they themselves were willing to extend the same courtesy to others. Put another way, if the “names-is-news” imperative had much merit, the telephone book would be much more thoroughly read than it is – and much fatter than it keeps getting in an Internet age.

More recently, though, in my retirement I’ve become involved in public events that could make the news spotlight – and haven’t, even when the TV cameras were turned on us. I’d love to show folks around me what we were up to. It’s confirmation we were there, actually. And that, I suspect, is what those readers wanted all along.

Curiously, that’s where social media are filling the gap in documenting everyday life. In the examples I’m thinking of here, the photos of us look great, for starters. The only problem, personally, is that I’m always somewhere in the corner, often cut in half. I guess it just goes with being in the bass section.

Well, maybe I could start taking selfies and posting them here. On second thought, though … I’ll spare you.

~*~

As a footnote, I’m also remembering one locality where everybody was willing to sign up for an event, especially as the committee chairman. Or more accurately, chairwoman. And as soon as the promotion announcement appeared in print, they all somehow vanished, leaving the two newcomers to the group with all the responsibility for actually pulling it off.

We never ran a follow-up to that effect, either.

FROM SCRATCH WITHOUT A RECIPE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a novel that could never have been written from an outline. I had to pour all the ingredients into a mixing bowl and start cooking.

No outline? No recipe! And no formula, either. Here are the ingredients, what are you gonna do with ’em? In this case, it starts out fantasy, of a sort, goes through steampunk, of a sort, and ends up dystopian, of a sort. Or somewhere close with a happier end?

The framework’s simple enough. Daily coded electronic dispatches between Bill, in the field, and his boss, in corporate headquarters – back in the days just prior to emails and the Internet – are soon augmented by a few trusted colleagues as Bill infiltrates the once bustling town of yrubBury. The goal is to covertly buy up the decaying riverside mills and, under the pretext of historic preservation, transform them into maximum security high-tech manufacturing.

For the record, I pursued the renovation angle from the earliest drafts of the novel, long before savvy investors bought up similar sites for small-business launch pads. In that regard, I feel vindicated by developments – including those where I now live.

As the conversations that shape the novel evolved, however, the conflict between small-is-beautiful and international conglomerates came into the fray.

When I first envisioned Big Inca, I was covering 14 states as a field representative for a Fortune 500 company. Or at least one of its subsidiaries. And I’d already been involved in management politics and thinking. Memos and checking in from the boondocks were already part of my repertoire. So all of that went into the stew.

There are other conflicts, of course, to contribute.

In the story, Bill’s a generalist in an age of specialists and fresh out of college when he’s sent into the field as a kind of entrepreneurial anthropologist. He’ll need detailed help along the way. He definitely can’t do it alone.

The town itself is populated with ancient ethnic rivalries – as well as some new ones, as Big Inca will demonstrate. The Old World and the New World are bound to collide, as they always have, especially in the most unanticipated places.

There’s even what’s legal and what’s shady to confront.

We have basic issues of making a living and making a difference and romance and intrigue to deal with. All thrown into the steaming cauldron.

Over the course of the novel, give them three years to simmer and boil.

Even if it took three decades to come together.

Inca 1~*~

The novel is available here.

 

 

MEMORY, IMAGINATION, AND LITERARY INTENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A passage in an essay by Joyce Carol Oates stopped me cold in my tracks:

Literature is not a medium that lends itself well to the Surrealist adventure of disponibilite. Even radically experimental fiction requires some strategy of causation, otherwise readers won’t trouble to turn pages. Unlike most visual art, which can be experienced in a single gaze, fiction is a matter of subsequent and successive gazes, mimicking chronological time, as it is locked into chronological time. … (“Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature,” New York Review of Books, August 13)

So that’s been my “problem” as a poet and novelist? A surrealist adventure? Oh, my! I’ve long been fond of surrealism, often because I often see and hear life in that vein. While stopping short of subscribing to any manifesto, including those that gave rise to dada and surrealism, their ambitions continue to suggest possibilities for artistic exploration and discovery. As for chronological narrative, certainly there must be other ways to relate an event. Right? Well, even the alternative realities of dreams seem to emerge along timelines of some sort, even if they overlap from episode to episode that form what is remembered as a single dream event. A poem, moreover, can aspire to exist purely within a given moment it expresses, even if the reader returns to the lines repeatedly.

Maybe my saving grace here is in my assumption of invisible roots – everything happens for a reason, even accidents. (You don’t have to impute divine intervention there, either.) Perceiving these underlying currents, as some would suggest, demands something other than Aristotelian logic. Hence, the surrealist option, among others.

I do like Oates’ sense of gazes adding up into a quilt-work pattern, though, especially when they can bounce off each other to create yet something more.

And then her essay takes a remarkable turn that reinforces my invisible-roots assumption:

The hypocampus is a small, seahorse-shaped part of the brain necessary for long-term storage of factual and experiential memory, though it is not the site of such storage. Short-term memory is transient, long-term memory can prevail for many decades … If the hypocampus is injured or atrophied, there can be no further storage of memory in the brain – there will be no new memory. I have come to think that art is the formal commemoration of life in its variety – the novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment of a specific place and time, and its suggestion that there is meaning in our actions. It is virtually impossible to create art without an inherent meaning, even if that meaning is presented as mysterious and unknowable.

Again, I’ve long viewed my writing as an attempt to remember what’s right in front of me in my life. Let’s face it, everything often seems chaotic. Times of reflection and self-evaluation are crucial. It’s easy to leap from there, as I’ve found, into meditation and the Quaker practice of group worship grounded in silence itself. Along these lines, Oates puts all this into another framework:

Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture – no collective memory. As if memory were destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we “were” no one – we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source. As it is, in contemporary society, where so much concentration is focused upon social media, insatiable in its fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of more permanent art feels threatened. As human beings we crave “meaning” – which only art can provide; but social media provide no meaning, only this succession of fleeting impressions whose underlying principle may simply be to urge us to consume products.

The motive for metaphor, then, is a motive for survival as a species, as a culture, and as individuals.

Of course, I would see true religion, not art, as the provider of “meaning.” And now the conversation would turn lively.

NEW POTATOES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

We’ve tried growing them in barrels, but that’s a long story. Sometimes we’ve just harvested them from rows in the garden.

Either way is always an experience.

~*~

dig up the last of the potatoes
fill a large basket

roasted with garlic
the marble-sized ones quite tasty
along with the softest skin

another year
I empty two of our five potato barrels
amid spitting snow

poem copyright 2015 by Jnana Hodson

BIG STATES AS CORRECTIVE BALLAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When the most populous states try to butt up in the presidential primary scheduling, they actually lose much of their potential power. They should be holding back, as the last line of correction, in case the field goes haywire. Whatever happened to Favorite Son nominations, anyway? The placeholders who could wheel and deal at the convention?

Instead, we’re faced with what happens when it’s all Big Money and Slick Packaging.

Just as we need a rudder to steady the course, something has to be at the back end of the boat.

CRITICS AND A MODEL OF POETIC INTENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Arts critics are often portrayed in the negative. Listen, for example, to the excerpts of voices who denigrated what became symphonic mega-hits or operatic standards. It’s a long list.

On the other hand, some critics (when it comes to classical music, dramatist Bernard Shaw and composer Virgil Thomson come to mind) have proved invaluable in sifting through artistic output and finding those jewels who would otherwise be lost in the volume before us and the drive for monetary success. Quite simply, good critics glean value from gems lost in the estimation of box-office success, bestseller popularity, and high audience ratings. With an eye for lasting quality, they guide individuals to work – and workers – they esteem.

As I look at the flood of artistic output on the Internet in our time, the role of good critics appears to be more crucial than ever.

Let me add that good critics are also teachers. I’m deeply indebted to people like Hub Meeker of the Dayton Journal Herald or Winthrop Sargeant of the New Yorker for their role in shaping my artistic awareness. As I’ve found over the years, reading a familiar critic becomes an active dialogue.

This leads me to a recent essay by the poet Charles Simic, long a star on the University of New Hampshire campus one town over from where I live. In “The Incomparable Critic” (New York Review of Books, August 13), he touts a collected volume of reviews by Helen Vendler and her examination of contemporary poets, centering down to her high estimation of one in particular:.

However none of these [William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, even the Beats] had the audacity, she points out, to switch back and forth between the sublime and the ignobly ridiculous as [A.R.] Ammons did. … for Ammons there is a “continuo of the personal – the ‘noise’ of the everyday mind – from which the lyric rises and into which it subsides.” This setting “of the lyric moment within its non-lyric ‘surround,'” Vendler writes, “is the fundamental device of modern poetry, from The Waste Land to this day.

That, in itself, is an audacious insight, of one reviewer to another.

Apart from any specific works, what is described is an ideal I admire – one I’ve sensed present in the works of Philip Whalen I’ve admired. And so we continue, writing and reading, in whatever quest we follow.