Tag: Jobs

No question, my Indiana years were special

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve been seeing in this sweep through my journals, not all of my experiences in Bloomington wound up in my poetry and fiction.

Back when I switched my college major from journalism to “something that would expand my mind,” as one influential editor advised me, I chose political science because so much news coverage focuses on government and its impact. Somehow, I fell under the spell of Vincent Ostrom, especially his federalist perspectives of a compound republic and ground-upward rather than top-down action. My earlier posts reflect how this turned into a personal relationship, even before I was invited to join what’s now known at IU as the Ostrom Workshop.

His wife Elinor, better known to us as Lynn, was just beginning to teach at IU when I was an undergrad and I didn’t find the opportunity to enroll in her courses. (The fact the department scheduled her classes at 7:30 am was an additional problem for night-owl me, as I was as the time.) Despite obstacles erected because of her gender, she soon became a popular teacher and by the time I returned to campus, was a rising star. What I saw on my return was how naturally she functioned as the central figure in running our collaborative workshop, and how utterly amazing she was all around. It should be no surprise that she became not only the first woman but also the first political scientist to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Yes, the dismal science.

While I have never run for political office or served in a governmental role — I’m of the camp that believes doing so would compromise the neutrality or objectivity at the heart of serious journalism — I have carried many of the lessons from that training through the remainder of my life.

One is the ability to critically read a text, period. It serves well in literature, theology, proposing a course of action, as well as editing. A corresponding step then asks which assumptions can be relaxed or even removed from the paper under examination.

Another lesson involves management and associative structures. Many similarities exist in operating public, for-profit, and non-profit organizations. They are what make a civilization function. They were especially helpful when I was navigating the steps in the management ladder of corporate journalism in my moves to come.

The next question regarding any field of organization, of course, is how do we make it work better?

~*~

In this review of the experience, I’m surprised to see a parallel in the youthful enthusiastic personnel at the Workshop to the idealistic newsroom staff in my novel Hometown News.  Most of the events shaping that book, be warned, come in the years ahead.

~*~

As I look back, I see how crucial this year-and-a-half became in my life.

My evolution from yogi to Quaker began, for one thing, though an overlap would continue for another year or two.

Through a circle headed by three very fine poets, my personal voice in that vein took shape, accompanied by appearances in literary reviews across the nation.

Kat and I settled into a life that was largely pleasurable and fulfilling. I’ll leave the details for you to decipher in my novel Nearly Canaan. The middle novella in The Secret Side of Jaya, “Miller at the spring,” was also inspired by this period but written 40-some years later and recast in the Ozarks.

There was a curious semester when Nicki and Kat were enrolled in the same weaving class in the art department. Did my ex-lover know my wife was a classmate? Eventually, they became acquainted and that led to a face-to-face of the three of us, allowing me some resolution to the past.

And I felt freer to move forward.

~*~

Vincent had grown up on a mink farm near Mount Baker in Washington state, and he was quite encouraging in our move to the Northwest. Living in the interior desert, I would finally understand the intricacies of water legislation and management, which had been one of his specialties. Another arose from being a writer of the Alaska state constitution, a place that also had close connections to Washington state.

After packing up and moving westward, I never returned to Indiana, apart from the brief drive crossing on the toll road in the north on our return to Ohio after the Pacific Northwest.

I’d say the book was closed, yet the writing and revision were actually still ahead.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

 

Is a job search always a tribulation?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After reviewing old clippings: “How close my writing has come to greatness … or to babble.”

At the RT, how much our photography carried us, especially considering how thin, until the end, our local coverage was – how important our Saturday front-page feature was in setting us apart and giving the staff a fairer schedule. .

Morning on long-distance calls to Bordner, Aldrich, Swaisgood, L. Nighswander.

Other fronts, Russ called back, said Larry Hale expected an “editor’s position” in several weeks … So much confusion, would I really want to go back there?

And the letter from Tacoma, $20,000 arts and entertainment, if they get the opening … What do I make of this? McClatchy upswing versus Gannett versus a fighting crew at the foot of Pike’s Peak?

 

So what about Colorado?

Imagination still reeling with thoughts of the Rockies. A place to be at peace? Low pay may be an incentive to freelance or grow.

The West may spur a novel. I’m too boxed in here.

On the brink of Colorado. A time of despair, anxiety, and waiting through the layoff.

Early May, Colorado Springs, round-trip ticket, $189.

On flight out: half of southern Indiana is forest. Region defined the sudden shift to farmland where the hills give way to flatness.

Contrasting smoothness of disked fields next to rougher plowed.

Strip-mine lakes outside Terre Haute.

~*~

Colorado Springs Sun: Don’t feel there’s much I can do here – to many “trained incompetencies,” exhausting and routine-work hours. B.B. [the editor who was to hire me] is leaving for Detroit after eight months here.

No local color in the paper. Newsroom looks and smells like RT. Computer (VDT) may help – question is, how much?

Upon seeing first UPI lead, realized how clear, precise, and simple my own style has become. Newspaper work may destroy that – at least, I feel it slipping away.

No sense of nuance, of grace, of individual voice – that is, true style – in this news writing, which exists as stilted and artificial as any literary style. It is divorced from the human voice and from American speech.

 

Another Far West facet

All along during my stint as a research associate, I was reading technical material on Indigenous artwork. Here are some sample entries from my Bloomington journaling.

 

 

 

 

~*~

Back from the Rockies

Indiana feels too thick, too green and wet in contrast. My sinuses are acting up again. I’m out-of-place in America.

Horoscope says a month or two before big change. We’ll see.

Looking at the cons: long hours (nine to ten hours a day), ending at 2 or 3 am; low pay, publisher interference, no investigative reporting, and someone named Dana …

I’m having to admit that not getting that job was a blessing. I would have been engulfed. The trip was, though, at my own expense, devouring half of our savings. 

 

Just where might I be heading?

Doubts about “where I want to go.” Should we make the plunge into NYC? Find an agent yet? (I’d rather wait two more years.) I feel the necessity of steady income, yet also feel “duty to yourself” calling. Turned down music critic position at Herald Telephone. Hard for me to say No to any job, even with low pay. ($10/review; negotiate on features, say $50/page.) Don’t think I really want newspaper work. That’s hard to admit.

Copy editors are a kind of janitor and paid accordingly. Hence, I should concentrate on power-writing. (Like advertising?)

My own failings coming home as nobody wants to hire me, not yet, free me from the damn suspense/suspension with half of our goods packed in crates and warping corrugated boxes, the general feelings of inutility accented by this ungodly heat and humidity

Late June, returned yesterday from two days [of housesitting] at Dietz’ … and found a letter waiting from Yakima. Very exciting prospect, work split between copy editing and general assignment reporting. A nice balance, good pay, exactly where I’d like to be – the dry side of the mountains. And Kat’s very excited. Hope everything works out. (Received a formal job application to fill out and return.) Getting anxious to get the address situation straightened out and new pieces into the mail. …

Wherever we wind up, I’d like to publish a few chapbooks of my work, for free distribution to friends and critics (and some for sale). Would also like to get a typist to do final drafts of potential freelance pieces. Will need to arrange more office-type space … we need Kat’s extra income …

Already, we’re anticipating spending that extra income … new car, furniture (that’s her idea), new clothes, bigger place, airfares …

A call today from Center for Law and Poverty in Indianapolis, a job I’m not too crazy about but one that might be the springboard for the southern Indiana magazine/tabloid I’ve been pondering.

Other calls to/from Yakima, which sounds better and better but less and less likely, like an impossible dream.

Nancy Neubert saying Yakima is a very nice, good place: agricultural, wealthy, conservative, hydroelectric cheap electricity, good produce abundant and cheap, Spanish and English …

The m.e., there since March, Steve Kent, from Albany, New York, thus appreciated my Binghamton angle. A good phone conversation.

Located Snyder’s lookout towers on the map, though Sourdough was not shown. Some of the other sites he relates, though, were.

Spicer: “West Coast is something nobody with sense would understand.”

Good place to end this journal. 10:20 pm, night of new moon, unseen through the haze

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

 

I never saw her in a skirt until her wedding

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At the small-town paper, Marcy made all the difference. She was also a future Pulitzer Prize winner.

With her camera she cut through all the crap to find something of real value in the people.

Her signature touch often blended humor and compassion while giving a glow to black-and-white images of daily life. What she found added up into a larger statement over time.

Photographer Burt Stern was one of her inspirations of the hard work to strip an event down to a simple, direct image and underlying message, albeit his were often of commercial intent.

In those days, please remember, ours were mostly black and white shots, though her darkroom technique did wonders with the grays.

I noted her remark about a coworker’s husband who had no concept of aesthetics – a photographic silhouette, to him, meant something went wrong. He saw everything as “good” or “bad” reduced to a scale of “I like” or “don’t like.”

Yes, “good people” (like us) versus “bad people,” who may simply be different rather than evil.

It’s been a problem across much of humanity, though consumerism cashes in on it.

Sticking to what you like means taking the easy way out, rather than aiming for greatness or achievement. Many of the things I value in my own life started out as dislikes – opera, contemporary classical music, asparagus, lamb, meditation, beer …

I suspect she was the inspiration to make the protagonist in the novels that became Subway Visions, Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and What’s Left a photographer rather than a writer. It was a step away from glorifying the writing trade. Besides, I had seriously considered becoming a visual artist but settled on writing instead.

“The camera itself creates and destroys illusion.” (Source long since lost.)

 

Life at the Workshop, part one

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Starting to get squared away at office: so much space amazes me [my own room!] and then all the backup material, staff, and freedom of movement. I feel like I’m in heaven. Hard to readjust to open work scheduling. New freedom, large-vocabulary return: academic life and performance seem somehow foreign, though I’ve never really left it. Either I perform/deliver now or flunk forever.

Feels very good to work at a slower, more thoughtful pace …

“Have the girls fill this out,” Charlyne said, as I trotted down the hall.

Our administrative assistant, incredulous when I wickedly passed the word along while getting my three carbon papers: “Tell Charlyne the girls are very busy; tell her the girls send their love.”

Charlyne was the uber-feminist in the outfit.

Openly referring to myself as “Jnana” sounds strange again: kept starting to say the legal equivalent of “Boy.”

The leisurely pace of academic reflectiveness, gestation, can be guilt-inducing after the gut-busting pace of the Review-Times [or other newsrooms or assembly lines]. But guilt will only clog intuition. I must learn to pace myself so that I will be producing at peak quality [not quantity]. More than three or four hours of heaving editing or writing is too much for one day, since concentration slips.

Sometimes, on this slower pace, it seems I’m going nowhere, that I should be producing on an 8-5 shift and doing my homework – reading – at other times.

Workshop, a place where craftsmen bring design/theory/aesthetics/tradition/discipline to fulfillment/practice in diverse materials …

In our sense, a place of testing and integrity …

A whole garden to delight the mind’s eye and the physical touch …

Somehow, right after the “little stroll around the block,” I note, 13:XII:74 [a Friday], just back from St. Louis, much energy. [No idea where we stayed – out near the airport? – think we did go to a fancy German one evening.] Came back with a clearer sense of the newsletter, greatly simplified: more like our yoga newsletter!

I think we settled on WORKSHOP REPORTS, with the potential of designating different series such as a police or city government.

Lynn wants at least one foundation or funding source thanked in each workshop paper: it builds their files, gives them a sense that their work is going somewhere (even if only into a folder).

VO discussing difficulties he’s had in writing for publications and how he developed the strategy of writing to write and then usually delivering the work as a paper when invited. Using this approach, he learned he didn’t spend a year to find out the editor had “chickened out” and that if an editor is interested, publication is a byproduct. This way, we have a good backlog so that when the shit hits the fan, we will be ready to market.

He mentioned that Hobbes worked over several decades revising his work.

Another time, he mentioned that his most depressed period was in trying to write a water report and not being able to frame his words: the theoretical framework was weak.

Also, the difficulty of maintaining a creative tension while writing.

My pace is recovering my yogic …

Kat on VO and EO: “I couldn’t imagine them married to anybody else,” and he was now Kat’s favorite person. How curious, considering how upset she would get at my political discussions.

~*~

On the side, Vincent enjoyed designing furniture with carpenter Paul Goodwin. Here’s a sketch of a bookshelf system in his house. I’m not sure now, though, how it connected to the floor, wall, or even ceiling.

~*~

Etienne and Amelie could frame a novel.

Her mother from a very wealthy, steel-making family that lost and regained its fortune; her father, from immigrant Ukrainian miners.

Etienne, from a morbid, divisively argumentative peasant family. It was preoccupied with death. When he was 12 or 13, the grandfather was living in the same farmhouse, not knowing he was dying, though the house reeked of the odor of rectal cancer. The father, in a furious argument, told the old man, “It doesn’t matter, in two months you’ll be dead!” something the wife, Etienne’s mother, could never forgive. The fights that followed led to separation but also their remarriage a week before Etienne and Amelie’s wedding, “so it would be proper.” Yet they still fought.

America? “Here it is just eat your brother!”

France? The mad pace of Paris or the boredom of the provinces.

“I’ve broken many bottles over such cars,” the ones trying to run down pedestrians. “Oh? Did I do that?”

In an office, I feel trapped or cut off. Want to be closer to sun or wind. My mind is no longer original.

Perhaps I write this under the weight of Saturn: I feel sluggish, sedentary. I have piles there and here, projects I do not know how to resolve.

That “little stroll,” by the way, led to my Leonard Springs poems. The site has since been developed into a public nature reserve.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

On work itself, when done right

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Reporter Tom: “I was building a cabinet several nights ago and everything kept falling into place, everything fit, I cut the wood just right and there was such a good feeling of simply working that in a way I didn’t want to finish the thing. They never taught us to work that way. It’s always to get the thing done.”

Nowadays, no sense of craftsmanship. No unity of elements or workers. Just things, not creation.

For Esquimaux artists, objects do not have to be seen but treasures to be unwrapped and felt on special occasions.

~*~

The downtown since I left. Main Street by Nyttend via Wikimedia Commons.

Within the journalism trade

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to mass media, the real power brokers are the big advertising agencies that foot the bills or at least allocate the payments. Forget “liberal media,” the rig of the game is elsewhere.

Here are some of my early journal entries along the topic.

  • Journalists are not eunuchs, or shouldn’t be. Those are the propagandists.
  • More people know the latest Alka-Seltzer ad than what Scotty Reston wrote last night.
  • The people of Fostoria hate the paper; they pick at the people who write for us, isolate them, castigate them. Within the city our only hope for recruits is among those outsiders who, like Teresa Beatty, simply don’t care about the neighbors. Yes, paradoxically, among the surrounding areas, our virtues are appreciated.
  • Another difficulty is in our correspondents; they want to write only about their interests, will not take assignments or cover feature-news … In writing only what they want, they miss the cream …
  • The R-T is a sinking ship. I see no hope … the paper cannot meet the city residents’ level of expectation without losing half of its circulation, the half that matters, beyond the city limits …
  • These “news” items they send in: “such-and-so met at the home of so-and-so and discussed the topic of (insert title). Mrs. A was in charge of refreshments, Mts. B was program chairman, Mrs. C was greeter, and Mrs. D was hostess. X, Y, and Z were elected.”
  • I used to think that if people were interested in the event, they would have been there and already know the outcome. Now I suspect they really don’t know where they were till they read it in print.
  • So much potential here, nobody in our five-state (but not five-star) circulation area touches: so many “off news” angles, one could win it all. [Thinking now of Marcy’s touch / specialty / inspiration …] [Also, of Kurt’s later … and wishing we hadn’t lost contact.]
  • Monday, an unsigned letter at work today, man who didn’t like anything: if we’d put out the kind of paper he wants, he wouldn’t like it: there would be nothing for him to rage about.
  • Some people exist on their dislikes.
  • Living devils, caught in their own hells.

“I used to think I had some control, but I’m finding out more and more that I have no control over the film. The film is gonna come out the same way,” depending on the performers, scriptwriters, prevailing moods, and other factors. “The material is being filtered through me, so it’s gonna wind up having my shape. And for me to think I can unshape it is crazy.” – Robert Altman, producer and director

My feelings after “having my own paper” on the prairie

“I hate to admit it, but everybody’s got the same news.” – Chicago Tribune Managing Editor Maxwell McCrohen on promoting features and columnists. He broadened the definition of “news.”

 

So I wasn’t losing my eyesight or my mind, after all

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Back when I had an hour commute home after working an evening shift at the paper, there were a few nights when I was mesmerized by what I saw in my headlights while driving the country highways in heavy rain. As the drops splashed from the shiny black pavement, they seemed to turn into frogs that were hopping wildly. That part was freaky enough, but all of the ones I saw were leaping in the same direction, say from right to left. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. There was no way to avoid them, either. Naturally, it was difficult to see at 60 miles an hour, and I was always anxious to get home, have a martini, and hit the sack promptly.

Why one direction? Something to do with the wind? Maybe just the angle of my headlights, so I didn’t pick up on just as many hopping in the other direction?

A few miles later, I would encounter another flock (officially, a group of frogs is called a knot, a colony, or an army, go figure) all flying in the other direction, left to right.

The phenomenon didn’t appear every time I had a heavy-rain midnight, but it did happen enough times over the decade to repeat the show, something I didn’t connect to springtime.

Turns out, as a recent Sunday Afternoon presentation at the Eastport Arts Center prompted, I wasn’t hallucinating. Didn’t need my eyes checked or a pair of glasses for driving. And wasn’t losing my mind. Frogs, toads, and salamanders have a Big Night (or two) in early spring when heavy rain, an inch or more, combines with thawing ice and snow to signal the amphibians to leave their winter shelter and return to emerging ephemeral vernal pools for breading. The high, shrill chirping chorus of peepers soon fills the night air for a few weeks after.

The temporary shallow ponds are fishless, and thus free of predators in the amphibian-breeding forest wetlands. With their job done around the time summer rolls in, the pools dry up for another year.

How do you feel about money?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a collection of captivating money quips, should you want to showcase your success and financial flair. Better yet, as I suggest in the Talking Money category at my Chicken Farmer blog, use these and others you come across as prompts for personal examination and study-group discussion. They’re more loaded than you likely expect.

  1. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy freedom.
  2. The best investment you can make is in yourself.
  3. Money isn’t everything, but it sure does help.
  4. The only way to have more is to make more.
  5. Money makes the world go round.
  6. The key to success is financial intelligence. (And what, dare we ask, is success?)
  7. Making money is hard work, but it’s worth it.
  8. Focus on making money and the money will follow.
  9. The more you learn, the more you earn.
  10. Wealth isn’t measured by money, but by the impact you make.