Tag: Politics

Workshop, part two …

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Life at the Workshop, part one

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Starting to get squared away at office: so much space amazes me [my own room!] and then all the backup material, staff, and freedom of movement. I feel like I’m in heaven. Hard to readjust to open work scheduling. New freedom, large-vocabulary return: academic life and performance seem somehow foreign, though I’ve never really left it. Either I perform/deliver now or flunk forever.

Feels very good to work at a slower, more thoughtful pace …

“Have the girls fill this out,” Charlyne said, as I trotted down the hall.

Our administrative assistant, incredulous when I wickedly passed the word along while getting my three carbon papers: “Tell Charlyne the girls are very busy; tell her the girls send their love.”

Charlyne was the uber-feminist in the outfit.

Openly referring to myself as “Jnana” sounds strange again: kept starting to say the legal equivalent of “Boy.”

The leisurely pace of academic reflectiveness, gestation, can be guilt-inducing after the gut-busting pace of the Review-Times [or other newsrooms or assembly lines]. But guilt will only clog intuition. I must learn to pace myself so that I will be producing at peak quality [not quantity]. More than three or four hours of heaving editing or writing is too much for one day, since concentration slips.

Sometimes, on this slower pace, it seems I’m going nowhere, that I should be producing on an 8-5 shift and doing my homework – reading – at other times.

Workshop, a place where craftsmen bring design/theory/aesthetics/tradition/discipline to fulfillment/practice in diverse materials …

In our sense, a place of testing and integrity …

A whole garden to delight the mind’s eye and the physical touch …

Somehow, right after the “little stroll around the block,” I note, 13:XII:74 [a Friday], just back from St. Louis, much energy. [No idea where we stayed – out near the airport? – think we did go to a fancy German one evening.] Came back with a clearer sense of the newsletter, greatly simplified: more like our yoga newsletter!

I think we settled on WORKSHOP REPORTS, with the potential of designating different series such as a police or city government.

Lynn wants at least one foundation or funding source thanked in each workshop paper: it builds their files, gives them a sense that their work is going somewhere (even if only into a folder).

VO discussing difficulties he’s had in writing for publications and how he developed the strategy of writing to write and then usually delivering the work as a paper when invited. Using this approach, he learned he didn’t spend a year to find out the editor had “chickened out” and that if an editor is interested, publication is a byproduct. This way, we have a good backlog so that when the shit hits the fan, we will be ready to market.

He mentioned that Hobbes worked over several decades revising his work.

Another time, he mentioned that his most depressed period was in trying to write a water report and not being able to frame his words: the theoretical framework was weak.

Also, the difficulty of maintaining a creative tension while writing.

My pace is recovering my yogic …

Kat on VO and EO: “I couldn’t imagine them married to anybody else,” and he was now Kat’s favorite person. How curious, considering how upset she would get at my political discussions.

~*~

On the side, Vincent enjoyed designing furniture with carpenter Paul Goodwin. Here’s a sketch of a bookshelf system in his house. I’m not sure now, though, how it connected to the floor, wall, or even ceiling.

~*~

Etienne and Amelie could frame a novel.

Her mother from a very wealthy, steel-making family that lost and regained its fortune; her father, from immigrant Ukrainian miners.

Etienne, from a morbid, divisively argumentative peasant family. It was preoccupied with death. When he was 12 or 13, the grandfather was living in the same farmhouse, not knowing he was dying, though the house reeked of the odor of rectal cancer. The father, in a furious argument, told the old man, “It doesn’t matter, in two months you’ll be dead!” something the wife, Etienne’s mother, could never forgive. The fights that followed led to separation but also their remarriage a week before Etienne and Amelie’s wedding, “so it would be proper.” Yet they still fought.

America? “Here it is just eat your brother!”

France? The mad pace of Paris or the boredom of the provinces.

“I’ve broken many bottles over such cars,” the ones trying to run down pedestrians. “Oh? Did I do that?”

In an office, I feel trapped or cut off. Want to be closer to sun or wind. My mind is no longer original.

Perhaps I write this under the weight of Saturn: I feel sluggish, sedentary. I have piles there and here, projects I do not know how to resolve.

That “little stroll,” by the way, led to my Leonard Springs poems. The site has since been developed into a public nature reserve.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

Is this too harsh? Even on a bad day?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A few asides on the small town where I was dwelling.

John Quinn, who grew up in Fostoria: “Small, flat, uninteresting. Platt-Deutsch. Smelly. Thick-skulled Catholic diluted with third-removed Yankee.”

B.L. Reid: “An ethnic polyglot with many Germans and a sprinkling of Irish and one unusual strain, a tribe of Belgians. To the time of the First World War, three out of four sermons a month in the Catholic church were preached in German. The Belgians were the glassworkers and conducted the local industry. A small opera house was visited by traveling musicians and players. Pretty public parks were much frequented by the Germans and Belgians, often observing their transplanted holidays in their native costumes. The Belgians formed a fine concert band and Belgian funerals, led by the band and followed by mourners on foot, were a familiar and impressive sight.”

Radio “newsman” Mel Murray, in his own voice, used my newspaper column as his “editorial” this morning on WFOB, two days after the concert I had reviewed. Obviously, he wasn’t there.

The people of this town gossip and bitch to each other but when it comes time to stand up, run away. They all want somebody else to stand up for their view, yet are afraid of anything different or new. They seem to be sleeping on their feet.

“Findlay’s only got nickel millionaires, but here, shit, these pishers may got money but they stick it up their ass.”

Nickel millionaires, sez the trashy town’s foot doctor.

[Findlay was headquarters of Marathan Oil and Cooper Tire & Rubber; Fostoria had none.]

~*~

The town sat at the nexus of four major railroads , the B&O, C&O, New York Central, and Nickel Plate lines. They were a constant presence. Photo by Nathaniel Railroad via Wikimedia Commons.

~*~

This piss-hole of a city! So much negativity, jealousy, and hatred it’s a struggle for anyone to remain alive long – negativity that could kill a horse

This place is still a swamp, not even an idea to look up to.

Everything’s got to be good or bad. Their minds can’t handle anything more. Their minds don’t work anywhere near as fast as their hatreds do.

They keep electing crooks just like themselves.

Reporter Tom, a West Virginian, observing how these Midwestern towns build statues of their founders and then live in the shadows: They think they’re friendly, chattering all day, cutting down each other, not a good word to say, a whole damned town of gossips, women and men …

As I saw it, the thing about this place is there’s nothing to look at, no lofty ambitions like a mountaintop, not even a holy man with a begging bowl.

There wasn’t even a river running through it or a lovely lake or pond to ponder. Just the railroad tracks and truck traffic.

 

Upstairs, downstairs

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I don’t mind social class distinctions as much as the imbalance of wealth in the hands of a few individuals in contrast to real labor done by the majority of the populace. That is, the superrich versus the people working in jobs that directly touch people.

The monetary rewards are definitely out of whack.

And the ensuing corruption isn’t helping.

First Lady Dolley Madison cut quite a character

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Dolley Payne (1768-1849) was the widow of prominent Philadelphia lawyer John Todd when she married the future fourth president of the United States, James Madison from Virginia. She was a colorful character, even apart from her extravagant fashion sense (which I see as a rebellion against the Quaker Plain constraints of her youth), a charming hostess who can be viewed as a founder of bipartisanship in American politics thanks to her dinners. Pleasurable food does enhance conversation, no? Dolley’s legendary social gatherings, known as “squeezes,” were attended by influential figures such as politicians, foreign dignitaries, and intellectuals, making her a central figure in American society.

Or, as a North Carolina Quaker minute book wistfully records her, “Formerly of our society,” meaning the Society of Friends. She was also the first president’s wife to be called First Lady.

Today, we have a Double Tendrils. The first set of quotes reflects her time in the White House and her flight during the War of 1812 when she saved the iconic portrait of George Washington in the throes of the attack that burned the new White House, which she had furnished and decorated.

First, things she said as First Lady.

  1. Two messengers covered with dust come to bid me fly, but I wait for him. … I am accordingly ready; I have pressed as many Cabinet papers into trunks as to fill one carriage; our private property must be sacrificed, as it is impossible to procure wagons for its transportation. … It is done… the precious portrait placed in the hands of the gentlemen for safe keeping. … And now, dear sister, I must leave this house or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it by filling up the road I am directed to take.
  2. I have always considered my husband my partner and equal, and have valued his opinions and ideas greatly.
  3. In times of crisis, it is important to remain calm and focused, and to make decisions based on reason rather than emotion.
  4. Leadership is not about wielding power, but about serving others with humility and compassion.
  5. You may imagine me the very shadow of my husband.
  6. A good leader listens to the voices of those they serve, and seeks to understand and address their needs.
  7. History is shaped by the actions of individuals, and we all have the power to make a difference.
  8. I believe in the importance of standing up for what is right, even if it means going against popular opinion.
  9. I have never been afraid to speak my mind and advocate for causes that I believe in.
  10. I believe in the power of collaboration and teamwork, and the strength that comes from working together towards a common goal.

The second set of quotes frame a larger perspective.

  1. It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people’s business.
  2. I believe in the power of education and the importance of women’s access to knowledge.
  3. I believe in the importance of preserving and protecting our natural environment for future generations.
  4. True strength lies in the ability to admit mistakes and learn from them. … Honesty and integrity are the foundations of a strong and lasting legacy.
  5. A strong woman is one who can support and lift others up, even in the face of adversity. … Women have the capacity to be leaders and agents of change, and should be given equal opportunities in all areas of society.
  6. Life is too short to hold grudges or dwell on the past.
  7. Excellence should be pursued in all aspects of life, whether it be in relationships, work, or personal growth.
  8. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity, regardless of their background or social status. … The true measure of a person’s character is how they treat others, especially those who are less fortunate.
  9. Kindness is not a sign of weakness, but a reflection of strength and compassion. … I believe in the power of forgiveness and the strength that comes from letting go of anger and resentment.
  10. I would rather fight with my hands than my tongue.

The backstory’s beginning to look presciently ominous for today

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my revisions of the novel Daffodil Sunrise into a more sweeping Daffodil Uprising, I added backstory involving Indiana politics and efforts to extract personal wealth from one of its state universities.

Considering the current effort of the governor to seize control of the school’s board of trustees has me realizing my dark imaginings were all too naïve.

We know what one-party rule did in Germany and also in the Soviet Union.

In my book, the administration had little interest in listening to the students, much less in responding to their needs.

You can bet that will be a renewed breakdown ahead.

She did have quite the tongue

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the official statement marking the death of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, President Jimmy Carter observed, “She had style, she had grace, and she had a sense of humor that kept generations of political newcomers to Washington wondering which was worse – to be skewered by her wit or to be ignored by her.”

Just listen.

  1. When her father was governor of New York, he and her stepmother planned to send her to a conservative school for girls in New York City. Curtly, Alice responded, “If you send me, I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will.”
  2. When her father became president after the 1901 assassination of William McKinley in Buffalo, she greeted the event with “sheer rapture.”
  3. She later said of her father, “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.”
  4. When a prominent Washington senator was discovered having an affair with a young woman less than half his age, Alice quipped, “You can’t make a souffle rise twice.”
  5. Most famously, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.” She had that one embroidered on a pillow kept in her living room.
  6. On Calvin Coolidge: “He sprang from the grass roots of the country clubs of America.”
  7. Another quick character sketch: “He looks as though he’s been weaned on a pickle.”
  8. And one more: “Never trust a man who combs his hair straight from his left armpit.”
  9. As for Washington, D.C: “A town of successful men and the women they married before they were successful.”
  10. Through it all: “I’ve always believed that if you’ve got a good sense of humor, you can get through anything.”

Do note, her father was quoted: “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”