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
BLURT 11: We all remember on big anniversaries. ‘Never forget’ does ring less hollow when the horror is but a decade old. But few see 9-11 as the toxic symbol it is: the toxicity of privilege and resentment, the disease of disunity, the pathology of meaningful futures sought without meaningful changes in outlook or decadent practices.
Yesterday after class, I went to my favourite noodle joint. I call it “the Muslim place” because one of my friends identified it that way, and a nodding salaam alaikum is received with appreciation, and because I can’t read the blue and white sign in either Hanzi or Arabic. A wall poster for the city of Lanzhou, capital of China’s central-western Gansu province and an ancestral home of noodliciousness, makes me think that the owning family must come from there. It’s fairly clean (but don’t use the washroom), there is a posted No Smoking request (but don’t ask them to enforce it), the noodles are hand-made, old-fashioned, in-house (free and easy to watch, from the back tables, the one-eyed maker throw the dough),
BLURT 10: It’s always good to try new things. Openness. Discovery. Antidotes to fear and complacency and sloth. But. What but? Lay’s Chinese potato chip flavour “Lobster Cheese”. Now trembling about “Refreshing Cucumber” and “Green Tea” as well.