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37 Centimetres (But How Much is That in American?)

Posted by :James Howden On : December 19, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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CBC Radio’s local show interviewed the man in charge of keeping Ottawa’s streets clean and passable. He figured that last Sunday’s snowfall – a one-day record 37 centimetres of fluffy dumpage – was going to cost between $4 and $5 million to clean up. We should hear numbers like this more often; among other things, it’s a good reminder that five million bucks, from the collective standpoint, isn’t really a lot of money.  It costs a tremendous amount to run a city, to provide the services that we taxpayers so often take to be automatic rights. (And “free” ones, too! Because when we’re that blisslessly ignorant of what city work costs, it’s easier to whine about how much we pay in municipal taxes.)

Taxes are, for the most part, a considerable bargain. I know how much private schools for my boys would have cost. I should probably know the price of all the pipes and pumping and purification to bring us clean water, too. But to tell the truth, the connection between the ploughing of my streets and my tax bill wasn’t the main thought that snow brought, thankfully.

I walk the street, with cold crunchy snow and the odd patch of black ice, and I remember hockey on Sutherland East, kitty-corner from Edinburgh Square, between the Timsons and the Martindales. When I was a kid, the streets couldn’t have been salted and sanded like they are now, and it’s not just my childhood-days-were-better hindsight to think that the winter temperatures were generally colder. That ideal street-hockey surface – snow packed hard by the passage of maybe a day’s worth of cars – was not always present, I know; we played eight or nine months of the year, anyway, and were as unstoppable as postal carriers (which my little town was too small to have). But winters then were, well, more wintry than they are now. (And no, no global warming rants today, except maybe for this: Walter Gretzky couldn’t build that famous backyard rink in Brantford now. Not enough chillin’.) And that’s one of many reasons for enjoying Ottawa, where I now live. It may still be considered the coldest national capital in the world. It’s the real northern deal here, especially this week.

Even though I don’t do a lot of winter sports, I still love genuine, made-in-some-idealized-Canada-of-the-mind winters, and Ottawa comes through more regularly than southern Ontario does. I was sidelined from most of the shovelling post-Sunday, as my back has been painfully wonky from a high school typing class injury. (No joke, but not even that good as a story.) And I was ticked off – I LOVE shovelling snow! I’m not quite the pitching machine I once was, but it’s a fun workout. I met more neighbours, even with my limited lifting, on Sunday than I have in weeks. Pushing folks out of snowbanks, commiserating, smiles and mitten-shakes, need an extra shovel? and why not just park it in my driveway for the night? Even though basketball dominates my sporting thought in winter, I live in hockey country and get out for an outdoor whirl and some puck-bashing several times a year. There are times when I idly wish that I was a skier. I do remember, though, how my thighs burned as I snow-ploughed down Mt. Tremblant on my second downhill excursion ever, and as for our region’s superb cross-country trails? Bought the equipment (used, archaic). Took the lessons (humiliating, painful). No doubt the snow angels I live with will try to strap me on to those accursed boards again this year, and I will resist with spotty success. (Course, there’s always hope that I won’t spend so much snowbank face-time, and it is a beautiful thing to be out in the hills and trees…) I love skating on the Rideau Canal, but I don’t get on it more often than an eager tourist does. New season, clean slate, and there is the outdoor rink two streets over.

Winter’s great, even if I’m not gliding down hills. I like striding down the middle of snowbound roads when the sidewalks are stuffed. I like watching Sam climb the mountain of snow collecting in the vacant lot down the street, or furiously excavating his front-yard fortress. And one of my ongoing pleasures, ridiculously and quintessentially Canadian, is building and maintaining our tiny townhouse backyard rink. Sam is seven now, and still wanted the rink, even though two hard skating strides necessitate a hard turn, even for him. He’ll have no choice but to learn stopping and turning; he’s been on the ice several times already this year. Perfect conditions, and so much earlier than the last three seasons!

One problem. Thirty-seven centimetres is a lot of snow — in Canadian or American — especially on a fenced-in rink with already maxed-out banks. Every shovel load needs to be pitched over a six-foot barrier into the common ground behind, and I figure it ain’t kosher to fire it into the neighbours’ yards. Although Diana wielded a mighty shovel on the driveway during my lameness, she draws the line at backyard silliness. Sam isn’t strong enough. I’ve had one very careful, old-mannish, bent-kneed session of human Zamboni-ism, and I’m looking at another two slow hours. So far, my back has made only grudging complaints, but I can’t afford the screaming spasms of last week. Slowly, ol’ buddy. Easy does it.

But now my weather report calls for RAIN this weekend! Five degrees! (Nearly 40 for metric deniers in the USA.) What is this, southern Ontario? Indiana? How’s a dad supposed to Gretzky-ize his son and keep his ice hard when spring comes in December?! (And that’s among the most emotionally compelling signals of climate change for Canadians, next to struggling polar bears: the northern migration of the home-made outdoor rink.) Hey, presto! I’ve just found what every Canuck carries as standard equipment: a reason to complain about winter weather. It’s just NOT COLD ENOUGH!

I’ve already spent more time hosing my backyard to flood the rink than I did in watering the tomatoes last summer. It’s looking good, or will when I excavate a few hundred more kilos of snow. Rain, rain, go AWAY / Fall as snow so we can play…

The American Idea

Posted by :James Howden On : December 17, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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The Atlantic is a magazine with which I have a turbulent relationship, or at least an up-and-down one. I have subscribed periodically, excited by its cover stories: long, smart, profound discussions of issues that shake and shape the world. And then I get bogged down, behind, and occasionally bored by its tendency to obsess about the American political system. It’s a great magazine, but I sometimes get lost in its density and its preoccupations. And the articles are too long for reading on the commode.

I’m about to enter another period in which, subscription abandoned, I will be free to wander retroactively through issues that still have weight and relevance for me, months or even years after urgency has passed. But I probably won’t. It’s one of those promises I guiltily make in the full knowledge that I won’t follow through. There’s so much to read, and grim obligation is such a poor prod to do so.

The Atlantic’s 150th anniversary issue came out in November. (I’m already reading it!) Referring back to a promise its founders made in 1857, this issue returns to what might be called the magazine’s central focus with a cover story on “The American Idea”. The editors invited dozens of American thinkers and commentators and builders to submit a short essay on the general theme, and they are brief and bracing pieces. There are the expected paeans to American freedom, energy, innovation, and destiny. (Early report: nobody writes more blandly on these things than the politicians, although Arnold Schwarzenegger does the unheard of, actually admitting a mistaken and overly partisan approach. God help me, but the guy is interesting!) But the voices don’t sing from the same all-approving hymnbook, and it’s a great reminder that, whatever you might think of the United States and its dominant position in world affairs, its leaders of thought are bright, contrary, and pretty darned brave. Here’s a taste of a few of them.

The writer Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) uses that ever-influential American text, Huckleberry Finn, to argue that the strength of the American idea is that Americans regularly depart – “light  out for the territory,” as Huck insists he must – from the most rigidly conformist expressions of it. While there’s a lot of fear-induced group-think going on in American life, there are also many who will challenge orthodoxy and “hope to be a little less ‘sivilized’”.

As an example of this, the columnist George Will begins by questioning the very concept of the American idea, arguing that the country gets in trouble whenever it thinks of itself as having one central concept, and therefore one predominant purpose. Because, he says, the lightly sleeping “missionary impulse” that is never far from American consciousness can take over; the current mania for bringing American-style democracy to the benighted world comes to mind. So listen to this: Will calls the greatest challenge to America “the false idea that American patriotism is inextricably bound up with the notion that being a normal nation is somehow beneath America’s dignity”. (Read that sentence again!)

Another broadside against the perverse elements of the belief in American “exceptionalism” comes from the wildly prolific novelist and commentator Joyce Carol Oates. “How heartily sick the world has grown,” she begins her mini-essay, “of the American idea!” It has become “a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose body-builder luridly bulked up on steroids…” (Wonder what she thinks of The Arnold?) She questions the overweening pride implicit in the whole notion of an American idea: “Our unexamined belief in American exceptionalism…makes our imperialism altruistic, our plundering of the world’s resources a healthy exercise of capitalism…[and makes it seem that our] political goals are always idealistic, while the goals of other nations are transparently opportunistic”. And she heaps scorn on the resolute and wilful ignorance of the motto, “my country, right or wrong”. Oh, and full disclosure: I may have been also swayed by her persuasive statement of the “higher degree of civilization embodied by Canada”. Wouldn’t you be?

There are many notable submissions. Bernard Lewis, a scholar and British World War II vet, observes that Americans are “unteachable”, insisting on doing things their own stubborn and sometimes ignorant way, but that they are also quick to recognize and remedy their errors. The wonderful David Foster Wallace makes a plea for modern society’s least-invoked virtue – sacrifice – arguing in effect that Americans by quiet consensus feel that 40,000 annual traffic deaths is an acceptable price to pay for the freedom of driving; therefore, why should a markedly lower toll of “terror” deaths lead to such mad curtailment of liberties as we continue to see? (Much of his mini-essay is in the form of questions, yet its own stand is clear.) Historian and poet Robert Conquest speaks of the “lethal certainties” – the worst of Marxism, or Naziism, or jihadism – that have faced Americans, and their own need to retain “a sense of proportion” and avoid the pitfalls of being cocksure. Columnist Arianna Huffington harks back to the Declaration of Independence and its famous credo of “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, suggesting that the Founders didn’t have in mind “the blessed-out buzz induced by drugs or shopping sprees”, but rather “the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good.” Talk of sacrifice AND service?? What decade are we in? Nice to hear. So much else, too, that is good and thought-provoking. Or irritating.

Two back-to-back submissions startle by their utterly opposite views of U.S. problems. Sam Harris, fervent anti-religionist and author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, bemoans Christian extremism and its “pious phantasmagoria” of distracting concerns: school prayer, gay marriage, etc. He longs for the boost to reason that America could give to the world if it wasn’t so hobbled by an ignorant Christian majority. Meanwhile, the essay immediately following, by the Christian pastor Tim LaHaye (he of the Left Behind series of novels about Rapture and “end times”, where the faithful do mighty tricks and the faithless burn), laments the godlessness of American life and the secret machinations of the “scientific humanists” who have undermined the “country more blessed by God than any other nation in history”. Shudder. Sam Harris blusters and exaggerates, but I must say that the writing of LaHaye – no doubt more circumspect and gentle than usual given the audience he’s writing to here – makes me wish for a sickening instant that I wasn’t a person of faith. (Perverting Groucho Marx for my own purposes, I’m inclined to ask, “Why would I want to belong to a club that would have him as a member?”)

But I am. (And I don’t ask.) While the American Bahá’í community has been regularly warned about the materialistic excesses, the substandard morals and the racist poisons infecting their country, the United States is also regarded as having achieved an exemplary level of civic cohesion. The States, in other words, through trial and many errors, have actually been  something of a beacon to the world by remaining united. It is ironic that the government of these United States has, in recent years especially, been so dismissive and even distrustful of the United Nations and its work to extend such civic harmony to the world level.

I recommend the November issue of The Atlantic, still likely available on newsstands, for anyone wishing to better understand this powerful and complex nation. Particularly if you tend toward reflexive anti-Americanism, you will find much to convince you that Americans do not speak with one under-educated voice. To brand those damned Americans for whatever hubris, intrusion or exceptionalism most irritate you is akin to absurd comments like typical male or just like a woman or [insert ethnic or religious minority here] are all alike. It just ain’t so. There’s a lot of brilliant, contrary and incisive commentary here. The essays, though a few are longer, are mainly about 300 words long. (A quarter the size of the woolly beast you just fleeced.) Together, they make for an interesting tapestry of American thought, a sort of U.S. Studies 101 if you’re inclined to education.

Requiem for a Coach

Posted by :James Howden On : December 11, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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My first thought was brilliant — they always seem to be — where else could the wake for Coach Wright be but in the tiny, tiled box of a gym where he spent so many thousands of hours with his “kids”, this never-married father of none? The Caledonia Sweatbox, the dim, cramped but comfortable Blue Devils’ lair, where half-court shots were no longer than an NBA three-pointer, where big-footed forwards needed to turn sideways to get their Chuck Taylor high-cuts completely out of bounds…

But what if there are only twenty people there? That gave me pause; even in that bandbox of a gym, twenty voices would make for some unfairly desolate echoes. As it happens, my grand thought was punctured, and for the best. As it is with too many aspects of sporting and educational life these days, the bureaucratic and custodial hoops we’d have had to jump through were too many, so we didn’t celebrate Don Wright’s life of ball-bouncing generosity in the centre court circle of The Gym, as madly poetic as that might have been.

We did better. The community hall we got was perfect. (Its hardwood floor was a far better surface than we ever played on in the old town high school.) What do you need, really, when it’s time to pay tribute to the life of a man – once painfully shy and young and slender, but by his last days grey and limping and carrying too much goddam weight – who gave to our youthfulness and to our kids whatever he had? Nothing but the people, as it turned out, and they were there. We were referees, athletes’ parents, fellow coaches, former players and friends. (I was all of these things. A five-time winner.)

Dave B was there. He had been to Don something I never was: a young coach who got to discover, years later in repeatedly teasing conversations, that he had cut the man we were honouring when Don was an earnest and under-skilled twelve-year-old. Dave and his wife Georgia had made sure, for the last several years, that Coach Donny had a place to go for Christmas dinner. (They also did most of the coffee-making, cookie-dealing and cleanup for the memorial. The Basketball Family lives.) Dave, the nearly legendary “Bart” of the Hamilton hoops community, had been with Don one of “the usual suspects” when it came to college and high school basketball games, especially for girls’ and women’s teams. His eulogy at the service had some good laughs, but it was serious business. It even allowed a glimpse of anger, for Bart wanted it known that his friend, our friend, was more than might’ve met the eye. Bart had seen and heard too much of those who dismissed the Coach as either a has-been or “some old guy, whatever”. He made earnest and teary amends.

Most of those who spoke after Bart were former players, though there were some old friends and fellow coaches that he’d never blown a whistle at. (Come to think of it, he rarely blew one at any of us. He had no interest in the whistle. He wanted his voice to be enough. It was.) The sharing was utterly informal, as Don had insisted and would have liked, but at least one former Ontario West university All-Star, an experienced teacher, had written her remarks in order to have some anchor, some way to not “lose it”. Mind you, she’d already lost it twice before her turn came, and duly lost it again, but my goodness, weren’t these the best kind of “losses”: of composure, of emotional restraint, of the kind of busy life-living that sometimes leads us to forget to say “thanks” to those who built us? Cindy and I weren’t the only ones to lose it more than once, and we gained so much by really feeling what we felt.

There were about 100 of us. It was a grand reunion, including the core of my own high school team from three decades gone. Present, too, were about ten young women, high schoolers who looked a little bewildered and felt, for a while, out of place. They were members of the last teams that my old buddy Don, sore and often discouraged, gave his last weary hours of coaching to. They honoured “Mr. Wright” by their presence, and they went away knowing more of the man than they had, and wishing perhaps that they had found a way to give something back to him. We all did.

So long, Coach. Thanks for all the sweat, the hope, the ideals. Keep caring for us as we do for you. Fare well, brother.

[I also wrote an “In Memoriam” for Donald Edward, and it’s in the “On Second Thought” section. It gives a more clear picture of the man and what he did.]

How to Know You’re a Nerd

Posted by :James Howden On : December 11, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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One sure indication of this FINE and immensely under-valued condition — Nerditude — will be your interest in turning to the On Second Thought section of the site. There, Your Nerdiness may find, for all your insomniac needs, an essay that I just completed for an undergrad English course in 20th-century American fiction. Hemingway. Anderson. Faulkner. Pynchon. Nabokov. Erdrich. Morrison. And among these greats was John Updike, of whose many novels I had somehow managed to read precisely none before this enforced novelizing. I read The Centaur, one of his least-known novels. Twice. And then I wrote about its depiction of a father and son.

If I Had Only Had…

Posted by :James Howden On : November 7, 2007
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It’s a perfect day to account for my failings as a writer, quite apart from the practical consideration that I have to teach school today. The call came. It came to me. I’m a class act.

I find myself at one of the real centres of juvenile creativity in Canada, Canterbury High School. It’s a specialized arts school. The annual musical is spectacular, and a far more important event than any number of Big Football Games. (Actually, there is no football at Canterbury. There aren’t even that many boys at CHS; it’s about a 70/30 split. The kids who attend here because they live in the immediate district are also a minority. They’re called “Generals”, as opposed to “Visuals” or “Instrumentals” or “Vocals”, and they can find it a hard place to come in some respects. The place is crammed with keeners who applied from all over the region to come here and dance, sing, play, act, paint, sculpt and write. It may still be the only school in the country with a Literary Arts program. My family’s move to Ottawa five years ago was made, in large measure, because Son the Third had been admitted here as a ninth-grade writer. It was a 500-kilometre move, and an easy decision, finally, and a wonderfully fruitful one.

Replacing Ms. Barkley today, my Dave’s ninth- and twelfth-grade writing guru, I’m in a class where to write myself seems not only possible but necessary. Grade 12s. Supremely pleasant and diligent and highly motivated, which does not suggest that they are not also distracted by the epic conversational possibilities with fellow writers they’ve shared and performed and edited and sweated with for four years now. Still, they don’t need much from me. It’s a strange kind of a high school. It’s beyond okay to be smart, to read, to care about social issues and cultural richness. Among the seniors, it verges on being a requirement, which explains why coming from the school catchment area without actually belonging to the Arts Canterbury crowd can be a bit of a trial. Generals. Of course, it could be a rich and fascinating place to wind up in if, say, you were a smart, sophisticated and confident adolescent, unbounded by cliques and suspicion. In other words, for only a few.

But back to me. (It’s all about me.) I am prone to think, Gosh. Sons One and Two would have been so much more at home or challenged or stimulated by a high school experience like this one. But I am also subject to selfish and exculpatory thoughts: Damn, if I’d been exposed to the idea that writers were real, if I’d had the chance to be among other kids that read as much or more than I did, if I’d been encouraged to write and party ARTY when I was young, I wouldn’t find the literary learning curve so steep in my advancing age. I coulda bin a contendah. I coulda bin a star. Yeah, I just didn’t get the breaks. Sigh. Et cetera.

All of which helps me not at all, but it’s a soothing diversion. And it’s writing, and so am I. And it’s now. And the bell hasn’t even rung yet. Maybe I’ll even get around to posting about the WritersFest, as I recently promised.

WritersFest: A Paranthetical, Not to Say Apologetic, Remark

Posted by :James Howden On : November 2, 2007
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I spent a little less than my usual night-haunting, all-day-Saturday-slouching-from-venue-to-bathroom-to-venue, inspiration-sucking hours at the Ottawa International Writers Festival this year. However, I do have some discoveries and some mental meanderings to report.

(Disclosure alert: For those of you who live in the Ottawa area, of COURSE I know that the Fest finished two weeks ago. It’s Slow News, like the Slow Food Movement, linger over the pleasures of life, “the purpose of life is not to increase its speed”, slow is good, “literature is news that stays news”, I want a man with a slow hand…)

(Nota bene: For those of you blissfully ignorant of subterranean artistic currents in Canada’s capital — that is, you don’t live in Ottawa — this is HOT OFF THE PRESSES! LATE-BREAKING NEWS! IT’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW RIGHT NOW!)

(No more parantheses.)

This was the 12th annual WritersFest. It’s a father and son story, two stubbornly bright men who didn’t know back then that what they wanted to do made no sense and would never get off the ground. Well, it does and it has. Here’s to Neil and Sean Wilson, and all the believers in their absurd, delightful and ever-more-substantial dreams.

Spirit, Ethics and Climate Change Action: IEF 3

Posted by :James Howden On : October 28, 2007
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Here’s a third quick instalment on the International Environment Forum’s conference earlier in October. As with the earlier three synopses, I give you a link to somewhat more expansive notes that I posted on the IEF site. The following link takes you to a news story, with photos, from the Canadian Baha’i community. (It focusses especially on the Friday sessions that I didn’t attend.)

Here’s a peek at what Saturday afternoon’s IEF session had to offer.

Living Lightly, With a Smile

David Chernushenko is an environmental consultant, activist, and author, and a former deputy leader of the Canadian Green Party. He took the conversation from the abstract and the global to tangible, immediate and home-based actions. His personal motto is “live lightly”: reduce our ecological footprints and do it with joy.

He emphasizes the following characteristics. Resilience. (Are we ready to ride out the rough spots?) Integrity. (Walk the talk.) Empowerment. (Are we encouraging our children?) Equity & Fairness. (Am I taking more than my share of the planet’s resources?) Redefining growth. (It’s not all economic indicators.) Humility. (Who do we think we ARE?) With that in mind, he suggested a range of simple, practical steps that any family can take. Make one step. Then make another. It’s simple, and it’s light. (Upon light!)

“Learning to Make Responsible Choices: The Consumer Citizen Network”

Victoria Thoresen, Ms. Thoresen, an Education professor from Norway and the manager of the CCN, challenged the conference. Many of her frankly imploring messages – I beg of you, please consider… — urged the perspective of parents and teachers, and the needs of their children/youth, about these concepts:

Sufficiency. How much is enough? How do we withstand the barrage of materialism? Courage. Sustainable consumption has powerful enemies. Encouragement is golden. Diversity of response. Not everybody should be doing the same thing, even if it was possible!
Empathy. Thoresen, with her wide travel and international experience, called upon us to remember how the majority of humans live. “We are only a small corner of the world, even if we DO own most of it!”

Dr. Thoresen also implored us to remain mindful of the UN Decade for Sustainable Development, 2005-2014, as well as the earnest United Nations’ Millennium Goals which many have already forgotten. She spoke briefly of the Consumer Citizenship Network (“’consumer’ is such a bad word in Canada!”) and its work to create debate and enlightenment about “the pressing need for consumers to understand the ethical choices that they make”. She concluded:

“For humanity’s nobility to emerge, its qualities of trustworthiness, compassion, selflessness, dedication, loyalty, sacrifice and service need to be nurtured and gain ascendancy over its selfish, baser impulses.”

Retroactivity Is Still Activity, Right? (IEF 2)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 27, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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I live in a mental and emotional framework in which, much to my bride’s consternation, time is elastic and late is a long sight better than not at all. Besides, as one of the great thinkers said, literature is news that STAYS news…

Not that my two-week-old reports on the International Environment Forum’s 11th conference are literature — my hubris has bounds — but the ideas and the challenges that bubbled during those consultations are as current as next year’s news. Such is my justification for this late report: this stuff MATTERS, no matter how tardy the messenger is. As before, I’ll give you a quick taste and link to the more full report on the IEF site, where there’s even some moderate-quality video, too.

Saturday afternoon, October 13: Local Eco-Action

Here is the briefest of summaries of a panel discussion on the theme “Value-Based Approaches to Environmental Action”, and featured two of Ottawa’s citizen leaders and an American guest.

Jessica Lax spoke of the Otesha Project, a “light living” NGO that seeks to empower and train young people. This initiative of Ms. Lax and friends came after a life-changing period of service in Africa. With joy and practiced optimism, Otesha’s theatrical and bike-tour activities have made a strong impact on the youth culture of Ottawa.

Clive Doucet is one of Canada’s strongest voices for re-imagining cities. His work for the greening of Ottawa, as a city councillor, has allowed him to see both what is possible and the nature of the obstacles to those advancements. Check out his book Urban Meltdown here.

Peter Adriance is the NGO liaison for the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States. He outlined some of the experiences and learnings of various elements of the American Baha’i community, and its collaborations with other faith-based organizations. Movingly, he told of grassroots development among impoverished women in Kenya, and struggling American fishers.

Session 2: The Development of Moral Capabilities

“Let your vision be world-embracing, rather than confined to your own selves.” This famous passage from the Baha’i writings, Gordon Naylor (a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Canada), began, is a radical call to moral and ethical advancement.

He urged the participants to adopt a humble, learning mode about the developments of human civilization to come. We don’t know and can’t imagine the civilization that we need to build, and we shouldn’t waste time and energy trying to make it in our own drastically limited images. Mutual encouragement is key. We must find ways to joyfully appreciate the talents and capacities of others. A mature respect for the rights of others is another of these capacities.

At Nur University in Bolivia, a set of 19 moral capabilities was developed to allow rural communities to move forward. They include the capability to:

• evaluate one’s own strengths and weaknesses without ego
• imbue one’s actions and thoughts with love
• take initiative in a creative and disciplined way
• contribute to the establishment of justice

Mr. Naylor advocates the following elements of a moral framework.
1. An orientation of service to the common good.
2. Leadership whose purpose is individual and social transformation.
3. Twin moral responsibilities to truth: know it, enact it. (Serve it.)
4. Transcendence through vision.
5. Belief in the essential nobility of the human being.
6. The development of capabilities.
7. Commitment to a world-embracing vision.

A Little Blubber With My Breakfast: MORTAL CITY

Posted by :James Howden On : October 24, 2007
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You know, you think that everything’s peaceful. Crazybird has caught his bus, Ladybird has madly pedalled her way into the professional distance, and there is bread in the toaster. A small hit of sports news so as not to feel left out of the loop of entirely imaginary conversations. (Will I speak to anyone today who cares that the World Series starts tonight?) A knife from the drawer, a practised flip from Tuner to CD and wherever it was that I paused last night’s silvered, tuneful progression of disks. Some even date from this century.

Where was I? Dar Williams, American folksinger, a 1996 album called Mortal City. I smile during my artful bread-spreading at the whimsical meanderings of “Southern California Wants To Be Western New York”. Smart fun. The title song is last. She recorded it in her bedroom. It has made my throat catch and my chest heave before this, but I’m not ready for that at 8:37 in the morning with honey dripping off my whole wheat. “Mortal City” has breathy, uncertain voicings, rueful humour, soaring loneliness, and good old-fashioned gentleness. Altruism lives. People find each other, at least for one night. There is crisis and self-doubt and tiny victories, and harmonies so longing that they hurt. This is a song that never would have made the radio even in the ‘good old days’, whenever that was, and not only because it’s seven minutes and fourteen seconds long and has only the most sombre and subtle of hooks. It doesn’t make me want to even think about dancing.

Dar Williams has done this to me before. She writes some of the most clever and feeling stuff there is. Good morning.

The World Serious: Game One

Posted by :James Howden On : October 24, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Just for fun, I’m going to not only watch Game One of the World Series tonight — it’s the Colorado Rockies against the Boston Red Sox, and it’s BASEBALL, a curious game played mainly in the U.S. and Latin America — but also write my urbane and knowing commentary on the whole she-bang. My site isn’t really well-equipped for this up-to-the-minute reporting, but my basic article will swell in volume, if not in perspicacity and wit, as the evening goes on.

You’ll find this in the It’s All About SPORTS!  section, though I’ll no doubt be ranting about the broadcast and the commercials and the fact that most of the alleged Red Sox won’t even have a red sock showing…