Tag: Musings

Miscellany, one way or another

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Who am I, really? What do I want to be remembered for?

Raccoon as a Trickster, a local Native twist.

Why be clever?

“The distance I felt came not from the country or the people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.”— narrator in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood set in Montana

A viral carousel.

Quaker by degrees. Turn up the heat?

Quaker vagabonds were Dharma bums, too. The itinerant ministry proffers its own humor.

Things I learned in two years of college French? Le is pronounced luh.

As a youth, I admired crystals grown from supersaturated solutions. Deep blue copper sulfate was my favorite.

I never expected a film literature course under Harry Geduld would influence my poetry as much as my college writing class under poet Dick Allen. But it did: the clash of thesis and antithesis producing an unanticipated synthesis in reaction, especially.

When I first began reading contemporary poetry (for pleasure, independent of classroom assignment), he sensed that often the poem existed as a single line or two, with the rest of the work as window dressing. Now I read the Psalms much the same way, for the poem within the poem, or at least the nugget your or I as the psalmist is to wrestle with on this occasion. Psalm 81, for instance, has both “voice in thunder” and “honey from rock.”

I’m past the bitterness, the years – all the lost potential.

Ten fears in an approaching hurricane

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Even this far north, we’ve had our moments. Among the things to consider:

  1. That it’s going it hit full force, or even with winds in excess of 70 mph and five or more inches of rain.
  2. Roof shingles blown away and/or leaking.
  3. Falling trees and branches.
  4. Flying objects. Things nobody thought to tie down, especially.
  5. Broken windows.
  6. Long power outages leading to loss of frozen and refrigerated food – meat, scallops, blueberries, homegrown chard, especially. Worse yet, the microwave won’t work.
  7. Basement flooding when the sump pump loses power. As for the furnace?
  8. Wet mattresses and books if the ceiling starts to “rain.”
  9. Isolation when the causeway floods.
  10. Just where we’re staying if ordered to evacuate.

Are they really vain expenditures?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Upon graduation from college, in my social-activist period, I wondered how American society could possibly afford High Art while so many went hungry and homeless – domestically as well as internationally. Then I began to see everywhere a desire for expressiveness – in every ghetto, the ghetto-blasters and Playboy, spreads, graffiti and blues bands. To say nothing of the influence of professional sport, to which nearly every ghetto youth seems to aspire. (And more than a few others.)

So opera and museums and other “Establishment” operations came to lose their exclusivity in my vision. Extravagant expenditures in those realms are overshadowed by big-league athletics sports for similar reasons and then by military budgets across much of the globe.

See how much each person needs to reach into the realms of thought and imagination – the spirit; anything less reduces our existence to nothing more than economics, impoverishing everyone in the society.

So I noted.

By the way, Versailles still offends me.

George Bernard Shaw wasn’t shy in sounding off on classical music

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The famed English playwright was also an esteemed music critic, though he wrote under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, 1888 to 1889, before moving on to a more respectable newspaper for four years. There, he signed his reviews G.B.S.

For perspective, he was an ardent advocate of Richard Wagner, which put him in opposition to Johannes Brahms.

Here are some sharp notes.

  1. “Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
  2. “A man who can tolerate Bach and Scarlatti on a modern piano can tolerate anything.” (He was the first converts to the original instruments camp of early music.)
  3. “Nine times out of ten, when a prima donna thinks that I am being thrilled by her vibrant tones, I am simply wrestling with an impulse to spring on stage and say ‘My dear young lady, pray don’t. Your voice is not a nail, to be driven into my head.’”
  4. “There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.”
  5. He did concede some points. “Mind, I do not deny that the Requiem is a solid piece of music manufacture. You feel at once that it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker.”
  6. He redefined the scope of the job, saying “I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was refined and academic to the point of being unreadable and often nonsensical,” or more to the point, “I believed that I could make musical criticism readable even by the deaf.” To wit:
  7. “Handel is not a mere composer in England: he is an institution. What is more, he is a sacred institution. … Every three years there is a Handel Festival, at which his oratorios are performed by four thousand executants, collected from all the choirs in England. The effect is horrible; and everyone declares it sublime. … If I were a member of the House of Commons, I would propose a law making it a capital offence to perform an oratorio by Handel with more than 80 performers in the chorus and orchestra, allowing 48 singers and 32 instrumentalists.” He was way ahead of his time on the size issue.
  8. Many of the musical affectations of the time drew his fire. Regarding one imposed on a Mozart aria, he commented, “The effect of this suburban grace can be realized by anyone who will take the trouble to whistle ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ with the last note displaced an octave.”
  9. To him, a “poor performance was a personal insult to be treated accordingly.”
  10. Still, stridently avoiding pale cliché, he did praise those who surpassed his standards. Describing one singer, he wrote, “I was consoled by a human caress after an angelic discourse.”

Where did all those classmates go?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

There are holes in the listings posted in the website. Individuals, perhaps, who want no contact, though their location is known. Perhaps others who have been ostracized, after prison or scandal. Others just fallen through the cracks.

I see, too, others have been added. Girls who left to have secret babies. Boys who maybe got their GEDs or returned to the fold through marriage. I’m glad to see them included.

In the meantime, I prepare a message. The one that says my location can be known, even if I’m not attending this year’s reunion. Even now, it’s a long road from here to there, and back again.

~*~

How curious, coming across that note a few decades after I wrote it.

I’ve reconnected with a few via social media.

But many holes still remain. Frankly, I don’t know what I’d say to them if they did show up. We have gone in quite different directions, after all.

We do have some striking place names around the Bold Coast

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t noticed, I can be entranced by place names. So for ten around here, let’s go.

  1. Bailey’s Mistake. Did they really land and then settle in the wrong spot?
  2. Boot Head. Try picturing that.
  3. Cutler. It even has a song about drilling into the bottom of barrels of wine confiscated during the Prohibition. And there’s a plank of wood as evidence.
  4. Destiny Bay. Also at Cutler, but what a name.
  5. Machias. Even as something-or-other disgusting kind of falls in the Native name.
  6. Magurrewock Mountain in the Moosehorn National Wildlife Preserve. At a modest 377-elevation, it still deserves attention, even if you can’t pronounce it.
  7. Meddybemps. It’s a town and a huge lake, but still, try repeating it three times.
  8. Moosehorn National Wildlife Preservation. Moose don’t have horns but antlers, despite the naming of a small river.
  9. Pope’s Folly. The small island just off the Old Friar monolith of Campobello Island, New Brunswick, seems to elude historic explanation. I’m not convinced it’s entirely religious.
  10. Treat Island. Named for an early settler, no matter the consequences, it’s still part of Eastport. And a fine IPA brew exists in its honor.