Tag: Literature

A FEW QUICK THOUGHTS ON THE LONG AND SHORT OF WRITING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As a writer, I love long pieces that allow a thorough investigation of a topic. Tell me the why and how of a situation, not just the final action.

The Wall Street Journal used to have those front-page, full-column “leaders” that jumped inside, often filling most of the inside page. These pieces actually telescoped a series of mini-stories into a comprehensive whole. How I admired those, even as I was being told to cut stories to much shorter length. (It often felt like reducing prime rib to hamburger.)

The longer stories, if well written and thoroughly researched, provided a sense of feasting, and I could point to research that showed some readers stayed around for those meaty offerings. I knew I had a feeling of getting my money’s worth after I’d savored one of those.

Not that I felt all stories should run long – I was also a big believer in running columns of briefs, in part to make room for the longer reports.

These thoughts return to me as I blog. In fact, I’m having a lot of fun “writing short” here at the Barn. You know, a couple of sentences and that’s it – especially with the photos.

For the longer efforts, though, I’ll point you to As Light Is Sown, Chicken Farmer I Still Love You, or the Orphan George Chronicles. Or to my novels. As I was saying …

THE STIGMA OF RELIGION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Intolerance, scorn, and judgmental stereotyping are hard enough to behold in public discourse, but they’re especially painful when they come from my side of the spectrum – people who proclaim themselves to be open-minded and smart. Yet the contempt is there, and nowhere more so than at the mention of religion, as Madeleine L’Engle has already pointedly observed. Even so, the fact remains that we do find individuals for whom belief and wisdom are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, even mutually enhancing. Let me suggest Bill Moyers’ Genesis: A Living Conversation, a Doubleday book based on the PBS series, as a demonstration of intelligence and faith in joint action. (Also available in audio or video, if you prefer.)

Admittedly, much of what we see and hear from the religious front can be superficial thought, convoluted logic, or emotional manipulation – quite simply, bad theology that too often goes unchallenged. (Not that we don’t encounter these in advertising, politics, entertainment, or professional athletics.) Curiously, when I listen to the reasons given by many who turn away from religion altogether, I often hear equally shallow arguments. Those who accuse religion of being the cause of all war, for example, blithely ignore Karl Marx’ insistence that it’s economic injustice instead – even as they invoke his axiom of religion as the opiate of the people. Or the way Sigmund Freud’s atheism is touted, while ignoring the degree to which his two key disciples, Karl Jung and Otto Rank, each turned to unique aspects of religion to advance their depth of human insight. I’m of the camp that contends that good theology is the only cure for bad theology, and is essential for progressing social justice. Rabbi Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right offers a fine line of reasoning in this direction. (As for advertising, politics, entertainment, professional athletics …?)

And, yes, the best reply to hypocrisy comes from the discipline of faith itself. Whatever happened to corrective rebuke and redirection, within the faithful group? (What old Quakers used to call “close labor.”)

Oh, my, and here I’d started out to reflect on the unfortunate state of religious fiction and poetry in our time, especially from Christian writers. With little support from my side of the spectrum, what appears is typically constrained by an orthodoxy that inhibits candor and rigorous exploration, and what emerges sounds saccharine, hollow, or even a false note altogether. That’s before we get to that matter of being preachy.

Still, I can point to the growing popularity of Rumi, a Sufi mystic of the 13th century, or to Zen-influenced Americans or Jewish novelists and a few obliquely Christian poets as signs of hope.

Care to add to the list?

AFTER THE FROST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As everyone’s been saying, New England had a strange summer. It felt shorter than normal, and despite some uncommonly hot spikes, was overall on the cool side. June was drier than usual, while July was wetter. And we swimmers were finding the ocean already growing uncomfortable toward the end of August, rather than leading into the glorious days of September we often anticipate. (The Gulf of Maine takes time to warm, after all.) I barely got my value’s worth out of my season pass to Fort Foster beach, unlike last year, even though I’m officially fully retired now.

As the buzz went, the fall foliage was better than we’d had in years, although it seemed to run about a week ahead of schedule and then essentially drifted off. And, after a few near misses in September, we were finally hit with killing frosts before the last week of October.

Not that many years ago, I would have said that was the end of the garden season, but that’s no longer the case. The cold gives the Brussels sprouts and kale a sweet edge, the parsley hangs in well for a few more weeks, and root crops like carrots, parsnips, turnips, and leeks can stay in the ground until it’s too frozen to spade.

Maybe part of my sense of a shortened summer can be laid to my revived activity as a novelist, thanks to the Smashwords publishing. With Hippie Drum released at the end of May, I found myself busy getting the word out through June and then spent much of August and September revising and formatting more works. Unexpectedly, but with a renewed sense of direction, I even drafted large sections of new material. What all this meant, of course, was time at the keyboard instead of outdoors.

Now that Ashram is in circulation again, I’m once more reflecting on attempting to establish a right balance in my life – time for exercise and home projects, for instance, renewed cooking and expanded social activity. Who knows, maybe I’ll finally reach that sweet spot.

For now, that includes cleaning up the garden, removing the dead zinnia stalks, eggplants, peppers, tomatoes. Pruning the raspberries. Turning compost. And then there’s moving the fig tree to the cellar, putting the hoses and Smoking Garden lights away, dismantling the hammock, stacking the tomato cages.

Already I’m looking at the dandelion leaves and calculating how soon they’ll be emerging from winter and heading to our plates.

Just don’t tell me it’s going to be a hard winter or there will be tons of snow to shovel.

Balance means savoring just one day at a time, right? Or can it mean all of them?

YOU READ IT HERE FIRST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Once, as I was being escorted around the Detroit Free Press newsroom, we bumped into a nationally syndicated columnist who was being given the VIP treatment.

Since I, too, was a guest, I had to bite my tongue.

A few weeks before, he’d ripped off the opening paragraph of our copyrighted lead story in the Yakima Herald Republic and opened his own column with it, nearly verbatim, without attribution.

As you know, that’s plagiarism – intellectual theft.

Despite heightened efforts to stem it, I suspect it’s long been part of the public information stream, to one degree or another.

Once, for instance, a small-town radio personality read my published concert review word for word over the air as if he had been there. Again, no attribution.

Or a Monday TV newscast read a photo page, without the photos, as if it was theirs.

More recently, we’ve had to shake our heads each time a certain television station says “W*** has learned,” because we know it’s code for “W*** read in this morning’s Union Leader.” At least they’d rewrite the story.

And then there were all of the charges and countercharges between the wire services and the big city papers, each accusing the other of taking stories and putting new bylines at the top.

But that could lead me to tell of my experience as a cub reporter at the Cop Shop (police station), where the rival newspaper ran my piece as its lead the next day. The reporter whose name appeared at its beginning had taken my carbon paper draft from the waste can.

So that’s how you learn.

THE CRAVING AND RELEASE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I said at the time: It’s power. As well as status.

There, we’ve said it. The crux of the matter. Power is always dangerous and needs to be curbed, or at least channeled. Dynamite. Gasoline. (No smoking around the pumps, ma’am.) Nuclear fission. Story of all Greek mythology, for that matter. With sex, it’s something that everyone – or nearly everything – has, in theory at least. In reality, well, we could start with one great mystery: why we are attracted to certain people but not to others. And then there are all of those mysteries involving male/female differences, as well as the daughter-father bond and the son-mother bond and the natural growth of struggling into freedom – the classic Oedipus Construction and its parallel Electra Construction. And I want what you won’t give me. Rape. Or don’t want your advances. Frigid. Or what you now threaten to take away from me. Story in the newspaper every day. Bang, bang. Especially when the balancing mechanisms break down – the commonly shared values, the commitment, spirituality, whatever. Or the out and out growing apart.

Even the religious foundations of sexuality and marriage itself can be quite different. In the Catholic and Episcopal mode, it’s procreation, pure and simple. You’ve seen the papal edicts. The best man and groomsmen in the ceremony as a vestige of forcibly seizing the bride. The ring itself as an emblem of possession. Which is why we have neither in traditional Quaker ceremony. In contrast, in the Quaker and Congregationalist/Unitarian strands, marriage embodies the sense of helpmeet or soul-mate in which Adam and Eve were created as suitable opposites for each other: deep companionship, with full equality and mutuality (no, eating the fruit is not Eve’s or the Serpent’s fault, no matter how Paul of Tarsus interprets the matter – it’s the beginning of human awareness and freedom, actually; and if God hadn’t wanted them to eat it, he wouldn’t have put it in the middle of the garden in the first place or told them, in the second, not to touch it!). (A point one of my fifteen-year-old Religious Education students argued convincingly. Kids can see through some of this stuff.) And then there’s the Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon; look up the Marcia Falk translation and explanatory notes – passion, overriding all convention.

As a sister (younger? older?) asks, as we turn the phrase, “Are you a slut?” I suppose a lot of it has to do with one’s perspective – long-term, or short? Immediate gratification, or something in which every experience builds into a sustained, shared history? Put another way, will the Other still be there when your raw physical beauty isn’t? When your health has you in a wheelchair and needing the committed partner? Or when the care of children requires joint sacrifices? The fear, of course, is that once the pleasure’s gone, so is that other person. And we both know that we have down days – bad hair or lack of it, whatever – often for long periods. Period.

My last girlfriend also used to accuse me of having been promiscuous. Of course, when you add up the numbers and divide them over the years – plus all the time in between – it really becomes rather monkish. As I said, it’s perspective. And what the others’ values come out as.

Conflicts, conflicts.

If others express their fears about your adventures, there are many reasons. For one thing, your feelings are on the line. Often your deepest feelings and desires and needs. Out of which can too easily arise the How On Earth Did It Come To This you write of. The epithet of “bastard” itself. The protectiveness of keeping predators away from Mine. Hence, all of the taboos. It’s not always “moralizing,” especially if you watch the matrons at poolside closely. And the rules aren’t always written by a patriarchy, but by the matriarchs. They know a good thing when they have it. Queen Bee, Queen Bee, one per hive. One of the most difficult things about trying to date women my own age, in fact, was that most of the available ones are so bitter. There’s no lightness in their dancing, either – and I link those two. Maybe it was that the ones who can make a relationship function successfully were in faithful marriages.

* * *

How much of this, fortunately, now stands as ancient history!

DASHES DON’T SHOUT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

100_9040The Cocheco Arts and Technology Academy, a public charter high school, has begun its new school year in a fresh location after moving from the Washington Street mill where it had resided the past five years. In its location on the top floor, CATA looked more like a lively arts colony than a high school, but the lively part had a downside, I suppose, especially when it came to music.

One of the things I’ll miss is the quirky fire door that had been painted with a wonderfully succinct set of English grammar and syntax rules. In fact, I can think of a number of people who think they’re writers (and have even been paid for their efforts) who could definitely benefit by taking these to heart.

There are parts I love, such as the “helicopter” concept for commas that close a phrase. Although I’ve had to live with newspaper style for much of my career, I’ve long preferred to use the closing comma in a series of three or more items, and from the door I’ve learned the technical term is the Oxford Comma. My!

But I will dispute the claim that dashes shout. I think they breathe. Exclamation points shout.

100_9032

The Punctuation Door to the tower stairway stood next to the Holy Quotes.
The Punctuation Door to the tower stairway stood next to the Holy Quotes.

Mentioning this to one of the students on moving day, I was told she had penciled the rules on the door and then other students painted them. Since their brushes ranged from thin to thick and their abilities varied, the lettering is hardly uniform. I think it adds to the charm.

In the meantime, thanks to Vikki for getting this started. Now the whole world gets to see it.

GOING PUBLIC

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Writers and artists who work alone may know the feeling. It might even fit composers, playwrights, and screenwriters. A piece looks quite different in manuscript or the studio than it does in a small-press journal or small gallery. It looks different, again, in galley proofs for correction or an exhibition. And it’s altogether different in full-length book publication or a major museum.

We could even consider all of the varied emotions that accompany these stages.

When the published novel’s in my hand, I’m not even sure I’d recognize its having any commonality with the manuscript or drafts all those steps earlier.

I suspect the experience for performers – especially those in groups – goes another direction. The rehearsals build a teamwork that’s carried forward to an audience. Could there even be occasions when the finished result is less satisfactory than some points beforehand?

We talk about a creative process, but I’m left acknowledging there are many.

RAT-TAT OSCAR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The title of a chapter in Bill Adler Jr.’s Outwitting Squirrels says everything: “Know the Enemy.” (My copy was a Christmas present, one of many squirrel-related items the family wraps and presents me, in their own vein of humor.) While Adler’s focus is on the difficulties squirrels cause bird feeders, including me, the bush-tailed mammals can be a homeowner’ nemesis – “tree-climbing rats,” as one friend insists – causing a number of fires as they gnaw through wiring and insulation. Ditto for the electrical utility.

In combat, however, one side can begin to resemble the other: their actions and thoughts parallel and overlap. A canny devil may even earn respect.

Many of the poems in a series I call Rat-Tat Oscar poems originate in my encounters with squirrels as part of my second marriage – evicting them from the walls of the house, from their raids on the bird feeders and garden, and eventually from the haunts in the barn – and are spurred by my wife’s quip, watching me transport them away in a Have-a-Heart trap, that I was operating a squirrel taxi. They can drive a man to madness or violence.

The poems also draw on annual Christmas letters to friends and family over two-and-a-half decades, turning the encounters to a would-be squirrel’s perspective. Of course, my wife and children will also insist I’m often more than a tad squirrelly.

Surprisingly, there’s not a lot about squirrels in mythology. Maybe the most prominent one is the Norse Ratatoskr, along with a handful of Native American stories. Maybe they had as much trouble making sense of squirrels in the universe as I do.

THIRD TIME’S A CHARM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Just want to thank all of you who have downloaded your own copy of my novel Hippie Drum and to say how much I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Since it’s my third published novel, and another in what’s considered the “experimental” literature realm, I’m grateful for all of the positive reaction.

If you haven’t yet joined the club of readers, let me encourage you to join now. Just click here for your own free copy.

MORE ANCIENT HISTORY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time, there I was, actually, admitting that about now, whenever that was, it would be nice to find a big chunk of time to work on some new poems. Hadn’t done diddly since my week in the Maine woods, back in October, years ago. Had a big project lined up, the first draft already keyboarded – but other projects intruded, including a book-length prose manuscript I tried launching with a holistic Certified Public Accountant. Most of that volume was already written, but getting her input sometimes felt like pulling teeth. Figured that one would occupy my “writing” space through May. And then it went nowhere.

Was also trying to master the new computer means that my reading time was spent mostly with those fat manuals – good thing they’re indexed! Wished I could get those damn AOL logos off the bottom of my screen, too. I shifted over to Mindspring – for now, at least. And one more thing to master, in time, this e-mail process! (Well, I was already doing my checks from the terminal, and had a lot of the genealogy input. Transferring old 5.25-inch floppies in WordPerfect 4.1 was now possible, thanks to a drive a friend installed a month ago, but very time-consuming – a lot of garbage had to be removed with S&R, a big job when you’re handling drafts of novels! I expected to be nibbling away at that well into the autumn.)

As I was telling a certain woman in the midst of all this:

OK, you do have me reading the celebratory Poppy Z., at least in snippets as I find time. A month or so ago, I turned to one of the Goths in our poetry circle and mentioned there was an author a ‘zine editor-friend of mine out in Chicago raves  about, and somehow one piped up, “Oh! Poppy Z. Brite!”- so there you have it! (My friend, by the way, is in N’Orleans for Fat Tuesday and some recovery time thereafter – but I sense it’s part of a much bigger story I shan’t touch on just now, except that it looks like all the nasty fallout.) What impresses me most with PZB right now is how masterfully she handles dialogue – especially with seemingly inarticulate people. How evocative it is! (Envy time.) Since you have been smitten by N’Orleans (as, somehow, has a colleague at the office – again, another story), I must recommend an astounding novel by John Gregory Brown, Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, which kept me up most of one frigid night in that cabin in Maine – as logs roared and sizzled in the fireplace – a box of Kleenex by the finale is advised, too – a real vortex of history, place, and those realms of caring for others that sometimes can never be spoken directly. By the way, did you catch the Streetcar Named Desire opera telecast on Public Television? Andre Previn’s music somehow intensifies an already sizzling text, and the casting would do Hollywood great. Less than a week after it was aired, I found myself spending an afternoon with a Cajun welder and his wife, whom my companion for the day had told me was involved with another man. Talk about things that cannot be spoken directly!

At any rate, much of your prose delves into matters that are generally not spoken directly – especially by a woman and by one who is still at an age when they are fresh! Matters of sexuality immediately stir up conflicts – lust versus love, power balances and reversals within relationship, passions/desires/dreams, promises and betrayals, egos, appetites, aging, vulnerabilities, layers of intimacy or distancing, pleasure/pain dimensions, possessiveness/freedom, giving/taking, nurturing/devouring. And that’s before we even touch on money, time, labor, wealth matters – the stuff that triggers most divorces – or questions of child-rearing or larger family interactions.

My, how much we had stirred up at the time! And how much lingers …