You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Art Newlin rose in Meeting and told of driving two- or twelve-hitch rigs as a young man. Once he hitched two strawberry roans to a tongue, and while they’d worked a rig before, they’d always followed and never really felt the bit or anything. Nonetheless, they performed well, even backing on command. Only later did he realize the risk he’d taken. “They could’ve become runaways. They could’ve killed me.”
He credited faith for protecting him.
If you’re among those of us who have some reticence or even dread about attending social gatherings where you have to engage in small talk – with strangers, no less – I’m offering this. Admittedly, mostly for my own reference, as needed. Please, please, add to the list when it comes to comments.
Get ready to tell an offending bore:
If your slicing and dicing of their mental lack of ability doesn’t do the trick, you can turn to their vanity or birth origins.
I really do regret not having these when the character of Cassia was emerging in my novel What’s Left, they’re right up her alley. To continue in what’s becoming my first-ever Triple Tendrils:
I suspect this just touches the surface of what’s exchanged on the scrimmage line of professional football games.
Besides, please remember, when somebody says, “Where have I seen you before?,” just reply, “I’m a porn star.” Or at least, “Was.”
When she said she wasn’t good enough for me, it turned out she was right.
Oh, my, the things I uncovered later.
I really was so green.
Others can say the same of me.
You may have guessed we’ve taken tons of photos of the renovations in our historic home. You’ve been viewing some as progress reports in this weekly series, but those show steps along the way.
Sometimes it’s helpful to skip over those, going straight from how things looked at the beginning and then leaping to what the work delivered in the upstairs phase of renovations.
Should you be interested in that comparison, I’ve assembled a gallery of before-and-after contrasts in a free photo album, one I’m making available to you, should you be interested.
As I’ll explain next week, we’re hardly as far along as we had hoped. So I’m calling the album “Before & Midway After.”
In assembling the photographs, I was emotionally overrun in seeing how dramatic some of the advances have been. It’s helpful in facing the remaining work ahead.
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That said, check out the free tour at Thistle Finch editions.
You’ll also find the history of the house and its previous residents in another booklet, should you be curious.
After four decades as a daily newspaper editor, I was recognizing I was among the last in a long tradition. I do worry about the future of community and democracy in the aftermath.
As I pitched my novel at the time, “Hi, my name is Jnana Hodson and I’m not surprised American newspapers are in crisis. In my four decades as a professional journalist, I’ve seen news coverage under attack – not just from the outside, but more crucially from owners who first bled billions from its renewed growth and vitality and now give the product away without a viable business model in sight. My novel, Hometown News, pays homage to the battle and what could have been, along with journalists’ role in the survival of communities across the continent and democracy itself. Along the way, Brautigan and Molly Ivins meet Dilbert and Kafka on the prairie, even when their names, sex, and races are changed. May I introduce you to the full story?”
An alternative version went, “Hi, my name is Jnana Hodson and my career as a journalist has placed me in enough decaying industrial cities to shape my novel of high-level global investor intrigue. If you think Dilbert tells of modern business operations, think again. May I show you my take?”
A bigger question was why anyone would be interested in this or see themselves impacted by these corporate machinations.
At their best, daily newspapers have shaped both a central identity for localities across America, and their conscience.
For many years, despite the arcane business structure in which advertising rather than sales of copies provided the bulk of the income, hometown newspapers were cash cows for their owners – who, in turn, paid their reporters and editors minimal wages.
The resulting management practices – reflecting those of surrounding corporate retailers and manufacturers – have put news coverage at risk, endangering both the communities and democracy itself. How will they, like the reporters and editors, survive?
As a journalist, my touchstones have been Accurate, Informative, Useful, and Entertaining. I wonder how those apply to poetry, as well.
The novel is cast on an experimental frame, one that anticipated AI and then backed away from it. The daily events, however, get weirder and weirder as the demands and tensions ratch up. You might even think of it a dystopian.
That said, you can find Hometown News in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. It’s also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain it.
If AGE was a sign of WISDOM, a vast age might have been a sign of great wisdom, so that Biblical ages stand not as a measure of time but as a scaling of experience or insight.
Methuselah, 969 years; Noah, 950.
Also, the the closer to historic times, the more normal – i.e., smaller the number, though still bigger than today’s.
Good thing negative numbers don’t apply here.
New Englanders sometimes joke that a town name will be found repeated in five of the six states of the region. It can be confusing. You know, people moving from one place to a new one but keeping the town name.
Maine, however, has its own twist, since much of the settlement occurred after the American Revolution, especially in the early 1800s, when “singing schools” became a popular community activity. Many of these were related to church life and the spread of four-part harmony hymn singing. So what if someone else had claimed the town name you had hoped to repeat, here was a fresh source.
Today many songs in a hymnal carry a title reflecting the words, but in earlier times the name identified the music itself – many of their lyrics can be transported from one composition to other scores within a given syllable-count system anyway.
That older tradition is continued today in a style of a four-part cappella singing called Sacred Harp, reflecting the title of the hymnal of shape notes that it used. Shape notes, should you ask, are not all of the round kind you see in most musical scores. Instead, some are little flags called fa; others are little boxes called la; or diamonds called me but spelled mi; and the round notes are called so. And there are no instruments, not even harps, much less pianos or organs, in this often rowdy tradition.
So much for that arcane sidetrack. Back to the song names.
I had assumed that the composers applied them to honor where they were written or some such. “Detroit” is one that always makes me smile.
At any rate, during a sacred-harp singing session a while back, it was mentioned that some Maine towns were actually named for the tunes, rather than the other way around.
Bangor was one. Though not in the Sacred Harp collection, the tune was written in 1734, “Oh very God of very God,” and influential. The Maine city was incorporated in 1834 from what had been known as Sunbury or Kenduskeag Plantation. The name “Bangor” is said to have been taken from a Welsh tune. Voila!
Now, for ten examples drawn from the shape-note collection. The name of each tune and town is followed by its date of composition and then the first line of the text it accompanies in the Sacred Harp collection, the date of the founding of the town, and then by something about the Maine community.
There are arguments that some of the hymns were named after Maine towns. Just consider Mars Hill, 1959, or Mount Desert, 1985.
When the scaffolding around the front and side of the house came down after more than a year, the public could finally see what we had intended.
The result actually took off in some tweaks that left it looking, well, we hope for the better – things like the double windows upstairs, which I’ve discussed in previous posts.
In a small community like ours, people were bound to gawk and talk, and so far all we’ve heard has been admiration.
When we embarked on this project, I quipped that old-house fixes took three times the estimated time and budget, and ours (alas) has been no exception on both fronts.
Actually, more, or maybe less, if you consider the Covid whammy and inflation. Besides, we got into a great deal more than adding space overhead: many of the extra costs addressed items in our home inspection report, things like rot, wiring issues, plumbing, masonry. Oh my, it was a long list in addition to the more pressing roofing situation that concerned our insurance policy.
So much of what we paid for would be unseen: the aforesaid rewiring (throughout the house, cellar to roof), sculptural work to allow the new farming to sit atop the old (how this structure ever survived before this is a miracle), spray-foam insulation, caulking. The interior storage lofts weren’t as simple as promised but they add for architectural drama (and the name of our architect, mainly us and Adam), nor were some of the exterior efforts to preserve the Cape image as seen from the street while drastically altering the reality.
But then, when our new cedar shingling was finally finished and the construction scaffolds were removed after more than a year, how handsome, as one of the coconspirators put it. Or, from my perspective, dramatic.
I’m hoping both Anna Baskerville and Captain John Shackford, as previous residents, would approve. As well as the list of others who have left their imprint here.
Frankly, we treasure all of it.
One of the luxuries of not writing under deadline is that you can put a work aside for a while to let it season. Pick it up again a few months or even years later, and you may see so much that needs reworking or the trash can, but at other times the page can astonish you.
I’ve had that experience lately at the monthly open mic nights at the arts center, where I’ve been reading snippets from my published The Secret Side of Jaya as well as selected poems. As I was halfway through my time on the stage one night, I was struck by the thought, “Who wrote that!” It was a daring approach to fiction, completely contrary to what would emerge from the Iowa Writers Workshop, but it was mesmerizing my audience. I certainly wouldn’t write that way again, either. Still, I feel pride.
Sometimes, of course, that sense of “Who wrote that, it is so incredibly fine,” is countered by “Who wrote that piece of tripe? I’m glad it never saw publication.” Sometimes only pages apart.
Reading at an open mic or as a featured reader is a valuable test for how a page works, as you can feel from the energy in the room. Lately, I’ve been taking pages from the middle of a novel and reading them without an explanation of the previous action. Think of them as a trailer for a movie.
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Well, mine is a contrast to the kids who get up on the stage and apologize for reading an old work, meaning something they wrote three weeks ago or even three months. Little do they know!
Parts of The Secret Side of Jaya go back 50 years.
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At the moment, that has me wondering how non-writers revisit earlier times in their lives. Photos, old letters, trophies, musical albums?
The Argentine writer Borges took the concept so far as to ask himself about Borges and the other Borges – the one on paper and the other in the flesh – which one was which, at any given time? He no longer knew.
Or the Japanese composer who insisted he wasn’t the same person today he was yesterday, much less 30 years earlier.
Another consideration in revisiting earlier writing, especially as drafts, is that what we’re most fond of is likely to be what bothers others the most; what we’re about to toss out in the next revision may be what is most effective with our readers. The point was raised, I believe, by Joyce Carol Oates, but it’s true to my experience.
As critics of others’ work, by the way, we’re likely to be harshest on those whose work is most like our own! Too much mirror?
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You can find my novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.
Jnana's Red Barn 