Rss

Gardens Green and Grounds for Optimism (Part One)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 19, 2014
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,

UPDATE: Author is reminded how to work his wife’s electronic mystery machine; photographs are added.

On a recent escape from Dalian – where lie wage-earning, grocery-getting and stale routine – my little nucleus explored choice cuts of Suzhou and Beijing. I dwelt on some of the unpleasant things of life in the Venice of the Orient here and here, but there was a great deal to like, especially when we were free to wander in parts of the old city less infested with tourist buses.

Photo opping the photo op: a view from Pingjiang Street.

Photo opping the photo op: a view from Pingjiang Street.

My bride and I strolled narrow Pingjiang Lu, and sure, it was meant for tourists, but it wasn’t garish, and it wasn’t wide enough for cars (let alone buses), and there were genuinely pleasant sights: bits of canal-watching, a pottery shop stocked with original pieces, Jiangsu street foods we hadn’t sampled before, and frequent tableaus of young Chinese women dressed in, I guessed, early 20th-century costume in the Chinese bride’s eternal quest — well, eternal for the last few years, anyway — for the perfect pre-marital backdrop. (I first thought the young women in sundresses and parasols lounging by the canal for a smoke, which is rather risqué and newly fashionable in China, might be “working girls”, but they were likely just waiting to turn a photographic trick.)

We’d heard about the “Humble Administrator’s Garden”, purported to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and had walked near it on the slightly nightmarish previous day.

Continue Reading >>

Hafez (on asking for the moon)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 17, 2014
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , ,

There isn’t enough poetry on this site. In my life. In my notebooks.

In the world.

There I was, though, minding my own business, when a Persian poem of considerable age bounced in front of my eyeballs. You might have heard of the 13th-century poet known in the West as Rumi; a century later, in Shiraz, Iran, came another gifted wordsmith and mystic lover called Hafez. The Persians revere him. Iran has a national day in his honour — imagine, for a poet. What follows, called “With That Moon Language”, is a small piece of why.

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Continue Reading >>

E.B. White (on writing, taste & popularity)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 12, 2014
1

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , ,

“The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself,
and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Let him start sniffing the air, or glancing, at the Trend Machine, and he is as good as dead, although he may make a nice living.”

Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) was an American writer, editor and quiet man of letters. He was a cornerstone of The New Yorker magazine from nearly its beginning, and edited and updated his former Cornell professor William Strunk’s “little book” The Elements of Style, making it the last word in writing with succinctness, clarity and wit. (If you write and haven’t read it, you must do so today. It is brief, potent and shockingly enjoyable to read, and I should do it again.) By the way, he also wrote Charlotte’s Web, perhaps the most enduring piece of children’s fiction that we have, plus Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan.

I don’t want to be “as good as dead”,

Continue Reading >>

Another Oldie-But-Goodie Flics Its Bic

Posted by :James Howden On : May 9, 2014
1

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , ,

I was raised in a two-smoker household, but now I find the whole habit puzzling, fascinating, telling. I live in China, so it’s a new — no, it’s a whole old ballgame, one of many ways in which China is very 1960s despite the high-rise towers and the accessorized smart-phones. There is great social pressure on men to smoke, and restaurants have the bluey-grey atmosphere of my childhood. Women, meanwhile, rarely do, but it’s becoming fashionable for the young and superchic women in places like Beijing’s Sanlitun neighbourhood. In this, maybe it’s more like the ’40s, when my mother’s “girls” in the secretarial pool were ecstatic when she lit up in front of them: “You’ve started!”

Smoking is a bizarre convention. It’s weird in so many ways. I’m much too highly evolved to engage in such a destructive and wasteful habit — I prefer potato chips — but as smoking became an awkward and shunnable offence over the past couple of North American decades, I started to notice that puffers had some advantages I didn’t, and some wisdom I could’ve used. I just posted an article to this effect from 2005, one of a bunch that never saw the light of publishing day. It’s in the On Second Thought section. Also, the so free and easy to subscribe it’s almost sinful button is just over there on the right.

Where do I start? you may be wondering if you’re new to JamesHowden.com . One way is to look at Eighteen Great Posts from 2013. You can see the list here, with delectable links if you want to go read them (again).

JH.com is on Twitter @JamesHowdenIII. Thanks for looking in. If you’re new here, read on to find out more of what JH.com is all about…

Continue Reading >>

Smokers Get All the Breaks

Posted by :James Howden On : May 9, 2014
0

Category: On Second Thought

Tags:, , , , ,

Remember matches?

Remember matches?

For various reasons, including some good ones, I have moved in mainly smoke-free circles for most of my life. Every once in a while, seeing someone with that fiery little tube between lips or fingers can startle me to attention, as if I’d just seen a rare bird or a quaint way of dressing. But I’ve also noticed enough workplace smoking areas to be convinced that smokers may be smarter than the rest of us. Really.

It was Wanda that got me thinking about it first. She was the professeur de français, a precise and careful woman who was also a dedicated smoker. It seemed incongruous to me, given her fastidious habits of diet and dress. After all, I was the “healthy” one, the school’s basketball coach, a guy who tried to keep an ex-athletic body in some kind of tune. We worked in a sparkling new high school with a total climate-control system, not an open window in the place.

“Time for a fix,” I’d smirk as Wanda left for the parking lot. Like the men on staff who smoked, she sat in her car, or drove around town if there were likely to be giggling grade nines or over-confident seniors lurking about. Sometimes I felt sorry for her. But then I’d find myself leaving school after practice, maybe even after the community house league games ended at 10 p.m., and I’d realize that I had breathed only recycled oxygen since early that morning. I’d barely seen the sun all day.

Continue Reading >>

Running, Pull-Ups and the Oneness of Humanity

Posted by :James Howden On : May 5, 2014
0

Category: All About Sports

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

I’ve never been able to endure even the idea of running on a treadmill, and only reluctantly do I join the walkers dutifully circling the track at local Chinese schools and universities. (My mind constantly runs in circles, so I don’t need cardiovascular reenactments.) Even plodding along familiar streets gets me restless, which partly explains why I love to run in new places. On a recent day in Suzhou, when my balky body had granted relatively enthusiastic permission for a run, I soured on what might have been a sweet outing, partly because my responsibilities as a friendly tourist nixed my locomotion. Walking (and stewing and brooding) burned a few calories, but I was glad to get out the next day.

We were, however, most favoured tourists. Our more-than-gracious hosts’ apartment  was across the street from Central Park, quiet and leafy in the modern section of Suzhou, so my live-in travel agent and I laced up and lumbered. Ponds and stone avenues, lawns and impromptu dancersize groups of Chinese women gave way to streetcore tourism as my bride signalled she’d had enough. I went straight down Broadway – actually, it was called Xinggang Lu, which means “Denim is my Destination”* — toward the Pants. More respectfully known as the Gate of the Orient, this huge dual tower looks like a pair of low-rise jeans on a hipless Chinese girl. Central Park punctuates, for a few blocks, Xinggang Lu as its traffic flows toward and away from the TrouserGate, and it was only partly for the sake of avoiding getting lost that I went Pants-ward. Impertinence aside, it’s enormous and visually quite compelling, and I didn’t resist its bowlegged charms.

* It most certainly does not mean that.

The boulevard made for pleasant city running.

Continue Reading >>

Suzhou 2: Trapping, Snapping, and Talking With the Dead

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2014
1

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,

This is the second part of an account of a day in the “Venice of the East”, Suzhou. (Read the first here.) I left off at the point where we were getting off the tourist boat, with me thinking we were nearly done but with the worst to come. Toward the end (spoiler alert!), we take a slight detour between my ears. I hope it’s a pleasant place to visit, though you wouldn’t want to live there.

“There’s a silk museum? We’re going there now? I thought –“

It's scenic, and has lots of evident history, and I often liked the older part of Suzhou. Really!

It’s scenic, and has lots of evident history, and I often liked the older part of Suzhou. Really!

We disembarked and climbed up the banks, and there again were the street vendors, and buses lined up to enter through the same narrow gates that we were. (Did I mention that the aggressively employed air horns on Chinese trucks and buses make me vaguely homicidal? I don’t think I mentioned this.) The ultra-amplified guide brought up the rear, and now even I understand his message: kuai yi dianr. (“Hurry up!”) Even if my Chinese hadn’t been up to that minimal speed, I’d have understood. Move along, folks. There’s stuff to buy, commissions to be earned. That’s where bemusement began to turn to anger. The museum was chintzy, but could’ve been diverting, at least briefly; I don’t know much about how we get from tree worms to gorgeous outfits and bedding. However, the museum was a false front, and once the guide had hurried us into the duvets-to-go area, I’d had enough. I signalled my son toward the exit. He didn’t resist.

“Dad, why are we taking an escalator up to the exit? We came in on the main floor.” Right. I have a bad feeling about this. We got to the top. Oh, no.

Oh, yes. Silk shirts. Silk bedding. Silk pyjamas. Silk ties. Silk showrooms, one after the other after the one after the first.

Continue Reading >>

Suzhou 1: Tourist Trapped and Nearly Snapped

Posted by :James Howden On : April 30, 2014
1

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , , ,

This post has been updated, mainly with photos. It is part one of two.

We went to see Suzhou, a small (only about six million humans) city in China’s Jiangsu province, a historic centre that bustles and builds ambitiously in the shadow of nearby Shanghai. I’m half a world away from my mother’s grave, so there was no visiting her on her birthday. At a certain point in the day, though, I took a moment to talk to her. It was much better than the dark muttering I’d been doing.

With a break in a busy schedule, we had come to the Venice of China — or, as one chamber of commerce-type banner had it, the “Fragrant Venus” — which has a reputation as, among other things, a city that helps ex-pats feel they’re getting away from China, just a little, you know what I’m saying, not that we always need this, but the place can wear on you, especially if, like me, a person’s prone to mentoring Chinese drivers from the side of the road, or thinking that over a decade of educational habit can be magically transformed by a semester of unconventional instruction from an idealistic white guy, so yes, “getaway” sounded good. (I get tired sometimes.) Travel Girl had made the plans, and Son the Fourth and I were relatively willing to be led to new pastures, or at least along different-coloured pavements. First impressions of Suzhou were pleasant, we arrived to the homely hospitality of a (young) old friend from Canada and his wife and even newer toddler, and what could go wrong?

Continue Reading >>

William Butler Yeats (on perceiving beauty)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 28, 2014
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , , , ,

“The world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

Guilty, guilty, guilty: I am a fan of W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet, and need this reminder, the all-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten reminder, to LOOK. Or the Yogi Berra  “dumb jock”-as-zen-philosopher koan: “It’s amazing what you can observe just by looking.” It’s amazing how much we don’t see, and discouraging how much natural, wholesome and otherworldly goodness we fail to notice because we’re fixated on the trashy, the tinsel, the temporary, the trite and the televisual. (That’s right, just call me “Mr. T”.)

Continue Reading >>

M.P. Freeman (on service and self-deprecation)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 26, 2014
2

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , ,

I’ve known MPF for a good while now, but in the way of introverts, the distance-loving perspective of nerdy writers, we’re getting to know each other more deeply via blog posts and nearly never-ending email threads. (G’mornin’, sir. How goes it?) One of his occasional comments here on JH.com recently blew up into this guest post on Aboriginal — and just plain human — identity and homing instincts.

We got ourselves into a brief exchange on feeling at home spiritually, or existentially, or even (Dawkins forbid!) religiously. Mr. Freeman, apart from his thoroughly Canadian love for hockey, curling and Tim Horton’s, is an unconventional guy, but quietly goes about serving others — as teacher, activist, fellow traveller and friend — in a way that most conventionally spiritual or religious types would do well to emulate. For my part, I come from a youthful ethical perspective that says work of any kind, performed in the spirit of service, is the truest kind of worship. I accused him of, therefore, being strongly implicated in this practical kind of faith, and I liked his brief, sardonic and wisely jocular reply:

Continue Reading >>