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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.

Changing Minds and Addresses

Posted by :James Howden On : August 23, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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Well, loyal lurkers – and you, over there, stumbling upon this site, wondering where the cool graphics and flashing doodads are – thanks for dropping by (again). Look. I’ve been unfaithful. (There it is.) I haven’t “always been there for you”, wherever “there” is. Mea culpa. I cringe when I note the last date of entry into HowdenTown and, as you can imagine, the public outcry has been furious.

But life changes are sometimes needed, always good for a scribbler, and I surely have bountiful fuel for the writing bus if I can only remember where I left the keys! Here’s the thing: I’m now on a continent where I’ve never been, learning a language I hadn’t imagined needing, obliging myself to draw on spiritual capital I’ve blandly believed was available, and buzzing with anticipation. My bride and I, and our wide-eyed nine-year-old son, have packed up our cozy Canadian townhouse and our cozy professional kits to learn more of what world citizenship involves.

We’re learning. June and July were blurs: wrapping up school and work, dispensing with as many of the trappings of familiarity as we could bear, and seeing what we could find to know and to love in a new way. And here we are in China. CHINA! There will be details.

Where No One Has Gone Before?

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

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Every time I do it, I swear it’s the last time. But it only happens every year or two, and I forget. And when, by whim or happenstance, I’m interested in a mass-market film, ain’t no place to go but the Megatastic Carnival of Audiovisual and Commercial Excess. In my town, it’s called Silver City.

Sensory overload. Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Zeal of the misled martyr. Eagerness of lemmings.

Haven from contentment.

Supersaturated solutions to the hungers of mouth and eye.

And loneliness.

So.

Few things have me muttering as angrily (how soon I forget, how furiously I regret  not showing up late) as my voluntary submission to big-screen huckstering, first for ads exclusive to Cineplex Odeon! (oh, we, the favoured ones, the self-selected targets) and then, just when I thought it was safe to watch laugh-out-loud trailers for Michael Bay-ish movies I’ll never have to see – Transformers, my Lord in heaven, what sort of overgrown boyos will watch that while sober! – along came MORE ads that I can at least walk away from when they interrupt the hockey game. I wanted to throw things. I wanted to go all Howard Beale on my new best friends in the theatre. (Wondering: It’s over 30 years since Network. Would it seem quaint, rather so what’s the point to kiddies raised on televisual brain candy of the 21st century kind?) My bride thoughtfully slapped my thigh and shushed me. I restrained myself.

Finally, when Star Trek came on (Really? We get to watch a MOVIE, too? Oh, boy!), there were improbable Romulan mega-ships and inexplicable time warps and decades-old dialogue (wait for ‘em, Treksters!) and up-to-the-nanosecond CGI spectacle and passable acting (I quite liked Bruce Greenwood and Eric Bana as Secondary Good Guy and Primo Baddie, respectively) and backstories to Kirk and Spok as kiddies and in-joke introductions to the rest of the crew: Scott, Bones, Chekhov, Sulu, Uhuru. The gang’s all here.

And I had a good time, ultimately. It’s a silly thing, and you surely don’t want to think too hard about the space-time scientifishy elements. But There Will Be Sequels. This baby is preset to run for as long as humanity can stand it, and it’s engineered to not only grab the young male crowd but late-Boomers like me who remember Shatner and Nimoy and the first interracial kiss on television. And in between, it also puts a major hustle on the in-between generations, those who, like my sons, grew up on Star Wars; there are numerous fairly obvious reaches for the mysticism of the Jedi. I shouldn’t have liked it so well, but nostalgia is a strong brew and I took a good long gulp. The young feller doing Bones was superb. Uhura was, again, mainly a waste in a great legs! sort of way. Scottie was, as always, a caricature (but I still missed James Doohan). Sulu was, too, but a subtly enjoyable one.

It all comes down to Spok and Kirk, of course. And I haven’t made up my mind on them. By Sequel Three they’ll have grown into their characters more, and then we can begin to judge. Even without the popcorn, though, I have to admit it: I’m a sucker for space opera and the victory of even the most unlikely (and often fairly comical) forms of extraterrestrial nobility.

Better Read Than Never 2: WHAT I TALK ABOUT…RUNNING

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

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My series Better Read Than Never – okay, technically, it is now a series because there are two of ’em – has been stalled because I’m too anxious to do too good a job for the too few of you out there in Electronville who, come to think of it, are often too busy to read The Howden anyway. My library copy of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood has been renewed three times and I’ve nearly paid for it in fines; mind you, I’ve never begrudged library penalties, which are merely an unreceipted form of useful charity. The review is going to be long unless I terminate it thuddingly. But it’ll come soon-ish. (I think.) (Prologue ends.)

In the meantime, though, I’ve read a couple of other fine things, one of which is recent enough that it doesn’t quite fit the series rubric, but makes me eager to read two writers that I’ve mainly missed so far. It’s an odd little book, one I found occasionally flat yet generally compelling, called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It’s by a Japanese novelist and translator named Haruki Murakami, and it’s a curious kind of memoir. It mainly tracks his twenty-five year career as a recreational long-distance runner (and sometime triathlete), which roughly parallels and, he maintains, both informs and essentially supports his work as a writer.

Murakami is a diffident confidante, an unfamiliar voice that obscures as much as it reveals about the author. On more than one occasion, he notes that readers “probably wouldn’t like” him, and he is sometimes distant and bland in his summaries of the meaning of this observation or that running result. That’s just how I am. That’s life. This is how it goes. At first, I found these simple blurts disappointing, a signal that this book was something of a rush-job, but I came to see them as an accurate (and, finally, interesting) portrait of a man in search of some limited and non-ecstatic conclusions about his life and its meaning.

In fact, by the end I regarded his tone as a subtle rebuke to the my life is singular and rich and here’s how ALL could benefit from fingering its silken edges ambience of some (western) celebrity bios. For only one small example, an early casual mention of having been married at 22 seemed to me a clear signal that marriage was far in his rear-view window. In fact, his wife later makes brief and almost accidental appearances in this memoir of monkish discipline; she is never named or described, a level of biographical focus (and adherence to privacy, I suppose) that is startling. The Western attachment to personality, fame and disclosure seems exhibitionist by comparison.

He likes to be alone, and he’s with the Buddha: Life is suffering. This narrow gateway to understanding informs his thought about running and life: “[t]hey might not amount to much, but they are personal lessons I’ve learned through actually putting my body in motion….They may not be lessons you can generalize, but that’s because what’s presented here is me, the kind of person I am.” I’m a worn-out ex-jock who still tries to run, though the distances have never been what Murakami routinely pulls off. (The jerk.) I’m also a writer, and the confluence of these two themes – rigorously and sacrificially adhered to by this paragon of focus and discipline – really took me in. If you have either of these two interests, or both, you may be, too.

And the title? Its oddly rambling nature fits perfectly, but it wasn’t until Murakami’s after-word that I realized it was a homage to one of his favourite writers to read and translate into Japanese, the American minimalist Raymond Carver. (I know Carver only by reputation – writers often refer to him – and he keeps popping up for me. Another one for the Better Read Than Never list.) One of Carver’s best-known tales is the title story of a notable collection: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Ah. I think I understand. Hiraku Murakami loves running. He loves writing. He loves simplicity in both. That’s how things work for him.

Mothering On

Posted by :James Howden On : May 9, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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Nobody names their children Enid anymore, although I did christen a backyard crabapple tree with that early-20th century moniker two springs ago. We’d always had a messily dropping but spring-briefly glorious crab in our yard when I was a kid, and my mother loved those evanescent pink blooms much more than I begrudged raking up the apples in the fall.

Enid Mary Elizabeth Howden was born on April 27th in a distant 1920. The Great War still haunted many thousands of men who didn’t know that what they had was post-traumatic stress syndrome. The Spanish influenza pandemic had already killed most of its 60 million victims. The League of Nations was a brand-new baby that hadn’t yet been thrown out with the fascist bathwater. (Speaking of leagues, the NHL was a toddler with four hockey clubs we wouldn’t recognize, and the National Basketball Association wasn’t even a glint in anybody’s eye. But my Mum loved the Cleveland Indians forty years before the Blue Jays came along, and that American League baseball team had been born 20 years before she was.) ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Bahá’í community’s leader and best Example, was still alive. (So was Thomas Edison. So was Enrico Caruso. Legendary Canadian Sir Wilfrid Laurier had just left the building. Elvis wouldn’t show up for another 15 years.) I like to think of my Mum and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sharing the same planetary dust for a few months, way back there in the ‘20s. Whole ‘nother century, much different world.

I love my Mum. I didn’t get it in writing for her birthday, but I’m a day ahead for Mother’s Day. Interexistential greetings, Enid! Thanks for all that laughter, all that bloody tolerance and dogged hope, all that thin-lipped endurance and all those wide-open welcomes to friends, wives, spiritual inclinations and especially to More Boys.

She always grinned (eventually) when she claimed that the only reason I kept you and your brother Bill around is ‘cause you made me laugh. She didn’t even play at grudging acceptance, though, when the grand-kids came. It was bright-blue smiles, bowls of sweets and rosy admiration, even at the end when she didn’t always get the names right. My first three boys only have to think of “Mama Hoe-ney” (was that Dave’s toddler-attempt at “Grandma Howden”?) to get a shot of spiritual warmth and belonging, even as they prepare to say farewell to their other lovely granny. Sam’s only 9, though, and he’s starting to lose track of her. We’ll get out the photos tomorrow while we celebrate his own sweet Mummy, in so many ways “a girl / Just like the girl / That married dear old Dad”: blue-eyed, excitable, loving, determined as hell. (That song’s even older than my Mum — 1911 — but it’s inerasable on my mental J-Tunes. A syrupy sweet prophecy.)

Hug your mothers, kids. Pray for them as they pray for you.

Living Back to Front

Posted by :James Howden On : April 23, 2009
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Category: At First Glance

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My brood – one bride plus one remaining brute equals a brood, for those of you who hate being told to “do the math!” – and I live in a three-bedroom attached house. Eco-bride emailed me the other day with the sales details for our (possibly fictitious) neighbours’ place a half-dozen houses down the row. (We’re not sure we’ve ever seen them.) What stood out to me was that the place apparently has four bathrooms, when it’s hard to imagine that as many as four people live there. My wife, meanwhile, was mock-offended that the ad “didn’t mention the friendly neighbours!” Ha. A sour little inside joke.

The whole point of places like this is to be free to ignore the neighbours. That’s why they’re all built backwards, as most suburban homes are. (Ours is more of a middle-class in-fill to what our real-estate agent thought of as a sketchy part of town – Vanier, for those who know Ottawa – but the same inversion principle applies.) The most prominent feature of our house is our garage, while the front door with its tiny front step is obviously something to pass through like a stealthy wind. That’s why our basketball goal off the drive is such an affront to our nearest neighbours.

We’re supposed to be invisible to each other. That’s why there are such tall and bland and ubiquitous fences. That’s why, ideally, one clicks the garage door opener and drives directly into the garage. That way, once you leave the hermetically sealed, climate-and-aural-environment-controlled ambience of your SUV, you can walk directly into the private foyer without having to risk the possibility of running into a human being not-of-your-same-address. That’s why most of us entertain only in the high-fenced micro-yards out the back patio doors.

And that’s why my wife is such an oddball when she throws a lawn chair out in our tiny front yard to read the newspaper on a warm spring morning. I like our little house, but I’m nostalgic for the old houses where I grew up, the ones with a rambling front porch where folks would drink their coffee, watch their kids, wave at passersby, jibe with the neighbours. And didn’t mind waiting for the bathroom to come free.