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Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers

Posted by :James Howden On : October 5, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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FDA (full-disclosure alert): that title is a false lead and a limping excuse to drop my current favourite band name into this and nearly every other conversation. Buddy is a Newfoundland band, three guys that play a mixture of goofy, hearty and sentimental songs from down home. (They would seem to have a solid touring career, playing across the Maritimes and for the Newfoundland diaspora all over Canada.)

But that’s not what I’m writing about. (And I haven’t even heard the lads play, so that’s all I have anyway. Reminds me of the opening to a Cockburn song: Woke up thinking about Turkish drummers / Didn’t take long, I don’t know much about Turkish drummers / But it made me think of Germany and the guy who sold me cigarettes / Who’d been in the Afghan secret police who made the observation that it’s hard to live…) Buddy reminds me that I listened to a trio of terrific Canuck writers last night at the local LitWit extravaganza, one of whom was a rumpled, denim-clad Newfoundland writer named Kenneth J. Harvey.

For son Will and me, Harvey was the intriguing highlight of the evening. Faded jean jacket, flushed cheeks under several days growth of beard, a plain black ballcap pulled low over his eyes, he looked the part of the shy, beery, but soberingly clear-eyed Buddy over in the corner, down to the local Legion Hall. I knew little about him, other than that he’s just now becoming widely-known in Canada despite quite stunning “writer’s writer” international praise for over a dozen books. The guy’s a writing machine, though perhaps not an eager seller. Even by Newfoundland standards, he keeps a low profile (he lives in an outport), and didn’t do terribly well with the excerpt he read from his new novel Inside. (Maybe it was his cold.) But the lead character, an old ex-con, started to become real in my head anyway, and in the following Q&A, Harvey was by turns blunt and eloquent, raw or funny, and always and distinctively himself. We bought the book. We bought him.

The Other Fellers are superb writers, and better performers. Steven Heighton is a prolific and adventurous writer (the new novel is Afterlands, an acclaimed re-creation of the harsh aftermath of an American North Pole expedition) and as cowboy-handsome as he is serious. His was the only book I didn’t buy last night – my library groans with unread but enthusiastically purchased books – though a previous Heighton reading had inspired me to buy his poetry, which I never do. He requires himself to write riskily, to drive himself batty but fascinated by not knowing where he’s going, by writing without a map or a safety harness. I could learn from that. I am.

Trevor Cole is a guy I’ve been meaning to read since Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life was short-listed for the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. It was his first novel, and I happened to be writing happily, feverishly and anonymously for the GG herself at the time. I was intrigued (and royally ticked off) by his “overnight” success; it turns out, though, that he’d been a prominent magazine writer before that, if one paid any attention to business, which I emphatically didn’t. (And in other news, I confirmed in the signing line last night that my bride’s vague memory of having gone out with Cole once or twice was true. Long ago, friends. No, my competitive irritation comes from his having made the jump to hyperspace so far ahead of me.) Perhaps more important (and more interesting!) for you to know, he’s one of those rare authors with a radio voice and real performing skill. His new novel is The Fearsome Particles, which sounds great, and not only because of his acting. He’s a fine builder of sentences and characters, with turns of phrase that are inventive and often deliciously wry. Because I’m cheap, and because I think this might be a writer I’ll follow closely and therefore feel the obsessive and über-controlling need to read him in sequence, I bought Bray in paperback.

This was one of the Ottawa International Writers Festival’s series called “Writing Life”: three snippets of new books and an engaging conversation with and among the three people who made them. It’s been another good Feast of Words and I’ll be dining again tonight. And if you like writers and writing, you can hear some of the best Canuck authors reading their stuff on a cool new site. (My pleasure.)

Writers Festival Highlights

Posted by :James Howden On : October 3, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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I read Andrew Cohen’s While Canada Slept about a year and a half ago. He’s an Ottawa man, so though his book isn’t new, he’s here and his book is even more relevant. Questions about Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan keep growing with every young man (and one woman) that we bring home to bury. Are we returning to a time when Canada “punches above its weight” as far as international influence goes? Cohen recommends it, from a military but especially from diplomatic and development perspectives. This is a smart and eloquent guy. If he was more prone to performance and less to dispassionate analysis, he’d be a big star in the punditocratic constellation. Punditocratic. a. describing those who make their living by entertaining us with their knowledge. Word of the day. Word to your father. You’re welcome.

Steven Manners has the look of a stubbornly loyal but chronically disappointed pro sports fan. (The Cubs. The Leafs.) He makes Cohen look like a sharpie, a vaudeville showman, but his wryly detached delivery began to grown on me as he discussed his Super Pills: The Prescription Drugs We Love to Take. I enjoyed his historical reminders of how root beer and Coca-Cola starting out as tonics, in the great tradition of Ayer’s Sarsparilla and Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. (For example, only when the forerunner of the American Food and Drug Administration began to investigate why Coke “contains neither coca nor kola” did the company begin marketing it as a mere beverage.) Mainly, though, his book addresses the modern phenomenon that has been called “cosmetic psychopharmacology”: the avid search for and consequently ready supply of meds designed to make us “better than well”. Valium. Prozac. Ritalin. Viagra. The list is long, and the stories around them are a caution. We do love our magic bullets.

After Mr. Manners, I hustled over to fancier digs at Ottawa’s famous Chateau Laurier ballroom to hear my Ol’ Boss, former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson. Her memoir Heart Matters is monstrously important for me and all my former colleagues, and is making a predictably big splash in Canadian newspapers and bookstores. Many in the large crowd, I’m sure, were anxious to hear the “state secrets” she has been admonished in some circles for telling. She was not a big fan of Prime Minister Paul Martin, it is now publicly clear, but she dismisses any idea that she’s broken a sacred code. In any case, she didn’t share anything from that part of the book. What she did read was fine storytelling, much of which I hadn’t heard before, about her family’s harrowing refugee experience and growing up an immigrant in a then very white Canada. She is a superb performer, of course, but she read far too long and the subsequent delightful conversation with host Ken Rockburn was far too short. (Yes, she simply cannot do without me. Ahem.) But then again, the line of book buyers eager to have it signed went on and on. I was in it.

The “Big Idea” series continued Monday night with Stephen O’Shea and his book Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World. I was not familiar with O’Shea, but he’s impressive and I’ll read his book. He’s a journalist writing history, and made a point about the importance of being in the place where great events occurred, and not merely consulting texts in libraries. This was perhaps a gentle critique of academic historians and also of our frequent tendency to give greater weight to abstraction and reference than to direct and felt experience. O’Shea devotes much of the book to countering a pervasive fallacy: the idea that war and conflict is what defines the course of history. Most accounts of medieval relations between Christianity and Islam focus on the great battles (“if it bleeds, it leads”), but O’Shea gives considerable attention to the long periods of peace and productive interaction between the two faith communities. He coins the term “Islamochristian civilization”, and terms the historic relationship as “a sibling rivalry, not this dangerous shibboleth of the ‘clash of civilizations’”. And as for “East is East, and West is West”? O’Shea argues, very convincingly, that “the twain did meet, and mingle, and marry”. He eloquently expresses his dismay at the contemporary toxic rhetoric that mixes politics and religion, and especially the West’s ignorance of Islam and its ongoing “fear of the Turk” – a renewable resource, it appears. “Religion, for all its solace, will always be a ready hand grenade for those who wish to make war,” he said. And I liked the following example, thrown off during questioning after his thoughtful and appealing talk. It’s a good conversation starter (or ender!), and rattles some of the slack-minded impressions of Islam into a new context. “Osama bin Laden is as much a Muslim,” O’Shea stated, “as David Koresh and the Branch Davidians at Waco were Christian…” This guy is good. (I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and listening about Islam lately. If you’d like a sample, start here.)  

ODY: Week 6 (42/365). Old, Blue, Borrowed and New.

Posted by :James Howden On : October 2, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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Just picking up Old Dog hairs from your carpet for the first time? The creation myth is here, and the first step is here.

I spent the first part of the week at a training seminar in Toronto, bunking at Sue and André’s place in a cozy Beaches neighbourhood. I’d dragged the guitar along, and kept the faith with some late-night strumming on Sunday. On Monday night, I got caught. André, husband of my wife’s old friend Sue, came home from work late and heard something that reminded him of music in his spare bedroom. He poked his head in to praise Sue for dusting off her guitar. Instead, he found me playing the ol’ Dégas in my underwear. Hurray! Male bonding!

I was training as a facilitator for the Virtues Project , an approach to teaching, child-rearing and relationships that puts fundamental human goodness right up front. Guitar Virtuosity was on my mind. Let’s examine a partial list:

Courage? (Check. Terrified of this thing, started anyway.)
Creativity? (Okay. I am making things. Basement noises. Muttering blogs.)
Enthusiasm? (Muted. Taking a jock approach: never too high, never too low. Should make more whoopee. Not what you’re thinking, though that’s not a bad idea, either.)
Determination? (Check. Day 42, kids!)
Diligence? (Long past due, but duly done.)
Humility? (If I needed more, this newfound clumsiness really helps.)
Idealism? (Larded with practicality and order, but hopefulness leaks through.)
Orderliness? (I have a good place. As for time, though, I shoe-horn practice into the absolute heel of my day, and the night-time, blues be damned, ain’t necessarily the right time…)
Patience? (Man, it doesn’t come easily, but it comes. Haven’t thrown anything. Yet.)
Self-discipline? (42 in a row argues for Yes, but the frayed edges of disappointment try to shout them down. I am disciplining Self to listen more to column A. All those days, whether purposeful or not, count. “90% of life is just showing up,” saith the prophet Woody Allen. I have showed up at fretboard and keyboard.)

Virtues I haven’t the nerve to acknowledge yet as part of this off-key odyssey:

Confidence. (A rumour, a far-away voice. So far, will and embarrassed enthusiasm rule.)
Excellence. (I have, however, just emerged from a pothole in the footpath to the parking lot next to the on-ramp to the road to excellence. That counts.)
Joyfulness. (I hear its giggle, but it runs away when I look.)
Service. (Hard to see what this does for others. Nobody-but-me for the moment…)

Tuesday was Day 3 of the Virtues seminar, and I was presenting some ideas and exercises on COMMITMENT. In part to counter-balance some of the syrupy-sweet or new-age ethereal music that had been played – but mainly to jumpstart my own courage (and humility!) – I went LIVE. I played a perverse kind of musical chairs (If you call that music. If you call those chairs!) with my new best friends. I had them scribbling some ideas in response to questions and challenges, and I (mercifully) didn’t give them much time to write. Mercifully, because their writing time was defined by my playing of “A Blues Riff”, first very slowly (à la Week 2 and 3) and, later in the exercise, as fast as I could go. Going public. Visible (and risible) commitment. (Merde, did I make a lot of mistakes!) Concentration was probably hard for them, as I inserted some startlingly realistic enactments of mock frustration. It was lively, let’s say that, and we laughed a lot. (Commitment is too often a grim, ominous and guy-unfriendly concept.) And that turned out to be my playing for the day, because I wasn’t back to my borrowed bunk ‘til 1:30 a.m., with an important meeting about the Old Dog Year the next morning, bright and early. But most importantly, I chose an intimate circle of gracious encouragement. So many pats on the back, so much praise for this tiny outreach to the Muse of music. I smiled and smiled.

The Wednesday meeting was an assessment of interest about this Guitarzan spasm of learning and all the on-line thinking I’m doing about it. Interest? ‘Fraid not. A busy man had the courtesy to indulge me with a meeting but hadn’t even looked at the submitted collection of entries on the first 31 days of the Old DogYear. Garn! I’ve learned what doesn’t work, anyway. And then it was the long trip home and another exhausted midnight guitar run. Commitment feels strong, though confidence is wobbling. This would have been the night of my second group lesson, but I missed it. I wonder how much farther KW took us.

The end of the week found me back in the beloved basement. Same old stuff. The dullard within. But doing all this repetition feels like early summer days, when the strengthening sun slowly burns off the fog of morning. KW had thrown lots of chords at us, and they’re coming. I’m starting to remember how to configure the C chord, but I’m also hearing what C sounds like and how it speaks to G and D. The little finger-picking sequence that the guitar guru showed us, an initially unruly little gang of 4 notes, began to resolve itself into a smooth and brainless pattern. Look, Ma, no eyes! It’s very relaxing, actually, quite a mind-emptying finger-dance where the digits are starting to remember their steps without my help. Sweet. A little less old. A little less blue.

And a LOT less borrowed, broken-necked Dégas guitar because, on Sunday, I finally pulled a Major Commitment Trigger by buying A NEW GUITAR. My guitar! I wanted to dance and giggle but, to my credit (or shame), I took it all in stride. It’s a Walden guitar – a D550, baby! – a solid-topped beauty that I got on sale for $200 at the Ottawa Folklore Centre. It’s a folk guitar, not low-rent classical as the Dégas was, so the strings are metal rather than nylon. The B and high E strings are like razor wire, so there is another level of fingertip toughening to come. They’re also the same colour as the – what is it, the pick-guard?—that guitar-body armour below the sound hole, so these eyes have trouble picking them out. Guitar Guy at the OFC spoke warmly and knowingly about my Walden, and I feel good about this machine. I bought a stand, an electronic tuner and a humidifier, none of which I know how to work yet. The humidifier is a fairly simple and obvious thing, though I hadn’t considered how dryness could affect a wooden instrument. I’m not sure how it sits, so that’ll be Question 67 or 68 when I go for the next groupthink lesson in a couple of days.

It’ll be fun to show off my new lovely, but I’m scared to play with her. She makes sweet and unfamiliar sounds that my borrowed love was incapable of making. The music we made was obviously much more full and rich, but I strummed as if I was nervously coaxing melody from a crystal vase. I missed the Dégas. This new friend doesn’t yet sit comfortably with me. I wanted to whale away with my mock solos and percussive energy, but I felt nervous and reserved. I wanted things to feel comfortable right away, ‘cause heck, she’s beautiful, she has a gorgeous voice and body, it’s a fresh and exciting start and besides, that first date had cost me a pretty penny! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there were those awkward pauses in the conversation, that I was unsure about how to treat her and how she might respond to my overtures. It was a tense kind of fun, though, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing each other again.

Writers Festival Day 1

Posted by :James Howden On : October 2, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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One of the highlights of my year is a big shindig of word people talking about their words, and word-ivores like me snuffling contentedly at the word trough. As a writer, libraries can be overwhelming and bookstores – especially that big used bookstore downtown, with all those dried-out husks of once-hopeful publication – can knock me down and dishonour my remains. The Ottawa International Writers Festival does me good, though.

I’m inspired by great sentences. I’m inspired, in an odd but clear way, by the ordinariness of the people. When the writers are great, I’m inspired to believe that I could be good, too. (It took me a surprisingly long time to realize the degree to which I idealized, nay deified, writers. Traces of outworn idolatry remain, but the WritersFest helps me cleanse the sanctuary.) When the writers are mediocre, a less noble inspiration turns my crankiness: if (s)he can do it, NO MORE WAITING for me!! It’s not exactly righteous anger, but it’s a deformed cousin of it. Details at eleven. (Or whenever I strap myself to the keyboard next.)