Tag: Top Ten

Dragging me out of the Stone Age

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I was tempted to make that “stoned age,” but I was of a more tempered side of the hippie era.

When it comes to high tech, though, I’ve leaned more toward neo-Luddite. You know, face-to-face and keeping people employed. That’s why I go inside to a teller at the bank, rather than an ATM or drive-thru. Ditto for fast food.

One way my family has of nudging me in the other direction is in their Christmas and birthday gifts to me.

Well, my clumsiness therein is another matter.

Here are some examples.

  1. My first cell phone and then, a dozen years later, the big upgrade to my S22 Ultra, in large part for its digital camera abilities.
  2. That replaced the Olympus digital camera they’d presented a few years earlier. I have to agree it’s a huge upgrade.
  3. A coconspirator in all this offered some puzzling lenses and a lobster tripod for photography that made no sense until I learned about the S22 Ultra. I was so ignorant, but these are cool.
  4. Then there’s the LED ring lamp for Zoom meetings with its warm and cool light settings. The way it’s set up now, I use it for a regular light at my workstation.
  5. A Fire tablet. An ebook author really should have one, though I use mine mostly to stream music. Which leads to …
  6. A Bluetooth headset that works with the aforesaid cell phone and tablet plus my laptop Zoom connections. Didn’t know I couldn’t live without one.
  7. As well as my Tribit remote speaker. I love the flexibility of taking my music around the house or of having hands free during a phone conversation.
  8. My little weather station, the one that doesn’t require wires running out to the wind, temp, and rainfall gauges. Hey, living on a windy island puts the weather high on the awareness chart.
  9. The mustache trimmer. The rechargeable battery device really does the job better than a razor.
  10. Most recent is a set of wireless speakers to go with the new audio system. I started to say “stereo” but know how outdated that’s become. Still, this one  accommodates vinyl, if you know what that means.

 

Well, maybe this should go somewhere

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Still more random notes in no particular order:

  1. Why so many churches? Only an unbeliever would ask.
  2. Note the hippie vibe of Pride Day. Like a time warp.
  3. The jolt of phoning someone and preparing to respond to the voicemail only to have a live voice pop up instead.
  4. Keys that don’t fit anywhere.
  5. It’s a Catholic church too small to conduct bingo games.
  6. I’m spending as much time keyboarding as ever.
  7. All those years I worked five-day weeks every holiday ‘cept maybe Christmas Eve. Or commuted in atrocious weather.
  8. What is literature? And why does it matter?
  9. She strikes me as little more than skin-deep beauty.
  10. What do you like about Christmas?

 

A shoutout some outstanding vocal ensembles

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

With the holidays just ahead, we’re coming up on the prime choral season of the year.

Look around, and there are many outstanding groups, not just the big, famed organizations in the footsteps of conductors Robert Shaw, Roger Wagner, Margaret Hillis, or John Oliver, either.

Hit on some of these on YouTube or Vimeo and let me hear what you think.

  1. Old Order Mennonite Harmonia Sacra. Let’s start from an old American shape-note tradition of harmony. Singing from the 1832 hymnal compiled by Joseph Funk in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, this video will likely lead you to others in this unique stream, including the Shenandoah Christian Music Camp. I’m inclined to sing along, using some much later Mennonite hymnals. Imagine an entire congregation singing parts like this, and many do. Eventually, it may even lead you to the unique Sacred Harp style. If you want to talk about American roots, don’t overlook this. I’m forever indebted to my exposure in this vein. So where do we turn from here? How about something completely different in the religious vein:
  2. Detroit Mass Choir. This large, tightly disciplined urban body runs flawlessly, turning on a dime when director Jimmy Dowell spontaneously decides to repeat a phrase or section or even jump back several parts or similarly ahead. Their take on Charles Tindley’s 1905 “The storm is passing over” is outstanding. Yeah, it’s one more place where stony unemotional me gets teary. That confessed, don’t overlook the instrumentalists, either. And I, for one, do appreciate the audience support throughout, something my mother would have considered interruptive and rude.
  3. Jehovah Shalom Acapella. And you thought the King’s Singers or Cambridge Singers epitomized the small, elite, all-male a cappella field? This six-member Ugandan Gospel group, members of the Seventh-day Adventist faith, delivers with an unbelievably smooth pop style. Where, by the way, do they find such an incredibly deep bass? Now, if we only knew how they’d handle Handel, Bach, and Mozart as well, we might have even more cause for amazement. By the way, we’ve also delighted in live performances by athletic Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
  4. Central Washington University chamber choir. Within a higher education state institution in tiny Ellensburg, well east of the Cascade Range and Seattle, there’s long been an outstanding fine arts program. In such situations, a few good teachers can make a lasting impression. (I hate to think of the destructive obverse.) Under the direction of Gary Weidenaar in works by contemporary Ola Gjeilo or Renaissance master Tomas Luis da Victoria , these student singers reflect, I feel, the high standards found in many other pockets across America – and not just its great conservatories and leading music schools. Returning to the shape-note tradition:
  5. Amherst Madrigals. In William Billings’ “Euroclydon,” a distinctive masterpiece, these ten singers blow me away. It’s a very demanding piece, after “all. And they present it so clearly, with no conductor in sight! For further confirmation, listen to what they do his “I am come into my garden.” Or, for pure polyphony, move onto another group for this:
  6. Indiana University’s Conductor’s Chorus. Their master’s of music performance of Palestrina’s “Sicut cervus” for conductor Daam Beam Kim in 2016 is unbeatable. After seemingly endless rehearsals and a few public performances of this choral masterpiece, I can’t imagine anything more ethereally sublime than this. Period. Even as an IU grad.
  7. Saint Olaf College Choir. This Minnesota Lutheran institution makes some incredible music. The diction in their videos and recordings leaves me envious, and their annual Christmas broadcast is understandably anticipated and admired. Still, compare their rendering of William Billings’ “What wondrous love is this” to one led by Ukrainian conductor Yuriy Kravets and the Shenandoah Christian Music Camp orchestra and choir, previously noted. Both are deeply moving.
  8. Luther College. Set along the upper Mississippi River in Decorah, Iowa, this church institution also has a superb musical program. Just listen to what its Nordic Choir can do. I’m even more impressed when I notice they sing their parts from memory and then their ease in navigating dynamics. Oh, my, that soon leads to a Baton Rouge high school performance that definitely stands out. Yes, high school.
  9. Quoddy Voices. My current chorus is an amazing group in a small remote fishing village with an active arts scene in easternmost Maine. Still, we would really welcome some younger voices. During the Covid restrictions, director John Newell put together some remarkable virtual presentations online, despite the fact we were recording individually under some highly unfavorable conditions. Now that we’re back face-to-face, I’m also delighted and humbled to be part of this circle and its stellar leadership.   
  10. Boston Revels. A unique half-century-old organization that blends history, folk traditions and classical music, dance, plus theatrical acting and story line, I have to admit a bias in being part of the organization though not its justly celebrated annual winter holidays extravaganza. Each year’s Christmas show ends with the entire audience joining in, in full harmony, on the Sussex Mummers’ Carol, inevitably drawing tears from me and, I suspect, most others in the packed and wildly cheering Sanders Theater at Harvard. As a charter member of its community chorus, I do confess this family custom is one thing I do miss in relocating to Way Downeast Maine. Thanks for the memories, all the same.

If you’re a self-published author, how do you stack up?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Yeah, we want folks to read our work, but we do dream of fame and riches, right?

Now, for a splash of cold reality.

  1. Even though a lot of authors are turning to self-publishing their own books, most don’t sell many copies. The typical self-published author sells about five copies, according to one report, while another has the average at 250. I’m guessing that some really hot sellers pull the average way up over the mean, kinda like winning the lottery.
  2. Another report has the average book now selling fewer than 200 copies a year and under a thousand copies over its lifetime. At the bottom, 90 percent of self-published books sell under a hundred copies. Not a lot to crow about, is it?
  3. On the other hand, self-published books account for a $1.25 billion annual market. At Amazon, that comes to $520 million in royalties. (As a self-published author, my royalties on an ebook rival what I get for a paper edition.)
  4. At Amazon, more than 1,000 self-published authors made $100,000 a year. Well, there goes a fifth of those royalties.
  5. For many authors, one secret to success is in having a lineup of titles rather than relying on just one. In that light, the average self-published author makes $1,000 a year in royalties, according to one account.
  6. But, back to the mean, a third of self-published authors make less than $500 a year and a fifth report making no income.
  7. New book sales don’t account for library patrons or the used book market. Used books? I don’t see ebooks showing up at yard sales. Consider that an advantage.
  8. The average American adult reads just 15 minutes a day, according to one survey that apparently doesn’t considering texting. On the other hand, just what are the others looking at on their phones?
  9. Still, if you’re an author, don’t quit your day job, OK?
  10. Only 1 percent of audiobooks on Audible are self-published.

Cranberries!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not everybody loves them, but they are a Thanksgiving tradition, jellied or stewed or otherwise.

Here’s some background.

  1. They’re one of the few fruits native to America.
  2. They don’t grow in water but the berries do float, which is how many of them are harvested, starting with a machine called an eggbeater.
  3. They also bounce.
  4. Only five percent are sold fresh. And eating one raw will be unpleasantly tart.
  5. Americans consume 400 million pounds of cranberries a year – roughly a pound and a half per person – a fifth of that during Thanksgiving week. How do you measure up?
  6. A gallon of juice requires 4,400 berries. Did we mention it’s a great antioxidant and high in Vitamin C?
  7. The “Sex in the City” TV series in the 1990s boosted the popularity of the Cosmopolitan cocktail, which features cranberry juice and vodka. Well, there’s a classic version with gin instead. Cosmos are typically served in martini glasses, after all.
  8. I’m quite fond of Craisins, the dried berry version that goes nicely in green salads and yoghurt, at the top of my list.
  9. Seven out of every ten cranberries sold in the world today come from Ocean Spray, a farmer-owned cooperative with more than 700 grower-families.
  10. Wisconsin is the leading producer in the U.S., followed by Massachusetts. A few are even grown here in Downeast Maine.

 

Just how many new books are being published, anyway?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

November is the month when a lot of amateur writers make a push to start and finish writing a novel. While I applaud the effort, I also question whether we need that many new manuscripts.

Again, definitive figures turn out to be elusive. Still, focusing on the United States, here’s what turns up:

  1. A conventional view places the output at 600,000 to 1 million new titles every year. That’s between 1,700 to 2,700 published every day – or more than 100 books an hour. Not all of it’s fiction, of course, not by a long shot. But if you’re writing, the competition is stiff.
  2. Another view puts the number at 4 million new books a year, three-quarters of them self-published. Under the radar, as it were.
  3. Hard cover and paperbacks account for just half of the books being sold in America. Ebooks get 36 percent, and audiobooks and “other” formats take up the rest. (When compared by the amount spent on each category, printed-on-paper editions skewer the picture.)
  4. A third of all ebooks are self-published.
  5. Two-thirds of the top-rated, self-published books are written by women, compared to just 39 percent of conventionally released books.
  6. The number of self-published books has increased by 264 percent in a five-year span.
  7. Of authors who released their first book in the last ten years, 1,200 traditionally published authors have earned $25,000 or more a year, compared to 1,600 self-published authors. That’s an eye-opener.
  8. The global publishing market is expected to grow at 1 percent a year, while the self-publishing market is expected to grow at 17 percent. I’m unclear if the figures are based on sales earnings or on the number of copies sold. Still, it’s a trend worth watching.
  9. Not every non-fiction book is read cover-to-cover.
  10. Fiction is for escape.

How many books do you read a year?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

These days, it seems that everyone I meet has written a book. As an author myself, I’d much rather for everyone to have read a book in the past week. Or, gee, even a newspaper.

Trying to get solid figures on how much is being published or read is trickier than you might suspect. But to get us started, let me offer some findings, albeit with a grain of salt. And, to further complicate matters, I’m not exactly sure how the researchers are defining “book.” I’m assuming textbooks, instruction manuals, catalogs, and the like are excluded. But cookbooks? They’re big in our household. That said, in the United States:

  1. Readership averages four books a year.
  2. A quarter to a half of adults admit to reading no books.
  3. A typical bookworm, on the other hand, devours 14 a year.
  4. Non-fiction dominates over fiction, three to two.
  5. History, biography, and memoir are major sellers.
  6. Two-thirds of book readers are women, but they comprise 80 percent of the fiction audience. Some surveys suggest that women age 18-24 are the most frequent fiction readers.
  7. On the other hand, half of American book readers are over age 55.
  8. Romance is the best-selling fiction genre, accounting for a third of the books sold. Mystery, fantasy, and sci fi are also boffo.
  9. Fiction titles still dominate bestseller lists.
  10. Books aren’t just for readers. They’re also for collectors. And gift giving.

 

Doodling around with the origins of ‘Yankee’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The label does have a range of applications, from residents of the six-state New England region or Connecticut in particular to a Manhattan professional baseball team to anyone north of Dixie (often prefaced with “damn”) to anyone from the USA who lands in a foreign country.

Along with the shortened “Yank.” Or its many uses as an adjective.

The word’s origins, though, are contested.

  1. The earliest recorded use is credited to British General James Wolfe in 1758 when he complained about the Americans under his command. The British continued to use it in a derogatory fashion. The pompous fools.
  2. A largely dismissed theory had it arising in a French word for English-speaker that the Wyandot rendered into Y’an-gee.
  3. Another had it being adopted when New Englanders defeated a Native tribe who had identified themselves as Yankoos – meaning invincible. Problem there is the tribe must have been invisible all along.
  4. More likely is a derogatory Dutch-language origin in the early 1600s through New Amsterdam, beginning with the name Jan, for John, pronounced Yan. One theory has Jan being applied to any Dutch-speaking English colonist, a kind of winking acknowledgement that they could converse. How about having it originate among those Dutch-speaking Englishmen? I haven’t seen that suggestion before.
  5. Or it may have been imported from the Old World as Jan Kaas, “John Cheese,” a generic nickname the Flemish had for Dutch in the north.
  6. Or Jan might have been combined with another popular Dutch name, Kees, into Yankee, as English-speakers turned it against the New Netherlanders.
  7. And then those New Netherlanders soon slapped the word on English colonists in nearby Connecticut.
  8. By 1681 there may have even been a Dutch pirate, Captain Yanky or Yanke. The Dutch settlers, now subsumed into the English colony of New York, may have seen the Brits as pirates. Sounds awfully late in the timeline for me. I think it was definitely widespread slang before that.
  9. By the time of the Revolutionary War, the song “Yankee Doodle” was well established. Whatever its original intentions of mocking the Americans as simpletons, New Englanders took it as a badge of honor, macaroni and all.
  10. Somehow, after the Revolution, it became a synonym for Protestants descended from New England Puritans and their values. Take “Yankee ingenuity” as a prime example.

None of these quite convince me, but I feel Scottish, Swedish, and even Persian roots are even less likely.

Sometimes I’m accused of acting squirrely

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Back in New Hampshire, I was often engaged in a losing battle with squirrels. We had them for a while in the wall of the house and in the bay window, found they’d chewed into the attic through the flashing around the chimney, and were never able to eradicate them from the Red Barn, where they pretty much devoured a 20-foot strip of crown molding. They were always digging up bulbs or taking chunks out fruits and vegetables in our gardens.

At least we eventually got a birdfeeder that would send them falling off, an advance that left us endlessly amused, especially when we noticed the obsessed critter as a new kid on the block.

One good friend, an avid gardener, aptly dubbed them tree-climbing rats with big tails.

Here are a few related facts.

  1. They eat their own body weight every week, typically 1½ pounds.
  2. They can find food buried under a foot of snow or, for males, smell a female in heat a mile away.
  3. Their front teeth never stop growing, even when they eat right through wood.
  4. They can climb about anything. Yes, metal poles are no problem. Plus they can rotate their front feet 180 degrees.
  5. To elude predators, they run in sharp zigzags. They also have a way of moving to the side of a tree trunk opposite the side of a human, keeping themselves out of sight.
  6. They can leap ten times their body length. But not quite that much straight up, which I think is only five lengths.
  7. They can fall 30 meters without injury and run sprints at 20 miles an hour.
  8. They can travel as much as 100 miles in a day. So much for all those Havahart trap runs I took across the state line, just to add a river between us and the liberated rodent.
  9. By chewing electrical wiring in the walls and attic, they’re a major cause of house fires, perhaps 30,000 a year globally. They’re also responsible for an estimated 20 percent of electrical power outages, including knocking out entire transformers and leaving towns in the dark.
  10. Chipmunks are a kind of small squirrel with a prominent stripe rather than a big fluffy tail. They may be cute, but they may be the most destructive of all of their kin.

At least we don’t notice them around our current home on an island in Maine. Instead, we have deer.

Various lifestyles I’ve lived

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t have selfies through most of it. Most of those shots would have no doubt been embarrassing now.

So here’s how my life’s shaken out in terms of lifestyles.

  1. Straight ‘50s middle class: Growing up in the Midwest.
  2. Hippie: From college to Upstate New York and various moves thereafter, including my first marriage to an emerging visual artist. Well, this does fuel my novels Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Subway Visions.
  3. Monastic: The rogue yoga ashram in the Pocono mountains. See my novel Yoga Bootcamp.
  4. Ascetic: In many ways, this was still hippie as I lived in a loft in a small downtown in a place resembling what I’ve called Prairie Depot.
  5. And back-to-the earth: The next move was a return to my college, this time as a research associate position before leaping on to the interior Pacific Northwest, one with my personal life filled with growth as a published poet, a shift to Quaker spiritual practice, and immersion in backwoods and wilderness wonder. These inspire my novels Nearly Canaan and The Secret Side of Jaya.
  6. William Morris: Steel mill region in what one called the Near East, aka the Rust Belt. Included a divorce and rebound. Hometown News arises in that experience.
  7. Nearly Plain Quaker slash Muppie: The Mennonite Urban Professionals I was hanging out with in Baltimore were the less expensive version of Yuppies. Living in a federal-style brick rowhouse in the Bolton Hill neighborhood was the culmination of my big-city dreams. During the week, I was often on the road with a company car and expense account. This was a rich mix for me, a time of much personal growth, ending in a self-gifted sabbatical year hunkered down in a suburb in which I drafted early versions of much of my fiction.
  8. Yuppieville on the Hill: Relocating to New Hampshire, I wound up living in a complex where I rented a small townhouse. Back in the working ranks rather than management, I was freed from long unpaid overtime hours and the neckties and suits of my earlier professional situations. Contradancing, especially, steeped me in Boston, an hour to the south, while I immersed my personal writing in poetry circles. My love life had many ups and downs.
  9. City farmer: Remarriage prompted my move to the New Hampshire Seacoast, where we bought an old house within easy walking distance of downtown and the Quaker Meeting. That “farmer” label actually befits my spouse, the avid gardener. The property also had the small carriage house you know as my Red Barn. Retirement included serious choral singer and daily swimmer roles.
  10. Island author: We needed to downsize, which led to the remote fishing village with a lively arts scene you’ve been reading about here.