I’ve never really liked the “baby boomer” description. Besides, I think there’s a major barrier between the early experiences of those born before ’47 or ’48, and those after. Around ’48, my wave, was when TV sets were present from the very beginning of our exposure to the world. We can’t remember ever not having one at least somewhere in the neighborhood. (Suddenly, I remember being three or four and having the Sullivan brothers show up to watch “Howdy Doody” with me. They didn’t yet have a tube of their own.)
Every year as our class advanced, our new round of teachers was baffled. All they knew was we were “different” from the previous ones. So to some extent, the TV influence feeds into the hippie outbreak. We were, in effect, wired differently from our seniors. Still are, for that matter.
But the other big shortcoming in the boomer classification is the way it ignores the huge fissure within our generation between those who supported the Vietnam Conflict and those of us who opposed it. That’s something that’s never fully healed, and it’s certainly crippled our ability to come together to advance the ideals some of us, at least, so passionately embraced. I suspect there are many politicians and corporate executives – the dreaded Establishment, that is – who actively worked to keep the wound festering.
So here I am, calling for a renewed vision of our legacy. That’s been one of the promptings of the novels in my series Hippie Trails. You’re welcome to come along on the trip.
Sometimes as I listen during an open mic, especially (and oh how I hate that spelling!), I find myself focusing on a particular reader’s moralizing and editorializing or cliche or heavy reliance on simile rather than metaphor, and that soon sends me into a disturbing zone.
What happens is that I begin editing heavily with an imaginary thick black marker, striking through all of the offending words and phrases, and pretty soon I’m tuning into only to the blackened blocks in the air and tuning out everything else.
Admittedly, I edit myself heavily, and this is a central step in the creation of many of my own works. Admittedly, too, I’m projecting myself onto the poor writer onstage. Admittedly, in particular, I’m forgetting to be humble and open here, star that I might imagine myself to be.
A central problem for newspapers in the past half century is that they became increasingly homogenized and thus lost their distinctive, individual identities. Admittedly, that was always a problem when people saw it as “the paper” rather than the Times or Post or Chronicle or Herald and so on. But in the days when a city would have two or more daily newspapers, each one needed to have some unique identity to set it apart in the marketplace. Sometimes it was along party lines – Republican or Democrat – or social identities, such as blue-collar or proper society, but often it also meant the kind of news that was emphasized: national and international, for instance, versus local. And hometown columnists were always a voice that readers could count on. Think Herb Caen in San Francisco, Mike Royko in Chicago, or Jimmy Breslin in New York – or any of the great sportswriters.
In those days, newspapers were thinner than they became in the last decades of the 20th century – often just two sections – rather than the four to eight that followed in the great mergers and closures that led most cities to have only one daily journal. Much of that problem, we should note, could be blamed on the “unduplicated readership” that ad-space buyers relied on in allocating their budgets. No matter how marvelous the Washington Star was in its final days, or the suburban Journal papers were in the counties around the city, they couldn’t overcome that hurdle – when it came to outright readership, the Washington Post had the monopoly. Since everybody had to read it, there was no point in advertising elsewhere.
With few exceptions – New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia – we’re left with single-paper markets where the product looks and reads like those everywhere else, except that the stories take place there than elsewhere.
As the local newspaper more and more became a one-size-fits-all model, what I no longer heard was the feeling that it “speaks for me” or my section of the wider community. And now, even those special voices within its pages are no longer there – one by one, the columnists were never replaced.
The newspaper I longed to create had little resemblance to that bland crime-and-crashes emphasis that too often prevails these days, in place of more difficult and costly investigative reporting or a bigger view that critically examines education, the fine arts, social justice, the environment, and so on.
It’s hard to get excited by what’s there. And we wonder why circulation kept declining even before the Internet?
This is, I should note, a contrarian viewpoint, since the publishers kept proclaiming the “improved service” each time they merged two papers into one. So here we are, online and blogging.
~*~
Hometown News
To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
It’s tune in, turn on, and take action in this tale of campus intrigue. Little does a small band in a remote college town realize its opposition to small-ante bureaucracy goes straight to the state capital. And then Washington and the Mekong Delta are another matter as the hippie movement hits tranquil Daffodil. Nothing will remain quite the same.
As the headline said:
BOTCHED DRUG BUST BACKFIRES.
When narcotics agents made an early morning knock-down-the-doors raid on the twelfth-floor of one of the high-rise dormitory towers, they turned up nothing – and were surrounded by irate residents before they could frame anyone, either.
“If you think the slaying of innocent students at Jackson State University was merely a racial atrocity,” Lakasha proclaimed, “you’re not seeing the big picture. It’s about an attack on civil rights – freedoms that belong to all of us. You don’t have to live in a big city to live in ghetto housing. Every student in Daffodil lives in a ghetto. Where I come from, we have a word for high-rise housing like these big dorms – the Projects. And the pigs who come charging into the Projects act just like those who busted in on the twelfth floor the other night. Never mind whether they find anything or not. Look, the university’s demanding that the students pay for the busted doors and busted furniture and busted walls. That’s why they call it a bust in the first place. Wake up, America! Demand the names of the ‘unnamed informants,’ the ones who were so wrong about the presence of illicit substances in those rooms. Wake up, I say! Mississippi’s closer to Daffodil than you think!”
~*~
To learn more about my novel, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
I read – and write – not to escape the world but rather to more fully engage it. So literature for me hardly falls into the Entertainment category, even when it’s entertaining.
Likewise, my goal in the written word is to perceive some basic or essential connection with new clarity, understanding, and compassion.
This makes a world of difference, page by page. Maybe I’m just looking for holy scripture, even of a secular sort. Or at least the Holy One along with the mundane.
Often, my approach to writing and other fine arts resembles the essence of a dream – one foot in the present, the other in the past. Or, in another way, one foot in concrete reality, the other in fantasy of some sort, such as surrealism, as a way to engage more than I’d otherwise apprehend.
Shifting to the world of epublishing has stimulated a gentle learning curve for me. Maybe because my to-do list has always been much longer than I can manage or maybe because I felt I already had too much detailed work at hand, I’ve tried to avoid becoming a computer geek who spends all his time in the technical minutia. Actually, it’s the same way with my cars – I don’t want to spend my mornings, afternoons, or weekends under the hood or on my back under the chassis; I just want to get in and drive. As for high tech, I’ll wait for all the bugs to get worked out before I buy the updated version, thank you, especially since I’ve always been on a very limited budget. And for the record, I hate Windows 8, which is always interrupting my work by blowing its apps in my face or requiring me to log on again throughout the day.
On the other hand, keyboarding on a computer has been a vast improvement over a typewriter, at least for klutzes like me, and the ability to correct and revise as I go or rewrite and edit later is, well, divine. Sometimes progress really is progress.
And sometimes it isn’t, as we seemed to discover at the office each time we moved on to a new system whether we wanted to or were instead forced to when our current equipment was declared obsolete. (I’ll let others relate those nights of terror when they pulled the plug on what was finally working as promised.)
Participating in the small-press literary scene has been another matter. When I first ventured into email, thanks largely to my now-wife, well, let’s say broadband’s been a huge improvement over those telephone connections and leave it at that. Still, cutting and pasting poems into the email and having them accepted within hours rather than be rejected months later was quite an eye-opener. These days, with most of the liveliest literary action happening in online journals, the process has taken leaps forward; typically, you use a submissions program, upload your file, insert your cover letter, and follow the pieces through the editorial process, if you wish. For a long time, I tried to maintain two sets of files – one for journals that still used, or even required, submissions via the Postal Service, and those that took them online. This year, finding that too complicated, I decided to drop the postal-only journals altogether. (That move, let me add, was hastened by problems with our computer printer as much as the much higher rejection rate on the envelope entries.)
The 2005 publication of my second novel, Ashram, as an ebook was another eye-opener. I was surprised by how easy its preparation was, how quickly it went from acceptance to general availability, and how pleasurable reading a long work on my computer screen could be (even if the work was issued only in PDF format). Unfortunately, we were also a bit ahead of the ebook reading trend and many would-be readers told me of their difficulties in downloading the volume. The other snag was getting the work reviewed at all – even online critics stuck solely to paper editions.
Blogging has revolutionized much of this world, probably more than we realize. For me, avowed neo-Luddite that I am, WordPress has been heavenly. It’s allowed me to take a model “out of the box” and run with it without modification, even if I do admire the customized tweaks many of the rest of you add apparently without hassle. The Blogs That I Follow, searching by topical tags, and Freshly Pressed streams have introduced me to many wonderful voices around the globe for my daily perusal. In fact, I’m still struck that in its first year, the Red Barn had readers in 72 countries. Amazing.
These days I’m learning again. The opportunity to publish my novels to be distributed across a variety of platforms (as they say) has meant following a new set of directions to strip out all the hidden codes (we hope; some of mine go back to the first versions on WordPerfect4.0) and set up the work to flow smoothly in a reading device. (I started to say “reader,” but for me, that will always be a person, not a machine.) I’ll admit that adjusting to the concept of considering a long work as a continuous text, rather than pages, has been major, as has the matter of inserting hyperlinks. Remember, I’m someone who loves the art of printing from its very origins. (How many Gutenberg Bibles have you seen?)
Even so, I’m excited by the new opportunities and the new visual dimensions.
Even as a cub reporter, I loved writing long pieces. It’s what I prefer to read, really read, when I have time. By long, I don’t mean pointless minutia or the trivia of, say, a public hearing, but rather the probing look at how and why a thing has happened and maybe even what to expect as a consequence. Add to that the human dimension, especially from the point of view of those most impacted by the action rather than those at the top of the pyramid.
One model of this style of news writing came in the three stories on the front page of the Wall Street Journal each day – what they called their “leaders,” back in the era before Murdoch. If you looked closely, you’d see how each one was composed of several smaller stories, each one telescoping into the next. The reporters could joke that their work was so heavily edited they no longer recognized the finished version, but for those of us reading, the result was rewarding, the way a good meal is.
As a journalist, the irony has been that I spent much of my career crafting headlines and photo captions … short, short, short … and that was even before I relied more and more on news briefing columns to get the day’s world and nation reports into the paper at all.
Not that I lost my love of long writing. My “shelf” of ebook novels is proof of that, including my most recent, which delves into the news business itself.
As a blogger, though, I’m also admitting pleasure in composing shorter postings like the ones that appear here at Jnana’s Red Barn. Apparently, from the stats, they must be connecting.
My other four blogs provide venues for the longer writing, and the results to date are mixed.
To my surprise, my genealogy blog, The Orphan George Chronicles, has drawn far more hits than I’d anticipated. I figured its appeal would be to a few dozen fellow researchers, and having the results online would be much easier to find than if the files were archived in a few libraries somewhere. As for publishing them in paper editions, the likely audience would never cover the expenses.
My Quaker blog, As Light Is Sown, has shifted from the two book-length presentations that appear as the initial postings to a year-long Daybook of short postings, so I must admit that trying to analyze the results there can be inconclusive.
Thistle/Flinch exists to present book-length PDF editions of poetry and fiction, so I guess you can say that’s writing long.
And the remaining blog, Chicken Farmer I Still Love You, is still taking shape, as the numbers show. The first part, Talking Money, presents essential material for addressing the material sides of life … income, spending, wealth, possessions, labor, time, goals, and the like … followed by a close look at New England’s famed foliage. These days, it’s taken on a new focus in reconsidering the hippie outbreak and its renewal. Again, many of its postings are chapters for book-length presentation.
What I am finding in general is that even without the demands of daily employment, time is still the most precious commodity in my life. There just ain’t enough of it for what I hope to accomplish these days – including reading or writing, much less in any length.
So I guess that’s the short of it, for now.
~*~
Hometown News
To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
Everything that’s transpired in the 28 years since I first drafted my novel Hometown News has made me feel prophetic.
Now, of course, you have an opportunity to judge for yourself. I just wish it hadn’t taken this many years to become public.
One thing I’d like to point out involves the initial experiment I used in constructing the novel. Quite simply, I wondered if I could build a computer-generated story – no matter how distasteful the premise itself strikes me in my self-identity as a neo-Luddite and fussy literary type. Maybe it was just some of the vestige of the scientist wannabe in me?
So I created a master day-in-the-life chapter, made multiple copies to repeat throughout the story, and included up to 120 variables for search-and-replace functions. And away I went, allowing the S&R efforts to produce their own pace and variations. Not that it quite worked as I’d hoped. I found myself going back over those pages and adding new layers, softening some of the edges, adding shadows and highlights. As they say in the visuals arts, it’s quite “painterly.”
Be that as it may, one thing I’ve observed over the years is how little we typically know of many of our coworkers. There might be a favorite phrase they repeat or a piece of clothing or a distinctive quirk. And that’s it, sometimes year after year. So that part was agreeable to the S&R structuring.
As a technique, though, I’m afraid to report – or maybe more relieved – that the S&R by itself was insufficient. It did provide the core “bones” for the novel, but I did have to paint over much of it to make it more pliant and, well, human.
All the same, I’m feeling vindicated. Maybe it’s a high tech revenge for what high tech is wreaking on the workplace and surrounding community.
To check out my Smashwords ebook story, go to Hometown News.
We’d get the phone call. “You promised a story.” We knew we’d been very careful not to do that. Instead, it was, “I’ll look into that” or “I’ll pass that along to the appropriate editor for a decision.”
My favorite was the caller who claimed to be good friends with the publisher, who had promised the coverage. Followed by our response, “You know she died twelve years ago?” And their embarrassed silence.
Of course, it’s not just stories.
People read into the most carefully crafted texts and then respond to only the parts they want to hear while tuning out the rest. Or they just plain tune out. It’s called the theory of cognitive dissonance. If they think you’re agreeing with them, they’ll bend the message their way. If they think you’re critical, they’ll shove you out altogether.
Often, all tripping over a tiny detail or two.
~*~
Oh, how I came to hate the telephone when I worked in the newsroom! If you want further proof, just go to my novel Hometown News.
Jnana's Red Barn 