Tag: Life

How about some remarkable couples?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes the sum is greater than the parts. Helps when each of the parts is already sterling.

Here are ten examples.

~*~

  1. My best friend’s parents: Hap and Pauline. Among other things, they nurtured my love of classical music.
  2. Our drip-line neighbors: Tim and Maggie. Warm, welcoming, generous, helpful, social justice activists, great parents. The list could go on.
  3. Political science mentors: Vincent and Elinor. They taught me how to read analytically and how to dissect public policy proposals. As professors, they never used textbooks but relied on real books, like the Federalist Papers or Democracy in America. Their goal was to train independent scholars and fellow practitioners.
  4. My ex in-laws: Sam and Jeanice. Losing them was the hardest part of the divorce.
  5. Can you identify them in the novel? Phyllis and Ivar.
  6. Memorable ministers: Myrtle and Howard at Winona Friends Meeting. She had the entire Bible memorized. And the dynamics were multiplied when they were joined by their best friends and neighbors, Rose and Harold.
  7. Faithful Mennonites: Bob and Ruby. I learned to sing harmony through Bob, who was also a beloved physics teacher and an avid Orioles fan. Ruby had taught in a one-room schoolhouse before moving on to the big city of Baltimore. She packed the most amazing dinners in her small tote bag, which she shared with all of us at the ballgames.
  8. Fellow Quakers: Jeremiah and Beth. Now that they’ve moved to Dover, we’re getting to know them even better. Lucky us.
  9. An ex-girlfriend’s parents: Gene and Doris. They welcomed me to a whole new world and were surprisingly liberal when it came to their daughter. Guess they really liked me.
  10. Cornerstones of the Meeting: Silas and Connie. Wish I could show you the video. And then, just up the road at Gonic, we had Shirley and Eddie.

~*~

Who would you nominate from your own circles?

Family terms of affection

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

While walking down the street after finishing a revision of my novel What’s Left, I noticed a vanity license plate with five letters, PAPOU. I smiled, recognizing the Greek for “grandpa.” The car was parked in front of the Orthodox church. Wonder if I know him.

Do you have a similar affectionate term for your grandparents?

 

Seriously, Saul

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

stuffed in the official portrait how Happy it is Ground Hog’s Day already with its SOLAR SEASON running six weeks ahead of the calendar, thus the first half of spring overlaps I don’t care what some people say, a photocopied Christmas message still delivers So how was the Holy Land?

 

Ten random notes in no particular order

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
  1. Honestly. Our dark sides. Do we really express our weakest aspect in our art?
  2. Big goals versus daily tasks, when in balance, an organized life.
  3. Another overnight snowstorm, I wake up chanting: I’M RETIRED! I’M RETIRED! Meaning no need to spend an hour or more digging out before spending two hours commuting to the office (twice the usual duration). What a huge relief. So nice not to have to scrape frost off the car windows before driving to work. Both parts of that equation, actually. As long as I can delay having to go anywhere.
  4. Some amazing French Baroque fanfares: “Les caracters de la guerre” by Jean-Francoise Dandrieu.
  5. My internal shift from writing to being an author.
  6. The experience of being “clergy” at the ecumenical service.
  7. How was I ever able to do so much while working full-time?
  8. All those years I worked the Vampire Shift came at a price.
  9. Blogging reminds me of a poet back in Indiana who would photocopy batches of his poems – not quite chapbooks – and hand them out or sell them for pennies at readings. Here, take one!
  10. Nobody understands me.

~*~

How about you? Ever feel misunderstood?

How about a running soundtrack for a food story?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Think of the names of bands and singers having a food tag. (Will Red Hot Chili Peppers or Smashing Pumpkins get your thoughts bubbling?)

Throughout my novel What’s Left, her uncle Barney has rock playing prominently in the restaurant kitchen. Does this provide a good counterpoint to his thoughts and actions? Do you find it amusing? Annoying? Confusing?

Who would you like to add to the food-themed playlist?

~*~

The old church Cassia’s family buys in my novel might have looked like this … before the wild rock concerts begin.

Ten things about Duolingo

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

For the past 3½ years, I’ve been doing a half-hour or so of Spanish early every morning using the free Duolingo online curriculum. I also started Greek but ran into a wall when I was supposed to type what I heard – an impossibility, considering my keyboard isn’t equipped for a Greek alphabet. I’m assuming that’s a problem with many other tongues, too.

Here are ten things about the service:

  1. Originated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 2009 and launched to the general public in 2012, it’s become the world’s largest foreign-language instructor.
  2. Offers programs in 40 languages – 38 in English.
  3. Has 300 million registered users worldwide.
  4. Employs 200, mostly in Pittsburgh, and has been recognized as a best workplace.
  5. Is criticized for simplistic level of instruction. Much of the grammar is presented piecemeal in an optional Tips tab at each button on its learning tree or in users’ comments on each of the exercises, usually 20 in a set.
  6. Garners highest course enrollment with 27.5 million English users in Latin American Spanish, followed by 24.2 million Spanish users in English. Jointly, that’s a sixth of the users.
  7. Gains next highest English-user enrollments of 10.8 million in Portuguese, 5.72 million in Russian, 4.52 million in Arabic, 4.43 million in French, 3.19 million in Chinese, and 3 million in Turkish. So much for German or Latin.
  8. Offers the constructed and fictional languages of Esperanto (285,000 users), High Valyrian (584,000), and Klingon (304,000).
  9. Awards “lingots” for accomplishments, which can be “spent” on perks or “donated” to fellow users. Often, the number awarded at any time seems arbitrary, and the number presented for reading a story selection is highly out of line with the points granted for finishing regular lessons. Other silly motivational devices include Leagues, where you can be promoted or demoted each week. If you manage to get to the top level, Diamond, there’s no retirement or reprieve – you’re stuck facing some really competitive geeks who have nothing else to do but spend their waking hours playing with languages; expect to be quickly bounced down to a more regular life.
  10. The program is meant to be fun, as Duo the owl mascot suggests, but the dinging sound when you get an answer wrong is annoying, especially when it makes anyone else nearby laugh. Which it does. I’m especially irked when the laughter comes from Chinese guests in our house.

Oh, yes, the lessons work best on my screen when I set the size for 90 percent to eliminate scrolling. And remember to type what you’re supposed to hear rather than what actually crosses your ears when commanded, “Type what you hear.” And I really wish they’d change their typeface so that I can actually see the accent over the lower-case “i” – they sure count it against me when I fail to use one.

 

Drawing on strong roots

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While my novel What’s Left picks up a generation after the final events in my Subway Visions tale, I found myself needing a better understanding of the five siblings’ roots. That meant going back not just one generation but two in this case.

Have you ever done genealogy or looked into your family’s history? Are there stories you feel would make for good fiction? How about the characters, too?

~*~

Here’s how her ancestry might have looked back in the Old World.

The Achilles heel in Quaker culture  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When the Quaker movement swept through the English-speaking world and a bit more in the mid-1600s, it saw itself as primitive Christianity restored from before the time apostasy set upon the church – that is, sometime before the Nicene Council of 325 CE.

In theory, nothing could have been simpler or more welcoming than what they presented, an alternative Christianity for all, though in practice what emerged was often more difficult than many could follow, even before the disciplined rules of conduct set in.

I could lay out many of the obstacles to continuing the faith over the generations, even admitting that I wouldn’t have survived the lifestyle restrictions during much of that time, but more recently I’ve been seeing the most insidious impact was in the curtailment of emotion.

Yes, Friends were often seen as gentle and kind, but it came at a price. The Quaker culture that evolved, quite simply, suppressed any expression of anger – which was usually seen as leading to violence, which Friends abhorred – but only in recent decades has there been an acknowledgment that emotions don’t go away, and suppressing the expression of one curtails an open experience of the others. Burying anger, in fact, festers as depression, which can be glimpsed in the memorial minutes of many of the “weighty Quakes” of the past.

While moderation in daily life and meekness were encouraged, they could be performed thoughtfully or habitually without being deeply felt.

I’ve heard instances of old Friends’ reluctance to show emotion.

Greeting a son returned from wartime service with a handshake rather than a hug, for instance. My own family, several generations removed from its Quaker and Dunker (Brethren) roots, was similarly restrained. And, as has been said, the Hodsons didn’t know how to have fun. (When students at one Quaker school asked to have a fun activity, the elders had to withdraw to ponder the peculiar request and then came back with a proposal to paint a widow’s barn. An old Brethren, asked what he did for fun as a child, was perplexed by the very notion and finally replied he guessed it was bringing the cows in each evening.)

Then there’s the sly comment that passed among young Friends in the 1970s, asking if we knew why the old Quakers were so opposed to handholding. The answer? It might lead to premarital intercourse, not meaning sex but rather conversation.

There are also stories, usually told within families, of the individual who would never, ever, express anger only to have an offense fester, leading to deeply hurtful reactions in convolutions much later. You can guess, the baffling ex-mother-in-law, after the divorce, that sort of thing.

Not all birthright Friends, I should add, are so conflicted. Many I’ve known have been among the most loving individuals in my acquaintance.

But in looking at the decline of the faith over its history, I feel an awareness of the psychological undertow needs to be acknowledged, especially as we face the future.

Religion, as I see it, always has work to do to bring each person to a fuller experience of life.

Merrily, Noelle

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

what news you published, contorting that instant, overcome with discomfort, a whirl as alert as any orchestra as that last confused and perplexing note confirms coyly your reckless addiction to lost causes, frankly in retrospect, it really didn’t take hours to start your obligating my leap without a job I’d subscribe to, oh, yes, the lifeblood we identify when you demand a reply, there simply isn’t enough time in two days for whatever prevented your return to the meetinghouse that weekend

Does a journey really have to go anywhere?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here are ten of my personal favorite journeys.

  1. Sitting in meditation on the way to bliss.
  2. Riding Amtrak’s Downeaster, south or north from Dover.
  3. Following a well-crafted novel, opera, movie, or play.
  4. Moving up and down a contradance line or around in a Greek circle.
  5. Exploring an archive.
  6. Meandering through an art museum.
  7. Pursuing the bass line while performing in a chorus.
  8. Probing the glassy world of a tide pool each summer.
  9. Entering a lover’s arms.
  10. Staying submerged in peaceful dreams or good memories.

~*~

Where do yours go?