Tag: Musings

FROM SHERHERAZADE TO THE PARTHENON AND COYOTE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Fatema Mernissi: Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems. Puzzled by the smirks of Western men whenever she mentioned harem, this Moroccan Islamic feminist launches into an attempt to understand the differences between Islamic male-female dynamics and those of the West. She draws heavily on the stories of Scheherazade and painting, noting what is emphasized East or West. Along the way, she presents interesting insights into Muslim life, including the “secret” side of the feminine, often rural, traditions where forbidden teachings continue. I find this a provocative book, good for launching further discourse. Where I think she misses the mark is in her failure to comprehend the harem as pure fantasy, one that may be more about power and wealth – and pure leisure – than about sex. In the West, multiple sexual partners (other than prostitutes) was essentially limited to the upper (ruling) class – a mistress, at that, rather than a panoply; sex itself, according to Roman Catholic teaching, was not for pleasure, unlike that of the harem fantasy (Mernissi does write of the pleasures of the public bath, noting how often bathing was proscribed through European history); furthermore, for many Western men, having sufficient freedom of time and wealth to indulge in a harem would be foreign to their thinking – work before pleasure. Not until Hugh Hefner do we see anything remotely resembling the harem fantasy, and he and his empire have always been somewhat outside propriety. I sense that major difficulties arise in the fallacy of trying to compare a powerful male with a harem to an average male anywhere; this is paralleled by trying to celebrate the heroic wife among many, rather than the average wife trapped within the system. More telling, as she reflects, would be the insights of artists’ wives, knowing their husbands were painting nudes.
  • Barbara Jane Reyes: Poeta en San Francisco (poems). A blazing collection of mostly prose-poems by a Filipina-American, often seemingly free-association, often multilingual, often Catholic-anti-Catholic (blasphemous within faith?), often addressing the aftermath of war, racism, sexism from ghetto streets, often full of blame for the other. All the same, full of juice. Passionate. Inflammatory, priming me with a desire to write, as well.
  • Ellen Cooney: Gum Ball Hill. This novel attempts to recreate the tensions in a Maine community just outside York during leading up to and through the Revolutionary War. It has had me looking up some of the York and Dover experiences during the King Phillip’s War period, and considering this place as frontier through a difficult century.
  • Damon D. Hickey: The Cross of Plainness: A Century of Conservative Quakerism in North Carolina (issue of The Southern Friend, 2005). Excellent presentation of Wilburite Quakerism focused on a single Meeting, now laid down. Solid quotations and material for future writing.
  • Robert Bowie Johnson Jr.: The Parthenon Code. Examining the friezes of the Parthenon, the author argues that they present the other side of the Genesis story – one focusing on the Serpent and the line of Cain/Kain, having the Creator pushed out of the scene entirely, and showing Noah/Nereus being overcome by the human will of Poseidon and his kin. The work of an impassioned amateur, lacking in footnoted documentation, is nonetheless provocative and intriguing. I wish he had acknowledged that the Genesis stories themselves are drawn from widespread Middle Eastern mythology, which means that the Greeks might also be showing themselves overcoming Babylonian might, rather than a small and insignificant Hebrew philosophy per se. On the other hand, if the Greek account celebrates the victorious and conquering human, the Jewish account also seems to side with the underdog! Our God favors the powerless!
  • Grandfather Duncan Sings-Alone: Sprinting Backwards to God. Part Coyote tales, mostly memoir, an easy-to-read and often humorous account of a Cherokee half-breed’s spiritual journey from preacher kid to Disciples of Christ pastor to Native healer and pipe-carrier. Candid insights into the failure of his four marriages. (His father was Scottish background.) Includes some embarrassingly purple verse by his current wife. Helpful glossary.
  • Howard Norman: The Northern Lights. In this, his inaugural novel, Norman follows a young boy through his trials in the Canadian North and finally with his mother running The Northern Lights movie house in Toronto. Some interesting insights along the way, but not altogether satisfying from my perspective. The structure, for instance, seems flimsy and the conclusions don’t really fit … too much deus et machina for me.
  • John Canaday: Invisible World. Poems drawn from the year he spent in Jordan, tutoring the children of King Hussein and Queen Noor. I wouldn’t have known, however, from the poems themselves his reason for living in an Islamic nation, only that these reflect his attempt to understand the place and culture.
  • Melissa Jayne Fawcett: Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon. A small, beautiful volume that includes telling blocks of quotations from the Mohegan matriarch responsible for bringing many of her people’s old ways into the twenty-first century. As the author notes, less is known about the New England Indians than about those anywhere else – and this is a valuable piece in that gaping puzzle.

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FROM BIRDING BY EAR TO GROWING OLDER, WITH OR WITHOUT CHOPSTICKS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Peterson Field Guides: Birding by Ear (booklet and audio tapes). Tweet! (OK, I still can’t identify most birds by their singing. Maybe I just don’t know the words?)
  • Stephan Yafa: Big Cotton. Exploration of the impact of another major commodity on world economies and politics. In line with Salt, Cod, Honey, even the fur and tusks that Farley Mowett has pursued.
  • E. Digby Baltzell: Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. A disturbing comparison of the legacy of two Colonial cities founded on faith. Baltzell’s reliance on High Society and family dynasties gives the work its own twist, so that families that moved away from either city vanish from sight, no matter their continuing contributions to society. Still, many of his conclusions are also disturbing, especially from a Friends’ perspective.
  • Henry David Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. A surprising amount of bad poetry here, as well as very little observation of what’s right before him. I find myself dismissing Thoreau as a suburban naturalist, more an antecedent to Kerouac than, say, Snyder.
  • Tom Montag: Kissing Poetry’s Sister. Includes looks at creative nonfiction as a genre. He’s another middle-aged poet who has continued to write in relative obscurity while being employed in non-teaching positions.
  • Elizabeth Lyon: The Sell Your Novel Toolkit. Had this one sitting on my shelf all along, thinking it was another self-marketing guide for once the work was published. Instead, it turns out to have in-depth sections on query letters, synopsis/outline presentations, landing an agent, and the like. As a result, I have reworked all of my materials for the three novels I’m pitching – even renaming two of them. Now, let’s see if it does the trick.
  • Victoria Abbott Riccard: Untangling Chopsticks. A young woman from New England moves to Kyoto to master the cooking and presentation of food that accompanies tea-ceremony. Along the way, she becomes adept in a culture where she would always be an outsider, even after a lifetime. Includes recipes.
  • Tom Plummer: Second Wind, Variations on a Theme of Growing Older. Pleasant essays more appropriate to newspaper or magazine columns, by an understated Mormon.

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UNBOUND PAGES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

What comes to mind when someone mentions “sitting down to read a book”? I often think of winter days, maybe sitting beside a window that has African violets on its sill. Or long nights, perhaps with classical music or jazz in the room. Either way, the image fits January, and that may be what gave me the idea of devoting my postings here this month exclusively to a list of “books read” I’ve been compiling from 2005.

It’s a break in the rolling categories I’ve been presenting each month – those will resume at the beginning of February. Even so, as we ponder the range of books mentioned here, you could argue those categories continue all the same.

The project originated when my schedule at the newspaper was switched from a Wednesday-through-Saturday timetable (with a double-shift hammer pounding each week to a close) back to all-nights. At the time, on those evenings when the newsroom was fully staffed, a break would occur between the lockup of the first edition and the later ones – and this was a great time to read a chapter or two from a book-in-hand. (Alas, cutbacks soon took their toll.) For a change, I could nibble at those volumes I’d piled up “to read someday” – and decided to keep track of just what I tackled. This ledger was never intended for public consumption, but given the nature of the Red Barn – delving through boxes, baskets, and bins stashed in the loft – it seemed fitting to air these anyway, at last.

As I’ve noted previously, one of my laments in trying to maintain a literary writing discipline while being employed full-time was the lack of time to keep up with thoughtful reading. As you’ve no doubt heard, if you’re serious about writing, you have to be devoted to reading. Even so, what I found was that my extended reading often came in “orgies” based on vacations, recovery from surgery or illness, even airline travel. So here we are, surveying a few volumes and occasional magazines each day during the month.

I love having you weigh in with related works or arguing with my observations – reading is, after all, a passion we share.

WHAT A YEAR THIS HAS BEEN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

While this was the year I officially retired, what really happened has me once again (or should I say finally?) wearing my novelist’s cap, with four ebooks published at Smashwords since May and more planned ahead. What a relief it is to see these in public at last, rather than sitting forever in filing cabinets in the face of an increasingly difficult traditional book publishing industry. (Hooray for the ebook upstarts!)

The first half of the year included a rash of poetry acceptances in literary journals around the world, including three in India. In fact, in sheer numbers, it was my best year ever, even before I had three presses accept poetry chapbooks for their offerings. (Please stay tuned.) That’s always an honor and something of a breakthrough for me.

On a lower note (pardon the pun), I joined the baritone section of the Boston-based Revels Singers – performing with Ciarin Nagel of the Three Irish Tenors in June and Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary in September – on top of the choir’s weekly workouts in Watertown. Apart from the rush-hour part of the commute, it’s been a heavenly experience.

I can also claim some pride in my major contribution to the garden efforts – the many black bags of seaweed gleaned from Kittery Point, Maine. Rachel was especially impressed by the way the mixture repelled our notorious garden slugs, even before we got to its impact as a high-quality fertilizer. More will be on the way.

And, yes, I’m still Quakering madly.

Did I say retired? A better description is that I changed careers. At last.

And looking ahead, as we open new calendars, this hope: May we all have a happy and prosperous New Year!

THE REAL HEALTH CARE DEBACLE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

I keep hearing those folks gloating and pointing fingers over the troubles in rolling out what they deride as Obamacare, and I want to shout, “Where’s your health care plan – one that will provide basic coverage for the remaining two-fifths of the American public?”

There should be an embarrassing silence. Behind all their bluff, they have nothing, not even two aspirin and a glass of water. Just who would they have you phone in the morning, anyway?

They might say we can’t afford it, but that’s another way of saying our current system is outrageously overpriced and needs reform.

But then they say it’s just fine. (For them, maybe.)

But then they won’t even let us take a close look at another model, single-payer, like Canada’s. Thing is, every Canadian I’ve talked to loves it. And if it’s anything like the government-paid system my military surviving spouse mother-in-law has, my family would take it in a heartbeat.

The party-line critics of health care for all Americans have done everything they can to derail the rollout. They’ve kept a lot of the details up in the air and fought funding. No wonder there are screw-ups.

But remember this, it’s much better than anything they’ve offered.

We’re still waiting for their plan.  And waiting. And waiting.

Maybe they’ll look in the mirror in the meantime and see where the real problem is.

JUST FOR ADDED KICKS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Admittedly, we live in an area that gives meteorologists headaches. It’s one of those where several major weather systems collide. Not quite as bad as where I once lived in Upstate New York and we sometimes wound up with four completely different forecasts for the day’s four editions of the paper as the day wore on. But here, one winter, when one of the local websites had its own retired Air Force meteorologist providing early morning reports, he did note an ongoing line running from Concord, New Hampshire, to Portland, Maine, and remarked that if it shifted slightly north or south, so would the weather, depending which side you were on. That line held on most of the winter.

In the past week, we’ve just come through two “weather events” that provide some amusement in the iffiness of science department, even if it has meant more than 20 inches of snowfall to dig out. In the last one, the projected amounts of snowfall kept changing, sometimes with hourly revisions, or so it seemed, going from one to two inches and settling on two to four, at one service, to three to six at NOAA. We wound up with over eight. So they missed, one of them (the one that’s usually somewhat hysterical in its warnings) off 75 to 88 percent.

In the storm before that, I’m glad I decided to back out of plans to head to Boston for a working session with Friends. The heavier-than-expected snowfall was a mess, and I never would have made it there in time.

Now we’re looking at another weekend, one with a gathering halfway across the state tomorrow night, and the other Sunday morning, the one we rescheduled in Boston. And I have no way of knowing what to expect, other than it might be messy.

Without getting into the percent chances of precipitation but sticking only to the forecast, here are the options:

  • Saturday overcast, Sunday ice pellets, Monday rain.
  • Tomorrow wintry mix, tomorrow night and Saturday rain/snow, Saturday night and Sunday freezing rain continuing Sunday night, Monday rain/snow.
  • Tomorrow a few afternoon showers, Saturday cloudy, Sunday rain, Monday cloudy.

So Sunday’s the only day they agree on, and even that could be simple rain or really messy?

I guess if I had to choose one, it would be the third option, especially since Sunday has only the warmer rain. Or maybe, if I look around more, I might even find a fourth choice I like better.

Or should I just check my horoscope for a clearer idea, instead?

HEALTHIER BALANCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For most of my adult life, I’ve tended to load up on the fresh vegetables, but fruit’s been another matter. Maybe if you stuck a piece right in front of me, on my plate. Yes, I love blueberries and, with breakfast, a grapefruit. But even after living in an orchard (cherries, plums, pears, peaches, and varieties of apples), I rarely went out of my way for that end of the dietary spectrum. Until I retired.

Maybe it was a sense of reclaiming some of my ashram experience, but once I left full-time employment, I found myself in a routine of setting down for a midmorning meal of fresh homemade toast (with homemade jam or jelly, meaning fruit), fresh homemade yogurt (with fruit), and (in season) an orange I’d just peeled.

And then there are all the goodies from our garden, much of it eaten fresh and the rest, frozen for later, such as the strawberries, blueberries,  and raspberries. That’s even before we get to the trips to the pick-your-own orchards, where we focus on the half-price drops on the ground, such as peaches and apples, or the crab apples we pick from the strips between the sidewalk and some city streets. Add to that a daughter who revels in canning, as well as making jams and jellies.

It may be deep cold outside, but on my table these days, I’m reliving summer. Now, what are we having for dinner?

SHUTTERING THE BUNKERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For all of its uber-quaintness and tony appeal today, the neighboring city to our south has long had its seamy side. It was, after all, a seaport – and, for that matter, remains one.

While times have changed and its once notorious districts have long since been gentrified or razed, one bit of that heritage has lingered. We see it along the major highways, usually on the side headed toward the vacation lands north and east, and not always in the city itself but close enough to count.

These are the cement-block bunkers that sometimes tout themselves as bookstores, but we’ve never been fooled. A few actually started out, it seems, as gasoline stations that covered their windows when they converted to the sex trade, while the others may have actually been constructed with this function in mind. Magazines, videos, toys … but not live performances. Maybe there are some clubs elsewhere, though I suspect that requires a trip to Portland or Boston. Maybe Lawrence or Lowell.

These bunkers may have a thin window or two high up in the wall, but the doors are solid. In other words, no peeping. If anything, these blockhouses always look forbidding and forlorn. You might even say they appear shameful or guilty rather than flirtatious and giddy.

Rarely, too, is a car or pickup seen parked in front. And in the past few years, there have been fewer and fewer of those parked on the side, either.

Unlike their cousins on downtown streets in larger cities, where customers may slip discretely through the doorway or out, these offer far less secrecy for their patrons. If anyone knows your car or truck, they know where you are.

As we’ve driven past on the busy roadways, I’ve long wondered how these places stay in business. Magazines of all stripes have been folding or shrinking, and when it comes to racy photography, there’s plenty available online these days. No secret there. Ditto, the videos. As for the toys, well, we have online retailers of all sorts, along with rapid delivery.

Well, we now notice another of these little box stores is shuttered. It’s not in a spot we see any other store wanting. It will be curious to see what happens to the real estate. But there are no signs of mourning, either.

Funny thing, though: just up the road, at the mall, Victoria’s Secret is thriving.

DREAMING OF A WHAT?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Golly, it really is too early in the season for this much snow. I spent much of yesterday digging out from a foot or so of the stuff, our first real round as we plunge into another winter, even though it’s officially still autumn and we’ve had a blanket of white on the ground for a week now.

It’s also too early to be this cold, considering the minus-2 Fahrenheit forecast for tonight. That should seal in the snow cover, for sure.

My wife is no doubt anticipating sending me outside with a guest or two to harvest Brussels sprouts in a little over a week, when it comes time to prepare for our traditional Yule feast. Looks like once again we’ll be using an ax to break the icy covering and a shovel to locate the greens. I’ve previously posted about the way frost gives the sprouts and kale a wonderful sweetness, but the snowpack always thickens the plot. She finds it highly amusing, watching from the kitchen window.

Meanwhile, as I shoveled yesterday, I kept remembering that since this is just the start, it would be wise to make an extra effort to leave room for the next storm … or three or four or … Thus, don’t leave the pile at the end of the driveway so tall you can’t see oncoming traffic, be sure to push the icy wall along the driveway back so you won’t have to throw the next round higher than your shoulders, keep as much on the side away from the foundation so it won’t drain into the cellar, … Yes, there’s a long list, based on long experience living here.

Then I remembered something else. Last month, I finally got the bindings on my cross-country skis fixed – and new boots to go with them. Sure looks like a good day to go outside and try them out in a loop around the yard. Hope I keep my balance. Here we go, even before the latest forecast: With Christmas really just around the corner, we’re expecting another inch or two tomorrow.

Whee!

BUBBLES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

With apologies to the Friends disciplines that warned of intoxicating beverages or to friends who are longtime members of twelve-step programs, let me confess to the period when I was an amateur homebrewer. I’ve recently retired from it, recycled the bottles, and distributed the gear. But it was an educational experience. (Seriously.) I never got as detailed as my friend Eric, with his sensitive scale to measure ingredients or his original recipes. No, the pre-measured kits from Stout Billy’s were unbeatable, especially when I learned ways to travel “cross country” to make double stouts or double bochs. And I soon bypassed the alcohol level measurements, a move that gave me one more bottle from each kettle of brewing.

My wife’s long been fascinated by the role of yeast in civilization. Think of bread or yogurt, for starters. We like the story that across Europe, the bakery and brewery were side-by-side, both relying on the yeast culture. She even baked some bread from our used beer yeast, though the younger daughter objected to its taste. Still, we know it can be done.

Yeast makes the difference between ales and lagers. The ale yeasts thrive at slightly warmer temperatures, such as the British Isles, compared to the lagers, of German fame, especially. (Pilsner is a sub-set of lager.) I soon fell into a pattern of brewing and bottling ales in the fall, before Christmas, when I’d take a break before launching into lagers. In all, I created more than 2,500 bottles, each one “hand crafted.”

Well, the Irish musicians did declare my stout tasted like the Guinness in Dublin – not the stuff they ship here. And I’ll take that as the highest complement, along with their smiles as they drank while playing.