BLURT 19: The Writing Coach confronts the writing classroom, exemplifying the Sacred Art while the awed students enter. Look, he’s doing it even though he doesn’t have to! Look, he’s wearing a tweedy-looking jacket! Teachers can, mm-hmm.
BLURT 18: That sort of day: re-reading Shea-bon on the blue bed, wrestling with DFW on the white, sundry forays into half-hearted purpose mainly avoided, semi-conscious caloric binges mostly not. Redeem the day? Or wait for the next?
(BTW, long and narrow-interest piece published below right in On Second Thought, plus a piece of Pittsburgh cited below that. I knew you’d want to know.)
[This family report was written in early September, 2011. The author stands by his commentary, if not necessarily his publication choices.]
Good morning, all my relations! It’s a blue-sky Monday in Dalian, and Sarah Harmer is singing “I am Aglow (With Thoughts of You)” in the next room. It’s not only a sweet and lively tune, but it’s a good mask for the usual September sounds in our apartment complex: military training next door. Freshman college and university students in China spend their first few weeks on campus in a kind of boot camp, so we hear endless repetitions of canned marching songs, indefatigable shouts of “Yi! Er! San! Si!” (their counting is outstanding, though limited; I used to think the same things about my high school’s football teams during their early-practice calisthenics), the crow-like hollers of young women crying out their martial arts thrusts and, of course, the Chinese national anthem. This morning’s alarm was megaphoned instructions a little before 6 am, and canned trumpets doing some sort of reveille. HELLO!! Sam was out the door by 7:30 for his third day of school, and Diana was teaching Oral English at her university by 8. So now it’s just me and Sarah, and a mad wind whirling about and through our 9th floor apartment. I can see the Bohai Sea between the cupolas of the apartment buildings across the street. I’ve just received the sweetest email from one of our dear friends here. It’s a good day.
Oh, the beds we’ve slept in! Canada was a glorious, homely and instructive place to be this past summer. We had two brief visits to our house on Presland Road,
BLURT 17: David Foster Wallace mentions, offhand, the “delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive”. Wondrous. Wearing the casual armour of cynicism is actually a naïve choice: where does it lead? what can it make, besides bitterness?
I’m a fan, but I still haven’t read the best known books. His Wonder Boys sold well and was turned into a box office success with Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire at the wheel, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for Michael Chabon. Yes, and there was The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, too, which won the double-crown of speculative fiction, the Hugo and Nebula awards. My first awareness of him might have come in buying a hardcover version – on clear-out from Books on Beechwood, a great little Ottawa bookstore – of his young adult novel Summerland, which had a superbly whimsical dust jacket to go along with its super-nifty title. (Mini-review: if you like any two of children, baseball, goodness, and fantasy-without-swords-or-dragons, you’ll like Summerland. Three or more? Home run. I went four for four.) Then came what made me a Chabon fan, the marvellous non-fiction of Manhood for Amateurs, but that’s not the subject of this review, either. (Real quick? Men who can read, should. He thinks heartily about many things needful for males. Funny, too.) He’s good, alright.
I write, though, of Chabon’s first novel, published when he was 24, started before and completed during his M.F.A. tour of writing duty In California.
BLURT 16: 359 posts. Five years. You would think I could operate this thing. You’d be wrong. Pinned by my stats counter, which now reads ‘ZERO’. Tied in knots by links that don’t; don’t know whether they ever did. (Link, that is.) Nobody writes me, or seems to — so I figure that link’s busted, too. (Writing to jay.howden@gmail.com does get my attention, though). Are you out there? Can you hear this?
REVIEWED: The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born, It’s Grown. Here’s How by Daniel Coyle (2009)
When I received my mutt of a Psychology degree in the early 1980s, I felt at ease discussing neurons, axons, synapses, neurochemical transmitters crossing the synaptic gap to a neighbouring nerve cell, and so on. I hadn’t specialized in neurophysiology (I hadn’t specialized in anything, including Psychology), but I could fake the basics. I could speak glibly of glial cells, though nobody knew much about what they did. What else? Oh, I was also a walk-on athlete, not quite good enough to make the varsity basketball teams at two different Ontario universities, but good enough to think I would’ve made it if, and stubborn enough to continue this skullbound conversation long after I had turned my athletic ambition to being the coach that I wished I’d had.
When The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle’s look at the intersection of brain science with athletic and other kinds of development, came to my attention, I knew I would inhale it even if it wasn’t good. Thankfully, it is.
Chances are excellent that you don’t know who Delvon Roe is. I am slightly daft for games, so I recognized the name in headlines from the world of (American) sports. (Hmm. Michigan State, wasn’t it? Yup. Maybe a third year shooting guard? No, senior forward, but nice try. Right area code.) There is a darkened sky over the land of Spartan basketball today, as young Mr. Roe, 23, has been forced to announce his retirement from the team and the game.
Roe is among those gifted American kids who went to university to study the deeper mysteries of jump-shooting and help-side defence. The most apt of these pupils never complete this most liberally defined of the liberal arts, of course, fleeing their pseudo-education after one or two years for the bright lights and big money of the NBA.
BLURT 15: Good laughs come in small Chinglish packages. Each of my classes has a ‘monitor’, my communications contact. No one resents them. I answered a student’s emailed question, then wondered if she had asked on behalf of the group. She LOL-ed my weary evening: Sir, I am the class commissar!
BLURT 14: The prayer asks for the secrets of sleep to become the foot and foundation of love. Clarity flows from a distilled, detached kind of love. This morning I simply knew something that had been muddied before. “Clarity is power,” says the Gospel According to Tony. I am buying.