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Blaise Pascal (on solitude as virtue)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 11, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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I bought the April edition of Harper’s magazine — you can’t get it at the supermarket checkout (except in FantasyHowdyLand), but my chi-chi grocery emporium’s mag-rack wasn’t that far away — and, well, I bought it because it was Harper’s (and I was hungry), but also because of a perfect storm of stories highlighted on the cover. (I felt fated, head-spatially profiled, chosen.) “American Hustle” features basketball (good news for this hoops-head) and how hothouse youth coaches exploit African kids (possibly even more attractive to this highly conflicted coach who loves the game, loves excellence, hates what is done in the name of religion sport). “Rotten Ice” is a story of Arctic melting, not only for me but for EcoBride. Rebecca Solnit writes, perhaps just for this career English Creature, an op-ed titled “Abolish High School!” The cover piece, though, was both the initial eye candy and the clincher: “GOING IT ALONE: Fenton Johnson on the dignity and challenge of solitude”.

It starts well, pleasing my expectant reading tastebuds. I haven’t finished.

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Gregg Popovich (on losing and being small)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 5, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Stubbornness is Virtue week has been renewed, though perhaps not entirely by popular demand. Meaning? I’m finishing up neglected pieces, or otherwise writing even more out of time than usual. But hey! The quote is right current, a brilliant basketball coach and genuinely interesting human — yes, it happens — wrapping up another season that did not end with a victory, though he’s had more than his share. It’s about basketball, but also a whole lot more. Get to know Coach Pop.

If you haven’t heard of Gregg Popovich, you’re not a basketball person, and that’s okay by me. Even if you are routinely insulated from the seductive drumbeat of ball on hardwood, or the peculiar sonic pleasures of colourful lace-up “kicks” squeaking across that same polished surface, you may encounter this man. The wide admiration and growing affection for this hugely successful professional coach is growing, even beyond the sweat-stained bowels of NBA arenas and of man-caves across the continent. Quick example: my most-viewed post so far in 2015 is because of Popovich. He has used the “pound the rock” imperative of a now-obscure immigrant-rights activist called Jacob Riis to inspire his Spurs teams to stay their relentless course. “Pop”, as his players have long called him and a smitten public increasingly does, has coached five teams to National Basketball Association championships. He is, of course, madly competitive, tactically astute and motivationally fiery. He is also a wine connoisseur, a book-lover, an amateur historian and — though his intolerance for stupid questions and media agendas might belie it — a kind, thoughtful and funny dude. It’s weird but not at all coincidental, say I: he loves basketball and pursues it with furious focus, but it may be his detachment, his ability to put the game in perspective, that has allowed him to be so successful at it for so long.

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Sanai (on pearls, swine, and patience)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 29, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Jesus Christ, when he made the famous statement Cast not pearls before swine, must have meant something like “Hey buddy, don’t waste your breath. No sense talkin’ if there’s nobody listenin’.” Something like, “Speak not until ye obtain a hearing”. Something like, Don’t let a precious thing be plopped down into the porking feedlot of distraction.

Sanai, I read recently, put it this elegant way:

“If to the fool my love you’d bring,

Or think my secret can be told

To him who is not wise —

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Rebecca Solnit (on the lie of “the best years”)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 21, 2015
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I don’t always read out-of-date stuff. In fact, Discerning Reader, the April 2015 issue of Harper’s magazine just found its way into my grocery cart. This issue has pieces on the basketball exploitation of young Africans, a climate change travelogue, and the cover story on the virtues of solitude. I was already sold when I saw reference to an editorial piece by Rebecca Solnit called “Abolish High School!”

Now, high school is where I have spent more time than in any other venue, five (yes, 5) years as a student and nearly another 25 as one of the dreaded Creachers. (English Lit and Writ, some French, a little Phys. Ed., and about half again that much time invested in extracurricular madness.) I believe in public education, though its limitations and squareness aren’t lost on me. I was eager to read Solnit on abolition, and while there’s some element of over-idealistic assaults on windmills, she’s thoughtful, sincere and a wonderful wordsmith.

Somehow, she avoided high school completely, and didn’t miss it a bit. Much of her argument proceeds from the inevitable peer-hazing that happens when a narrow age-range of people are processed within a semi-industrial system of “efficiency”. Solnit figures she’d have been a prime target for ridicule and isolation, and wonders why we so blandly accept this personality-warping pain as a necessary element of growing up. This writer is a long way from boxed-in thinking.

Towards the conclusion, Solnit treats the opposite effect: what about the high school winners? Do they really?

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Gunter Grass (on joining the SS, 1944)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 15, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Gunter Grass died Monday. I remember my 1970s awe at an older friend, Kenny, who buried his beard and mighty forehead in John Barth and Grass and other literary lions I’d never heard of. Hundreds of heart throbs later, I still haven’t read The Tin Drum, or even seen the movie, but in my usual time-impaired way I expect I will be soon. Because the man has died, and the man wrote fearlessly of the business of being German during and after that nasty Nazi business. He took considerable heat for revealing, in 2006, after a lifetime of calling Germans to account and to remember, that he himself had been drafted into the SS as a 17-year-old. Too late! they cried. Hypocrite!

I beg to differ, and so do most commentators who are better-informed than I am. So does anyone, I would think, who has actually read his account. It is deceptively laconic, describing almost whimsically the conditions of war-time Germany and of an ignorant, artistic lad who sought to escape poverty and insignificance. I got to read this New Yorker article by Mr. Grass thanks to smart Tweeters: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/06/04/how-i-spent-the-war?mbid=social_twitter (Sorry, I’m unable to hyperlink right now.) It’s an entrancing read, and I highly recommend it.

That he survived was a fluke, several flukes in succession. RIP, Gunther Grass.

That he survived was a fluke, several flukes in succession. RIP, Gunther Grass.

Here is a short piece of his description, riding the train to accept his call-up to some branch of the military (he’d wanted to serve on submarines), which turned out to be an extremely disorganized and depleted branch of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the elite “protective squadrons” of the Nazi armed forces. The British, the Americans, and the Russians were closing in:

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Margaret Atwood (on sadness, in fiction?)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 13, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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I’m reading Atwood’s weirdly witty near-future dystopian nightmare trilogy of runaway climate, corporate takeover, canyonesque income disparity and biotech gone to its illogical conclusion. In the second novel, The Year of the Flood, an overused and under-loved young woman named Ren leaves a decent, if menial, job because there’s too much pain there. She goes, as a backup plan, to Scales and Tails, a strip-bar/brothel whose chief pimp, Mordis, at least appreciates her dance training.

Ms. Atwood channels through this hooker’s-minder-with-a-heart-of, well, maybe not gold but apparently harbouring more careful attention to and protection of Ren than her mother ever showed. (Heart of cynicized bronze, maybe.) Mordis remembers Ren from when his SekSmart Corporation interviewed her at a job fair hosted by her seedy arts college, the Martha Graham Institute. Ren has no illusions about the work she’s getting into, and has only one qualm:

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Dave Smart (on coaching, culture & talent)

Posted by :James Howden On : March 14, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Dave Smart knew early that basketball coaching was what he wanted to do. A fine and funky player — he led the nation in scoring, and has Queen’s University’s all-time leading scoring average — Smart didn’t even use all his years of Canadian Interuniversity Sport eligibility. He’d likely shrug and agree with the fans of his Carleton University’s chief rivals at the University of Ottawa, who’ve been known to chant, Not so Smart! Not so Smart!

He sees the game at a genius level, and never lets his players relax. (Andrew Vaughan photo, CP)

He sees the game at a genius level, and never lets his players relax. (Andrew Vaughan photo, CP)

While he may not have been an academic superstar, the man is brilliant and a relentlessly insistent mentor. You may have heard: his teams at Carleton, never previously a basketball power, were winning national championships by his fourth season after taking the helm in his early 30s, and they’ve never stopped. That first title began streaks of five straight championships, thirteen consecutive national semifinals, and ten titles in the last 12 seasons. If that number sounds familiar, it tied one of the most storied records in the history of sport: John Wooden’s UCLA Bruin teams (Abdul-Jabbar, Walton, etc.) cut down NCAA nets in 10 of the Wizard of Westwood’s last dozen campaigns. The Ravens, with a win tonight, will play for an eleventh title in 13 years tomorrow. (My rundown on the opening round of the tournament, Carleton’s 40-point win, and the only two teams with a real chance to knock them off is here.)

So, yeah. He’s pretty good, and I’ve been studying why. I’m starting to get it.

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Oliver Sacks (on awakening to the end)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 20, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Oliver Sacks is the neurologist and professor who was brought to cinematic life by Robin Williams in Awakenings, helping and observing as Bob DeNiro’s coma patient emerges from the darkness. (Side note which I vaguely promise will not turn into an intolerably long digression, but the length of whose prefatory remarks must even now be giving pause to sensitive and perceptive readers such as you: I notice suddenly the number of films in which Williams is the psychiatrist/healer. Not just Awakenings, but his gruff and brilliant therapist to Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, and his turn as Patch Adams, the unconventional MD who used humour and nonsense to heal and console his patients. All of which did Williams no good at all in calming his own demons, or so it would seem. Terminate digression.)

Sack’s books on psychological oddities and wonders — Awakenings was his second book, I think, followed by such titles as The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Musicophilia, An Anthropologist on Mars — made him famous and beloved, though not always embraced by medical rivals. Now that he’s dying, as he announced recently, I want to read more than I have. Typical.

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Chuck Wendig (on weak & entitled men)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 5, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Chuck Wendig is funnier than I am, even when he’s pissed off. Especially then.

More Chuck/Howdy distinctions: Wendig’s funnier, more productive, less frightened of fiction, more joyfully profane and (allegedly) actually makes decent money as a writer. (I actually quite like him, though.) He writes a blog called Terrible Minds which is particularly aimed at writers, and secondarily at those who enjoy and consume fantasy and science fiction, whether electronically or by manual analog movement of stained wood-pulp tissues. (So-called “pages” within three-dimensional, sometimes weighty and sharp-cornered “books”. Weird stuff.) He has met Neil Gaiman. He has a writing shed.

But here’s how Chuck and I are brothers: he is the father of a little boy that he’s evidently fascinated by and cuckoo about; he believes in creativity and wonder; he has a thing for Margaret Atwood; he’s wacky about words (his writing is like steroid-enhanced psychedelic popcorn and, like mine, digresses wildly but with way more profanity and phrases like “shit-shellacked”, “jerky lackwits”, “a ranty, yelly, gesticulating mess of a screed” [about “arting harder”], and “a pair of toddler underoos spackled with mess”; AND, if you thought I’d never get to the point, like me he is often inclined to spew inflammable verbal dragon-venom when men are hateful towards women and their aspirations. Chuck Wendig is bloody merciless and absolutely off-his-nut indignant when men are whiny, machofeeble, femophobic and protective of illogical and illegitimate privilege. It enrages him. It enrages me, though less colourfully and NSFW-ish.

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Vladimir Nabokov (on disobedience and purity)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 1, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Perhaps I will do my usual rambling opinionation on today’s quote some other time. It captured me as I was gobbling up Azir Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, this unruly Iranian literature professor’s memoir of her last years in her homeland, and especially her Thursday mornings with one hand-picked class of book-mad young women.

Nafisi has her students read this exceptionally challenging novelist, not only Lolita but other texts as well. Of course, this did not go over well with the authorities of the Islamic Republic. Speaking of her father’s imprisonment before the 1979 Revolution, and her own and her students’ restricted lives after it, Nafisi recalls “a sentence by Nabokov” that she later learned. Here it is: 

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