Tag: Life

ONLY THE BEST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Often, the lessons appear when least expected.

One my thoughts returns frequently to a conversation I overheard on a Saturday afternoon in Baltimore’s Little Italy. A couple, recently back from New York City, was trying to impress the restaurant owner that everyone they had talked to was raving about the establishment, saying it was clearly the best in Little Italy. Finally, the owner was able to thank them, with this rejoinder: “Anyone who doesn’t think he’s the best in this neighborhood shouldn’t be down here.”

I admire that sense of upholding your own pursuit of excellence. No excuses. And I admire that esteem for the standards of others doing the same. Rivals. And yet colleagues.

I don’t want to hear a salesman slam the competition, or a priest short selling another denomination or congregation, except in this light.

My work is the best. And so is yours! And, yes, we can both do better!

Humbly yours, forever.

GRAPHING OURSELVES IN THE ECONOMICS CROSSHAIRS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I said at the time: Golly, I hadn’t thought in terms of “lower middle class” in ages, though that’s where I’ve been most of my adult life – even as management. According to government statistics, at least, and thanks to my union card, we made it up to median income, although in reality, considering the cost of housing in New England, we were never quite there. Before the housing market decline (our property had more than doubled in price in a half-dozen years), my wife saw the assessment and cried out, “I never thought I’d live in a quarter-million dollar house – and it’s still a dump!” Yup.

What is amazing is what can be accomplished when we focus our resources and set priorities. The secret is that you can’t have it all. My wife would love to travel, but then we managed for her to not have to be employed, which in turn allowed her to return to college and to chair the local charter high school (a full-time, unpaid job) while taking care of both her mother and the girls. Maybe we’ll get around to travel, but for now, there are too many other demands – on our time, especially. I was able to carve out blocks to draft/revise large sections of work, although in doing so, I wasn’t submitting much anywhere – that would come later, probably in retirement. So I hoped.

One of our favorite writers, Wendell Barry, points out that a divorced family is, on paper, far more economically viable because it has to pay for two households, hold down two jobs, maintain two cars, and so on, each point adding to the cash flow, which can be measured. Of course, that fails to calculate a lot of other, more meaningful values. Keeping my mother-in-law in her own little apartment in the barn, for instance, allows her some independence while still getting some family care – none of it showing up in the gross national product, or whatever we call that calculation these days.

VILLAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As humans, each of us assumes a cluster of identities – some of them chosen and changeable, others immutable. My grandfather, for example, proclaimed himself Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber, invoking a host of other identities as well: Mason, Protestant, middle class, married. I don’t think “grandfather” was high up in his awareness. Being male or female or teenaged or elderly, on the other hand, are simply givens. And the history of what we’ve done or failed to do cannot be altered, except in our own perceptions and retelling.

The range of identities is astounding. They include but are not limited to race, religion, nationality and locality, occupation, family (household and near kin to genealogy itself), education and educational institutions, athletics, hobbies and interests, actions and emotions, even other individuals we admire, from actors and authors to athletes, politicians, and historic figures. They soon extend to the people we associate with – family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. And, pointedly, our phobias and possessions.

Curiously, it becomes easier to say what we are not than what we are specifically. That is, set out to define yourself in the positive and you’ll find the list rapidly dwindling, while an inexplicable core remains untouched. Turn to the oppositions, however, and the list becomes endless. I am not, for instance, a monkey. Sometimes, moreover, a specified negative becomes truly revealing: “I am not a crook,” for instance, as the classic revelation.

Behind the masks of public life – our occupations, religious affiliations, social status, economic positions, family connections, educational accomplishments, and so on – each of us engages in another struggle, an attempt to find inner balance and direction for our own life. As we do so, we soon face a plethora of interior and exterior forces that must be reconciled. We get glimmers into this struggle – both within ourselves and within others – in statements that begin “I am” and “I am not,” as well as “I have been,” which recognizes the history and habits we accumulate and carry with us. There are also the voices – “he remembers” or “she insists” – that also recur in our lives, defining and redefining ourselves both within, as conscience or the angel or devil on our shoulders, and without, as any of a host of authority figures and friends or family members.

When I turned to this is a series of poems, I found myself identifying many of the subjects by occupation, even though their confessions or interior monolog typically reflected the more intimate concerns of their lives – relationships, activities, even the weather. The resulting poems are, then, overheard snippets more than public proclamations.

What began as an exercise in self-definition breaks out nonetheless into an entire spectrum of personalities. Do we know any of these people? Or are they somehow eluding us, masked by the bits that are revealed? Those we recognize, moreover, happen by accident – none of the portraits are of known individuals, but rather the inventions of the poet’s craft and imagination.

Listen carefully – especially when others talk of their romantic problems or other troubles – and another portion of a mosaic appears. My collection builds on such moments, constructing a cross-section of community like a web of each one of its members. Sometimes, a place appears; sometimes, a contradiction; sometimes, a flavor or sound or color. Even so, in this crossfire, then, we may be more alike than any of us wishes to admit. We may be more like the part we deny, as well. Our defenses wither. Our commonality, and our essential loneliness, are revealed.

In the end, I’d say I have a Village of Gargoyles.

EVEN FOR A BUCK OR LESS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Going through our bookshelves the other day, I was struck by how many of my first paperbacks were picked up for under a buck, new. How many, in fact, came in at under a half-buck. These were serious literature, mind you.

Yes, gasoline cost about a quarter a gallon, too, but just compare the impact of inflation over that period. While regular gas now runs up to $4, those fifty-cent paperback titles are now listing around $16, plus – more than twice as much inflation, relatively speaking.

Newspaper and magazine prices have also spiked, for a variety of reasons beginning with the cost of paper itself and distribution.

My concern as both a reader and a writer is that the figures for traditional publishing have simply become too prohibitive to take risks on unknown talent. For instance, I’m very unlikely to shell out $25 for a hardback novel, yet if that title doesn’t sell sufficiently, we’re unlikely to see the trade paperback, which can still be borderline prohibitive for modest incomes.

Public library budgets, meanwhile, keep getting shaved, forcing reductions in both new acquisitions and the staffing and open hours.

All of this means you’re less likely to find a new voice you find personally exciting. It’s all about blockbuster sales for one title rather than a wide offering catering to quirky interests and pleasures. And it’s not just commercial publishing.

Not long ago an official of an academic press related the painful decision they’d made regarding an important history manuscript that would not sell more than 400 copies, according to their marketing research. And so, in the absence of a major subsidy (such as an underwriting grant), the volume would not appear.

Since much of my own fiction falls in the category of “experimental” literature, the response I’ve received from some literary agents and presses has been that the work deserves publication but that it’s not “economically viable.”

The threshold for economically viable, I should point out, has been rising steadily through the four decades I’m reviewing.

I remember hearing the novelist Wright Morris in a televised interview where he said how lucky he was to have a niche following where a press run of eight-thousand copies was sufficient to support him. That’s hardly the case today, especially when the field has been consolidated into two publishing houses handling the bulk of American fiction.

*   *   *

Even so, hundreds of new novels appear every week, many of them from small presses run as a labor of love. Few of the authors will get any notice, even though some, as I’ve found over the years, are a fine alternative to the cookie-cutter work typically found in commercial fiction. At least the Internet is opening new opportunities to be heard and discovered – and even for readers to pick up a fresh writer for a few bucks once again.

So who are you reading these days you feel speaks directly to you? Or whose style bristles in ways you find delightful? And how did you come across this author in the first place?

Maybe his or her successful niche following is around the corner if we all talk about literature as if it counts in our time. Just maybe.

DANCING IN THE WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In his volume of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall draws distinctions among jobs, chores, and work. The first is done for the pay, the second because it must, while the third arises as a passion, a calling, often an avocation – and is ultimately energizing and life-affirming. Lucky, he says, is the person whose work is also a paying job. So for income, where do we turn? Retreat into farming? Farmers aren’t surviving.

Wendell Berry speaks of two Muses. In Standing by Words, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983, highly recommended, he writes: “There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form.

“The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap energy civilization, in which `economic health’ depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”

Here, then, is yet another slant on work from an unabashedly Christian poet and essayist.

Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Certainly for the revision.

And revision. And revision. His estimate, it seems, is quite optimistic.

In the practice, I keep asking: Are my facts right? Is this the most appropriate detail? How will the piece open and what structure will it assume? What is unique and most meaningful here? For whom? Does it boogie?

All of this to guard against shoddy workmanship; anything lazy, even deceitful; the artiste and the counterfeit.

PRACTICE AS THE WAY ITSELF

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Central to a life in art is the matter of practice. By this, I do not mean a dry run for a finished performance or product, but rather the repeated exercises that make an action habitual or proficient or even, in its variant, practical. Everyday, useful, helpful, sensible. At its core, the Greek root for practice means “to do,” something we see repeated when a musician practices scales, a physician practices medicine, an attorney practices law, an athlete practices basketball – it’s what one does or must do to be a musician, a physician, an attorney, a ballplayer. In its purity, a practice is pursued apart from an intended outcome – a concert, a healing, or courtroom victory – but rather as the daily discipline itself, which may in turn possibly lead to discovery and increased proficiency. To accomplish this requires time and physical space for experiment: what if I try it this way, what happens if I change that?

All of this requires time, of course – especially time free of specific outcome. (The Shakers, for all of their “Hands for work, hearts to God” ethic, left enough unencumbered time in their labors to experiment and invent – the creative acts that have become their legacy and living witness.) Still, I often find myself coming to my writing with a sense of guilt. (For that matter, even sitting down to read can be accompanied by that burden.) Other people lay claim to my time and attention. They see my writing, revising, and publishing as feeding my own vanity, rather than their needs and desires. There are dishes to wash, a garden to weed, a lawn to mow, walls needing paint. Looking to larger issues, some point to a world full of social injustices and programs that cry out for volunteer action. Somewhere deep in my bones I even carry that ancestral aversion to art for art’s sake, superfluity, escapism, dissolution. (Nowhere do they note how Jesus kept returning to the wilderness for prayer and renewal, leaving the fervid crowds far behind.) This is all complicated by the American measure of ultimate success – the almighty dollar. Its corollary, that a professional is superior to an amateur. Or that making the best-seller list is the measure of a great author. (No poets need apply.) (Inducing its own layers of anxiety and guilt: could I be making more? Have I sold out? Am I somehow now trapped by expectations?) Here, I could have been working overtime at the office.

All of this complicated by Samuel Johnson’s admonition, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” (Which may even be a grumpy acknowledgement that writing remains work, paid or unpaid. Or of his frequent status as a hack writer.)

To push this a step deeper, consider the practice of prayer. I’ve long sensed that poetry and prayer – or, from another perspective, art and religion – spring from a common root in antiquity. The spells, rituals, and restrictions that accompanied fertility, hunting and harvesting, and death lead to both pathways. (“And God saw that is was good,” in Genesis 1, has the meaning of “good to eat” – that is, nourishing – that soon evolves into morally and aesthetically good as well.)

I’m not alone here. For instance, Carmine Starnino, in “Lazy Bastardism: A Notebook” (Poetry, January 2010), admits a similar unease about both reading and writing and then says, “My first contact with poetry was the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary.’ Yes, they’re prayers, but they’re also pockets of linguistic energy … epic-accented statements … wonderfully archaic usages.” In his reflection, he argues, “Other prayers were loaded with religiosity, but uninterestingly flat,” and concludes, “Writing poetry is not, in itself, a prayerful activity. That’s because prayer is not a craft; it is the opposite of a craft,” one he sees as essentially secular: “poetry might even be said to be a menace to religious belief … because poetry, to work, needs to strip religious belief of its theological privilege.” To which he adds, “The best religious verse … flirts with faithlessness.” As he move on to other topics, he leaves me recognizing how narrow his understanding of prayer ultimately is and how much of his argument can be turned as a critique of poetry, as well. Many well-crafted poems, I find, remain uninterestingly flat – contrived and spiritless. Many hover well within the bounds of literary privilege. Read at weddings or funerals, they sound obscure and stuffy, as welcome as the parking attendant. Just as we struggle to define a poem within the range of writing today, so too does prayer run a range, from the unintelligible babbling of glossolalia (“praying in tongues,” in Pentecostal practice, as a craft, in some cases, to a raw emotional outpouring, in others) to intimate confessions to the formal Book of Prayer-type compositions of Starnino’s experience. At one end are those who pray for something specific (including a job, love, money, or healing), on to those who seek only to know God’s will and then to those mystics who sit silently waiting to listen to the divine voice in their hearts and bones. The tradition of English poetry, meanwhile, is prey to sermonizing, however secular or prosaic. Only when we break free of our prevailing orthodoxy – religious or artistic – do we truly “flirt with faithlessness,” finding ourselves defenseless in the face of ecstasy or despair, in the face of the one that cannot be named. This is the realm of epiphany, sacred or secular (or both).

I think Starnino loses the trail when he sees poetry as a craft, rather than a practice. Craft emphasizes a finished artifact, unlike practice, which embraces the activity itself. Practice can often resemble a hike in the woods or taking a trail up a mountain, with all the stages of attention or inattention that go with it. As you build stamina and endurance, you can also gain freedom. Whether mountain climbing, praying, or writing poetry, you may unexpectedly break free of the exertion itself – and cross into a state of oneness I’ll call the Zone. Others may discuss whether such moments of communion are epiphanies or a state of grace, or even secular or sacred, but when they come when I’m writing or revising, the lines seem to appear on their own, each move feels surefooted, the world around me appears as vibrant imagery and context. In this realm, I would declare poetry or literature to be a state of awareness, more than any artifact on a page or bound between covers. Likewise, the Zone may appear – it can never be summoned – in any of a number of disciplined activities. My wife experiences it while cooking and gardening; I enter it while dancing or singing, as well. Often, the Zone overlaps multiple ongoing activities: I jot the lines of a poem at a bend in the trail approaching a mountaintop.

I am left wondering why we cannot remain in the Zone long. Whether it would even be healthy. Whether we need some resistance or grit to balance the ethereal. Whether this reflects a basic mind/body, spirit/flesh duality.

Still, sustained practice is not easy. It remains work. Given a choice, the rational decision would be to sit back and devour great pages already given to us by others. (Or view great paintings or plays or films or dance productions and so on.) We can even ask, do we need more books? Who’s reading the ones we have now? I’m not speaking of all the junk fiction, junk movies, junk television, either. All that other kind of butt time. (Yes, I see a need for a slew of Creative Reading programs, more than Creative Writing, but that’s another facet of the work.)

HAS THEE BEEN REFRESHED?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

It’s an ancient question after the hour of worship, along with “Has thee been fruitful?” or “How has Truth prospered?” A related question would ask just what draws each of us to sit in the communal quiet in the first place. On the one hand, there’s a need for relief from the conflicts of daily life – a desire for a time of lightness and joy. But ours is not a religion of escape, and I’ve become quite aware that the quest for social justice is also a central Biblical theme. Some weeks, in fact, we come quite close to “praying the newspaper,” as our hearts carry a world of suffering to the invisible altar.

While we reflect on the world, on one hand, we also examine ourselves in our worship. Maybe it’s impossible, if not just difficult, to be as thoroughly honest with ourselves at the deepest levels as we’d like. A therapist, after all, keeps redirecting the client back to the questions being skirted. Still, it’s important we try. Salvation, including being saved from our own negative thoughts and actions, has a root word related to healing. As I’ve been sitting on a succession of Psalms week after week, I’ve come to appreciate the authors’ growing candor – first, to admit the array of enemies, something many of us might have difficulty addressing – and then, in asking that they be smited or the petitioner be sheltered from their assault, which becomes an act of distancing and handing over the desire for revenge; it’s not, after all, no longer, “Let me smite them!” As we survey the realm of struggle around us, let me suggest that saving the world has a direct connection to saving ourselves, in all senses of the meaning. (I’ve always liked the bumper sticker, SAVE THE WHALES.)

Placing the question “Has thee been refreshed?” within this framework has a dimension of renewal and recharging for the work at hand. It’s for more than an hour, then, isn’t it.

TALLY HO, PIMLICO

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As I said at the time, I’ve been thinking about names. Especially place names. Take “Baltimore,” a name most of us use repeatedly and never consider. There’s Balty More, kind of salty. Or Balta moor, rather Mediterranean. The name itself sounds Irish. I know, they were English. But it sure sounds like Ballyhagen or . . .

Of course, not everybody pronounces quite the same. I was in Florida a couple of years back and we went out to a restaurant owned by a woman and her husband, who had retired from Tennessee and, well, got so bored with the retirement life they went back into business just to take their minds off the boredom. So, following the dinner, she asked us where we were all from and the first of my colleagues replied, “I’m from Los Angeles,” and she said, “Oh, that’s very nice,” and the second colleague replied, “I’m from Chicago,” and she said, “Oh, that’s a nice city,” and the third said, “I’m from right here in Florida,” and of course she had to ask what neighborhood, and then my fourth colleague drawled, “I’m from right outside Atlanta,” and naturally they had that Southern thing going right away, in ways we Northerners can never know about. Finally, she turned to me and I said, as some folks around here do, “Bal’mer.” All of my colleagues looked at me queerly. Bal’mer? Not Bal-ty more? But not that lady, no sir. Without missing a beat, she came back, “Oh! Merlin!” Yessirree. I’m from the state of Merlin.

But back to Bal’mer, which sounds like something you put on a wound. Especially a burn.

At one time, the name made sense. Unique, except for the home plantation, wherever that was back in the British Isles. Named for the good Lord Baltimore, and all that.

But it’s time for a change.

For one thing, there are so many other Baltimores around the country, we’re only the biggest of them these days. I mean, there are all of those West Baltimores, New Baltimores, and North Baltimores, and so on running around, who needs them?

Even the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad decided it was time to change its name to CSX or whatever. Even here, in the metropolis, we have problems confusing, as we do, between Baltimore City and Baltimore County.

No, friends, it’s time for a change. New and improved, as they say in the advertising business.

We could turn to the original names, but Fells Point just doesn’t ring quite right. And Jonestown just won’t work, not after the Reverend Jim and his little band of suicidals. Nor would Otterbein, with its sectarian overtones as a denomination that no longer exists, for that matter. Harbor City doesn’t quite say it. Our nicknames Charm City, Mobtown, Crabtown, and so on, fail us as well.

What I am proposing is Pimlico.

Yes, this is Horse Country. And Pimlico has a nice ring to it. Consider the crowd that does Paris and Rome each year. Would they ever say, “I did Paris, Rome, and Baltimore”? Hell, no. But now try “Paris, Rome, and Pimlico” and you see what I mean. Pimlico has the kind of sound to it to reflect our definite up scaling of the city. It sounds just a tad racy, too.

Say Pimlico it shall be.

Remember, when you see the shining college students outside your favorite supermarket and they ask you to sign the petition, do not hesitate. And remember to vote yes on Proposition Fourteen, to rename Baltimore City and Baltimore County. Either or both.

Then we call all unite in saying, with renewed vigor: “Tally Ho, Pimlico!”

If only …