Tag: Culture

WINDY CITY PERSPECTIVE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune conducted an international architectural competition for the design of its new headquarters. The World’s Greatest Newspaper, as it proclaimed itself, could have erected a landmark modernistic tower envisioned by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer or an impractical giant lectern styled by Adolf Loos but instead went with a neo-Gothic bullet by Howells and Hood.

By the mid-‘80s, when I was employed by the paper’s syndication service, the grimy gray building was surrounded by many much newer buildings that resembled the glassy proposal the publisher had rejected. Maybe that says everything, in the end.

By then, though, the newsroom had definitely changed. Gone were the typewriters, long replaced by computer terminals and keyboards. Tours were guided through glass-shrouded catwalks overhead, where they could look down on journalists at work. I remember being fascinated to recognize there were four semi-circular copy-desks below me, each one ringed by copy-editors and a single “slotman” at the center, just as it had been when I started. I’d heard, too, that none of those seats were ever vacant long; this was a paper edited ‘round the clock for its many editions. But then I noticed that the editors on one of the rims were doing nothing except writing and editing photo captions. Nothing else for the entire shift. I’m sorry, but I’m used to far more variety when I’m editing. How did they ever stay awake?

Since we were really there to see two of our cartoonists, we headed for a set of elevators serving floors six through 32. And we were headed to the top, Jeff MacNelly’s suite, which sat just under the floor of microwave gear.

With his panoramic windows between flying buttresses looking out over Lake Michigan (you couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began that day), I wondered how he ever got any work done on his editorial cartoons or his Shoe comic strip.

One floor down, which Dick Locher commanded, was quite different. With its tiny diamond-shaped windows, the suite wrapped around the elevator and service shafts felt more like sitting inside a gargoyle.

At that point, one of my colleagues noticed a framed Pulitzer Prize on the wall. “That’s all it is? A piece of paper?”

Locher, who drew the Dick Tracy strip in addition to his editorial cartoons, had won two.

On the couch, MacNelly, who’d just won his third Pulitzer, grinned. “Yup, that’s about it. A piece of paper.”

WHERE, O WHERE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

“Hey, you know your portrait’s hanging at Harvard?”

“Eh?” I replied, wondering what century the canvas would have evoked.

“No, it was the ‘60s. You were younger, of course.” And while a residence hall on the Yard was mentioned, I was too awash in wonder to catch the details. (Darn!)

Still, it stirs up the what-if musings.

At the time, Ivy League was completely outside my range of possibilities, beginning with finances.

Even so, here we were, one town over, a half-century later.

If only …

Or if they only knew …

THE DYING ART OF CARTOONING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Flipping through the latest New Yorker and admiring the cartoons brought a sense of loss, too. While the New Yorker and Playboy had long been the epitome of the art, paying the premium rates for work that matched the highest standards, almost every magazine ran cartoons, at least as fillers in the back sections. These days, though, hardly any of them do.

When I was in high school, the wit of fellow Buckeye James Thurber became a model, along with the Addams Family even before the TV series. And then there was Gahan Wilson’s mordant pen. But who’s come along, say, in the past decade to fill the ranks? Not in magazines, as far as I see.

Or in newspapers, where having an editorial page cartoonist was seen as a badge of distinction. (Except at the New York Times, of course, which abstained.) In the collapse of the second newspaper in most markets – and the elimination of afternoon editions – the ranks of those cartoonists have also been evaporating. Even before we get to the recent rounds of attrition.

It’s not a laughing matter.

OBJECTIVITY, FOR STARTERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Journalism students used to be told of a reporter writing a weather story in a newsroom. Even though he can look out the window to see that it’s raining, he turns to the guy at the next desk, asks him to look out the window, and then quotes him in the report. It’s probably apocryphal, but it does reflect the kind of training no-nonsense reporters had in turning to sources, rather than their personal observations.

That’s why you see so many direct quotations in a news dispatch.

What you learn along the way is that what you see may not be the full story, much less the real account.

For all I know, it could have been glass falling from an explosion or sawdust, as they do in theater productions.

At least this way, there’s someone to blame if it’s wrong.

VOCAL ROOTS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Everybody’s from somewhere. You know, the accents, etc.

Merlinders with their “youse” and so on. To say nothing of the Bronx or Queens. Or New England, now that I’ve moved.

I should talk. I have no accent. Pure American Broadcaster Country.

Except that one line of my ancestry started out Pennsylvania Dutch (talk about talking funny!) and came to Ohio by way of Maryland and Virginia.

And another line came up north more recently, meaning the 1880s, from the North Carolina Piedmont.

So, there. No, folks. This time, I’m keeping my mouth shut.

SINGING WHERE WE LIVE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Like all of the arts, poetry has a long tradition of speaking for the marginalized and disenfranchised. Just look at a lot of the Psalms (even those attributed to David the King!) or Isaiah, for starters. That, as well as the court poets throughout antiquity. Or Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive. We sing where we live.

As for the review, remember: being a writer requires a thick skin when it comes to criticism – and, as Gertie Stein said, every writer wants to be told how good he is, how good he is, how good he is. Now, let’s look at the depth of this “criticism”: adjectives like dumbest, dumb, dumb … how many times? To say “I didn’t like this” is not criticism, O Wondrous Publisher, but the lowest form of consumerism.

Much of the most powerful art we find unlikable in our initial encounters – only through repeated exposure and exploration do we finally begin to see it open in its fullness and awe, and to appreciate its scope. (Not that everything that’s unlikable is great art, or even art, mind you – just that candy in and of itself can leave one seriously malnourished.) So don’t invite this cad to the opera, Shakespeare or Shaw, the symphony, art museum, jazz, a wine-tasting or brewpub, wilderness camping/backpacking, or your next edition. I once counseled a photographer I know in the Pacific Northwest to go beyond the obvious, superficial beauty there and to instead capture the real nature of the landscape.

Last time we talked, he said his work had taken on a breathtaking intensity, but that none of the galleries would touch it – because they didn’t believe it was real! It isn’t what the owners and collectors think they see in the outdoors – it’s the reality, in its naked majesty, instead. That’s what art is about! Or should be.

Or, as Gary Snyder once argued, all poetry is nature poetry – even if the closest the poet comes to nature is his old lady’s queynt.

Another thing to remember when it comes to publishing: not everyone will like everything. Back when Doonesbury was the “hot” comic strip, one newspaper was astonished to find in a survey that the strip was both its most popular – and the most hated! Please the latter subscribers and you might not be selling copies to the former; but please the former, and the latter will still be onboard, to get whatever it is that they like. Or. if a restaurant removed every item that any of its clientele found objectionable, there would be no menu. Even McDonald’s has detractors.

Of course you’re going to tinker with each edition! Every poem is different, too – or should be. (I could name some writers who are repeating the same formula they struck upon ten or twenty years ago, but that’s not for me – Eskimo artists, I’ve heard, will do a subject only once and then move on to another. Good model, methinks, although the “once” might mean a work within a series of sixty to a hundred poems – kind of like a novel, I guess.)

Maybe you’ll even have a stretch where the personal life and upheaval and discovery and adventures quiet down, and you feel it’s time to do a mostly-poetry issue – go for that, too!

Right now, what’s singing where I live is the mockingbird. Ever so gloriously, with a song that’s rarely the same.

FREQUENCY OF ATTENDANCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Every week? Every other week? Once a month? How often do you come to worship?

It’s a question that’s nagged at me ever since participating in my first Friends community. There I noticed a number of people who seemed to come every other week, meaning in practice we had two largely separate circles of people. A few years earlier, as part of a monastic practice, I had experienced what group mediation twice every day could do, how the energy would build up and the experience, deepen.

Early Quakers were much more insistent on attendance, including the Midweek Meeting. The Amish, on the other hand, gather every other week, using the off week to visit at a distance. In fairness, on many weekends we do have multiple activities scheduled, and three or four hours in the meetinghouse on Sunday is not uncommon.

Still, we must wonder. Are our lives so busy we haven’t enough time for worship? Or do we need a Sabbath from the labors of Meeting? My views have changed over the years. Yes, Sunday often becomes a time of catching up. But miss worship for a few weeks straight, and getting back into the rhythm and focus of Meeting becomes difficult – it’s easy to slip away. What I do know, often more in theory than practice, is the importance of Sabbath rest – especially the kind that helps us rediscover family and joyous playfulness. Something that’s quite distinct from leisure. Or even thank you and please come again. “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work.” Let that remain our invitation and refreshment.

RESTAURANT CITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment
A cluster of restaurants and their decks overlook Tugboat Alley in Portsmouth. It's an iconic site in the city.
A cluster of restaurants and their decks adjoins Tugboat Alley in Portsmouth. It’s an iconic sight in the city. A quartet of the tugs is also often seen in the ocean near the mouth of the harbor, waiting to escort a large ship to port. 

Portsmouth, a city of 24,000 just a dozen miles to our south, probably has as many restaurants per capita as Manhattan – by some counts, 160 within a close radius of the downtown.

Much of the demand relies on the tourist trade. Nearly everyone driving to Maine comes through the city, usually on Interstate 95. Half of those going to New Hampshire’s White Mountains turn north there as well. And many simply stop altogether to vacation. It is, after all, on the Atlantic.

Still, that’s a lot of dining.

SHIFT IN SUBMISSIONS STRATEGY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

For decades – perhaps generations – writers would send their works off to magazines as exclusive submissions. Only one journal at a time would get to look at a piece, usually taking six months to reject it. And with rejection rates running 95 percent and higher, a writer could spend a lifetime trying to see a piece published.

More recently, many editors have turned to allowing simultaneous submissions, something I’ve avoided simply because of the difficulties of keeping track of what I have out where. But I don’t call mine exclusive submissions; if I don’t hear back in six months, I assume the work was lost, the periodical’s gone kaput, or the piece has been rejected – and then I put it back into circulation.

The Postal Service submissions also meant including an SASE – self-addressed, stamped envelope – for return of the work and the typical rejection slip or scrawl or, happy day, the rare acceptance note.

When I returned to submitting after a five- or six-year hiatus, much of the field had changed. Many of the journals now took submissions only electronically, especially through one of several formatted services. For a while I tried to maintain two separate sets of files, one for submissions I was sending off in envelopes and another for the online offerings.

And then, one day, I looked at the odds. All of my acceptances were coming from the online submissions. More impressively, some came within six hours rather than six months.

A few editors still limit themselves to entries on paper. But they’re not seeing my work. At the moment, I don’t even have easy access to a printer. (But that’s another story.)

THE HUMAN IMPRINT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

In the old days, a newspaper or magazine often had a personal imprint. The publication took on the publisher’s or top editor’s vision, and a certain tone and range of interests followed. We can look at the legendary names – McCormack, Hearst, Pulitzer, Scotty Reston’s New York Times, Ben Bradlee’s Washington Post, the Bingham family’s Louisville Courier-Journal, Tom Winship’s Boston Globe, even Bill Loeb’s Union Leader – and then realize it’s not something you see in the corporate journalism of today, especially where top editors are out the door in a year. Can you name anyone at the helm today?

As for the big-name stars of network and cable news/entertainment, well, let’s just say they’re pale imposters. There’s something to be said for knowing the ropes of a community and its people. Of having roots and depth – and the responsibility of recognition when they’re out in public.