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Happy November

Posted by :James Howden On : November 1, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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It’s a great day for Catholics to remember and revere their preferred holy souls. It’s great for everybody, I say. All Saints Day (once called “All Hallows” day), was the original churchly stimulus for the dark and tricksy slant to the “All Hallows E(v)en(ing)” preceding it, which has grown into the tooth-rotting cuteness of the North American Hallowe’en. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except when high schoolers exulting in their sexuality and maturity also want to swipe the free candy that should go to small children. And to me.)

Coincidentally, it also was a day for me to repair a rather ragged piece that I had (prematurely) posted to the right in the It’s All About Sports! section. I had never suitably commemorated a passing that I’d been anticipating for years: the death of John Wooden last June. Coach Wooden was the closest thing to a saint that we’re likely to see in the world of sports, a coaching genius and an old-fashioned Christian gentleman and a great and enduring hero of mine since I was 16.

And did you know that National Novel Writing Month started today? It began as a lark by a few friends in San Francisco, California, and now a few hundred thousand people worldwide are going to try to write a 50,000-word novel this month. Tens of thousands will use the month as a carefree, quantity-not-quality way to be able to say: “I wrote a novel!”

Are You Thinking Yet?

Posted by :James Howden On : October 18, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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How do we know when we’re actually thinking? Someone once said that if you don’t know a second language, you can never know whether you are thinking or simply replaying a skull-encased recording of other people’s views, Coke jingles, cultural driftwood and stale tales that pass from gossip to “common sense”. But I speak a second language and shards of other ones, and while I love to find the way another coding system expresses an idea or an action, I don’t think that mental access to another manner of speaking is any guarantee of thought, either.

All this in light of the Robert Frost quote I recently found — “to learn to write is to learn to have ideas” — and use in every class and in my own auto-peptalks. Sometimes — I think — I come closest to genuine thinking when I’m writing. How can I know what I think ’til I see what I’ve said? (Somebody. Another orphan quote.) And maybe the repeated citation of other people’s bons mots is also a sure way to avoid original thought. But I doubt that. (!)

A Little TIC

Posted by :James Howden On : September 13, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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Dorothy Gale’s hushed and wide-eyed sensation — Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more — is something we refer to, in my house, as a “TIC moment”. When we are slapped silly by the knowledge that we’re not in Canada anymore, we’ve learned to shrug (or smile, or swear) and say, “This Is China!”

Our latest TIC gem happened on Sunday morning. (They often do. Even though Canada is an increasingly secular society, we still have shreds of attachment to the idea of Sunday as a day of rest. Not here!) Our son was in bed, half awake at about ten minutes to seven, when he heard knocking at his second-storey window. Like a good Canadian boy, he dreamily thought, “Why is there a woodpecker at my window?” And then the guy outside pounded again, so Sam opened his drapes.

Outside was a man suspended on thick, natural-fibre ropes from our apartment roof. We see them every day, scaling the exterior walls of our building with wood ladders and hemp and muscle-power to do the never-ending patchwork of the exterior bricks and concrete. He gestured. Sam opened the window, and asked what the heck he wanted in good local vernacular. He needed water for his cement-mix. (TIC! When two men came last spring to do some interior repair and painting, they not only asked us for a water bottle they cut open to hold their paint, but for wet cloths and elbow grease to clean up after them. Drop-cloths? Silly reader!) So, like good Chinese apartment dwellers at seven a.m. on a Sunday, Sam and his mother ran to get glasses of water. But the window screens here aren’t easily removed. Spiderman tilted his mixing bucket, nodded. My wife emptied the glass toward the window screen, and apparently some of it went into the mix. “Xie xie,” the wall-crawling repairman said.

Sam was later thanked for a second emptying of a water-glass out through the screen, and for a cloth that our new best friend needed to wipe off the concrete splashes on the window. Sam ran down and threw that one up to him. TIC. They’re out there again today, using a hand-drill and a long extension cord to chip away at decaying concrete. (Another TIC indicator: this apartment complex where we live, no doubt built at a feverish pace, as everything else is here, is no more than a dozen years old.*) The next thing you know, we’ll be asked to pay for repairs to the defective kitchen stove! Oh, wait, that’s right. We just were.

* Fact check: it opened in 2003. Wow.

By the Waters of Galilee

Posted by :James Howden On : September 6, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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Among the delights of a summer spent home in Canada, squeezed between two years in China, was a weekend with the Baha’is in a little town near my capital home. Summer school: reunion, reflection, prayer and conversation, kids and laughter and sun through the trees. We talked and studied and played in a gorgeous riverside retreat, an oasis of Christian calm and service garnished with pine trees and sparkling waters. Sweet.

Bernie took his canoe, for dawn prayers of the paddling kind. Dona brought tennis rackets, and found a hitting partner slightly less disastrous than his bride. Rhonda retreated from just having packed her life to go to Pakistan – two weeks before the deluge. Wee Carmel brought her brown astonished eyes, and we were grateful. Our family circle grew, like a deep breath in, inspiration, maybe for a few days, possibly beyond. Nobody watched TV.

I watched clouds and learned from faces. I listened to spirited seminars and conversations blown through the woods. I try to see and hear them now, in the midst of the city millions, the car horns and the concrete and the day’s discourse that I don’t understand. I am in Dalian. I am in China. But I spent a few divine days in Galilee.

Where Have YOU Been?

Posted by :James Howden On : June 7, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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No, not “what are you doing right now?”, because who but a twit would want to know that about anybody who isn’t themselves or, at least, someone connected by blood or love or deep belonging? (I know. Millions of people. I laugh, when I don’t curse or sigh.)

I have such a remote and tentative connection with the Powers that make my words available to (random fractions of) the Universe. It has taken me weeks to get my floating head back into the blue heaven. It was a few of my more curious Chinese students pointing out that my site was suspended that informed me, among other things, how rarely I’ve been posting. So thanks, and hello.

And rest in peace, John Robert Wooden. I cannot stop reading about him. Among the things I’m sure of, his hoped-for greeting at the gauzy doors of the next kingdom was surely given, or none of this has sense: Well done, thou good and faithful servant. And apart from those Mighty Messengers Whose missions none of us can possibly be inspired to emulate, Coach Wooden has been my greatest and most abiding hero. And now I can let this go, too, for I’m not getting any closer to that galaxy, non plus…

Slowing and Fasting

Posted by :James Howden On : March 2, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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I know, I know. Where are the rants on the Olympics from the sports-loving Canadian expatriate? They’re in gestation. It has been a fun sort of oddness to watch Chinese sports television — CCTV 5: All Skating, all the Time! — from a Canuck mindset. For now, you might want to check out a recent non-Olympics post on an athletic passing, not quite so tragic or sudden as that of the Georgian luger, but still one that moved me. It’s in the It’s All About Sports! section.

Okay, so what about those Better Read Than Never reviews? Don’t you do any reading while you’re in China? Well, you bet I do, and I’m even publishing some of my earlier rambles in a glossy but editorially questionable ex-pat magazine here called Focus Dalian. But to answer your question, here are a few recent alphabetical journeys: another re-reading of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, a spiritual butt-kicking for those “whose reach is beyond their grasp“; The Rebel Angels, a witty and erudite Robertson Davies novel, first of the Cornish trilogy; Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man?, in which former hoopstar Charles Barkley wonders interestingly about race and power “and why everyone should buy my book” in conversation with a pre-Presidential Obama, a post-Presidential Clinton, Morgan Freeman, Ice Cube and other American notables; Mind, Heart, & Spirit: Educators Speak, a remarkable collection of testimonies and memoirs stitched together by Canadian poet Heather Cardin; Changing Planes, linked short stories by Ursula K. Leguin that acerbically explore alternate nearly-human realities (gosh, she’s good — I’ve also been reading her Earthsea Cycle as bedtime for a few young bonzos, deep and wondrous tales that an adult can also thrill to); Norman Bethune, my old boss Adrienne Clarkson’s biography of the great Canadian hero of revolutionary China; Waiting, a fascinating and distinctive novel of a Cultural Revolution-era family, by the expatriate Chinese novelist Ha Jin; The Advent of Divine Justice, a powerful book which is really one long letter to the then-tiny North American Baha’i community by the Faith’s Guardian, Shoghi Effendi, before the Second World War (a vision and a call just as awesome in 2010); Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s classic romance, glorious writing and funnier than I’d expected; and last, so that this listing paragraph might be righted (and written), Dreams of My Father, Obama’s pre-Presidential and pre-Senatorial memoir, and how wonderful is it, if we must have individuals in such positions of power and fame, that the Number One Dude can think and really write? It’s not easy to find English books in Dalian, but we brought plenty and (who knew?) our Thailand sojourn led us to a little Chiang Mai hub of remarkably good used bookstores. We will survive.

Yeah, but we still remember a promise, hmm, last August (!), that “there will be details” of this Chinese experience? Justice is on your side, faithful readers, but the trouble is that I’ve been too busy experiencing. And justice is also on my side, because I didn’t say when, now did I? Luckily, my bride is a more prompt, practical and pictorial reporter than I am, and so your lust for details on our lives in China can be satisfied with a trip to her LiveJournal record. It’s fun and thoughtful stuff.

What about fasting? Yes, we’ve heard about my chronic slowness, but we’ve hit that sacred, spring is coming time of year and I’m fasting, fellow babies, I’m fasting for the 37th consecutive March. I hope to do it well, to go beyond syllables and sounds, beyond brainless fridge-prowling and absurd appetites, and beyond eat-drink to pray. I wish me luck, and I hope for sparks and progress, but I always love it. A cool blogger called Phil is writing his experience of fasting the Baha’i way, and I recommend him. He’s always a good read.

So here’s my question: is there anything else you’d like to know? You could comment. I’m also told that it’s easy — hey, I’m the god-king of this little electronic pasture, so I’ve never actually subscribed to it — to get JH.com hand-delivered to your Inbox by hitting the orane button up top. Let me know how that goes. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Save the Thinking for Later

Posted by :James Howden On : December 17, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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I ran this morning, and it was surprisingly good. After a November that was sickly and often rather blue, I’ve begun to re-establish a (physical) fitness routine, which includes a half-hour run every other day. It’s been going fairly well, considering the draggy condition of my posterior during that sorry excuse for a month, but today I didn’t feel at all like running – until I was five minutes in.

Prayer is like that. The disciplines of prayer and meditation have rarely felt easy or natural for me. Although I grew up in a faithful, churchgoing family, I didn’t learn to pray, and certainly not with any system to it; there were only the odd rapid-fire mutterings of grace before a special meal. Though a Baha’i seeks moderation, this one has always been fond of extremes in temperature, immoderate efforts in sport and elsewhere, and those edges of life that “proved”, however uselessly or painfully, that I was no average Jay. Throw in a little melancholy perfectionism, and I found the pathway to prayer free and open only when I felt especially good (read “worthy to approach the sacred threshold”) or remarkably bad (read “emotional free-fall”, “worthy to approach the rocky bottom”). Spirit feast or soul famine. Yet I’ve discovered – and it has felt lovely and fresh every uncountable time – that, mainly, I only really feel like praying once I’m praying. I found that out this morning. (Again!)

In the four months I’ve been heading toward or living in China, the walls to writing have seemed similarly high. For awhile, though I had a very fuzzy imagination of myself being set free to make new word-things here, I was paying attention to the thousand things that a newbie  needs and wants to do. How do we enrol our son in school? Buy groceries? Find this? Understand that? And then I started to think about writing, about creating the psychological and physical space in our modest apartment, about how hard it is here, about the books/time/energy/order I wish I had, and the disappointment of being so far behind writerly young men that I once tutored in the art.

And then I started to write, hesitantly. And it’s early days, yet, but I think I’m remembering that the way in to writing is to write. (As if I hadn’t taught that, not least to myself, for centuries.) It’s such an old and stubborn error: we imagine an existential order in which we have values, and then realize them outwardly; in which we have a recognizable emotion or intellectual impulse and then act upon it. But all the artists who have “gone pro” (as one hard-bitten writing coach put it), all the great Sages, and all the top jock gurus know that it’s often the other way ‘round.

Inspiration comes to those who show up at their workbench, expecting it.

Certitude comes to those who practise, though uncertain.

Guys who can run can run ‘cause they run, so run!

I Hear Voices

Posted by :James Howden On : December 15, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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I sit down to think, but instead I listen to the loud male voice next door. I lean toward the wall, waiting for the climax, the blow, the upended table and chair. Sometimes I can hear a softer voice, the mortar between the sharp red bricks, and sometimes nothing seems to interrupt the harangue. Is he talking on the phone? Does he ever run out of breath? Why is he so angry? What is his point?

Of course, it’s all Chinese to me, and this wouldn’t be the first time that this canadien errant has proven himself deaf to the culture, as every billboard and storefront proclaims my blindness, or at least my ignorance. Each time we drag a local friend into my son’s school to mediate between us and the unilingual administrator, I ask, Is she angry? She sounds bitter, and spits out those alien syllables in a way that would spell barely controlled rage on my street. I’m told, no, she may be a little tense, but not angry. Cellphone shouting, a bus driver’s emergence from silence, bartering in the market, so often I hear resentment and irritation that seems out of place. (Maybe it’s me.) It’s disorienting – so many ways to be muddled in Dalian! – to not be surely able to recognize anger in the voices of others.

The shoe of violence didn’t drop next door. I had finally slapped the wall a few times, just to sound a kind of warning if it was male rage I was hearing. Or to suggest they turn down the TV, who knows? Which makes me wonder what our neighbours make of our ex-pat noise-making?

Now A Word From Your Sponsor…

Posted by :James Howden On : November 19, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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…and Friendly Neighbourhood Writerman, yes, it’s me, trying again, seeking the magic way and Key Organizational Construct that will open the gates of amusedom and wisment and get me producing again…

This adventure in China (and the preparation for it last summer) gives me superb writing fuel but not (yet) the order and settled mind to regularly get it down. But here I go again.

Good Friday.

 

 

Getting the Word Out

Posted by :James Howden On : September 14, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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Faithful browsers, this is just a quick note to point out that there are other ways to get your periodic jolt of all things Howdenian. My family and I, ensconced as we now are in Dalian, China, have started a site here to record our observations and experiences, and it will be photo-friendly and much more pithy-brief than my commentaries on JH.com . Our semi-annual Howdy Herald, a family newsletter, is going out to more people than probably, strictly speaking, actually need that much input about me and mine. I’ve included it in the “On Second Thought” portion of the site, for those of you interested in the details of my family brewings and doings.