Rss

Retrofitting a Fancy

Posted by :James Howden On : April 1, 2025
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,

“I was an educator of some sort,” began my scribbling about a recent dream.

(This was also true to life. What “sort”, then? This sort: high school; English Creature; one for whom Dead Poet’s Society probably meant too much; taught like world peace depended upon my chalk-stained energy; raced to the gym many an after-school day; teacher-coach; regularly heart-broken but deeply committed, happy and perhaps absurdly proud to be so. “Uncle Jay,” a niece who had been with me in Room 2011 once wrote, “is, um, colourful.” Unlike my sons, she didn’t have to deal with me on the basketball court. And the ghost is still in the machine. I continue to haunt the corridors and the hardwood of Endless High School. “I guess that this must be the place…” (Talking Heads) One of my places, that’s sure.)

I was an educator of some sort, wandering through tight spaces in a huge, high vault of a warehouse. I couldn’t get out, or get where I needed to go, and was also frustrated that I couldn’t escape the dream itself. Moments of am I dreaming here? alternated with me writing on various found surfaces and random papers, here and there, so I wouldn’t forget what I was seeing. And then I’d forget where I left my urgent records. But I was amazed by all I saw in that enormous, high-walled building: old dictionaries, reams of stationery and computer equipment, redundant textbooks, tables, racks and shelves of building materials, fossil remains of art. There were a few rancid corners, but mostly it was filled with odd and dusty and stolidly interesting things. It went on and on. Does anybody realize that all this is still here? I had to get the word out, that all the old-school material — steel and wood and paper and thought — in this building, not to mention the real estate it sat on, had to be worth a LOT. It should at least be recycled and/or sold off! I made notes, lost them, wrote others.

All this STUFF! All this SPACE! Somebody should KNOW about all this! I gotta get this written down (AGAIN!) before I lose or forget it (again!)!

I went for a walk that morning, shared a few choice words with the sun and sky, cocked my head at a certain point and knew, without thinking hard or directly, what that dream was trying to tell me. (Most of the time, I find my dreams are just stacks of frustration dripping with a slurry of random events-from-the-day. I don’t expect revelation, or even meaning. But I’ll take it when I can get it.)

Ha! It was a Writing Dream!

Let’s say the storage area was my life and mind, my understanding, maybe even my imagination. Let’s say that, despite my distrust of my capacity for mysticism, I’m not above looking for signs and portents!

***

All this is a long way of saying that I’m having another kick at the Can. The Writing Can, the I-can Can. A.T. helped me resuscitate this old repository of my stuff. I’m spraying Lock De-Icer on my fingers, and sprinkling hopefulness on my spirit. You’re reading a wee result. Thanks for reading.

 

[I have also dumped, *just* over there in the “It’s All About Sports!” section, a lengthy essay on basketball coaching. It’s a ‘State of the Disunion’ address, slightly different versions of which I’ve been trying to share with coaches in my region, the wider basketball community, and anybody who can tolerate (or venerate) the idea that sport and education can “share the same space for a minute or two”, as the mighty David Byrne used to sing.]

A Modest Proposal: Coaching Hoops While North

Posted by :James Howden On : March 29, 2025
1

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

[17-minute read]

[This is a slightly different version of a letter I have been stuffing into coaches’ Inboxes. It seems that some are actually reading it, good glory in the mornin’!]

 

MARCH MADNESS of my very own, 2025

(Being an OPEN LETTER to Canada’s (Young) Hardwood Whistle-Blowers)

Dear coaches and basketball dreamers,

(And especially *you*, young hoopers, trying to make your mark on this game we love so crazily and so much):

Hear me out, folks. This is not a rant. But its heart is in making basketball a better place to work and play and live in. (This will take you 17 minutes or so. You’ve got this!)

I’m the old guy waaaay over there in the baggy sweats, still blowing his whistle and dreaming his dream, still wondering if we can make This Thing We Do better for the next generations of hoop-crazy kids. My view: as with many other Big Important Deals going on in the world, the biggest problems we face all have to do with not getting our stuff together.

The basketball community – in Ottawa, where I live, and maybe where you are, too – is like a team whose players all have different ideas about how to win. We leaders/coaches don’t play together. We don’t play smart. (We do play hard, to finish the old formula advanced by Dean Smith at North Carolina; Ontarians, Canadians, are putting in the work, don’t get me wrong.) As a result, we don’t come near achieving, certainly in my city, what the sum of our separate talents might suggest we should.

We’re not united. Greater unity is the solution to nearly every problem. Zoom all the way out to climate change, the renewed scourge of war, or infighting in your favourite local or national legislature: only long-view collaboration can overcome them. Can basketball development be much different?

I get it, this is sport; this *is* competitive. But to too great an extent, the basketball community doesn’t act as if we have shared interests, as if we are all in the same boat (we ARE) of trying to realize a double vision: a) to create maximum opportunity for masses of kids to enjoy (and stick with) this game, and b) to encourage excellence at all levels, especially for the (relatively) few who are ready for the push. Instead, we coaches go our own ways. Instead of competing mainly on the court, where it best belongs, too often we are going our own stubborn and selfish ways, poking away at each other, undermining each other’s efforts, often without intending to. We’re guarding our yard, you might say (or growing our brand), without seeing beyond our own little patch of real estate.

As always, in any community (or any family), the cost of disunity is borne by the kids. For the truly talented (or truly privileged, or both) among our players, this might not be a big problem; if their ambition is to play at various “next levels”, their athletic gifts and other resources usually allow them to succeed in the basketball economy. The worst effects are felt, unfortunately, by the greatest number of young players.

[I’ve coached more high school than anything else, but have run numerous house leagues and founded a regional basketball club, have coached in elite development programs in Ontario and with a top-level club in Ottawa. I will probably end my decades of coaching in a high school program where I have been welcomed and have a fine young coach to work with. That’s where I’m coming from.]

So here’s what I see.

***

High Schools, Prep Schools and Clubs. In Canada, hockey, soccer and baseball have traditionally been club-based sports, just as in Europe, Asia and most of the rest of the world. Football and basketball have tended to be school-based, following the globally unusual American model. (“Education through school sport” is the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) motto. I still maintain my stock!) Bias alert: my main career was as an English teacher; I love the intersection of sport and education; John Wooden is my coaching icon.

Of course, school-based sport has its challenges, especially in the U.S. where it is practiced at its best and most extreme: jocks getting an educational “free pass”; frequent corruption where schools rich in facilities and other resources get richer while the poor schools get poorer. (Hey, can you say “NCAA transfer portal”?) However, this American model has produced by far the greatest proportion of the best amateur and professional players in our sport. The Amateur Athletic Union (A.A.U.) system in the States developed as an extra way in which motivated athletes could enrich their development and playing experience, particularly if their schools did not have a solid off-season development program. Clubs in Canada have filled a similar void.

And between such school and club programs falls the modern “prep school”. Originally, every secondary school was considered a prep school, preparing students to succeed in post-secondary education. (Americans still refer to high school sport in general as the “prep” level.) Specialized preparatory schools, usually private ones, often offering an extra high-school year, evolved to help get students prepared academically for entrance into high-ranking universities with lofty admission standards. It’s only in the last few decades that this concept was extended to preparing “student-athletes” – yeah, I’ll say it, far more emphasis on the athlete part of the equation! – to get athletic scholarships. Pay the prep school fees, so the current thinking goes, wear cool gear, attend shoe company tournaments and you’ll be readier for and better known to the college sports powerhouses. (Pardon the history lesson.)  

Fine.

In Canadian basketball, it seems to me, we’re following the American model, sometimes to our benefit, but for better and for worse. For most of my basketball life, a player needed to take care of academics if he/she wanted to play after high school, whether that was in a Canadian college or university or (for the very few) in the NCAA. That squashed the ambition, for example, of my super-talented high school teammate, since he didn’t care much for school. But it also kept a great number of high school football, basketball and other players in school, and at least somewhat motivated to succeed there. And playing for your school, if that community cares about what you do, is one of the best things sport has to offer. More on this later.

The “for worse” part is this: instead of emphasizing the value of school-based athletics, as the Americans have done for over a century, we are (I think pretty blindly) copying the AAU mentality, as well as adopting a prep-school-is-the-only-school approach. Both of these can seem to benefit the top, let’s say, 1 or 2% of players, but they also can actively interfere with the development and enjoyment of a majority of those who play our game seriously.

CONFLICT. It wasn’t that long ago that club and high school basketball had quite distinct seasons. When I was coaching club teams in Ottawa in the 2010s, these select players would finish their high school seasons (perhaps with some extra weekend training with their clubs) before starting a club season that would run from March to May and beyond. My current high school teams don’t have a lot of club players; the ones we do have, though, are stretched thin. Their club coaches are insisting on what amounts to a nine-months-or-more commitment; meanwhile, we’re trying to build a team culture, a shared commitment and feeling, for a four-month season, at most. (I’ll leave aside the growing fact of kids’ inability to play multiple sports, which we know has huge advantages for young athletes.) Our club kids are pulled in opposite directions, and are incentivized to pace themselves at my practice because they’re going to his practice that evening. Or to skip one or the other. They’re more prone to overuse injuries. They’re more likely to get stale. (“Coach, basketball is starting to feel like a job,” one of my boys confessed this past season.)

Yes. We’ve all heard it: “High school ball is dying.” Really? Isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy? (It’s alive and kicking hard at our school, and we’re not alone. At the risk of being obvious, it’s still — to an almost absurd degree — a Pretty Big Deal in the Excited States of America!) So many kids are enticed to pay big money – and to sacrifice the real comradeship that comes with studying and playing and graduating at your own high school with your buddies – to pursue the prep school dream, which is an illusion for so many; I’ve seen the love for the game, for too many boys, dampened by their eventual, inevitable disillusionment. Even the ones who “succeed” there are often role players on a thrown-together “all-star team” where one or two kids get all the reps. I can’t help thinking of specific case histories of players I’ve coached or trained, who would have been much better off leading their own high school (or local club) teams, and developing as complete players rather than being slotted as under-sized forwards, or strictly as rim-runners, or as corner-three specialists.

[HOCKEY SIDEBAR. Canadian hockey learned this the hard way, probably still is. It took forever for our hockey leaders to acknowledge that the Soviets, and the Europeans in general, were producing more skilled hockey players with their emphasis on puck-handling, more creative and flowing movement, and especially on having a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of practices to games. Elite Canadian youth teams, meanwhile, tended for decades toward the opposite ratio, played sixty- and eighty-game seasons, asked their players to fire the puck into corners and then fight to get it back, and began losing international competitions they had once dominated. Every Russian or Swedish forward, it seemed, could out-skate and out-dangle our guys and roof backhands over the goaltender. Eventually, we learned. The McDavids and McKinnons and Bedards of modern Canadian hockey didn’t learn those exquisite puck skills playing dump-and-chase, game after game after game. They had quality practices with huge numbers of puck-touches, and enormous numbers of skill reps. Okay, back to basketball!]

I agree: exceptional ballplayers (think Cooper Flagg, leaving Maine in search of competition) may benefit from playing with and against other gifted athletes. (Hmm. But Larry Bird and LeBron James, Michael and Steph, Steve Nash, Caitlin Clark, all played for their hometown high schools, and benefitted from the responsibility-for-winning that they carried. Just saying.) At our place, we tell truly hungry kids that we’ll recommend they leave our high school program if we can no longer give them what they need to continue improving.

But as high school coaches, we have huge advantages to offer our players. At our place, we can (and do) provide gym access, nearly year-round, before school. And of course, we have the standard three hours (or so) that high schools have after school for their teams, zero-cost gym availability that gives us basketball coaches at least two practice slots available every weekday (more if the secondary gym is available, which it often is); it’s everything we need. I was constantly frustrated, as a club coach, by the cost, the scarcity and the scattered locations of our practices.      

The AAU Curse. Speaking of skill development, I watched that rock-fight in the NCAA second-round game, no. 2 St. John’s under Pitino and Calipari’s late-developing Arkansas team. This isn’t breaking news, but it seemed pretty obvious: here were superb athletes, assembled by two master recruiters, and the intensity was ferocious. These young men have each played many hundreds of games, some important, but many meaningless. (The 5th glorified pick-up game of a weekend on a secondary court against another area all-star team? Come on.) Yes, their ball pursuit was relentless, and they competed. But they couldn’t shoot. Defensive fundamentals were rough. I didn’t see a single great pass. And the offences they ran, under these two Coaching Giants, were based on brute force and one-on-one, high pick’n’rolls where the “roll” man was ignored, and very little sophistication. (Kinda like Canadian dump-and-chase hockey in the ‘70s and ‘80s.) In other words? I would bet my house, were I a gambling man, that most of these powerful athletes, on the whole, had played at least four times as many games in their lives as they had had quality practice sessions. It’s an old story. It’s one of the reasons I coach high school ball instead of club and so-called “AAU teams”. Skill development.

***

“So, Coach Jay, what are you saying, exactly?”

What can we do? How can we adopt a more united vision of what coaches, schools, clubs and trainers can accomplish for our players together – in our city, or pretty much anywhere? And hey: why should you WANT to?

I have some thoughts.

Basketball is a team game. Let’s work together. I was at a local USport game, and got talking to a young guy that (maybe?) I’d coached against in the National Capital high school league. He went to uni in Boston, got into coaching there, and had returned to his home town. He was keen, excited. “Yeah, I want to start up a training program and make my name here.” DON’T DO IT, I surprised him by saying. We’re not short of young guys marketing themselves as personal trainers, or starting their own one-man coaching bands. But we *do* have well-established clubs in Ottawa that need help, clubs with infrastructure and house leagues, resources and referee-development and established “home gyms”. These are fine places for young coaches to plug in their talent and enthusiasm. And hey, at my school we have two excellent coaches in need of assistants, and all the gym time in the world, and no need to squeeze kids for money! In other words, I suggested, be a team player, and contribute to something that Already Exists, instead of re-inventing the wheel and having to poach players from existing organizations. (It’s a disease.) Ottawa does NOT need more clubs and Basketball Dream Factories. The traditional clubs, across the city, sometimes don’t play nicely with each other, but they are sustainable and solid, offer real resources, and could use your energy and talent.

So yeah, young fellas, be team players! Build your skills and experience within a structure that offers opportunity, perspective and help.

ALSO. “All I’m askin’ is for a little respect (Just a little bit)…” In Ottawa, the dog-eat-dog pursuit of scarce (player) resources means that club tryouts for a primarily spring/summer season occur in August and September of the previous year. That’s a LOOOONG club “season” (more like three seasons, all-season!). When I was coaching both high school and in an elite club program, I made a clear distinction between phases of our club program’s development. Once the team was chosen, we tried to get one weekend skills practice per week, from October through February, so that my 14 athletes from 13 schools could dedicate themselves to their high school programs. We didn’t install team sets and terminology; most of them were getting enough of that in their schools, where each guy was a leader. And then, come Madness time, and right through to early summer, we ramped up as a club team, playing in our various tournaments and leagues.

It’s still a good model. But the weaponized pursuit of players has meant that because of the endless club season, club coaches not only don’t or can’t coach high school, they are actively interfering with the traditional high school season with competitions and practices through the winter.

(A brief road trip down Highways 416 and 401: High school tournaments in Kingston, a smaller city producing fine players, and club and high school teams, have been eye-opening for our coaching staff. Years ago, they united several clubs into one, and the high-competition teams from U15 up don’t do much during high school season; in fact, many of their best school coaches are Kingston Impact coaches as well. The Queen’s University program seems to support this process. Kingston looks so good from where I sit. Maybe you have similar examples where you are.)

This kind of mutual respect between existing club and high school programs would have huge benefits. Clubs that, increasingly, disregard the high school season are counter-productive. The result is burned-out players (and families), the dilution of high school ball (quite obvious in Ottawa and elsewhere, sadly), to say nothing of 12- and 13-year-olds who can’t even imagine trying another fun sport, even if it was primarily as cross-training for hoops.  From a 30,000-foot view, there are no obvious advantages, whether for individual players or the basketball eco-system as a whole. I’d argue that club ball would actually benefit from a shorter, more focussed season, just as the NBA surely would.

“Sometimes when everybody else want to zig, you maybe oughta ZAG.”

So. Yes! I AM going to finish with an unpopular suggestion. We need more young basketball-lovers to ZAG in their approach getting involved in the game. What does this mean?

Consider COACHING HIGH SCHOOL BALL. (In some cases, this could include “prep schools”, which can be very good overall experiences. Too often, though, they can also be exploitative, badly run money-and-attention-grabs that seek to attract and market talent, but don’t develop it as well as they could.)

You may find yourself in a school, maybe even the place you graduated from, where recent tradition doesn’t seem all that, y’know, competitive. But that can change. Schools are meant to foster enthusiasm, learning, and EXCELLENCE, and athletic programs  can benefit from that basic “education through school sports” philosophy, if you’re willing to work at it.

The advantages? Holy cow! They can be awesome.  

The High School ADVANTAGE. Academics automatically matter, and you can use your coaching as motivation for your players to be real students. Player development matters, because you can’t just pluck and choose your talent from wherever; you will be required to do what all-star “teams” can too easily neglect – skill development.  Team feeling, family feeling matters, because your players can be together through four years of shared experience, fun, trials, wins and losses and ultimately their graduation alongside their friends. Affordability and gym access MATTER, since you’ll no longer be scrambling for expensive evening rentals but will instead have all the hours you need – and heck, you might even be able to spend more evenings at home. (Or continuing to play yourself!) The existing infrastructure matters; you’ll still have to schedule tournaments and exhibitions, of course, but establishing your practice itinerary will be a breeze compared to coaching for a club, and there is a league and playoff structure already in place. (In Ottawa, it’s way too brief and under-promoted, and I know it’s much better in other jurisdictions. But the more there are dedicated coaches in our schools, the easier such problems will be to solve.) Example matters, and when have the youth had a greater need for a big brother or sister to look up to? (Especially those coming from minority backgrounds.) School spirit matters, and when you’re doing something exceptional, it can begin to galvanize the whole school community; our boys have had the experience of playing big games in our gym with a genuine home-court advantage – big and loud audiences of their friends, school-mates and (gasp!) even their teachers! Club coaching often means you’ll have a higher calibre of talent overall, and these programs certainly has their place. (In the high school off-season, that is!) But the games aren’t as meaningful, the practices aren’t as frequent, and it’s only a few parents who generally get to watch.

Think about this. Why is the NCAA Women’s and Men’s “March Madness” tournaments so compelling? Where does the interest, the hype, the tradition come from? Largely, they come from school communities, fan bases that really care about their alma mater, their teams, and from student bodies who find a reason to get excited over something together and graduates (plus band-wagon jumpers, sure!) who remember and re-kindle their own school experience. You wouldn’t see anything even resembling that at an AAU-style or club tournament.

High school sport, at its best, is a BLAST! For most players, it’s the highest and most personally meaningful level they will reach.

And here’s the other thing: coaching high school ball won’t prevent you from doing personal training, or catching on with a club if that’s your thing. I would argue it gets you readier to do a great job in those other coaching environments.

***

Okay, faithful readers and friends-in-sport. You’ve been generous with your time, and patient with my rambling and All These Suggestions you didn’t ask for. I appreciate your reading ALL THE WAY DOWN TO HERE. I’ll finish with the obvious: Like any team, like every sort of collaboration, the more the leaders in our basketball community work and PLAY TOGETHER, the greater our results will be for the ones that really matter: little house-league ankle-biters, high school strivers, next-level talents, and even the adult recreationists who still feel good about our game. The PLAYERS! What’s best for (ALL OF) them is our shared purpose. Thanks for listening!

And hey, if you’re in Ottawa, take an old coach to lunch!!

Sincere and hair-on-fire regards,

“Coach Jay”

 

Canada Day: It’s Complicated

Posted by :James Howden On : July 1, 2024
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,

[5-minute read]

Eh? What’s that? Time to put on red ‘n’ white clothes and fly the maple leaf flag on our barren flagpole?

Maybe so! Lady Laughter and I did finally slide our narrower (and much nimbler)  son out of our bedroom window in early May to take down the tattered flag that barely survived the winter. It was a drapeau of Earth, one of those photos-from-space of our little blue planet, and it had come to be a horrible reminder of the war-torn regions and generally fraying tapestry of the human world’s tentative movements toward oneness. While I do think that we obsess, in an unseemly and hugely discouraging way, about our destructive tendencies – sudden, violent, other-making, spectacular – and that a little more dwelling on the pleasant things of life – construction, kindness, vision, unity – would do us enormous bunches of good, that disintegrating rag of blue and green was a WAY too obvious metaphor. And to take the symbolism farther: we didn’t have a new Earth banner to put up, either.

And we totalled our car, got the gardens underway, dealt with contractors, listened to podcasts, and many other lively pursuits. My bride, it should be said, is a working person, while my retirement has me even less tethered to timelines that don’t involve high school hoops. June came. Events occurred. And then we went east. (Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Maine, Quebec. It was lovely, thanks!)

We got back to Ottawa, car-worn and happy, on June 30. I woke up to Canada Day, none too early, and remembered that we did have a Canuck flag tucked away in a drawer. We haven’t flown it for a while, certainly not since a convoy of “freedom”-seeking protesters tied our city in knots for a while back there. For most of my life, Olympics aside, my fellow Canadians and I have not been big on flag-waving. Even our recent afternoon drive from Bar Harbor, Maine to the Quebec border, which is predominantly middle o’ nowhere forest, was notable for how much more likely American homes, businesses and every second telephone pole in the woods were to fly the stars and bars. Such conspicuous and rampant patriotism doesn’t suit us; at least, it doesn’t suit me.

However, a time came when disgruntled, irritated, peevish and me-first (me-only) Canadians took to flying our flag from trucks (alongside various iterations of “F— Trudeau!” and “government SUCKS, ‘cuz, like, vaccines and taxes and shit!” and you’re not the boss of ME! signs) and cars, making the humble red-and-white Maple Leaf suddenly a signal of rejection, it seemed to me, of the traditional Canadian virtues. Peace. Fairness. Good government. Order. The common good. Loyalty. A sense of proportion. Politeness. And, since the ‘70s or so, ethnic diversity has also become our very good friend, at least the idea of it. We used to call it multiculturalism, and some folks still do; unity in diversity is even better.

It bugged me that I felt unable to fly the red ‘n’ white because of what I uncharitably thought of as its (mis)appropriation as the flag of selfish yahoos. Mind you, even before the notorious “trucker convoy” protests, I had reservations. I wasn’t eager to be more jingoistic, in the American “my country right or wrong” vein. I was increasingly aware of associations that flag-flying might have for, say, Indigenous peoples or Black Canadians. Many citizens seek greater truth-telling. Many call for reconciliation between the undoubted pride and good fortune that most of us feel to be Canadian, and the unquestionably unjust choices that our country and its Eurocentric majority peoples have too often made. Beyond that, I have long been working to nourish the mindset, and the accompanying lifestyle and actions, of a global citizen. You know, trying to see all humanity as one family, that not-so-old idea.      

So, it’s been a few years since the Maple Leaf flew from our second floor pole, but Happy Canada Day anyway! Eh? And yes, despite his even more rampant youthful discomfort with The Whole Canada Thing, my lanky son was out on the roof again earlier today to do his father’s diffident bidding. There’s a red maple leaf, about 4′ x 6′ (and no, I don’t know what that is in metres!) waving outside my window once again. There’s a part of me that feels I should be lettering a bedroom-window disclaimer of all the things that we *don’t* mean in letting our not-so-freaky flag fly. I may yet.

In the meantime, we don’t use the Leaf to signify any of these things. 1. An undying loyalty to the red-and-white of the Liberal Party of Canada. (I vote, but partisan politics is all the more obviously the divisive force that I have long believed it is. In this and other degrading ways, we’re getting more like the Americans.1) 2. A belligerent antagonism toward the Liberal Party of Canada. (Ditto.) 3. A resentment of paying taxes. (I am often impressed, despite bloat and inefficiency, by the services our governments provide, education and health care and snow removal and so much more, for just about everybody.) 4. Some petulant desire to have our country be the more male-dominated and white-skinned place that it used to be. (I intend no self-hatred when I say that unipolar ethnicity and mouldy conceptions of masculinity can be boring, to say nothing of the hateful and retrogressive extremisms they can produce.) 5. A bitter rejection of broader loyalties, and signs of a planetary order. (What, you’d prefer planetary disorder?! The Guardian of the Bahá’í international community called all to a greater consciousness of the oneness of humanity, but also affirmed the value of “a sane and intelligent patriotism”, in which affection for one’s country was no impediment to loving the world.) So no, none of that.   

  1 And just to be clear: there are all kinds of ways in which Americans are marvellous. (Never forget.)

It’s my country’s national day, and there’s still lots to be grateful for. Canada still stands for worthwhile things, and it is composed of magnificent and favoured geography and a tonne of mainly beneficent folk. It’s my country, and I’ll party if I want to. Still, I probably won’t join the masses on Parliament Hill for the concerts, the boozy downtown celebrations, or gaze in childlike wonder at the fireworks displays, as magnificent as they will no doubt be. Some of that’s just being an older dude, and some of it is not really being much good at celebration in general. Maybe I’ll read an Alice Munro short story, or crack open J.R. Saul’s A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (2008), a way of thinking about my place in the world, one that I’d like to understand better. Let’s make reading great again!

But then again, our garden needs some attention, and cutting grass is a way of “standing on guard”, I suppose. I foresee a long walk along local streets, after all our tramping about down East. There will be more than the usual frequency of friendly nods and waves. And I’ll maybe buy myself an ice cream sundae, because Canada Day comes but once a year…  

Bertrand Russell (on not being so damned SURE all the time…)

Posted by :James Howden On : June 23, 2024
0

Category: He Said/She Said

[4-minute read]

“…The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity…”

W.B. Yeats, Irish poet, “The Second Coming” (1919)

(Surprise BONUS! You came for some Bertrand Russell, but this is a ROGO post! (Read One Get One, free!) William Butler Yeats was an Irish contemporary of Russell, the British thinker, and this fragment from an epic poem is a fine companion to what I have to say about what Mr. Russell had to say about doubt. All set?)

There were no philosophy courses in my undergraduate career. I barely squeezed in an English Lit survey course, and only after graduation did I add more English and even a history course. Meanwhile, if I had known myself better, I would have majored in English with Psych, History and Philosophy on the side – which is a long-winded and self-referential way of saying that I’ve never read Bertrand Russell at length.

Yes, it’s an example of what dear old Mr. Hill once wrote on one of my high school assignments – “this is the evil of Bartlett’s” – when he recognized my random and promiscuous leafing through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations instead of reading anything in full and in depth. The great English philosopher, activist and ultimately one of our greatest advocates of global peace? He remains known to me mainly through a quotation here or there, most recently in a study guide to The Promise of World Peace, an epic 1985 open letter from the Bahá’í community’s leaders to “the peoples of the world”. Bertrand Russell was one of the most profound and respected voices of the 20th-century movement for international peace, long before it became a popular cause in the late 1960s and ’70s. Here, though, I am referring to his thinking about the value of doubt, of a scientific and skeptical cast of mind.

(So yes: Once again, I am Actually Am doing this! I am chiding myself (and you!) for settling for little scraps of wisdom from Bertrand Russell (and many others!), even as I add another entry to my He Said / She Said quotation mill. I do try to source the quotations, and track down whether S/He did in fact say it. I do put it in context, if in no other way than to offer insights into how this particular mind – that is, mine – dances around and tries to understand the words of others. Back to What HE Said…)

Below is a chunk of Bertrand Russell’s thought from 1922. He was 50, famous and at his peak though he would remain a vital intellectual force well into the 1960s. Alongside his public advocacy for peace, he was a noted apologist for the philosophy of skepticism (he wrote a book-length collection of essays on the subject, and would have been, ahem, rather “sceptical” about the way that Canadians tend to spell it now). For Russell, it was not some bitter unwillingness to believe anything, but rather an attempt to use our minds to seek truth via reason, through some approximation of the systematic investigations performed by scientists. He would have agreed with Yeats’s criticism, above, of the skewed and toxic certainty of people who adopt their beliefs unthinkingly, via emotional selfishness and tribalism. (See: “My country, right or wrong!”) Russell would not have accepted so easily that doubtfulness, the willingness to consider all sides of an issue, and indeed scientific thinking in general, are examples of the poet’s reference to good folk who “lack all conviction”. Russell took stands, acted on his convictions, often paid the price of widespread criticism, and wasn’t afraid to challenge publicly an idea that he had earlier championed.

But he was firmly convinced of the value of doubt. This is all the more medicinal in our times of deep fakes, distrust of authority, idiocy widely adopted and higher education routinely scorned. He wanted us to consider the relativity of truth, and its changing nature, but without giving up on the search for what is real and true:

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge. Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell, in the Conway Memorial Lecture, March 24, 1922 “Free Thought and Official Propaganda”

I disagree with his conviction that science is the only route to true knowledge. He was a fearless critic of unthinking, barnacle-encrusted religious dogma, and good for him, though he may have thrown out the baby of genuine wisdom with the cold and sludgy bathwater of bigotry and superstition. But what good medicine against prejudice and foolishness if we could adopt that opening mantra None of our beliefs are quite true…

 

Alexei Navalny (on NOT GIVING UP)

Posted by :James Howden On : June 6, 2024
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,

[2-minute read]

Alexei Navalny died in February. I’m sure somebody knows why and how, but the great WE doesn’t. It is not impossible that nothing acutely nefarious happened in his Russian prison four months back. Maybe his body had just had enough after the earlier poisoning and years spent on the run or in jail. But there is no doubt that, aged 47, he had sacrificed not only his freedom but his life to oppose injustice and to offer hope to the despairing. His death should be remembered. I learned more about him after he left us, and his words and example still work on me.

This is dramatically capsulized in his “final words” to Russian compatriots in the event of his death; they close the Oscar-winning 2022 documentary film Navalny, which chronicles what the dissident lawyer had come to understand following his nearly miraculous recovery from an obviously sinister poisoning in 2020. He is about to return to near-certain imprisonment or even death in his mother country. His interviewer asks him what, in the event of his demise, he would want to say to his fellow Russians. His answer is powerfully simple.

“NOT GIVE UP.” He speaks quietly to the camera, but something in his eyes had me writing it in capital letters. That is his message.

Of course, the film-maker wants more, and Alexei Navalny provides it. He includes a well-known saying, often unattributed or wrongly so¹, but it feels true coming from him. In so doing, he leaves for his countrymen, and for anyone and all peoples facing apparently overwhelming oppression – and hey, even for a Canadian Bahá’í-guy basketball coach with a comfy life and a scribbling itch – these quietly defiant words:

“I have something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong. We need to utilize this power, to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad dudes.

“We don’t realize how strong we actually are.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. SO DON’T DO NOTHING.”

Don’t do nothing, noble reader. And try to do it in ALL-CAPS.

¹ When attributed, it most often goes to the Irish intellectual Edmund Burke, who said something in the same vein but not in these words. Reuters Fact Check has philosopher John Stuart Mill writing a speech saying, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” (Wasn’t that an enjoyable detour?)

Where We Found Them

Posted by :James Howden On : June 3, 2024
1

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , ,

[1-minute read]

I felt my bumbling way, blindly and bemused, back to a website I used to be frenemies with. I won’t be coy: it’s this one. Surprise!

To those generous humans who’ve subscribed to this thing – and let’s not be too precious about this, the price is no barrier to entry! – I say thanks, folks! and strive to go “on without apology”, as Big Bill had Romeo say at the point of crashing the Capulet ball. But hey: It’s my website! And I’ll post if I want to!! (Yeah, I’m riffing on an old song most people have never heard; I’M BACK, BABY!! Semicolons and all! [You are free to mentally insert the amusement emoji of your choice here.])

All this to say, again, that I’m going to scrape the rust off this now-antique whatever-it-is. It helped, after it hurt to see the gap of three years since I had anything to say here, to re-read my last two posts. One was local and light-hearted, and the other was global and everything but. They were my only two posts that year, but I really really liked them! I couldn’t restrain myself from frowning over this little bit of awkward punctuation, or that weary word choice, but mainly I had that consoling reminder that comes from reading old stuff and thinking, Hey, this guy’s not bad, even if he *is* me! I confess: I enjoyed these two articles, and wish I’d done a little more with them back then. But we takes our confirmations where we finds ‘em…

I will still hive off athletic ruminations into the “All About Sports” nook, and quarantine quotes from others (and my reflections on same) into the “He Said/She Said” file. Both the pieces above sit, along with this little greeting, in the “At First Glance” section, though the second one probably belonged in the “On Second Thought” compartment, since it ran deep and feeling and long. Come back anytime, friends, neighbours, citizens of Earth.

Hazrat Inayat Khan (on suffering)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 7, 2022
1

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , , , ,

[1-minute read]

Not long before a Chinese city that most of us had never heard of became Ground Zero for a novel coronavirus – you may have heard of it, and its Greek-lettered children – a small group of Ottawa women decided to raise the level of conversation in their beloved Baha’i community, and beyond it. H.H. and L.O. and some friends began a series of talks they called “Big Ideas: The Baha’i Faith and the Issues of Our Time”, starting with a discussion on climate change and inspired ways to cast light (and a little hope) upon this global crisis.

Now there have been 29 of these presentations, on subjects ranging from education to agriculture, from global governance to personal creativity, from racial justice to marital harmony. I love ‘em. (To be transparent: my bride gave the first one, and several friends have contributed their own. I am proudly and profoundly biased in favour of this project.) A recent BI talk by the intriguingly named Justice St. Rain focussed on human suffering – how we should think about it, and how to respond to it.

Its title – shared with one of his books, which was subtitled “A Spiritual Guide to Growing Through Tests” – was simply Why Me? I wrote a brief summary of the thing; here I will say only that Mr. St. Rain urges us to believe in the basic benevolence of a parent-like Creator, and to seek understanding of the difficulties that life inevitably presents to us. (Simple! But not so easy. Not for me.)

Virtuoso and music scholar, too: The Mysticism of Sound and Music is among his books. (photo from ramdass.org)

Almost as a coda to an hour-long seminar, St. Rain introduced me (and perhaps most of his audience) to a Sufi musician and philosopher, the India-born Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), and cited the counsel below. It’s gorgeous: simple, persuasive and poetic. I thought you’d want to know.¹

 

 

 

 

“I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.

“I asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to learn to solve.

“I asked for prosperity and God gave me a brain and brawn to work.

“I asked for courage and God gave me dangers to overcome.

“I asked for love and God gave me people to help.

“I asked for favours and God gave me opportunities.

“I received nothing I wanted.

“I received everything I needed.”

 

¹ Wonderful, even in spite of my distaste for its wide popularity and commercialization and careless quotation. When I first looked up this quote, I think I remember finding a source for this. I think it might have been Khan’s Pearls From the Ocean Unseen. Sadly, in typical Quotable Quotes on the InterWebs form, my search for its origins today went everywhere and nowhere. It was quoted on Christian wisdom sites (boy, are THEY going to be surprised to find a Muslim in their heads!), personal coaches’ and bloggers’ pages, all without sourcing and sometimes quoting an “author unknown”. The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist is the closest I could find to a source; she uses the poem but apparently doesn’t attribute it to a specific book of Khan’s, of which there were many.

Having Fun While Me

Posted by :James Howden On : December 7, 2021
1

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Big house, great sound, respectful audience, super popcorn, and MOVIES! (photo from Playback magazine)

[4-minute read]

Sunday night was Double Date night – no second couple, in this case, but just my bride and I bopping from one Ottawa cultural heartthrob to another. After a light and early supper at home, we were off to the Mighty ByTowne cinema (yes, kids, it’s back!) for a mouth-watering bite of history. Then we hopped on our pony and bustled to the western edge of downtown for a Writers Festival event (yup, pardners, they’re back, too, in Three Entire Dimensions!).

This was my fifth or sixth Return to the ByTowne since its new ownership re-opened that grand old videodrome in the fall. All my fears of it having been blandified (or turned into condos, he shuddered) have been dispelled. Many of the familiar staff faces are back, the popcorn hasn’t been meddled with, and the slate of movies remains rich, diverse, international and occasionally quirky. The Power of the Dog with Cumberbatch and Dunst, C’mon C’mon with Joaquin Phoenix and Gaby Hoffmann, are both still bouncing around my brain days or weeks later. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, strangely current even all these years after his prime and then his passing, had me sobbing repeatedly. (Vonnegut does this to me regularly, but I was still surprised at how hard this loving documentary tribute punched me. Hi ho.)

We were there Sunday for Julia. For anybody over, say, 40, who has been around American television shows, filling in the last name might be easy as omelettes. Julia Child was a towering presence in popular culture, especially from the 1960s through to the ‘90s – and not just because she was 6’3”. Her monumental first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her subsequent presence as the “French chef” on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) made her an icon. Julia tells her life story in lavish detail, and with stunning re-creations of many of her most famed recipes, and shows not only her fame and cultural impact – yes, her show was parodied on Saturday Night Live! — but also “how important she was, is, will be”, as one of her admirers puts it.

On set in 1978: Julia Child, TV star, at 66. She was far from finished. (Wikipedia)

She was the first person to make cooking on television attractive, in spite of her plainness and age. I had thought Meryl Streep’s voice for her in Julie and Julia (2009, another Child-focused film I hadn’t expected to greatly enjoy, StreepLove aside) was a bit clumsy and overdone — until I saw Julia, that is. I hadn’t connected her to the rise of real attention to good eating in America, but she profoundly influenced young chefs and helped spawn “foodie” culture. The silly, materialistic extremes of that movement don’t undo the value of eating good food, lovingly prepared, which was Child’s essential oeuvre. I also wouldn’t have thought of her as a feminist icon, for example, and in hindsight I’d have been wrong. Julia involves some time travel, painting a vivid (black and white) portrait of the life of one unusual woman in the first half of the 20th century and her flowering, in her mid-50s, as an ambassador of French cuisine. The film is funny, informative and absolutely delicious to look at; the gorgeously framed contemporary food-prep sequences are big-screen-worthy, even for a culinary primitive like me.

We raced from the ByTowne, skipping the end credits (gasp!), to Christchurch (Anglican) Cathedral, the most common recent venue for the live events of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. We went from one local arts treasure to another, and from an American TV icon to a pair of Canadian ones. Linden McIntyre is a Nova Scotian journalist (most famously hosting The Fifth Estate, and then famously retiring to save one younger person’s job at the beloved and beleaguered “Mother Corp”, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Also a novelist (he won the Giller Prize for The Bishop’s Man), he was our laconic and charming interviewer for a younger Maritime star, Newfoundland’s comedic genius Rick Mercer. Once the “angry young man” of Canadian comedy, He has written something longer (and mildly less angry) than the 90-second “rants” and other satiric slices that have made him beloved across the country. Talking to Canadians is a memoir that my wife and I will read with delight.

You might have heard the echoes of his (in)famous “Talking to Americans” segments in that book title. Among the many irreverent stories he told

Striding down Canuck streets, ranting.
(from the Globe and Mail)

at Christchurch Cathedral was of the genesis of that thoroughly Canadian project; it is something of a national sport to enjoy Americans being foolish. (Thinking they can beat us at hockey, f’r’instance.) While Mercer was filming in Washington, D.C., a passing American public servant was savvy enough to determine that the “Canadian Broadcasting Corporation” printed on an equipment case meant that Mercer must be from..…(wait for it)…..“Canada!” It was a gift to a young satirist there on other business: Guv Guy was completely gullible about the absurd name Mercer gave to Canada’s Prime Minister (“Benmergui”, which true CBC-lovers chuckle at as a reference to former radio host Ralph), but was quite prepared to explain the concept of “alphabetical order” on camera when Mercer pretended, to this pompous ignoramus, that Canadians weren’t familiar with this clever new method of organization. From his sudden starburst on the national scene, to his membership in the This Hour Has 22 Minutes¹ crew, to The Rick Mercer Report to his current return to stand-up comedy and whatever comes next, we all got to be spectators as MacIntyre prodded Mercer into story after story, and even his closing punchline “I’ve been glad to be that prick.” (Had to be there, folks!)

Jay and Diana went out on a date, and an icon-fest broke out. And that’s why Ottawa isn’t “the town that fun forgot”! ²

¹ Such a CBC-centric occasion, in so many ways. True dévotées will remember not only the show, but its sly naming echoing an ultra-serious 1960s CBC TV news magazine called This Hour Has Seven Days. 
² As I am wont to do, I refer here to the acerbic and ever-living Allan Fotheringham, who described Canada’s capital in this unfair and fairly accurate way, depending on your definition of fun.

The Universal House of Justice (on crisis and resilience)

Posted by :James Howden On : December 2, 2021
2

Category: He Said/She Said

The seat of its deliberations: the Universal House of Justice, evening on Mount Carmel.

[2-minute read]

This is a “They Said” entry. They speak with one voice. None asserts individual privilege or claims personal credit. When they write, as with the samples below, one of them signs “The Universal House of Justice” for the group. This is no cultivated mysteriousness, no marketing shtick; it is just that their function as a body is all that matters, and their avoidance of egotism and arrogance is as complete as can be imagined…

The House of Justice, an elected council which directs the affairs of the Baha’i Faith, is an astonishing institution, though it remains unknown to most people. (I wrote about it on this site before, a long-ish read right about here.) Elected without fanfare or campaigning every five years by the global Baha’i community, it is beloved. It guides and inspires the Baha’is, and an increasingly large number of its allies and friends who admire the Universal House of Justice’s approach to the task of building global peace, unity and progress. I will not go on and on. Let me say only this: against the backdrop of the “furious storms lashing humanity” in November of 2020, what follows is part of this institution’s advice and counsel during the various ongoing crises of that time (and this). [I have italicized passages that ring the loudest in my mind.]

Your resilience and your unwavering commitment to the well-being of those around you, persistent through all difficulties, have filled us with tremendous hope. But it is no wonder that, in some other quarters, hope has become a depleted resource. There is a mounting realization on the part of the world’s people that the decades ahead are set to bring with them challenges among the most daunting that the human family has ever had to face. The current global health crisis is but one such challenge, the ultimate severity of whose cost, both to lives and livelihoods, is yet unknown; your efforts to succour and support one another as well as your sisters and brothers in society at large will certainly need to be sustained…

As usual, the House praises our community’s efforts in helping to build a new civilization — for that *IS* the call of Baha’u’llah, the Author of the Baha’i teachings and practices — and urges us to stay the patient yet urgent course that it prescribes. There are no rash promises or threats, yet the language of their diagnoses and prescriptions is uncompromising.

The following spring (April, 2021), the Universal House of Justice sent its annual “Ridvan Message”, a much-anticipated highlight of the community’s greatest festival, the 12 days of Ridvan (Arabic for “paradise”). We read it eagerly, and shared it with friends. The following extract is a small part of its assessment of the world’s condition, along with a brief reminder of Baha’u’llah’s central remedy: the overarching need for planetary unity.

[H]umanity, chastened by the exposure of its vulnerability, seems more conscious of the need for collaboration to address global challenges. Yet, lingering habits of contest, self-interest, prejudice and closed-mindedness continue to hinder the movement towards unity, despite growing numbers in society who are showing in words and deeds how they, too, yearn for greater acceptance of humanity’s inherent oneness. We pray that the family of nations may succeed in putting aside its differences in the interests of the common good.

I love to share and explore quotations that seize and galvanize me. It is amazing that I cite the Universal House of Justice here for the first time, for nothing provokes hope and purpose in me more than a letter from Mount Carmel.

Carlo Rovelli: On Science (what it is, what it does)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 26, 2021
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,

Rovelli, a book, and a blackboard covered with inscrutability. He’s great with words, too.

[3-minute read]

Rovelli is a physicist who inhabits a realm of thought I couldn’t find with any GPS. Grade 12 physics had already left me behind. But Rovelli is an intellectual star, with a degree of celebrity from a series of articles he’d written for an Italian newspaper; Seven Brief Lessons on Physics became a slow-moving international sensation. It has been on my vague gotta get around to that sometime list for about five years. I was surprised and impressed to find Rovelli’s Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity among the books I picked up from the library for my enterprising life partner, who is even less science-literate than I am. (N.K. Jemisin’s fantasy novel The City We Became was a choice she struggled even more to explain; knowing a bit more about quantum physics suits her pragmatism better than fantastical battles between eccentric good and brooding, yucky evil, even though she loves New York City. Yup, I’m reading that one, too.)

I thought I’d try to be pragmatic. I would read the introduction to Reality is Not What It Seems during a half-hour walk to the library. That would do it: grasp the basic outlines of the physicist’s thinking, pop the thing in the Return slot, and bypass the thornier bits to come. Good plan! It didn’t work, because Rovelli writes with grace and conviction as he outlines the ancient roots of the bewildering investigations of modern physics. Reality is Not What It Seems, written before Seven Lessons, has been widely translated after the success of the Seven Brief Lessons that followed it. It is profoundly engaging. I was all the way in after reading this portion of “Walking Along the Shore”, Rovelli’s introduction to the Reality of quantum gravity. (Yes, I’m going to be reading about quantum gravity. I’m 70 pages in, have winged from Democritus to Newton and am now beginning the summary on our dear 20th-century friend Albert. My brain has not yet been broken.¹ It’s a wonderful read.)

In his introduction, Rovelli recalls Plato’s allegory of The Cave. Remember? One man escapes his chains, leaves the cave and encounters initially blinding new vistas, a sequence of approaches to “reality” he couldn’t have imagined from the cave’s shadowy depths. He “returns excitedly to his companions, to tell them what he has seen. They find it hard to believe.” Plato’s philosopher-king, the one who transcends the limited understandings of his benighted companions,  is Rovelli’s image of the scientist:

“We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance….If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science. Scientific thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change. The world is boundless and iridescent….We are immersed in its mystery and in its beauty, and over the horizon there is unexplored territory….[O]ur precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don’t know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.”

Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What It Seems, p. 8

To think in progressively more useful ways. To refine our perception of what truly is. To refuse to be bound by traditional constraints on understanding. I love this poetic description of science.

I infer from much of his commentary that Rovelli is firmly anti-religion in his views, seeing the impulse toward faith as necessarily a reinforcement of tradition, authoritarianism and reason-held-hostage. I do think he’s mistaken in this, falling into the same trap religionists have, all too often; dogmatism among scientists has a long rap sheet of its own, some of which Rovelli recounts. However, I am no less attracted by his excellent, accessible explanations. I am also confirmed in my own unsystematic, accidentalist approach to deciding what I’ll read next. Good to meet you, sir.

¹ I spoke too soon. My brain pan started to leak noticeably last night, around page 72, as Rovelli explained Einstein’s special relativity to me. I’m not giving up yet, but it appears that my ability to roughly grasp physics ended in 1904. (Einstein was twenty-five in 1905, when he submitted three journal articles “each…worthy of a Nobel Prize”, according to Rovelli.)