Ever really look at those playing cards?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Yup, there are 52 in a deck, plus one to six Jokers, at least if you’re looking at what’s considered a standard commercial deck. There are, however, other traditional, and often older, suites to consider. Today we’ll put those off for another time and stick to the French-suited cards that are almost universally found in English-speaking countries. Got that?

To continue:

  1. The deck has four suits (clubs, diamonds, spades, and hearts) that come in 13 ranks, starting with the ten numeral or pip cards – if you’re wondering why there’s no “1,” it’s actually the Ace, despite its usual power. And then there are the three ranks of royalty, the court or face cards we know as Jack, Queen, King.
  2. Each numeral card displays the appropriate number of pips (the suit images) as well as the numeral itself.
  3. Early cards were single-headed, or single-ended, but that changed around 1860, when the double-headed versions appeared. These could be read without having to turn them to an up-position. Corner indices were added around 1880.
  4. The Jack of spades and the Jack of hearts appear in profile and are thus known as “one-eyed” Jacks. Likewise, the King of diamonds is depicted with one eye. The rest of the royals are shown full-face or oblique.
  5. Suicide kings appear in hearts, where he usually has a sword behind his head, as if stabbing himself, and in diamonds, where he has an ax pointed blade-down toward him. Adding to the nickname is the blood-red color on the card.
  6. The Queen of spades, holding a scepter, is also known as the black lady or bedpost Queen. She’s the only Queen facing left.
  7. The Ace of spades is sometimes called the death card. Those printed or sold in England from the reign of James I until 1960 carried an indication of the printer and that an excise tax on the deck had been paid.
  8. The 52 cards are said to represent the 52 weeks of the year, with 13 cards for each season or the 13 lunar cycles of the year.
  9. Possibly originating in China or India or Persia, the cards arrived in Europe from Egypt in the 1370s, perhaps in the hands of Crusaders. The first cards were hand-printed, limiting them to the wealthy classes. That changed with the arrival of the printing press at the end of the 15th century.
  10. Originally, the suit symbols were taken from everyday objects, which may have had any symbolic meaning: flowers, animals, birds, shields, crowns, pennies, rings, even pomegranates. I rather like the possibilities there, “King of bears” or “Queen of bananas.”

Acid test poet: Jack Spicer (1925-1965)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

His wild poetics drawn on linguistics theory broke ground for a number of us. Quite simply, the narrative within a poem – or a series, as Spicer soon turned away from the single-page model – no longer had to conform with factual reality. I can only imagine what he would have done with Donald Trump as a figure. An image, however, took on a life of its own.

I didn’t realize how central the Los Angeles born character was to the West Coast poetry world. He was co-founder of the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where the Beat movement burst forth, and later in the Berkeley side of the Bay Area literary scene.

His collected poems, published posthumously by Black Sparrow and Grey Fox presses, remain core works on my bookshelf.

I also loved the way Ed Dorn picked up and continued Spicer’s stream.

Food along the way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Every night, the canopy is spread
every morning, stowed away

how he manages a wood cookstove
eludes me
the galley’s tight and must be a hot space
on a hot or humid day
regardless, he starts at 3 a.m.

and there’s coffee by 6:30 all the same

 

blueberry pancakes, slice of melon
cod chowder, a biscuit
roasted chicken drumstick, asparagus,
a risotto, Boston cream cake

lunch an excellent beef stew
and a great, crunchy sourdough bread

feeling like I’ve been here forever
in a good way
knowing it’s rarely this perfect

“no matter how much I eat
I keep losing weight on this ship”
sez male crew member

the cook’s apron
a variation on his overalls

the cook never learned wood-stove cookery
in culinary school
‘cuz he never attended one

in lighting a cook fire
the secret’s you have to stack
the firewood in tight

the galley’s quite crowded

the French burns four cords in a season in summer

Zen temple abbot and head cook
two most important personages

the cook also helps with the crew
mans an oar
hauls line, as needed

Over the hump?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Any expectation of having the back half of the upstairs finished before starting on the front slowly faded from reality. We definitely wouldn’t be moving goods from downstairs or storage into the new space anytime soon.

Just look at the ridgepole and it was obvious Adam would need to have elbow room to work freely up while attaching the new rafters before any wall could go in.

The rafters and roofing to the right of the new ridge pole are about to come off. It’s a miracle they’ve stayed up as long as they have.

He did have to demolish the drywall and framing that had separated the front and back rooms, and with that came my realization that putting up new drywall any time before the entire upstairs was ready for that phase of work was premature. As would be painting the walls, ceilings, and floors. Duh!

Adam’s big shock came when he exposed the top of the existing dormer and found that there was nothing to speak of holding the descending rafter. What were they thinking?

The rafter was simply cut short when the dormer was added. The plank under it was insufficient for the weight sitting upon it.

It was one more impending disaster that had somehow kept ticking until being defused now.

~*~

The front half promised to be less complex than the previous section. There was no plumbing and only two rooms rather than four. On the other hand, the top of the stairs might add some complications.

Officially released today, hooray!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I rather backed into this project, beginning with the elusive question, “What do Quakers believe?”

It led me to something much bigger, ranging beyond the Society of Friends, but springing from the seemingly quaint language of its earliest voices in mid-1600s Britain. There are good reasons the time and place are referred to as the world turned upside down.

Centering their experiences in three interlocking metaphors – Light, Seed, and Truth – they created what’s been called an alternative Christianity, and though their thinking and process have been diluted over the centuries since, their foundation remains revolutionary, startling, and challenging. I’ll argue that it’s cutting-edge contemporary, as well, in a time of disbelief and skepticism.

For one thing, how do you see “truth” as a verb? It becomes something quite different from carved marble or courtroom proceedings.

While some of the chapters originally appeared as chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions, this newly enlarged volume of essays is now available on your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.

The book now ranges far beyond religion and spirituality, by the way. Even atheists have their beliefs. Change the perspective, as I think I do, and you can find the exchange of first-hand experiences refreshing. How else can we talk about the deepest issues in life?

The move unites the essays in a single volume, rather than a series of four smaller chapbooks, and makes them available to a wider range of readers worldwide.

Do take a look.

Breaking my literary logjam was a godsend

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For readers and for writers, the emergence of Smashwords.com revolutionized the publishing world. It also made self-publishing a much less risky investment for those of us who are indy authors, and let readers purchase books by unknown writers at low cost. It consolidated the platforms so readers of Nook or iPhones could read the same offerings as those coming from Kindle. It also offered an alternative to Amazon, which countered with Kindle Direct Publishing, meaning we could appear in both venues. Real competition can be a good thing, right? Essentially, it’s free for those who follow a few formatting guidelines and can design our own covers.

Since I’ve posted previously about the pros and cons of digital books versus paper, both for readers and for writers, I’ll focus today on my personal reflections on the development.

Getting my books “out there,” rather than collecting dust in a filing cabinet, provided a huge emotional relief. Twenty-three years had passed between the publication of Subway Hitchhikers and my Smashwords debut. And now the novels were available at the Apple Store, Barnes & Nobel, and other ebook retailers, as well as public libraries.

First out of the gate was Hippie Drum, drawn from my subway story outtakes, at the end of May 2013.

At the beginning of September came Hippie Love, using other outakes, and then Ashram in October, reissuing what had been Adventures on a Yoga Farm.

Daffodil Sunrise, developing more of the subway story outtakes, appeared in November.

Subway Hitchhikers was republished in January 2014.

So I had something along the lines of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet before the public or maybe a string of Jack Kerouac tales.

I then turned to my other big pile of drafting to extract Promise, which appeared in April. I intended to follow that one with two related novels, but the royalties weren’t covering the cost of having a designer create fronts for those volumes. Instead, Peel (as in apple) and St. Helens in the Mix would eventually appear as free PDFs at my Thistle Finch imprint.

That left Hometown News, my newspaper-based novel, for September release.

Getting noticed, however, was a different matter. Nobody was reviewing digital editions, or at least nobody of note. You can’t sign copies at readings or bookstores, either. What was left was largely social media.

And that’s where it stood until the beginning of 2018, when What’s Left joined the lineup. I’ll tell you more about that one and its impact on the earlier volumes in an upcoming post.

As for marketing and self-promotion? It’s still an uphill struggle. Do most users of Facebook even buy books?