Tag: America

THIS SECRET SOCIETY OF READERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

One of the more baffling questions for just about any author, I suspect, is the one that asks, “Who are your readers?”

Yes, I know about genres and their core audiences – Chick Lit, aimed at unmarried females in their 20s; Romance, middle-age women; Sci-Fi, geeky males; Young Adult, well, it’s self-explanatory. I even know that commercial radio programmers could target their listenership to hit an average, say, of 24.7-year-old women in the office.

For a poet, though, or the novelist working outside common genres, this question becomes more problematic. I can imagine those I hope will find the work appealing, but the reactions often turn up elsewhere. I’m thinking of a writer who hoped her work would speak to her friends, only to hear them say, “I don’t read books,” as if it’s a badge of honor. (Oh, for shame!)

What that suggests is that rather than expecting a boffo bestseller, we writers might envision a much smaller-scale enterprise – connecting with readers one-on-one, as an underground understanding. Let it be private and personal, then. Our own quiet conversation.

Whether my Hippie Trails novels find their appeal more for those who lived through the era or among younger readers undergoing similar searching is still taking shape. I would hope both. But I am enjoying the feedback I’m receiving, from wherever.

It’s not the big-business Manhattan operation I once dreamed of or the San Francisco counterculture success, either. But here we are, connecting, in our own little underground society. Little do the others know what they’re missing now, do they?

ANTIQUE OR JUST OBSOLETE?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

Climbing around the barn the other day, I came upon a few items I now realize are ancient history. The T-square, for instance, was used for paste-ups for pages that would be photocopied for publication. But nowadays, that’s all done in the computer. The circular wheels were actually slide rules we used to calculate proportions when cropping photographs, also for publication – and once again, that’s all done in the computer these days. The metal ruler has special calibrations in picas and points, the measurements traditionally used by printers. You run into point measures now in the font section of your word program. And then there’s the mouse pad. You remember those, back before you switched to laptop?

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So I came back into the house and turned on my stereo. You may notice I still play vinyl, which probably deserves a posting of its own. When I was a teen, I dreamed of the day I’d have an entire wall of LPs and the system to play them on. Now I look at this and realize it can essentially fit into my laptop or, uh, an iPod, if I ever go there.

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COCHECO MILLS CLASSICS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
A typical water-powered textiles mill would have thousands of these foot-long bobbins feeding its looms.
A typical water-powered textiles mill would have had thousands of these foot-long bobbins feeding its looms.
A sampling of the designs that made the Cocheco Mills world-famous.
A sampling of the designs that made the Cocheco Mills world-famous.

The short distance between New England’s mountains and its Atlantic coast means its rivers and streams drop in elevation rather quickly, and that has provided both powerful currents and many opportunities for power-generating dams. As a consequence, the region is peppered with old mills – usually brick but sometimes stone or even framed wood – that were once the industrial backbone of America.

Downtown Dover, for instance, is built around the Cocheco Falls, where the river plunges into the tidewater. The falls are topped with a dam, and the diverted water once powered a complex of textile mills that produced world-famous calico, among other woven products. The Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, meanwhile, were noted for their denim, which supplied Levi Strauss in his legendary San Francisco production. Nor was fabric the only product coming from the mills. Everything from precision tools to locomotives to shoes and socks and cigars was being shipped from the cities and towns along the waterways.

Over the years, many of these mills have fallen into disuse through a combination of newer technologies, cheaper competition from steam-powered Southern mills, and overseas production. But the legacy remains.

As I learn from my elder daughter while examining a glorious sampling of cloth she’s intending to turn into quilts or comforters, the designer Judie Rothermel has recreated some of the classic patterns found at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, and reproduced them in partnership with Marcus Fabrics.

The Cocheco Mills Collection, issued serially over several years, is one of the impressive results.

Let me say, some of the technical results are mesmerizing while the colors are deep and delicious.

How did we ever stop making this?

REGARDING A GRANDFATHER CLOCK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I was growing up, “going to the farm” meant a trip to my grandmother’s sister and brother-in-law in the other corner of our county. One of my memories was of the grandfather clock that stood at the top of the stairs and Aunt Edna’s mentioning that it had been carried over the mountains in a Conestoga wagon “from the place where Conestoga wagons were made.”

As a history buff, I eventually realized that was Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, now famed for its Amish population. The plot thickens, as I explain at my genealogy blog, The Orphan George Chronicles.

Decades after the farm had been sold and I began working on the genealogy puzzle, I received a few photographs of the clock, and a few days ago I scanned them into my computer. You can’t see many of the details, but I remember the small moon and sun that would rotate in the clock face. A few years ago, back in Ohio, I was surprised by how short the clock itself is. We think of grandfather clocks as large, but this one is probably shoulder-high to me.

Most amazing, though, is the sweet ringing it issues in singing its quarterly rounds. Not a gonging sound at all, but more like the clinking of crystal stemware.

And to think, the clock itself had been rediscovered, hidden away on its side in a loft of one of the barns. Just goes to show, you never know quite what to expect when you go rooting around in an old barn now, do you?

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FROM A WEED LECTURE AND WINE TO SOME WILD COOKING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Martha Paxson Grundy: Quaker Treasure. Having known Martha since we were both active in Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative), and watched her subsequent service in the broader Quaker organizations, I find my admiration upheld in this 2002 Weed Lecture given at Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston. As she observes, unlike evangelical Protestantism, where the emphasis is on personal salvation, the Quaker treasure is its emphasis on the shared experience of the Prophetic Presence. In that, we nurture and guide one another in a living faith.
  • Jancis Robinson: How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine. Designed as alternating pages of Theory and Practice, this volume was a 2000 update of a 1983 book by a British wine authority. She does a clear job of introducing the differences in the ways we taste, and of linking that to the language of wine, complete with a decent glossary. Also helpful is her survey of grape varieties and the wines they produce, both in France (where they assume geographic names) and around the world. As she speaks of international wines, however, the book dates quickly – Washington State and Argentina, especially, have come a long way since. Even so, an excellent reference book.
  • Kim Stafford, ed: William Stafford on Peace and War. A profound and moving selection of poems, journal entries, interviews, and published excerpts focusing on Stafford’s pacifist faith and witness. Well worth returning to repeatedly.
  • Sheldon Morgenstern: No Vivaldi in the Garage: A Requiem for Classical Music in North America. In this rather strange memoir by an orchestral conductor best known for his role in establishing the Eastern Music Festival on the campus of Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, some of the best pages examine the strengths and weaknesses of boards of trustees in the non-profit world and, at times, the ill-informed consultants they sometimes hire. Yet he doesn’t shy away from gossip, skewering some of the big names and their inflated fees while lavishing praise on his buddies and students. While he repeatedly dismisses his teacher, Thor Johnson, I suspect he overlooks positive aspects; in contrast, one friend of mine, who had been a regular substitute in a major symphony orchestra, said Johnson was the best prepared conductor he had played under. And while Morgenstern has little fondness for contemporary music, which is the core of American classical composition, he appears ignorant of our rich Romantic-era legacy, which I think is essential for American repertoire in the future. I’m left wondering just how much of this is sour grapes from an almost-ran.
  • Tamar Adler: An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace. After living more than a decade with a wife who’s a cooking genius and two daughters who follow in their mother’s wisdom there, my own kitchen skills had largely atrophied. To be honest, I’ve never had her knowledge and seemingly intuitive sense of using herbs and spices, and preparing anything I think they’ll be eating becomes inhibiting. Still, now that I’m freed from the office and commuting routine, the time has come for me to pick up some of the meals preparation each week. Nevertheless, it feels like learning from scratch, especially after the Pellegrini readings. So when Adler begins with a chapter “How to Boil Water,” I thought I’d be on the right track – like Yehudi Menuhin learning to play violin all over again as a young adult. Wrong! She quickly veers off into a much different realm of cooking, one loaded with onions, anchovies, and beets (three of my least favorite ingredients ever), and soon seemingly slapdash in all directions. This, from a woman who admits ineptitude when it comes to making bread. In the end, though, this will likely be the volume I keep returning to as we make the best of our garden produce through the season. She has me largely rethinking meals and routines – this, coming from a Midwestern kid whose idea of dinner revolves around a slab of meat, or some substitute in the vegetarian variations. Rice, anyone?

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FROM HISTORY MUSEUMS TO GRACE, ALONG WITH A FEW MEALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead. This 2000 novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is built around three essentially motherless preteen girls who are ultimately unsupportable as believable characters. I kept reading, wondering why, only to find the ending simply evaporate. She has her fans, but I’m not one of them.
  • Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds: History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment. As someone with long familiarity with both natural history and art museums, I have also long visited American history museums without giving them much thought as a separate category until my wife mentioned the cabinet of curiosities concept, based on the trunks seafaring captains were expected to bring home for the enlightenment of their communities. Wonderful insights in these essays into the growth and critical limitations of theme-focused collections, living history villages, historic house sites, shrines, and so on. My favorite rips Disney, especially at EPCOT, to shreds.
  • Kate Chopin: The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction. Despite her glimpses into Deep South and Creole society in the late 1800s, Chopin’s portrayal of an infantile self-centered heroine, like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina before her, drew little sympathy from me. Tedious.
  • Richard Russo: That Old Cape Magic. A lively, humorous story with a pair of very dysfunctional, professorial parents unfolding in the background of the protagonist’s own string of affairs and failing marriage. In the end, quite pointed, bitterly funny, and emotional moving. Quite different from Empire Falls.
  • Angelo M. Pellegrini: The Food-Lover’s Garden; The Unprejudiced Palate; Lean Years, Happy Years; and Vintage Pellegrini. More than a decade before Julia Child began to transform American cuisine, this Seattle-based English professor born in Italy launched his own arguments for a more delicious, healthier alternative to the dull meals of the era, on one hand, and the impossible directions for preparing pretentious international fare, on the other. For those who grew up thinking spaghetti came out of a can, as I did, Pellegrini’s texts are a reminder that even garlic, zucchini, and broccoli were exotic rarities, when they could be found at all. (As for cheese?) His emphasis remains stubbornly on fresh vegetables and fruit, the essential role of homegrown herbs, and the joys of wines made in one’s own cellar. I love the simplicity of many of his meals – a broth, salad, and bread as dinner, for instance. His stories along the way are delightful. I can see why he has long been one of my wife’s favorite food writers.
  • Anne Lamott: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith and Blue Shoes. Another of my wife’s favorites, Lamott’s confessions of faith are refreshingly both comic and startling. While the novel Blue Shoes sets out on that light-toned approach, about halfway through it takes on a dark realism that soon parallels Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, complete with the parents’ infidelities.  It’s hard to think of other authors who present children as masterfully as she does, or, for that matter, relations with a parent in mental decline. Her real-life religion admits the realities of adultery, even among believers, and of grace in unexpected encounters. The protagonist’s discoveries about her own father lead to some of the most heart-breaking pages one will encounter, and some of the most illuminating examples of selfless love. A knockout.

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FROM BISHOP SPONG TO LIGHTHOUSES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • John Shelby Spong: Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes. Or, as the paperback cover also proclaims, “Freeing Jesus from 2,000 years of misunderstanding.” Here the then-Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, advances scholarship that argues the Synoptic gospels and Book of Acts were intended to be read aloud in the synagogue and early church as parallel texts to the day’s Pentateuch (Torah) portion. Rather than being accurate biography or history, then, he contends that they were essentially a midrash voicing something of the intensity of the early “followers of the Way,” theologically but not factually true. Crucial to his rational is an awareness of the major Hebrew holidays of the time, and placing the Christian teachings within them – that is, also within a lunar calendar. Thus, instead of a chronological history of Jesus’ working with the disciples over a three-year period, or more, the Synoptic texts compress their presentation into a one-year framework. In the final sections of the book he deconstructs the Nativity and the Resurrection, as well as many of the teachings attributed to Jesus, yet leaves a strong case that what was being demanded was an experience of the Spirit/Holy Spirit, rather than Jesus.
  • Patricia Lynn Reilly: A God Who Looks Like Me: Discovering a Woman-Affirming Spirituality. Essentially a self-help workbook for women to work through, either individually or in “circles of support,” this 1995 publication is now a generation old and no doubt surpassed by more comprehensive volumes. It does included reference to El Shaddai as “breast” even though it’s often translated in its other meaning, “high places.” She also includes a list of alternative images to use in place of masculine terms, including Womb of Compassion, Nurturer, Seeker of the Lost, Source of All Life, Faithful Mother, Shekhinah, Healer, Sophia, Queen of Heaven, Gathering Mother Hen, and so on. She makes a strong case for the negative outlook on female functions, including birth, as unclean, and curiously the lack of an infant rite equal to circumcision. She also makes a claim for the decreased value of woman as they age. I like her suggestion to record reactions to her exercises using one’s non-dominant hand, and wonder if this might help me get deeper into my own repressed layers.
  • Harold Loukes: Friends and Their Children. This 1958 British publication comes from another era as it attempts to steer a third way between those parents who would insist on a dogmatic training for their children and those who would offer them none. He does follow the cycle through infancy, the first years at school, adolescence, and so on. I wonder if any of it would have helped, back when.
  • Eugene Ehrlich and David H. Scott: Mene, Mene, Tekel: A lively lexicon of words and phrases from the Bible. Despite William Safire’s praises in the New York Times, I find little reason to continue keeping it on my bookshelves, not when I have Strong’s concordance.
  • Jessamyn West: Except for Me and Thee. A charming novel of a Midwestern Quaker couple and their family roughly covering the years 1810-1875. Some of it I would question against the cultural history, but for the most part, I think she gets it right. In some ways, it dovetails in nicely with MFK Fisher’s outsider look at small-town California Friends only decades later.
  • Sarah C. Gleason: Kindly Lights: A History of the Lighthouses of Southern New England. While my focus is on the lighthouses of New Hampshire, Maine, and Cape Cod, this volume goes far beyond its Southern New England catalog. Gleason provides a detailed history of the origins of the American lighthouse system, including a timeless examination of the true costs of a bureaucracy that for too long concentrated on a lowest-bidder mentality.
  • Jared Diamond: Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Despite the title, this is a rather pedestrian dynamic based on the need for childcare within the tribe.

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FROM GOD TO CINCINNATI

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A stunning a provocative overview. One I will be returning to repeatedly. Its examination of early Islam, especially, opens entirely unexpected perspectives to my awareness. The distinction between the Trinity of Western Christianity and of Orthodoxy is quite helpful in my emerging argument of Logos/Light.
  • G.I. Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men; P.D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way: A Lucid Explanation of the Practical Side of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Teachings. Two that will be leaving my collection. The meetings aren’t all that remarkable – for the most part, mostly travel journeys, actually, or an autobiography – in quite meandering, wordy prose. I could easily come up with nine more remarkable individuals from my own sojourns – and not exclusively male, like his. The Ouspensky turns out to be equally convoluted Q&A accounts of speculation. The wordiness (and vast ego) leave me unmoved.
  • David Meltzer: Hero/Lil and Six. After Armstrong’s explanation of Kabbalah and its growth, I returned to these two poetry collections and find them quite rich and energizing. Hero, however, comes across as more of a villain (and a deadly trickster, at his best) than does Lilith. Some great leaping within the individual works, including (to my surprise) the prose-poems in Six that actually work for me.
  • Robert Lawrence Smith: A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service, and Common Sense. A former headmaster of Sidwell Friends School reflects on the lessons he learned growing up in Philadelphia Quaker culture and the ways it played out over the ensuing years.
  • Stephen Mitchell: Parables and Portraits. An enjoyable read of original poems and prose poems based in large part on Biblical figures and their stories as well as others ranging from Manjushri and Huang-po to Vermeer and Freud.
  • Three poetry chapbook competition winners – Carolyn Page, Barn Flight; Linda Lee Harper, Buckeye; and Gary Myers, Lifetime Possessions. Page, a native of Rochester, presents some disturbingly violent insights into Swamp Yankee and then redneck (in North Carolina) life; the poems are essentially flat, prosaic, a single read tells you everything. Harper, with her stories of a childhood in Cincinnati, has a little more edge; still, I’m left wondering how rare my upbringing was, since I’ve found no hints of childhood sexual abuse. The last four poems in Myers’ volume break free from the pack and enter into a dreamlike state – the first pieces, in fact, that have stirred my admiration (how I wish he’d been able to sustain this for the entire book!).

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FROM POETRY WINNERS TO MIRACLES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Poetry book competition winners, mostly. Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe); Chuck Carlisle, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf); Mark Conway, Any Holy City (Silverfish); Becky Gould Gibson, Need-Fire (Bright Hill); Michelle Gillett, The Green Cottage (Ledge); Noah Eli Gordon, Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw); Jason Irwin, Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw); Joshua Kryah, Glean (Nightboat); Rachael Lyon, The Normal Heart and How It Works (White Eagle Coffee Store); Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline (Nightboat); Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story (Ahsanta); Heather Aimee O’Neill, Memory Future (Gold Line); Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek (Arizona); Pitt Poetry Series, New and Selected 2012; Liz Robbins, Play Button (Cider Press Review); Jonathan Thirkield, The Waker’s Corridor (Louisiana State); Cider Press Review, Vol. 12; Slipstream, No. 31.  By and large, how dreadful – even meaningless or worse, false – I find these hermetic works of creative writing MFAs, often incestuously selected by associate professors of creative writing or literature. Far from finding anything I might wish I had written, I’m instead left grasping at straws for anything I might even admire – even a single line or stanza seems elusive. On top of it, the pervasive anti-Christian invective in many seems to amplify the shallowness of much of any thought running through these – often, there’s only a vague link to the title. And all of these similes!  Admittedly, many of these are gorgeously produced – their covers, especially. So what I’m keeping, this round: Need-Fire, with its impeccable scholarship of early Christianity in England and its lovely reconstruction of early English verse; Glean, with its lacy evocations. Ortiz remains in a class by himself.
  • Albert Goldbarth: Heaven and Earth. Wonderful collection (poems).
  • Poetry, December 2011-April 2012. Catching up! Some good work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Dick Allen, and Linda Kunhardt (December), varied responses to prayer and faith (“One Whole Voice,” February), Marina Tsvetaeva plus Kabbalah-influenced work (March).
  • American Poetry Review, March-April 2012. No keepers, apart from an essay on metaphor.
  • George Fox: Book of Miracles. A reconstruction of pastoral work by Fox, with extensive introduction looking at the expectation of miracles and providences at the time.
  • Evelyn Underhill: Abba. A close gloss on the Lord’s Prayer and its radical implications.

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FROM SYMBOLS TO MAKING A DIFFERENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. This is one volume that has perplexed and confounded me ever since I picked it up in 1983 in Dupont Circle. Part of my difficulty is in her compression of symbol and ritual, and another part in her use of African tribal anthropology to illustrate some theory. What I take away from this is that there are conventions in any society that enhance or facilitate actions that benefit both the individuals and the collectivity. When the experiences of individuals are paramount, there is little way of expressing them across the collectivity; when the collectivity is paramount, the individual may be crushed. Divide this individual/collectivity plane by another she calls grid/group and you get what I see in the collectivity as the faith community (group) or the totalitarian/bureaucratic regime (grid). Here, in the grid, the empowered individual may be the elite leader who moves people as pawns, while in the group, the individual may be … the mystic? If I interpret her right, groups may form at the fringe of society, while grids instead become the majority or norm. Whew!
  • David Burnie: Light. An Eyewitness Science illustrated book, this one gives me a clearer concept of scientific thought on light itself. Apart from a timeline of discoveries from the time the Quaker movement emerged up to the present, the bits leave me wondering just what I might incorporate into the idea of metaphor … and how.
  • A. Monroe Aurand Jr.: Early Life of the Pennsylvania Germans. Pamphlet.
  • Plain magazine. Nine issues Rachel received on Cushing Street. Lovely periodical that would likely have been better as a blog, if only they weren’t so neo-Luddite! Yes, I remain fond of hot type and all. The Barnesville connection made the issues especially pertinent to me as I reflect on the moves that landed me here.
  • Charles E. Fager: A Man Who Made a Difference: The Life of David H. Scull. This biography of a 20th century Friend made an interesting counterpoint to the Plain strand, although perhaps just as economically distant from the modern mainstream. Scull was able to do much of his far-reaching work within socially conscious organizations because of the freedom his small company gave him, thanks in part to his equally committed business partner. But that road, demonstrated by the cusp of the computer revolution in printing, Scull’s business, has changed everything. What are the alternatives for young Friends today?
  • E.F. Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Like Muddling Toward Frugality (above), this classic is both dated and visionary. The devastation of globalization – on American wages, for starters – and the emergence of the Internet throw many of his strategies into disarray, yet the underpinning arguments of wrong focus and limited resources remain intriguing and relevant.

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