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Too Bad About Your Gift, Bro (Sis)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 16, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Better luck next life…

An acclaimed young architect, with signature projects having been built, with his mind blooming with visions of constructions yet to be, finds that he is less and less able to draw. After years of intense training and the honing of a unique skill, a brain surgeon notices, not long after her 30th birthday, that she’s sometimes a bit clumsy with her scalpel. An ethical young lion of business finds herself hesitant, unable to make up her mind, while the dynamic teacher faces his class and finds, in the second decade of his dream career, that he doesn’t really know what to say to the kids anymore.

These are local tragedies, but what’s up? How does this happen? There must have been an existential earthquake. Cancer, a brain aneurysm, Lou Gehrig’s disease, something dreadful has suddenly snatched away or disabled someone’s essential gift. What a pity! It’s unjust, dispiriting. It just shouldn’t happen like that. If we are wealthy, we fear losing our money and possessions. When we love, we worry about the loss of the beloved one. And if we have a great gift, and we know it, our greatest fear is having that gift abandon us. (Of course, there are those who neglect or abuse their gift: the sellout songwriter without a thing to say after a string of popular hits, the monster athlete who loves bars and strip joints and can’t find the gym. This is not about that.) The imaginary designer, the doctor, the tycoon and the educator above, through no fault of their own, have had their way to shine snuffed out far too soon. We all agree that this would be awful for them, to say nothing of the loss to society.

But then, why dwell on a hypothetical sudden loss for imaginary professionals? Such things happen, of course, and hey, it sucks, but it’s just one of those weird things, we would probably say, just a lonely little box of bad luck. Most of their peers, and most of ours, work for as long as they want, potentially well past standard retirement ages. But listen: imagine if this happened to everybody in a given profession. It’s not difficult, actually. It happens to every professional athlete.

Given the absurdly high salaries that the top jocks pull down, it’s not fashionable to spare much pity in their direction, but it’s hard for them, all the same. Money can’t buy happiness, and fame doesn’t take away the pain (“it just pays the bills”, as Fred Eaglesmith sings). I think about this a lot.

Kathleen Raine (on preference for ugliness, need for beauty)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 12, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“I have found myself wondering why the present age seems positively to shrink from beauty, to prefer the ugly, to feel safer, more at home with it; and I have come to realize that there is a reproach in the beautiful and the perfect; it passes its continual silent judgment and it requires perhaps a kind of courage to love what is perfect, since to do so is an implicit confession of our own imperfection. Can it be that the prevalence of the low and the sordid in contemporary writing is a kind of easy way, a form of sloth, an avoidance of that reproach which would call us, silently, to [aspire to] a self-perfection it would cost us too much to undertake? And yet it is in order to work upon us that transformation … that works which embody the beautiful alone exist. That is their function…”

Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) was an English poet and critic. I don’t know much about her, sorry to say. I believe this extract (the underlining is my emphasis, not hers) comes from a collection of her essays called Defending Ancient Springs (Oxford 1967). I ran across it in an essay by the Canadian poet Roger White, in a book called The Creative Circle: Art, Literature, and Music in Bahá’í Perspective, and can only think that this is more true now than when Ms. Raine wrote it.

Praising the Bull, Savouring the Curry

Posted by :James Howden On : May 8, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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There were no great surprises in the first round of the NBA playoffs, though two series rose above the others for interest and flavour. I would cheer for the laundry of the Golden State Warriors – their regular duds, not the short-sleeved jerseys with the weirdly non-matching pinstriped shorts – even if they didn’t have Stephen Curry and several other players I find easy to like. Meanwhile, what the Chicago Bulls did in taking a seven-game series on their opponents’ court was heartening evidence that coaching matters. (Thibodeau may not lead the most balanced of lives, but his Bulls teams are superbly prepared.) Character matters, even in the star-tossed salad of the National “Big is Here” Association.

Derrick Rose, Chicago’s dynamite point guard, hasn’t played in a year. (Loved his teammate’s sincere “shaddap” to Mr. Rose’s couch-bound critics.) His backup, Kirk Hinrich, missed the last two games of the Brooklyn Nets series with a bum leg, as did their Mr. Everything small forward, Luol Deng, who has been

The little fella has driven coaches nuts, but he’s been clutch. Boozer and the young kid, Jimmy Butler, have been aces, too.

seriously ill. Third-string point guard Nate Robinson is shorter than me, though he is a mighty mite and an absolutely conscience-free scorer. Centre Joakim Noah has been gutting out his minutes because of plantar fasciitis (sore feet). I hadn’t seen much of the Nets/Bulls collision, the only first-round matchup to go seven games, but I’d read most of the fairly astonishing accounts of how the Chicago men were getting by on focus, cohesion, toughness, and last-ditch defensive efforts that lasted entire games.

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Spambot Z666-Bjx9 (on James Howden’s brilliance)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 6, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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Great goods from you, man. I’ve understand your stuff previous to and you’re just too excellent.

The Spambots love me. They really, really do.

“Beijing Spirit”

Posted by :James Howden On : May 6, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Here is Beijing Spirit (as codified in a subway display ad):

Patriotism. Innovation. Inclusiveness. Virtue. Quite apart from the questions of who developed this formula, what the public purpose is, and whether anyone in the citizen audience for such encouragement pays even the remotest attention (and indeed, whether there is any reason that they ought to), I found this intriguing. I thought about this on several long walks between subway lines, and sandwiched among my fellow humans who were Going Places on the Beijing Metro.

I am all for sane and non-toxic forms of patriotism. I still love me some Canada as I learn to love the world.

Innovation is a grand thing, the yang to tradition’s yin. (Or vice versa.) Bring on the new; in China, for all its reverence for the 5000 years of civilization, change is a high-speed train. Wisdom is needed to keep it on the rails.

It’s hard to see any dark side to inclusiveness, so long as it’s about more than holding one’s nose in tolerant contempt – say, for the migrant workers who build the luxury highrises and supermalls – or smiling for the foreigners who buy and spend, and then muttering darkly about them in private.

Virtue seems such a quaint idea, and is all the more lovable and necessary for it. Chinese respect for virtue runs deep, and let’s hope it’s a renewable resource in this furiously competitive, deeply wary society.

Think. Ask. When does patriotism collide unkindly with virtue? Can it co-exist with inclusiveness? Must virtue and innovation be at odds, or can there be new and creative expressions of the truly and deeply good? (Pray for ‘yes’.)

These are thoughts from an afternoon on several subway lines.

In the Village

Posted by :James Howden On : May 5, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I went to Beijing and all I got was this gorgeous chocolate…

I wrote recently about the extremes of wealth and poverty that may, at a certain level of unremitting seriousness, be the essence of professional sport. Sport is not the reason I came to Beijing, but here I am, in one of the Chinese capital’s many little shrines to conspicuous wealth.

SanlitunVillage. I assume there must have been a village here once, but now it’s something rather other: sexy Adidas megastore with giant photos of a steely-eyed David Beckham; Godiva Chocolates, where I lost

The shopping heart of Sanlitun, from the street. The “bar street” is to the right, Soho luxury highrises are behind and to the left of us, and spending is dead ahead.

my mind and my dietary determination just twenty minutes ago; Starbucks, naturally; McDonald’s, ubiquitous and inevitable, but almost shamefaced in the basement among the more glittering expressions of European, American and Chinese wealth; a Megabox cinema (five posters of a kneeling, battered and helmet-less Robert W. Ironman are leering at me as I write, but I ain’t goin’); and, off to the side, “Sanlitun Bar Street” which I walked towards after leaving Godiva’s in a chocoholic swoon – two quick solicitations for “lady bar, mister? lady massage?” got me back into the den of conspicuous consumption and away from the pits of addictive loneliness. Ah, escape.

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Albert Schweitzer (on human purpose)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 4, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve…The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965) was a Christian theologian and medical missionary in Africa (in what is now known as Gabon). He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 because of the above, off-the-beaten-path but eminently Christian philosophy. This may the heart of all true and useful religion. Was he his “brother’s keeper”, a la Jesus Christ, practising the Buddha’s “right action”, and applying Baha’u’llah’s injunction to “carry forward an ever-advancing civilization”? He tried.

The Rich, the Poor, and the Playground

Posted by :James Howden On : April 30, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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I have known for most of my life, at least in a shallow way, that extremes of wealth and poverty are toxic to world unity and peace. The Baha’i teachings have insisted on their elimination for something close to 150 years. I accepted the tenet as fact – alongside the necessities of defusing all prejudices, widening all loyalties, and rethinking all assumptions – as an idealistic young man, no more than a boy, really.

During my privileged, Canadian-born lifetime, the gap between rich and poor has only widened, and now I live in a country hell-bent on leading the world in this dubious marker of development. (My understanding is that the Excited States of America is still in front by a nose, but China and Brazil are

Sorry, this is a bit graphic. Yes, that is Chairman Mao on the 100-yuan note, China’s largest denomination (about seventeen bucks Canadian). Families live on that for a month.

closing fast. To the winner goes the spoiling, the rot, the instability, but the runners-up will know it, too.) Lately, I’ve been  brooding on the reasons for my steadily – sometimes violently – growing disillusion with sports, at least at the pro level.

Stratospheric salaries for the best horse-hide whackers and roundball  bouncers (and all their sweaty peers) are, of course, a cliché these days. Spaniard Pau Gasol of the Los Angeles Lakers will make $19 million next season, and he’s far from the highest-paid jock. I made a good and steady North American income for nearly 30 years, and my take was somewhere between a mil and $1.5 million, I figure. Such comparisons are so banal that nobody really talks about it anymore, which is why I just did.

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Edward Gibbon (on consultation)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 30, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”

Edward Gibbon (1737  – 1794)was an English historian, most famous for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To be entirely self-centred, I’m not sure if this quote tells me more about my lack of understanding or my dropping out of genius school. It does remind me that nobody can do my most important work — whatever that is — but me. This idea may express an outdated, super-individualistic view of exceptional accomplishment, and it might not.

William Cowper (on truth and freedom)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 22, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

He is the free man whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves beside.

William Cowper (1731–1800). Cowper’s is a name that I knew from hymnals in our little Baptist Church when I was a child. I hadn’t known he was responsible for this line, which adorned the masthead of my little home town’s weekly Grand River Sachem, and may yet. It is likely inspired by the Gospel of John, in which Jesus says, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” 

Cowper was also a noted poet and occasional madman, in addition to his writing of Christian hymns. “God moves in a mysterious way, / His wonders to perform; / He plants his footsteps in the sea, / And rides upon the storm” is a Cowper lyric. So is this familiar line from a poem I’d never heard of: “Variety’s the very spice of life, / That gives it all its flavour.” Good job, Bill!