Newspapers are mostly ads. But rarely taken out by the big-box stores.
~*~
For more, see my novel Hometown News.
Tag: Memories
Northwest, Pacific Northwest, at last
The first of my extra-long spiral notebooks was a, Citadel, 8-by-12½ medium ruled with a 3-inch wide margin.
Begins on the new moon, 28 June 1976, “as we await our future.”
We were back house-sitting on Harrison Lake, just a sliver of that moon against caps of rosy storm clouds over the hardwood hills at the end of the water, one of a series of lakes backed into the first of the “Brown County mountains.” Elsie Sweeney’s palatial contemporary temple overlooked everything, facing the sunrise. [She was a spinster philanthropist from the Cummins diesel engine family.]
Also:
Nervous about job interview, Center for Law and Poverty. Bought new pants (fancy but I can live with them) and tie. Actually, for Yakima, if that works out but will do the dry run with this.
Indianapolis more active, dressier, cosmopolitan than I’d seen it before. The director was pretty mellow, surprisingly so. The job was $9,500 to $10,500 a year, with four-weeks’ vacation. I would have to develop contacts, write my own material, edit, etc. Doesn’t look too bad, if Yakima doesn’t come through. Some PR and video work, too.
Fourth of July fireworks in Woodsville, after worship in Waynesville earlier in the day. Different corners of the state.
Waynesville Quakers — Miami Monthly Meeting. The house of worship was built in 1810, during Madison’s administration. It originated with South Carolina Friends (Quakers) who nearly all relocated north in reaction to slaveholding. Many came first to Waynesville and then moved on within western Ohio and all of Indiana. Miami Monthly Meeting held their memberships until new meetings were established, resulting in Waynesville’s being the largest monthly meeting in all of Quakerdom by 1805 and explaining the large size of the house, with three rows of facing benches (the ministers and elders’ gallery). It’s the oldest meeting west of the Alleghenies. (A detail that may allow Friends in Tennessee some leeway.) The meeting was central to the Underground Railroad, I was told.
Worshiping there was a fine way to spend the Fourth of July 1976, the bicentennial of the nation.
Do note, the Underground Railroad was founded and organized in the South.
Followed by limbo
Feeling of hopelessness, of inutility, a faith-draining thing. This waiting, suspension, is costly: can’t send any poems out (mss), we don’t expect to be here long. Kat can’t sign up for summer school, we need the funds and must be prepared to run. Plus the energy lost sending our job applications, etc. the money in samples and resumes (a quarter each) and postage. “We’ll be back to you in a week,” the liars, so polite.
Waiting for mail that doesn’t come, telephones that do not ring.
And then the whirlwind
Weir Cook airport, same rotunda where I departed on my first-ever flight (the Florida Easter). Put together the details for the Yakima trip yesterday afternoon.
Sentimentality now about Daffodil/Bloomington. Figured out what’s bugged me: everyone is so slow — the farmer syndrome.
Is the Waynesville Meeting working its magic again? (The Fostoria job came through after I worshiped there …)
Can we afford the move ($1,000 loan from my parents?). Will all of our goods fit into an 18-foot U-Haul?
Washington state newspapers seem to have the fanciest letterheads: color print jobs, imaginative graphics. A good sign, it seems.
Bill and Mig stopped in Chicago, hoping to see his brother still alive. Instead, Bill arrived in time to conduct the funeral.
The interminable earwash of airport lounges. Last time I flew American to the Northwest was breaking up with Nicki.
Bob Suter’s advice: “Don’t stick your finger in front of any turtles”
Long trek at O’Hare to new international section — Customs and all the rest — not much traffic, empty inside — airlines share the gates — glassed-in halls within halls — was beginning to wonder if this flight was going on to Japan or if I had the wrong gate designation …
Midwestern farming towns, seen from the air: two parallel tracks cut through: one the highway, the other the railroad tracks Can hardly tell which is which, shining in sunlight: white concrete, white gravel, plus white blazing roofs.
2½ more hours to Seattle
Over central South Dakota, at 35,000 feet the outside temperature was minus 59 — Centigrade!
Flying over Billings, Helena, Great Falls — echoes of that futile trip to lure Nicki back … my first Far West exposure …
~*~
The sky scudded over from there. Only gray below me. But then, at one point, I looked down at something incomprehensible and amazing.
Yes, we had flown directly over Mount Rainier and its glaciers.
~*~
As for the rest of the trip?
Don’t think things today could have gone much better. Spent six hours with Kent, the m.e. Lunch with him and Gil, the assistant m.e. (who was critical of some of my layouts with Marcy’s photos … and one pic I should have cropped). Gil telling about almost grabbing rattlesnakes beside lost golf balls … sluggish, unmoving bastards, sez he …
Good meeting with Human Resources, too. (Is the department always headed by a woman?)
A short meeting before I left. Accepted the offer, $260/week … more than double what I had been earning …
Sounds like I’ll be doing mostly editing, special sections and weekend news, as well as lead articles for Crossroads …
[I should note that this flight was also at my own expense. If the job had not come through, we would have been screwed.]
Back home
Received a letter from Indianapolis, no dice, as if everything were working with Divine plan …
Maybe they didn’t like my looks? You never know.
Indianapolis? I’d just as soon live in Scranton.
Got a few nice poetry rejection letters but mostly silence …
~*~
From my spiralbound journals, mostly.
Some thoughts about the notebooks themselves …
As you’ve noticed, I fell into the practice of journaling rather haphazardly. At times compulsively, even. I started to say the “habit” of journaling, but it was rarely that effortless,
I was still in spiralbound volumes — eight years before a stretch of using hardbound sketchbooks followed by a return to spiralbounds before the hardbounds took hold a dozen years after the journal at hand.
No. 45, for those keeping track, was the first of the 8-by-12½-inch books I’ve truly appreciated. The added inch-and-a-half of length fit my hand and pen well, though not the bookshelves or the milk crates that generally wound up holding my journals.
Eventually, there were 17 of those in all, plus three fat softcover sketchbooks, 15 black-cover spiral sketchbooks, and three bargain thin hardbound journals nearly that tall. Thirty-eight in all, out of 200-plus. Why did that shape vanish from the market? Probably because I preferred them. I have long run contrarian to the marketplace, not exclusively involving my tall, skinny clothing size.
Somehow, I had thought that my legal-size notebooks started at the Cornell bookstore, but it now looks like my first ones were bought in Bloomington.
In looking up what’s called “legal pads” (as if the others are clandestine?), I find most today have shrunk to 11¾ inches height, though at least one exists at 8½ by 14 for those willing to pay a premium. And that’s not bound. As for filing those in storage cabinets? I’m not a lawyer nor a legal secretary. It no doubt requires special filing furniture.
~*~
The first third of the volume covered our final month-and-a-half in Bloomington, aka Daffodil, followed by my flight to the Pacific Northwest.
As I look ahead, I see pages that were used to draft and refine poems that found publication as well as other entries that more or less became fiction in my novel Nearly Canaan and the third novella in The Secret Side of Jaya.
I’ll skip over those in this series and instead look for the unexpected.
A few old newsroom notes
Reporter Jerry Handte, someone I saw as a grizzled old-timer. Threw the word “hardscrabble” at me in a story, one I didn’t know. Changed my perception of him.
AP’s middle-class conformity.
Contrived news stories, with formulated sentimental reactions: hippie story, Agnew story, dog or handicapped child story, medical/scientific breakthroughs, etc.
“Chimes,” the Evansville Courier’s wrap-up of church activities.
The Press won’t hire anyone else as long as it can slide by as it is.
~*~
The tug toward middle-class: security: keep job, get a degree, build retirement, home, house, and family. It’s gonna be so hard telling Mom and Dad I’m splitting.
I’m becoming like them: Don’t rock boat, don’t do deep fixes on stories, let it slide, why bother with better headlines and layouts, etc.
Lost and found in the woods of Lampkins Ridge
VO showing the grave sites of two infants at the edge of his ravine: one stone left, the other one, dating to early 1800s, stolen …
~*~
I see now, 50-some years later, there’s actually a public-access trail around there.
~*~
Further to the east was Brown County, with its rugged geology, state and national forests, and a large state park, making it Indiana’s outdoors destination. It definitely feels like stepping back in time. I have memories of hiking and camping there as a Boy Scout, even before my explorations during the time covered in my return to the university.
Hiking trail photograph by Kgirischandra via Wikimedia Commons.
Panorama views by Elizabeth Nicodemus via Wikipedia Commons.
I had friends who lived in log cabins, which remain in widespread use in the southern part of the state.
No question, my Indiana years were special
As I’ve been seeing in this sweep through my journals, not all of my experiences in Bloomington wound up in my poetry and fiction.
Back when I switched my college major from journalism to “something that would expand my mind,” as one influential editor advised me, I chose political science because so much news coverage focuses on government and its impact. Somehow, I fell under the spell of Vincent Ostrom, especially his federalist perspectives of a compound republic and ground-upward rather than top-down action. My earlier posts reflect how this turned into a personal relationship, even before I was invited to join what’s now known at IU as the Ostrom Workshop.
His wife Elinor, better known to us as Lynn, was just beginning to teach at IU when I was an undergrad and I didn’t find the opportunity to enroll in her courses. (The fact the department scheduled her classes at 7:30 am was an additional problem for night-owl me, as I was as the time.) Despite obstacles erected because of her gender, she soon became a popular teacher and by the time I returned to campus, was a rising star. What I saw on my return was how naturally she functioned as the central figure in running our collaborative workshop, and how utterly amazing she was all around. It should be no surprise that she became not only the first woman but also the first political scientist to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Yes, the dismal science.
While I have never run for political office or served in a governmental role — I’m of the camp that believes doing so would compromise the neutrality or objectivity at the heart of serious journalism — I have carried many of the lessons from that training through the remainder of my life.
One is the ability to critically read a text, period. It serves well in literature, theology, proposing a course of action, as well as editing. A corresponding step then asks which assumptions can be relaxed or even removed from the paper under examination.
Another lesson involves management and associative structures. Many similarities exist in operating public, for-profit, and non-profit organizations. They are what make a civilization function. They were especially helpful when I was navigating the steps in the management ladder of corporate journalism in my moves to come.
The next question regarding any field of organization, of course, is how do we make it work better?
~*~
In this review of the experience, I’m surprised to see a parallel in the youthful enthusiastic personnel at the Workshop to the idealistic newsroom staff in my novel Hometown News. Most of the events shaping that book, be warned, come in the years ahead.
~*~
As I look back, I see how crucial this year-and-a-half became in my life.
My evolution from yogi to Quaker began, for one thing, though an overlap would continue for another year or two.
Through a circle headed by three very fine poets, my personal voice in that vein took shape, accompanied by appearances in literary reviews across the nation.
Kat and I settled into a life that was largely pleasurable and fulfilling. I’ll leave the details for you to decipher in my novel Nearly Canaan. The middle novella in The Secret Side of Jaya, “Miller at the spring,” was also inspired by this period but written 40-some years later and recast in the Ozarks.
There was a curious semester when Nicki and Kat were enrolled in the same weaving class in the art department. Did my ex-lover know my wife was a classmate? Eventually, they became acquainted and that led to a face-to-face of the three of us, allowing me some resolution to the past.
And I felt freer to move forward.
~*~
Vincent had grown up on a mink farm near Mount Baker in Washington state, and he was quite encouraging in our move to the Northwest. Living in the interior desert, I would finally understand the intricacies of water legislation and management, which had been one of his specialties. Another arose from being a writer of the Alaska state constitution, a place that also had close connections to Washington state.
After packing up and moving westward, I never returned to Indiana, apart from the brief drive crossing on the toll road in the north on our return to Ohio after the Pacific Northwest.
I’d say the book was closed, yet the writing and revision were actually still ahead.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
The three poisonous elements
Greed, hatred, and illusion.
Leading to 84,000 kinds of defilement.
I didn’t mean to get political. Take it as Buddhist fact.
Is a job search always a tribulation?
After reviewing old clippings: “How close my writing has come to greatness … or to babble.”
At the RT, how much our photography carried us, especially considering how thin, until the end, our local coverage was – how important our Saturday front-page feature was in setting us apart and giving the staff a fairer schedule. .
Morning on long-distance calls to Bordner, Aldrich, Swaisgood, L. Nighswander.
Other fronts, Russ called back, said Larry Hale expected an “editor’s position” in several weeks … So much confusion, would I really want to go back there?
And the letter from Tacoma, $20,000 arts and entertainment, if they get the opening … What do I make of this? McClatchy upswing versus Gannett versus a fighting crew at the foot of Pike’s Peak?
So what about Colorado?
Imagination still reeling with thoughts of the Rockies. A place to be at peace? Low pay may be an incentive to freelance or grow.
The West may spur a novel. I’m too boxed in here.
On the brink of Colorado. A time of despair, anxiety, and waiting through the layoff.
Early May, Colorado Springs, round-trip ticket, $189.
On flight out: half of southern Indiana is forest. Region defined the sudden shift to farmland where the hills give way to flatness.
Contrasting smoothness of disked fields next to rougher plowed.
Strip-mine lakes outside Terre Haute.
~*~
Colorado Springs Sun: Don’t feel there’s much I can do here – to many “trained incompetencies,” exhausting and routine-work hours. B.B. [the editor who was to hire me] is leaving for Detroit after eight months here.
No local color in the paper. Newsroom looks and smells like RT. Computer (VDT) may help – question is, how much?
Upon seeing first UPI lead, realized how clear, precise, and simple my own style has become. Newspaper work may destroy that – at least, I feel it slipping away.
No sense of nuance, of grace, of individual voice – that is, true style – in this news writing, which exists as stilted and artificial as any literary style. It is divorced from the human voice and from American speech.
Another Far West facet
All along during my stint as a research associate, I was reading technical material on Indigenous artwork. Here are some sample entries from my Bloomington journaling.
~*~
Back from the Rockies
Indiana feels too thick, too green and wet in contrast. My sinuses are acting up again. I’m out-of-place in America.
Horoscope says a month or two before big change. We’ll see.
Looking at the cons: long hours (nine to ten hours a day), ending at 2 or 3 am; low pay, publisher interference, no investigative reporting, and someone named Dana …
I’m having to admit that not getting that job was a blessing. I would have been engulfed. The trip was, though, at my own expense, devouring half of our savings.
Just where might I be heading?
Doubts about “where I want to go.” Should we make the plunge into NYC? Find an agent yet? (I’d rather wait two more years.) I feel the necessity of steady income, yet also feel “duty to yourself” calling. Turned down music critic position at Herald Telephone. Hard for me to say No to any job, even with low pay. ($10/review; negotiate on features, say $50/page.) Don’t think I really want newspaper work. That’s hard to admit.
Copy editors are a kind of janitor and paid accordingly. Hence, I should concentrate on power-writing. (Like advertising?)
My own failings coming home as nobody wants to hire me, not yet, free me from the damn suspense/suspension with half of our goods packed in crates and warping corrugated boxes, the general feelings of inutility accented by this ungodly heat and humidity
Late June, returned yesterday from two days [of housesitting] at Dietz’ … and found a letter waiting from Yakima. Very exciting prospect, work split between copy editing and general assignment reporting. A nice balance, good pay, exactly where I’d like to be – the dry side of the mountains. And Kat’s very excited. Hope everything works out. (Received a formal job application to fill out and return.) Getting anxious to get the address situation straightened out and new pieces into the mail. …
Wherever we wind up, I’d like to publish a few chapbooks of my work, for free distribution to friends and critics (and some for sale). Would also like to get a typist to do final drafts of potential freelance pieces. Will need to arrange more office-type space … we need Kat’s extra income …
Already, we’re anticipating spending that extra income … new car, furniture (that’s her idea), new clothes, bigger place, airfares …
A call today from Center for Law and Poverty in Indianapolis, a job I’m not too crazy about but one that might be the springboard for the southern Indiana magazine/tabloid I’ve been pondering.
Other calls to/from Yakima, which sounds better and better but less and less likely, like an impossible dream.
Nancy Neubert saying Yakima is a very nice, good place: agricultural, wealthy, conservative, hydroelectric cheap electricity, good produce abundant and cheap, Spanish and English …
The m.e., there since March, Steve Kent, from Albany, New York, thus appreciated my Binghamton angle. A good phone conversation.
Located Snyder’s lookout towers on the map, though Sourdough was not shown. Some of the other sites he relates, though, were.
Spicer: “West Coast is something nobody with sense would understand.”
Good place to end this journal. 10:20 pm, night of new moon, unseen through the haze
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Aftermath of the layoff: anxiety and rest
I have had the leisure of a year in these woods – some weeks, every day – to watch and learn and assume their changes. Meaning, I’m turning.
My insecurity over income – as for antiques as a line, seems akin to Swami Rudi and his disciple (the routes not taken!) …
At least I was on unemployment compensation.
The dripping wet richness of these soils.
Meeting, with all the people I wanted to get to know better.
Electrical outage: Can’t write, can’t cook, TV won’t work, music’s silent, too dark to read. Our life has come to this?
Horses can tear up trails, too.
~*~
We lived on Leonard Springs Road, named for a ravine and at the time hidden cave beyond our home. My frequent explorations inspired a set of poems, which can be found at my Thistle Finch blog. The terrain, which included the then breached city water reservoir, has now become a public park, as you”ll find in a photo album at Thistle Finch. The woods had more than its share of trash at the time.
Images by Vmenkov via Wikimedia Commons.
~*~
Don’t remember this, must have been a Mtg picnic at the Dietz’:
Crazy sunfish, or some other board with two sails, won’t steer right, won’t steer left, the wind’s unsteady, shifting, blowing us over again and again.
We can’t go back, keep going in circles.
Two hours in May, cold lake water, chilled to bone before we run ashore on the dam.
Bill comes out in his outboard boat to tow us back.
A hot shower, group hug, and two cups of coffee couldn’t warm us from that.
Half of our goods packed, not knowing whether we’ll be here or faraway – no way to plan.
Kat upset (but trying not to show it) because her husband is a bum (she keeps wanting to see me working around the house, but I feel cramped in/crammed in) … I’m wondering how inert a human can be … she’s not working at her art, either …
A break in the 90-degree weather: “bearable, even pleasant like Upstate bright sunlight amid small clouds.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Workshop, part two …
Plain sheet, “Session w. EO: 16 December 75”
Qs about my future direction: poetry/fiction or social science, technical editor? (Would like to pull them all together, in manner, say, of Norman Mailer.) We need to think these through.
If top-notch soc sci editor, need further methodological/statistical expertise (Tuftde’s reader?) Also, the Psychological Assn. stylebook. NEED TO EXAMINE TABLES IN OUR OWN MATERIAL. That means going beyond the text side of the work.
How does a niche writer/editor survive outside New York City/Washington? How does one get out of the newspaper game, with its dead end in the future?
Need to invest time in reflection, in serious review, in gestation of a piece (and of myself).
Schedule normal [regular] half-hour/week session with EO, putting more concerns on paper, increasing the communication between us.
With tables, I need to verbalize what’s happening: create sentences summarizing the data: check the data with the text. Haven’t been doing that.
Revisiting this, I cringe. The prophecy is on the wall.
~*~
A break, a vacation – chance to think, breathe, reflect – pushing too long, with too little success …
Notes of struggles at work, in my own literary efforts, and at home …
Pages of attempting to come to grips with editing statistics …
Induction / Deduction
Specific / general
To general / to specific (syllogism)
Probability soups, judgment soups, convenience soups, etc.
Frequency or distribution of measures: straight tables, numerical &/or percentage, as I noted.
~*~
3 feb 76: Valve blown on Omkara; engine will be torn down to see how bad the damage is. Long conversation with EO and RBP today. Feel they are half pleased, half unhappy with my work. Very frustrating. Job very demanding but feel most of the time I’m working in a vacuum. RBP wants more incision on statistical recitation, more devotion (upset at Thanksgiving trip away), more initiative (finding outlets and ways of repackaging our materials). EO needs more time to write, as does RBP. Send them memos, rather than speaking, unless in a meeting.
Graduate Library, all the floor indication lights/numbers on the elevators worked today,
Vol. 40, blue IU, 5:III:76, opens: Layoff.
Portentous day
Kat gone to Louisville (w/ classmates?).
Meeting w/ EO & RBP expecting the worst on “the newsletter and the future” turned out to be two-months’ notice. “The time has come to realize our paths are diverging and to part while it’s still cordial.”
EO saw our different directions, the increasing math editing to come, plus the budget delays.
Pflum: “They always do it so gently.”
Looking at options for future, and whether Kat could complete her degree in a year. Freelance editing? “The insecurity scares me.” Among the scenarios I put on the plate: go to Sycamore, clean up Mom’s old place next door, learn antiques for a year or two …
“I feel abandoned and unbelievably alone. Haven’t felt this way since meeting Kat … Noz is lonely and trying to bat this pen”
I need to recapture and regenerate the joy of life, the simple contagious power to live …
WILD-ness and clarity.
What an emotional stress the Workshop has been – the anxieties, deadlines missed, wild-goose chases; their anticipation of 60-hour weeks (yet also quality and originality), the deadening meetings and academic facades.
I sense one principal has never suffered. He lacks that depth, or didn’t learn from if he did, or else formed a shell.
These days I wonder how much the movement toward quantification in political science (statistics rather than theory or philosophy or psychology even) has led to the conundrum today: surveys and strategies for votes – an absence of moral values, convictions, or purpose.
~*~
From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 