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.)
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.
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.
BLURT 13: There is more to China than silk and economics. “Superiors” berate, threaten a friend for involvement with “this evil religion”. No opportunity for explanation or defence, but this might’ve been a good one: “we desire but the good of the world and the happiness of the nations”. Ignorance is a long, long march from bliss.
BLURT 12: Professional basketballer Ron Artest has changed his name to Metta World Peace. Shall we rejoice? The end of war on earth is a punchline, not a pipe-dream!
Subtle, he wasn’t! This is the title of a poem by the American Vachel Lindsay, one of my daily electronic gifts from the Academy of American Poets. Sometimes, the day’s package of words overwhelms me – again? More tangled texts to unravel? – or just irritates me. Poetry at its best is wonderfully irritating, like the grit in a clam shell. I was glad to greet Mr. Lindsay. (And sometimes it just ticks me off, especially some contemporary stuff, so aggressively obscure that it’s no surprise most people have given up on “serious” poetry. But the words don’t give up on us, and they keep returning: in popular song, in gangsta rap, in comics and graffiti, like twitch grass sprouting between the patio bricks.)
Vachel Lindsay killed himself in 1931, victim of another era’s financial meltdown
