EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT

January 16, 2015December 3, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

If you want a clue to a person’s educational achievements, don’t ask about degrees or where they went to college. Rather, ask, “What are you reading now?”

The answer will tell you whether the individual has curiosity and intellectual growth, and where those are occurring. Having no books on the list, for me, would be reason for concern. Where are their horizons and challenges? Or even their guilty pleasures?

I’ve met too many people having a slew of degrees who are still unimaginative hacks, whatever their field. And I’ve met people having nothing more than an elementary school education who are well read and have minds to match.

Reading, I’ll insist, is a discipline that needs to be engaged if one is to have credibility as a thinker. Any idiot can have opinions, but a reasoned analysis, well, that’s a much different matter.

By the way, just what are you reading these days?

CALICO AS COCHECO

January 13, 2015December 3, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Calico – cheap cotton cloth printed in a figure pattern of bright colors, as the dictionary says – was a renowned product of the Cocheco Millworks in Dover, New Hampshire.

The city was not alone. Throughout New England, red-brick mills clustered around rivers seemingly anywhere a dam could be constructed – sometimes leading to factory compounds more than a mile long, like those at Lawrence, Lowell, and Manchester (itself famed for its denim, which gave rise to San Francisco-based Levi Strauss).

Sometimes, the operation would be much smaller, supporting little more than a village.

Upstream, existing ponds were enlarged to guarantee sufficient water flow through the year. Altogether, their commerce left its imprint on the landscape and its character while financing the legacy of the Boston Brahmins.

Likewise, the rain and snowfall flow through many of my poems. It’s not just water over the dam on the Cocheco River, after all, that’s noticed.

RULE OF ECONOMICS

January 10, 2015December 3, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

So there we were, in one of our informal noontime forums, this one led by an economist. The group itself was multidisciplinary, which made for some lively discussion.

As we analyzed the problem at hand, we saw that there were downsides to every possible solution we envisioned. No course of action was perfect, although some appeared to be better than others. Any way we turned, we’d be making some kind of mess for someone else to clean up or a burden for one group or another to carry.

We laughed, realizing that this is the way most of life actually is. There’s almost always a cost involved, and often unintended consequences.

And then one of our colleagues summed it up in a line that became our institute’s unofficial motto:

UNMIXED BLESSINGS ARE IN SHORT SUPPLY.

Once in a while, economics really does touch on reality.

BEHIND THE HEADLINES

January 7, 2015December 3, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Hometown News goes behind-the-scenes in the ways decisions are made in reporting the daily life of a seemingly pedestrian community – the kind of place where many of us grew up or perhaps resided. Focused on a family newspaper as it moves to a new generation of leadership, the novel builds on the aspirations of a core of young professional journalists. They share the ideal that aggressive reporting will foster grassroots democracy and an entrepreneurial vision as well as a widespread, healthy community. At most of the nation’s 1,500 daily newspapers, however, the bottom-line corporate outlook has meant that newsroom resources were squeezed to fatten corporate profits, even before the Internet began to erode paid readership. In that business model, readers and advertisers both got less and less for their money, and lively news from the neighborhood went untold. Unlike the Front Page tradition, today’s editors and writers have been stymied more by corporate bean-counters within than by Public Enemies without.

~*~

To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

HONEY, WE HAVE IGNITION

January 1, 2015December 3, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

Finding the perfect fire starter for the wood stove or outdoor grilling has been a challenge. Paper burns too quickly and usually with insufficient heat to do the job, plus it can quickly clog everything and then simply smolder.

Small twigs occupy a lot of storage space, at least during winter. You want to keep them dry, by all means.

Corrugated cardboard leaves a lot of papery ash – nothing you want flying up into the food on the rack.

And so on.

Maybe it was by accident I discovered that using cardboard tubes – those found in toilet paper and paper towels – works much better. Plus, you can crush a few and insert them inside another for extra oomph. They’re firm enough to allow air to circulate while the fire’s starting. And they’re easy to store.

You never do know quite what’s going to turn up in the Barn, do you?

ROAD WORK

December 26, 2014October 14, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve spent a lot of my life behind a steering wheel, and that’s where a number of my poems originate.

From this, I can look at a concept. Lines from the road. Basho? Brautigan? McCord?

Flight or escape remains a central theme in American literature. Kerouac’s On the Road and Hunter Thompson come to mind, along with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Blue Highways. Of course our two greatest American novels also reflect this action, often with its male bonding and fields of discovery – Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn. It’s not just some vague sense of the liberty of a frontier to resettle, but with wheels, there’s the thrill of speed more destructive than hiking or canoeing or sailing. As for hobos and the rails? Another era. Outlaws more than vagabonds? As for the Gypsy, there’s an entire community to consider. As well as flights with a destination, in contrast to those lacking.

A FINE STATE OF THE SEASON

December 18, 2014December 18, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Sorting the holiday cards coming into the house renews my appreciation for the human scale of the state we live in.

There’s a card from the governor and her family, and another from our U.S. senator. (Note the singular: the other one’s a national embarrassment who represents the One Percent, non-fulltime-residents of New Hampshire all, even including any who do summer here.)

OK, these cards aren’t personally signed, but it’s still a reminder that retail politics is a Granite State tradition, one that carries some responsibility as well.

No, we aren’t responding with cards to them as well. But we still wish them a very merry Christmas. And we’re glad they’re on the case.

REGARDING THE THREE-FINGERED MOUSE

December 15, 2014April 20, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

I’m inclined to agree with Bukowski in blaming Disney (with all that “happy, happy, happy”) for America’s problems. Or even the world’s. Not that I’d agree with his solution for escaping them, meaning cigarettes and the bottle or a barroom brawl and violent sex.

You see, I’m uneasy when it comes to “happiness” as a goal or a life’s purpose. There’s too much suffering and oppression around us, after all, and no spiritual unity with the universe can exist by denying that. Still, that’s not to argue we need to be pulled under with its negative impact.

As for “fun”? I see that as a self-defeating destination. Its flipside, we should note, is boredom.

Joy, however, is another matter. It’s central to the message of Jesus, as the 16th chapter of John makes clear.

To that we could add bliss or contentment, not in the sense of denying the upheavals and evil of the world but rather in the dimension of accepting a personal inner peace that allows one to labor in furthering the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

For me, this means learning to be more loving, and that’s a never ending challenge. It’s quite different from being giddy or depressed or self-centered or even blaming, gee, I was at the beginning of this post.

Oops! Back to Square One, once again.