Tag: Literature

Acid test essayist: Joan Didion (1934-2021)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Her dry, acerbic approach to the subjects in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and other writings were invigorating at the time, especially when they reflected the hippie counterculture. I didn’t especially consider it New Journalism, much less its use of novelistic techniques. Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were already there, ahead of her, in my reading.

I didn’t keep up with her output, though, and returning to the early work I now see much that strikes me as dated and shallow. Maybe that’s a consequence of seeing national reporters come briefly into a locality and then write of it as if they have some authority, in contrast to what I know after longer residency.

More recently, reading Where I Was From, the account of her upbringing in central California, I felt her telling was more novelistic than actual nonfiction.

Here’s your chance to get my newest book for free

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

It’s not just a whole different way of looking at religion. It’s about intense life experiences and the ways we talk about them, hoping someone else will understand.

Quite simply, I believe everyone has a “religion,” even atheists. Just listen to ardent sports fans for examples from the secular side of the equation.

My book embraces that universal situation and then turns to the unique spirituality of early Quakers and the ways they used metaphor to guide each other in a revolutionary social transformation. Many of their advances you take for granted, no matter your labels.

Do take a look at my ebook Light Seed Truth at Smashwords.com during its annual July sales sweep. What do you have to lose? Remember, it’s free.

I used to find ‘sale prices’ puzzling

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my mindset, a product or service has a fair-value point. You know, it costs so much to make and distribute, even before factoring in a profit. If you’re selling it at a lower price, why don’t you keep it there all the time? Maybe my outlook reflects the one-price for all practice of Quakers who objected to the upper class who expected to get a discount over the poorer masses.

Beyond that, the concept of bargaining or haggling found in many cultures absolutely repulsed me. I still feel like poor artisans and farmers in those countries are getting cheated or at least cheating themselves.

Either way, I rarely buy much and usually shy away from the more expensive range of items. Quite simply, I’m just not a shopper.

In my two years working as a field representative for a newspaper syndicate, I did finally come to appreciate the need to have something special to motivate a potential buyer. We couldn’t offer “specials,” and in most markets, we no longer had competing newspapers vying for our latest product. It was frustrating. There was nothing to make an editor jump onto our latest comic strip or columnist or game feature, no matter how excellent these were.

In the book publishing industry, free advance reading editions and review copies were sent out in the hopes of creating a buzz, but for digital books, that is a more challenging effort. Giving somebody a coupon to order online just ain’t the same as handing them a paper book.

So just what can an indy author do to get reviews or, better yet, a word-of-mouth buzz?

Welcome to Smashword.com’s big July-long ebook sale, where writers opt to present titles at sharp discount or even free.

Remember, this year I have two recent works available for free and two other new works at half-price.

Check them out at my Jnana Hodson author page! And then look at many of the fine offerings by others, too.

Acid test essayist: Jim Corbett (1933-2001)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Multilayered and deeply personal, Goatwalking: a Guide to Wildland Living is a rich blend of social activism, clandestine adventure, wilderness survival, political resistance, witness for justice, and spiritual growth and grounding.

It’s all based on Corbett’s experiences as a founder of the Sanctuary movement for persecuted Central American refugees. He escorted many of them on foot through the desert from the border to safety within defiant congregations across the Far West. On the trail, he was accompanied by milking goats who provided needed nurture – hence the title.

The book is as a much a journal as a history or social philosophy. As I found related elsewhere, when Corbett first came among Quakers, he knew more about Buddha than Jesus. But then, waiting for his next party to arrive at a remote chapel, he meditated on the crucifix on the wall before him and realized that if anyone could possibly know the terrors his charges had suffered, it was Jesus. Later, working with a dedicated priest, he was treated as an equal in everything but the serving of the eucharist – “I’m a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus,” he was told, “and you’re a member of the Society of Friends,” or Quakers. “What’s the difference?”

His insights are as relevant today as they were when first published.

Consider that bold ‘John Hancock’ on paper

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a writer, I love what alphabet letters and words by themselves can do on paper, apart from any meaning. Just look at one man’s intrepid signature on the Declaration of Independence and try to imagine that document without it.

I used to love visiting a friend who was a professional calligrapher and type designer. This was her life’s work.

Are other writers also inspired by such visual artistry?

The Lilly rare book library at Indiana University puts on exhibits of historic volumes, not just their typography and inside pages but also their bindings, endpapers, and spines. This is part of a legacy every serious writer is indebted to.

In its reading room I delighted in periodicals from the 1700s as well as contemporary poetry broadsides, limited edition prints intended to be framed and displayed on walls or preserved in rich patrons’ collections. Who wouldn’t aspire to see their own work presented as such a creation?

And then there were the psychedelic rock concert posters for the Fillmore back in the 1960s. If words could dance, they certainly do so here.

~*~

Most people are baffled by the wealth that gets doled out to acquire a painting or even a bottle of very old wine. I’m not in their camp, either a collector or a scoffer.

I will, however, declare what some people spend for trendy items they assume will be valuable someday – baseball cards included – is utter folly.

What I will defend is those individuals who spend a fortune to preserve an exalted example of inspiration – and I worry about those who might use possession as an opportunity for ostentatious destruction. Consider the lost Buddhist statues in Afghanistan for the latter.

I raise this out of gratitude for those patrons who preserve examples of excellence.

~*~

While I lament the loss of the craftsmanship involved in the letterpress printing of my early days in journalism, I am recognizing that online design has come a long way in even the last decade. Much of it is truly striking. Still, even as an ebook author and a prolific blogger, I still hold a special place in my heart for fine paper that’s attuned to the words entrusted to it.

That said, what else do you know about Mr. Hancock other than his signature?

Acid test translator and poet: Jerome Rothenberg (1931- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My encounter with Technicians of the Sacred: A range of poems from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceana came about the same time I was taking up yoga in the early ‘70s. This sampler of so-called primitive peoples had a freshness I found stunning. Many of the translations were fragmentary, giving the sense of having just been excavated from an archeological dig. Others reflected my sense of discovery arising from the practice of meditation. These were unlike any poems I had previously encountered, and they altered my writing direction.

Thus, I was immersed in what he called deep image and ethnopoetics before I’d ever heard the terms.

I know it’s not his only book in my library, and I am anticipating looking for the others when we move many of our goods out of storage.

The DLQ adds up

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Q in my DLQ acronym doesn’t stand for Quaker, though it’s not that far off, either. Instead, it’s from Dedicated Laborious Quest, a concept I constructed from Gary Snyder’s Real Work, or life mission. It usually differs from daily employment or a career. Maybe the middle term should have been “labor-intense” or “labor-filled,” we can discuss the subtleties later.

As poet Donald Hall pointed out in his memoir Life Work, our labor falls into three categories: jobs, which we do to earn money; chores, necessary tasks that pay nothing; and work, which can be energizing. In his own case, he realized that when your work coincides with a job, life’s good. For most of us, work is a money-losing activity. More of his thinking along those lines could be found in the Talking Money category at my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog.

In one draft of what would become my novel Nearly Canaan, DLQ was the core of Jaya or her earlier figure’s life, a blend of yoga spirituality (only at that point it was Sufi), an arts engagement, and the altruism of her career. It also came to reflect Kenzie’s journey in the hippie stories, though not so overtly.

It may even be an expression of an individual’s magnetic center in the esoteric philosophy of P.D. Ouspensky. If I interpret this correctly, you have to have something you do with a sustained passion, such as an art or a sport, something that requires daily practice and discipline. Without that foundation, you cannot advance spiritually. Checking up on that, I’m seeing a whole literature on magnetic center in mechanical physics, making me wonder if it’s applicable to Ouspensky’s metaphor, if at all.

This goal isn’t for everyone. As the Bhagavad Gita says, only one in a thousand – or maybe one in a million – pursues it, and out of that, only one in a thousand – or a million – arrives at the summit.

Whatever it is, the yogis at the ashram, Kenzie and his Buddhist buddies, and Jaya all craved it.

~*~

The practice of writing is a big part of my own DLQ, but for a long time I felt vaguely guilty about the amount of time I devoted to it, as if it was a selfish endeavor when I should have been doing something more productive or even more worthwhile. Only after the prayer workshop at New England Yearly Meeting of Friends that one summer, when I was told that writing was a spiritual gift I needed to nurture, did I feel the permission to type away as needed.

My job at the time had me on a four-day workweek, which gave me a three-day weekend after a double-shift on Saturday. Following a suggestion from the workshop, I dedicated one day a week, usually Tuesday, to my writing and revision efforts.

It didn’t seem like that much, frankly, but looking back, I now see that added up to ten weeks a year, plus another two or so of my vacations. For perspective, consider how many people manage to draft a full novel in the month of November as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge.

For me, that time was allocated among fiction, poetry, and nonfiction projects – one of them resulted what became the Talking Money series at the Chicken Farmer blog after a book publisher backed away when a potential coauthor with financial counseling creds failed to mesh into the proposal. Submissions and queries also occupied some of that time.

~*~

It was also time taken away from other parts of my life: from my spouse or significant other, family, travel, hiking or camping, physical exercise, service on city council or a school board, friendships. Even reading got slighted.

From another perspective, I could have devoted it to an overtime shift every week, at time-and-a-half pay, which would have more than covered the mortgage.

~*~

What becomes apparent to me in these reflections is that the DLQ was essential for my sanity. My moves across the country and, for a while, up the management ladder, kept uprooting me, leaving much uncompleted in each place or, at a gut level, undigested. Writing was not only a means of recording highlights and depths before I lost them but also of releasing and letting go of self-imposed obligations to my past, freeing me to more openly face the present.

Acid test novelist: Jeffrey Eugenides (1960- )

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As the 21st century got underway, I was baffled that all of the published contemporary novelists and many of its poets I admired were in place by the time I graduated from college at the beginning of the ‘70s. Where were those my own age or younger?

Yes, the publishing world was in turmoil, but that couldn’t have been the entire problem.

I was also recognizing that my native Midwest, especially as I experienced it in industrial Ohio, went unrepresented – something missing largely from Hollywood presentations as well.

And then, as I discovered Greek-American culture, I was amazed to find how little of that culture, too, existed in public awareness.

The one exception who came to light was Detroit-born Eugenides. And how!

His three novels, each one a unique take on the novel itself, address the previous blanks. For large stretches of the Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, I thought he was talking about Dayton, including the race riots of ’68. The Marriage Plot, meanwhile, looked at Quaker practice in ways that gave me confidence in the Greek-American dimension of my own novel What’s Left.

The man is a master, for sure.

How ‘Pit-a-Pat High Jinks’ came into play

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Indiana wasn’t the only thing bogging down my original subway manuscript. The dude’s life off in the countryside after college was another big complication.

Well, that and my grounding as a journalist, meaning focusing on facts as I observed them, in contrast to writing as a novelist, meaning putting feelings and some imagination first.

Head for the hills, then, as I did by default to upstate New York. I didn’t get there quite as I describe Kenzie’s journey, but the route wasn’t that far off, either. In the story, I’ve kept the location rather vague. It could as easily be pockets of western Connecticut or the Berkshires in Massachusetts or even southern Vermont. Let them blend together.

I was pretty lost in my first year-and-a-half after college, the period leading up to my embrace of yoga. It was a wild ride for me, at the margin of general society; my highs punctuated deep depression. Most of my friends – including housemates and girlfriends – were from The City or its wider orb, and that included short trips with them when my work schedule permitted. (I rarely had two days off in a row, much less three.) And, my, was I green.

For much of that period, my own journalism slash writing career and dreams were going nowhere and paid next to nothing. More troubling, my love life was non-existent, even considering how I had a housemate who came back every night with a different bedmate, all of them delectable in my sight. What was my problem? What was wrong with me? What was I missing?

And then I found yoga and everything changed. Even the romance.

What could possibly be wrong with that story?

Well, it had fed into Subway Hitchhikers, but most of what I had drafted there was eventually excised to focus on the urban dimension of the story.

~*~

During this period, my social life revolved around two locations.

The first was a once luxurious apartment building turned slum at the edge of downtown. I later moved it to Daffodil along the Ohio River far to the west for the college-years novel. Well, many but not all of the renters were college students.

The second encampment was what many people would consider a hippie commune out in the hills, a very rundown farm high in the hillsides along the state line. As I explain in what’s now Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, we shared the expenses but not our incomes. I now think there were some freeloaders anyway.

Both dwellings, from what I see in satellite photos, have been torn down.

And I still believe my two-ring circus there (three, if you include the newspaper where I was employed) was a richer source of characters than, say, Bonanza or the Friends sitcom.

~*~

I’ll have to revisit my journals for clues about how the lode from this period evolved during revisions. When I heard about Smashwords a dozen years after the subway novel had been published, I must have already had two versions of the experience in hand, both drawn from the earlier outtakes augmented by journal entries and correspondence.

They differed sharply in tone and focus.

Hippie Drum was closer to a memoir that focused on the general hippie scene around me. Hippie Love paralleled the chronology but focused on its erotic encounters, with the added twist that our protagonist had far more success in the love department. One was gritty; the other, free-wheelin’ trippy.

In these parallel accounts of the same story line, the first focused on Kenzie’s overall adjustments to being out on his own, adapting to the workplace and his new housemates and a wider underground, freaky community. He was desperate for love but rarely connected. Frankly, much of the hippie life was drab and impoverished. The other, an R- or X-rated version, was more fanciful, examining what could have been if he had possessed a bit more finesse. Both books ended at the same point.

Making sense of what happened in my outwardly dull life in goofy counter-culture times included what happened out in the sticks were nobody seemed to be looking, that is, where I had landed or even taken refuge. It was just up the road from Woodstock, only on the far side of the Big Apple.

~*~

I originally envisioned the two books kind of like the three-show play The Norman Conquests, where a line of conversation starts in one room and of finishes a night or two later on the other side of door he had passed through. Not that I was that meticulous in my crafting. I was just trying to run with the material at hand.

Alas, the “love” book was wisely deemed “adult” content, invisible unless you checked your filter.

~*~

As for related input? Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Jack Kerouac’s spree narratives, Anais Nin’s sexual frontiers, Robert Crumb’s stoned cartoons, and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” can be seen as touchstones for what finally came back together as a single volume, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, in its current incarnation. There may even be some Hunter Thompson in the mix.

~*~

Hippie Drum was the first book I published at Smashwords.

Hippie Love came out the next month.

Both, in the autumn of 2013.