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Alice Munro (fiction and parental fears)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 21, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Don’t be fooled: her writing isn’t dainty, but perfectly dangerous.

Well, you all know that the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, 82 years young, won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year after a career of writing nothing but short stories.

Or maybe you didn’t. Short story: she’s magnificent, and I blushed at how long it’s been since I have read her. When the Nobel news came there was only one thing at hand for me to read: “Miles City, Montana”, from a paperback Canadiana collection that I picked up somewhere, my Can-Lit homework for this fifth China year.

It’s typically homely, but danger lurks. A couple and their two small girls travel by car from British Columbia to southern Ontario, mostly via the United States. I won’t go on, but simple events and the hauntings of memory make us feel that we have known the narrator from the inside. Here’s the quote.

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Love My Shorts

Posted by :James Howden On : October 20, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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The mighty Iron Shorts! See how proudly they stand! How scornful they are of Photoshop or rigidity-enhancing chemicals! Straight off the clothesline, in our living room…

They say, don’t they, that small things amuse small minds. Here’s proof!

I grin sometimes when I drop my shorts at the end of a warmish day and they stand where I stood. I decided that you, dear readers, should not be deprived of this odd bit of jollity. Clothing that “wears like iron” is a desirable quality in my world, though not in my bride’s. She grimaces at a garment that stands on its own two pant-legs, rather than softly swirling. I, on the other leg(s), will be proudly wearing these shorts in 2023. I bought ’em on a steep discount from my usual low-fashion outlet, and later bought a similarly reduced fall/winter jacket under the same label and made with the same heavy, durable canvas. (And with such numerous, handy and sturdy-zippered pockets! I’m not into backing companies with no need of my support, but it’s good stuff.)

The next load of laundry was ready for hanging in our south-facing balcony, but these bad boys don’t dry too quickly. I took them off the line, then stood them up on the ottoman to finish drying. No extra starch. No hidden supports. No photo magic. Just an upstanding pair of shorts, just the way Howdy likes ’em.

Waking Up the Dads

Posted by :James Howden On : October 15, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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These things happen when you’re a wai guo ren in the most Chinese places, instead of hanging safely in the ex-pat havens. I had boldly gone – and only through the dumbest of luck – where no “outside country person” had likely gone before. No big deal: I was in the mid-court seats of a chilly Dalian gymnasium, the ones where Party members or other administrative kingpins sit for the bigger ceremonies. It’s the closest thing to corporate boxes at my university’s indoor stadium: padded office chairs roll freely behind a ten-metre-wide desk, instead of the moulded blue plastic bum-holders in the rest of the building. Can you see me now?

I was minding my own business avidly minding every bit of business connected with the on-court director of our newly-stumbled-into youth basketball club, and with my son’s performance of a medley of this young coach’s greatest hit, “50 Ways to Beat a Pylon”. (It’s probably just a coincidence, but in my head it has the same tune as Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”.) Reassurance to my sports-averse readers: this isn’t really about basketball. It’s about me, and China, and Chinese fathers (one of ’em),

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The Luckiest Man on Earth

Posted by :James Howden On : October 13, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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If you’re North American you likely know the story, or at least parts of it, even if you’re not a sports fan. Lou Gehrig was not, once upon a time, the name of a disease. He was the Iron Horse, one of the most lethal of the famed “Murderer’s Row” batting lineups of the New York Yankees of the 1920s and

Gehrig takes batting practice. What a swing he must have had!

‘30s. One day, an early part of the Gehrig story goes, the Yanks’ first baseman Wally Pipp needed a day off, and a young Gehrig filled in admirably. 2130 games (and 14 seasons) later, he asked to be taken out of the lineup in May of a strangely ineffective ’39 season, and within weeks had had confirmed a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), still known to many as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”. On July 4, 1939, Yankees fans were given their chance to say farewell. By 1941 – on the same date that he replaced Pipp on his way to becoming baseball’s greatest-ever first baseman – he was dead, days before his 38th birthday.

Gehrig was a two-time MVP, six times a World Series champion, a Triple Crown performer, and still

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Susan Delacourt (on politics as marketing-as-usual)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 11, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“In a nation of consumer-citizens, the customer is always right. It is not the politician’s job to change people’s minds or prejudices, but to confirm them or play to them, to seal the deal of support. Speeches are not made to educate or inform the audience but to serve up marketing slogans. Political parties become ‘brands’ and political announcements become product launches.”

Susan Delacourt, Canadian journalist and author, in her recent Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them. Yeesh. (And what’s more: hurray for democracy!)

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Better Read Than Never: SAUL’s The Unconscious Civilization

Posted by :James Howden On : October 9, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I’ve come back for a second assault of John Ralston Saul’s 1995 book The Unconscious Civilization.1 It’s a brainy thing, but not awfully long. And it’s not that it was such tough going; Saul’s prose is quite readable even on difficult subjects. I just wasn’t bringing my mind to it, and there are always Other

JRS in book-signing mode. Best advice I’ve ever heard on writing a book: “Finish it so you can go write a better one!” I remain heedless.

Things to Read. Saul made his early reputation as a novelist, but that phase of his career has been eclipsed by his recent prolific output of essays and book-length arguments on globalization, citizenship, the true nature of democracy and of his Canadian homeland. He is something of a gadfly, and sometimes the epithet “philosopher-king of Canada” is muttered irritably, usually by fellow Canucks suspicious of both thinkers and those who dare to do it in public.

I find him a witty, scarily smart and superbly opinionated voice. In the mid-oughts, when I was writing for the Governor General of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson, I got to spend some time in various front-row seats for the JRS experience.

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Baha’u’llah (the essence of all…)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 7, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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I’ve been reading a short, incredibly dense series of statements by Baha’u’llah from “Words of Wisdom”. Each brief pronouncement names the “essence of understanding”, “the source of courage”, the “beginning of magnanimity”, “true remembrance”, and the like. It is five minutes of reading, and a lifetime of grasping. It concludes this way:

“The essence of all that We have revealed for thee is Justice, is for man to free himself from idle fancy and imitation, discern with the eye of oneness His glorious handiwork, and look into all things with a searching eye.”

Baha’u’llah (1817-1892) was the Founder of the Baha’i Faith and the Author,

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Not Supposed To Be Here: NBA Finals, America & LeBron

Posted by :James Howden On : October 4, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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According to the mighty Grantland – no, not the iconic Golden Age of Sports-writer Rice but the Wise Guys Guide to Sports and Other Stuff We Watch on Flatscreens – we are 26 days from the opening of another NBA season. (Grantland.com started counting down over 100 days out for this NFL season, such is the pigskin sickness in the Excited States of America.™ 1 ) In recent days, the countdown has included the following essential bits of news. Chandler Parsons digs fashion and wears trendy glasses and fashionably nerdy

Chandler Parsons, fashion plate. (Can’t be in the weight room *all* the time.) Photo from Grantland.com.

hair. Kevin Durant is learning to be angry, while Pau Gasol is an unrepentant nice guy (actually, a surprisingly insightful short piece). The Philadelphia 76ers are the early favourites in the tanking derby to try to select Canada’s Andrew Wiggins in next June’s draft (he’s a Kansas freshman), something Grantland terms “Riggin’ for Wiggins”. Drake hearts the Raptors. The Blake-Griffin-as-Doctor-Dunkenstein days are over, according to Blake Griffin. In other news, JaVale McGee remains JaVale McGee. Some of these I actually read. Any port in a storm.

Mostly, though, I’m still looking backward to the 2013 Finals. I was pulling for the Spurs. I replay, as Tim Duncan will for the rest of his apparently fairly contented days, the easy putback he missed late in Game 7. I still can’t quite believe Ray Allen got both feet outside the three-point line for that game-tying miracle at the end of Game 6.

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Better Read Than Never: Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN

Posted by :James Howden On : October 2, 2013
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Category: On Second Thought

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Chaney and Meredith, Lennie and George (1939).

Quaid and Blake (1981).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I quoted John Steinbeck recently (in “He Said/She Said”, below right) because I empathize with the fear and inadequacy he felt as a writer. It’s always good to know that heroes are what they are not because they have “no fear” – that great modern lie of the superhero movies and shoe-hawking T-shirts – but precisely because they do fear and it doesn’t stop them. His writerly doubts came as he was struggling with an experimental novel, the classic Of Mice and Men, and I read about them in its introduction. Then I dived, certainly not for the first or second time and (swear to God, hope not to die) likely not for the last, into Steinbeck’s timeless evocation of rural California, sometime early in the 20th century.

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Abdu’l-Baha (on peace, happiness & everything)

Posted by :James Howden On : September 29, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“The body of the human world is sick. Its remedy and healing will be the oneness of the kingdom of humanity. Its life is ‘The Most Great Peace.’ Its illumination and quickening is love. Its happiness is the attainment of spiritual perfections.”

‘Abdu’l-Baha (1844-1921) was the son of Baha’u’llah, the source of the Baha’i system of knowledge and practice.

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