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Vladimir Nabokov (on disobedience and purity)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 1, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Perhaps I will do my usual rambling opinionation on today’s quote some other time. It captured me as I was gobbling up Azir Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, this unruly Iranian literature professor’s memoir of her last years in her homeland, and especially her Thursday mornings with one hand-picked class of book-mad young women.

Nafisi has her students read this exceptionally challenging novelist, not only Lolita but other texts as well. Of course, this did not go over well with the authorities of the Islamic Republic. Speaking of her father’s imprisonment before the 1979 Revolution, and her own and her students’ restricted lives after it, Nafisi recalls “a sentence by Nabokov” that she later learned. Here it is: 

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George Bernard Shaw (on the virtue of disagreeableness)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 24, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, David and Goliath. Like most of his books, this one takes things that we blandly believe to be true and asks questions, tells stories, and cites research to suggest that they ain’t necessarily so. In Blink, for example, Gladwell challenged the idea that sound decisions come only after long reflection, that following an impulse is always a bad idea; his Outliers is one of several recent books that punch holes in our belief in the solitary genius, the I-did-it-my-way exaltation of individualistic accomplishment.

David and Goliath argues that it wasn’t such a big upset when the shepherd boy stoned the slow-moving giant — he made what appeared to be a disadvantage into his ace-in-the-hole, by not playing the game the way the Philistine Tallboy arrogantly assumed it would be. In a chapter that spotlights the unusual proportion of noted entrepreneurs who suffer from dyslexia, Gladwell cites an advantage they have: used to being outcast, at failing repeatedly, they are not only inured to difficulty but they may also be less afraid to be disagreeable. At which point, Gladwell quotes a beloved old chestnut from George Bernard Shaw, and I get to my point!

Contrarian, egalitarian, smarty-pants.

Contrarian, egalitarian, smarty-pants.

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Forgetting MLK: Back to a Future

Posted by :James Howden On : January 21, 2015
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Category: At First Glance

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Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day in the Excited States™ (not my phrasal ™, but Dr. Foth’s). I celebrated by studying concepts of spirituality with two friends. We didn’t mention Martin. Or movies.

(Quite incidentally, we did hear some Langston Hughes, because Langston Hughes. Johnny’s nuts for poetry, his own and recently that of Hughes, and can’t stop himself from reciting and reading aloud. He was never a Freedom Rider, but he’s still riding today. He is an old white guy, older than me! He burns.)

Also: I shopped, napped, put my basketball team through its awkward paces. Six kids have African backgrounds, but no remembrance of Martin. They’re young; no such excuse for me.

I was set for sleep by 9. Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath was warming by my bedside. My laptop was on top of my lap (you do the math), confirming that I was free for repose, though a squadron of open tabs reminded me of great online reading that I could ignore for another day. Twitter called. Helplessly, unfortunately, I answered. It chirped of a movie I’d meant to see.

It wasn’t even Selma.

I threw on discarded sweats and jumped in a borrowed car.

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2014: A Howdy-Do Year in Review

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

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

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

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

Fabulous Fifteen!

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

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

2. Lost in Cambodia  (February 5)

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Bruce Springsteen (on being born a 99% American)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 12, 2015
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Springsteen is singing in my living room. The album art is very 1980s, and Bruce looks like a boy, but he was writing and shouting like a man. It’s a pop-cult quote o’ the day!

Five years in China was five years removed from my modest collection of vinyl records and my turntable. Even on summers home, which gave me access to Hewitt’s Dairy and good chocolate and real hamburgers, yes, and libraries and bookstores, too, there was no listening to the old records because our home was rented out. I don’t have much of the collection that I had as a kid and as a young man, and (mainly) thank goodness and improving taste for that. (Divorce helped, too.) No John Denver, no Grand Funk Railroad, no diminishing returns of obsessively buying every progressively more disappointing Chicago album and only belatedly accepting that they’d left their soul in the ’60s.

I play through what’s left, though, and I’m about three quarters of the way through listening to the whole cabinet. After bouts of Talking Heads and Steely Dan, and a week of playing The Atlantic Family Live at Montreux – the Average White Band and a host of other jazz players blowing their brains out, fine stuff that doesn’t age for me at all – I flipped this morning to what is probably one of my bride’s earliest LP purchases, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. The title song slays me.

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Two Thousand and Fifteen. Happy?

Posted by :James Howden On : January 7, 2015
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Category: At First Glance

Can’t say that I am. There’s really no excuse for that, except that “men” are asserting their “honour” and “courage” by killing a family in Edmonton or by shooting dozens of verb-slingers at a magazine in Paris. (And they call that faith?) Or that this man has staggered about “trying to find” his writing groove, which is where it always is, of course — in scheduled or impulsive, thoughtful or brainless, inspired or insipid attempts to do my thing.

But I’m happy that it’s 2015, I guess. Fresh starts, and all that, not to mention holiday visiting (and overeating) that we missed during the China Years. 2014 was a pretty good year at JH.com, lots of growth and bigger numbers than ever before, so my electronic muttering and waving is being engraved on more eyeballs. Yay, eyeballs! Heck, 4 or 6 of you might even be interested in this WordPress traffic report for this site:

http://jetpack.me/annual-report/39522313/2014/

My most-read article of the year is over a year old, so WordPress encourages me:

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Some Poor Sap in a Big-Box Store (on mis-education & fear)

Posted by :James Howden On : December 6, 2014
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Category: He Said/She Said

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So there I was, looking for a little brainless recreation, a (slightly) guilty pleasure that doesn’t expand the horizons of my waistline. It was the latest edition of Sports Illustrated, which is about sports (and has lots of photos). I thought I’d be reading about football and basketball, and I was, but I wasn’t far into a profile on an NCAA hoopster I’d never heard of before I got slapped in the face with a frozen sociocultural mackerel.

Honest, I wasn’t planning on extracting any Higher Meaning from this piece. Luke Winn tells the story of Alan Williams, a master of one of the less glamourous aspects of basketball, rebounding. Snaring missed shots is deeply important to successful teams (and even more to unsuccessful ones, like the one I’m trying to coach these days), not to mention under-valued. I thought maybe I’d try to convince a few of my players to read his story and learn from his approach, with no great expectations or hopes even on that lukewarm front.

But then this chunk of backstory happened: Williams, as a nine-year-old, offers himself as a translator for a Hispanic man in a Toys “R” Us. (Deep prejudices leapt forward from the shadows: I used to call the place Toys “R” Satan when my kids were young, because it was a hellish place to take little boys. I swore I’d never enter one again, and so far I’m good, something like 23 straight years.) Alan Williams is black, and his parents are prominent in the legal and law enforcement communities of Phoenix, Arizona.

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News, Stuff, Things & Subscriptions

Posted by :James Howden On : November 30, 2014
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Category: At First Glance

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Have you missed me? (I’ve missed me.)

In the ongoing whirl of readjustment to Ottawa living, my bride getting back to work, and me coaching junior varsity basketball as if it was played on Mount Olympus, my writing routine has been thrashed. I haven’t been a very productive pen monkey. (Chuck Wendig grimaces in violent dismay and arse-kicking encouragement.) The good recent news is that a quite fine (thank you) American website, The Classical, ran a much-revised version of a piece on my Rugby Daddery and the Adventures of Son the Fourth in learning a brand new game. @classical specializes in long-form writing about sports, stuff that goes beyond the stats and standings. This made me happy.

I should have reviewed the film Whiplash, a disturbing, slightly over-the-top examination of a crazed mentor — in this case, a musical rather than an athletic one — and his perhaps equally nutty victim/protegé. I ate it up, loved and hated the thing, and have been thinking about the making of excellence and just exactly where that line is ever since. Yes, this was at the mighty ByTowne. Whiplash is a claustrophobic, in-your-face depiction of an extreme teacher-student connection, and J.K. Simmons is infuriatingly great as the megalomaniacal mentor. Okay. I suppose I just did sort of review it, but also have wanted to get to a Better Read Than Never review of John Feinstein’s The Last Amateurs, and an account of a brilliant human rights lecture by Payam Akhavan, and reflections on not living in China anymore, and more on books I’m eating, and I haven’t said a word about Ferguson or Jian Ghomeshi or the wars we try to forget or the Toronto Raptors…

…and don’t get me started about my stillborn books. (Thanks for not getting me started.)

The posting pace is about to quicken, I hope I hope I hope. Here’s what’s been going on recently here at JH.com, especially for you newbies.  If you’re a strange lurker here, WELCOME! The bits below will help explain how all this works:

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George Monbiot (on economic growth and the dreaded WHY)

Posted by :James Howden On : November 20, 2014
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Category: He Said/She Said

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For his quirky autobiographical note alone, I'd admire the man.

For his quirky autobiographical note alone, I’d admire the man.

For most of our politicians, in most of our countries — those who are elected to preserve and advance a governance system that appears unable to consider anything besides economic growth as keys to the good life, the good society — George Monbiot is on the lunatic fringe. His book Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (2006) was unsparing, openly pessimistic and radical in the original sense — it called for fundamental change in how we look at our governance, our lifestyles, our future, everything. “Radical” means “going back to the roots”. Those that we invest with the authority to make societal changes aren’t often interested in radical thought, partly because it requires so much thought and partly because it undermines their own privileged positions in society.

Here was Mr. Monbiot earlier this week, concluding a recent commentary in the Guardian newspaper — “Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased” — with questions that the elected don’t often consider, but which citizens must:

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STRICTLY MID-LIFE: Crisis? What Crisis?

Posted by :James Howden On : November 17, 2014
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Category: On Second Thought

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Here’s another piece — not that anybody asked for it, as Kurt Vonnegut once muttered in opening a collection of essays called Fates Worse Than Death — that now sees the light after nearly a decade in the electronic cellar. When I wrote it, I was in Ottawa, not yet in my 50s. Five years in China are in the rear-view now; we’re back in the same house, and visiting the same local complex for its library, pool and workout facilities. For reasons mainly organizational, this one never got posted, but despite the years that have passed, it’s nearly as true now as it was when it was fresh. And hey, how are you doing?

“Well, this sure isn’t Monday Night Football,” I thought. It’s been a long while since I was twitching and “ready for some football!” that late on a weeknight, anyway. But on this particular Monday, I was in the St. Laurent recreation centre getting ready to put the ol’ bod through its paces.

Now, I have spent more pigskin hours in front of the Sacred Tube than I care to remember, but Monday nights weren’t always about a football broadcast. They never are, now. Even as a kid, there were hockey practices, and from about age 15 on, the squeak of sneakers and the pounding of basketballs were the soundtrack to any given Monday (Tuesday, Wednesday…). Even in my increasingly clumsy thirties, as the rim somehow felt higher with each jump-shot, I could still be found running around on my wife on a winter evening. Nope, not a romantic betrayal, but another doomed attempt to outrun a bunch of teens and 20-somethings. The dream was dead, but I could still fool myself for minutes at a time.

It seemed, back then, that my competitive fever had finally broken. A successful night had come to mean a few jumpshots, a good sweat, a few laughs and no icepacks. (Well. I tried to define success this way, but I was chronically annoyed with my uncooperative hands and reluctant legs.) But there I was last Monday at St. Laurent,

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