Tag: Literature

EVEN FOR A BUCK OR LESS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Going through our bookshelves the other day, I was struck by how many of my first paperbacks were picked up for under a buck, new. How many, in fact, came in at under a half-buck. These were serious literature, mind you.

Yes, gasoline cost about a quarter a gallon, too, but just compare the impact of inflation over that period. While regular gas now runs up to $4, those fifty-cent paperback titles are now listing around $16, plus – more than twice as much inflation, relatively speaking.

Newspaper and magazine prices have also spiked, for a variety of reasons beginning with the cost of paper itself and distribution.

My concern as both a reader and a writer is that the figures for traditional publishing have simply become too prohibitive to take risks on unknown talent. For instance, I’m very unlikely to shell out $25 for a hardback novel, yet if that title doesn’t sell sufficiently, we’re unlikely to see the trade paperback, which can still be borderline prohibitive for modest incomes.

Public library budgets, meanwhile, keep getting shaved, forcing reductions in both new acquisitions and the staffing and open hours.

All of this means you’re less likely to find a new voice you find personally exciting. It’s all about blockbuster sales for one title rather than a wide offering catering to quirky interests and pleasures. And it’s not just commercial publishing.

Not long ago an official of an academic press related the painful decision they’d made regarding an important history manuscript that would not sell more than 400 copies, according to their marketing research. And so, in the absence of a major subsidy (such as an underwriting grant), the volume would not appear.

Since much of my own fiction falls in the category of “experimental” literature, the response I’ve received from some literary agents and presses has been that the work deserves publication but that it’s not “economically viable.”

The threshold for economically viable, I should point out, has been rising steadily through the four decades I’m reviewing.

I remember hearing the novelist Wright Morris in a televised interview where he said how lucky he was to have a niche following where a press run of eight-thousand copies was sufficient to support him. That’s hardly the case today, especially when the field has been consolidated into two publishing houses handling the bulk of American fiction.

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Even so, hundreds of new novels appear every week, many of them from small presses run as a labor of love. Few of the authors will get any notice, even though some, as I’ve found over the years, are a fine alternative to the cookie-cutter work typically found in commercial fiction. At least the Internet is opening new opportunities to be heard and discovered – and even for readers to pick up a fresh writer for a few bucks once again.

So who are you reading these days you feel speaks directly to you? Or whose style bristles in ways you find delightful? And how did you come across this author in the first place?

Maybe his or her successful niche following is around the corner if we all talk about literature as if it counts in our time. Just maybe.

DANCING IN THE WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In his volume of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall draws distinctions among jobs, chores, and work. The first is done for the pay, the second because it must, while the third arises as a passion, a calling, often an avocation – and is ultimately energizing and life-affirming. Lucky, he says, is the person whose work is also a paying job. So for income, where do we turn? Retreat into farming? Farmers aren’t surviving.

Wendell Berry speaks of two Muses. In Standing by Words, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983, highly recommended, he writes: “There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form.

“The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap energy civilization, in which `economic health’ depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”

Here, then, is yet another slant on work from an unabashedly Christian poet and essayist.

Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Certainly for the revision.

And revision. And revision. His estimate, it seems, is quite optimistic.

In the practice, I keep asking: Are my facts right? Is this the most appropriate detail? How will the piece open and what structure will it assume? What is unique and most meaningful here? For whom? Does it boogie?

All of this to guard against shoddy workmanship; anything lazy, even deceitful; the artiste and the counterfeit.

PRACTICE AS THE WAY ITSELF

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Central to a life in art is the matter of practice. By this, I do not mean a dry run for a finished performance or product, but rather the repeated exercises that make an action habitual or proficient or even, in its variant, practical. Everyday, useful, helpful, sensible. At its core, the Greek root for practice means “to do,” something we see repeated when a musician practices scales, a physician practices medicine, an attorney practices law, an athlete practices basketball – it’s what one does or must do to be a musician, a physician, an attorney, a ballplayer. In its purity, a practice is pursued apart from an intended outcome – a concert, a healing, or courtroom victory – but rather as the daily discipline itself, which may in turn possibly lead to discovery and increased proficiency. To accomplish this requires time and physical space for experiment: what if I try it this way, what happens if I change that?

All of this requires time, of course – especially time free of specific outcome. (The Shakers, for all of their “Hands for work, hearts to God” ethic, left enough unencumbered time in their labors to experiment and invent – the creative acts that have become their legacy and living witness.) Still, I often find myself coming to my writing with a sense of guilt. (For that matter, even sitting down to read can be accompanied by that burden.) Other people lay claim to my time and attention. They see my writing, revising, and publishing as feeding my own vanity, rather than their needs and desires. There are dishes to wash, a garden to weed, a lawn to mow, walls needing paint. Looking to larger issues, some point to a world full of social injustices and programs that cry out for volunteer action. Somewhere deep in my bones I even carry that ancestral aversion to art for art’s sake, superfluity, escapism, dissolution. (Nowhere do they note how Jesus kept returning to the wilderness for prayer and renewal, leaving the fervid crowds far behind.) This is all complicated by the American measure of ultimate success – the almighty dollar. Its corollary, that a professional is superior to an amateur. Or that making the best-seller list is the measure of a great author. (No poets need apply.) (Inducing its own layers of anxiety and guilt: could I be making more? Have I sold out? Am I somehow now trapped by expectations?) Here, I could have been working overtime at the office.

All of this complicated by Samuel Johnson’s admonition, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” (Which may even be a grumpy acknowledgement that writing remains work, paid or unpaid. Or of his frequent status as a hack writer.)

To push this a step deeper, consider the practice of prayer. I’ve long sensed that poetry and prayer – or, from another perspective, art and religion – spring from a common root in antiquity. The spells, rituals, and restrictions that accompanied fertility, hunting and harvesting, and death lead to both pathways. (“And God saw that is was good,” in Genesis 1, has the meaning of “good to eat” – that is, nourishing – that soon evolves into morally and aesthetically good as well.)

I’m not alone here. For instance, Carmine Starnino, in “Lazy Bastardism: A Notebook” (Poetry, January 2010), admits a similar unease about both reading and writing and then says, “My first contact with poetry was the ‘Our Father’ and ‘Hail Mary.’ Yes, they’re prayers, but they’re also pockets of linguistic energy … epic-accented statements … wonderfully archaic usages.” In his reflection, he argues, “Other prayers were loaded with religiosity, but uninterestingly flat,” and concludes, “Writing poetry is not, in itself, a prayerful activity. That’s because prayer is not a craft; it is the opposite of a craft,” one he sees as essentially secular: “poetry might even be said to be a menace to religious belief … because poetry, to work, needs to strip religious belief of its theological privilege.” To which he adds, “The best religious verse … flirts with faithlessness.” As he move on to other topics, he leaves me recognizing how narrow his understanding of prayer ultimately is and how much of his argument can be turned as a critique of poetry, as well. Many well-crafted poems, I find, remain uninterestingly flat – contrived and spiritless. Many hover well within the bounds of literary privilege. Read at weddings or funerals, they sound obscure and stuffy, as welcome as the parking attendant. Just as we struggle to define a poem within the range of writing today, so too does prayer run a range, from the unintelligible babbling of glossolalia (“praying in tongues,” in Pentecostal practice, as a craft, in some cases, to a raw emotional outpouring, in others) to intimate confessions to the formal Book of Prayer-type compositions of Starnino’s experience. At one end are those who pray for something specific (including a job, love, money, or healing), on to those who seek only to know God’s will and then to those mystics who sit silently waiting to listen to the divine voice in their hearts and bones. The tradition of English poetry, meanwhile, is prey to sermonizing, however secular or prosaic. Only when we break free of our prevailing orthodoxy – religious or artistic – do we truly “flirt with faithlessness,” finding ourselves defenseless in the face of ecstasy or despair, in the face of the one that cannot be named. This is the realm of epiphany, sacred or secular (or both).

I think Starnino loses the trail when he sees poetry as a craft, rather than a practice. Craft emphasizes a finished artifact, unlike practice, which embraces the activity itself. Practice can often resemble a hike in the woods or taking a trail up a mountain, with all the stages of attention or inattention that go with it. As you build stamina and endurance, you can also gain freedom. Whether mountain climbing, praying, or writing poetry, you may unexpectedly break free of the exertion itself – and cross into a state of oneness I’ll call the Zone. Others may discuss whether such moments of communion are epiphanies or a state of grace, or even secular or sacred, but when they come when I’m writing or revising, the lines seem to appear on their own, each move feels surefooted, the world around me appears as vibrant imagery and context. In this realm, I would declare poetry or literature to be a state of awareness, more than any artifact on a page or bound between covers. Likewise, the Zone may appear – it can never be summoned – in any of a number of disciplined activities. My wife experiences it while cooking and gardening; I enter it while dancing or singing, as well. Often, the Zone overlaps multiple ongoing activities: I jot the lines of a poem at a bend in the trail approaching a mountaintop.

I am left wondering why we cannot remain in the Zone long. Whether it would even be healthy. Whether we need some resistance or grit to balance the ethereal. Whether this reflects a basic mind/body, spirit/flesh duality.

Still, sustained practice is not easy. It remains work. Given a choice, the rational decision would be to sit back and devour great pages already given to us by others. (Or view great paintings or plays or films or dance productions and so on.) We can even ask, do we need more books? Who’s reading the ones we have now? I’m not speaking of all the junk fiction, junk movies, junk television, either. All that other kind of butt time. (Yes, I see a need for a slew of Creative Reading programs, more than Creative Writing, but that’s another facet of the work.)

THERE’S A REASON IT’S CALLED WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Perfection: the goal. The end of craft. The essence, completely uncovered. Yet writing is never perfect. Can never be. Not even in its own era, its own place, its own vernacular. So we’re working within a field of potentialities, choosing one aspect over another. Liquids at play. The words themselves will change over time. Energy fields. Northern lights. Sunsets. The mind and flesh, mixing.

Consider a square grid sheet neatly intersected, and then place yourself at the center, where the four quadrants intersect. Take the horizontal line and name it for one continuum, say “highly emotional” at one end and “completely rational” at the other. Now take the vertical line and apply another continuum, say “public” at one end and “private” at the other. As if we could actually measure any such qualities and then scale them on the grid. (We could even consider this as a color field, with white/black as one dimension and red/green or blue/orange as the other.) We could even consider this as a kind of Chinese checkerboard, but stepping outward. The point is, you have to move: to stay at the center produces a muddy gray: nothing unique emerges. The fulcrum remains static and lifeless. As one proceeds away from the center, a kind of balloon or blob may appear on the grid: you’re working somewhere between selflessly emotional and rational, for instance. Or maybe it’s highly focused. In an art – and possibly other areas of life – I see the goal being to move out to an arc from the ends of the horizontal and vertical axis lines – somewhere along an optimal and growing frontier of two qualities. Beyond that, however, destruction awaits. An orchestral conductor, for instance, can emphasize a work’s inner rhythms or its singing lines – or, more likely, arrive at some combination – while counterpoising them with architectural structure or emotional outpouring. The choices determine whether the result is an orthodox repetition of familiar security or an insightful and exciting (and even disturbing) revelation.

So there’s the question of when to stop, on a given piece. When we’ve depleted ourselves. Or when we’ve moved on. Or when it’s more or less accomplished what we set out to do – the less ambitious works having more prospects for success than do those that attempt to soar closest to the sun. Or when the piece moves off into the marketplace, one way or another. Or when we die or grow infirm. Or when we realize we’ve completely missed the mark.

My focus here is primarily on poetry and fiction, although the concepts can be readily expanded outward through all of the arts and probably into a number of other fields as well.

ON TURNING SIXTY … FIVE!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

The milestone demands some acknowledgement, or at least a hard assessment of my life to date. To be honest, when I graduated from college, I hardly expected to survive past my mid-thirties, and the way things were going, maybe I wasn’t far off the mark. On the other hand, I never anticipated the turns this journey has taken.

For one thing, I rarely thought of journalism as my lifetime career, but rather as a steppingstone to something else. While the field could be exciting at times, getting caught up in the management side of the business took a toll, and the more recent downward spiral of the professional publishing industry in general is downright frightening.

I had envisioned myself either returning to my hometown and writing for a newspaper that no longer exists, or else working in the heart of a large metropolis with its range of concerts, galleries, lectures, and theater, possibly after going back for a law degree. Of course, neither way opened, but the ashram route did. And I, who started adulthood somewhere between agnostic and logical positivist, was now on a spiritual pathway that would lead me to Quaker practice.

As I look back on my adult life, the only thing that has made sense has been this spiritual evolution. Each of the geographic moves, ostensibly in pursuit of a career, actually introduced the next step in an expanding faith and practice. Now my generation is having to move into places once filled by the “mighty old oaks” who came before us – the most troubling aspect being that we are, all these years later, still the younger members of Meeting or, for that matter, much of literature and the fine arts.

The craft of writing has itself has taken its own curious twists within this; while the poetry and fiction have often arisen in the discipline of keeping my skills sharp in the face of the daily grind, and thus have often veered toward the “experimental” side of literature, they’ve also served as a tool for investigating the unfolding experience – something quite different from trying to “create” a poem or story. Examining a situation honestly and directly, rather than trying to be ironic, cute, entertaining, or ideologically correct, is one of the consequences; on the other hand, you’re constantly measured against some standard of innovation. It ain’t easy, balancing the two.

Nevertheless, I’ll confess to a lot of remaining frustration. All of the unfinished work before me, for instance, or the difficulty in achieving successful book-length publication, despite having more than a thousand poems and short stories published in literary journals, at this point, on five continents. On a more personal level, I could look at all of the social skills to be fostered, to say nothing of a round of grandparenting, should that happen.

Even so, as I told my wife a few months back, I have nearly everything I’ve wanted, though it resembles none of what I imagined. The crux here is in being receptive and grateful, which proves surprisingly elusive when we’re in the middle of the usual swirl.

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This is something I wrote for myself at sixty. And here it is, with a few tweaks, five years later. Just as applicable.

WILL THE REAL ME PLEASE BRAND UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Branding, we’re told, is everything. It’s not just marketing, or even just a product. It’s the whole lineup. A slogan for differentiating one Big Box Store or high-end boutique from another (including everything inside). Even academia wants a label as a way to file a writer or artist away for easy reference, however awkwardly into one slot or another. It’s ultimately a word game, with or without an actual referent. But what if you’re a misfit, as many truly are?

In literature, the labeling relates better to those who stay within a genre or stick to a manifesto or particular technique or remain in a specific locale – an Oklahoma gothic mystery crime writer, for example – than to my favorites, especially those whose work ranges over many subjects and forms and continually grows. Likewise, I’m bewildered by how often the labels applied to them are downright erroneous, if not simply glib. Or matches one part of their output while ignoring all the rest.

This turns up repeatedly when I attempt replies for those who wish to pigeonhole me. I do what I do. The writing goes where it goes, and the revisions follow. I try to be faithful. So far, I’ve been a part-timer and non-commercial. Neither by choice, but both by fidelity. My opportunities for literary writing (in contrast to the daily journalism that’s paid the bills) have never been that easy or as sustained as I’d wish. I’ve envied those who set out knowing the direction they would pursue for a lifetime, those whose work presents a continuous focus and tone. Especially those who mature as they progress, rather than repeating a facile formula.

Looking back over my poetry and fiction from across the years – and, for that matter, across the continent – I’m struck by the ways so many of the pieces differ, at least outwardly. How varied the subject matter and approach. Here I keep intending the plainspoken, direct, clearly focused piece, and keep winding up with Mixmaster compounds and distillations. Maybe my mind’s rarely that unified; instead, a multitude of mental and emotional activities have kept occurring simultaneously and the most I could hope for is some convergence. Besides, so much of my writing has arisen in some opposition to my daily employment, with all of its own dulling repetition – my writing keeps veering toward the “experimental” fringe, if only in reaction to the daily grind of news stories and headlines. Or, in the past decade, obituaries. Through much of my adult life, I’ve felt torn and uprooted, from Ohio and Indiana to the East Coast and then Washington State and back again. To say nothing of my love life and social environment. The nature poems stand in contrast or discord with the police blotter love poems or, in turn, with my current home setting. That, before I even consider my fiction or the genealogy or Quaker expressions.

(Have I performed the daily journalism to pay the bills while I pursued my literary endeavors? Or had I pursued the literary work as a way of keeping my journalism skills sharpened? What started as one wound up the other, and then shifted back again.)

The writing, in turn, has been an attempt to bring some understanding to all the eruption I’ve experienced. The turns in the road, the setbacks, the advances. A quest for understanding and, if not clarity, some meaning or permanence. I tend my personal journal because I forget so much, and often record observations I will not comprehend until years later. Am baffled, because I have yet to define my mission with a label that sells. Write, then, to discover myself in this morass.

Still, I’m open to suggestions. If you can.

POLICE CALLS, 10 P.M.

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

“Have you read Crime and Punishment?” the guy at the next desk says on the phone. “I think you’ll like it.” A little later, I hear, “It’s by Dostoyevski.” Still later, he turns to the editor at an adjoining desk, “She’s into chick lit.” Meaning the small-town police dispatcher.