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2014: A Howdy-Do Year in Review

Posted by :James Howden On : January 15, 2015
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Category: At First Glance

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Last January, I didn’t get my 2013 lookback, The Great Eighteen, up until the 20th, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to call this prompt. Efficient. Timely — at least for me! Reflection on accomplishments never comes at a bad time. (Does it? Of course, you ninny! Okay, but — Which doesn’t mean it’s always foolish to look backwards, either. Alright then, so maybe — Just get to it!)

I posted to JH.com 93 times last year, which is as productive as I’ve ever been, and that with December nearly ringing up a doughnut. (That’s jock-talk for nada. Zero. Hole in the JZone layer. Nuttin’, honey. I missed that bizarro perfection by one lonely post, so the rest of the year must’ve been excellent.) Starting with my self-conscious blurts in the middle of 2005, JH.com now has an archive of 637 posts. That seems like quite a few.

So, I consulted a panel of experts. What were the most meaningful, artistically satisfying and world-changing posts of 2014 on JamesHowden.com? No. I didn’t. I trawled through 2014 and asked myself, “Okay, self, what do you still like and think others might, too?” Oh, I did take my readers into account, based on what got read most, or what found life elsewhere on the ‘Net, but mainly this is me Me ME. So here is a quick skate through some of the things I wrote here last year. It gives a reasonable portrait of what gave my head a shake in 2014. It’s a quick read, and you can click on anything that appeals. Here, then, are the

Fabulous Fifteen!

1. Sequel: The (Not Quite) Christmas (Late) Show* Must Go On (Jan. 2)                 * (with Chinese Characteristics)

For the last three years in China, my wife and I taught in the School of International Business, a small college within our university in Dalian. Every December, there was a spangly student SHOW. Here, I reviewed this incredible, excessive, odd, passionate, obligatory celebration of something-or-other. Warning: this is only the second half of the extravaganza, and you may not be able to resist dipping back into December 2013 for the full jaw-dropping effect. It was amazing. (And only occasionally depressing.)

2. Lost in Cambodia  (February 5)

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Better Read Than Never: Livingston’s Gecko Tails

Posted by :James Howden On : March 24, 2014
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Category: At First Glance

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I’m still thinking about Cambodia. When there, when I wasn’t reading faces, or reading between the lines of the socio-economic polka of carefree tourists and often profoundly poor locals, or skimming for the wisdom in ancient piles of stone such as Angkor Wat, I read Carol Livingston’s 1997 memoir of Cambodia. Gecko Tails sounds like a children’s book; at first I thought it must be Livingston making punning reference to the stories she heard in a Phnom Penh ex-pat bar, the Gecko. But this benign little lizard, climbing walls wherever one travels in southeast Asia, has the ability to grow a new tail after sacrificing the old one to predators. This must be symbolic of Livingston’s hope for the country. (It’s still a weak title.) The book recounts her earlier tours of love and duty, and it’s pretty average¹, though the subject is strikingly unaverage: the latter days of the bitter Cambodian civil war. It’s nearly 20 years old now, but I still found it useful in fleshing out my dim and youthful impressions of killing fields and other by-products of the bloody Vietnam War. As an introduction to Cambodia that goes beyond beaches, cheap travel and temple tourism, it works well.      

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Temples of Ancient Stone. One of Pure Imagination.

Posted by :James Howden On : February 13, 2014
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Category: At First Glance

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Once or twice a year in my childhood, our tiny Baptist Church’s congregation would join the Presbyterians up the street. They had “Reverend Mac”, a wryly smiling minister who acted Noel Coward and Charles Dickens on the side, made jokes during sermons, and never complained about our footballs and baseballs bouncing on to his front lawn. We had a tightly-wound young fundamentalist who’d have been shocked to know of my Mum’s bridge club, cards being the devil’s playthings. Coming from our plain, cramped sanctuary, the

Awesome as a kid, and still a fine small-town centre.

Presbyterians looked rich and their church seemed a soaring, grand and holy place. It had the highest bell tower in our little town, and in early adolescence I took to sneaky climbs inside the steeple that led to a view of houses, river, ball diamonds, trees, and the farmland beyond them. I’ve found holiness in forests and fields, in looking out over water, in song and in word, even sometimes in the steady rhythm of running or flinging a ball toward its home. I’ve loved, too, architectural prayers: shrines, cathedrals, temples, any place built to honour and inspire loftiness of mind, an enlarging of spirit. (Sometimes, even a gymnasium will do.)

In China, such places have been hard to come by. Before we leave, I hope we’ll get to one of the sacred mountains, but even those sound discouraging, given the masses of people that visit with little that I recognize as reverence; small-town Canuck that I am, I still equate spirituality with solitude, quiet, elevated language and, where possible, green-ness and sky. However, our teaching of English in Dalian does qualify us for more than visas, salaries, and our small service to the torrential societal change in our temporary Chinese home. As we beef up our world citizenship credentials, we also have the luxury of south Asian travel that we couldn’t have managed from Canada.

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Lost in Cambodia

Posted by :James Howden On : February 5, 2014
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Category: At First Glance

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I’m back! I’ll be writing about my Vipassana meditation experience, which took me away from reading and writing and phones and friends and music and talking for ten days, but I’m still processing. That was in Thailand. We now continue our Chinese Spring Festival migrations just to the east, in another of the countries that our nearly five-year residence in the Middle Kingdom has made affordable and reachable. I got lost, twice in twelve hours. Story of my life, but a pretty fortunate tale and an extravagantly lucky existence it’s been, and remains. And how are all of you doing today?

So much has been lost in this country, which is the embattled remainder of a once-mighty medieval Khmer empire. I came here knowing little of that, other than something of the dreadfully crazed policies of the Khmer Rouge political movement, its maniacally destructive leader Pol Pot, and the fierce heat of words like “killing fields”: millions of dead in a country with less than half the population of Canada. We came for the more

An astounding pile of rock. How’d they do it? Stay tuned to this radio station for some of the details!

substantial fruit of an earlier monomania: the astounding Angkor Wat temple complex, the most outstandingly ambitious of the hundreds of tributes to gods and kings and god-kings in the area near the city of Siem Reap. We got lost in merely inconvenient, petty or even amusing ways. Again and still, the moral of the story is right up front: people of my time and place are such privileged people. We can tell stories, like these, where the worst peril is blisters, unmerited indignation, or the story falling flat in my telling. Danger! So, let’s see:

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