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Tripping Over Gandhi

Posted by :James Howden On : December 18, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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I must be reading (at least some of) the right things. I’ve stumbled over citations of Mohandas K. Gandhi three times in the last half hour. Three of them, in “He Said/She Said” just down there to your right, come from a passionate, funny and often gloriously written book called God Laughs and Plays by the American novellist, rough-edged mystic, fly-fishing environmentalist and anti-fundamentalist Christian David James Duncan. (I’ll post a review of the book when my site allows me; troubles continue.)

The other Gandhi Trap was in the back of the wonderful Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac 2005, which I picked up just now in a spasm of brainlessness. Beneath a set of “Weather Facts” — fastest tornado winds: 286 mph, Wichita Falls, Texas, April 2, 1958 — was this delicious food for thinking:

Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Sins

Wealth without Work.

Pleasure without Conscience.

Science without Humanity.

Knowledge without Character.

Politics without Principle.

Commerce without Morality.

Worship without Sacrifice.

(Wonderful, yes? I don’t know its source. It is widely cited, in Stephen Covey’s Principle-Centered Leadership, for example.)

G.K. Chesterton (putting humility in its place)

Posted by :James Howden On : December 11, 2006
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Class Action, Nash and Klassen.

Posted by :James Howden On : December 11, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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And a Prairie Woman Shall Lead Them…?

First things first: this is not like baseball star Larry Walker being National League MVP and getting “beat by a car” for the Lou Marsh trophy as Canada’s outstanding athlete (that car, a very fast one that season, was driven by Jacques Villeneuve in Formula 1). Today the TorinoFabulous Cindy Klassen was given the award, and I applaud her heartily. For reasons that the Globe’s Stephen Brunt outlined on Saturday, it was a brilliant year for sweaty Canucks but, like him, I hold out for Steve Nash. (I wrote about him, with appropriate playground bedazzlement, here.)

The Lou Marsh voters, sportwriters all, tend to prefer international athletes, those not getting the usual Canadian buzz for whichever homeboy leads the NHL scoring parade. (Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux combined for 16 Art Ross trophies as scoring champs and 12 NHL MVPs, but “only” five Lou Marsh awards. They were beaten, for example, by Olympians like Gaetan Boucher, Susan Nattrass (target shooting!), Carolyn Waldo (synchro swimming!!), Myriam Bedard (betcha can’t name her sport) and Silken Laumann. Oh, and by a guy called Ben Johnson. Twice. Oops.) Villeneuve was a bit of a departure from this tradition of honouring competitors in sports with a lower profile (and lower salaries), and I won’t start ranting about the dubious athleticism of car jockeys. The choice of Klassen, though, who will continue to be the focus of high-pressure expectation and excitement as the Games come to Vancouver in 2010, is one that honours a great athlete and addresses, in small measure, the usual disregard for female sport. Bravo, say I.

I can’t get much righteous indignation going, though, at the selection of a marvellous Olympian like Klassen. She was a powerhouse at the Torino Winter Games, the most outstanding athlete there and the leader of a superb crew of Canadian women athletes with her five medals, including an individual gold and two silvers. She’s the most decorated Canadian Olympian ever, the 2006 speedskating World Cup champion., and bubbled radiantly with grace and joy at her accomplishments and, wonderfully, at those of her teammates. (I wrote about her with great enthusiasm here last February.)

But I can’t help but say this: how many basketball players are there in the world? Of all those many millions, how many times will a Canadian be judged, for the second straight year, the most valuable to his team at the highest level? Fine. And how many competitive female speedskaters are there on the planet at any given time? Would there be more than ten thousand? I feel like a jerk for pointing out numbers like that, because Cindy Klassen represents much that is most honourable in sport, including the chance for young women to see a wonderfully strong role model and young men to (briefly?) cheer a strong, accomplished and fully-clothed woman. The Olympics are one of the few occasions when female athletes can take centre stage, albeit too often for events with sequins and swimsuits. So it is a sweet thing for this attention to a superb competitor to continue. But the greatest accomplishment by a Canadian athlete, in this or nearly any other year, is that of Mr. Nash.

Sunday Morning Angels

Posted by :James Howden On : December 10, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Good things happen to men who do dishes and tidy up their rooms, especially if they listen to good radio stations. Here are a couple of highlights from a mere 90 minutes of radio (plus a little scrubbing, a little filing, a little man, look at this place!).

Hail to Jane.  How do we make cities work? Three radio guests offered their answers, their hopes and despair, about the state of cities in Canada, in everywhere. Reverend Bowtie (aka Michael Enright) was piloting The Sunday Edition, and navigating the airwaves with him were architect Brigitte Shim, a former Vancouver planner (was it Larry Beasley? Ah, the downside to writers doing dishes: poor note-taking), and Toronto’s William Thorsell, a former Globe and Mail editor and now head of the Royal Ontario Museum. They were talking cities, and responding to Enright’s how do they work questions. They decried city development that was piecemeal and commodified and developer-driven. They argued that density wasn’t a bad word, if it was combined with humanity and concern for the building of coherent and livable communities within a city. Shim, in particular, wondered how long it would be before we figured out that bulldozing prime farmland for sprawling one-family commuter suburbs might not be a sustainable practice. Thorsell, in particular, confessed his shame at being a Torontonian every time he visits Vancouver, a world model for urban sustainability. And Beasley – if I’ve actually got the right guy – was particularly humble in discussing what North American cities might be able to learn from what Vancouver is doing. (So why hail Jane? Because behind all this thinking and re-thinking about what can make cities the centre of art, culture, science, dynamic forms of human understanding, is the astoundingly clear and still-ringing voice of the late Jane Jacobs. The only reason I could even follow this morning’s conversation was because I finally read her brilliant book The Death and Life of Great American Cities last year. Few books have informed me like this one.)

Hail to Ingrid. Check this out. Not only is she a woman, not only is her name Ingrid, but she grew up as a devout Roman Catholic in Kitchener, Ontario. This seemingly ordinary constellation of facts becomes astonishing when you hear, as I did this morning for the first time, that Ingrid Mattson has been elected President of the Islamic Society of North America. (She had been a vice-president since 2001, and a good profile of her from that year can be found here.) She converted to Islam as a young woman, having rediscovered in Muslim practice the child-like wonder and reverence she had loved as a Christian child. She also found great scope and comfort for her brilliant mind, and she is now professor of Islamic studies at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. What a calm and intelligent voice she has! And what a potent perspective she brings to Muslim communities around the world, and to those who wish to better understand Islam, as a woman of European/Christian heritage, Canadian upbringing and profound Muslim scholarship, a wife, mother, academic and Western convert to the Faith of Muhammad. I’m glad to know Ingrid is at work in the world.

Hail to Agnes. For a reason I didn’t entirely catch, there was a brief tribute to Agnes McPhail in my radio, too. In the first year that Canadian women had the right to vote — did you know it was 1921? — McPhail was elected to Canada’s House of Commons as the first – and for a long time, the only – woman Member of Parliament. She served nobly until 1940, and later spent five years as an Ontario M.P.P. I heard her voice for the first time this morning, a tape of a CBC interview from the late 1930s, I think. Here was another smart and serene (and quietly fierce) female voice. (It’s the same voice she used when, heckled by a fellow MP — “Hey Agnes, don’t you wish you were a man?!” — she fixed him with a cool stare and said “Why yes, don’t you?”) She had an eloquence we don’t often hear these days, and a flatness of tone that showed no evidence of media training or the search for the perfect sound-bite. Yet she was incisive, clear and almost unbelievably modern in her views, without the shrill extremes that often accompany contemporary quests for justice. Except perhaps for the diction, her discussion could only be dated by the laughably archaic worries of the male union leader she was quietly slaughtering in debate.

Hail to Wendy. The last thing I heard on The Sunday Edition was a repeat documentary, first aired last spring, on a fifth-grade teacher in an Ottawa Catholic elementary school. Her name is Wendy Alexis, and her voice was one of those reminders of the greatness of the good teacher. Our culture too seldom recognizes it, but the Wendys of the world are priceless gems. “Always keep a diamond in your mind…” This Tom Waits lyric rumbles through my thoughts in the voice of Solomon Burke, and today it refers to Ms. Alexis. Her classroom is one of those New Canada, New World places where the children come from 20 countries, speak 15 languages among them, and are often refugees from humanity’s greatest modern failures. So Wendy Alexis gets her kids to be quiet so they can listen, to clean up the floor, and to learn their times tables. Yes, and she has created a community that is a microcosm of a suffering but still-hopeful world, where children can tell and hear their stories and work for the betterment of a world that has done them harm. And these kids at St. Luke’s school have a small project. It’s called “One Angel at a Time” (oneangelatatime@hotmail.com), and it is a project of remembrance. They are collecting feathers, 800,000 feathers, one for each of the slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. I’m not sure what they’re doing with them, and I don’t much care. They are becoming angels of mindfulness and compassion. They have about 50,000 so far. They are learning to read and think and love and trust. I’d like to send some feathers for these angels. And you?

Jane and Ingrid and Agnes and Wendy. Good morning!

ODY: Weeks 14/15. Frantic Talk, Classic Rock.

Posted by :James Howden On : December 5, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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My account of a mid-life guitar obsession continues. 105 straight days of terrorizing an innocent instrument, and counting. It started on August 21…

I rarely listen to Classic Rock radio stations anymore. It just gets old, quite apart from having to listen to the ads. (In the car, I always have at least two pre-set stations for any form of commercial radio so I can minimize the sell. Easier, of course, to keep locked on CBC/RadioCanada – always something I can listen to one of those four channels – or, occasionally, campus radio where there are wonderful little enclaves of ethnic music.) The classic rock that I want to hear generally doesn’t get played, but the occasional historic blast is fun to hear. Mostly, though, I’m with Watterson.

I still get Bill Watterson’s late lamented Calvin and Hobbes cartoons on-line, and here’s one of the latest. In the first three panels, Calvin is sitting on the floor listening to a portable radio. It bellows, “You’re listening to ‘Boomer 102’, Classic Rock – where we promise not to expose you to anything you haven’t heard a million times before! We’ll get right back to more hits from those high school days when your world stopped… But first, here’s our critic to review the latest movie based on a ‘60s or ‘70s TV show!” In the fourth panel, Calvin walks away from his father’s easy chair with an expression of, what, smouldering rage? Or maybe it’s terminal disappointment etched on his face. Dad: “What’s that look supposed to mean?”

I will admit to dipping back into musical nostalgia and “comfort tunes” occasionally. Heck, I was playing my vinyl Chicago VII this morning. (Remember “Wishin’ You Were Here”? Embarrassingly sweet, but this was one of their last albums that still had some meaty rock and roaring, untamed horns.) I’d rather hand-pick my sentimentality than have it served up to me in a pre-digested, sell-the-ad-space format. (I also lecture on Mondays and Thursdays.)

All that is a prologue to this Old Dog’s Guitar Lesson the Last with Kurt, which took me to old Ottawa south in the middle of Week 14. For some reason, I flipped to “The Bear” and found myself listening to John Fogarty and Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band I’ve been thinking I should revisit. Some simple and good guitar lickin’ for ODY embellishment, and Fogarty is one of the great voices of rock ‘n’ roll. (I can’t play the song yet, but I patrolled Centre Field for major parts of my memory; I’m grateful for Put me in, coach! I’m ready to play…) It had been a pretty soggy month in my part of the world – It’s beginning to look a lot like Climate Change / Everywhere you go… – so no surprise that “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” should be playing. It was just slightly spooky that this was one of the songs that Kurt the Guitar Guru skated through on our last evening. All I need to do is get the hang of the regular right-hand muting of every second or third strum, and from there it’s a breeze: it’s a two-chord alternation (G and C), with a turn to D at the end and a ringing E minor as the sonic cherry on the top. I can do that.

We also, in the midst of a quick glance at another muting technique, raced through little ditties that may raise my respect quotient with my own six-year-old Calvin: one of them is that little intro bass plunking of the TV Batman theme, and the other was “Shaken Not Stirred”, the brainless and archetypal Bond-on-the-run theme. What else? Daily Scale Studies, page 35 of the manual. (Do ‘em as much as you can stand!) More Scale Studies, 36. (Do more than you can stand!) Daily Non-Tonal Studies, 37. (These are even less musical than the previous ones, but they are a MUST for getting those fret fingers strong and independent. Go hard!) Blues, 38. (Don’t forget these guys. Memorize the 12-bar and 8-bar blues progressions. You’ll be glad you did!) Basic Chord Progressions, 39. (I know, you’ve had chord pages to work on before, but these are longer and more challenging ones. And look out, kids! Some of them are Actual Songs! See if you can identify ‘em.)

(At this point, I asked the GG how to do that “cheating F” chord, since the regular F is “such a bastard!” So he scribbled the diagram, noted that it was a moveable one – aha! – as is B-flat, by the way, oh, and B-flat minor which becomes C minor just by running up two frets, and take a look at the root note in an F minor and you’ll see that up one fret it’s an F-sharp…So remember, the basic movement through the chords is that changing from one letter to another, like A to B, is usually a two-fret movement, except between E and F and B and C, now, howya going to remember that? Okay, ‘Ernie farts’, ‘Bert collapses’! Okay? It was a bit fast for me, and of course there was way more than I could take in, but the encouraging thing was that it didn’t seem like Ancient Greek anymore. I can’t speak the language yet, but I can understand some of it, at least enough to go back later and teach myself what he said. Which is the GG’s modus guitarandi, anyhow, that and bubbling with enthusiasm for music and unrestrained goofiness.)

Campfire Songs #1, 40. (You’ll be able to figure these out. And I think I can!) Campfire Songs #2, 41. (Ditto.) Rhythmic Studies 1. (Okay, these exercises have every rhythmic figure you can strum, in 2/4 time, anyway. ‘Member the left-hand muting? Well, this is it. Spend a few hundred hours!) “And as for the rest of the pages we didn’t get to,” the GG grinned, “don’t bother with ‘em. They’re too hard!”

All this semi-frantic run-through was just to get us to keep practising like fiends when there is no longer any urgent reason to do so: no more lessons for awhile, and Lord knows there is no outcry for me to play my chaotic rhythms and stumbling chord-changes in public. In another month or so, the GG will be doing Beginner’s Guitar for Adults II, which he promises will be more song-based, but until then we’re on our own again. “Okay,” he said, “thanks for trying, keep on trying, bye!” And off he ran to his next group lesson. I still don’t know any names – no, wait, there was Glenn – but some will be back for BG 2. It might be fun, next time, to actually try to get to know some of these strangers I’m sharing my insecure stabs at learning with…

Meister Eckhart. (Damn your idea of God!)

Posted by :James Howden On : December 4, 2006
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“There are those among you who want to see God with the same eyes with which you look at a cow and to love God as you love a cow – for the milk and the cheese.”

Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim), Catholic theologian/philosopher, b. 1260, modern Germany. A blazingly brief condemnation of vain imaginings…

Barnabus Quotidianus

Posted by :James Howden On : December 4, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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BQ is a web log that I recently stumbled upon. (It’s written by a guy older than me, which I find encouraging and consoling.) If your grasp of Latin is even shakier than mine, I’ll tell you that it means something like “The Daily Barney”.

But no, worry not, there is no annoying soundtrack and zero appearances by purple cartoon dinosaurs. Barney is a British writer who comments on community and spiritual development, primarily – all the places where social concern, citizenship, faith and activism converge – but he also writes appealingly on a wide range of personal stories and interests. He’s a good read. He manages a fairly difficult thing with ease and style: he can write about matters of religion, for example, with refreshing plainness, sense and even fun.

It’s a personal log, so it doesn’t carry any official stamp, but Mr. Leith is a prominent member of the Bahá’í community of the United Kingdom. So, there is a fair sense of how they approach issues from gender equality to religious discrimination, along with the Barnabus take on technology, media, writing, family and a long list of other interests. It’s a pleasant cyberspace stroll that you might enjoy, as I do.

Don’t Forget About the Boys

Posted by :James Howden On : November 30, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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I did a little cosmetic surgery on an essay I wrote called “Boys Will Be Men”. It argues that gender equality is not only a matter of increasing opportunities for and confidence among our girls and women. Guys need help, too, especially if we are to raise generations of males who not only don’t resent women’s strivings, but actively embrace the work for equality between the sexes. It’s in “On Second Thought”, among a pile of mid-life guitar meditations, the “Old Dog Year”.

Through a Skier’s Eyes: Global Warming

Posted by :James Howden On : November 30, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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There’s a good story in The Toronto Star today about the point where the ski wax hits the snow. Or doesn’t, as it happens…

Two of Canada’s best winter athletes, the alpine skier Thomas Grandi and his Olympic silver-medallist wife, cross-country star Sara Renner, have outed themselves. They are environmentalists. They have a broad social consciousness that may have been pricked by their chosen sports, but which extends far beyond the winter playground to a greater concern for the way we live, especially in the wealthy Western hemisphere.

Grandi’s World Cup season is in jeopardy because of a lack of snow. Snow-making (and preserving) equipment is now critical to international meets, though it was rarely needed two decades ago. Many of the world’s top cross-country ski teams train together now because there are so few places with reliable snow cover. Renner skied through a driving rain at a meet well above the Arctic circle in Finland this year. The United Nations even proclaimed it a few years ago: skiers may be an endangered species.

What’s encouraging about Renner and Grandi is that they see beyond their sport. Athletes are young and they are focused. Elite competitors often live narrow and self-interested lives, and may be required to do so by coaches and associations that insist on Olympian levels of concentration as a prerequisite to success. But here’s the thing: especially for athletes in the well-paid professional ranks, how do they fill the other 18-20 hours a day beyond their training and competition? How much X-Box can they reasonably be expected to play?

No problem for these Canadian stars. They’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth. Not only do they know who David Suzuki is, they’re working with him on a public- awareness campaign on greenhouse gases and climate change. Their sport, and the industry and municipalities that support it are threatened. But for Thomas Grandi and Sara Renner, it’s not just about sport, either. They work hard – biking, cutting household energy use, buying sustainably – to reduce their own environmental footprints, and they even purchase carbon credits to offset the greenhouse gases produced when they must fly or drive. It’s everybody’s air; it’s everybody’s water, they say.

Bully for them for saying it, and for walking their talk. Now, when Sidney Crosby starts to express public concern for the increasing difficulty in building an outdoor rink, or when LeBron James begins to buy back the carbon offsets for his basketball road trips, we’ll know that the jock world is waking up to smell the global warning. (It’s about Climate Change, smarty!)

Boys Will Be Men

Posted by :James Howden On : November 30, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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In Arthur Miller’s grim masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, the stumbling Willy Loman careens downhill right in front of his two grown sons, one aimless and thieving, the other bent on whoring and cash. As “the only dream a man can have” disintegrates, Willy beseeches his sons, “Where are you guys? The woods are burnin’!” It’s a good question.  Where are the men?  I don’t know if they are still being moulded on the playing fields of Eton, but I’m having trouble finding them in my little acre.

The organizers of the Million Man March (now when was the last time you thought about that?) asked Willy’s question, lamenting the lostness they saw among African-American men. To their great credit (and that of the men) they found a lot of them, too, at least for a day. (1995. Whole different century.) Their concerns were not exclusive to the black community; their call was simply good and loud, and well-publicized, though it’s hard to hear now.  We are noticing, more and more – and should it come as a surprise? – that, in all cultures, both genders have been affected, afflicted, by the huge changes of the past century, and specifically by the struggle for equality between women and men. This should never have been a zero-sum game; women’s advancement should not require male retreat, but there are disturbing signals.

Every thoughtful gathering of men is filled with guys in search of their fathers. (So are tail-gate parties, but beer and burgers make it easy to forget.) Like an astonishing number of his professional peers, basketball icon Vince Carter was raised by his mother, with his father only a marginal and shadowy presence; it’s a story Sports Illustrated writes again and again. If you can stand the corrosive resentment, listen to Eminem. He flails viciously at his mother, but his departed dad scores at least as high on his rage meter. As an educator and father, I worry. I see men in retreat, especially the young ones.  Despite the advantages we still have (and let’s not whine about reduced opportunity; the corridors of commercial and political power are still dominated by the good ol’ White Male), we are leaving fields of honourable struggle in troops. The oppression of women remains a fact, but their emergence from it, at least in our part of the world, is an even stronger one. I’m afraid men are an endangered species.

I taught for a long time in a small-town high school.  Recently, of the top 9 students academically honoured in grades 9-11, one was male, and through the ‘90s and into this century the proportion of boys winning academic distinctions was rarely as high as 30%. The last time I counted, among our June graduates receiving awards, 79% were young women (and thank goodness for Paul, or the numbers would have been worse!) Of the dozen young people on the school’s “Wall of Fame” for outstanding extracurricular involvement, one has a Y chromosome, and our student leadership was routinely dominated by eager girls. My school was no exception. University spokespersons are wondering out loud where the lads are. It is young men in our schools who appear most in need of the loving arm, the encouraging smile, not to mention greater numbers.

In December, my students were always asked to think and write on the anniversary vigils in remembrance of the Montreal Massacre. (1989. Remember?) Fourteen shining female students were hunted in their university classrooms and slaughtered by a young man who blamed their success for his uselessness. This event was news to most of my students. It was sobering to them, but only because of its scale and, perhaps, because it couldn’t be dismissed as a “crazy American” aberration. And now there has been the Dawson College rampage in the same Canadian city. Men keep threatening, hurting, even killing women they claim to love when they find they can no longer keep or control them. These, of course, are the shocking extremes. More often, men just seethe in terminal frustration, or fade away. Legions of boys and young men, and more than a few midlife crisis managers, find that if life insists on a look inside their hearts, there is a smoking hole where a role model ought to be. What is a guy supposed to do?

A man yearns to be useful.  He needs a thing to work at. And yes, there are lots of toys – mechanical, electronic, chemical, female – to spend our hard-earned money and hormones on, not to mention being a slow-moving target for televised sport, World Wrestling Entertainment, record producers, porn kings, and the Hollywood hype machine. But we all know. All this “cannot fatten nor appease their thirst”, as the Teacher said, yet so many men, and most tragically the young ones, just can’t push themselves away from that all-you-can-eat banquet, or even realize that there is anywhere else to sit.

So I made the care and feeding of young men my specialty, teaching and coaching and prodding my four sons and their kind. Women trip and fall on this lurching, drunken planet, but they are building strength and vision and wisdom. They’re coming. They’re here, in every high school. I want to believe there will be enough good men brave enough to walk beside these bold and lovely ladies. It’s a big issue, but I suggest we start small. Take a man to lunch. Help a man across any metaphorical street you can. Let’s continue our work for the advancement of women, but don’t forget the boys!