Tag: Culture

CHANGING STYLE, CHANGING TASTE, CHANGING DIRECTION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Driving any of my back routes to the beach, I pass impressive houses that have views of the water. Often, they’re old estates reflecting established money. Some are infused with history. Some are large, with four or more chimneys. Others are cozy cottages with four-season porches.

For much of my life, I would have dreamed of owning such a place.

Lately, though, there’s been a sea-change in my perspective. Part of it is no doubt my arrival at a point in life called retirement, although for me it’s been more a matter of culminating focus on the Real Work, as the poet Gary Snyder calls it. Another part of it has to do with stripping away all of the competing visions of where I thought my life might have been heading. The two dovetail, actually.

When I was starting out, I held often contradictory goals. As one date once admitted, she couldn’t decide whether I’d been in a corner office in a Manhattan tower or in an artist’s garret 10 years hence, and she wasn’t far off the mark, even before the ashram intervened.

Of course, the corner office and the house overlooking the water both assume a sizable income, and that was never in the offing for a journalist unless I somehow became publisher at a young age. Unlikely from the outset, but all the more so once the hippie movement kicked in.

Even so, as a writer, there was always the dream of the blockbuster novel that became a hot movie, but my work kept veering more and more toward the experimental while the publishing industry kept constricting. You get the picture.

You could add to that the possibility of a wealthy girlfriend or the talented one whose career took off big time, but both of those went up in smoke. Or whatever.

Come to think of it, the dream wasn’t just about houses. You could figure in the shiny cars, too, or a sailboat or global travel.

The vision, as it turned out, included an entire lifestyle. An exteneded family with a handful of my own kids, at the least, running around. Many friends and business acquaintances, along with political connections, all coming to stay in the guestroom or guesthouse. A fully stocked library with an impressive collection. An art collection, too.

What it didn’t include was the life I’ve wound up living. Much smaller scale. As a writer, what I really require is blocks of uninterrupted time and solitude. Let’s be honest. A studio can be not much larger than a closet, for that matter.

As for the big place? It would need household staff, for one thing. And a long list of handymen.

What I have instead is an old house and its barn in a small city, along with a common car with 250k on the speedometer. It’s more than enough to handle, even before adding the family.

On top of it all, I also have a shelf of books with my name as author.

CLASSICS MADE IN THE USA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If classical music’s to find a fuller audience in America, the works of our own composers need to be presented. Especially those I call the Illuminists, after the great painters who finally have found widespread appreciation.

I love the orchestral works of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, MacDowell, Griffes … and no other composer spanned so much change within two decades as Charles Ives.

We know only the surface. Listen closely, and you’ll find none of them sounds truly German, despite the accusations. Even were it true, we need to remember (a) German was the standard for classical music, so much so that even Dvorak suffered, and (b) German was a central component of American culture at the time, anyway – it was even a required language in many major city high schools.

Acknowledging this puts Aaron Copland within a longer tradition, and all of those who follow.

Now, if our major orchestras would only live up to the challenge. Is it really to much to ask that they play a fourth of their repertoire from their home base?

BREAKING THE STEREOTYPES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

She never did drugs, and she married a soldier. She was a faithful mother and wife. She doesn’t even know the smell of marijuana, and she talks to her legislators rather than standing in a demonstration.

But in my book, she’s still a hippie. There’s no question where she falls on the granola-heads to fundamentalist spectrum.

I’d give you my reasons she’s a hippie, as far as I’m concerned. But I bet you know others who are something like her. So I’d like to hear some of the qualities you perceived that help us break the stereotypes, at least when thinking of hippie.

YEARBOOK CONFESSIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

There was the night when my daughters – at the time, one in college, the other beginning high school – had been chattering about something that prompted me to get out the yearbooks. Show them what things had been like back then, when Bob Dylan was just going electrified, Vietnam was ramping up, and hippies, well, were still more than a year away in the future. (My wife insists this came up on my birthday.)

Their reactions weren’t quite what I expected. Yes, there was the giggling, especially over the girls’ flip-style hair and A-line dresses. And their dismissal of some beauties I’d lusted after, as well as their agreement on others. Initially, they couldn’t find me in the pictures, and then, when they did, they started laughing: “You’re everywhere! Is there a group where you weren’t an officer? Hey, he even has some poetry here!” As well as my wife’s, “My, you were cute back then.” Which pains, in a way: I’m not now? Of course, I was the skinny, clueless intellectual back then – and generally unloved. To my further surprise, my girls declared that the boys in my high school class were generally pretty attractive – “They look put together,” as they put it – compared to those today. Maybe it was all the ties and shorn heads. I thought we looked pretty dorky. Still do, looking back.

A bit later, one night at the office, as one of my coworkers was complaining to another about the latest machinations by her son’s teacher, and his high school’s draconian response, I remembered that I’d been having a fleeting sense that this would have been the year for my 40th reunion – that is, if anyone was still in charge. With all of my moves about the country, though, they’d long since lost track of me. I’d never made any of the reunions anyway, either being unemployed at the time (and thus short of cash), unable to get the vacation time off or budget for the air fare, or even learning of the last one a couple of months after it happened. Lately, though, there have been some tentative Web searches for individuals, which did lead to a posting of some items from The Hilltopper, from when I was editor-in-chief. So now, around midnight, I decided to Google, just in case, a reunion notice might be posted, somewhere. And lo and behold, there it was. The Victory Bell, and then photos from their 35th anniversary gathering.

The Web site itself wasn’t in the best shape. A bit of nosing about did turn up a notice that there would, indeed, be a 40th observance, though because “we’re especially short of funds,” no mailings would be sent out. (As if they had my address.) But do I want to spend an evening in an American Legion hall with a DJ and people trying to make happy? The idea gives me the creeps. I’m a country dance kind of guy, or would at least prefer a setting where conversation would be facilitated, rather than masked.

Still, something in my awareness was pierced, and the emotions could not be restrained. For 40 years, from my perspective, at least, these classmates have been frozen in time. Their supple flesh and worldly inexperience, preserved intact. Jarring, then, comes the notice on the site, informing of the death of one who had been incredibly desirable, with side-by-side photos of her at 18 and then aged. As are notices of a cluster of others, now deceased. I click again, to photos from the 35th reunion, and am appalled. I recognize no one. They’re loud, badly dressed, and have not aged well. Finally, I find a few photos with the people identified, and then admit some are actually in pretty good shape. Another icon leads to a listing that includes married surnames, and the trail of these classmates is no longer lost from my sight. Further Web searches, for instance, present one I’d idealized who is now spouting political drivel, while another – once the epitome of cool sexuality and now apparently divorced in the past five years – is teaching knitting or quilting in a fundamentalist church. I return to the class Web site. Wonder about the Adonis club males, and just how did so many become so grotesque? As for the dress, strange tans, paunches, and wrinkles, the gray or dyed hair, or lack thereof: this is what I thought I wanted to return to, after college. Here, I must confront the reality that some – essentially the reunion crowd – were able to stay in town, largely on the one side of town, at that – while some others have been scattered to the winds. After all, I am among those “location unknown.”

How could I possibly begin to relate to them all of the twists in my own life – the ashram experience, the orchards and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the St. Helens eruption, my Quaker progression and return east, publication of experimental novels and countless poems, the divorce and finally coming to have children when many of them are enjoying grandchildren, to say nothing of having a wife who’s nearly the age of their own children?

I looked at the posted photos and wondered, who are all these old people? Wondered, too, how I ever escaped that circle. (Oh, vanity!)

 

A WORLD QUITE ALIEN TO MY OWN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

As we watched the movie (let’s withhold the title as being irrelevant to my point), I was struck that these were not characters I would – or could – ever draft. Even if I’d managed to conjure up the range of members of the extremely dysfunctional family, they wouldn’t be believable, arising as they do from a world quite alien to mine. (Not that my family didn’t have its, uh, dysfunctions.)

It’s an awareness I’m having with increasing frequency – or at least maybe it’s just a heightened recognition. It involves not just family dynamics, either, but extends to a perception of romantic attractions or destructive people in the workplace or political office and beyond.

In the case of this particular movie, each character was appalling in a distinctive way and played to perfection by a top-line cast, which only added to my admiration of the scriptwriter’s achievement, one author to another.

Could it be I’m simply becoming more and more aware of how wide and varied our world really is?

 

READERS, READERS, WHEREVER YOU ARE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Are there many readers outside New York City? When it comes to literary fiction, at least, the majority of the work often seems to be set in the City, and maybe that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I do love the fact that so many subway riders are also transit readers, though, and maybe that plays a big influence in the book reading populace. Ditto for taking the bus.

But I’m always baffled by the question, “Who are your readers?” I like to think they come from everywhere, and from all walks of life.

And just who are you?

The marketing crowd, of course, likes to peg a genre to a demographic. Chick Lit is a prime example, which in turn created Hen Lit for an over-29 female readership. Romances we can guess. Maybe even the many strands of Sci Fi.

But I still like to hold out hope for a more diverse core of readers for my own work, including the new books appearing at Smashwords. Am I just being naive?

Heavens, is it really Boomer Lit? I’d hope not to be so limited.

CONTINUING SHADOWS OF THE HIPPIE EXPERIENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Look at a lot of the bikers or some of today’s teens and you can see they’re carrying some of the hippie legacy. The long hair, especially, and the desire to be as free as Gypsies. But something there doesn’t quite fit, either.

Too much military, for the bikers – the peace vibe ain’t there.

As for the teens, I don’t see the playful side that accompanied the late ’60s and early ’70s, along with all the desperation. Even the drug use seems different, maybe purely numbing rather than mind-expanding.

I’ve already mentioned some of the hippie streams I see continuing. But I haven’t said much about the darker side. I’m open for some suggestions and comments here. Feel free to weigh in. Anybody still picking up hitchhikers, for starters?

ESCAPE? OR ENCOUNTER?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

A comment by Aaron James a few days back in response to my post “The Novel as a Time Machine” has prompted me to rethink my own expectations of literature, both as a reader and a writer. It was one of those elephant-in-the-room moments, actually, in which the most obvious thing can sometimes be the hardest to see.

Quite simply, when he said “a lot of people like to read as a form of escapism,” an alarm was triggered, based on a deeply engrained value from my formative years, the one that derided escapism as, well, unhealthy at its core and essentially fluffy. Looking back, I suspect the message was that escapism had the social relevance of sugar overload or a wild drunken night on the town. You know, it just wasn’t serious enough.

At a deeper level, I suspect the reaction also touches on the lingering historic distrust of the arts from my dad’s Quaker and Dunker roots, perhaps even some from my mother’s mix of Calvinist traditions (never mind Sir Walter Scott), and that’s even before we get to Tertullian and his critique of the “pagan” arts during the formation of the early church itself. You know, it all begins with assuming a role of another’s identity, something that’s simply counterfeit and a lie. (My apologies for way oversimplifying a marvelous line of reasoning. And, for the record, many modern Quakers are fine writers, actors, and artists.)

Still, as I was reflecting on Aaron’s comment, I had to admit how much I enjoy work that crosses from “reality” into a magical realm, one of fantasy or surrealism. I like to be taken places – or, as he hints, be given a sense of travel where exploring and learning are part of the sensation of the trip.

Is that escapism? Or is it encounter?

My inclination is to argue the latter. But does that make for a more rugged route? It even has me thinking about the “diet” we allow ourselves when it comes to literature – do we go vegan, for instance, or kosher, or out-and-out hedonistic? What’s “good” and what’s “bad”? And what’s simply another guilty pleasure?

AMPLIFYING THE LIST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

When we were considering literature arising from the hippie experience a while back, one of the surprises came in the reader comments as we recognized the predominance of non-fiction rather than novels. (Who says literature must be exclusively fiction, anyway?)

Still, there are four novelists who recently resurfaced in my memory, and I think they deserve consideration for their efforts from the time:

  • Edward Abbey: The Monkey Wrench Gang, etc.
  • Ernest Callenbach: Ecotopia
  • John Nichols: The Milagro Beanfield War, etc.
  • Tom Robbins: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, etc.

Noticing that these are all male, and that three focus heavily on the socio-political aspects of the movement, I have a nagging suspicion that we’re overlooking a range of female authors weighing in on their side of the experience. Any more nominations?

THE NOVEL AS A TIME MACHINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

Anyone else wonder about the appeal of stories set in another century? Just what’s the attraction?

The future, of course, is one direction, a whole set of “what if” projections that for now cannot be tested against historical development. (Admittedly, Orwell’s 1984 certainly has become an exception in the years since I first read it, gee, was it ’64? As has the movie 2001.)

The past, however, seems to be the more romantic option, beginning with historic period romances and Westerns. I suppose it’s not that far removed from those who inquire of astrologers or palmists or mediums about their past lives, although what I’ve always found most fascinating there is how many people who do so claim to have been Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn or Helen of Troy or the like, rather than one of the common, suffering, exploited populace. No, the stories tilt toward royalty, court intrigue, the power struggles of the rich and mighty – the glittering elite far removed from everyday life. (Maybe that’s our fascination with celebrities, too, as if wealth and beauty leads to true love and happiness, not that it ever seems to hold over the long haul. In pure weight, tragedies trump over comedies.)

My wife sometimes jests that I would have been more at home in 18th or 19th century America, especially in a context of the Enlightenment, scientific advancement, and perhaps opera, along with a flourishing Quaker culture. (Never mind that the Quaker discipline of the time banned music and fiction as superfluous, vain, and untrue.) Again, though, the projection is toward a place of refinement, culture, and ease rather than the long, hard, physical labor of the masses.

So what, ultimately, is the attraction of historical fiction? Is there some time or place you’d willingly be relocated to, if it were possible, even if you could never come back? And, while we’re at it, what about the importance of location, even over time itself? Who and where would you like to be? Just what is it about other eras? Ah, the intrigue! To say nothing of the underlying connection.