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Better Read Than Never: THE ALCHEMIST

Posted by :James Howden On : September 28, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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It’s just a short stroll. Painless, really.

There was a year, back there somewhere in the early oughts, when it seemed everybody was reading Paulo Coelho’s short novel, The Alchemist. First published in Portuguese in a small late 1980s print run, it became first a Brazilian and then an international literary phenomenon. More copies were sold than live in my country (my home country Canada, that is, not China!). Perhaps it was the contrarian in me, maybe it was just a case of distraction, or it is conceivable that something in the breathless reaction some people were apparently having (and the frenzy with which it was bought) that put me off it. Sometimes ignorance and bias aren’t all bad.

I should’ve liked it. It is a story that speaks unabashedly of spirit, of living simply, of pursuing extraordinary dreams, and while I’m no great exemplar of them, I can enthusiastically get with these ideas.

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Pride and Xenophobia: Hitting the Wall

Posted by :James Howden On : September 28, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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Another James, an American Philosophy grad with a jones for football and a twinkly-eyed swagger, learned who his friends aren’t this week. He lives in the foreign teachers’ residence at our university, along with other Yanks, Aussies, Canucks and, not incidentally, several Japanese professors and students. Jim was rather indignant to find that women in the main-floor administrative office were posting patriotic – that is to say, anti-Japanese – stickers on the office door and in the lobby of the residence. (I wrote about the growing Chinese resentment over the Diaoyu Islands here.) He’s no newbie in China, our jock Socrates, and he saw no point in ‘opening a dialogue’. He took direct and impolitic action, indignantly removing posters that he found distasteful and presumably hurtful to visiting Japanese at our allegedly international university.

Welcome

By the time I met raging James, he was hurt by the lies apparently told to his Chinese colleagues by the office girls he’d always been friendly with, sputtering darkly about threats of dismissal, and incredulous at how quickly he’d been offered the fond  f— you :  This is China. If you don’t like it, leave. Everywhere on our campus float the balloons, the proud red and yellow banners, and the insistent welcome of ubiquitous volun-told student smilers honouring big anniversaries for our school and our college. I don’t believe Jim went for the faculty photo (“an important historical document”) and the following festival of executive self-congratulation. I didn’t, either.

General Jack Speaks: A Play

Posted by :James Howden On : September 23, 2012
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Category: On Second Thought

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General Jack Speaks

 This short monologue attempts to capture a little of the spirit and story of Marion Jack (1866-1954), a legendary Canadian Baha’i pioneer who was much extolled by the Faith’s Guardian, Shoghi Effendi, and much loved by ‘Abdu’l-Baha, the son its Founder. The three “letters” that Marion “writes” during the play are fictional, though based on letters that she wrote to, among others, fellow believers Ella Robarts and Edna True. The text uses Marion’s own words where possible, and such quotations are indicated in bold print. Statements about “Jacky” written by or on behalf of the Guardian are underlined. She was nearly 90 when she died in Sofia, Bulgaria, her pioneer post since the early 1930s.

 

[Marion Jack, in the middle of the stage, is seated at a small desk in her tiny hotel room writing a letter and reminiscing. An off-stage voice introduces her.]

“[Marion Jack] was such a lovely person– so joyous and happy that one loved to be with her. Her shining eyes and beautiful smile showed how much the Baha’i Faith meant to her….We used to love to go to her studio and talk with her, also to see her paintings of the Holy Land and familiar Green Acre landscapes….She always entered into any plan with zest….If we could all radiate happiness as did Jacky, I am sure we would attract more people to the Faith.”

 

[Marion looks up and begins speaking.]

August, 1945

My dear Ella,

This terrible war is finally over, and perhaps things can return to normal now. I apologize for using a pencil, but my little inkpot has dried up. I began this letter in a little coffee shop. I like that place as I have had the chance of speaking to a couple of fine men here, so lately I try to frequent it in hopes of catching a listening ear…[and] pass on the Glad Tidings.

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NINE-EIGHTEEN: Face to (Losing) Face in Asia

Posted by :James Howden On : September 19, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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This morning in Dalian, there were no all-city sirens and alarm bells at 9:18. Yesterday, though, the Chinese loudly remembered what they consider perhaps their greatest national humiliation, an injury that they just won’t let go: the invasion of northeastern China by Japanese forces in 1931. They just call it “9-18”. It’s eighty-one years now, but if anything the memories are recently growing more bitter, as the obscure islands in the East China Sea — now, does Japan call it that? — that are claimed by both countries become a renewed source of hostility.

Diaoyu! Senkaku! Let’s call the whole thing off…

The People’s Republic of China says the Diaoyu Islands are theirs. (Actually, it says these islands belong to Taiwan, but that Taiwan belongs to mainland China, the PRC.) The Republic of China agrees, though it prefers the spelling Tiaoyu Islands. (It, however, also insists that it is a sovereign nation, so that’s a bit of a disagreement.) And although these tiny islands are quite close to Taiwan, Japan calls them the Senkaku Islands and says they are in charge,

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Howdy Hearts Quotes

Posted by :James Howden On : September 17, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound – if I can remember any of the damn things.

That was the divinely caustic Dorothy Parker, she also of “Brevity is the soul of lingerie” and a gazillion other nastily gorgeous things. I, too, have forgotten an absolute army of wise, witty sayings. However, setting up this Version 2.0 of JH.com, I had the opportunity (well, because of my rickety old Internet platform, the necessity) of looking at nearly 400 of my posts as I transferred them here. I also found a record of posted quotables. Hurray!

And although I wasn’t terribly reliable about uploading quotations to my He Said, She Said box, there were quite a few goodies, so I’ve decided to repost them, too. You can take a look — they’re a LOT shorter than most of my posts! — just down and to the right. Good stuff.

Dreaming the Compost Dream

Posted by :James Howden On : September 16, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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I’m finally writing about compost, but don’t leave me on that account. I think about this subject fairly obsessively, and while it’s become a suburban constant in Canadian cities — trucks for curbside pickup, pretty green bins on wheels — it’s not even on the radar in China. So let’s talk about compost. Don’t you love dialogue about rotting fruit and decaying leaves? I do.

It’s one of my oldest and clearest links, I realized recently, with a long-departed father who was always present while I grew up, but in a fairly vague and fogbound way. For some reason, maybe just because we weren’t that far removed from farmers in our rural community, we had a compost heap in the backyard 50 years before most people did.

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It’s Been a Quiet Day in Dalian

Posted by :James Howden On : September 10, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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Well, except that there’s a loud-speaking voice carrying into our ninth-floor apartment from the college next door. No doubt, it’s another exercise in, well, exercise and patriotism and precision marching for the young people of Qing Gong Xue Xiao. (This means something like the School of Light Industry, and as far as I can tell it’s where the future barbers, seamstresses and short-order cooks of Dalian come from.) Like all college and university freshmen — though some of these kids look about 15, and may have simply not qualified to get into high school — their first few weeks of school are spent marching, shouting patriotic slogans, and singing team -building songs.

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Better Read Than Never: THE WAR OF ART

Posted by :James Howden On : August 16, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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[As with most of my “BRTN” reviews, a more concise version of this review will be published in an ex-patriate’s magazine in my Chinese city, Focus on Dalian. I can buy a pizza with my fee.]

I finished my third reading of a favourite guide – or was that four? – not long ago, and realized that I haven’t written about The War of Art much. (There are many scribblings and fluorescent highlightings in the pages of Steven Pressfield’s brief 2002 masterpiece on the struggle to be creative, and I have a seminar in mind, but this is my first sustained post, I think.) This is a book to be read and re-read, and is sometimes uncomfortably insistent on cutting through the crap and requiring a response from its reader. I hope you won’t avoid it on THAT account!

Pressfield might be best known for his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance (and the Will Smith movie that was based on it), but his main niche is historical fiction.

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Driving Miss Piggy (Crazy)

Posted by :James Howden On : August 15, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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[This piece, or something similar, was originally posted in May, but then I withdrew it as I had decided to shop it around. A shorter version was accepted by Canada’s national newspaper — www.globeandmail.com — and it ran in the print edition of August 13, 2012, and on-line as well. If you missed it, here it is again, for the record.]

 

The tones, the tones, bane of my existence and forger of linguistic atrocities! You probably know enough of Chinese languages – Shanghaiese, or Cantonese, or the pu tong hua (“common speech”) that we call Mandarin – to recall that they are tonal. People used to say, and some probably still do, that Chinese people speak in a “sing song” way, but now that I’ve been listening to this music for a few years, I can’t help thinking that English must sound blunt and monotonous to folks here. (Actually, the French have been muttering about that for a long time, so no surprise there, I guess.) Yes, the tones do add melody to the language, and a certain intensity, too; for the first year I lived in China, I saw arguments breaking out everywhere for what seemed like no reason. Whenever I was with students or friends who could speak English, I’d ask, Are you angry right now? Or, What are those guys fighting about? The answer was wonderment, or confusion, or just a chuckling, They’re talking about their schedule/the weather/what was for lunch in the cafeteria. I was constantly fooled by hearing rising, strident tones that, in English, generally mean consternation or incredulity or rage,

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NBA Finals: It’s Morning in China

Posted by :James Howden On : June 16, 2012
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Category: All About Sports

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To paraphrase the late great media blowhard Howard Cosell – and listen, though he blew hard, he often blew well, but who calls anybody a “blowwell”? – I reject the notion that the NBA is a sacred cow which emits only the purest of good, wholesome milk. (Even when The Finals begin in Oklahoma.) I’m a basketball lover, a long-time coach, someone who still pumpfakes and dropsteps and stumbles around outdoor courts with college students. In China. (And no, I don’t often post guys up. 5’10 ¾” is bigger here than back home in Ontario, but I’m not usually the big man on campus courts and I don’t jump anymore.) I’ve loved (and often hated) the Association since well before Miami or Oklahoma City dreamed of having teams, when Dave Cowens was a floorburned 6’9” centre and Bob McAdoo, an early Kevin Durant prototype, floated jumpers for the Buffalo Braves. (Yeah, I bin around.)

Now, for three years, I’ve watched my NBA games in the mornings when I’m free.

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