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It’s Where You Find It

Posted by :James Howden On : April 27, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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So here’s a sports take with literary flavour (or perhaps just a slightly bitter aftertaste. Fear not, my brave ones!) I find that I’m relearning lessons I thought I’d mastered in the more sweat-soaked phases of my life. I’m listening to this advice, directed to those who think they might have something to say in print. It’s all about the drive, but it takes an interesting road in talking about it.

“Most writers must learn to make a pact with dullness. Not boredom, or lack of imagination or passion, but dullness of routine. Keep your daily appointment with the computer screen and keep your ass on the chair until you’ve reached your daily quota. However rich your inner life may be, seek also the dullard within.” David Carpenter’s credo, the foundation of his life in letters (he’s a short story writer and novelist, among other things), is a call I can understand. It says to any writer – this writer – that the idea of waiting around for Inspiration to come one’s way, that the idea of waiting at all for good things to somehow find us, is not only silly but actually takes the legs out from under any ambition or project.

As a long-time athlete and coach, I thought I knew this. No pain, no Spain was a jock mantra in the buildup to the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. I used to make my basketball teams read a mossy but nonetheless wonderful hymn to athletes by the early-20th century sports journalist Grantland Rice. It was a poem (a jock poem!) called “How to Be a Champion”, and it ended like this:

You wonder how they do it and you look to see the knack,
You watch the foot in action, or the shoulder, or the back,
But when you spot the answer where the higher glamours lurk…
That the most of it is practice, and the rest of it is work.

You have to put in the hours. You hope that Inspiration will seep into the cracks of all your efforts, but you don’t wait for the tap at the window. You go out and find her. You take that daily constitutional. You do your reps. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re hoisting jumpshot after jumpshot, pumping iron, working on your chord changes or getting your daily pages done.

I’m listening to Grantland Rice. (You know GR. This is his, too: “For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks not that you won or lost / But how you played the Game.” One of the great things we ever got from sport, say I.) I like Carpenter’s dullard within, too. But this is wisdom that goes far deeper than our centuries, thoughts much older than the NBA or the Olympics or even that great hitter, Willie Shakespeare. There is an ancient Arab proverb which says, “He who seeketh out a thing with zeal shall find it.” And one of the only verses from the Qur’án that I know from memory speaks with the Creator’s almighty and encouraging voice: “Whoso maketh efforts for Us, in Our ways will We assuredly guide him.” Now, that’s inspiration. (So’s my mother. Happy 86th, Mum.)

Oh, To Be Young and Aboriginal!

Posted by :James Howden On : April 26, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail is a blunt and practical woman, a columnist I always find interesting even when I don’t agree. (On the other side of the coin of opinion, Globe-ster Rick Salutin often strikes me the same way.) She had a column yesterday on the Caledonia/Six Nations standoff. Said standoff, with its barricades and its bipolar policy of mutual assured inconvenience, has this worst quality: it makes it look as if there are two sides, a White Towny one and an Aboriginal Activist one. This is another of those persistent and phony dualities, so easy to set up and so damned difficult to extract from people’s thinking. There are MANY sides to this thing. Anyway, back to Ms. Wente.

She begins with an assault on cliché, one of her specialties. The politicians haven’t learned anything from the last standoff at Ipperwash, we’ve been hearing, but Wente says, “Baloney. They learned everything from Ipperwash. Above all, they learned not to touch a native protest with a bargepole.” Her frequent tone is one of weary dismay. She can dish out caustic commentary, but mostly isn’t a slave to cynicism. “As usual,” she writes,

the roots of the dispute are buried deep in ancient history. Who knows where justice truly lies? Not I. I doubt the myriad of lawyers and mediators, who have laboured on this case for many years, know either. The paperwork now amounts to a staggering 70,000 pages….  In any event, for many native people these disputes aren’t really about the facts. They are about respect, recognition, and identity. The politics of protest are enormously empowering. The young adults who make up the majority of the protesters grew up on images of Oka. What would you rather be — a 20-year-old high-school dropout with dim job prospects, or a Mohawk warrior in combat fatigues…?

 The “dropout” comment is inflammatory – it’s another overstated either/or view of the reality that exists for native youth – but the comparison does contain some much-needed seeds of white understanding of the long-term combination of despair, stoicism and anger that lives in Aboriginal communities across Canada. And Wente, alongside her rejection of the “politics of protest”, shows some comprehension of the history that has created it. (Though she undermines her credibility a little with a reference to the “Six Nations Reserve in Caledonia”. South and west, actually. Yikes.) But she is like a lot of Caledonians these days, and many pretty bright Canadians: she wonders what’s wrong with native people, especially the young.

After all, the explanation goes, consider their advantages: tax-free buying, tuition-free education, and the best country in the world to live in. What’s their problem? Here’s Wente again. “Today the opportunities for young aboriginals in Canada have never been better. And yet, it’s hard to see the opportunity all around you when you’ve been nurtured on so much grievance and injustice….Many of the injustices were real. But how do you move on? How do you make peace with the modern world when you are haunted by ancient wrongs and obsessed with a romantic version of an idealized past?” She summons an alternative example, the story of Skawenniio Barnes, a Mohawk from Kahnawake Reserve who is on her way to the Ivy League on full scholarship. I agree with Wente: Ms. Barnes is a brilliant example, someone with great talent and drive who “changed the script”. But when the columnist goes on to say that this student’s wonderful – I would even say heroic, miraculous – accomplishments and prospects are “worth all the land-claims settlements in the world”, I shake my head.

I, too, wonder how far we go with apologies for historical wrongs, and the re-packaging and re-naming of land. I wonder when enough is enough, but I don’t doubt that land will be (must be) part of Canada’s attempt to get anywhere near justice on matters Aboriginal. But if whites think native people are so deeply fortunate, with all their perceived “extra rights” and advantages, how many would want to exchange positions? Maybe it ain’t so easy being red. Maybe we should be trying harder to answer this excellent question: Why aren’t there more like Skawenniio Barnes? I’m pretty sure we would be abashed and ashamed if we actually listened to honest answers.

Jane Jacobs

Posted by :James Howden On : April 26, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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My wife, Environmental Avenger and all-around Sustainable Cities Babe, has been educating me for about ten years on Jane Jacobs and what she has meant to urban planning, urban thinking, urban renewal. It’s been a good but fairly steep learning curve. After all, for this small-town Baptist –especially after spending a dark and deeply annoying decade in Toronto one year – cities were nasty and brutish places where stays should be short. Scrape the grime and the moral sleaze off on your way out. Park your principles. Pick up your smile on the way out the door….

Maybe I’m growing up, though. There are wisecracks about Ottawa as the City That Fun Forgot, but it is a city and I mostly like it here. I also understand better some of the wretched costs of our pursuit of Country Living for Everyone! I still can’t get used to going to a supermarket and knowing nobody there, but when the news of Jane Jacobs’s death came through yesterday, I had sufficient respect for cities, and knew enough about her work to improve them, that I felt a real pang of loss. Diana was her neighbour for awhile in the Annex in Toronto, but I only knew her as a deeply appreciative reader. I had finally read her classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, under professional pressure. (When I worked for Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, I was forced to read all kinds of magnificent stuff; here, we were preparing together for the William Kilbourn Memorial Lecture she was giving in Toronto.) It entirely changed the way I looked at cities and suburbs, it astonished me as the work of one citizen opposed to the way her city (New York, at that time) was developing, and it impressed me with the clarity and power of its writing. Gosh, she was good.

Now she’s gone. She left us with several remarkable books, and her final one, Dark Age Ahead, needs to move to the front of my next-to-read line. Citizen Jane was a ferocious and compelling example of civic activism and intelligence, and we’ll be referring to her for a long time.

Fred in My Head

Posted by :James Howden On : April 25, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Synchronicity is alive and well at my house. Loading up the crockpot with the contents of various plastic and metal containers – je suis le maître de la cuisine, mes amis – I was listening to Fred J. Eaglesmith and the Flying Squirrels. It was their double live album from Santa Cruz, CA, called Ralph’s Last Show.

I’m learning to trust my Radio 1 intuition. When the commercials on sports radio got too annoying (cripes, when aren’t they?), and the heads were going to talk OttawaSenatorsHockey! for another seven straight hours anyway, I flipped to CBC 1 and heard that Fred was going to be interviewed. Cool! Now listen up. If you don’t know Fred, you have your earphones plugged in to the wrong hole. He’s the real deal: terrific songwriter, storyteller and singer, with a tight and road-tested band and a fiercely independent nature.

Fred grew up in my neck of the southern Ontario farmbelt (near Alberton, I think). I’d always wondered about his name, and figured out this morning that he belonged to a big Christian Reformed church family – sounds like his background is Dutch, part of the Elgersma crew – that required some wildness to escape from. He’s a rough-cut romantic, scarred by love, burnt by the passing of rural livelihoods, and transfixed by tractors and trains. “Today, Dad, I sold the old John Deere / The man who bought it’s gonna fix it up / And put it in a museum…” His latest album, all of them on his own label, is Milly’s Café, and he’s in good voice.

Fred has a gently fanatical following for his live shows, where he mixes wry storytelling with an ever-changing string of wry, melancholy and exuberant songs like “White Rose Fillin’ Station”, “Pretty Good Guy” and “My Baby’s Got Big Hair!”. His albums are good (and there are lots of ‘em), and his live shows are better. He’s on the road for over 200 shows a year, so you should be able to catch him sometime. You might want to try a ride on the Eaglesmith train, kids, “’cause I like trains / I like fast trains / I like trains / That whisper your name…” 

All the Way With LBJ

Posted by :James Howden On : April 24, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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Here’s a big question in the Toy Department, professional basketball division: has LeBron James, 21-year-old hoops wizard and savvy Goliath of the sneaker wars, done enough this year to be named MVP of the National Basketball Association? Or will he, as I suspect, need to pay further dues? (And just by the way, by what club are these “dues” being collected? Presumably, it’s the CREWS – the Chronically Resentful and Envious Writers of Sports.)

I wish I was seeing more LeBron Live than Magazine LeBron and King James the Pitchman. Even a jaded old dunks-are-overrated dude like me can get a buzz from some of his highlight reels, but there are several things about James that excite me a whole lot more. One of the first times I saw him play, he tapped a loose ball toward a teammate and hustled out to fill a lane on the fastbreak. The dunk at the end was sweet, but I was blown away by his hustle and speed; I’ve ever seen a big man so fast. And he fills up scoresheets, not just the points column, not to mention that with a Sports Illustrated cover in 11th grade (and another at 20 musing about him being “The Best of All Time” when he hadn’t even made the playoffs yet), James has every reason to be a flaming idiot.

My impression is that he isn’t. He speaks thoughtfully, doesn’t appear to think he’s bigger than the game, and his teammates seem to enjoy playing with him.  Best of all – at least until he becomes a philanthropist and advocate for the disadvantaged – LeBron James loves to pass. For a young guy with hops and scoring ability, he understands the game at a high level. He’s rare. I loved what he said last week, which went something like this: it’s cool to get that ‘Oooh’, but when you make the great pass, you get two ‘Ooohs’, one for the dime and one for the dunk. Not to mention that, suddenly, the game isn’t all about ME anymore. Imagine: brothers in short pants doing their thing together. Unselfishly!

Things are looking good for the Association when its Most Valuable Player is likely to be either King James or the reigning king of delivery, Steve Nash. And looking at the dominance of the Pistons, it looks like Team Ball and “playing the right way” (ah, but Larry Brown, where are you now?) are getting cooler by the quarter. Nice!!

Caledonia Gets Interesting

Posted by :James Howden On : April 21, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Back in 1996, when I was dragging my new wife back to my little town, she was worried. A city girl, she wondered, “Does anything happen there? Will there be any interesting people?” But my roots were deep and my sons were there, as was my job teaching and coaching at my alma mater high school, so we packed up our honeymoon kit (and the caboodle) and moved back to Caledonia, Ontario. “A Grand place to live!”

I’d always thought so, but influenced by my Diana, an environmentalist and Jane Jacobs admirer, I’d come to see how suburban sprawling my childhood village had become. (It’s three times bigger than when I was a boy, but its downtown struggles. There were, as of our 2002 move to Ottawa, three stoplights in town. Too much!) And my bride did find it dull, and though there were lots of JamesHowdenHistory and family there, interesting people were hard to come by, let alone excitement. Now that Caledonia and its eternal neighbour, the Six Nations reserve, are at the centre of Canadian attention, Diana flings her hands in mock dismay.

“I lived there for six years and now it gets interesting?!” Well, my blissful life sentence in Caledonia was commuted after thirty years, so I know what she’s talking about. And I’d like to be there right now. I know these people, on both sides of the barricades. For our shared six years, Diana and I lived in the town’s first condominiums, built by Jack Henning (father of John and Don, the developers at the centre of the current dispute) in the 1970s at what then seemed an absurd distance south of the river; the town’s business area and its older homes were all on the north side. Now, the Zehrs and Canadian Tire superstores that have been appearing in national newscasts are farther south still.

John Henning played first base on Caledonia baseball teams the age group below mine, and was the first kid I knew to have a proper trapper. (Rumour was it had cost forty bucks. John also had the country habit of spitting and rubbing in its pocket while he played; it stank to baseball heaven.) He was a rookie on the Caledonia High football team in my glorious senior year – we nearly won the league after years of being a patsy against larger schools – and became a touchdown machine as the star running back when the Blue Devils actually won.

And John and I, like his brother Don and generations of white kids from Caledonia, had the experience of sharing science labs, hallways and playing fields with guys from the upper end of Six Nations who came to town for high school. I played four years of football with Ben Thomas and Alfred Logan, and was a teammate for shorter periods with various Hills and Bomberrys, Porters and Martins. So were the Hennings. And I can’t help but wonder who, among these young men from a parallel world with whom we all “went to war” as adolescent athletes, might now be on the other side of that barricade.

It’s a divide between the town and the proud and struggling nations that have watched it grow from nothing along the banks of their cherished Grand River. Today, the barrier is vivid and tangible, tense and angry, but it is not new. It just used to be quieter. It used to be that, if you wanted to, you could pretend it didn’t exist. For some Caledonians, like many Canadians, it was easy to live as if the reserve itself wasn’t there.

That time is over, for now, and that’s not all bad. There’s great potential for entrenching suspicions and stereotypes in the heat of this conflict, but – and call me naïve, if you like – there is also the chance in this standoff to build understanding: of the tangled history along the banks of this lazy river, and of the needs and aspirations of the two communities that share it. It’s an interesting place now. It’s a piece of geography that shows us a great deal about Canada, and what happens in the days and months to come will tell us a whole lot more.

[This entry was later expanded into a Hamilton Spectator Forum piece that you can find here.]

Here’s to Diners

Posted by :James Howden On : April 18, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Because my cluttered study is shared with wife and sons (teenaged and kindergartenish); because ‘Net-wading and inbox adventures sometimes feel like Actual Work; because laundry and dishes sometimes shout louder than my keyboard does; and because I had a nearby appointment anyway, I spent a big chunk of my work day at Ada’s Diner. I read, I ate, I planned, I ate, I wrote and I ate. Working bliss! (Today, I love being a writer.)

Over three hours, I did actually get done some decent work and some needed spring cleaning of the cerebral kind, but mostly I like diners. I discovered Ada’s a few years ago, when I was taking some supply-teaching dates at the elementary school around the corner. It’s a tiny storefront restaurant with clean floors and tables, good food and friendly people. There actually is an Ada, with a husband who bakes fresh muffins for the weekend brunch crowds and a pretty, smiling server who’s been there for several years. (Just realized that, unlike many of her customers, I don’t know her name. Not getting to Ada’s often enough!)

At Ada’s, I get the impression that my patronage is genuinely welcome. I feel like a real person rather than an object of marketing and plastic hospitality. Nobody knows my name there, yet, but it’s a cheery and homely place. Here’s to Ada!

Just Human Nature?

Posted by :James Howden On : April 15, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Have you ever noticed how gloomy we are in the way we talk about ourselves? About our species, I mean. Someone cheats – on his taxes, on her partner – and we shrug and mutter, “Well, it’s only human nature.” Over and over, we sing the same mournful refrain in response to signs of dishonesty, selfishness and aggression, most often evident among people that we don’t know.

I find this bizarre. I think we need to reclaim this phrase, and shout Now THAT’S human nature! whenever we catch people in acts like this: pushing a stranger’s car out of the snow; smiling at small children; preserving history or restoring spoiled habitats; singing the good old songs; standing against injustice; jumping into icy water or burning houses to save another. I don’t mean that lying and brutality don’t happen, only that they are not the default mode of the human system.

It reminds me of the view of history as one unrelieved tale of war, tragedy and competition. If this was true, how could we have cities and art and temples and enduring music? War destroys quickly, and this is the horror, but it is also the exception. If war and aggression were the rule, we’d have destroyed ourselves long ago. If it were otherwise, how could any of the cooperative projects and personal accomplishments of human beings remain? The King James Bible, Chartres Cathedral, Réal Madrid CF, the computer program on which I write: pick your favourite example of human enterprise and progress, and know that it required time and peace to be built.

And if our human nature is nothing but self-interest and negativity, how have we survived? (Just give us time, I hear some of you muttering. We’re working on it.) We can be beastly to each other, but we can also be angels. When we think of our friends, our family, the colleagues we know and respect, we don’t assume as some sort of default stance that they are “only out for themselves”, “naturally aggressive” or, God forbid, “born in sin”. Oh, we screw up. We are in constant need of education. Most of the time, though, most of us are just ordinary Janes and Jamals who are trying to be useful, wanting to enjoy the company of others and to leave some legacy of goodness behind. It’s only human nature, after all.

(And here’s Waldo! Ralph Waldo Emerson, that is, with his description of humans being at their best, the success that, in our heart of hearts, most of us want more than anything else:

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a little better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

On the Walrus Shelf

Posted by :James Howden On : April 13, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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How lucky am I? Well, I’m David’s Dad, for one thing, and last night that meant an invitation to an amazing event. My kid is finishing up at Canterbury High School, the specialty arts school for this region. (We chose Ottawa, in large part, because of his successful application. And it’s public education, speaking of great institutins and lucky fathers.) CHS, with its Literary Arts program, took a strong role in hosting The Walrus magazine’s Ottawa instalment of its “Bookshelf” promotion, and My Dave was one of two student readers at McGinty’s Pub downtown.

Four novelists were there to read from their work. James Meek read from The People’s Act of Love. From the United Kingdom, Meek draws here from his years as a journalist in Russia. The novel sounds bleak and fascinating, though I found his writing about sex clumsy. (I find nearly everybody’s writing about sex clumsy, though Bruce Cockburn, oddly, is an exception. Maybe sex and prose don’t mix.) Rawi Hage, born in Lebanon and living in Montreal, read searing stuff on the adolescent idiocy of civil war from his début novel DeNiro’s Game. Jaclyn Moriarty comes from an entirely different authorial zone, and she was a delight. She is Australian, a lawyer with a Ph.D. and a practice she has left behind for writing. (It’s hard to imagine that charming and quirky voice arguing copyright law, but that’s my bias.) I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes is suburban fantasy, I suppose, and it was intriguing and funny. The remarkable Canadian Ann-Marie MacDonald closed with a superbly delivered (hardly a surprise, given her acting and performing background) series of readings from The Way the Crow Flies. (Wow.)

Yes, and my Dave and Fatima read their poetry, too, and hundreds of teachers and librarians (and the odd freeloading parent) absorbed beer and bar food and WordsWordsWords with rapt attention. The editor of The Walrus, Ken Alexander, spent several years as a high school English teacher. The Walrus Bookshelf hit 12 Canadian cities this year, and its partnership with publishers like HarperCollins, Anansi and Vintage Canada results in schools walking away from the evening with dozens of autographed copies of the novels at hand for use with their students (25,000 books, I’m told, across the country). It’s all about reading and the good teaching that encourages it.

And until Dave leaves for university next year, I have four signed hardback novels under my roof, and they are squirming to be read. (That’s me squirming, I admit it, especially since I still haven’t read MacDonald’s ridiculously successful first novel, Fall On Your Knees.) My guy was a bit overwhelmed, in his usual understated way, as we walked away: “I had no idea how prestigious this was.” That made two of us. What a great night to be a Dad, to be a (once upon a time) teacher, to be a writer with an itch.

Lefties are Right

Posted by :James Howden On : April 10, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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I’m no golf guy, but there are some loyalties too important not to proclaim. I’ve only been on a golf course without windmills 6 or 8 times in my life, but as a member of The Loyal Order of Crooked-Armers, I extend a modest salute to Mr. Mickelson. Big Lefty has won the Masters, a sporting tradition hyped like no other. And Little Lefty, the crooked-armed upholder of the mighty maple leaf, Mike Weir, wasn’t far off the pace, tying for 11th. (Another Canuck, Stephen Ames, was right there with him, though it must be noted that he does hit from the wrong side of the ball.)

I’ve always said that golf is a game I’ll take up when I can’t run and play sports any more. (Oops. That day is dawning.) But I have always swung my hardwood (and, I confess, my aluminium) from the correct side of the plate, and Wayne and I know how to hold a hockey stick. I didn’t actually watch any of the lush and hushed semi-athletic drama from Augusta over the weekend — the pace is too brisk for me — but my golf-fiend big brother took it all in on my behalf. (I’d forgive him his enthusiasm if he didn’t hit from the wrong side. No sexual innuendo intended.) Anyway, my slicing and dicing aside, lefties rule. If it weren’t for that potbelly, I’d say that Mickelson might save golf.