Tag: Literature

MEMORY, IMAGINATION, AND LITERARY INTENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A passage in an essay by Joyce Carol Oates stopped me cold in my tracks:

Literature is not a medium that lends itself well to the Surrealist adventure of disponibilite. Even radically experimental fiction requires some strategy of causation, otherwise readers won’t trouble to turn pages. Unlike most visual art, which can be experienced in a single gaze, fiction is a matter of subsequent and successive gazes, mimicking chronological time, as it is locked into chronological time. … (“Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature,” New York Review of Books, August 13)

So that’s been my “problem” as a poet and novelist? A surrealist adventure? Oh, my! I’ve long been fond of surrealism, often because I often see and hear life in that vein. While stopping short of subscribing to any manifesto, including those that gave rise to dada and surrealism, their ambitions continue to suggest possibilities for artistic exploration and discovery. As for chronological narrative, certainly there must be other ways to relate an event. Right? Well, even the alternative realities of dreams seem to emerge along timelines of some sort, even if they overlap from episode to episode that form what is remembered as a single dream event. A poem, moreover, can aspire to exist purely within a given moment it expresses, even if the reader returns to the lines repeatedly.

Maybe my saving grace here is in my assumption of invisible roots – everything happens for a reason, even accidents. (You don’t have to impute divine intervention there, either.) Perceiving these underlying currents, as some would suggest, demands something other than Aristotelian logic. Hence, the surrealist option, among others.

I do like Oates’ sense of gazes adding up into a quilt-work pattern, though, especially when they can bounce off each other to create yet something more.

And then her essay takes a remarkable turn that reinforces my invisible-roots assumption:

The hypocampus is a small, seahorse-shaped part of the brain necessary for long-term storage of factual and experiential memory, though it is not the site of such storage. Short-term memory is transient, long-term memory can prevail for many decades … If the hypocampus is injured or atrophied, there can be no further storage of memory in the brain – there will be no new memory. I have come to think that art is the formal commemoration of life in its variety – the novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment of a specific place and time, and its suggestion that there is meaning in our actions. It is virtually impossible to create art without an inherent meaning, even if that meaning is presented as mysterious and unknowable.

Again, I’ve long viewed my writing as an attempt to remember what’s right in front of me in my life. Let’s face it, everything often seems chaotic. Times of reflection and self-evaluation are crucial. It’s easy to leap from there, as I’ve found, into meditation and the Quaker practice of group worship grounded in silence itself. Along these lines, Oates puts all this into another framework:

Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture – no collective memory. As if memory were destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we “were” no one – we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source. As it is, in contemporary society, where so much concentration is focused upon social media, insatiable in its fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of more permanent art feels threatened. As human beings we crave “meaning” – which only art can provide; but social media provide no meaning, only this succession of fleeting impressions whose underlying principle may simply be to urge us to consume products.

The motive for metaphor, then, is a motive for survival as a species, as a culture, and as individuals.

Of course, I would see true religion, not art, as the provider of “meaning.” And now the conversation would turn lively.

CRITICS AND A MODEL OF POETIC INTENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Arts critics are often portrayed in the negative. Listen, for example, to the excerpts of voices who denigrated what became symphonic mega-hits or operatic standards. It’s a long list.

On the other hand, some critics (when it comes to classical music, dramatist Bernard Shaw and composer Virgil Thomson come to mind) have proved invaluable in sifting through artistic output and finding those jewels who would otherwise be lost in the volume before us and the drive for monetary success. Quite simply, good critics glean value from gems lost in the estimation of box-office success, bestseller popularity, and high audience ratings. With an eye for lasting quality, they guide individuals to work – and workers – they esteem.

As I look at the flood of artistic output on the Internet in our time, the role of good critics appears to be more crucial than ever.

Let me add that good critics are also teachers. I’m deeply indebted to people like Hub Meeker of the Dayton Journal Herald or Winthrop Sargeant of the New Yorker for their role in shaping my artistic awareness. As I’ve found over the years, reading a familiar critic becomes an active dialogue.

This leads me to a recent essay by the poet Charles Simic, long a star on the University of New Hampshire campus one town over from where I live. In “The Incomparable Critic” (New York Review of Books, August 13), he touts a collected volume of reviews by Helen Vendler and her examination of contemporary poets, centering down to her high estimation of one in particular:.

However none of these [William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, even the Beats] had the audacity, she points out, to switch back and forth between the sublime and the ignobly ridiculous as [A.R.] Ammons did. … for Ammons there is a “continuo of the personal – the ‘noise’ of the everyday mind – from which the lyric rises and into which it subsides.” This setting “of the lyric moment within its non-lyric ‘surround,'” Vendler writes, “is the fundamental device of modern poetry, from The Waste Land to this day.

That, in itself, is an audacious insight, of one reviewer to another.

Apart from any specific works, what is described is an ideal I admire – one I’ve sensed present in the works of Philip Whalen I’ve admired. And so we continue, writing and reading, in whatever quest we follow.

OF TURTLES AND SHOES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time …

A constant challenge in any artwork is how do we shape the material so that it enters some other place from the one where it originates? What form or structure is appropriate or helpful? How much abstraction? Do we stay general or become specific? (I notice that you don’t identify what kind of turtles these are!) How much elaboration? What does it take for the unexpected force to appear, that third enterprise apart from the author and the reader? How transparent or center-stage should the author be? Never easy answers!

I have many fond memories of Cincinnati, once I was able to drive down to escape Dayton for an evening or weekend, back before I finally got away to Bloomington and points beyond. Maybe you’re ready to do a poem about Erchenbrecker and Vine, the address of the zoo?

I love the cover. A good feel to that turtle art. And the Revolutionary War-era American composer William Billings (who’s also a kind of Yankee grandfather to the Southern “Sacred Harp” style of hymn-singing) has a wonderful part-setting of the Song of Solomon citation you use.

Thanks for the reactions – and for giving the shoes a good home.

Catch you later – Namaste.

~*~

This was to small-journal editor Troy Teegarden, who’d sent me a copy of his latest poetry chapbook, Reflections on the Elkhorn (1997).

CHANCING UPON A DESIRED TALE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

In today’s publishing world, it’s impossible to keep up with the output. Even in a specialized niche.

I recall asking an English department chair at a respected college if she’d heard of so-and-so – the kind of novelist who gets reviewed by the New York Times both in its daily edition and again, independently, in the Sunday Book Review section. The answer was no.

(In fairness, she and her husband always introduce me to a range of fine authors when I scan their many home library bookshelves.)

Why wasn’t I surprised?

More recently, recognizing the extent of Greek-American influence in my own community and throughout much of the Northeast, I began searching for works that might reflect its family life and culture. Even a search by a public library research desk came up pretty empty. The Greek-American authors we did find seemed to be writing about other things.

There are, as I’ve noted, a few exceptions, but there should be more.

And then, by chance, I picked up Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. His was one of the Greek-American names I’d come across, but this story was focused on five sisters in a Roman Catholic family. I quickly resonated with the Midwestern setting of the story, which easily fit into a band across northern Ohio and Indiana and, as became more apparent, southern Michigan. This was familiar terrain, not far from my native soil – and another one that is rarely represented in literary fiction (yes, I know the objections to the term – but how do we distinguish it from commercial genres that are sales driven?). Despite its gruesome premise, this is a humorous book, befitting the thwarted desires and misunderstandings of its adolescent male observers.

And then, on page 171 of the paperback I was reading, came a glimmer of the novel I’ve been seeking. In the household of the narrator’s friend Demo Karafilis, we encounter his grandmother, Old Mrs. Karafilis, who generally stays to her room in the basement, where she keeps her memories of growing up a Greek in Turkey who managed to escape with her life. The next three-and-a-half pages are an incredible portrait that left me yearning for the novel-length development. As Demo explains it, “We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. … What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”

What I discovered a few nights later, in the stacks of the library I’d consulted earlier, was the elusive Greek-American novel. How could it be so invisible after being acclaimed on Oprah’s list and even awarded a Pulitzer Prize? It was Eugenide’s second novel, a 529-page masterpiece.

Maybe part of it has to do with the sexuality theme that masks everything else – the narrator’s peculiar adolescent gender shift thanks to a recessive gene and the impact of earlier incest. Well, it is a riveting tale. For me, though, the primary story of Middlesex is the multigenerational presentation of a Greek-American family and its culture, done in a matter-of-fact way, with nothing sentimentalized. It’s an incredibly rich novel, no matter which part of the narrative claims your attention.

Not to take anything away from all the novels of ethnic life in New York City or Chicago or the regional flavors of New England, the South, southern California, Texas and other Far West locales, it’s safe to say many other strands of American life are greatly underrepresented or even missing entirely.

Any you want to point out?

BEFORE THE INTERNET, THERE WAS THE TELETYPE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Well, we also had the telephone – and memos, sometimes delivered by a mailman and sometimes by an office courier and sometimes, gasp, in person by the boss himself. Or maybe just his secretary.

But when I began drafting Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider, the Internet was somewhere over the horizon. Yes, online communications did exist in what we now consider some crude form. That’s progress for you, I suppose.

Still, in developing the story, I wanted some kind of encrypted exchange between the distant handler and young Bill in the field, and that led to the technical arrangement described in the novel.

Thus the events could be disclosed in a series of memos covering a three-year period. It’s almost like playing cards, one at a time.

To tap into their exchange, just click here.

Inca 1

WALKING THE DOG THROUGH THE ZOO

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Humankind’s attraction to other animals – the baby ones, especially – is universal. What is it in our love of pets, for instance, that so opens us to our own existence?

What I see is a recognition of our animal nature and a desire to snuggle in amid our fellow critters rather than hover above them. Well, most of them – there are those we fear or detest. Even so …

As the German grandmother loves to quote, God has a big zoo.

And that includes us.

In a Heartbeat~*~

For a look at my animal kingdom poems, click here.

FROM A SECLUDED SLIP BELOW THE LEVEE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’ve already written of living along the Susquehanna and being introduced to the trail that wove through a wooded strip between the water and the freeway.

The site included a bridge that stood closed to vehicular traffic and a low dam that once diverted water to power cigar factories along the riverbanks. Only part of the foundations of the mills remained, along with some of the weir, which filled with moody water after a heavy rainfall.

At the time I was living in an inner-city neighborhood – Italian by day, Afro-American by night. The riverside provided a mostly private escape into nature.

It was enough, though, to give rise to poetry. Follow its seasons and flow in my new chapbook by clicking here.

Susquehanna 1

NOT JUST BETHLEHEM, THEN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In early postings about creating a suitable bibliography reflecting the hippie era, your comments suggested some of the best works are in the realm of non-fiction, in contrast to Tom Wolfe’s demand for the big novel. Yes, as we discussed, there are some good novels, the bulk of them proving that small is beautiful, in contrast to Wolfe’s standard.

My reflections the other day on Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids (2010), added the underground artistic scene in New York to the list and has me thinking just how different the hippie centers could be. Most of them, as I see it, eventually wound up around college campuses.

Some recent overviews of Joan Didion’s life work have brought her 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, to mind. Without going into criticism that she concentrated on the scandalous rather than the broader scene, what is stirred in my revisiting her essays is how localized and fleeting the hippie outbreak could be as it developed.

Quite simply, what fit one neighborhood or time didn’t necessarily fit others.

Haight-Ashbury, after all, soon morphed into back-to-the-earth networks or even rural communes, along with other situations, leaving its name to linger as a legend.

I mention this simply as a reminder of how far we are from a clear understanding of this remarkable history, much less its continuing – and pervasive – streams of action.

As for the big novel? Maybe it’s still waiting to happen.

FESTERING ETHNIC TENSIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

With America’s reputation as a melting pot, it’s surprising to see how long some ethnic tensions continue – often for generations.

Sometimes it’s simply in the ways values differ – the extent to which cunning is admired or detested, for instance, or how the family is expected to behave at the dining table.

Sometimes these erupt in a marriage of spouses from different backgrounds.

And sometimes the conflicts arise in the Old World the family fled in the first place. Think of the Balkans or Middle East, for example.

In Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider, these come to the fore in mysterious ways in the isolated community of yrUBbury, especially once Bill puts the Company agenda into motion.

That is, once Big Inca also begins moving mysteriously in the background, drawing and redrawing the battle lines, largely along ethnic identities.

It’s a wilder fantasy, after all, than Wall Street. To continue, just click here.

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START FILLING THE GROCERY CART … WITH BOOKS AND VIDEOS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I blogged during the summer of 2014, the No. 1 topic of discussion across much of New England concerned the dramatic battle for control of the Market Basket supermarket chain. In an unprecedented reaction to moves by one-half of the family owning the company to sell the popular stores to more expensive rivals, its management, devoted workers, trusted suppliers, and loyal shoppers united to bring the enterprise itself to a halt. A grinding halt. And it worked.

After months of earlier rebuffs and daily headlines, the part of the family actually running the stores announced an agreement to buy the entire operation from its hostile relations.

It was a complicated story, with some long-festering feuds in the not-so-recent background. The kind of story that’s bound to show up as movie adaptations. Maybe even as a television mini-series. Maybe not Dallas in Boston, but as rich in its material.

We’ve been waiting for the book-length analyses, and the first one is finally making the rounds: We Are Market Basket (the title comes from a slogan at the time) has been published by an American Management Association affiliate.

Authors are frequently advised to “know their audience,” with the implication of tailoring their work to assumed demands. In this case, the book can be seen aiming at two audiences: New Englanders who remember the revolt and likely participated in some part of it, and then business majors and managers around the world. It’s both a strength and weakness for the volume.

Reading the text, it’s easy to see which part was written by which coauthor: Lowell Sun newspaper reporter Grant Walker drafted the day-by-day narrative, while associate business professor Daniel Korschun provided the chapters on business management. It’s all good stuff, though a bit repetitive, as one might expect from daily news reports that have to recap earlier developments. And I started wishing Walker had more sources to draw on. Still, they underscore the point of their book.

As the subtitle says, The Story of the Unlikely Grassroots Movement That Saved a Beloved Business, this was a remarkable event. Korschum uses it as a platform to argue for an awareness of stakeholders in a company – not just stockholders. It’s a theme Bernie Sanders has been pressing in his presidential campaign, and he’s not alone it saluting its importance. Workers, suppliers, and entire communities have investments of one sort or another in the companies that operate in our presence. For Market Basket, with prices typically 16 percent lower than its major competition, customers have a definite reason for supporting the stores, which, as it turns out, are remarkably profitable, despite or (as Korschum argues and others of us believe) because of their culture of contrarian instincts.

You can read the book for the reasons why. The list of down-to-earth practices throughout the operation, where the lowest level workers are encouraged to find ways to improve the business, is worth the read alone. You won’t walk through any store quite the same afterward.

My interest in the topic goes back decades before this, as I saw the operations of a smaller but similar grocery operation run by my then-girlfriend’s father. His own father had started out with a produce cart that went door to door. Besides, my own inclination has been for smaller, typically family, operations rather than monolithic corporations – as I demonstrate in my novel Hometown News and pursued for most of my employment as a journalist.

As I was perusing We Are Market Basket, I kept thinking of business books like Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence series. They’re fun to read and make their point, though there just might be more to the story. In this case, I definitely feel there is.

Yes, when we come to the stakeholders argument, we can look to John Henry Patterson’s benevolent leadership at the National Cash Register Co. in Dayton, Ohio, or the glory years of the cereal makers in Battle Creek, Michigan, or Aaron Feuerstein’s moves in the aftermath of the Polar Fleece fabrics’ devastating factory fire in Malden, Massachusetts. Essentially, these provide similar models of enlightened leadership along the stakeholders’ ideal. But this book also leaves me wondering about the next generation after Arthur T. Demoulas’ leadership – he is, after all, pictured riding a white horse. So there’s a need for a management text on maintaining leadership a generation or two down the pike, which this book glides over as one of simply maintaining the historic company culture. There’s a lot of repetition on Market Basket’s culture in these pages, perhaps to drive the point home or, as I suspect, perhaps because of slack editing. But will that culture be enough?

On another front, there’s a volume yet to appear that puts the Market Basket experience in perspective with other leader-defined companies. Yes, we love our heroes, but they’re hardly the stuff of corporate America these days. More often, they’re anonymous and invisible. What kind of executive would be needed to fill Arther T.’s shoes?

And there’s another round of writings that might relate Market Basket to other family-owned companies and their survival or failure in moving from one generation to another. Family ownership issues have become a distinct subset of a business school curriculum. You don’t get fired from being a brother or a sister or cousin or grandkid — it’s a lifetime position.

We Are Market Basket skims over the earlier family conflicts that erupted into ugly, protracted, and costly court battles only years before the events at the heart of this book. To understand the bitterness of the most recent round, I’d love to see a volume – or at least one more open to both sides – more detailed than what this one presents. Not that the other side made itself in any way sympathetic in the 2014 accounts. Even so, the events were not quite as black-or-white as they seem to appear. An astute reader senses the authors’ desire not to antagonize their sources, meaning the book’s told basically from one side.

Another fascinating dimension also appears in corporate ownership that’s not quite split evenly 50/50. Television viewers may remember an episode of Ed Asner’s Lou Grant series where the newspaper was threatened by such a division – not that much different from the Seattle Times, actually, where one percent held the sway vote.

When it comes to Market Basket, we have one crucial family voter who switched. Why? Everyone wants to know.

So I’m still hoping for a more definitive volume than this entry. Maybe by the crack team from the Boston Globe, which could throw far more reporters at the story than the suburban Lowell Sun could – reporter/author Welker at least had the advantage of having the Demoulas family grocery stores originating in Lowell and putting their headquarters one town over, in Tewksbury, but he was a Lone Ranger in the face of a large reporting and editing staff in Boston.

Another of the case studies waiting to happen would look at Market Basket since the uprising. Can it sustain the large debt load and still maintain its generous employee bonuses and profit-sharing, along with its low prices? A year-after report by the Globe found that the company is indeed prospering in its rebirth. But long-term questions remain.

Will the fuller story ever come out?

For me, more and more, I’m looking for another current example, somewhat the way scientists want an experiment that can be replicated — another stakeholder over stockholder victory.

In the meantime, we’re still shopping – almost religiously – at Market Basket.