Tag: Top Ten

What makes a place ‘home’ for you?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the big themes running through my novel What’s Left was that “family” can mean so many different things to so many different people.

Maybe it’s all the renovations going on in our old house, but recently I’ve been pondering many varied understandings of the word “home,” too.

For starters, sampling of what others have said, a home is:

  1. “Where one starts from.” (T.S. Eliot)
  2. “Where we should feel secure and comfortable.” (Catherine Pulsifer)
  3. “A shelter from storms – all sorts of storms.” (William J. Bennett)
  4. “Where there’s one to love us.” (Charles Swain)
  5. “Any four walls that enclose the right person.” (Helen Rowland)
  6. “Where my habits have a habitat.” (Fiona Apple)
  7. “Not where you live but where they understand you.” (Christian Morgenstern)
  8. “A place that gives you unconditional love, happiness, and comfort. It may be a place where you can bury your sorrows, store your belongings, or welcome your friends. A happy home doesn’t require the trappings of opulence.” (Simran Kuhrana)
  9. “A machine for living in.” (Le Corbusier)
  10. “The place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” (Robert Frost)

Is it even a place at all?

Cecilia Ahern insists it’s a feeling. Lemony Snicket pegs that as homesick, “even if you have a new home that has nicer wallpaper and a more efficient dishwasher than the home in which you grew up.” Maya Angelou relates it to an ache “in all of us, the safe place we can go as we are and not be questioned.” For John Ed Pearce, it’s a state of  mind, somewhere “you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.” Edward Sharpe senses home as his beloved’s presence, “Wherever I’m with you.” Edie Falco connects it family when he returns to them from his paying job and realizes they make his labors “richer, easier and more fun.” For May Sarton, it must have “one warm, comfy chair” as the line between being “soulless.”

Things we still need a can opener for

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I don’t eat canned soup anymore – can’t stand it, not after being upgraded at home.

Beer, meanwhile, has a tab or comes in a bottle.

So here are my reasons for not throwing our can opener into the trash:

  1. Tuna fish
  2. Tomato paste, as well as whole and diced tomatoes
  3. Sweet corn
  4. Sweet condensed milk
  5. Garbanzo beans (already softened)
  6. Pumpkin filling, not just for pies
  7. Coconut milk
  8. Chipotle
  9. Pineapple (not fresh)
  10. Baked beans

If we only had a dog or cat and their cans of pet food. 

Among trendy folk

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’m really in the dark about what’s “in” these days, though I do get some glimmers through family.

So let me ask.

  1. Are Carhartt pants continuing to overtake blue jeans?
  2. Is Apple still preferred to Android?
  3. Depop for second-hand clothing. Is it the next eBay or etsy?
  4. Are Gmail addresses still tops? Or is email essentially going over to texts?
  5. Wraparound sunglasses? I’m finally noticing them.
  6. Paypal for online use rather than cards themselves? What about Venmo?
  7. I’m finally aware of Reddit. But what about Twitch?
  8. As for snacks: Doritos chips and salsas? Goldfish crackers? Oreos?
  9. Are Ugg boots and Crocs really making a comeback? As for Vans shoes?
  10. How long can vegan hold on?

Some things ‘Quaking Dover’ has in common with my novels

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not that I really noticed the parallels until now.

  1. Counterculture is central, leading to an awareness of an underground community or at least kindred spirits.
  2. Both have meant learning to write differently than my neutral third-person journalism. Emotion, for instance, over fact, is the rule in the fiction. And the history opened a similar vein as creative nonfiction.
  3. The role of a narrator in both. In the history, that meant developing the gently laughing curmudgeon as he pored over historical data. In four of the hippie novels, it was the snarky daughter reviewing her late daddy’s hippie experiences.
  4. Both veins are self-published, falling under the shadow of being “not commercially viable” by publishing houses. That places an additional burden on the author.
  5. Marketing is a huge challenge. Apart from Subway Visions, none of my stories take place in a big city or address a big audience. How many hippie novels can you name, anyway. As for Quakers?
  6. Spirituality and religion run through all of them. In the novels, it’s often yoga, though Hometown News runs up against a puzzling array of churches. In Quaking Dover, though, it’s often the clash between the upstart Friends and what I first saw as rigid Puritans before both traditions begin to, uh, mellow.
  7. There’s a strong sense of place, even if these locations are far from the mass-media spotlight.
  8. I go for the big picture. I really would like to have a simple book – something, as Steven King advises, having only one big idea – but that’s not how my mind works.
  9. They’ve all undergone deep revision. Much of the fiction actually got new titles and new characters after their original publication.
  10. They were all labors of love.

Here these go again

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The random notes in no particular order continue:

  1. Did college recruiters ever come to my high school? We weren’t elite and we weren’t any of the other demographics they were hot for. How about yours?
  2. Our high school guidance counselors did little more than sign you up for a draft card, as far as I can see.
  3. Genji was a definite historical character.
  4. Argentata chard … doesn’t taste like chard … hardier and cleaner than spinach.
  5. Gentrification versus decay.
  6. An inept lover, too charming by his very incompetence, unintentionally funky, nothing more than some everyday world seen through myopia. So why am I bothered?
  7. I love some of the drone videos filmed around here. But definitely not all.
  8. And then we learn that the mayor’s involved. As we said in the news biz, this story has legs.
  9. Yes, I remember Hudson, it’s up in the Cuyahoga Valley, a lovely New England style village not far from the Cleveland Orchestra’s summer home.
  10. Some writers place most or all of their plots in a particular locale, usually a big city or perhaps a state. Just never mine.

 

A few thoughts spinning around Scripture

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment
  1. Even if Biblical Scripture is essentially the “men’s minutes” of divine history, the women therein generally come off much better than the men – and whenever the women are named, there is growth in the church: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, etc.
  2. Because the male gender language has been inclusive, representing the universal, there is no English way for men to refer to themselves in the particularity of being male – no way, in other words, that we can distinctly represent the specifics of being male only. So just who has been more impoverished by this defect?
  3. When I get away from my emotions, I’m also far from my God … (God is love).
  4. Argument: It’s possible to do religion without faith, but impossible to maintain a mutually loving connection without faith i.e. trust. Thus, positive relationship exists with the Divine.
  5. Hosanna and Alleluia as universal expressions of awe and ecstasy.
  6. Hashem = “the unnamable name” = neutral.
  7. Adoni = lord = male.
  8. Elohim = breast = female.
  9. The idea of “casting spells” is that you can order God/the gods/spirits to do your bidding rather than the other way around.
  10. Zionism originated to save a language. That is, a language needs a place where it lives.

Here’s what bugs me about ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For reference, I’m focusing on the Amazon Prime video series, not the earlier books.

  1. Pop songs as a running commentary or an alternative dialog. This isn’t opera.
  2. The lack of positive male role models.
  3. The maudlin playing of the brothers’ mother’s death, especially after she’s gone. It definitely reduces her to a two-dimensional character.
  4. The fact it wasn’t filmed on Cape Cod, contrary to the story. The color of the water is wrong and the McMansion is so out of place, ultimately. Even the beaches are wrong. Where are the lobster boats?
  5. The way the story keeps evading the richer possibilities of polyamory or outright incest, which it keeps skirting. Instead, if the projections are correct, season three is going to veer off into one brother or the other, but not both together. That’s why I’m thinking I’ll be tuning out.
  6. Superficial treatment of so much.
  7. The flashbacks feel like a riptide. Just where are we at this point?
  8. The presence of a commercially published novelist as a major character. (I would object if she were a successful painter or actress or other fine artist for that matter – it’s simply rather incestuous creatively.)
  9. The way our Ugly Duckling’s mother, the writer, has so many lines of wisdom. She could be speaking in paragraphs.
  10. The difficulty I have in following slang, even when it’s the difference between “big bitch” and something else as an equivalent of beloved girlfriend.

There’s more to the Northern Lights than you see

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Living as far north as I do, just a hair below the 45th parallel halfway between the north pole and the equator, I’m starting to keep an eye out for the Northern Lights on clear nights through winter. Moonlight, clouds, precipitation, and pollution all block viewing, but our remote location means that many of our nights can be visually crisp and rewarding for those who bundle up.

  1. More formally, the beautiful, dancing waves of light are known as the aurora borealis, named by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1619 in honor of Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, and Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind. They most famously resemble giant colorful curtains blown by some cosmic wind, though that’s all a mesmerizing illusion. In fact, where I live, they’re more likely to be detected by time-exposure photography than by the naked eye.
  2. They’re best viewed between September and April, when the night sky is longest and darkest, especially in the “auroral zone,” a cap roughly within a 1,550-mile radius of the North Pole. Places like Fairbanks, Alaska; Tromso, Norway; Lapland, Finland; Orkney, Scotland; and Yellowknife, Canada, are key travel destinations for viewing, but rare sightings have been reported as far south as tropical Honolulu, Hawaii.
  3. While Northern Lights happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, they are most intense after a geomagnetic solar storm, which tosses energized particles into Earth’s upper atmosphere at speeds up to 45 million miles an hour. As the Earth’s magnetic field shields the surface by drawing the onslaught toward the poles, the energized particles collide with atmospheric gases, producing vibrant hues of blue, green, pink, violet, and even gold in surreal movement across the night sky.
  4. Solar storm emissions run in 11-year cycles. The last peak of extreme activity was in 2014, and the next is next year. We’re already in the higher-than-usual range.
  5. The strongest geomagnetic storms can disrupt GPS systems and radio signals. One temporarily knocked out electricity across the entire Canadian province of Quebec. The largest solar storm recorded, Carrington Event of 1859, sparked fires on telegraphs. I remember some occasions in 1970-’71 when they turned the overnight teletype news reports from the Associated Press, United Press International, and other wire services into unintelligible jumbles. (Some of my Sun Spot poems are drawn from that outpouring.)
  6. The storms even have the potential to wipe out the Internet for weeks or months unless the technology is “hardened,” , according to some warnings.
  7. The night lights also appear in the Southern Hemisphere as the aurora australis but are more elusive because there’s less land mass, and, thus, fewer suitable spots for viewing the spectacle.
  8. Earth’s not alone. Jupiter, with a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s, has far brighter blazes. Auroras have also been discovered on both Venus and Mars, despite their very weak magnetic fields.
  9. NOAA’s forecasts are available online at NOAA’s Aurora Viewline for Tonight and Tomorrow Night page, mapping the southern-most locations from which you may see the aurora on the northern horizon.
  10. The best time for viewing? One source says mostly just before sunrise or after sunset. Another says between 9 pm and 3 am.

Some things I’m anticipating in the year ahead

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
  1. Sitting beside our newly installed wood-burning stove on otherwise chilly mornings and evenings.
  2. Completing the second phase of our upstairs renovations along with moving into the back half up there, including my book collection when it comes out of storage.
  3. My second week on the water in the schooner Louis R. French.
  4. Revisiting my journals from the Baltimore years on.
  5. A magazine orgy.
  6. Renewed time with the Bible.
  7. Using my passport. We do live right next to Canada, after all.
  8. Events at the arts center.
  9. Continuing Quaker worship face-to-face rather than Zoom.
  10. Scallops in season as well as local blueberries, cranberries, lobsters, and crab.

A few things I’m grateful for in the past year

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
  1. A second presence in the house year-‘round. Plus our guests.
  2. Seeing the home renovations finally under way. And how.
  3. My maiden voyage in a ship overnight. As you’ll be seeing.
  4. A steady supply of real tomatoes, once they started arriving at the beginning of September, thanks to a serious, raised-bed garden already featured here at the Red Barn.
  5. Our new choral director. We may be a small community, but there’s some deep talent.
  6. The resurrected film society. The showings are followed by some serious discussion into the wee hours.
  7. Contradances, too, both here in Eastport and at the Common Ground Fair.
  8. My appearances resulting from Quaking Dover. You can still find some of them online.
  9. Scallops in season. (And local blueberries, cranberries, lobsters, and crab.)
  10. All the eagles I observed during the alewives’ run and additional encounters after. Always inspiring.