Tag: Literature

Acid test translator and poet: Robert Alter (1935- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After reading Jewish authors complain about mistranslated passages from the Hebrew Bible, I welcome Hebrew scholar Alter’s thorough translation with an eye and ear for its innate literary qualities. A fine poet himself, Alter’s sensitive three volumes (including notes and footnotes that illuminate the working of puns and other devices) have become my go-to version in referencing passages and stories. The big and beautifully designed volumes are (1) the Five Books of Moses, (2) the Prophets, and (3) the Writings (Psalms and Proverbs, for instance).

Also of note are his The Art of Biblical Poetry and The Art of Biblical Narrative, examinations that challenge many earlier Biblical scholars’ contentions. I find both books to be excellent presentations of the craft of writing (and reading) both poetry and literary prose even apart from their Biblical subject.

Acid test novelist and poet: Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Fairy tales for adults. That’s what I first thought on encountering Brautigan weeks after I graduated from college. More accurately, playful children’s stories for young adults of a hippie leaning.

With his surrealistic or perhaps warped vision taking a simple voice, and his fondness of simile and imagery, his was a unique voice that amused many of us and annoyed many others.

Trout Fishing in America barely touched on fishing of any sort. Confederate General at Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar were about, well, shyness and innocence as much as anything.

His usually very short poems were mousetraps of longing and loss.

Their freshness still beat 99 percent of the literature that surrounded them.

If only his sweet sadness weren’t soured by the pressures of success.

When passion gets terribly tangled

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever been in a committed relationship, only to be struggling against what you later learn was a triangle? The third party doesn’t even have to be another person, for that matter, but secrecy does tip the balance.

The desire was still there and burning, hoping for reconciliation and renewal. Just don’t call yourself a victim, OK? Not as long as you were actively engaged in the scene.

As for the evidence? In hearing your side, who knows what was factual or imagined, other than the reality of your feelings.

Move on, then, with the memories. Don’t say it wasn’t love, especially of an adolescent sort. Or maybe even your first time.

Having originally appeared in Thistle Finch editions, this collection is now available on your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.

The move makes the poems available to a wider range of readers worldwide.

Do take a look.

Acid test poet: Philip Whalen (1923-2008)

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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

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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)

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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

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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)

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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

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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- )

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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.