You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Where, for heaven’s sake, would this place be? We don’t have a lot of options in our remote rim of Maine.
And then I was told the restaurant was a late and lamented site a block from my home, now reincarnated as an echo of the grill and bar next door. Only, perchance, a shade better.
Well, as a reaction, I did have an appropriate Greek slang expression I’d found earlier when researching background for my novel What’s Left, not that I’ll quote it here.
In my parallel universe, my real-life life, newspapers were caught up in technological “advances” that kept setting us back. Those changes had started well before my sabbatical break, but they were speeding up. Back when I was starting, perforated teletype tape meant we really couldn’t edit stories we received from the Associated Press or United Press International or similar services. And then scanning of typewritten pages made improving even staff reports physically difficult. After that came the early stages of computer screens and keyboards, where editing took about three times longer than it had with a pencil – moving that cursor around took more effort, certainly, and computer crashes were commonplace. These were all matters that impacted the emerging story of Hometown News, though I believe anyone working in a large business office would have parallel experiences to relate.
We forget how much reliability our laptops and PCs have gained. Does anyone else remember losing a draft to a static electricity spark that then erased whatever was on your screen? Or, for that matter, when it was a bigger power outage?
I could detail the shifts from letterpress and hot type to pasteup and eventually pagination or from typewriters and linotype machines to early computers to, well, the digital devices we have today or from letterpress to offset printing and now digital editions skipping paper altogether.
Or similar leaps in photography, as we see in following Kenzie.
~*~
Paid work occupies a large part of most adult lives. Even when it doesn’t, how we handle our money, wealth, time, and so on is a highly emotional issue, no matter what the dismal science of economics insists. (For that line of useful inquiry, go to the Talking Money series on my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog.)
I just couldn’t create characters without their having jobs. Well, most of them – the hippie farm had some of dubious means.
Besides, so much of a typical male’s identity and life purpose is tied up in his job, especially when he can take pride in it. The job even defines his social circle.
I didn’t want to add another book about a hopeful writer to the literature. What a cliché. Or a musician or actor or even a painter. How about a plumber or fireman or circus clown?
But I still needed a witness figure for the history abstracted to fiction that was before me. I defaulted to using a photographer, in part because I had wished I had taken up a camera, if only I could have afforded the time and a darkroom, blah-blah-blah, and in part because I had been a serious visual artist in high school. You can see those elements developing in Daffodil Uprising and later coming together in What’s Left, but they also play out in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks and Subway Visions. I’m a highly visual guy in my awareness and thinking, OK? The fact he was employed at a newspaper is one part I couldn’t evade.
I still value novelists who manage to set their story outside of the writing world, and that includes universities. Charles Bukowski gets points for me for his novel Post Office. Well, I guess that’s also where genres kick in, too. They’re about detectives and spacemen and billionaires and cowboys and so on.
Photojournalist? At the time of the first draft of Subway Hitchhikers, I didn’t have any models to draw from, but that quickly changed. I wound up working with some of the best in the business.
Over time, photography, the kind that required light meters and F-stops and film and darkrooms, became ancient history. That part I would have to intensely rework and explain as my books underwent revision, thanks to Cassia in What’s Left.
In contrast, Hometown News was primarily about work. I had no problem in this case where everything took place at a newspaper plant, though the economics of the surrounding community also emerged as a central thread.
Jaya became a more difficult case. Her career in the early drafts was drawn from my newspaper offices and hours, now vaguely abstracted to management in general. It would get more specific in the revised titles, where she specializes in nonprofits management. It’s a real job description in a major component of the economy. For that flash of inspiration, I could look to one neighbor in Dover and the impact she had statewide in peace and social justice matters.
Lowbush, rather than high. Sunrise County is the world capital. This tray is about to be frozen for later use.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
James Madison in Federalist No. 51
cow skull and elk vertebrae from ridges above the Yakima Valley
Eastport, as you may have gleaned from this blog, can be overrun with deer. They do make gardening a challenge.
The encounters become more lively when mention of an albino deer arises. We’re discovering that Moose Island, where we live, has had a series of white deer, including fawns with the gene.
For the record, they’re probably not albino but leucistic, and as I saw in this case, mostly pink. Defining piebald has its own set of technicalities.
This encounter was on a Sunday morning while I was heading out of town on my way to Quaker Meeting for worship. I passed what I thought was lawn decoration and then realized it wasn’t. When I whipped back, this was the best I could capture before lowering the car’s window, and by then they had slipped behind the house. Wily critters they can be.
The deer in question, by the way, is on the right in the photo.
My first brush with the concept came in a hearing a classical musician talk about his arrival in a major symphony orchestra and looking around at all the talent and amazing sound they were creating. “I felt like an imposter,” he said.
Oh, my, I could identify.
Little did I know of the Imposter Syndrome, a term coined by psychologists in the 1970s.
Rather than go into the details and nuances – there are many, look them up if you wish – I’ll mention ten places it hits me.
Tell me I’m not alone. Please?
The naked eye saw only white sometimes tinged with pink or blue. The cell phone camera using a 4-second exposure saw this and much more. Was anyone really expecting northern lights?
Indiana-born in the shadow of Chicago, Rexroth’s childhood took place in a liberal household filled with socialist activity in the years before the First World War. The radical network across the Midwest that he details in his Autobiographical Novel will surprise most Americans, who believe it was confined largely to big East Coast cities. Not so, as he insists.
His family was at a less restrictive edge of the Brethren heritage, today a handful of pacifist denominations where some still resemble the Amish. It was very much a counterculture from its arrival in Colonial Pennsylvania and Maryland and on through the Civil War. While Rexroth himself headed in a much different direction, some of those roots continued to shape his actions and his religious questioning and questing.
Orphaned in his teens, he broke loose at 19, filled with anarchist thought and an IWW (Wobbly) identity, hitchhiked west, and worked odd jobs, including a Forest Service stint at the Marblemount Ranger Station in the North Cascades, where Gary Snyder would later spend several crucial summers in the high fire watch posts, as did others who came under Rexroth’s spell.
With a wife, a painter, he settled in San Francisco in 1927 as what his biographer calls “forerunners of the flower children who flocked to northern California during the fifties and sixties.” All along, he was notably active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist circles, along with jazz and Buddhist influences. His book, Communalism: from Its Origins to the Twentieth Century, remains a fine overview of counterculture communities over the centuries. In some of these circles, he was aligned with Brethren, Quakers, and Mennonites, perhaps without being fully aware of the connection. His personal life, however, had its tangles.
His translations of classic Chinese and Japanese poetry are what first caught my attention, and still do. His own works are strongly crafted, often with an erotic strand.
He’s sometimes called the father or even the heart of the Beat movement, both as a mentor and as the MC at the famed reading at San Francisco’s Gallery Six in 1955, but it would be more accurate to call him a godfather of the Bay Area poetry renaissance that began blossoming before that and flourished for several decades after. Weekly readings in his house now sound like a who’s who of literature.
I remember that when he died, about the same time John Cheever did, Cheever got the accolades in the press while Rexroth got brief mention. I still think they had it backward, considering the lasting influence of each.
Jnana's Red Barn 