Tag: Literature

Acid test poet: Philip Whalen (1923-2008)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a Reed College student, Whalen lived in a rooming house with Gary Snyder and Lou Welch, making for a trio of fine poets. There, through Snyder, he was introduced to Zen Buddhism after earlier dabbling in Vedanta yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. In time, he would emerge as an ordained priest at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Although suicide cut Welch’s life short, Whalen and Snyder remained close friends for life. I had no idea just how close until coming across David Schneider’s biography of Whalen, where the appear as complementary opposites – little brother helping bigger brother through key shifts in survival.

They were considered Beat poets from the start of the movement but soon moved away from its poetic conventions. Whalen, preoccupied with the movements of the human mind and awareness, blended mundane details immediately before him with timeless, erudite quotations from a world of sources. The results were a unique and absorbing mental dance on an unseen energy field.

I also enjoyed his novel, You Didn’t Even Try, dealing with a failed marriage.

He came a long way from the Dalles, a village along the Columbia River in Oregon where the eastern desert begins.

It’s as close as I’ve come to a romance novel

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The model in the photo I selected for the original cover of the story that stands today as Nearly Canaan was nearly too perfect. I even had to tweak the description of Jaya on the pages inside to make for a better match. Much later, I came across other photos from the shooting and was appalled.

In yoga circles, it’s what we would call Maya.

Apparently, I had shifted Jaya’s spiritual identity from Sufi much earlier than I recalled. Now that I had a solid backstory for her in my novel Yoga Bootcamp, I could turn my attention to the messy trove that had sprawled into three big books. Thanks to Cassia from What’s Next, I was now intent on distilling them back into one. Trying to compress them into the maximum 120,000 upper limit of a big novel meant having to hone more than one hundred pages of manuscript. And that’s before I decided to add a fourth section for fuller closer.

~*~

At heart, I was trying to figure out just what had gone on in my first marriage. I’m still not sure. And note I had said “gone on,” not “gone wrong.”

But I also wanted to say something about the influence of the landscapes where I’ve lived. In fact, I came to think of them as major characters. If only I could have allowed them to speak? The first was pretty bleak and, for a small town, rather petty. The second had its beauty and its rough spots. The third, their intended Paradise, initially appeared desolate and unforgiving.

Place as a character? How about the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn? The story wouldn’t have been the same if Twain had started on the Ohio River, even though it was larger than the Mississippi where he did.

Naturally, I had to abstract real people and events and in doing so, I settled on some big flips. Jaya emerged as the older partner in her marriage, for one, which gave a fresh twist on a December/May romance.

Along the way, the story became one of overlapping couples, a contrast of marriages that were close to Jaya’s home. It’s almost like the mirrors in an amusement park house of mirrors, to my way of thinking, not that the story started out that way.

Yeah, we’re supposed to avoid religion and politics. That leaves some pretty big gaps in the meaning of life and, as I’m seeing, in relationships, too.

If you haven’t noticed, changing the novel’s name from Promise to Nearly Canaan is a Biblical nod. Well, I had previously been calling it their Promised Land.

Developing Pastor Bob and his wife, Wendy, provided a big advance for the revised novel. They might have had serious reservations about her as a heathen, but they were still intrigued and at points even supportive. That marriage also had its problems.

I definitely wanted to avoid having southern Indiana in one more of my books, so I shifted the scene of the middle section to the Ozarks of Arkansas. There are a lot of similarities, from what I’m finding.

In addition, I wanted Jaya’s career to be as volatile for her as newsroom management had been for me. She needed to work weekends and nights, too. Beyond that, I did have an experience of being paid from “soft money,” as grants are sometimes called, and having a very good neighbor work as regional director of a social action agency provided me more inspiration.

By the way, the cover photo I settled on for the revised edition did require some tweaks on Jaya’s physical description on the inside pages.

Acid test novelist: Pauline Reage (1907-1998)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Blame Susan Sontag for the introduction, but she was right in lauding the erotic achievement of the pseudonym French author only recently revealed to be Anne Cecile Desclos.

While many of the once shocking practices in The Story of O and its companion volume have become common knowledge in the years since publication, other parts remain contentious. I’ll leave the subject matter there.

What fascinates me as a writer is the spare, even lacy, language that develops the story. O herself says very little and next to nothing is revealed about her background – there’s nothing at all about her family – yet everything is shown as if we’re inside her head. Somehow, Reage skirts being prescient in the mater-of-fact telling. We learn more background about other characters’ families, in fact. When it comes to scurrilous events, she avoids dwelling in detail but hints briefly and quite effectively moves on. As for cliché? Minimal.

Let that be a reminder to some of us who would otherwise produce too much information for our readers at certain points of our own drafting.

Retrofitting Jaya into the ashram led to a chain reaction

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I had expected that the deep revisions to my previously published novels in reaction to the appearance What’s Left would apply only to the ones related to Cassia’s father.

I was wrong, once again. I blame Cassia, by the way.

She had led me to present a more unified set of hippie novels and bring them more into the present. Now she wanted me to do something similar to my remaining works.

I could connect two more books through the character of Jaya. She was the center of my book that leads into the Pacific Northwest. By shifting her spiritual identity from Sufi to yogi, I could then weave her into the yoga novel, in effect creating a two-part series.

How would that work?

It all depended, I sensed, on the yoga novel. She would have to become one of the eight resident followers of the guru.

The obvious one, Swami’s right-hand disciple, was male. That shift would throw off the balance of having half of the followers being male and the other half, female. In addition, the interaction with Jaya and the guru, a female, would lack a basic tension.

Having Swami be a woman, as mine was, had presented a hurdle for many of my potential readers. The ashram was rogue enough as it was.

The gender change allowed for a more credible – and colorful – character. It also had a ripple effect through the rest of the cast.

In the end, the book had a new title and some renamed and otherwise altered characters while now leading organically into a series. Just where does she go when she leaves the ashram? You got it.

~*~

Finding the artwork that now graces the cover was a boost. Maybe it even prompted another sweep through the story to enhance the humor.

Much had happened in the yoga world in the time since I drafted the story and eventually published it. Many of the new religion organizations in America – and I’ll include yoga, despite the usual protests – had suffered serious scandals, either monetary or sexual. At least I had avoided that by keeping my story to a single day.

Bit by bit, I learned some of what happened after I had moved on. A chance encounter in a central Pennsylvania diner with one of the figures, who was waitressing on a very busy day, revealed one disturbing schism. Later, through the Internet, I heard from several key players from my residency and learned I hadn’t been ostracized, after all, but the operation had undergone a serious upheaval shortly before Swami’s death. And then I had some long phone calls with the figure who had been in the role Jaya subsumed in the revised novel. The relationship wasn’t exactly as I had assumed – or anyone else, as far as I can see. On top of that, a former girlfriend finally told me of her mistreatment when she visited. There were other dark sides I hadn’t suspected.

Repeatedly, they agreed that I was at the ashram during its glorious apogee. I missed later conflicts that erupted when the locals decided the place was a cult or events I see as fatal changes in direction, especially in terms of guru worship.

~*~

With the focus on Jaya and what she gained from her experiences on the yoga farm, I’m spared from going into an expose of a marginal spiritual community. For me, the time was a major turning point in my life, leading me to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, which to my surprise had been the faith of my ancestors.

I still believe as a nation, we could be doing much, much better. Something more like what I see in the Biblical Kingdom of God on earth.

Yoga had been a stretch for me. My preference would have been for Zen Buddhist, had a teacher appeared. Instead, this American woman in a pink jump suit came across my path. It still seems surreal.  In my hippie novels, it’s Tibetan Buddhist.

A good friend who had been an Episcopal nun had her own insights on monastic life, with many overlaps to what I had experienced. I’ve long been fascinated by American Shakers, too. More recently I’ve added Greek Orthodox examples and mysticism to the mix. And, curiously, my most “hippie” identity or fullness came during those years on the yoga farm.

There are lessons I’ve carried through life, but I should also acknowledge potentially damaging instances, including things that came up in therapy years later. My denial of emotions, especially.

Novels about yoga are surprisingly few. As touchstones for his book, I’ll instead cite non-fiction: Anagarika Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, collected writings of Swami Sivananda. Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, and stray bits by and about Murshid Samuel Lewis, and Kathleen Norris’ Cloister Walk, for a Christian parallel. Surprisingly, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha left me cold.

 

Acid test novelist: Nikos Kazantakis (1883-1957)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Another recent addition to my elite list is the master best known for Zorba the Greek, though the protagonist’s name was rendered into English incorrectly – it should be Zorbas.

Inclined toward big, knotty books, Kazantakis tackled the upheavals of post-World War II Greek culture, a volatile realm even before The Last Temptation of Christ, his most controversial novel.

My favorite, though, is The Fratricides, centered on the struggles of an out-of-favor Orthodox priest in an impoverished village as he and it are drawn into the crushing vise of civil war itself.

As I’ve welcomed Greek perspectives into my awareness – befitting the element in my novel What’s Left – I appreciate his contention that Greece is neither West nor East, a place where Eastern instinct is reconciled with Western reason. Or, in his novels, logic is pitted against emotion.

I’m in no position to argue whether his language reflects the peasants he met in his travels around Greece, but in translation, it feels large-boned and sure-footed.

Taking the subway to now

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Damn Cassia! She even tore apart my first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers.

A lot had happened in the nearly three decades since the book was first published – and even more since it was first conceived in 1973. Gee, that’s more than a half a century.

As I came back to the story after the release of What’s Left, my first task was to bring the tale more in line with the rest of the series, starting with the name of the lead character. Kenzie was an advance over the hippie-era Duma Luma, which rather echoed Wavy Gravy of Woodstock renown. His earlier legacy of being a lama reincarnated in Iowa was also downplayed if not entirely erased. Besides, there had been reports of such things actually happening since my book was first published. I have no idea how they turned out, either.

Another big job involved changing the original structure of short present-tense chapters flashing against past-tense ones, like subway trains passing in opposite directions. It was a creative touch but quickly confused the reader. A more conventional chronological-order storyline took its place.

That was accompanied by a new plot based on Kenzie’s monthly trips down to Manhattan to study with his Tibetan Buddhist guru in a tenement on the Lower East Side. That development added a handful of other devotees to the characters and realigned any who had previously existed.

Some of the Tibetan details now reflected tales I had heard from a more recent friend who was studying to become a Buddhist nun. Never mind that her experiences came decades after his or that there might not have been a Rinpoche residing anywhere near the Big Apple. Rival yogis, however, were plentiful.

Tibetans by the early 21st century? Our favorite dining option in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a Nepali restaurant that featured momos, a steamed dumpling staple in Tibet, too. The owners and staff were quite honored when an authentic Buddhist Rinpoche dropped in and approved of their dishes.

My, I have lived in a changing world. When’s the last time you even saw a subway token, by the way?

The freewheeling hippie-era fantasies of my book were soon followed by some creepy downsides. Hitchhiking out on the open road had turned sinister. Subway surfers, seeking the thrill of riding atop the cars in the tunnels and on the elevated lines above the street, were being decapitated and worse or worse by immovable objects in their trajectory. And the onset of homelessness during the Reagan years created whole villages surviving underground, as Jennifer Toth reported in her book The Mole People: Life in the tunnels under New York City, which was published just four years after my novel.

In addition, Long Island Newsday had assigned a columnist, Jim Dwyer, to its new subways beat, leading to a nonfiction book, Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York Subways, which came out only a year after mine. Now that’s some tough competition. No wonder I didn’t hear from him after sending him a comp copy for review when my book came off the press.

By that time, though, I was living an hour-plus north of Boston and entering a time of my life when I’d be riding its MBTA trains about once a week – perhaps a thousand fares one way and back with girlfriends and later family on my visits. Familiarity with underground mass transit hasn’t lessened my fascination.

Still, since Subway Hitchhikers had been about hippies, I had to admit they had largely fallen into disrepute or self-denial. But that’s not how the book stands now, something that’s reflected in its current title, Subway Visions; Along the tubes to nirvana.

As for today? Here I was, with my fascination with subway systems, asking my favorite lifeguard about her experiences in Boston during her freshman year of college. She must have been taking the cute little cars of the Green Line, right?

Instead, she emphatically told me how disgusting they are, miserable on hot days and packed at peak hours – and, especially, the fellow passenger, an utter stranger, who puked on her feet in sandals.

I didn’t dare show her my book after that.

Acid test novelist and critic: Nicholson Baker (1957- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You can add Baker to my elite circle of treasured novelists who began publishing after I graduated from college.

Start with his ability to look in depth where others haven’t gone – the phrase “literary microscopy” fits him to a T. Sometimes what he investigates is right in front of us, perhaps an escalator in an office building or a thermometer for a daughter’s baby bottle or a common book of matches on a sequence of icy winter mornings. Other times his focus is on portent issues in world affairs like Human Smoke in the buildup to World War II, the outbreak of Covid-19, where he was the first, in “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” to argue the coronavirus was manmade and spread by accident, or the destruction of paper archives in major libraries.

I like the way he generally alternates a volume of fiction with another of nonfiction before returning to fiction, works of originality and high quality in either vein. As a craftsman, he’s impeccable, whether with 250-word sentences that flow seamlessly or fiction that’s footnoted. He writes with cool passion and an irrepressible conscience, even in the three volumes of erotica that led the New York Times magazine to dub him the Mad Scientist of Smut.

My favorite novel is The Everlasting Story of Nory, where nothing seems to happen in the first 50 pages, befitting the thoughts and expectations of a nine-year-old girl spending a year with her parents in England. Brace yourself for the tension that follows, though.

When an interlude becomes pivotal

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Rather than being a retreat to the hills, as I initially saw the period between her future father’s leaving Daffodil after college and his return a few years later, I now see him undergoing a major slow-motion transformation amid frenetic surroundings.

For him and for me, this was a personal High Hippie time, pro and con, no longer a mere interlude to a landing somewhere in the future but a rich mix of its own.

And now, thanks to the daughter, Cassia, I had a better sense of where the larger story was headed.

Before writing and publishing my novel What’s Left, I had depicted his situation in two parallel volumes – Hippie Drum and Hippie Love – one full of near misses when it came to new love, while the other (R-rated) more often connected.

As I returned the drawing board with Cassia standing beside me, I had to admit the dual presentation was a luxury that did nothing to advance the overarching story. The two conflicting books, while beginning and ending at the same points, ultimately confused the reader. Still, it was a valuable experiment for me to file away. Thanks, Cassia.

Reuniting them into one book was a bigger challenge than you’d think. Finding the right tone, verb tense, and balance were only a start. More clearly profiling Kenzie’s country and in-town circles plus his workplace required another big effort.

If I ever do another novel, I don’t want more than four or five characters, if that. (Fat chance.)

~*~

Helpfully, What’s Left now gave me a clearer sense of Cassia’s aunt Nita as a central figure. Only a year older than Cassia’s future father, she now expanded from being his guardian angel, as she was in Daffodil Uprising, into something more of a magnet and Wise Woman who came and went as needed as he underwent crucial encounters, many of them emotionally painful.

~*~

In my revisions to what now stands as Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, I also wanted a better integration into the urban parallel to Kenzie’s life at the time, the subway novel, which would undergo its own thorough reconstruction.

My own job hours at the time would have been too constrained to allow the escapes to the Big Apple that I compress into Kenzie’s timeline. I didn’t even have a two-day weekend – only Sunday off after a late Saturday night, and then Wednesday; four of my days I had to be at the office by 5 or 6:30 in the morning, and it was brutal. In one of my later career positions, however, I did have a floating three-day weekend, which I adapted to Kenzie’s situation. Once every month he could head off somewhere, which soon became jaunts to New York City.

Another thread that I strengthened was his introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and subsequent growth in its practice, giving him a good reason to be heading off to the big city as often as possible.

~*~

In the years after moving from Binghamton, the scene of the action, and off to the ashram and beyond, I lost touch with all but one person from that period. Well, make that two, but he was an older sports editor who had nothing to do with the hippie scene. The other was a former girlfriend where the parting had been mutual.

As for the rest? I wondered where they all went, though I’ve even forgotten most of their real names. Why couldn’t I have been more snide, like calling a character “fat, stinky Frank” or “gaunt Ellen”? Nicknames were only a move in that direction.

As I revised, though, I now had the Internet at my fingertips.

Satellite maps allowed me to see that two – and maybe all three – of my housing sites there had been demolished. (I’m wondering whether I even tried driving past them in my calls on the newspaper editor when I was with the features syndicate. I don’t recall.)

And then a few ghosts from my past reconnected, first from the ashram years – I hadn’t been ostracized after all – and then my former housemate in upstate New York, the one who forms the basis for Drummer in the story.

He event came up with his wife for a visit in Dover. It was about time I met her. She was a much better fit for him that the Latina who commanded his devotion in the book. (I couldn’t invent a character like her out of thin air, by the way. She really was a center of attention in any room we shared.)

Back in the day, he had gloried in a full naturally blonde Afro back in the day, only now it was shaved bald. His smile and intensely blue Nordic eyes were the same, along with his eternally goofy outlook on life, but that chrome dome was disconcerting.

It was time to catch up.

“Did Jnana really have long hair?” my elder stepdaughter asked.

“Oh yes,” came the reply.

Somehow that was enough to get one of my younger generation to relent from their vow to kill me if mine grew out again.

“If you’re writing hippie novels, you might as well look the part,” she conceded. So I got their permission to grow a ponytail. Maybe she was just tired of what was called a combover for the balding.

He also filled me in on some of mutual friends. One was an OB-GYN in inner-city Philadelphia. Another, a federal attorney in upstate New York. Yet another was a functionary for the United Nations. And the biggest lover of the lot had settled down to raise a large family while working as a social services executive. So much for one of my hippie circles.

I even found a girlfriend, via a Chicago Tribune photo and story, who remembered very little of the time and only vaguely pictured me. She had been much more of a presence in my life, even at our distance, than I was in hers, it turned out. I had even hoped she’d be The One.

In fleshing out the characters in my pages, I now had a second Summer of Love to draw on as well as related experiences. I could ask people about their own hippie identities, and many of the thoughts filled earlier posts here at the Red Barn.

While connecting the dots for one figure whose account to me had never neatly added up, I broke out weeping. Signs of adolescent abuse were abundant. I suspect one of her teachers as a villain, but have no proof, of course. Is he even still alive?

As for the others?

Let’s be honest. We freaks weren’t as close as we’d like to think. I hate to consider that the despised fraternity brothers of college may have had the more solid connection.

So what did happen to those who shared the farmhouse? And most of the lovers?

Not that I’m thinking they’d make another novel. Not unless a unique structure surfaced, say something like postcards.

Acid test diarist: Ned Rorem (1923-2022)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The first I became aware of Rorem was, I believe, through the Paris Review, possibly set as some very wild topography. Oh, the possibilities it presented!

Over the years, Rorem became a classical music composer I knew of vaguely rather than directly. I may have even heard a few of his songs in recital. And then, in Dover, I was gifted his Paris Diaries one Christmas.

Baring his private scribblings to the public did lead to some notoriety for their candor, even snideness, much of it about celebrities in the contemporary fine arts world, yet the gossip also reveals much about himself, intentionally and otherwise.

Wandering through the broken pedestals in Rorem’s pages has been a guilty pleasure for many. These days it can be seen as a history, too.

In the revisions, the plot of our shooter’s college years ominously thickened

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, in writing, at least, starting at the end and moving forward is the way to go. Now that I had What’s Left as the ending of my hippie series, I could revise the earlier books to provide a more uniform development. I had hoped the process would involve simple tweaks.

I was wrong. A thorough overhaul was ahead.

Crucially, Cassia gave me a clearer idea of her father, the aspiring photographer. And in filling him out in the revisions, he went from being known simply as DL to Kenzie, to conform with What’s Left as well as present a more substantial figure.

She had also grown up at the edge of the campus where he had come to study. (Just as I had.) In my return to the university as a research associate, I lived at the far fringe of the college town and saw faces of the community that were quite different from my undergrad experiences.

Some of these played into her story, What’s Left, but others were woven into the transformation of his undergraduate years, what would emerge as Daffodil Uprising rather than Sunrise.

This time, it was more character-driven rather than action.

It’s also darker, including an ominous air and an admission that the hippie movement was often drab rather than psychedelic. Drugs and sex could have serious downsides, and Vietnam weighed heavily on the spirit.

Yes, Bloomington was a gloomier place than I had wanted to paint it, but now, thanks to Cassia, I could acknowledge Gothic and tragic sides – even a paranormal streak.

The plot was restructured into a full four-year chronology, and the hippiedelic excesses, as well as Kenzie’s situation of being a reincarnated Tibetan monk, were toned down or erased.

Age differences, from freshmen to seniors, took importance in the nurture of a student community. And there were significant new characters, including Lee Madbury, named after a New Hampshire highway exit sign.

The college dorm of the first half of the book was loosely modeled on the Men’s Residence Center, which was suffering from neglect on high. I am happy to see via Internet that what I call Mulberry Row in the book has been renovated into the Ralph L. Collins Living-Learning Center, one that’s not all males, either. Sometimes hard reality follows the dreams of fiction.

In moving the second half of the book more off-campus, I imported a large and once-impressive Victorian apartment house from my upstate New York hippie experience after I had graduated. Instead of having the Susquehanna (as well as the Upper Mississippi from yet another one of my personal relocations) just a block or so away, we now have the Ohio River. The distances do create a bit of a joke for folks closer to the action.

I originally thought Daffodil was about hippies. It’s really about the rise of the modern mega-university. David and Goliath with a dash of counter-culture in the face of the military-industrial complex. Really sexy stuff, right? Except that our kids and grandkids are burdened with huge debts in the aftermath of seeking its credentials. I’m thinking of it more as tragedy, with the focus essentially on Cassia’s future father, lost as he was. It might even be seen as a critique of the hippie outbreak. And did my failed engagement a decade and a half later also seep into the story? I was now looking at these events about a half a century later.

~*~

Cassia also gave me a clearer understanding of her aunt, Nita, who had functioned as guardian angel for her father in the campus years. In the revisions, Nita becomes a more central thread through the entire series.

And, thanks to What’s Left, Cassia was freed to comment on her father’s college years life. Why not? She had the advantage that looking back that history allows.

~*~

Cassia even had me adding subtitles to my novels. They’re commonly used for nonfiction, but somehow rarely for fiction. Well, why not? Adding “the making of a hippie” does give a browser (meaning a human rather than an online device) a clearer idea of what might be inside the covers. Should I have used that for the title, rather than what I did?

I do like the colorful batik flowerbed by MsMaya that now adorns the cover, even if I miss the bold single daffodil of the earlier version. To me, it more aptly conveys a sense of the era.

Daffodil The revised story now carries more heft and is, to my eyes, something of a baroque book.

Well, if Kerouac thought his experiences were remarkable, why shouldn’t I, looking at my own? And he did write in big bursts that released a lot of pent-up energy.