Tag: Life

Piracy today, yes, it’s real

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If you think that pirates are a long-ago thing or are cute and romantic along the lines of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series or actor Johnny Depp, think again. This Tendrils won’t even attempt to name the ten best pirate movies ever or ten best pirate actors or ten examples of the crazy language employed there. Egads, matey?

Instead, let’s take a look at what’s taking place in the 21st century.

  1. After a trend of declining activity, the International Maritime Bureau reported a global increase in piracy against shipping in 2023, with an especially alarming rise in the number of crew being taken hostage. I don’t think we can blame Covid, though. More recent data are difficult to sift. There’s so much jargon and legalese, perhaps because of the insurance companies.
  2. The leading hot spots today have been the Gulf of Guinea, the Callao anchorage in Peru, and the Singapore Strait along with Southeast Asia in general. Look them up on the map.
  3. The majority of vessels targeted by attackers were bulk carriers, that is, merchant ships specially designed to transport unpackaged bulk cargo such as grain, coal, ore, steel coils, and cement. Tankers and containerships were also hit, as were smaller vessels such as commercial fishing boats. Even yachts have been at risk.
  4. Incidents were nearly evenly split between vessels anchored or underway. For those that were anchored, that usually meant attackers shimmying up the anchor chain in the depth of the night.
  5. Consider an attack undertaken in broad daylight when six pirates in a skiff began chasing the MSC Jasmine and opened fire with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The master the ship raised an alert, sent most of his sailors to the ship’s citadel, and ordered his security team to return fire. The pirates retreated, but didn’t get far. Two warships, one American and one French, responded the distress signal, intercepted the skiff, and caught its mother ship to boot. Twelve pirates were taken into custody.
  6. In another violent attack, the Singapore-flagged product tanker, MT Success 9 was boarded along the Ivory Coast by 12 pirates wearing ski masks and gloves and armed with guns. They hijacked the tanker, restrained the crew with cable ties, and kept them hostage while part of the oil cargo was stolen. Before leaving the vessel, the pirates also destroyed the tanker’s navigational equipment.
  7. Other pirates even used military helicopters. So much for walking the plank.
  8. Southeast Asia, however, remains the primary area for piracy attacks. Most of those were petty crimes with ship stores or property stolen.
  9. Incidents in the Callao Anchorage in Peru and the Indonesian archipelago have also been rising, to the point that Indonesia’s 17,500 islands and surrounding waters may now take the title as the world’s most heavily pirated.
  10. Most of the attacks are driven by factors ranging from corruption and institutional weakness to depleted fishing conditions and a lack of economic opportunities in countries outside of the Western nations’ primary focus.

Online and intellectual piracy is a whole different matter.

The upstairs front half wasn’t nearly the snap we expected

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Now, to update you on much of the demolition and rebuilding that transpired while we engaged in uncovering the history of our old house. Or as I can now say with confidence, our historic house. I do hope you enjoyed reading those findings.

While I’m confident we do not have ghosts in our crannies, unlike some of our neighbors in theirs, I can say that after learning of the families who previously resided here, I am conscious of the earlier residents’ imprints. Our is not just any old house, then, but a manifestation of Eastport itself. I do wonder how the parade of earlier inhabitants would react to what we’re doing to the home. The few still living whom I’ve spoken with have been encouraging. And Anna M. Baskerville is, I hope, smiling over all of it.

My biggest lesson to date is that ours is an ongoing project, a work-in-progress, far from finished much less ever perfect. Still, we keep trying to come a bit closer to that ideal.

~*~

As we entered 2024, we still had the front half of the upstairs to rip away and enlarge.

The biggest hurdle was already behind us — the insertion of the ridgepole the length of the roof and the four supporting columns. It was needed to hold up the old front rafters until they were replaced, and needed afterward, as well. The new front rafters would connect to it.

This round promised to be a piece of cake in comparison to what came before. There would be no plumbing to contend with.

We now knew how the roofing would come off, as well as the way that removing the knee walls would extend the wall of the new dustpan dormer out further than the two small dormers that were becoming history. Also, the color of the new metal roofing was already decided.

We even knew the brand and style of the windows.

If only it went that easily.

~*~

We anticipated resuming full-force in the spring, but it was closer to the beginning of summer. Our contractor had a few earlier commitments to follow up on, for one thing, and then rainy weather forecasts set us back, for another, as well as health issues for our hardworking contractor.

And then those little dormers turned out to be far more complicated than expected. When they were added, apparently sometime after 1850, the rafters above them were simply severed, with no structural support. Adam was appalled. What were they thinking? How did it ever hold up, especially once a slate roof was added?

Weather didn’t cooperate, either. And then when all the debris would have been generated, we couldn’t get a dumpster – turns out they get booked out a year ahead around here for the town’s big Fourth of July festivities. Who’d a thunk?

And there were other delays.

Our plumber, for one, wound up on a big project out in Indiana and then another in Seattle. He promised to be back.

Some people thought we staged this as a theatrical statement, but the big tarp was a desperation replacement for several smaller ones – and it, too, got torn up in some fierce weather. We had some water “raining” in the two front parlors, despite the best efforts otherwise.

The roofing, eaves, window framing, new electrical lines, and spray-foam insulation all took time.

And there was the delay when the electrical panel in the cellar blew out and had to be replaced, along with the circuit-breaker box.

The upshot was that the front upstairs wasn’t buttoned up until Halloween, a bit over a year after we set forth, and then interior framed and drywalled finished just before Christmas.

Many people told us that was moving quickly by Eastport standards.

Uh-huh.

It has been an adventure, one that fluctuates wildly between elation and despair.

My literature and histories are not all about ‘back then,’ exactly

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If it’s not personal, what’s the point? While I am talking about writing, in particular, let’s extend that to religion and politics and life in general, wherever we can.

Please make every effort to see those points where we may connect with mutual respect if we’re to advance the human condition. Period.

~*~

I’m left with the realization that my “serious” writing, meaning literary rather than the quickly perishable daily journalism, originated as contemporary poetry and fiction but now falls into historical.

So much has changed, it’s almost hysterical.

Photography, for instance – the career of a central character in four of my novels – no longer requires film, dark rooms and developers and enlargers, or light meters and F-stops.

As for rotary-dial telephones and thick books of people and their numbers?

Instead, I’ll start with the fact that America has never come to terms with its hippie past – positive as well as negative. At least my cool end of it. I’ll let the uptight ‘Nam side defend itself. For my side, it’s like we’re scared or embarrassed of what opened our hearts and minds. While we retreated from the general effort to push the envelope, to advance to Edge City, to demolish boundaries, we also failed to examine what we learned and carry from that experience. Instead, there was a society-wide state of denial that was bound to erupt in unanticipated ways – likely, without any sustaining wisdom. I’ll insist that’s why the nation is in the state that it is now.

For now, my novels stand as a witness to that era and experience and the root of many changes for the better we take for granted today. I do wish there were more voices to tell of that revolution, thwarted as it eventually was. Histories, whether of the scholarly sort or as the art of its time, sustain societies.

~*~

To that let me note that daily fresh air essential for my well-being. The outdoors counteracts feelings of entrapment or engulfment and depression I’ve been susceptible to otherwise. I need to get a taste of wild nature – my feet on the ground, my fingers in the soil, my eyes on the horizon and sky.

It’s part of my spiritual recalibration, even when I was living in the yoga ashram in Pennsylvania’s Pocono mountains.

In this, every day counts, good weather or bad.

~*~

Personal relationships have certainly changed within my lifetime. My parents’ generation suffered many more unhappy marriages in contrast to today, though many youths at the moment have only an envy of deep connection and commitment.

My love poems of the turbulent ‘80s and ‘90s stand as witness to that transition, as do my novels Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Nearly Canaan.

~*~

I am embarrassed for Ohio and Indiana since I’ve left. They had such greatness and potential.

~*~

You’ll 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.

Slatkins and the Hollywood String Quartet

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

From what I saw of the classical music scene in America when I was growing up, the West Coast in general and Los Angeles, in particular as its primary metropolis, were seen as something of a backwater, despite some of the city’s celebrity musicians such as violinist Jascha Heifetz, pianist/composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, and serialist composer Arnold Schoenberg.

In the classical field, the city’s music-making was dismissed as subservient to the film industry. There wasn’t even any opera, in contrast to San Francisco.

That perception has changed, especially since the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s rise under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel to what prominent critics have deemed the most important orchestra in the nation.

Meanwhile, LA’s earlier life is getting reconsideration these days, thanks to the Slatkin family and its history that centers, especially, on the Hollywood String Quartet.

Here’s why.

  1. The quartet, drawn from film industry musicians but known largely through its recordings on Capitol Records, was critically acclaimed as the best string quartet ever in America. But because of conflicting schedule demands among its four members, it was unable to tour outside of California except on rare occasion. That did dampen their awareness in the larger artistic world. Listen to their recordings, though, or view their only video performance on YouTube, and the case is compelling. We can argue about the amazing American ensembles that have come since. These days, I’ll say simply the Hollywood Four remain unsurpassed but are now rivalled, which I see as a blessing. And here I had dismissed their name as somehow celebrity gloss.
  2. Let’s start with the first violinist, Felix Slatkin. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Jewish family from Ukraine, he studied violin under Efrem Zimbalist and conducting under Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. It doesn’t get any better than that. At age 17 he joined the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra as assistant principal violinist before becoming concertmaster for Twentieth Century Fox Studios, where he soloed in several acclaimed soundtracks. He and his new wife also cofounded the quartet in 1939. As a conductor, he founded the Concert Arts Orchestra, comprised largely of studio musicians, and led the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, local professionals in the summer season. He recorded widely on the Capitol label with both the quartet and the two orchestras. He was also Frank Sinatra’s concertmaster and conductor of choice. He died of a heart attack at age 47.
  3. His wife was a New York native of Russian Jewish extraction, Eleanor Aller, the principal cellist of the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra. Not only was she the first woman to hold a principal chair in a studio orchestra, hers was a position no woman held in any of the major orchestras of Europe or America, due to her sex. Kudos on the breakthrough. Oh, yes, she did make her mark as a soloist on major soundtracks as well as on the concert stage. Shortly after their marriage, the couple established the Grammy-winning quartet while continuing to work as studio musicians.
  4. Today, their son Leonard is the best-known family member. American conductors have faced an uphill battle against Europeans when it comes to prestigious positions, but this Slatkin has earned a well-placed distinction. At the early age of 33, he was offered the music directorship of three fine American orchestras and chose St. Louis over Minnesota and Cincinnati, in part because of the support the management offered in his development. As he led St. Louis to world-class recognition, many highly acclaimed recordings followed. Later appointments had him heading the National Symphony of Washington and those of Detroit, Nashville, and Lyon, France, as well as the BBC Symphony. He also had significant roles in Chicago, at the Aspin festival in Colorado and Blossom festival in Ohio, and even in Las Vegas. It’s quite a resume, even before getting to opera.
  5. Over its 22-year span, the quartet had two second fiddles and two violists. The original second violinist was Joachim Chassman, joined by violist Paul Robyn. With the outbreak of World War II, the quartet disbanded when the three males enlisted in the military. When the quartet resumed in 1947, Paul Shure replaced Chassman. Alvin Dinkin took over the viola chair in 1955.
  6. All of the members were leading studio musicians during a period noted for its vibrant, lush movie scores. How could that not influence their chamber music as well? They were all Jewish, trained at either Juilliard or Curtis, and of relatively the same age.
  7. Frank Sinatra, yes, Ol’ Blue Eyes, was accompanied by the quartet on several acclaimed records during the ‘50s. He even became a close professional and personal family friend of the Slatkins. For perspective, listen to Chuck Granata’s contention that “In Slatkin, Sinatra found a kindred spirit, as the violinist’s immaculate playing paralleled what Sinatra sought to achieve with his voice; serious listeners will note many similarities comparing Sinatra’s and Slatkin’s individual approaches to musical interpretation. One hallmark of the HSQ was its long, smooth phrasing which was accomplished through controlled bowing techniques; Sinatra utilized breath control to realize the same effect. Likewise, where Felix would frequently add slight upward portamento to a critical note and neatly strike an emotional chord, the singer would often inflect a note upward or downward or seamlessly glide from one key to another.” Friends, that’s real music-making.
  8. Capitol Records played a supportive role. Based in Hollywood, the label recorded not just Sinatra during this period but also most of the quartet’s albums and Felix’s Hollywood Bowl and Concert Arts Orchestra vinyl disks. It’s an impressive list.
  9. The parents did have a rivalry. Son Leonard was awed by his father’s being able to pick up the violin after three or four weeks of neglect (due to conducting demands) and still polish off the Tchaikovsky concerto or some other demanding solo work in contrast to his mother, who practiced up to five hours a day just to maintain level. He said it was a cause of resentment. Understandably. He also pointed out that his father’s bowing arm control was unsurpassed, something the video confirms.
  10. Victor Aller, Eleanor’s brother, appeared with the quartet as pianist. He studied at Juilliard under Josef Lhevinne and became a distinguished film industry pianist and manager.

My first encounter with the quartet was, I vaguely remember, on a Contemporary Records release I found at the Dayton Public Library, perhaps with a very young Andre Previn on piano. Alas, I find no reference to it now. Son Leonard’s rise as a conductor would have come much later.

How young we were!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Fictional characters don’t come out of thin air, as far as I’ve seen. Instead, they’re prompted by real people the author has known and then, to whatever extent, abstracted. Better yet are the figures who emerge when two or more of these prototypes are crunched together.

Not uncommonly, over the years between the initial events and the revisions leading to the published book, I’ll even lose the original names (in part or in full) of individuals who prompted the eventual characters.

Still, I’ll venture that all the people in the worlds of fiction, cinema, and television were somehow inspired by real people. Forget the obligatory denial you view in the credits.

The writer’s job is to abstract that into something more universal and eternally new.

That said, I was recently startled to get a message relating that one inspiration was now 87. Here I had thought him “older” as Wes in Nearly Canaan, but now see he was in his early 40s at the time. And riding high, as I recall with admiration.

Photos of colleagues in the newsrooms that prompted Hometown News or in the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University – details that infuse Nearly Canaan, The Secret Side of Jaya, What’s Left, and likely more – have all elicited the shocking realization of how young we were at the time. Even our leaders.

Ditto for the ashram that inspired Yoga Bootcamp or the ghetto and hippie farm of Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

The events that propelled the novels came in times of great upheaval in my own life. Like me, I think you would be surprised to learn that most of the Pacific Northwest is desert – that the famed rainy landscape occupies merely a narrow band around the ocean and its inlets. Yet the desert is where the apples – and much more – are grown. It’s a remarkable region, with four distinct seasons and cowboys, Indians, miners, and much more in the mix.

In the broader scene, my professional relocations meant that personal connections from one locale to the next soon ceased, meaning that individuals from one to the other became frozen in time. For me, everybody in high school was frozen in time, as were others in the later leaps.

Reconnecting with a few has felt strange and yet invigorating. As more than one has exclaimed, it’s like nothing has lessened in the gap.

~*~

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.

When you’re lost in a fog, listen to this

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Lighthouses do stir the hearts of many coastal residents and tourists, though foghorns have long provided at least as much foul weather warning for seafarers along the coasts. These horns do get overlooked, though.

Do note:

  1. The earliest known form of a fog signal comes from ancient China around 250 B.C.E., where bamboo pipes produced sound warnings in foggy weather. The concept was later adopted by other early civilizations such as the Greeks and Romans, who used trumpets made from animal horns or bronze. It was one way to keep musicians employed.
  2. Small cannons or other explosives were later used, though they were labor-intensive and time-consuming. Not much bang for the buck, ultimately.
  3. In 1851, a powerful steam whistle in Liverpool was first used, according to one version. As Emma Sullivan’s account at Working-the-Sails.com goes, “Its thunderous blast cut across thick curtains of fog with astonishing clarity.”
  4. Scotsman Robert Foulis apparently kept tinkering. While walking home one foggy night, he heard his daughter practicing piano and realized the lower notes she was playing came through most clearly. That led him to create what would become the first automatic, steam-powered foghorn in 1859 in New Brunswick, Canada, though the credit long went to others. The one in Canada, generally considered the first foghorn, remained in position on Partridge Island and in use until 1998.
  5. Crucially, lower notes have longer wavelengths, which allow them to pass around obstacles better than high notes do. As a result, the water droplets of fog do not diffuse the low notes as much as they do the upper ones. So the explanation goes.
  6. More common designs have relied on compressed air to create the booming alarm. Each of these horns requires a clever interplay of air pressure, diaphragms, and acoustic amplifiers. Other horns have used vibrating plates or metal reeds, somewhat akin to a modern electric car horn. Others forced air through holes in a rotating cylinder or disk, much like a siren. That may be why I’ve been unable to find much in the way of illustrations.
  7. More recent versions include electronic sirens and acoustic transducers. I’ll save the technical mechanics and their history for discussion in a museum setting or the like.
  8. A horn typically has a “sound signal” or frequency pattern, say an initial blast of about four seconds followed by a pause of a minute or so. This originated with a semi-automatic operation achieved by using a coder, or clockwork mechanism, to open valves for the air, giving each horn a timing characteristic to help mariners identify them. Today it’s probably computerized.
  9. They come in different sizes and shapes, depending on their mission and situation. Many but not all are associated with lighthouses, where the beacon of light can be obscured by heavy rain as well as fog. Many others, though, are on ships to warn others of their presence or even under bridges.
  10. Some foghorns can be heard up to eight miles away. Maybe not in a storm.
That little pillar at the right, sitting at the base of the Cherry Island Light in New Brunswick, Canada, is likely the foghorn we hear 2½ miles away in Maine. For anyone interested, it seems to be pitched at G on the musical scale.

You don’t say, Charlie Brown

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

How about ten memorable quotes from the popular Peanuts comic strip character created by Charles “Sparky” Schultz? That kid really was a master of angst.

  1. “A friend is someone who knows all your faults, but likes you anyway.”
  2. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it sure makes the rest of you lonely.”
  3. “Keep looking up … that’s the secret of life.”
  4. “My anxieties have anxieties.”
  5. “I’m already tired tomorrow.”
  6. “Be yourself. Nobody can say you’re doing it wrong.”
  7. “In the book of life, the answers aren’t in the back.”
  8. “What can you do when you don’t fit in?”
  9. “Whenever I feel really alone, I just sit and stare into the night sky. I’ve always thought that one of those stars is my star, and I know that my star will always be there for me. Like a comforting voice saying, ‘Don’t give up, kid.’”
  10. “Good grief.”

And here I had long dismissed him as somehow shallow, coming up with sappy lines like “Happiness is a warm puppy.”

Do kids today even know what a comic strip was?