BEYOND DRESSING FOR SUCCESS

November 1, 2014September 18, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Waiting in an airport lounge for their flight to arrive and begin boarding, a wife was describing to her husband the computer she had ordered (not just any computer, mind you) and then detailing the renovations required for the room they were upgrading, or perhaps it was a wing they were adding. He nodded in thoughtful agreement throughout. They appeared to be comfortably retired, and she was resolved that this was what she needed to sit down and begin writing her first novel.

Somehow, it all felt wrong.

Not the writing, but the matter of appearances, as though one begins the volume by posing for the back cover color photograph – tweed for the men, a tasteful blazer for the women. As though writing depends on the workspace itself. As though you just plump down in a picture-perfect setting and turn out a critically acclaimed bestseller. Or at least a hefty advance. It is echoed in the group photographs of famous authors one comes across in Vanity Fair, the half-dozen or more serious novelists arrayed in a two-story private library or a publisher’s corner suite overlooking Manhattan, the happily ever after with afternoon cocktails. Leather and brass.

I’ve long pondered the airport scene, attempting to nail down what has struck such a loud discordant note. Listen to published authors discuss their workspace and you often hear it comes down to a concrete block cell or a corner of an attic or even, thanks to laptops and wi-fi, a booth at McDonald’s – not an interior designer’s photo spread. We write wherever we can – sometimes, as I prefer, in solitude, or other times, as daily papers’ newsrooms, in a large office crowded with shared computers and telephones augmented by TV screens and police radio scanners. They write, I would hope, out of some urgency – some sense each one has something unique to explore and present to the world. It’s what Bukowksi called his daily “butt time.” It’s what you put in to be a writer, the dues you pay, the actual effort rather than any posturing.

This is not a matter of comfort. The best writing, I will argue, comes with discomfort. It’s hard, after all, doing good work. Finishing the first draft is just the beginning, leading into multiple revisions and a pile of correspondence (much of it unanswered, even when the obligatory SASEs are included) attempting to connect with an agent and publisher before embarking on the marketing of the finished work – one of the five hundred or so novels published that week.

Did the retired beginner actually complete a first draft? Or did she find excuses along the way? Did her health hold up? (Writing demands more physical strength than one imagines – especially in maintaining the mental concentration of developing the characters and plot turns.) Did she have a storehouse of memories and exotic experiences to draw upon or a long gestated outline to quickly fill in? Had she done her homework in devising a story fitting a tightly defined marketing niche – one that would easily sell? Had she filled suitcases with letters, notes, and snapshots to prompt specific details or sketched in a lifetime of personal journals? Did she possess crucial contacts who would come to bear on publication?

There’s more to writing than looking like an Author – whatever that is. Maybe in the ensuing years she succeeded. But at the airport gateway, she gave no awareness of the actual struggle ahead. I, for one, cannot wait for the perfect space to appear. Rather, I’ve settled in to work where I could and then plugged away, between sleeping and the commute to my paying job.

COMPOSING A REQUIEM

October 29, 2014August 31, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I first drafted this novel three decades ago, little did I expect it to be a requiem for a profession I’ve loved and served all my life. Now, though, as the history has unfolded, I’m left hoping against hope it’s not a requiem for community after community across America as well. Read it and weep – yet laughing along the way. We are, after all, still a resourceful people

~*~

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

NEWSPRINT, PAPERBACKS, AND HARDBOUND VOLUMES

October 25, 2014June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

My entire life I’ve harbored a bias regarding quality in the world of writing. Even though I’ve long been a front-line journalist, I’ve believed the text in a hardbound, academic or commercially published book must somehow be superior to what’s presented in a newspaper.

For that matter, magazines were, in that measure, a degree above newspapers, but a step or two below either paperback or hardbound volumes.

In the past few years, though, that misconception has been shattered, in part because of conversations I have with one of America’s top literary voices and in part because of encounters with a host of other living authors of more mundane accomplishments.

Yes, we have every right to expect a work that requires a year or two to draft to be superior to reports written on the fly, but in some ways, that long work often turns out to be little more than a series of daily reports strung together. What turns up can be as formulaic as any pyramid-style news dispatch, and filled with more cliche and unchallenged bombast. Read carefully and you might notice a higher standard of editing in your daily paper.

What I now realize is that I had expected the books to be eternal monuments that would sit forever on public and private library shelves. I never expected them to be commodities with their own precariously short shelf life, with rare exceptions. Even public collections have only so much space and so much patience. Rarely do I find there a recommended piece I desire.

What this all comes down to is that reality that good writing is good writing, no matter the place it appears. That, in itself, is cause for celebration.

Now, for more on the newspaper dimension, there’s my Hometown News novel. Adding a further twist to this plot, though, is the fact it’s available only as an ebook.

WHERE’S THE BUSINESS MODEL?

October 23, 2014June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Newspapers have long run on a peculiar business model.

People buy the paper mostly for the news, but what they pay for the product covers only a fraction of the actual cost. Traditionally, advertising generated the other 80 to 90 percent.

That imbalance always resulted in an inherent tension in the executive offices, where any expenditure for news coverage was viewed with suspicion, especially when few of the publishers – the top local executive – came from the news-gathering side.

The rest of the operation included the composing room and related departments that manufactured the actual pages that then went to the presses, plus the “mail room” where supplements were inserted and the bundles were arranged for distribution, the circulation department, and then the ad sales reps, accounting, community services/promotion, and human resources. Especially accounting. In more recent decades, the computer techs assumed their own role.

For a bit of perspective, go to a store and buy an artist’s newsprint sketchpad and then compare its cost and the amount of paper against what the typical paper carries. You’ll see what a bargain the daily paper has been. What you pay for the news essentially covers the cost of getting it from the end of the press to the place you read it.

So this is how things ran until the Internet came along. And then, for a host of reasons, publishers began putting websites up and readers began getting the news without having to view any of the surrounding advertisements that were paying the bills. That, in itself, was a recipe for disaster.

Curiously, long before the arrival of the Internet, I’d noticed that what the readers paid for a paper would be sufficient to staff a newsroom and its supporting services. Leap ahead, and you can see that if users would pay for their local news online, you could create journalism that would not have the advertisers lurking in the corners. Unfortunately, online users have become spoiled and rarely pay for anything. Attempts at firewalls, as we’ve seen, have also failed.

At the moment, the future of American journalism looks grim. And that’s bad news for our political structure and the lives of our communities themselves.

~*~

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

ACKNOWLEDGING TWO WORLDS

October 17, 2014August 31, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

So what have our children learned, as far as religion goes? What seeds have we planted? Actually, I’m thinking of this not so much as a curriculum matter for the Religious Education committee or as a reflection for parents but rather as a consideration of what’s happened in American society in general – the kind of place where soccer practice is now seen as more valuable (“value enabling”) than Sunday School. Or where a child may develop an aversion to being viewed, in any way, as a “Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”

My thoughts leap ahead to the tension many of us feel in the workplace. As Michael Lerner writes in The Left Hand of God, it’s the conflict of values between our dog-eat-dog competitive economy and those we hold dear and sacred. Fundamentalists, at least, attempt to resolve it by separating the two worlds, but at what cost? Children, of course, pick up on this, tuning out what they see as useless to their survival. And that includes what they observe at home. (Should we note the popularity of so-called “reality TV” – as manifested in The Survivor?) The Amish and other old orders attempt to hold the values of workplace, home, and faith in one sphere, but we can easily imagine the difficulty that, too, presents.

Obviously, I’m not going to resolve any of this in the next few sentences. Without the music of hymns and praise songs, the pageantry of robes, processions, lighting of altar candles, and communion, or the attentive consideration to set prayers and sermons, what do we give our children to cling to? (In the old days, did the plain clothing and “thee/thou” speech offer some refuge or rooting?) Or what invitation do we extend to those “voted off the island”? What I am going to suggest is that the answer is not found so much in any catechism or ceremony as in the way we treat our smallest members, our moments of laboring together, and, yes, the repeated ritual of a certain casserole on youth retreats and its reception.

THE MISSING VOICE

October 8, 2014June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

A central problem for newspapers in the past half century is that they became increasingly homogenized and thus lost their distinctive, individual identities. Admittedly, that was always a problem when people saw it as “the paper” rather than the Times or Post or Chronicle or Herald and so on. But in the days when a city would have two or more daily newspapers, each one needed to have some unique identity to set it apart in the marketplace. Sometimes it was along party lines – Republican or Democrat – or social identities, such as blue-collar or proper society, but often it also meant the kind of news that was emphasized: national and international, for instance, versus local. And hometown columnists were always a voice that readers could count on. Think Herb Caen in San Francisco, Mike Royko in Chicago, or Jimmy Breslin in New York – or any of the great sportswriters.

In those days, newspapers were thinner than they became in the last decades of the 20th century – often just two sections – rather than the four to eight that followed in the great mergers and closures that led most cities to have only one daily journal. Much of that problem, we should note, could be blamed on the “unduplicated readership” that ad-space buyers relied on in allocating their budgets. No matter how marvelous the Washington Star was in its final days, or the suburban Journal papers were in the counties around the city, they couldn’t overcome that hurdle – when it came to outright readership, the Washington Post had the monopoly. Since everybody had to read it, there was no point in advertising elsewhere.

With few exceptions – New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia – we’re left with single-paper markets where the product looks and reads like those everywhere else, except that the stories take place there than elsewhere.

As the local newspaper more and more became a one-size-fits-all model, what I no longer heard was the feeling that it “speaks for me” or my section of the wider community. And now, even those special voices within its pages are no longer there – one by one, the columnists were never replaced.

The newspaper I longed to create had little resemblance to that bland crime-and-crashes emphasis that too often prevails these days, in place of more difficult and costly investigative reporting or a bigger view that critically examines education, the fine arts, social justice, the environment, and so on.

It’s hard to get excited by what’s there. And we wonder why circulation kept declining even before the Internet?

This is, I should note, a contrarian viewpoint, since the publishers kept proclaiming the “improved service” each time they merged two papers into one. So here we are, online and blogging.

~*~

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

WRITING LONG

October 2, 2014June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Even as a cub reporter, I loved writing long pieces. It’s what I prefer to read, really read, when I have time. By long, I don’t mean pointless minutia or the trivia of, say, a public hearing, but rather the probing look at how and why a thing has happened and maybe even what to expect as a consequence. Add to that the human dimension, especially from the point of view of those most impacted by the action rather than those at the top of the pyramid.

One model of this style of news writing came in the three stories on the front page of the Wall Street Journal each day – what they called their “leaders,” back in the era before Murdoch. If you looked closely, you’d see how each one was composed of several smaller stories, each one telescoping into the next. The reporters could joke that their work was so heavily edited they no longer recognized the finished version, but for those of us reading, the result was rewarding, the way a good meal is.

As a journalist, the irony has been that I spent much of my career crafting headlines and photo captions … short, short, short … and that was even before I relied more and more on news briefing columns to get the day’s world and nation reports into the paper at all.

Not that I lost my love of long writing. My “shelf” of ebook novels is proof of that, including my most recent, which delves into the news business itself.

As a blogger, though, I’m also admitting pleasure in composing shorter postings like the ones that appear here at Jnana’s Red Barn. Apparently, from the stats, they must be connecting.

My other four blogs provide venues for the longer writing, and the results to date are mixed.

To my surprise, my genealogy blog, The Orphan George Chronicles, has drawn far more hits than I’d anticipated. I figured its appeal would be to a few dozen fellow researchers, and having the results online would be much easier to find than if the files were archived in a few libraries somewhere. As for publishing them in paper editions, the likely audience would never cover the expenses.

My Quaker blog, As Light Is Sown, has shifted from the two book-length presentations that appear as the initial postings to a year-long Daybook of short postings, so I must admit that trying to analyze the results there can be inconclusive.

Thistle/Flinch exists to present book-length PDF editions of poetry and fiction, so I guess you can say that’s writing long.

And the remaining blog, Chicken Farmer I Still Love You, is still taking shape, as the numbers show. The first part, Talking Money, presents essential material for addressing the material sides of life … income, spending, wealth, possessions, labor, time, goals, and the like … followed by a close look at New England’s famed foliage. These days, it’s taken on a new focus in reconsidering the hippie outbreak and its renewal. Again, many of its postings are chapters for book-length presentation.

What I am finding in general is that even without the demands of daily employment, time is still the most precious commodity in my life. There just ain’t enough of it for what I hope to accomplish these days – including reading or writing, much less in any length.

So I guess that’s the short of it, for now.

~*~

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

ON THAT COMMITTED JOB, TOO

September 26, 2014September 26, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

You can name those who jump in quickly, volunteering to tackle any new task their supervisor proposes. (“Sure, Boss, we can do it.”) And you can name those who are more cautious, evaluating the time commitment and resources.

I’m thinking, too, of all the people who join a committee and then fail to follow through.

Or the coworker who’s muttering under his breath once we’re overloaded with the additional project. Or all the other tasks that get slighted.

How many others do you know?

PHILISTINES AND AMERICAN SOCIETY

September 25, 2014September 25, 2014 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Before my graduation from college, back in my social activist period, I wondered how American society could possible afford High Art while so many went hungry and homeless – domestically as well as internationally. Then I began to see everywhere a desire for expressiveness even in every ghetto – for that matter, ranging from ghetto blasters to Playboy. There were murals and blues bands. To say nothing of the infusion of professional sports, to which every poor youth, from the inner city to the mining company towns, seems to aspire. So opera and museums and other “Establishment” operations came to lose their exclusivity in my mind. Indeed, over the years I’ve heard that the real classical music lovers are the ones in the cheaper seats, the ones they can afford. Mankind, after all, has a need to reach to the higher realms of thought and the imagination of the spirit; anything less reduces our existence to nothing more than economics, impoverishing everyone in the society.

Look closely, and you’ll also see that in America, Art has become the state religion, no matter the level of state and federal funding exists. In this country, at least, there’s also been a long recognition of the fine arts as an adjunct to wealth, for whatever reasons. Many sense an abstract “goodness” in the products of art chamber music, art museums, Shakespeare festivals, opera, poetry, the “book” that so many people dream of writing even if the artist himself/herself remains (often with good reason!) somewhat suspect, a shady character. Perhaps that’s why these big institutions stand between us and the rest of ourselves, as artists and audiences. Something abstractly “good” even when they themselves admit they don’t know much about the field. Contrast that to the related state religions in America: collegiate and professional athletics, Hollywood movies, and rock concerts, wherein no one actually advocates any common wealth. (The High Priests are paid handsomely, after all.)

Art as the semi official State Religion of today? Or should that be entertainment and its host of celebrity worship? The stamp of approval. The aspiration.

Art as commodity, too. “How much did it sell for?” What was the box office?

At heart, all art is, primarily, either spiritual/religious or secular/amusement in intent and execution. Take Milton or Pepys. Today, the overwhelming materialism of our society reflects an insatiable hunger.

Even as starving artists we’re enmeshed in materialism, one way or another. It’s so easy to hold the artist up in some idealized light or the product itself as the object of worship, an idolatry, totally forgetting to turn to the Source of All. The worship of living genius, from Beethoven and the Romantic era on. Or the pretty faces of mostly Hollywood celebrity today.

As an editor on newspapers where nearly everyone was giving totally (many unpaid hours of overtime, etc.) in an attempt for excellence, I was always appalled by the charge of “elitism,” which comes to mean “give me mediocrity not the truth” or “mere pleasantry” from the same people who would not accept such standards in their professional football team or new automobile.

The shift in the meaning of “culture” from learning and aspiration to the mundane lowest common denominator of daily life. Culture, as in a petri dish of mold or germs, rather than a rare book library or new opera.

Still, if you want to comprehend the view from the top of the mountain, you need to climb it. And be warned: driving, if a road’s an option, loses a lot in the translation. From a religious point of view, at least, we can’t settle for anything less than the best in the end.

HIGH-TECH CONSTRUCTION

September 23, 2014June 3, 2018 ~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Everything that’s transpired in the 28 years since I first drafted my novel Hometown News has made me feel prophetic.

Now, of course, you have an opportunity to judge for yourself. I just wish it hadn’t taken this many years to become public.

One thing I’d like to point out involves the initial experiment I used in constructing the novel. Quite simply, I wondered if I could build a computer-generated story – no matter how distasteful the premise itself strikes me in my self-identity as a neo-Luddite and fussy literary type. Maybe it was just some of the vestige of the scientist wannabe in me?

So I created a master day-in-the-life chapter, made multiple copies to repeat throughout the story, and included up to 120 variables for search-and-replace functions. And away I went, allowing the S&R efforts to produce their own pace and variations. Not that it quite worked as I’d hoped. I found myself going back over those pages and adding new layers, softening some of the edges, adding shadows and highlights. As they say in the visuals arts, it’s quite “painterly.”

Be that as it may, one thing I’ve observed over the years is how little we typically know of many of our coworkers. There might be a favorite phrase they repeat or a piece of clothing or a distinctive quirk. And that’s it, sometimes year after year. So that part was agreeable to the S&R structuring.

As a technique, though, I’m afraid to report – or maybe more relieved – that the S&R by itself was insufficient. It did provide the core “bones” for the novel, but I did have to paint over much of it to make it more pliant and, well, human.

All the same, I’m feeling vindicated. Maybe it’s a high tech revenge for what high tech is wreaking on the workplace and surrounding community.

To check out my Smashwords ebook story, go to Hometown News.