Rss

Morrie Schwartz (on rushing for meaning)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 21, 2014
1

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , , ,

“Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.”

Morrie Schwartz (1916-1995) was a “teacher to the last”. A professor of sociology at Brandeis University, he became a household name through the dignified, unashamed and generous manner of his dying from ALS (“Lou Gehrig‘s Disease”). The news magazine show “Nightline” featured him several times during his excruciating but somehow uplifting decline. Of course, Mitch Albom‘s huge-selling 1997 memoir, Tuesdays With Morrie, made Schwartz well-known and loved around the world.

Continue Reading >>

Hafez (on asking for the moon)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 17, 2014
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , ,

There isn’t enough poetry on this site. In my life. In my notebooks.

In the world.

There I was, though, minding my own business, when a Persian poem of considerable age bounced in front of my eyeballs. You might have heard of the 13th-century poet known in the West as Rumi; a century later, in Shiraz, Iran, came another gifted wordsmith and mystic lover called Hafez. The Persians revere him. Iran has a national day in his honour — imagine, for a poet. What follows, called “With That Moon Language”, is a small piece of why.

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Continue Reading >>

E.B. White (on writing, taste & popularity)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 12, 2014
1

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , ,

“The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself,
and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Let him start sniffing the air, or glancing, at the Trend Machine, and he is as good as dead, although he may make a nice living.”

Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) was an American writer, editor and quiet man of letters. He was a cornerstone of The New Yorker magazine from nearly its beginning, and edited and updated his former Cornell professor William Strunk’s “little book” The Elements of Style, making it the last word in writing with succinctness, clarity and wit. (If you write and haven’t read it, you must do so today. It is brief, potent and shockingly enjoyable to read, and I should do it again.) By the way, he also wrote Charlotte’s Web, perhaps the most enduring piece of children’s fiction that we have, plus Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan.

I don’t want to be “as good as dead”,

Continue Reading >>

William Butler Yeats (on perceiving beauty)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 28, 2014
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , , , ,

“The world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

Guilty, guilty, guilty: I am a fan of W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet, and need this reminder, the all-I-need-to-know-I-learned-in-kindergarten reminder, to LOOK. Or the Yogi Berra  “dumb jock”-as-zen-philosopher koan: “It’s amazing what you can observe just by looking.” It’s amazing how much we don’t see, and discouraging how much natural, wholesome and otherworldly goodness we fail to notice because we’re fixated on the trashy, the tinsel, the temporary, the trite and the televisual. (That’s right, just call me “Mr. T”.)

Continue Reading >>

M.P. Freeman (on service and self-deprecation)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 26, 2014
2

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , ,

I’ve known MPF for a good while now, but in the way of introverts, the distance-loving perspective of nerdy writers, we’re getting to know each other more deeply via blog posts and nearly never-ending email threads. (G’mornin’, sir. How goes it?) One of his occasional comments here on JH.com recently blew up into this guest post on Aboriginal — and just plain human — identity and homing instincts.

We got ourselves into a brief exchange on feeling at home spiritually, or existentially, or even (Dawkins forbid!) religiously. Mr. Freeman, apart from his thoroughly Canadian love for hockey, curling and Tim Horton’s, is an unconventional guy, but quietly goes about serving others — as teacher, activist, fellow traveller and friend — in a way that most conventionally spiritual or religious types would do well to emulate. For my part, I come from a youthful ethical perspective that says work of any kind, performed in the spirit of service, is the truest kind of worship. I accused him of, therefore, being strongly implicated in this practical kind of faith, and I liked his brief, sardonic and wisely jocular reply:

Continue Reading >>

Jerry Wainwright (who?) (a whistle-blower’s last request)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 13, 2014
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , , , ,

Yeah, well, I didn’t know who Jerry Wainwright was, either. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, Jerry Wainwright was the author that I nearly gave credit to for my last “He Said/She Said”, but thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I (think I) got it right in crediting Martina Navratilova, instead. In sourcing the “Wainwright” quote about winning in sport (and life), I learned about the man, which was interesting in the context of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Wainwright was a Division 1 head coach for nearly 20 years.

He had moderate success at two middling schools, occasionally qualifying underdog squads for the “Big Dance” of the national tournament, until his dogged success might have gotten him higher on the basketball coaching ladder than he’d have wanted, in hindsight. He took the headman’s spot at Chicago’s DePaul University, leading a program that had once been something of a national power but which has struggled in recent decades, a weak sister in a strong conference. As it had done with several other hires before him, the position ate Mr. Wainwright, bringing massive stress and even hate – ah, the shining ideal of sport in America! – towards him and his family. The Blue Demons lost more than they won.

I will get to the point, to his quote, after a little more context. (Who doesn’t love context, after all?)

Continue Reading >>

Martina Navratilova (on winning)

Posted by :James Howden On : April 4, 2014
1

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , ,

It being March, me being an irredeemable basketball junkie (and hoops purist, which is a difficult double these days), I’m thinking a lot about winning.

(FEAR NOT, MOTHERS-IN-LAW AND OTHER STRANGERS WITH LIVES OUTSIDE OF SPORTS: THIS ISN’T REALLY ABOUT BASKETBALL, AND IT’S BRIEF.)

Life is hyper-competitive these days, has been for a long while, and most of the favoured paths to success, or happiness, or just plain fame, take the path of least cooperation. Beating that guy, out-performing those rivals, one-upping the neighbours, even defeating those personal demons: everybody’s urged to be competitive, and if you’re going to compete, then it’s usually better if you win. (Though not always.) Even the English language chimes in — being able to do your job, to have useful skills, is to be competent. Cooperation is often framed as secondary, nice for kids, a good refuge for the untalented. This is one of our biggest philosophical/historical misunderstandings, say I, but let’s not go there for now. Let’s say we’re competing,

Continue Reading >>

Douglas Coupland (on the economics of fat)

Posted by :James Howden On : March 12, 2014
1

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , ,

“Perhaps the ultimate truth about weight gain in western cultures – certainly in the U.S. – is that obese people are simply much, much better for the economy than thin people. They eat more food and, in so doing, drive up the need for agriculture, food processing, packaging and advertising. They get sicker more often and keep the medical system busier. They rely more on their vehicles, which is great for big oil. In fact, there is not one single aspect of capitalism that is not enhanced, on the dollar level, by obesity. Obesity…represents the end state of a certain way of viewing and experiencing the world.”

Douglas Coupland (1961- ) is a Canadian writer, best known for the first of his dozen novels, Generation X. He also trained and still works as a visual artist, and has several non-fiction books as well, usually incorporating photography. He became a writer completely by fluke, he says, though now “there’s nothing else I’d rather do”.

This is extracted from a piece called “Living Big” in the Financial Times Magazine. (The emphasis in the quotation is mine, not Coupland’s.) It’s very interesting, starting off with a series of anecdotes that seem only partially connected, and then concluding with an argument that makes what preceded into a sensible whole — not your standard high school five-paragraph expository essay. Hurray!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

J.R. Saul (on Adam Smith, Rolling in his Grave)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 28, 2014
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , , , ,

I’m no historian, and my knowledge of economics is even thinner, but I never liked Adam Smith. This was due mainly to my ignorance, as well as the company he keeps. Right-wingers and trickle-down theorists invoke him as if he was a bearded Old Testament patriarch, and as a younger man I assumed that their often-heartless, always plutocrat*-friendly policies made St. Adam someone to reflexively dislike and ignore. I still haven’t actually read much of Smith himself, but Saul’s The Unconscious Civilization points out, several times, the ways in which Adam Smith’s thinking has been cited selectively and often incorrectly by modern “voodoo economists”. Here’s one excerpt:

* noun (derogatory) 1. a person whose power derives from their wealth. (syn. : rich person, magnate, millionaire, billionaire, multimillionaire)

“This idea that sympathy for others is the essential characteristic of the human condition was…central to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, a treatise that is rarely mentioned by the false disciples of his economic theories. They limit themselves to a narrow reading of The Wealth of Nations and then apply it to the general…society….How poor Adam Smith got stuck with disciples like the market economists and the neo-conservatives is hard to imagine. He is in profound disagreement with their view of society.”

John Ralston Saul (1947- ) in the closing chapter of The Unconscious Civilization, a 1995 book that echoes his delivery that same year of Canada’s remarkable annual Massey Lecture series. The talks and the subsequent book are a good capsule of Saul’s views on individualism, corporatism, and the building of a humane and progressive society. I’ll soon be posting my final look at this excellent and admirably brief publication, the end of a series of posts that began here.  

Mr. Dog (on blogging)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 16, 2014
1

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , ,

“I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”

New Yorker magazine cartoonist Alex Gregory put these ice-cold words in the mouth of a certain pooch. I laughed when I first saw it, good and hard, and ever since it’s been a wry little knife in the ribs — a witty stiletto it remains, but a sharp.

There are dozens of quotes, most not as nasty or flippant as this one, in the “He Said/She Said” section of my, um, my blog thoughtful repository of compelling on-line thoughts and observations.