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Better Read Than Never: SAUL’s The Unconscious Civilization 2

Posted by :James Howden On : November 4, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I began talking about John Ralston Saul’s book back here, though on that occasion I mainly focussed on the writer. Here is the first part of my precis of this short, bold, stimulating, even visionary book.

Kind of a cheesy cover, but don’t judge…

“Know thyself.” “The unexamined life is not worth living.” John Ralston Saul might have chosen these Socratic aphorisms to lead off The Unconscious Civilization, his 1995 lecture series and book. Instead, he chose a slightly more modern reference to self-knowledge, and his fundamental argument is that this same imperative of understanding applies to societies and even entire civilizations, hence his title.

Saul argues that mere propaganda has become a domineering substitute for the socially constructive use of language in public discourse. He warns that our practice of what we call ‘democracy’ is in fact warped and even thwarted by the steady march of corporatist thinking.

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Love My Shorts

Posted by :James Howden On : October 20, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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The mighty Iron Shorts! See how proudly they stand! How scornful they are of Photoshop or rigidity-enhancing chemicals! Straight off the clothesline, in our living room…

They say, don’t they, that small things amuse small minds. Here’s proof!

I grin sometimes when I drop my shorts at the end of a warmish day and they stand where I stood. I decided that you, dear readers, should not be deprived of this odd bit of jollity. Clothing that “wears like iron” is a desirable quality in my world, though not in my bride’s. She grimaces at a garment that stands on its own two pant-legs, rather than softly swirling. I, on the other leg(s), will be proudly wearing these shorts in 2023. I bought ’em on a steep discount from my usual low-fashion outlet, and later bought a similarly reduced fall/winter jacket under the same label and made with the same heavy, durable canvas. (And with such numerous, handy and sturdy-zippered pockets! I’m not into backing companies with no need of my support, but it’s good stuff.)

The next load of laundry was ready for hanging in our south-facing balcony, but these bad boys don’t dry too quickly. I took them off the line, then stood them up on the ottoman to finish drying. No extra starch. No hidden supports. No photo magic. Just an upstanding pair of shorts, just the way Howdy likes ’em.

Waking Up the Dads

Posted by :James Howden On : October 15, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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These things happen when you’re a wai guo ren in the most Chinese places, instead of hanging safely in the ex-pat havens. I had boldly gone – and only through the dumbest of luck – where no “outside country person” had likely gone before. No big deal: I was in the mid-court seats of a chilly Dalian gymnasium, the ones where Party members or other administrative kingpins sit for the bigger ceremonies. It’s the closest thing to corporate boxes at my university’s indoor stadium: padded office chairs roll freely behind a ten-metre-wide desk, instead of the moulded blue plastic bum-holders in the rest of the building. Can you see me now?

I was minding my own business avidly minding every bit of business connected with the on-court director of our newly-stumbled-into youth basketball club, and with my son’s performance of a medley of this young coach’s greatest hit, “50 Ways to Beat a Pylon”. (It’s probably just a coincidence, but in my head it has the same tune as Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”.) Reassurance to my sports-averse readers: this isn’t really about basketball. It’s about me, and China, and Chinese fathers (one of ’em),

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Better Read Than Never: SAUL’s The Unconscious Civilization

Posted by :James Howden On : October 9, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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I’ve come back for a second assault of John Ralston Saul’s 1995 book The Unconscious Civilization.1 It’s a brainy thing, but not awfully long. And it’s not that it was such tough going; Saul’s prose is quite readable even on difficult subjects. I just wasn’t bringing my mind to it, and there are always Other

JRS in book-signing mode. Best advice I’ve ever heard on writing a book: “Finish it so you can go write a better one!” I remain heedless.

Things to Read. Saul made his early reputation as a novelist, but that phase of his career has been eclipsed by his recent prolific output of essays and book-length arguments on globalization, citizenship, the true nature of democracy and of his Canadian homeland. He is something of a gadfly, and sometimes the epithet “philosopher-king of Canada” is muttered irritably, usually by fellow Canucks suspicious of both thinkers and those who dare to do it in public.

I find him a witty, scarily smart and superbly opinionated voice. In the mid-oughts, when I was writing for the Governor General of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson, I got to spend some time in various front-row seats for the JRS experience.

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The Rock: Good Medicine?

Posted by :James Howden On : September 27, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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There I was, though I wasn’t sure why, mostly minding my business, loitering in a new place but with enough quasi-official approval that, even though I didn’t know anyone well, they sort of knew me and blandly accepted that I was fiddling around in some vaguely useful way behind that desk. That’s one thing.

I don’t know why they ran a film, but they’d have probably argued for some linguistic or educational purpose behind the CGI, though I think they were just as bored as I was and equally content to be that way. So there we were. This happened:

I couldn’t stop looking, either. Mysterious!

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Zhong Qiu Kuai Le

Posted by :James Howden On : September 19, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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It’s the evening of Mid-Autumn Festival day in Dalian, China. It has been a lazy but pretty day. Zhong qiu kuai le literally means “middle autumn happy”, the standard holiday greeting. We wandered through the nearby university on the way to the first restaurant we entered in this city, in September 2009. Then, an American veteran of the Dalian scene noticed us dazedly looking around, and came out of Fengxin Jiujia (literally “harvest money alcohol home”), a homey little restaurant/tavern with a menu in English. It’s been a mainstay since.

We’ve eaten a little bit of “mooncake” (yue bing), which is a little like what Christmas cake used to be in Canada — everyone gives them or serves them during the season, but many don’t actually like them. We smile, imagining the furious cross-country scurrying of couriers delivering elaborate and requisite mooncake gifts to people who then have a disposal problem. Some people love ’em, though, and there are decadent and non-traditional ones that my sweet tooth would likely savour. (This is a short greeting, so don’t be afraid to continue!)

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Happy 500th Birth(day)!

Posted by :James Howden On : September 17, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Got some cake? Know where the ice cream is hidden? We won’t bother with the five hundred candles, thanks, but I welcome you to eat your favourite birthy-day-ish things.

I’m trying to quit, so do the festive eating for me.  bekicookscakesblog.blogspot.com is the site from which I nabbed this low-cal number. Mmm.

 What are we celebrating? I nearly missed it myself, but my recent posting of a quote from the great Paulo Freire, down there on the right in “He Said/She Said”, was the

500th post on JH.com!!

Some were short blurts, or quotes from others, but most — as some of you know only too well — were pretty full-bodied pieces that most often run between 800-1400 words. Especially to those of you who’ve digested a pile of ’em, thanks for reading. Thanks for raising a long-stemmed glass of Cherry Garcia, or German Chocolate Cake, or even Redcoat Rations (!) in a toast:

to reading!

to writing!

to everything that goes with it!

 

* Ice cream counts as part of “everything”, even if I could only manage a McD’s sundae today. But then so do peace, justice, education and clean water. (And basketball.)

Thinking of Yourself, Less

Posted by :James Howden On : September 9, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Time to plant.

I remember when humility was a virtue, a quality that most people felt was praiseworthy and useful. We had no trouble distinguishing it from humiliation, which was a shameful condition visited upon us by others. Oh, we liked it when the braggart was forced to “eat humble pie” (sometimes, even, when it was us who had to eat that bitter confection), but mainly we felt that baking that pie and nibbling at it regularly was not just good medicine but often a sweet and sustaining way to eat.

Here’s today’s question: does a humble writer try to increase his page views by shamelessly flogging his ‘brand’? (“Duh, of course!”) Or to put it another, less JH.comAllTheTimeHeyEnoughAboutMeWhatDoYOUThinkOfMyWebsite?- centric way, how can we use the incredible connectivity and expressive potential of social media without becoming insufferably dull and incurably self-absorbed? I don’t know, and mainly err on the side of Luddism and avoidance.

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Take the Red Pill! Rainn Wilson & The Matrix II

Posted by :James Howden On : August 31, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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This is the second part of my recollection of actor Rainn Wilson’s talk at the recent Association for Baha’i Studies conference in Irvine, California. Part One is here.

Rainn Wilson related, with wonder and amusement, how excited many people became in  connecting the “man was embryonic in the world of the matrix” quote of ‘Abdu’l-Baha to the  mind-blowing Matrix trilogy. He said that there were groups of people who embrace “Matrixism” as religion, and regard ‘Abdu’l-Baha as its early prophetic voice, and as its link to the entire history of revealed religion. This was news to me, but I found them in a most curious and bemusing on-line presence. One of their four basic tenets is the use of hallucinogenics as a sacrament; another is “adherence to the principles of one or more of the world’s religions until such time as the One [Neo doesn’t count] returns”. This tiny group does elaborate a few more funky laws, my favourite of which is that “all forms of professional athletic competition have now been abrogated”. (The revenge of the picked-on against the surly jocks!) That’s funny stuff, I guess, unless it’s pathetic. However, it points out again, if we needed more evidence, how hungry human beings are for a sense of meaning in life.

Wilson showed another clip from Matrix the first. Neo faces off with the baddies who are trying to prevent him from penetrating and exposing the mass hallucination that intelligent machines have created. Their programming illusion is intended to convince the humans that life is as it always was – meanwhile, their actual bodies are imprisoned in pods and used as robot fuel. This is where many of the oh cool! effects of the movie are featured. Neo bends

“Bullets, be still and know that I am Neo!” Who hasn’t done this?

space and time. A hail of bullets slows at his silent command and clatters to the floor. He leans at impossible angles, and leaps with impossible speed. He artfully decomposes a bad dude by flying right into his holographic gut and exploding him from the inside. (Nice!) Neo has wondrous powers in the supercomputer-generated matrix because he understands that it is only a projection, an unreal construction. (Well, and because he is The Chosen One, which obviously helps.) By knowing the reality of life in that world, he becomes the master of it. 

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Rainn Wilson Explores The Matrix

Posted by :James Howden On : August 30, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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The Association for Baha’i Studies is knocking the “stuffy” out of the notion that academia and intellectual pursuits are narrow, competitive, elitist and pretty darned dull. The concept of scholarship is being remade out of its old “ivory tower” paradigm into something more closely resembling a noble, shared adventure in learning. This, among many other things — the new friends I meet, the musicians I add to my playlist, the books I lust over, the writing ideas I hatch — has made the Association’s annual conference one of my greatest treats. So many smart and good-hearted people! Such outstanding, mind-altering presentations! So many confirmations of my careening efforts to “walk the spiritual path with practical feet”! 

Anyway. What follows is Part One of a report on one of the highlights of the recent conference of the ABS in Irvine, California, which is (kind of) on the way from Ottawa to Dalian…

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“So I went to the fights the other night and a hockey game broke out!” Rodney Dangerfield

It’s an old gag, but it’s still a goodie. In the same spirit, I went to the 37th annual conference of the Association for Baha’i Studies and a pop-culture laugh riot ensued. Not only did I feel happy and a little smarter at the end of that comic lecture, but nobody tried to sell me anything except ideas. This is the second time, so far as I know, that actor Rainn Wilson has spoken at one of these spirited, brainy conclaves. He brings a healthy kind of irreverence and the humour one would expect from a certified Comedy Star, but also a serious commitment to his faith community, a sharp mind and a blazing conviction that soul matters. (And no, he doesn’t speak or behave like Dwight Schrute from The Office.)

The iconic poster: trenchcoats and coolness and guns, oh my!

Mr. Schrute’s Wilson’s talk was designed to show that the 1999 blockbuster film The Matrix had more to it than awesome special effects and a cool visual style. He wasn’t joking, but he was hilarious.  Just in case we’d forgotten, or had missed Keanu Reeves (as Neo) and Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus) and the gang when The Matrix came out, Wilson went to the video screen for a reminder.

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