Tag: Life

Do you use storyboards and photos?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While these weekly Arts & Letters postings have been focusing on the writing life, at least as I’ve known it, some of the insights do spill over into regular life more generally. (I’ll leave that redundancy for emphasis.)

I am visually oriented, more so than many writers, and I did have four intense years of art training in high school. As a newspaper editor, I was regarded for my design layout skills and photo editing and presentation. I credit my high school teacher for much of that.

As a writer and designer, I’ve collected magazine photos, art books, postcards, and stray photos that happened my way. Use of a personal camera was more sporadic and problematic.

And then came digital photography, for me about the same time I started blogging.

But first, to back up.

Memory can carry you only so far, and even good notetakers miss much at the time. A story or poem can become vivid through a detail that pops a character or a scene. A sensitive writer might find that specific in a scent or a taste or motion or a particular word that’s voiced or sensed, but in many more instances, it’s something visual, the sort of thing you might find in examining a photograph or a painting. I’ve learned how those saved magazine photos as well as later images found online can be valuable that way. You or I can even build memory boards to support certain characters or locales, even a room in their house, to assist in our thinking. Some might use a website like Tumblr to do that, too, though I’ve found much more’s available more openly.

Much of my revision of the novels Daffodil Uprising and Nearly Canaan greatly benefitted from such prompts, as did the drafting of “Miller at the Spring” in The Secret Side of Jaya, and especially some books I won’t tell you about.

Some of these photo archives have become albums I’ve posted at Thistle Finch editions, should you be interested. Others you’ll find there, more recent, are images I’ve been taking in my new setting at the easternmost fringe of the continental USA. They’re more of what I’m considering an adjunct kind of journaling – impressions that might have spurred poems back when I was without a camera. I’m even finding a similar stream in what I’ve posted on my Facebook profile, where the images are more likely to be video. (Yes, today’s author is supposed to be active hustling everywhere.)

I hate to admit this, but the ubiquitous digital camera is greatly reducing my on-paper journaling.

Besides, just what are all of those people out there holding up their cell phones wherever they go planning on doing with all of those digital shots? It’s like they’re trying to confirm their own existence. Note the selfies. Or that what’s in front of them is actually happening.

Not that I’m trying to say I’m somehow nobly above that. (Well, maybe?)

As for photo inspiration? In my household, the collected images are impacting our thinking in the ongoing renovation of our historic old house. At this point, the kitchen, especially.

I am trying to be more selective in what I post here at the Red Barn, even if the subsidiary blogs are picking up some of the overflow. Maybe you’ll enjoy them there, too.

~*~

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.

When’s the last time you went bowling?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Well, the sport does figure prominently in the movie The Big Lebowski and the TV series Surreal Estate, a device that slyly dates the both stories.

That said, here are ten factors to consider.

  1. A realization that parking lots outside bowling centers were largely empty in sharp contrast to their crowded condition only a few years earlier prompted a landmark study by Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam. His 2000 nonfiction book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, expanded on his 1995 essay, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” examining the steep decline of in-person participation in group activities pf all kinds by adults across the nation. It wasn’t just bowling but civic clubs, social lodges, churches and synagogues, labor unions, political meetings and campaigns, even neighborhood parties.
  2. In America, the sport usually refers to indoor ten-pin bowling on polished wooden lanes, although lawn bowling is popular in across much of the rest of the world. Think of the places named Bowling Green as a referent. Bocce and curling are close relatives.
  3. The pins themselves come in differing sizes, which then have matching balls to be rolled at the targets. The most common in the eastern United States and Canada are ten-pins – tall, fat, and the heaviest, matched with a large ball about 8.59 inches in diameter, weighing between six and 16 pounds, and having two or three finger holes. Duckpins, invented in Boston in the early 1890s, are shorter and like candlepins, invented in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1880, are played with balls that fit in the palm of the hand and have no holes. Other varieties include nine-pin and five-pin.
  4. At its height of popularity in the United States in the years after World War II, hoards of players – men and women – participated in weekly leagues, wearing customized team shirts and their own bowling shoes and playing with their own balls. Non-league players could, of course, on a lark rent the shoes and balls, if they could find an open lane. For many, it wasn’t a bad date-night option.
  5. I won’t get into the intricacies of scoring – I never did figure that out, much less those for tennis. But I can admit that candlepins are tricky.
  6. Traditionally, the balls are constructed of blocks of maple glued together and then lathed into shape and covered with plastic, paint, and a glossy layer. Synthetics are now also allowed, depending, and rubber pins were once even in use.
  7. The sport has a long history in antiquity before some action moved indoors, as best as I can tell, in the mid-1800s. In 1875 in the U.S., rules for ten-pin play were standardized by the National Bowling Association in New York City, superseded in 1895 by the new American Bowling Congress.
  8. Chicago-based Brunswick Corporation was already well established as a maker of billiard tables when it began making bowling balls, pins, and wooden lanes to sell to taverns installing bowling alleys in the 1880s. The company became synonymous with bowling.
  9. The arrival of automatic pinsetter machines in 1952 eliminated the need for pin boys, a precarious and dangerous job for males who sat unseen above the pins to clear them and reposition new ones after each frame of play. (As I was saying about scoring?) The machines made by American Machine and Foundry of Brooklyn, New York, speeded the game and sent the sport’s popularity rocketing.
  10. The Golden Age of Ten-Pin Bowling took off around 1950, including weekly television coverage. Some professional bowlers earned as much as their colleagues in baseball, football, and hockey. The era ended in the late 1970s.

More bits from one writer’s journey

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I am one of the few poets and novelists who has spent the bulk of his career editing daily newspapers, rather than teaching literature or creative writing. Still, when it came to creating a contributor’s note for a literary journal, I had to think of myself in the third-person.

Here are some of those contributor’s notes I don’t think were published … until now.

  • In a typical year, Jnana drove enough miles to circle the globe, yet rarely ventured far from his relatively small state.
  • Jnana admits there’s something quite frightening in any occasion of encountering a dragon, much less being carried off by one. He’s been scorched more than once.
  • In his lifetime of writing, Jnana has found himself addressing issues of PLACE as much as character or social conflict or even religion and ethnicity. Place, of course, intertwines with history and the natural sciences. In examining where he lives – where we live – and have lived – he also examines movement, change, home, and community.
  • When Jnana graduated from college, the economy was in a tailspin. The hippie movement was flourishing. He was too skinny to be drafted for Vietnam.
  • Jnana once spent a week at an ecological workshop in Port Worden, Washington, where Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, and Howard Norman were joined by biologists and anthropologists. It’s as close as he’s come to a writing seminar.
  • As copy desk chief, Jnana was a glorified secretary rather than the top grammarian.
  • Jnana began his professional journalism career as an Action Line research assistant.
  • As a homebrewer, Jnana handcrafted more than 2,500 bottles of fine ales and lagers.
  • Jnana’s elder daughter wanted to raise chickens, ducks, and bees at their small-city homestead. He wondered about the neighbors’ dogs and cats, as well as the possums, groundhogs, and skunks. He didn’t want the misery of another henhouse raid.
  • His wife thought Jnana would have fit the mid-1800s better than contemporary America. She wondered how someone engaging an Anabaptist religious line could be so unorthodox in his art.
  • As a daily newspaper editor, Jnana sensed he was among the last to uphold a vital blue-color trade. He wondered how democracy could survive without independent reporting or clear writing.
  • Considering the brevity of New England summers, Jnana had hoped to launch a line of Hawaiian sweaters.
  • Jnana hates onions but loves a good martini. (Gin, not vodka.) With or without olives.
  • As a journalist, Jnana lived in the trenches of community life – in the tensions of industry and finance, retail commerce, social inequalities and prejudices, and reactionary politics. He admires the progressive activists who have maintained their optimism in spite of it all.
  • In management and as an editor, Jnana had his head and heart handed to him on a silver platter more than once.
  • He hopes he never has to load or unload another U-Haul as long as he lives.
  • Jnana is quite grateful his younger daughter gave up rugby for crew as her first college sport.
  • Jnana senses rural values are rooted in his soul. His dad was born on a farm.
  • Jnana’s mother was born in St. Louis. She loved taking him to the zoo.

Journaling over the years

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Prodded by a crusty newspaper editor-in-chief to keep a personal journal, I started the practice 55 years ago using spiral-bound notebooks. At the time, I was largely in quest of exploring “my problem,” meaning the deep depression and loneliness that followed the breakup with my first lover and my inability in social circles to find another. Long story to pick up later.

What I found instead was the manic upside in my funky settings during the hippie outbreak. Many of those entries, some of them in my favored 8½-by-14-inch notebooks – an option that disappeared all too soon from the market – found their way into my eventual fiction and poetry, though much of the rest is dross. At their best, they do have a sense of Richard Brautigan. Look him up, if you must.

As for the banal run of most of the entries, people who snooped into my journals and then voiced their disappointment in what they found told me as much. Note to those of you who consider doing something similar, it is an invasion of privacy and will likely bruise your relationship. It is an abuse.

Entries were rarely a daily thing for me, more likely weekly or, of late, even monthly. When I sat down to do so, I was more likely to record what was going on around me than I was to delve into my emotions or underlying perceptions. Those latter elements might appear whenever I had more time at the project. The big lesson was that my life was much richer than I had suspected, and I was too prone to lose the connecting threads without these times of reflection. In some ways, they were like Lewis and Clark’s explorations across the continent, I suppose. Who knows who might need the maps later.

In earlier returns to these, I did find I had duly noted details of unfaithfulness and other impending disasters that I was denying to myself, yet there they are in clear daylight when we return.

Among my goals this year is a thorough revisiting of the 200-plus volumes to date, the latter half mostly  in hardbound 8½-by-11 artist sketchbooks. Most of what I review will be discarded, harsh as that sounds, but I the act will release emotional burdens as well. My novels and poems distill and carry much of that journey, thank you.

The ones beginning in 2000, though, retain so many details of my current situation, I really can use the reminders of things I don’t recall when they’re raised by others. I’ll let you guess who, especially.

~*~

My practice has definitely changed since I began blogging. Much of the recording of events, personal observations, and reflections has deflected from the hardbound journals to these online entries. Well, so has much of what would have gone into long letters to friends and colleagues now has vanished online as well. Emails and texts fall far short of real correspondence, OK?

The journaling on paper continues, though at my age, life feels more routine, less worthy of intense recording. So much of it I’ve already said, even to myself.  Still, as a practice, it’s one more thing I can see as prayer, too.

You’ll likely be seeing more of what I turn up in those yellowing pages.

Meet patriot Lewis Frederick Delesdernier

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In researching the history of our house, I learned about many of its earlier neighbors as well. Of note to the south was one with a rather exotic surname. Turns out he was a rather influential figure in the establishment of Eastport.

Here are a few points about him.

  1. He was born as Louis Frederic DeLesdernier in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1752 to Gideon de les Dernier and Judith Marie Madelon Martine. As for that French surname? The precise location at that time could have been under either French or English rule – the conflicts are quite tangled. He was, however, a generation removed from Geneva, Switzerland, by then. French-speaking, all the same, however anyone wound up spelling it.
  2. His uncle Moses was the first Protestant to farm among the French Acadians.
  3. When the American Revolution broke out, Lewis enlisted in an effort to bring the American Revolution to Canada. The attack on British Fort Cumberland in Nova Scotia was defeated and then, in retreat, Lewis ultimately wound up in Machias, Maine, where he was charged with maintaining good relations with the local Passamaquoddy to assure that they didn’t defect to the British. During this time, in 1779 he married Sarah Brown, the daughter of a fellow garrison member. For a Frenchman, attacking the English makes sense.
  4. After the war, he resettled on an island in the waters either in today’s Lubec or Eastport, Maine, one called variously Fredrichs or De Les Dernier island. There he was appointed as the first customs collector for the district, possibly encompassing both today’s Lubec and Eastport, and, in 1789, when the first post office was established, was named postmaster. Could that island have been what emerged as Moose Island, today’s Eastport?
  5. In Eastport, he was not only the first postmaster but also the first collector of customs. Case closed?
  6. The first owner of our house did have a ship named after him. In those days, naming a ship after someone often obligated them to buy a share in it. Did this present a conflict of interest for the custom’s collector?
  7. After Delesdernier’s first wife’s death in 1814, he married the widow Sophia Fellows Clark in 1817. Trying to determine the number of children remains elusive, but I’m finding no descendants in the region today.
  8. When he died in December 1838 at his son’s home in today’s Baileyville, Maine, a warm friend, Alfred A. Gallatin, the fourth U.S. Secretary of the Treasury (1801-1814) under President Thomas Madison, said, “He is to me of all Americans I have seen, the most zealous and full of enthusiasm for the Liberty of his country.”
  9. An 1803 arrival in Eastport of Harvard graduate Jonathan D. (the initial for you can guess what) Weston was auspicious. Shortly before his death, provided details on much of the early settlement of Eastport in a history published in 1834 and later woven into William Henry Kilby’s 1888 volume. He also hosted famed ornithological artist John J. Audubon at his 1810 home at the corner of Boyden and Middle streets. I’m not finding any direct relationship, but will venture that the middle name was in honor of Lewis, perhaps even hinting at the reason for Jonathan’s moving to Eastport.
  10. Lewis’ circa 1807 house was eventually moved from down on the water to higher ground. The only remaining evidence of its original location is in the naming of Customs Street, far from the later custom’s offices. Today, the Delesdernier home on the south end of the island is proudly owned by symphony conductor and cellist Dan Alcott, who anticipates moving into it year-round. We can’t wait!

I prefer, should you wonder …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

a shower to a bath, but indulge in hot tubs.

a hot tub to a sauna in the snow, not that I haven’t delighted in the latter.

religion that relies on questions more than answers.

discovery to fabrication. Accuracy more than cleverness.

Chocolate or candy?
White chocolate. Or dark, bittersweet.

Waffles or pancakes?
Either one, awash in melted real butter and local maple syrup. Better yet, a classic cheese omelet. Or baked pears or baked French toast.

Embracing my sunny side

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s celebrate the publication of my poetry ebook Mediterraneo this week.

As a series of poems, this book was a turning point for me. My earlier poetry had been mostly of the nature or love genres.

Here I focused on Western culture itself, through places around the Mediterranean Sea. It was someplace I’ve never visited, though it’s had a huge impact on my artistic and spiritual outlook. What I have known comes through artworks, literature, philosophy, operas, insights from my daughter and wife’s travels and those of my goddaughter and friends and even Greek Orthodox dancing and liturgy as well as ancient Hebrew scriptures. Put them all in the mixer, then, and see what we can distill.

It’s quite distinct from my ultimate roots in the British Isles and Germany.

When I created these poems, I had not yet relocated to a remote fishing village on an island in Maine after 20 years in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire. The climate is colder than the Mediterranean’s, for certain, but the light of the sun does reflect off the sea and back into the sky, magnifying the luminance in a way that attracts artists, as it does in many of the locations in this homage to the cradle of notable classic faiths, cultures, and cuisines. I do miss Greek dancing and related dining. The ability to see whales from shore or deer in my small-city yard do offset that.

The Mediterranean is much larger than I had supposed. It would reach from nearly one end of the United States to the other, yet also spans so much more diversity.

While I’ve never been to the Mediterranean, much less Egypt, and never out of the country, for that matter, excepting pockets of Canada, all the same, I’ve flown places in my imagining, and some convey some underlying kinship.

Barcelona is one of those. Seemingly far out of my northern nature, this Latin complex of sensuality, color, and Roman Catholic devotion also harbors a stubborn independence, under its ostensible domination by others. Spanish, but not Spanish. Catholic, and yet in a historic realm of heretical lay movements. A passion for the musical dramas of Wagner, accompanied by industry.

Perhaps my genetic line does run, as a marker suggests, from northern England to the border of Spain. Uncork a red wine, then, and sit in my Smoking Garden on a summer late afternoon. Muse on a line from on friend or other while listening to an opera broadcast.

Consider Pharaoh’s descent, the ways the culture of ancient Egypt anchors one corner of the Mediterranean. Was there another anything like it, in its mindset or visual conception?

Or the pervasive smell of camels with their wave-like gait as they nearly sail from the southern shore of the Mediterranean and on deep into the interior of north Africa. In many ways, it’s their land more than man’s.

Or the continuing influence of Greece and its blinding sunlight, scented with lavender and sage, spills over the the culture we inhabit, sometimes with an air of longing

So much ancient history is filled with brutality and revenge, lusts and conquests. Especially, we would venture, around the Mediterranean and its sea.

The Italian Renaissance, with its lush reds and golden adornments, leaves its mark on the imagination. What would Europe be without it?

As for Minotaur in the Ring, with strokes of Picasso, don’t overlook Barcelona, the fifth most populous metropolitan area in the European Union. Some say the port city was founded by Hercules, which would fit its fierce spirit. It even lives its own language, despite Spanish rule. And then there’s its unique style.

They’re all energies in these poems.

You can obtain the collection in the ebook platform of your choice at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital bookstore retailers.

Practicing excellence in modest work

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Rather than the big splash – the masterwork, Oscar performance, Pulitzer Prize, MVP sort of thing.

Think of a pastor, crafting sermon after sermon each week.

A woman who found housing for the homeless and then patiently worked them through their finances to point them toward independence.

The big dreams of a novelist or poet page by page that never found a readership, or the correspondent for a local weekly newspaper.

A doctor or nurse. Teacher. Carpenter. Mechanic.

Keep your eye open and the list grows quickly.

It even becomes more impressive than many who have fame.