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Better Read Than Never 2: WHAT I TALK ABOUT…RUNNING

Posted by :James Howden On : May 15, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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My series Better Read Than Never – okay, technically, it is now a series because there are two of ’em – has been stalled because I’m too anxious to do too good a job for the too few of you out there in Electronville who, come to think of it, are often too busy to read The Howden anyway. My library copy of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood has been renewed three times and I’ve nearly paid for it in fines; mind you, I’ve never begrudged library penalties, which are merely an unreceipted form of useful charity. The review is going to be long unless I terminate it thuddingly. But it’ll come soon-ish. (I think.) (Prologue ends.)

In the meantime, though, I’ve read a couple of other fine things, one of which is recent enough that it doesn’t quite fit the series rubric, but makes me eager to read two writers that I’ve mainly missed so far. It’s an odd little book, one I found occasionally flat yet generally compelling, called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It’s by a Japanese novelist and translator named Haruki Murakami, and it’s a curious kind of memoir. It mainly tracks his twenty-five year career as a recreational long-distance runner (and sometime triathlete), which roughly parallels and, he maintains, both informs and essentially supports his work as a writer.

Murakami is a diffident confidante, an unfamiliar voice that obscures as much as it reveals about the author. On more than one occasion, he notes that readers “probably wouldn’t like” him, and he is sometimes distant and bland in his summaries of the meaning of this observation or that running result. That’s just how I am. That’s life. This is how it goes. At first, I found these simple blurts disappointing, a signal that this book was something of a rush-job, but I came to see them as an accurate (and, finally, interesting) portrait of a man in search of some limited and non-ecstatic conclusions about his life and its meaning.

In fact, by the end I regarded his tone as a subtle rebuke to the my life is singular and rich and here’s how ALL could benefit from fingering its silken edges ambience of some (western) celebrity bios. For only one small example, an early casual mention of having been married at 22 seemed to me a clear signal that marriage was far in his rear-view window. In fact, his wife later makes brief and almost accidental appearances in this memoir of monkish discipline; she is never named or described, a level of biographical focus (and adherence to privacy, I suppose) that is startling. The Western attachment to personality, fame and disclosure seems exhibitionist by comparison.

He likes to be alone, and he’s with the Buddha: Life is suffering. This narrow gateway to understanding informs his thought about running and life: “[t]hey might not amount to much, but they are personal lessons I’ve learned through actually putting my body in motion….They may not be lessons you can generalize, but that’s because what’s presented here is me, the kind of person I am.” I’m a worn-out ex-jock who still tries to run, though the distances have never been what Murakami routinely pulls off. (The jerk.) I’m also a writer, and the confluence of these two themes – rigorously and sacrificially adhered to by this paragon of focus and discipline – really took me in. If you have either of these two interests, or both, you may be, too.

And the title? Its oddly rambling nature fits perfectly, but it wasn’t until Murakami’s after-word that I realized it was a homage to one of his favourite writers to read and translate into Japanese, the American minimalist Raymond Carver. (I know Carver only by reputation – writers often refer to him – and he keeps popping up for me. Another one for the Better Read Than Never list.) One of Carver’s best-known tales is the title story of a notable collection: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Ah. I think I understand. Hiraku Murakami loves running. He loves writing. He loves simplicity in both. That’s how things work for him.

BetterReadThanNever 1: Talent, Potential and the Myth of Ability

Posted by :James Howden On : April 13, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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“Talent doesn’t exist. Talent is nothing. It’s all about what you do, how you work, how you dive into the process.” That was Ben. (It may still be Ben.) He was learning to love his trombone in a Jazz Performance program at Montreal’s McGill University.

“Listen, you’re right, process matters, it’s great to focus on what you can control. But you don’t believe in talent? You’ve never coached basketball, that’s for sure.” And that was me, his teacher-coach father.

This was a conversation that lasted hours, across several days and venues. I, of course, was the voice of balance and reason in the face of Ben’s extremist argument. Because every athletic coach knows this: if you’re gonna make rabbit stew, you’d better start off with some rabbits. Some kids you can teach for a week and they can do it slowly, and some are at high speed after 15 minutes. Everybody knows this, right? So maybe my argument was dispassionate, based on grey hairs and considered experience. And perhaps it wasn’t, always, because I was interested in reminding my boy that he was talented (always different from “skilful”), and I might also have been nurturing a niche or two of my own where I doggedly hope that there’ll be some natural flow and not all hard work. (See “Writing”.)

Surprised as I was by his “naïveté”, I was moved by his argument. It made sense, given his position: you’ve been accepted into a prestigious program after auditioning; you are what you play, so thinking about “natural ability” is distracting at best, corrosive at worst; and besides, the only thing you can control is your level of effort and quality of focus. I got that. It’s one of those beliefs that, regardless of its level of absolute truthfulness, is just useful to believe. It’s forward-looking, it’s practical, and it gives the person seeking mastery the permission to keep on looking. Good.

All of which reminded me that I hadn’t gotten ‘round to reading something all educators should (even if they don’t speak math), as should any who like to think about human potential and barriers to its expression. John Mighton, a Canadian writer and educator, came out with The Myth of Ability: Nurturing Mathematical Talent in Every Child in 2003. Just as I had with Ben, I was dubious about Mighton’s egalitarian premise but excited about the possibilities it opened.

Mighton loved mathematics as a child, but left it behind in discouragement before he left high school. He went on, doggedly, to teach himself to write, which he did well enough to win a Governor General’s Award (Canada’s top literary prize) as a playwright. I’d heard about the book – a new approach to teaching math to kids – but I was at least as interested in the author, and his odd movement from writing for the stage to a belated doctorate in mathematics. He examined the systematic approach he’d taken to writing, and applied it to the rekindling of a stifled earlier love. He became an adult math prodigy, and he watched carefully how he did it and why it had taken him so long.

And along the way, he began volunteering to teach the “unteachable”, those kids – often from underprivileged and undereducated backgrounds – who had fallen “hopelessly” behind in their numeracy. He started with Lisa, a sixth-grader operating at about a grade one level; she was unable, for example, to count by twos to ten. Using the basics of what became the JUMP (“junior undiscovered math prodigies”) method – rigorously defined teaching by clear and tiny steps, coupled with dollops of unremitting praise – Mighton helped her to the point where she could pass grade 9 high school math at the academic level. It was the first of many remarkable success stories.

He’s convinced that the teaching of mathematics is rife with false ideas, chief among them the elitist notion that only a few students can be expected to excel in it. And, though he argues this rather gently, that it is poorly taught, based on the expectation that most will eventually fail anyway. Teachers, especially at the crucial elementary levels, either are among those who picked it up easily (and therefore unconsciously expect that everyone should do the same) or those whose own mystification with mathematics made them rather phobic about it. (Mighton doesn’t ask this, but I do: how many primary- and junior-level teachers actually like mathematics? Having trained as one, my unscientific answer is: not many.)

Everybody can learn mathematics. (There, I gave away the ending.) Mighton is evangelical about this message; it’s an educational call to arms, and an emphatically political one. The Myth of Ability takes the principle of democracy and slams it down into every grade school classroom in his province (Ontario) and beyond, arguing forcefully that it is deeply ingrained prejudice that makes us think that only the few can possibly have had the magic fairy dust of mathematical potential sprinkled upon them. (It reminds me of another bit of widely believed exclusivity: that art and creativity are only permitted to the rarely gifted, when what is really needed are the means, the time, and the confidence.)

To a man with a math obsession, of course, perhaps every problem looks like innumeracy: “more than half the world’s children still live in abject poverty. In affluent countries, violence, overconsumption and the destruction of the environment continue….Children who grow up…meeting only a fraction of their potential, unable to reason clearly or weigh the consequences of their actions…will be exploited and misled with ease by corporations and politicians…” Hyberbolic? Perhaps. Mighton is a mighty believer in the power of education, that good teaching and constant encouragement are the antidotes to apathy and failure. He writes: “If children in any part of Canada were being starved to the point where they looked like famine victims, people would demand that they be fed. But children regularly graduate from our schools after reaching only a fraction of their potential. Why do we tolerate this vast loss of potential…?….We must all believe, on some level, that these children are not being starved, they are simply incapable of eating.” Mighton has proved to himself, and the JUMP program seeks to demonstrate to more and more schools, that the great majority of young can not only eat math but love it, too.

It’s a challenging thesis, but a painless read. He writes clearly, engagingly, and concisely. Mighton tells his story, outlines the development of JUMP and pleads for a more challenging (yet more equitable) approach to education in well under 100 pages. (In fact, if you’re as lazy as me, you can skip the entire second half of the book, in which he reprints selections from the JUMP manual, from teaching fractions to something called “finite state automata”. Good thing I’m not getting paid for this review!) The Myth of Ability is a small but potent package, and well worth the read for anyone who believes – or wants to – in the importance of education and the undiscovered country of human potential. at times I felt that Mighton might slightly overstate his case, although he does not suggest that there aren’t inborn differences in ability. I think, though, that my “talent is nothing” son Ben would approve. He would nod furiously at Mighton’s title, that’s for sure.

Better Read Than Never

Posted by :James Howden On : April 6, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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I once described myself as an “accidental reader”, and it’s even clearer now. I have my lists, my piles, my really shoulds, and believe me, I really mean to be faithful. But they are usually trumped by the book (magazine, email, billboard, menu…) that flirts and flounces into my sight. Goodbye to faithfulness, and hello serendipity.

Yes, even my reading is erotically charged. Sure. What this actually means is that I don’t read what’s current. I’m too time-stingy to give those hours to writing that hasn’t yet shown some endurance, and too darned cheap to buy new and full-priced books. The Used Bookstore Syndrome. Coming soon, therefore, to this space: a semi-regular but entirely unscheduled look at reading that I finally get around to. Better Read Than Never. (Bonus books in the great book of life to anyone who writes to unpack the delicious blend of clichés underpinning this title. I am Title Guy. What am I saying? Bonus points to ANYBODY who writes me!)

Coming soon will a quick look at The Myth of Ability. Nice.

Arts and Remembrance

Posted by :James Howden On : March 19, 2008
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Category: At First Glance

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(This rambling wreck careened out of a keyboard when days were colder in Ottawa, Canada, where the pro hockey team is a source of civic anxiety and depression, but where the temperatures sometimes now hit double digits by mid-afternoon. Celsius.)

Reasons that Ottawa is great, Article 5, Subsection 3, Clause 11: the National Arts Centre is a five-minute drive from my house. (Okay, the last time, it took 10 because we’re the snow capital of the world right now. We’re getting another 25 centimetres this week. Me back, me achin’ back!  But the sun is lingering longer and I believe in melting.)

Back to the NAC. Ballerina Bride still loves to see the occasional dance piece, although she has little patience with the avant-garde stuff. It’s all pretty new to me, so I end up enjoying the fascination with oddness while she boils and filibusters non-verbally. We recently switched to a dramatic presentation, because she’d seen the director’s name in some promo material. That can’t be the Yvette Nolan that was my manager at Swenson’s Ice Cream and then my roommate in Winnipeg, can it?! said the once and future Twirler. While she was studying at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, my bride lived with an Yvette, though she hadn’t known her as a theatre person. But Yvette had been part Aboriginal, and this was a native-themed play at the NAC, so maybe just maybe…

Absurd coincidence appeals to me, too. When she showed me material for Death of a Chief, I noticed a name from my teaching past, that of a girl from the Six Nations Reserve who had silently suffered through my grade 11 writing class. Yeah, but there are lots of Johnsons and it’s a pretty big country. But the play looked interesting, even if there weren’t old friends and students in key roles: it was a Native North American spin on Shakespeare’s classic tale of leadership and rivalry, Julius Caesar. And so, to the National Arts Centre we went.

[He finally gets ’round to the review.] In the Studio Theatre, the stage was bare, except for a curved arrangement of what looked like rocks. Black-out, and when the lights slowly came up, there were simply-costumed actors lying on the stage, slowly moving and then slowly chanting traditional Aboriginal songs. There were coloured banners – one of them a road which we later learned was an evocation of the troubles between white developers and Native activists near my old home town, along southern Ontario’s Highway 6 – and stylized movements and nary an English word. We were taken to a primal place of dance and song and symbol, and we were there for a good ten minutes. I was expectant, fascinated, with only the smallest tinge of impatience.

And then in walks Cassius, played by a short, fierce woman. “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look,” comes the familiar Shakespearean line, delivered by a tall, slender, female Caesar with a long white ponytail. It was jarring, and purposely so. Suddenly, the ensemble, which has been wordlessly weaving a visual and auditory tapestry of traditional Native culture, switches into a condensed but textually familiar performance of Shakespeare. Caesar wears a brightly coloured robe, others wear buckskin or hooded sweatshirts, and the swords of the Roman senators and warring factions become the flint knives of Aboriginal leaders, both modern and ancient, disputing for power.

It was a fascinating performance. We soon became used to a female Caesar (Monique Mojica), and an Aboriginal Brutus (Keith Barker) who plots her downfall out of concern for his home and native land. And the delivery of Shakespeare’s lines was strong, though for this lover of the Stratford Festival, a few lesser performances were grating. (Nothing has ever compared to the brutality committed by Keanu Reeves as Don John in a cinematic version of As You Like It. Wow. His syllables clanked like stones in a bathtub.)

As unsettling as the opening is – and the initial mash-up of Shakespearean English and tribal custom – the piece overall worked well. I watched avidly. And when, at the death of Caesar, the soft, mournful chanting begins anew, it feels like a natural and homespun part of the world that the Native Earth Performing Arts troupe has woven.

The play arose from a joke. Aboriginal actors, playwrights and directors were discussing how they could widen their theatrical possibilities. After all, there are only so many parts for noble savages and other ethnic clichés. One of the performers flippantly said, “Why can’t we do an all-native Julius Caesar? It’s really just about Aboriginal politics, after all.” That offhand comment developed into this production and, yes, the joker was my wife’s old roommate, director Yvette Nolan. And when I picked up my program before the show began, I was delighted to see that Decius (and several other roles) were indeed taken by my former student, Falen Johnson. Nifty!

Falen was good, very watchable and with command of the language. After Diana and I talked to Yvette, Falen was also open to post-show meetings with an unnamed old fella; I’m sure Yvette had forgotten my name. The silent, rather delicate young Goth-dressing woman from a long-ago grade 11 class was, after the show, a strong-voiced, laughing (but very serious) actor. What a treat it was for both Diana and me to be able to lurk near the dressing rooms and speak to a couple of the principals, especially since it was a chance to make connections with our pasts.

And to think it all happened on Elgin Street. (I wonder how the play was received in The Big Smoke (Toronto), where it ran for a week or two at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.)

A Planet, Several Moons and a WORLD

Posted by :James Howden On : October 12, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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My reading list is always long, all the more so now that, just for fun, I’m doing a university course in 20th century American fiction: Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Pynchon, Morrison, et al. I have some definite gaps in my life reading list. To clear my path to the Excited States of Narrative, I eagerly finished another novel by one of my discoveries of the summer, a Scottish writer named Andrew O’Hagan. Our Fathers was filled with beautiful writing and memorable characters, and his Be Near Me took me far away from Ottawa. Amazing stuff, really. The incidental descriptions of youth, education, social mores and fads are wonderfully quotable, and I will be using them.

Even more interestingly, before I could dive into the short stories of a youthful Ernest Hemingway for class, I had to finish another labour of love and annoyance. Annoying, because it was a first novel by another mid-20s writer, while mine remains on the dream shelf. Lovely, because the author is not only Canadian, he’s a home boy, my eldest son’s good buddy Jon. The world he has invented was beginning to hatch when Jon August McRae was in my grade 11 Writers’ Workshop in my home town high school. How cool is that, friends and (long-distance) neighbours? As long as I can restrain the muttering, teeth-grinding excesses of envy – which, fortunately, is most of the time – it is delightful to have read speculative fiction of such depth and quality from a kid who not only lounged in my living room but doodled during my English class.

At 16, Jon was drawing and scribbling and mentally living the fantastic lives of Jupiter and Io. (To tell the truth, as fine a writer as he was even then, Jon didn’t ace the course. He had some incomplete assignments, because he knew what he wanted to write and it sure wasn’t The Business Letter.) And he never entirely stopped, to the point that the first novel in his Lost and Found Souls series is out, the second is growing in his lap-top and sketchbook, and the narrative of the third novel has been roughed out.

And guess what? Io: First Book of Lost and Found Souls is a terrific read. It is a richly-imagined world with its own history, language conventions, and mythology. I mentioned Jon’s sketchbook because I am certain, knowing his drawing talent and the novel’s majestic descriptions, that he has already drawn these places, characters and events. It is a world of noble and ignoble Lords, sorcerers and causes, and young Io and his intended bride, Jupiter, are swept up in the chaos of rivalry, exile and war.

I’d heard about Io from time to time, and I ordered it immediately when Young Whippersnapper McRae bashfully let me know it was available. I felt bashful, too: there was no doubt Jon’s former writing creature was going to buy the book, but what if I hated it? Jon is well-nigh family, after all. I sighed with grinning relief not long after cracking the plain black cover, because I knew I was in good hands only a few pages in. It was no surprise that Jon could write, that he could craft some fine sentences, but I was no less impressed for all that. His descriptions, especially of place, are remarkably good; they come from an author with a full toolbox and a great eye, who has seen these places and not just once.

Where are we? We meet Io and Jupiter first as young inhabitants of a walled city in a medieval world. His father is a hunter, her daddy is a morose and mysterious blacksmith. There are whispers of disloyalty, rumours of siege and, before long, hints that there are more than workaday talents at play. When Io and Jupiter, out of juvenile curiosity and recklessness, bluff their peasant way into the castle of Lord Adrastea, they are caught up in political currents and occult powers – some of them, their own – that lead to the separation and suffering of these two loving young friends. One is imprisoned, one is exiled. One tries to survive as an enslaved gladiator, one comes under the tutelage of a nearly silent sorcerer. Each becomes more central to the battle for the city-state of Adrastea, and the broader struggle for power in the entire kingdom of Askasha. There is a palpable, though sometimes confusing, history to this place, and we are led to care about the events there, as well as the personalities that enact and witness them.

And it’s not literary candy. The language is rich, and the interior landscapes of the main characters are serious and detailed, though sometimes challenging to penetrate. The action sequences are full of colour and sensation, though there were times I felt lost. For example, a sudden outbreak of violence, fairly early in the novel when the young Jupiter and Io do bloody battle to earn themselves their respective punishments, confused me. I wasn’t sure what they were fighting, and especially why. This incident is key to creating the movement of the plot, but perhaps too lurchingly. Some of this mystery is intentional, I’m sure, for both Io and Jupiter – get the astronomical hint? He is a moon to her, and not the opposite, as we might expect in swords and sorcery – are also confused by the forces that drive and transform them. The dialogue occasionally gets a little stiff and long-winded, as can happen in fantastic medieval worlds.

Yet McRae has a good ear for dialogue, too, which shows especially in bantering conversations between Io and his cousin Ganymede. (Yes, it is another moon of Jupiter. Two points for you!) There is almost none of the awkwardly explanatory dialogue that one might expect from a youthful first-time novelist. In the conversations, in the historical depth behind each character and event, and especially in the visual depiction of this time and place, this book conjures a world that a reader can inhabit and feel. By times, I wanted just a little less pre-history and geographical detail; it reminded me a bit of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion in that way. Sometimes the narration got dense. The novel certainly wants a map, and I suspect that Jon August McRae has drawn several of them that are not available in this early edition.

Jon describes this self-published effort as a “zero print-run” edition to a speculative fiction series that he will continue to pitch to mainstream publishers. I hope it is someday able to appear in full, cartographically illustrated form, because it is good, good stuff. Io rewards a thoughtful reader, and if you like fantasy – there are full-bodied echoes of the best of Tolkien here, too – you’ll be impressed by this maiden voyage. While the book awaits a more fitting publication, you don’t have to wait. It’s easy to order your own copy of a well-imagined adventure (and a decidedly unusual love story) by simply e-mailing the author at jon.august.mcrae@gmail.com . I recommend it.

A Beautiful Biography

Posted by :James Howden On : February 6, 2007
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In my typically timeless style — I’m referring to tardiness, not eternal glory — I missed the Ron Howard film A Beautiful Mind when it won all those Oscars in 2001. (Gracious. Ron Howard has Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Film, and Martin Scorcese doesn’t.) It was just before Christmas, actually, that I finally saw it, and I liked it well enough that I watched it again with my girl a couple of weeks later.

An old friend told me years ago that I should see it, partly because of its cinematic merits but mainly because she’d seen pictures of my Dad as a university grad. “Crowe looks just like your father!” It was true: I was knocked out by Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the troubled mathematical genius, John Nash, but there was an extra thrill of creepiness there. My father was in his 50s when I was a young boy. I caught ghostly glimpses of a Dad I’d never known except in black and white photos from the thirties, forties and fifties. And beside that, Crowe was great. He didn’t tower over a so-so film like Jamie Foxx had in Ray – Beautiful Mind is better than that – but there was a family resemblance. I’d forgotten that it won four Oscars, and its best performance wasn’t even one of them.

I immediately went looking for the Sylvia Nasar biography that had inspired the film, and just finished it. And when I note that the movie version won for Best Screenplay, well, it’s interesting. A Beautiful Mind was based on the Nash bio of the same name, but I was startled by how much “creative licence” Hollywood allows itself in recounting a true story. The love angle, besides being much more central than it actually was, was mainly fiction. Almost the entire depiction of Nash’s paranoid schizophrenia, too, is completely invented. (I guess faithfulness to the book would have eliminated a good role for Ed Harris.) Given the Hollywoodization of life, it’s no wonder how little understanding the public has about mental illness!

But’s let’s concentrate on the book, which was superbly told and incredibly detailed. As a case study of genius, as an examination of psychiatric problems and their effect upon families, and as a recreation of critical times and places in mid-century America, Nasar’s book is a brilliant and compelling investigation. Its detailed description of Nash’s mathematics and of his fall into delusion barely slows down the book. I was engrossed, especially once I gave myself permission to skip the hundreds of end-notes in this densely detailed life history.

It has made me think long and hard about many things: how lonely it can be for our leading minds, how fine the line between creative genius and madness, the courage it takes to be an innovator or to live with one. In our dreamy moments, we sometimes think we’d like to be in the forefront of some great idea or cause, but most of us shrink from the cost. As spookily good as Russell Crowe was in the film, the story of the “beautiful mind” of Dr. Nash is best and most interestingly told – hey, have you heard this before? – in a book. The movie was worth the look, but A Beautiful Mind is a better thing when it’s read.

Chicks Dig the Long Haul

Posted by :James Howden On : January 13, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Sprung! There was nobody home and no particular deadline. My bride was on the family road, and Sprout the Last had an after-school playdate with his buddy that promised to extend into the evening. (Mom and Friend of the Year nomination: Josée!) Jailbreak! Run to daylight!

Flee to that beam of light in a dark, dark room: Escape to the Bytowne Cinema! I didn’t much care what was there, but wasn’t displeased to find out that Shut Up and Sing!, the Dixie Chick-flick, was on. I’m not a big country music fan, but it had been hard not to be fascinated by the boiling stew of disgusted American overreaction when the DC lead singer mouthed off in London. So I was interested to see what this documentary made of the mess, and why these Chicks were in the middle of it.

Do you remember? Tanks and troops were massed on the Iraqi border, tens of millions of people around the world were massed in pre-emptive protest, and the DC happened to be in London where a huge crowd had marched for peace, perhaps that same day. “We’re with y’all,” lead singer Natalie Maines told the audience to roars of approval. “And just so you know, we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas…” And once word got back to the American networks, the if you’re not with us you’re against us neo-con PR steamroller had a gorgeous target. The DC were beautiful, popular, female and sold most of their records in the so-called Red states. And the world of country music is redneck-friendly. (I played the heck out of Garth Brooks’s The Hits for several years, and loved how he had  gradually brought gospel choirs and a social conscience – “When we all can sit / In our own kind of pews / We shall be free…” – to country music. Still, I found it hard, no matter how catchy the tune, to listen to a song like “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association”, which “represents the gun-rack, bare-crack, achin’ back, overtaxed, flag-wavin’ fun-lovin’ crowd…”)

When it came to the “disgusting traitors” who “should be strapped to a bomb and dropped on I-Rack” (people actually said things like that), the country music world spoke with one voice. The Chicks were Satan, and must be destroyed. The film, directed by Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck (Gregory’s girl, I think), follows the DC from the grainy video taken of THE ACT in London in 2003 and throughout their at first slack-jawed, then stubbornly defiant reactions to the uproar. It culminates in the release of a new and very different Dixie Chicks album in 2006. (Cynics might call the entire movie a marketing ploy, just as climate-change deniers devalue Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as campaign fodder. And hey, the Chicks certainly understand marketing, but they also paid a huge price for their stance.) At the controversy’s height, not a country station in the U.S. played them – they had been for some years the biggest-selling band of any genre – and their record and concert ticket sales went way south. Yes, and there were disc-burnings, public floggings by the likes of Bill O’Reilly, and death-threats both vague and direct. One of the most chilling sequences in the film shows the Chicks before a concert in Dallas, where metal-detectors and 24-hour surveillance were the order of the day. They played their arses off that night. Tough Chicks.

Not surprisingly, they come across well. After all, when you’re in a contest with ignorance and xenophobia and time has shown you to be on the right side, it’s hard not to look good. For example, another strong scene has the Chicks and their spritely manager, Simon Renshaw, meeting with a PR consultant not long after the deceivingly easy early going in Iraq. The audience I was in laughed hard (and bitterly) over lines like these: You’ve got to lay low. The war is going so well, and it’s only going to get better. The President is incredibly popular, and his approval ratings are only going to climb… We were treated to the infamous time-dishonoured footage of the smirking Bush’s aircraft-carrier congratulations on “a job well done” to the Forces of Goodness. The Dixie Chicks were (and, to some extent, remain) a more corporate, commercially oriented act than I generally favour, but I came away impressed. These are talented women: Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, sisters and the basis of the band, are prodigiously talented musicians, and Natalie Maines can flat-out sing. She’s a compelling stage presence, and even in back-stage or hotel conversations, the camera can’t let her go. Neither could I.

She’s so watchable. It’s easy to see how she could become a shit-storm magnet. She is an alpha female: charismatic, funny, bright, tough, principled, and a self-confessed “bigmouth”. (Fluently foul-mouthed, too. I never quite get used to women making as many oral sex references as men might. BJ jokes abound, and all the Chicks join in.) But they are ultimately very appealing. (Shots of the darling seven children and interesting husbands they have among them, not to mention Emily’s childbirth experience, don’t hurt.) The women managed not only to stand together but to emerge, from what I saw and heard, a better and deeper and more interesting band because of their struggles. Heck, they’re even helping to write the songs. Shoot, I may even buy the new album. Shut Up and Sing is a good night at the movies. Not only did it entertain me and interest me musically, but it was a nervy case study of the mass psychology of war and patriotism and the precarious nature of free speech.

And I didn’t pay a dime for babysitting.

Retro Reading

Posted by :James Howden On : January 10, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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I can’t post extensively here, but I can still work in my weekly quote in the He Said/She Said block below right. This week, it’s back to G.K. Chesterton, with one of a few gems I found in his 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday. As a novel, there are unlikelihoods and glitches in the story-telling, though it should be said that he subtitles it A Nightmare.

It’s one of those novels that expects the reader to accept that its characters could have the most astonishingly eloquent, philosophical and lengthy conversations. Once you allow for that, the pleasure of Chesterton’s prose is fine. It’s quite a remarkable book, underlaid with serious intent and ideas and yet told in a witty, sardonic and fantastical way. (With one young man of my dear acquaintance quite fascinated by the tenets of Anarchism, the serious and mocking shots that Mr. Chesterton lobs its way were especially piquant.) In the midst of all the adventure and bon mots, GKC throws in the occasional aphorism like this stealth missile on the glories of old-fashioned monogamy. He’s a quote machine.

Why He Didn’t

Posted by :James Howden On : November 29, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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After hearing Sheldon Kennedy interviewed by Jim Rome a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to read his book, the finally I’m ready to tell about all this stuff publication of his memoir of his hockey career but especially of the years-long sexual abuse he endured from a trusted coach. One of the bitter ironies of Kennedy’s life is that only now, after a very successful junior career and a journeyman’s eight years in and around the NHL, is he rediscovering the love and joy in the game that he had known as a child.

Why I Didn’t Say Anything: The Sheldon Kennedy Story is very affecting reading, and answers most of the quiet wonderings I’d had about this episode, a tale which I mainly knew from sensational headlines and brief interviews. His voice comes through strongly but reasonably and without bitterness, though his co-writer and editors have allowed many grammar errors and typos to remain. (Kennedy tells of a healing encounter with residents of the Morley Reserve during his cross-Canada skate to heighten awareness of sexual abuse. The meeting was so emotional, he reports, that “everybody was balling” after it. What, a 3 on 3 hoops tourney broke out?) This is certainly not high literature, but the raw sincerity of Kennedy’s prose is a revelation and a challenge to anyone who cares about sport, about children, or about the personal and societal damage caused by sexual abuse. It’s a quick read and a useful one.

The Heart and the Congo

Posted by :James Howden On : October 24, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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Until recently, the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver was best known to me for an article she wrote in Utne magazine, something to do with the virtues of off-grid, off-the-paved-and-beaten-track, off-beat living. Translation? Going rural. Growing your own. A willing ignorance of haste and celebrity and media and the quest for higher consumption. This is how I remember the piece, and it was a thoughtful and eloquent one. I was well aware, though, that this was the Poisonwood Bible woman, she of the large sales figures and the Oprah stamp of literary approval. This may account, along with my own embrace of slow literary living, for how long it took me to get around to the Bible. I should’ve gotten there faster.

It’s a remarkable book, hugely ambitious and earnest and uneven. I found it thrilling and irritating, filled with gorgeous and poetic phrasing (especially in the interior monologues) alongside sometimes clangingly explanatory and unlikely dialogue, with characters both beautifully and cartoonishly drawn. It follows a Georgia missionary family, the Prices, that goes to the Congo in 1960, where it experiences brutal hardship of its own (mainly of its patriarch’s) making, but also that of the Congolese in general as they go from Belgian colony to “independence” under the brutal Mbutu regime. We follow the lives of the Price women, a mother and four daughters, and their mainly male-made problems. The rich characters are the women.

Men do not come off terribly well in The Poisonwood Bible, which when it errs does so on the side of the Nobly Suffering Woman archetype. (It also portrays the dignity of women under hardship in a heart-wrenching way, don’t mistake me.) The ultra-zealous preacher Nathan Price is a bully and a bad advertisement for Christianity, an extremist and even a sadist in his manic, ignorant spreading of a patronizing Word. He never quite feels real, though there are some belated attempts to explain the creation of this monster. (There is no attempt to explain the other bastards at all.) Meanwhile, the two benevolent male characters are upholders of a stainless, if eccentric, goodness. They never quite seem real, either, though they are sometimes interesting.

Reverend Price’s deeply oppressed wife, Orleanna, is a poetic voice of bitter hindsight, and the voices of two of her daughters are the narrative highs and lows of the book. The mute and brilliant Adah is a fascinating creation with strange, gripping perspectives on the occasionally comic but relentlessly painful events of the book. The lovely and skin-deep eldest daughter, Rachel, is the counterbalance to the female heroism mentioned above. She became increasingly annoying to me as the book went on, so unrelentingly vain and self-absorbed was she. My vain imagining is that Kingsolver just had too much fun skewering the vacuous cheerleader belles of her own high school days. (The malapropisms were amusing at first, but Rachel’s verbal mistakes get wearisome. Her comments about language students working on their French “congregations”, well, okay, but when she complains about someone not having the simple “confederation” to get drinks for everyone in the room? I’ve now forgotten the most irritating examples; suffice to say that they begin to smack of Kingsolver trying way too hard, or having too much fun, or not knowing when enough was enough. Let’s blame the editor.)

About midway through this 650-page saga, the bloom came off what had been a terribly thorny but breathtaking rose. There were too many points to be made, too many clumsy character assassinations, social criticisms and historical observations that burst out of their literary clothing and lay there naked on the page. I was actually angry, at a certain point, because so much of the book had been so movingly, compellingly done up to that point. The story just went on too long, tried to do too much. But once I relaxed enough to accept what Kingsolver had in mind, I was able to enjoy the weaker back end of the book, though not quite with the wonder and alarm of the first half. Okay, she’s indicting the entire enterprise of African exploitation, American ignorance and materialism, male weakness and chauvinism. Let’s go with that. So I did, and I learned lots of history and context and continued to find narrative brilliance in some of the several narrators. The conclusion moved me again, and I felt content with the ending.

And a funny thing. (This reviewing of literature, I must say, is a strange and troublesome effort. I’m being forcibly reminded of what the producers of Brick, a literary magazine, place in the front of each edition, a quote from Rilke: “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little appreciated as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.” There is a wonderful lot to love in The Poisonwood Bible. That sounds lame now. Well, and there’s this, too, which should undermine some of what I wrote above: Barbara Kingsolver is a fountain of good writing, and even with respect to novels, only part of her mighty flow, the score is BK 5, JH 0. So there.) So reading, thinking about books we read and remark on: you know what? Aside from its frequently stunning portrait of the colonial project, I may remember this novel most for something that precedes it. In Kingsolver’s introductory remarks, she ends in gratitude to Steven (her husband?) for his belief that “a spirit of adventure will usually suffice…” I love the brevity and punch of that line. Of course, it most spectacularly did not suffice in the individual mission of the crazed Nathan Price, nor of the European and American mission to get from Africa what they wanted. But for this pale adventurer, the words are branded on my brain. They’re beside my writing desk, too.