BALDING IN THE BACKGROUND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

And you think I’ve raised a lot of questions already? Just wait till I begin pondering my wife! I’d start there, if I thought I could make any sense of it without all of the previous history and experiences, good and not so good. Yes, she and I both believe it would have been much better if we’d met, say, 12 years earlier … We would have been younger and more flexible, in many ways, than we were when our lives enmeshed. Or did I mention there are many parts of this getting older I just don’t like, all in addition to balding? She’s a most remarkable woman, incredibly talented and frustrating, highly opinionated and conflicted, too. We’ll just have to see where this all goes, especially in the transitions we see coming ahead.

Enough! What I am simply trying to do here is look under or around the all-too-often light give-and-take you and I have enjoyed and known, this time to more clearly see and identify the “differences” you so early noted while I so blithely remained ignorant or in denial. Through everything, though, you remain very special, mysterious, and yes, magical, in my life.

After all of this, for the record, it’s not snowing here – yet. And I’m off to the office, again.

As one funeral director ended our call on a night when I was the obituary editor a few months ago, “Stay well” – or better yet, as I’d add, “Stay faithful to all you are and believe.”

Fondly and ever gratefully yours.

IT ALL ADDS UP NOW

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Maybe it was one of those equations on the blackboard in an episode of Big Bang Theory, but suddenly I perceived that grammar could be tackled as mathematical equations.

What finally hooked me on grammar – and the art of writing – was a very patient and very demanding English teacher my sophomore year of high school. We spent far more time than we were officially allotted mastering the rules of grammar, and looking back, I see a close similarity to what we were also doing in geometry.

The turning point came in our diagramming of some very long sentences – 250 to 300 words or so – and then realizing the lines and forking could be arranged in various manners, depending on our application of the rules.

Put another way, those lines on the blackboard were also equations that might also reveal errors in thought and observation or even allow new ways of balancing what was at hand.

A few years ago, though, when my elder one delved deeply into sentence diagramming as part of her linguistics training, I hoped we’d soon be swapping insights. Didn’t happen. Didn’t work, either. The newer approaches she was being taught – and a completely different terminology – were so far from the classic approach in my discipline that we simply had no common ground.

Anyone active in the math and sciences world have similar experiences?

AN ARTS AND LETTERS NIGHT IN THE MEETINGHOUSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

In many Quaker meetings, we have little idea of what other Friends do outside of the meetinghouse. Maybe it’s simply an unfortunate consequence of contemporary life as we live and work at distances from one another and find our schedules anything but simple.

Bridging that gap remains a challenge, especially if we intend, in the words of George Fox, to “know one another in that which is eternal.”

At Dover Monthly Meeting in New Hampshire, we’ve chanced upon what has become an annual event that other members of the Fellowship of Quaker Artists might want to expand on. For four years now, we’ve had an annual Arts and Letters Night – an opportunity for individuals of all ages to share something of their creative lives with the larger faith community. For us, it’s usually come on a Friday or Saturday night in March – a time when we in snowy winter landscapes are ready to start stirring again. (Hopefully, when the worst of the winter weather is behind us.)

While Dover Meeting is large enough to have a number of serious artists of various stripes within its community, other Friends might find the idea to be something more suitable for Quarterly Meeting or a similar occasion. Like Meeting for Worship itself, each gathering has been unique.

Visual artists bring their work into the meetinghouse beforehand. Much of it goes up behind the facing bench (in the “elders’ gallery”), but other pieces have been displayed on easels or even been passed around the gathered circle. Work has ranged from painting to prints to weaving and textile crafts to photography to furniture-making and sculpture – including one child’s Sculpee creations. One year, an attender ran home to bring back examples of commercial designs she was doing for paying customers – and her work was indeed impressive.

We’ve encouraged these pieces to be kept on display through Meeting for Worship the following First-day, so that everyone may have an opportunity to view them – or even revisit them.

The “letters” part of the equation has had Friends reading publicly from their original poems, short stories, or journals – or from pieces they’ve found especially moving.

We’ve also had music – ranging from one violinist’s performance of the “Meditation” from Thais to original songs – as well as children demonstrating their Tae-Kwon-Do martial arts patterns. Lately, we’ve had videos, including one a Friend had made for Public Television showing another Friend doing sculpture – three decades earlier.

Depending on the length of the readings and performances, there may be time to go around the circle, discussing what inspires and motivates us in the work we pursue. Questions seem to arise spontaneously.

And afterward, we’ve enjoyed repairing to the “culinary arts” – a dessert potluck with tea or coffee.

So it’s one idea. An easy program. One Dover Friend has taken on the responsibility for signing others up – and I’ve the pleasure of being emcee and reading a few of my own poems at the end. We arrange it all through our Ministry and Worship Committee, though it could fit under Pastoral Care as well. (We split our Ministry and Counsel several years ago, to lighten the load.) In any event, do what you want with this proposal. As I said, it’s an easy program.

Invite the public. Invite the news media. And then have fun.

Originally published in Types & Shadows:
Journal of the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts,
No. 34 Fall 2004/Winter 2005

 

SUNFISH ON A PAPER PLATTER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I said at the time …

The image is simple enough, and direct: a sunfish transferred to paper, a child’s project in dull red poster paint. The specimen, found on a beach, measures fourteen by seven inches – larger than most of the fish caught back where I’m from, but nothing remarkable here. It has long, prominent spiny dorsal and pelvic fins (the anal fin’s much smaller), and a rather compact caudal, or tail, fin. While much of the scale pattern is apparent, it’s difficult to tell about pectoral fins. The gills and eye, however, are thick paint, and a band of dots runs most of the length of the body to the tail. The mouth, of course, is agape with a small, receding lower jaw. It’s the roundness of the profile that kindles my imagination – at least rounder than the way I would draw a fish or design a machine for the water. As soon as I acknowledge the underlying circle, it becomes drawn out, like a balloon pinched apart by two fingers.

Sometimes I picture a fish encased in a suit of mail armor, though I know that’s hardly the case. Rather, the intricacy of the interlocking exterior – like shingles on a house, rather than brick or stonework – fascinates my landlubber sensibilities. As I stare, the image becomes concave – the fattest part of the body, because of the scales, has the most openness, the least paint. Still, there’s no anticipation the fish will suddenly turn, either in attack or in flight.

I suppose that roasted over open flames or fried in a skillet, a meal might emerge. It’s larger than a typical trout, after all. The child behind the painting, however, now refuses to eat seafood of almost any variety.

The nature of fish is as mysterious to me as the array of the night sky, and to my mind far less mechanical than the knowledge of hooks, bait, spinners, and water depths prized by devoted fishermen. Jesus promised, of course, to make us fish for people, a far more elusive objective than any school underwater.

The paper itself has yellowed and crinkled, as I have.

THE FREEZER IN THE BARN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

In one of our discussions of feasts and fasting as spiritual practices, a Friend mentioned purchasing a used freezer and how much he and his wife have saved over the years – by purchasing in quantity when supermarkets have sales, especially. It tipped the balance in our own decision to buy one, which we fit into the barn.

My wife’s no slouch in the grocery specials department, but its bigger value has been in preserving our own produce. How wonderful in January to pull out our own peas, or our own strawberries in February, or our own tomato sauce in March (if there’s any left!). Often, while she’s digging around in its drawers, she comes across surprises. Eggplant, anyone, already sauteed? And we never go wrong with a roast chicken bought on sale or, while it lasted, something from the half-pig we met at the farm.

In fact, we wound up buying a second freezer at a yard sale — and both are packed with goodies.

 

THAT DISTINCTIVE LOCAL VOICE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

By now you’re no doubt aware of my belief that local newspapers need a strong local voice, the kind that’s manifested in a talented general columnist or two. The New York Herald-Tribune, for instance, at one point had both Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe in that role. Think, too, of Mike Royko in Chicago or Herb Caen in San Francisco. In Dayton, we had Marj Heyduck holding forth from the Journal Herald’s Modern Living section – but everybody had to read her daily four or five vignettes, especially when they had a humorous edge.

These are the kind of writers who speak personally from the places regular people live, rather than the council meetings and police blotter events that fill the news pages. Unfortunately, they’ve largely vanished in the cost-cutting rounds at newspapers large and small, and communities and subscribers are impoverished as a consequence.

At their best, they get out and report stories that wouldn’t otherwise appear – or at least the aspects they dig up along the way are fresh and insightful. At the Herald-Trib, for example, Breslin would go to the city desk and rifle through assignments for ones he wanted to cover from the street – that’s how he wound up in Selma, Alabama, with dispatches from the front line of the civil rights movement.

Within the newsroom, however, they were generally viewed with disdain or even contempt, even when they scooped the beat reporters, as Caen often did to his colleagues at the Chronicle. Part of the gulf originated, I suspect, in the professional wall between third-person and first-person singular writing, and the fact that reporters are supposed to be neutral observers while a good columnist is permitted to be actively present and even emotionally involved in the story. Ideally, too, reporters are to be invisible agents, unlike the star billing given to a columnist.

All of the snow we’ve been getting has me reflecting on the first newspaper I served after graduating from college – and my frustration with its resident Scribe. There were, for starters, his affectations of a thwarted wannabe novelist – the tweed jackets with elbow patches, the scarf, the half-moon eyeglasses, and, yes, the fragile ego that demanded deference if not worship. There was also an over-the-top serving of purple prose but little substance that cut to the bone. Ultimately, what he served up was inoffensive and bland, but he did have a following.

His one redeeming quality, though, was an eagerness to jump into covering two kinds of stories no one else in the newsroom really wanted to do – weather storms and the deaths of prominent local figures. And there he excelled. Looking back, I can see where a first-person voice can enhance the story – we’re all in this together, after all – even when he was weaving in rewrites of breaking news fed to him by reporters and correspondents, as I vaguely think he was. The deaths, meanwhile, lend themselves to an “we recall when” transition from one detail to the next. Moreover, as a minor celebrity himself, his presence probably got many sources to say more than they might have otherwise. Hmm, my memory is that he leaned toward the editorial “we” rather than the more direct and contemporary “I.”

Outstanding local columnists, I should add, have never been confined to the big metro papers.

A few leaps later in my career, launching Jim Gosney’s daily profiles in Yakima, Washington, demonstrated that. He gave us a parade of characters who made a difference in the community without themselves being considered the kind of movers and shakers who normally got quoted.

And then, in Manchester, New Hampshire, John Clayton began doing something similar.

Both, I should add, were top-notch reporters when it came to questioning a source and digging up facts – and both could turn a phrase in their engaging storytelling and flawless prose. (That combination is rarely a given.) What they offered was the kind of local color and connection too often missing from today’s standard and shallow coverage.

Perhaps you know of others who deserve recognition. Maybe they could even serve as models in a rebirth of the tradition.