Tag: Literature

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.

And then ‘What’s Left’ came into focus and changed everything before it

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

By the time the ebooks were published, I had remarried and settled into our little city farm on the New Hampshire seacoast, the one with the red barn that gives this blog its name. My life had stabilized and my job wasn’t devouring me alive, unlike my previous lower-level management positions.

But something kept nagging at me. I wanted to know just where the hippie movement had gone. Many of the insights have been posted here at the Red Barn, and I did draft a series of essays – Hippie Hopscotch – for a book competition that was cancelled after I sent my entry off. My conclusion is that the hippie impact is still around in many varied streams, much of the legacy taken for granted in contrast to the mass-media stereotypes or the current teens’ perception of hippie as being a girl thing. My wife and stepdaughters kept asking about the era and were astounded to hear just how much had changed for the better because of it. They were incredulous at the restrictions I had faced. Were things really as bad as Mad Men presented them? Yes, and the show had me retasting the first newspaper I worked for, the one that came closest to major metro. I mean, I could almost smell it.

Could any of this earlier work be salvaged? And what could I do with the searing childhood betrayal piece published online in Hobart?

My first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers, had ended with Kenzie’s return to Indiana. Intuitively, I had him, as a Tibetan Buddhist lama reincarnated into Iowa, marrying into a Greek-American family in Daffodil. I saw it as a way of blending two streams of ancient wisdom – one Asian, the other at the origins of Western culture. Something still felt incomplete in that ending.

Rather than trying to pick up the story with Kenzie himself two decades later, I decided to shift the focus to the next generation, which led me to create a daughter. This would be her story. As an added twist, I decided to have her lose him, not to divorce but an avalanche in the Himalayas, when she was just 11.

Unlike my earlier fiction, this one was undertaken totally in my retirement years. Yes, I had the ending of Hitchhikers as my prompt – and, based on that, some characters and a setting to work from – but this book would be done with fewer external demands than I’d faced in working on the others in my “spare” time.

Surprisingly, this became the hardest of all to bring to fruition, undergoing nine thorough revisions. In one version, there were no quotation marks. Another changed the tenses.

No quotation marks? Since she was relating the story anyway, including what other people had told her, who knows how accurately she repeated them. Blame Cormac McCarthy as a bad influence there. It was one flash of brilliant inspiration that ultimately proved confusing. Now, how many quotation marks did I eliminate in one sweep and how many did I have to insert as repairs? Both times, it involved a lot of keystrokes.

The focus shifted greatly, too.

At first, it was on what she uncovered about her father and his times. He was a hippie, after all, so we would see the hippie scene through her perceptions of his photographic record of people and events. In the next revision the focus turned to what had attracted him to join her extended family, one so different from his own roots. That led me to questions of just what a family is – a pretty slippery concept in today’s America – and then an examination of Greek-American culture in the Midwest itself. Finally, the focus was entirely on her, period, starting with her stages of adolescent grieving and emotional recovery.

I was a bit spooked when she began talking to me through my fingers as I was typing. She was snarky, too. Talking? She was dictating. Even scarier, she sounded a tad like my younger stepdaughter.

And it wasn’t just when I was up in my third-floor lair. Sometimes she talked to me while I was swimming laps or weeding the garden.

At some point this was no longer about a distant past, in her eyes at least, even when those roots impacted the present and its conflicts. By now, I was watching her grow up with each revision as she gained a snide, seemingly cynical tone and a goth appearance. I wish I had answers or at least advice for where she and her generation of the family wind up at the end of the book, but we do know what their options are.

The book also evolved into a multigenerational affair, reaching back to her great-grandparents and later jumping ahead to her nieces and nephews within a large, tightly knit extended family.

How to structure this baffled me until I came upon the way Jonathan Lethem handled a multigenerational novel that built on four sections of four chapters each, like a mosaic. Mine has five generations at play, once you include Cassia’s nieces and nephews, but the structure holds. Somehow it works differently than the traditional chronology of twenty-some chapters.

One of the 16 chapters, the subway ride to the Brooklyn art museum and its Tibetan galleries, comes from a lengthy outtake from a Hitchhikers draft, this time two or three decades later with Cassia, the daughter, rather than her father.

I should also admit that the title remained elusive. One I liked, Cassia’s Quest, got shot down for sounding more like a space journey. Another, in desperation, Diana’s Daughter pushed Kenzie out of range. What’s Left results as a double entendre, addressing both her situation and the manuscript itself.

Finding a suitable cover image was equally challenging. I liked a failing egg yoke as a reference to her being broken open and to her family’s restaurant. Photos of a grieving child or young woman never quite fit the physical description in the text itself and also failed to reflect the span from early adolescence into her 30s.

~*~

The project also had me reconsidering my own experiences.

Was I really ever a hippie? In my promotions for the novels, I contended that we came in all varieties and nobody fully fit the stereotype. That was, in fact, a central thrust of my novels, even when hippies are nowhere to be found, as was the case in Hometown News.

In the background, the local Greek Orthodox church opened the faith and culture to my curiosity. As I’ve discussed in posts here at the Red Barn, what I encountered was quite different from my Quaker simplicity but definitely enriched it, not just theologically but as in the traditional dancing, music, and food.

It was a good thing that I didn’t encounter the novels of the masterful Jeffrey Eugenides until after What’s Left had been published. I would have been too intimidated otherwise.

In addition to Jonathan Lethem, writers of inspiration during this project included Poppie Z. Bright, Anne Rice, and John Irving.

~*~

Not only was this the most difficult of my novels to writer, with deep revisions, but the central character, the snarcastic Cassia, had me rethinking everything that had gone before. She ordered me to revise the earlier books. Or else?

One of the advantages of ebooks is that new versions can be published rather easily. In this case, as you’ll see, she had my hippie books getting new titles, many characters getting new names, and many of the stories themselves being vastly enhanced.

All from what I jokingly called my culminating novel.

And that was before I returned to the others.

Here I had finally found myself in my goal of being free from the newsroom and having time to focus more fully on my “serious” writing. I just didn’t imagine it like this.

I still held a fondness for the hippie movement and its hopes but could clearly admit I had moved on. That part was liberating.

I’m still looking for that better world, though, as you know.

So here I was, back to the drawing board.

Finally, I turned the camera on the newsroom

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My novel about small-market journalism originated as an experiment on my first PC, an off-brand back in the days before hard drives or the Internet. In this case, I decided to build a book as a series of variations on a theme relying on a template chapter that I then copied and pasted for development. Set in a newsroom, each day was the next day’s edition but sampled months down the road. Some of you may think of the movie Groundhog Day, but that was still seven years in the future. The key to the book’s development was a set of seemingly random search-and-replace possibilities I then ran through the manuscript – on both of the 5.25-inch floppy disks that were required for the full book. Other variations required physical input, one by one. Either way, think of Mad Libs with seemingly random repetitions popping up like loose threads through the entire tale.

The basis, of course, was a composite of several of the newspapers where I had worked. By extension, it could also represent offices anywhere, but I found myself thinking about how little we usually know about our coworkers. Often, it doesn’t go much deeper than a phrase they repeat all the time or a piece of their favorite clothing or some annoying habit they have. It was enough to sketch each of them through the rounds of the book.

And then I put it aside to season before tackling it again.

When I returned afresh, I had to admit that the variations were insufficient. The loops were, uh, loopy. By then, the revision was turning into a kind of paint-by-numbers to flesh out the bones.

The tale still needed more work. So much for my pioneering experiment with A.I.

~*~

Hometown News did take my fiction in a fresh direction. It wasn’t exactly countercultural, for one thing. And it took place largely within a workplace, with day-to-day drudgery many people might identify with or at least recognize.

While Kenzie in my hippie novels labored as a photographer on his campus newspaper and then on a small-town daily chronicle, he did move on to higher pursuits once he married. In contrast, when my savings ran out, I was back in the newsroom.

Another surprise as I look back. This manuscript was also in the works before my Baltimore sabbatical big writing spree opened.

I have memories of jotting down notes while driving Interstate 95 between sales calls in Connecticut. My time on the road and in motels left me plenty of opportunity for uninterrupted thinking.

Even with TV shows like Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore, the public had little idea of what really happens in a newsroom. At the time, the job carried some prestige, if not outright fear.

There was an adage that every newsman had a novel waiting to be born, and there was the cliché of the crusading reporter battling corruption and crime. Even Clark Kent and Lois Lane of Daily Planet renown. Mine wouldn’t be anything like those. The villains weren’t politicians or mobsters but, in the ultimate view, capitalism itself. And here I was, cheering for small, local enterprise.

For me, what emerged is the most problematic of my published novels, yet one of the most fertile. It certainly has the darkest humor and a large dose of dystopia.

I do recall one newspaper editor who candidly admitted to having taken a popular genre novel and essentially written over it to launch his own successful line of commercially published successes. Should I note that the owners of his newspaper also had one of the top book publishing houses in the world? Connections? Don’t discount them. Just don’t think of them as literary success, which I was aspiring to.

Rather than having the high drama of big bad guys somewhere outside of the newspaper company, mine were more insidious. In my experience, though, a more pervasive conflict smoldered behind the scenes within the business itself between the journalists, on one side, and the bean counters and their bottom line of obscenely rich profits, on the other. As the saying went at the time, many newspapers were a means of printing money for their owners. Not that much of it ever got down to the workers.

Let’s just say, too, that some papers were more competitive and innovative than others.

In my job of calling on editors across the Northeast, I heard personal stories that added to my own insights from working within two dailies that had undergone major transformations under inspired leadership, as well as lessons from leading a small paper in the town I call Prairie Depot and some stints elsewhere. Let’s skip the rest of the resume and get on with the book.

It was a world all its own. Or so I thought. And yes, it was set vaguely somewhere in the American Midwest.

Check it out at my Jnana Hodson author page at Smashwords.com.

Acid test essayist and novelist: Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Although she’s famed for her young adult fiction, what I appreciate more is her personal writing reflecting her life with a well-known actor, including the years of hiatus they spent in a 200-year-old farmhouse in Connecticut before they returned to New York City and his acting career.

Her candid reflections on being subject to prejudice from both liberal parties, who shunned her books for their religious content, and from conservative Christians, who avoided them for their universalism, speak of a painful reality for those of us who embrace a radical, even revolutionary, faith.

A devout Episcopalian, she mentions deep discussions with Chase, who turns out not just to be the father of a fine friend of mine but also a rector of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan. My friend has mentioned babysitting her grandchildren in her apartment several floors above his family’s.

 

More than volcanic ash spewed out from my days in the Pacific Northwest

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Stephen King has advised novelists to have only one Big Idea in a book, but I came across that way too late to put it into practice. (Maybe if I ever tackle another novel?)

As I hunkered down in my self-imposed sabbatical in Baltimore – or was it self-incarceration or even cloistered? I did little else – my attention eventually turned to a more recent span of my life than the Kenzie novels covered. It was time to consider my nearly ten years of marriage and its breakup. If only I really knew how to star in it.

I thought that this next book would be about the most heavenly time and place imaginable, but as I typed and would eventually see, the real story was about a deeply troubled marriage, with me holding the debris after it blew up and a whirlwind romance afterward left me in a fog where I was.

So courtship, marriage, and relationship per se were one big subject. (Idea, in King’s expression, feels too refined.)

The other was the Pacific Northwest as seen from the other side of the Cascade mountains in Washington state, a land that is essentially desert rather than rainy gray Seattle.

One was something many people had some familiarity with, but the other was what I found more enticing as a writer. Besides, I had written many landscape poems I could draw from. Swami’s insight from her first visit to India, that the reason Hinduism had so many gods was a reflection of the ways each locale had a distinct vibe. The Yakima Valley and the Cascades were unlike anything I had experienced in the eastern half of the U.S. Especially the vast spaces you never see in a movie or read about in a book. And there I was with my new bride.

My inner drive was to better understand – and remember – the events leading up to what I thought was near perfection, my Promised Land. Except that it all blew up after four heady years, and we retreated eastward in haste. Now, six years later, I was trying to make sense of everything, and writing is my primary tool of thought.

One big hurdle was that I still had too many unresolved issues to provide clarity on the relationship struggles. I couldn’t see that the darling I thought every reader would find fascinating was, in a wider view, dislikable.

The plot – and the manuscript – kept growing by the proverbial pound.

Baltimore for me was so many lonely nights broken periodically by sex that wasn’t with my beloved. The whirlwind who came after the marriage. The one others have called my one true love. If only she had been true.

~*~

I really should go back to my journals to get a clearer sense of what I was going through both as I drafted it and also during its revisions. I suspect the reality would be painful, even embarrassing, and as I write this, those volumes are wrapped in plastic under the house renovation. Maybe that’s for the better.

What was I even originally calling the manuscript?

What coalesced for me was the many dimensions of the word “promise,” including the wedding vow, potential, and what I saw as our Promised Land. And then I had the flash of ending the book on a shocking note.

Well, so had much of my life.

I suspect that I spent far more effort than I’ve thought on the novel that now stands as Nearly Canaan.

Somehow, I even had a round with a real literary agent, who ultimately passed on the project.

During later revisions in New Hampshire, the big blob of material I had in hand turned into three parallel volumes – Promise, Peel (as in apple), and St. Helens in the Mix. And I was wondering about my subsequent engagement and the young woman I thought was a perfect subject for later. (I now see how banal that would have been.)

Would the project have been any easier if I had all the facts rather than empty denials and evasions? What if I had steered this more into the fantasy realm, perhaps having the earth magically speak directly to Jaya? Or broken it into a sequence of short books, each with a sharper focus?

A very bruised journalist, alas, was still at the helm, one still engaged in a difficult, painful exile and trying to report on the facts before me.

~*~

I’m trying to recall books and authors I was reading at the time, especially ones that might have nurtured this project. What comes to mind are Ann Tyler (I can smell the back entry of some homes in her Roland Park section of Baltimore); the Random House Vintage Contemporaries series edited by Gary Fisketjon and writers like Jay McInerney (Ransom more than Bright Lights, Big City) and Tama Janowitz; beyond that, Larry McMurtry, Tom Robbins, and Joan Didion; as well as Calvin Trillin’s U.S. Journal letters from here or there in the New Yorker. I also had John Nichols (Milagro Beanfield Wars), Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion), Edward Abbey, and Ecotopia.

~*~

Promise came out as an ebook at Smashwords but went nowhere. Rather than pay for covers for two companion volumes, I released them as PDF freebies at my Thistle Finch imprint, only to find nobody was downloading anything that big. Ditto for the full-length poetry collections. There would be a major refocusing of the offerings.

Recalling some favorite magazines

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As an editor and a writer, I’ve long been inspired by a stream of classy, glossy magazines with outstanding illustrations and design supporting sharply edited, masterful writing.

In this category, I’m skipping over purely literary periodicals, even the ones with deep pockets, as well as newsweeklies and many other kinds of magazines.

The ones I’ve admired, as I’m seeing now, all reflected a single editor’s voice and vision, not that I remember all of their names now. Maybe that’s for another Tendril.

For now, here’s what I mean.

  1. The New Yorker. The writing and editing, of course. I was captivated way back in high school – the staff of the Hilltopper even gave me a year’s subscription when we graduated – and still a delight in my retirement, maybe even more, in its current direction. Still, there’s no way to keep up. I should mention, in passing, its assiduous fact checkers, a vexation for many famed writers.
  2. Fortune, back when it was big and classy. Big? The pages were large, like 10 or 11 inches by 12 or 13 inches deep — often on high quality paper, and each issue was fat and thoughtful. Artists were commissioned to create portfolios, with authors to match. It definitely reflected wealth and luxury, unlike other business publications, which often felt pinched. And then the U.S. Postal Service began charging extra for oversize mailings, leading many magazines to shrink their formats. Titles like Life, Look, and Vogue lost their impact, and photographers, especially, took a hit.
  3. New York. Originating as the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune, this one took off on its own in 1968 after the newspaper’s demise. Brash and definitely connected to everyday life on Manhattan streets, it was an avatar of New Journalism and Push Pin graphics. Still has that cutting edge.
  4. Esquire. By the late ‘60s this former cheesecake vehicle had evolved into a champion of New Journalism and high-impact graphics. Some of the covers remain classic. More recently, Vanity Fair continued in that vein until its solid content evaporated in a demographic desert.
  5. Evergreen Review. Another of the late ‘60s blossoms, this one had a West Coast perspective, openly leftist leanings, and literary ambitions, including Beat poets. Its cartoon serial “Phoebe Zeitgeist” became an underground cult item of a scandalous sort.
  6. Playboy. As a matter of candor, consider its now-classic interviews, plus the fiction, and, yes, the cartoons, a nearly extinct venue these days. The photography was often masterful, no matter the content. The editor in this case did go on to become a pathetic caricature of himself, reflecting the vapid “philosophy” he was espousing.
  7. GEO. This hip German-based alternative to the National Geographic debuted in 1976, distinctive for its green-bordered covers, trend-catching photography, and progressive topics and awareness. The English editions blossomed and then trickled from sight. Much of it, like the international hippie roots it reflected, looks dated today.
  8. New England Monthly. Published from 1984 to 1990, it was an epitome of ambitious, sophisticated, city- and region-based magazines that flourished during the decade. It ran into an identity problem when big advertisers wanted a Greater Boston focus, while important regional issues spilled over into western Massachusetts and Cape Cod as well as Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, where subscribers existed. The final edition featured a devasting account of the high-level executive arrogance regarding the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire led to its corporate bankruptcy, rather than the commonly blamed regulations and enraged environmental protests. After revenue shortfalls shuttered the magazine, some of its writers went on to stardom.
  9. Elle. This upstart to established fashion bastions Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar was actually founded in 1945 in Paris as a newspaper supplement but came to prominence with a monthly American edition in 1969. Propelled by Gilles Bensimon’s inspired, fresh, even exciting photography and sharp page layouts that delivered in tight spaces, there was no mistaking this entry from its rivals. Another upstart, Sassy, a feminist teen platform aimed at well-healed Seventeen, lacked gloss and polish but sizzled on editor Jane Pratt’s brilliant assignments from 1988 to 1996, when it finally succumbed to a longstanding boycott by an evangelical women’s organization. As a former lifestyles editor, I found Pratt to be most refreshing.
  10. Harper’s. These days, it rules the roost for me. Its monthly index of seeming random statistics and trends, toward the beginning of each issue, even provided inspiration for these weekly Tendrils.

Acid test novelist: Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I first encountered his writing during the fall of 1968 at the recommendation of a friend who was attending a college elsewhere in Indiana, Vonnegut was a breath of fresh air. I loved the sassiness, hipness, and dark humor of books. They had none of the pretentiousness of serious literature but were seriously satirical.

Besides, he was writing about the heartland of the neglected Midwest, at least at one point in each book. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater nails the milieu and remains my favorite.

Overall, though, I feel an overarching nihilism negates a redemptive mission for his work. As for the gimmicks? Let’s just say this former favorite has shrunk in my estimation over the years.