Tag: Counterculture

A CLUTCH OF MAPS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of my favorite passages in all of poetry comes from Howard McCord’s “Longjaunes His Periplus”:

A chest of maps
is a greater legacy
than a case of whisky.

Followed by:

My father left me both.

Like my younger one, I’ve always been fond of maps. My bedroom wall was lined with tacked-up National Geographic charts, which tended to sag in our humid summers.

I was reminded of this the other morning when I was looking for a Boston street map, just in case I lost my bearings. Yes, I could have gone to the maps at Yahoo or Google. Even looked for the satellite views and all of the scary ability to snoop that goes with it. I couldn’t, though, use a GPS, neo-Luddite that I partly remain.

So I opened the drawer and here’s what I found (I won’t give you the years, though many are from the early ’80s):

  • Connecticut.
  • Pennsylvania (Exxon).
  • Seacoast (New Hampshire).
  • Idaho.
  • New Jersey.
  • Sierra Club USA.
  • Pennsylvania (official).
  • AAA USA.
  • Long Island/New York City.
  • Saugus Iron Works.
  • Maine.
  • Historic Bath.
  • Delaware.
  • Audubon Flyways.
  • Walking Tours of Bath.
  • Strafford County.
  • Dover (0ne of a half-dozen varieties).
  • Maudslay State Park in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Has a great stand of mountain laurel overlooking the Merrimack River.
  • University of New Hampshire campus.
  • Museums of Boston.
  • Gonic Trails.
  • Doctors Without Borders global view (two copies).
  • Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
  • Paul Revere House in Boston.
  • Manchester, New Hampshire.
  • Vermont.
  • New Hampshire (one of several varieties).
  • National Geographic the Making of New England and another of Canada.
  • North Cascades.
  • Mount Rainier, including trails.
  • New York City subways (two versions, three maps).
  • Brunswick and neighboring Maine.
  • National Geographic Endangered Earth.
  • Virginia.
  • White Mountains trail guides.
  • Mount Agamenticus.
  • Lamprey River.
  • Pawtuckaway State Park.
  • Trumbull County, Ohio.
  • Baltimore (two versions).
  • Britain and Ireland.
  • Mohegan Island.
  • Historic New England properties.
  • Maryland.
  • Lake Champlain Ferries.
  • Maine State Ferry Service.
  • Ipswich, Massachusetts.
  • Portsmouth-Exeter-Hampton etc.
  • York (Maine) Water District trails.
  • Minute Man National Monument, a series of sites in Massachusetts …
They even take me places I haven't yet been, as well as back to some old favorites. All without leaving the house.
They even take me places I haven’t yet been, as well as back to some old favorites. All without leaving the house.

And that’s before we get to the drawer of topographical maps, especially those from my Cascades years. Or the books and atlases. Or the genealogical maps, Guilford County, especially in those files.

Oh, the memories! And you want to tell me they’re obsolete? Fat chance!

GUERRILLA CHRISTMAS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

No other time of the year opposes our testament of simplicity as much as the Holiday Season. Here widespread expectations of generosity and excess counter our Quaker discipline of frugality and moderation. The situation becomes especially complicated for individuals like me who find themselves lacking in gift-giving savvy.

Even when Friends formed a sizeable community, they found standing apart from the surrounding society on these activities became impossible over time. Quakers eventually yielded to giving the children an orange or two the day after “the day the world calls Christmas.” We can see similar struggles among Jews regarding Chanukah, where its essential message from 1st and 2nd Maccabbees – to withstand pagan demands, no matter the cost – instead begins to mirror the activities of the general populace. Add to it our mixed families, coming from many different traditions, and any distinctive witness falls by the wayside. In my case, having a wife with a German mother, I’ve learned just how much compromise is required in these decisions.

Actually, she’s taught me a lot about ways to wage a Guerrilla Christmas. Yes, there’s the battle with consumerism, but most of us – and most of the people we know – don’t need more “things.” We have enough clutter already, thank you. So preference is given to gifts that can be used up – food or tickets to an upcoming cultural event or a promised action on behalf of the recipient. Whenever possible, small local enterprises are favored over “big box” retailers. Some of you know about our family tradition of making gingerbread houses, a bit of silliness that accompanies our observation of Advent. As for Advent itself, when you remember that the Twelve Days of Christmas begin the day the advertising ends, you’re liberated to enjoy a less frenetic round of being with those you love.

It’s not what earlier Quakers would have expected from us, but it’s still a witness. Maybe it’s also a way for us to expand our understanding of simplicity and joyfulness, too.

So here’s to the First Day of Christmas. Remember, the season runs all the way to January 6, so enjoy.

A COSMIC CONNECTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Question: What do you do when something doesn’t work?

Answer: Fix it.

Q: And what if it still won’t work?

A: You throw it in the trash.

Q: But what if it’s not a thing but a person?

A: You fire ’em.

Q: But what if they’re one of the family?

A: Now the situation gets difficult. Really difficult.

NO NEED TO APOLOGIZE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

Whenever I come across a blog that begins as an apology for not posting lately or even being on hiatus for a few months, several thoughts spring to mind.

The first is simply that there’s no need to apologize. We’re not short of reading material here in the WordPress network, for sure. Nobody’s holding you to those deadlines, and we’d certainly rather have you back with something good to report than to have you mindlessly keyboarding.

The second thought, though, has me reflecting on my own approach to blogging. Rather than constantly being fed by current activity, the Red Barn and its sisters draw on my deep files of writing and, more recently, photography. That’s allowed me to plan ahead and schedule their release in a timely manner, sometimes even spiraling pieces from decades ago and now.

But now that has me wondering. Is that cheating?

Or is it just another example of the maxim, “Age and cunning will beat youth and ability every time”?

CATCHING UP DECADES LATER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

In moving around over my adult years as I have, I’ll probably never know the destinies of many of the individuals who’ve shared my life at crucial points. In many cases, even their last names slip away.

But I’ve recently learned of how things turned out for one small circle. It produced two women attorneys (one a federal prosecutor), an OBGYN female doctor, a food wholesale executive now turned United Way director, a technical support field manager, a retired six-figure systems analyst … for starters.

Looking at the service club logo behind one of them in a news story photo, it’s difficult to explain how far we’ve come in the decades since the early ’70s. Hippie, eh?

But from what I hear, some of them still like to party.

THE CAMPUS CONNECTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

A misunderstanding of the “turn on, tune in, drop out” motto popularized by Timothy Leary in 1966 likely blinded most of us to the extent to which the hippie movement was rooted in college campuses. That is, the “drop out” part was assumed to mean quitting one’s studies, even though Leary later insisted he meant it as a discovery of one’s unique nature and self-reliance, a mission that should have been central to the college experience itself.

Revisiting the era as it blossomed in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I see how much of its energy came from college students and the circles they supported – musicians, artisans and craftspeople, small-scale entrepreneurs of all stripes, social activists, dealers. Not just students, either, but hip young faculty and their families – all overlapping.

Essentially, it meant dropping a lot of old assumptions and embracing new experiences and values.

The reality, then, is that relatively few hippies dropped out of college, at least over the long haul. Talk all you want about Gypsies or vagabonds, few hippies stayed out on the road for long. Most remained grounded right in the center of the action.

A WRITER’S IDENTITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

“You’re more of a poet,” one of my favorite authors mentioned over coffee.

Huh? I had, after all, found publishers for two of my novels but none of my collections of poetry. So what if both novels were out of print, right?

Back in high school, when the writing bug hit me, I envisioned successfully working in fiction, poetry, theater, and journalism – successfully and famously, at that. That was way back before I discovered the reality of just how specialized each field can be, even before we get into the micro-subcategories, or how much rarified knowledge is required to navigate them professionally. Or how much competition there is across the board.

A first I felt my friend’s comment as a gentle reproach. There is always so much more to master, after all, as I tell myself after encountering another moving example of fine craftsmanship and deep insight.

As I returned to his comment, though, I picked up on another angle, the one that reflects a particular author’s sensibilities. He has me realizing that my basic outlook is as a poet, and that I carry that over into my novels.

Recently, another friend and I were discussing what we’d been reading, and he brought up Jim Harrison’s novels. He’d just finished seven in sequence. “He’s also a fine poet,” I said. But now, as I return to my bookshelves, I see an argument that Harrison is a novelist first, an outlook he carries over into the poems.

This is not to say that a writer has to be pigeonholed or can’t move among forms. After all, I could present a long list of fine poets whose essays I treasure. Many of them, as I noted in the Talking Money series at my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog, address the decidedly down-to-earth issues of income, budgeting, labor, possessions, time, wealth, and community.

Detailing what would place a writer in the poet category or else in the novelist line could provide an interesting roundtable discussion all its own. We’ll leave that for another time.

I will, however, suggest it arises in a state of mind – of seeing the world and of relating to those around us. And, I will add, I find myself far from writing or revising poetry when I’m working on a novel, simply because the fiction generates or relies upon another state of mind, even if the prose that results has poetic qualities.

 

THE NOVELIST STRIKES ANOTHER POSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

100_9850Dear Reader:  Are you aware that this is a social protest novel? Have you delineated the symbolism running through construction? Can you guess the antecedent novels that most influenced the Author in his quest of the Muse? What form will his next opus assume? Will he learn from his mistakes? Does he even perceive them? Will he renounce writing? Who will turn this into his next movie? What music will be selected to amplify it?

Please clip and mail to the Author. Your comments are always appreciated.

Thank you.

The Author.

~*~

To learn more about my novels, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

LEGALIZING POT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 10 Comments

Another of the festering wounds of the ’60s and ’70s is the matter of illicit drug use. It wasn’t just hippies, actually, not once the troops in Vietnam turned to it, too.

It’s a troubling legacy on many fronts. For one thing, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world – much of it regarding drug traffic. In other words, there’s a demand for the product, and if you believe in a free market, maybe you need to listen.

I won’t go into the history of banning many of the substances that are now verboten, even if it suggests a political tradeoff in repealing the Prohibition. But the basis of declaring the substances illegal appears to have been made on reasons other than the ones officially proclaimed. Let’s be honest about tobacco and alcohol, including their ability to be taxed, in contrast anything you might be able to grow on your own. (This, let me add, is coming from a former homebrewer.)

On the other hand, the widespread, frequent use of mind-altering substances among the young – and I’m including tobacco, alcohol, and activity-inhibiting legal prescriptions – leaves me deeply concerned.

That extends to the parents who give their kids pot … or even allow them to sell it at school.

That, in turn, points to a divergence between hippies and stoners.

Faced with a decision on the legalization of marijuana, I’m not entirely sure how I’d vote. But I do know the current policy isn’t working – and is doomed to continuing failure.

Why can’t we have a frank discussion on the issue … without all the hubris?

TEN HIPPIE MOVIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

We’ve already looked at music and literature from the hippie era, but now I’m wondering about movies. Yes, there were some that played straight into the stereotypes. Peter Sellars’ The Guru would head my list there.

But there were also others that took the issues and era seriously, even when they were comedies. Not all of them, I should emphasize, come from the ’60s or ’70s.

For a starter Top Ten list, let me propose:

  • Alice’s Restaurant
  • Putney Swope
  • I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
  • Yellow Submarine
  • Brother Sun, Sister Moon
  • Godspell
  • Hair
  • Jesus Christ Superstar
  • Love Story
  • Zabriske Point

Maybe The Graduate, Swept Away, 10, or Hippie Masala belong on the list. But it’s your turn to weigh in, savvy viewers that you are. What other nominees do you propose?