Tag: Counterculture

Acid test novelist: Jeffrey Eugenides (1960- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As the 21st century got underway, I was baffled that all of the published contemporary novelists and many of its poets I admired were in place by the time I graduated from college at the beginning of the ‘70s. Where were those my own age or younger?

Yes, the publishing world was in turmoil, but that couldn’t have been the entire problem.

I was also recognizing that my native Midwest, especially as I experienced it in industrial Ohio, went unrepresented – something missing largely from Hollywood presentations as well.

And then, as I discovered Greek-American culture, I was amazed to find how little of that culture, too, existed in public awareness.

The one exception who came to light was Detroit-born Eugenides. And how!

His three novels, each one a unique take on the novel itself, address the previous blanks. For large stretches of the Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, I thought he was talking about Dayton, including the race riots of ’68. The Marriage Plot, meanwhile, looked at Quaker practice in ways that gave me confidence in the Greek-American dimension of my own novel What’s Left.

The man is a master, for sure.

How ‘Pit-a-Pat High Jinks’ came into play

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Indiana wasn’t the only thing bogging down my original subway manuscript. The dude’s life off in the countryside after college was another big complication.

Well, that and my grounding as a journalist, meaning focusing on facts as I observed them, in contrast to writing as a novelist, meaning putting feelings and some imagination first.

Head for the hills, then, as I did by default to upstate New York. I didn’t get there quite as I describe Kenzie’s journey, but the route wasn’t that far off, either. In the story, I’ve kept the location rather vague. It could as easily be pockets of western Connecticut or the Berkshires in Massachusetts or even southern Vermont. Let them blend together.

I was pretty lost in my first year-and-a-half after college, the period leading up to my embrace of yoga. It was a wild ride for me, at the margin of general society; my highs punctuated deep depression. Most of my friends – including housemates and girlfriends – were from The City or its wider orb, and that included short trips with them when my work schedule permitted. (I rarely had two days off in a row, much less three.) And, my, was I green.

For much of that period, my own journalism slash writing career and dreams were going nowhere and paid next to nothing. More troubling, my love life was non-existent, even considering how I had a housemate who came back every night with a different bedmate, all of them delectable in my sight. What was my problem? What was wrong with me? What was I missing?

And then I found yoga and everything changed. Even the romance.

What could possibly be wrong with that story?

Well, it had fed into Subway Hitchhikers, but most of what I had drafted there was eventually excised to focus on the urban dimension of the story.

~*~

During this period, my social life revolved around two locations.

The first was a once luxurious apartment building turned slum at the edge of downtown. I later moved it to Daffodil along the Ohio River far to the west for the college-years novel. Well, many but not all of the renters were college students.

The second encampment was what many people would consider a hippie commune out in the hills, a very rundown farm high in the hillsides along the state line. As I explain in what’s now Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, we shared the expenses but not our incomes. I now think there were some freeloaders anyway.

Both dwellings, from what I see in satellite photos, have been torn down.

And I still believe my two-ring circus there (three, if you include the newspaper where I was employed) was a richer source of characters than, say, Bonanza or the Friends sitcom.

~*~

I’ll have to revisit my journals for clues about how the lode from this period evolved during revisions. When I heard about Smashwords a dozen years after the subway novel had been published, I must have already had two versions of the experience in hand, both drawn from the earlier outtakes augmented by journal entries and correspondence.

They differed sharply in tone and focus.

Hippie Drum was closer to a memoir that focused on the general hippie scene around me. Hippie Love paralleled the chronology but focused on its erotic encounters, with the added twist that our protagonist had far more success in the love department. One was gritty; the other, free-wheelin’ trippy.

In these parallel accounts of the same story line, the first focused on Kenzie’s overall adjustments to being out on his own, adapting to the workplace and his new housemates and a wider underground, freaky community. He was desperate for love but rarely connected. Frankly, much of the hippie life was drab and impoverished. The other, an R- or X-rated version, was more fanciful, examining what could have been if he had possessed a bit more finesse. Both books ended at the same point.

Making sense of what happened in my outwardly dull life in goofy counter-culture times included what happened out in the sticks were nobody seemed to be looking, that is, where I had landed or even taken refuge. It was just up the road from Woodstock, only on the far side of the Big Apple.

~*~

I originally envisioned the two books kind of like the three-show play The Norman Conquests, where a line of conversation starts in one room and of finishes a night or two later on the other side of door he had passed through. Not that I was that meticulous in my crafting. I was just trying to run with the material at hand.

Alas, the “love” book was wisely deemed “adult” content, invisible unless you checked your filter.

~*~

As for related input? Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Jack Kerouac’s spree narratives, Anais Nin’s sexual frontiers, Robert Crumb’s stoned cartoons, and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” can be seen as touchstones for what finally came back together as a single volume, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, in its current incarnation. There may even be some Hunter Thompson in the mix.

~*~

Hippie Drum was the first book I published at Smashwords.

Hippie Love came out the next month.

Both, in the autumn of 2013.

Acid test mystic: James Nayler (1618-1660)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The most powerful of the public ministers in the early Quaker movement, Nayler remains unjustly tarnished by what I see as a street theater event that erupted into scandal and his conviction by Parliament (not court) on blasphemy. His shameful treatment by Quaker leader George Fox afterward furthered the sleight.

He’s seen as the most systematic theologian of the emerging movement, as I’ve written elsewhere. What fascinates me the most, though, is his articulation of the Light, as early Quakers experienced Christ. Nobody has written more insightfully in its wide-ranging appearances.

One difficulty is that the experience isn’t “like” anything else. What, for instance, is light itself like? Or the color green? Nayler’s writing, then, can make full sense only to others who have experienced a spiritual Light inwardly. Logically, we’re stuck in a tautology.

His text, though, works and sounds more like contemporary poetry than you’d expect from 17th century English prose. Well, Ezra Pound did describe literature as “news that stays news,” which I think fits here.

 

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.

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.

Acid test novelist: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My introduction to Kerouac was the 1968 Paris Review interview he gave to Ted Berrigan (accompanied by Aram Saroyan, if I recall right – they did have to crawl through a bedroom window to get around Kerouac’s watchdog wife). The idea of typing on long scrolls of teletype paper was something I certainly took up after graduation from college – many mornings I had to go into the newsroom before dawn to attend to the teletype machines and replace the rolls of paper. Nobody else was interested in the discarded bolts.

I’ve never been able to get through On the Road but have read about everything else he wrote, especially Dharma Bums. What appealed in the hippie experience of the early ‘70s was Kerouac’s narrative of similar questing for transcendental awarenesses in music and poetry, music, travel, spirituality/religion, and romantic love – often in the realities of borderline squalor. His experiments with Buddhism resonated with my early yoga, though I now see how much it was more an exploration of French-Canadian Catholicism. The jazz details the excitement of the transformations of the ‘50s and its Beat movement, history as it happened.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much Binghamton in upstate New York resembled Kerouac’s native Lowell, Massachusetts, but without the French-Canadian dimension. The rawness of his freeform narrative was nevertheless entrancing.

Eventually, when I moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, I encountered the Quebec element in the city’s West Side and then in the mills of Lowell itself. We even had obituaries for some of his distant kin who spelled the name Kirouac.

For a fact-oriented journalist like me, his dark and cloudy and openly emotional approach to a story was a revelation. As an aside, I must confess that I now see Henry Miller’s earlier stream-of-thought fiction is superior.

As for Kerouac’s celebrated and lamented Cody? I seriously doubt that he measured up to his image. But that’s a matter of being human, too.

Acid test novelist: Ishmael Reed (1938- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Assigned as part of a contemporary novels course in the spring of 1970, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was unlike anything I had previously encountered. The lively tone and style were a kind of pre-rap, I suppose, as were the content. He was amusing in a way Leroi Jones wasn’t and also an example that we can be free of having to “write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it.

He certainly introduced a new world to my essentially suburban Midwestern nature.

Reed was, as critic Anita Felicelli wrote of a later novel, a firebrand, crackling, overflowing, pugnacious, “someone who doesn’t care about genre boundaries any more than he cares about historical boundaries, but who does care deeply about innovating.” In other words, right up my alley.

The novel Mumbo Jumbo confirmed my impression, but, somehow, I haven’t encountered him since, even though he’s written and published prolifically. Note to self: Rectify ASAP.

Acid test mystic: Isaac Penington (1616-1679)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Unlike many of the early Quaker voices, Penington was well educated and respectable, the eldest son of a Lord Mayor of London. He even became William Penn’s father-in-law. But his joining with Quakers led to harsh persecution, including imprisonment six times, as well as intense spiritual experiences he described in various writings, including his letters.

A critical reader will recognize that articulating what is ultimately non-physical or confirmable is a difficult challenge. What Penington achieves remains insightful, personal, yet universal. There’s nothing dogmatic or doctrinaire or theoretical or speculative, not when grounded in personal practice.

His style fascinates me, long sentences that coil around and around as they move toward a core. Pulling a short quotation from them proves difficult without losing the wider field of wonder. As an example, “Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion.” Eighty words, in all – typical.

Somehow, I find myself contrasting him to the Muggletonian William Blake a century and a half later, who struggled with similar challenges for a much different result.

Is small really beautiful?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One place I was appearing as a writer was in the small-press realm. Largely unseen and at the fringe of the literary world, its prolific, low-circulation reviews, quarterlies, ‘zines, chapbooks, and even full-sized books reflected a passion for literature, an intense mission, or outright ambition rather than an accountant’s commercial motivation. Many were marginally funded, mimeographed or photocopied, while others had more traditional printers, perhaps even typesetters, and a few of the biggest even had paid staff. Most were edited by dedicated individuals or partnerships; others by an institution or circle; and still others by college English departments, with either students or faculty as the team.

It’s where the action was – and remains.

Among the book publishers, Black Sparrow and Copper Canyon stand out, along with Shambala for a Buddhist focus.

In general, university book presses garnered more respect and financial backing and weren’t open to those of us who weren’t in a professorial track.

In college, I had been told of a widely recognized poet who averaged 20 rejections for every poem he had accepted in one of these journals. That was meant as inspiration to keep us lesser voices from despair.

Well, a few years later, I was getting about 20 rejections for every batch of five poems I mailed out. Still, I got more than a thousand acceptances. They usually paid me with two contributor’s copies, or did before the action shifted online. There are some fine online sites, by the way, if you look.

The track was how you were supposed to build a reputation and even entice an agent or editor. I think they were all too busy to notice.

A newspaper career was usually supposed to grow the same way: start out on a small daily somewhere out in the sticks, one with next to nothing pay, and work your way up. Or as one critic warned publishers, this was a process of eating your young. Or your seed corn, in another version.

(The highest income I ever reached, by the way, was the national median. And that was thanks to our Newspaper Guild contract, unlike most of our rivals.)

~*~

Acceptances created another challenge, drafting a contributor’s note.

I noticed that many of the writers listed their most recent book or two, but I really didn’t have that much. Others went with where they were teaching or working on an advanced degree. With my name distancing myself from the more common tag I used in the newsroom, naming the newspaper wasn’t really an option – and not that wise, anyway, if the content was of a controversial nature, as many still saw the hippie movement.

The solution, then, was to look for some bit that would make me more human. Do try it, if you’re asked to come up with something similar. Even be flip, if you can.

~*~

The World Wide Web has taken all of this in a new dimension, of course.

We bloggers are essentially producing ‘zines or similar small journals. We even have photography as a regular option, not a given back in the day.

I’ve even gathered my published poems along with newer ones and published them as free PDF chapbooks at my own online imprint, Thistle Finch, a sister to this Red Barn. Do look it up.

More crucial has been the growth of ebooks and on-demand print publishing, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post.

Acid test novelist: Gurney Norman (1937- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Returning to Tom Wolfe’s charge that no great novel sprang from the hippie counterculture, it’s clear that he overlooked Divine Right’s Trip, which originally appeared in the margins of the Last Whole Earth Catalog. (Far out, indeed.)

Rather than taking place in any of the celebrated hippie havens, Norman’s pilgrim figure finds himself in Cincinnati, a largely redneck habitation I’ve heard described as a place of perpetual Lent, before heading on into the strip-mined mountains of eastern Kentucky. Yes, hippie did indeed take place in seemingly unlikely locales. It was also often drab and lonely. And then, as Norman illustrates, it also drew nurture from some very unlikely sources.

If anything, there’s widespread lament that Norman didn’t write more. Divine Right’s Trip is humbly beautiful.