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I’ll Miss You, KV. Hail and Farewell.

Posted by :James Howden On : April 14, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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My bride has been well-prepared. She woke me up Thursday with a sympathetic face.

“Sorry to say, but I think it’s a national day of mourning.”

“Oh, my. John Wooden?” I’d heard that my 96-year-old coaching hero, the great UCLA basketball guru, had been in hospital, but had left it reasonably well. She shook her head. So it must be, and was, another American icon, the shine from another facet of my mind. “Kurt Vonnegut, then?” She nodded.

[The New York Times obituary is a good one. You may also be interested in a piece I wrote on him just over a year ago. You’ll find it here.)

If I had a stronger journalistic streak in me, I’d have had this written long ago, though I did make a start in February of ’06. I hadn’t heard of the fall he’d had a few weeks ago and of his quick decline, but I’ve been waiting for this news for at least a decade. Finally. Vonnegut was 84. He’d been referring to himself as “an old fart with his Pall Malls” and hacking with every laugh for at least 20 years. He introduced his last novel, 1997’s Timequake, with a muttering prologue about being too old for this sort of thing:

“I had recently turned seventy-three. My mother made it to fifty-two, my father to seventy-two….Johannes Brahms quit composing symphonies when he was fifty-five. Enough! My architect father was sick and tired of architecture when he was fifty-five. Enough! American male novelists have done their best work by then. Enough! Fifty-five is a long time ago for me now. Have pity!”

He was tired. He was A Man Without a Country, his recent and now final non-fiction foray. He still supported social dissent, though he felt it did about as much good “as a banana cream pie”.

So how’s this for spooky? In his prologue to Timequake, Vonnegut writes of his recurrent fictional character, the utterly unknown but wildly prolific science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. (Is such productivity hopeful or insane? Determined or desperate?) Vonnegut confesses what everybody knew anyway: that Trout is his alter ego. Trout is central to the novel, and KV makes a cameo appearance himself. Timequake sees the death of Trout, just as he gives a lonely but finally hopeful description of “the special place of Earthlings in the cosmic scheme of things”. Vonnegut mentions in the prologue that Trout dies at 84, just as he did himself last Wednesday. Hi ho. And this, too: my son Will knows what Vonnegut has meant to me. He phoned me Thursday night to tell me that Kurt had died, but I already knew. I had gorged myself on obituaries, like too many dips into the chocolate box: they were sweet, and I felt a little queasy. Will also told me that he had borrowed Timequake from the library, for no particular reason that he knew. But he was dialled-in, I’ll say that for him. He finished it Wednesday night. And so it goes.

You couldn’t read a better obituary for Vonnegut than Timequake, though it is a fair bit longer even than this post. Perhaps it will make you want to read more. Slaughterhouse Five is his signature novel. 1969. Some say KV is best read young, but I’ve read it then and nearer to now, and I’ll read it again if I’m allowed to get old. It will last. My favourite might be Slapstick, in which a dishevelled but dignified old man runs for President of a post-apocalyptic America. His winning campaign slogan? LONELY NO MORE! He has invented a new method of giving Americans the sense of family and connectedness that they had long lost. Though civilization has been destroyed, they have something to live for, because the President has given them extended families to count on as they scrounge a living from the ruins of empire. A little gentleness, a little compassion, a little hope amid the decay of a dying century. That was the best of Vonnegut, over and over. And I laughed out loud a couple of times when I first read it.

But I don’t know where Kurt found the courage. (“Ah, Koort, it’s so hard,” he once quoted a German writer and friend, telling him what he already knew too well.) I don’t know, still, precisely why the tears come so fiercely when I randomly read lines this morning from Timequake, or when I dive into his essays and memoirs (Palm Sunday, say, or Fates Worse Than Death.) I think it’s the courage. Vonnegut tried to kill himself in the 80s. (“I wanted out of here!”) In the 90s, I saw him give a public lecture on literature, which at one point veered into a brief digression on smoking. “Why do people tell us that smoking will kill us? Don’t they see that this is exactly the point?” The audience, eager to laugh with the comic writer, the Shakespearean clown, the “moralist with a whoopy-cushion” — Jay McInerney, New York Times, the best review of KV I’ve read — roared with too-ready laughter. Then, eerily, instantly, suddenly self-consciously, they realized what he’d said and veered into a collective groan. Sometimes it worked the other way ‘round, too, but for me, well, maybe I’m too serious. Most often, what he said and wrote hit me as too painfully TRUE, or just too full of pain, to laugh with. He was the comic genius that made me cry, still and again.

Some commentators list Hocus Pocus as among his greatest, joining Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, or even his first, Player Piano. So I’m reading it again. I bought it in 1991 in a bus station or corner store. I was mid-divorce and devastated. Cover blurbs from the Houston Post (“hilarious”), the San Diego Tribune (“it’s a scream!”) and Playboy (“a king-sized relief valve of comedy”) prepared me not at all for what I found to be a grindingly sad bleat of human despair, all the more so for its bleak jokes and whistling-past-the-graveyard satire. Wow. What was the matter with me?

I’ve picked it up again, now that he’s gone. Fellow novelists Joseph Heller (Catch 22) and John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany is my favourite) have the front-cover blurbs, and they loved it. It doesn’t grab me yet, not in the way other Vonnegut can send me reeling with sorrow and wonder and gratitude. But it’s him, all right: characters without much depth whose comments and circumstances knock the wind out of me; quirky plots that seem to wander through banality to absurdity then suddenly coalesce in a storm of meaningful incident; a grim look at humans as a collective that is (occasionally) redeemed by the heartbreaking goodness of individuals, in spite of all. (Cruel and creepy things done “for love” made Vonnegut wary; he once – or twice – wrote that “what the world really needs is a little less love, and a lot more human decency”.)

Wedded as I am to a hopeful and consoling vision of the world, the one proclaimed and elaborated in the Bahá’í community, I wonder at his dignity and dogged belief. He saw the 20th century not as a transition and a birth pang, as I do, but as the death of civilization. He’d been right at the fiery centre of World War II, what he called “humanity’s second failed attempt to commit suicide”. He felt that the planet’s immune system was set to purge itself of our species, yet he kept on urging us to sanity and compassion, no matter what. No matter what. Such courage, such grace, even though he was convinced that the game is over. I’m humbled by his example. I hope to continue all the more to be moved by it.

I’ll finish Hocus Pocus before long. I predict that I will shake my head and mutter, “How did he do that?” Where did he find the guts to make art, and even a little merriness, out of the shrapnel of dismay? God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

Poets Leading

Posted by :James Howden On : April 10, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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I stage-whispered, proclaimed, I hollered and I sang to my classes, elementary and secondary, “Readers are LEADERS!” It was an article of faith, the Creature’s Creed, a plea for evidence of things perhaps not unseen but increasingly rare, especially among the young and male. (Unless they are sons of mine, in which case they read with absorption and fury and discrimination. Dad the Lucky.)

I have loved and cited often a passage from the American poet, Richard Wilbur: “What is our praise or pride / But to imagine excellence and try to make it?” But I don’t know his work very well, or very much of it, so I’m reading his recently issued Collected Poems: 1943-2004. I don’t read enough poetry. Maybe you don’t, either. JH.com to the rescue! Here’s the full text of Wilbur’s “The Reader”, which I cite in this week’s He Said/She Said… It is a telling artefact of the poem that its “reader” is female, but not a necessary condition! All of us need to visit (and discover all over again) the “realms of gold”…

The Reader

She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,
And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.
Onward they come again, the orphans reaching
For a first handhold in a stony world,
The young provincials who at last look down
On the city’s maze, and will descend into it,
The serious girl, once more, who would live nobly,
The sly one who aspires to marry so,
The young man bent on glory, and that other
Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does
What will become of them in bloody field
Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times
She sees their first and final selves at once,
As a god might to whom all time is now.
Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps
She meets them this time with a wiser eye,
Noting that Julien’s calculating head
Is from the first too severed from his heart.
But the true wonder of it is that she,
For all that she may know of consequences,
Still turns enchanted to the next bright page
Like some Natasha in the ballroom door—
Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,
The blind delight of being, ready still
To enter life on life and see them through.

It will mean more if you read it again. Trust me. This is not text messaging. (Well, actually, it is, but you know what I mean.)

Seeing the World from the Heart of Downtown

Posted by :James Howden On : April 3, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Here’s a sports story that’s not really a sports story. (Oh-oh, I hear some of you saying, I bet this is a sports story. Hang in there, friends. It won’t hurt.) That’s why it stays here, rather than in my own little on-line jock ghetto on your right.

It starts in high school and, yes, it starts with five kids playing for their school team. It was Toronto, possibly the most multicultural city on earth and certainly the basketball capital of Canada. One of its best teams that year featured a couple of guys from a Jamaican background, and one each from Jewish, Italian and Swazi families. Who knows how these things happen, but apparently they had more to talk about than flashy moves and hot girls as they approached graduation.

That summer of 2001, this particularly Fab Five put on the first of their downtown Concrete Hoops basketball camps, attracting many urban kids — often poor and not much younger than they were themselves — for a week of basketball and much more: a glimpse of their place in the world beyond the court. As the camps developed, they began to include music and dance, and to address racism, gender issues, community leadership and youth engagement.

Several of the founders went on to fine educations and athletic careers. The one I’m most familiar with is the McMaster Marauders star Ben Katz, who just finished his remarkable hoops career playing for his Dad while beginning graduate studies at the University of Toronto. He’s the director of the ongoing Concrete Hoops camps, but I’ve found that there’s more to this story than giving city kids a shot, as fine as that is.

Ben’s buddy Jama Mahlalela played his varsity ball at the University of British Columbia, but his family roots were in Swaziland. And in a few weeks, for the third straight year, Concrete Hoops will take its show on a very long and enlightening road to one of the most poor and deeply afflicted countries in AIDS-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa. “Swaziland is my home and I love the opportunity to work with the young leaders in the country. What we are doing has a huge impact in the community, and in basketball development in a country that really loves the sport,” comments Mr. Mahlalela. The Toronto crew teaches basketball, social commitment and the value of education — in a setting that makes even the real problems of Canadian urban poverty suddenly seem more manageable by comparison. They’ll spend three weeks there. They believe they’re making a difference that lasts longer than that. It is what every educator, every coach, every agent of social justice and change must believe. And they are seeing results, not least in the effect it has had on their own lives and perspectives.

It has been the annual March of excitement in North American basketball, with high school championships, the national tournament for Canadian university teams, and last night’s Final in the American NCAA men’s basketball. (The women play tonight.) I still love it, but I find it harder and harder to stomach the absurd and ever-growing levels of privilege and arrogance displayed by young men, who posture and bray and beat their chests in front of TV millions. It’s not all their fault. They’ve been encouraged to believe that what they do in winning basketball games is “making history” and “shocking the world”. (What do they do for an encore?)

But give me quieter kinds of historical building that leaves more behind than a banner and some game film. Show me young men who look to the subtle betterment of their own small parts of the world. So the most satisfying basketball news that has come my way recently is about the guys who built Concrete Hoops. I briefly hoped that I might be able to join in their fundraising event in Toronto this Saturday night, April 7, because this confluence of sport and world citizenship turns my emotional crank like few things can. However, the best I can do is to let you know how you might support this small package of good work done in the world. The fundraiser, featuring live music and video footage of previous trips to Swaziland, takes place Saturday night at Revival, on 783 College Street in Toronto. You can find out more by contacting Ben and the gang at concretehoops@hotmail.com . Their website can be found here, and has other information about the event.

There’s more to life than sports, I’ve long told young athletes, but there’s more to SPORTS than sports, too. I love it when sports leads to a kind of social good that goes beyond a little adrenaline here, some team spirit there (and media overkill everywhere…). Maybe you’ll want to join me in supporting the locally and globally good work of the Concrete Hoopsters.

When is Enough Enough?

Posted by :James Howden On : March 28, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Some great things land in my Inbox. Here are a couple of recent examples, and links that can get you more where they came from…

I’d never heard of Gary Tyler until recently. I’d never heard of Jocks for Justice, either, but there is a group of mainly ex-athletes – only Etan Thomas, a forward for the NBA’s Washington Wizards, is an active jock activist – who are standing up for what appears to be one of the great miscarriages of justice in American history. Gary Tyler, in 1974, was riding a bus with other black students to a newly desegregated high school in Louisiana. When the bus was attacked by a white mob, one white teen ended up shot to death. Tyler remains on death row in the notorious Angola prison for being, as a New York Times writer has recently uncovered, simply “the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time”. Amnesty International has flagged the case. Human rights and judicial reform activists are on the bit, too, as are Tommie Smith and John Carlos (the “Black Power” saluters from the Mexico City Olympics of 1968) and other sports notables. Dave Zirin, a writer whose beat is the social and political edge of sports, tells the whole story, with appropriate outrage, here.  It’s a quick but worthwhile read.

Another writer, no less passionate but more measured in his approach, is the noted American environmental crusader Bill McKibben. He’s not just a tree-hugger, although he loves the forests and trails. He’s one of the world’s most thoughtful contributors to the big discussions of how we should live, how we can remain in harmony with our highest human values and with the rest of creation. I first read McKibben in a short article in Utne magazine on how to survive (and more) the all-out consumer assault that our “holy season” has become. It was called “The $100 Christmas”. I had somehow missed his first book, The End of Nature, which was nearly 20 years ahead of its time. It was perhaps the first widely read discussion of the drastic effect on global ecology and climate that has been caused by our industrial excess. I heard McKibben recently at an Ottawa conference of the Sierra Club of Canada. He was thoughtful, he was extremely sobering, yet somehow he managed to be encouraging at the same time. And what a graceful writer!

If you have some time to read great writing that will change (or at least stimulate) your mind, try McKibben’s piece in the spring ’07 edition of Mother Jones magazine. It’s called “Reversal of Fortune”, and it begins this way: “For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both…” In other words, the human quest to achieve or acquire more – more food, more invention, more control over our circumstances – has generally served to make life better. But as McKibben notes here, and in his new book Enough, we have hit the stage in human civilization where the desire and attainment of MORE of everything has stopped being beneficial and has become the source of many of our most threatening problems. It’s intelligent but superbly readable, and it won’t leave you in despair. There are things we can do to make our lives BETTER. (If you’d like to read more about this – and this is a case where ‘more’ and ‘better’ still DO roost on the same branch – please click here for more McKibben. Always a good thing.)

 

And a NEW DAY to You, Too

Posted by :James Howden On : March 21, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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The sun is beaming where I am, and the mercury will rise to stream-swelling temperatures tomorrow. It’s my favourite time of the year, and not only because there is the best of basketball, and days that seem brighter than they’ve ever been. It’s also a New Year in my world, and welcome to it.

The Bahá’í communities of everywhere celebrated Naw-Rúz (“New Day” in Farsí) last night with food and dance and song and holy words. “If we are not happy in this Day, for what time do we wait?” Today is a holy day on the calendar, hours of gratitude and festivity and renewed hope. (And, to be sure, of a certain kind of relief that the fasting period is over! I am, though, a big fan of the Fast.) Naw-Rúz is a Persian festival that has been celebrated for nearly 1400 years, one that is now shared by the Bahá’í Faith, youngest of the world’s religions. Bahá’ís haven’t had it easy in Iran, but last night in Ottawa Naw-Rúz was also a time of mutual respect and shared cultural richness among Muslims and Bahá’ís of Iranian extraction. So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth, said Bahá’u’lláh, and there was a fine little ray of it in Ottawa over dinner last night. (Wish I’d been there, but my Farsí is pretty limited.)

I’ll say it again: what a great time to be celebrating New Year’s! All that green, all that growing, all those immoderate northern symbols of rebirth and regeneration…

Happy Naw-Rúz!! May the spring be a season of joy for you. May your crocuses bloom.

It’s Been Quiet, but JH Lives

Posted by :James Howden On : March 18, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Actually, it’s been a little wild: I’ve been suddenly getting lots of supply teaching dates, and in between that and busy family-ness and travel and keeping up with other writing, I’ve been neglectful of my floating blue CyberPresence. I’m grabbing a quick scribble on a hotel lobby machine in Halifax, where I am taking in the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball championship. The pleasure is all mine; I’m travelling with eldest son Ben, the Itinerant Artist, and it has been great so far. You’ll start finding my notes on the trip to the CIS with the IA, where we also take in the NCAA tournament on TV, in the IAAS (It’s All About Sports!) section of this site PDQ. TGIF! (Thank Goodness Initials are Finished.)

Sports Writing Worth Reading

Posted by :James Howden On : March 6, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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Well, YES, he said immodestly, but I’m not talking about my own stuff here. Give me credit for some level of humility! (But it’s true,  there is a lot of good jock journalism in the box to your right.) I mean Dave Zirin, an American writer I read fairly regularly. He writes on the “Edge of Sports”, and insists on making the connection between athletics (especially the professional variety) and real life, unlikely as that may seem. He keeps hollering that social justice and the Great Big Sandbox are related to each other, that they MUST be.

Zirin is worth reading, even if you don’t normally open the sports section. For example, the article I got through subscribing to his service sent me an article that addresses the history of racial injustice in American sport, and suggests one small symbolic way to address it. (His web site is here. I’ll post an excerpt from the article in It’s All About Sports! right here.) If you are a sports fan, I defy you to answer the three trivia questions that he asks; I couldn’t. There were more barriers to be leaped over – still are – than the one with Jackie Robinson’s signature on it. I commend this to your interest, as Dave Zirin would say, in struggle and sport.

(Pulling a) Fast One

Posted by :James Howden On : March 2, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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The warmest of shouts out to the people of Bahá today, et bon courage, as they enter their period of fasting. (And give yourself an extra helping of sausage tomorrow morning if you got the pun in the title, be you believer or not.) I’d write more about this fasting business, but I’ve been up since six and it’s a SNOW DAY IN OTTAWA but I drove Sam to school and I’m going back to bed! Yippee!!

Today’s cosy indulgence will be sponsored by the cracking open of a novel, The Go-Between by the (alas, no longer scribbling with us¹) English writer L.P. Hartley. It’s the one with that pregnant first line, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there…” No matter how well it begins, there will likely be sleep. There has already been guitar, and there may be more. There will certainly be shovelling. (Yes, my sweet, and dishes and laundry.) And today’s forecast is that the sweet and overwhelming inspiration to write will strike me with both fists at exactly 1:00 pm this afternoon.

¹ Anyone out there get this particular literary allusion? Think snow falling “like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards”. (And if you can’t wait for next Christmas – or you need to know the answer NOW – please click here for my favourite re-creation of childhood. It’s worth five minutes. Heck. Six.)

Back to Adolescence. Again!

Posted by :James Howden On : February 28, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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I’ve been a Substitute Creature for the last couple of days at a local high school. I do it all: French, Drama, History, Geography, English (of all things!)… I did demure this morning when a Tech class was in the range of Mr. Flexibility choices, although I WILL remind you that I won the grade 9 Industrial Arts Award at Caledonia High School, lo, those many years ago, where I made the most absurd and sickly book shelf in the history of design but aced all the tests.

Given my stupendously modest earnings as a writer this past year, I’m courting the don’t give up your day job Day Job, and I’m looking in the direction of education — where I spent the bulk of my professional career — rather than writing for government contract or speech-makers. I’m convinced that my own stuff would wither away if I was writing for other people from nine to five, though I can imagine writing after the classroom fog lifts and I’ve scrubbed the chalk off my fingers (sleeves, thighs, forehead). I’ll be off to make the Art of the Theatre sparkle and inspire young minds in half an hour. (I sense a movie coming on…)

I am finally getting to my long-overdue notes on my Guitarzan odyssey, that ODY-ous quest (the “Old Dog Year”) to become a guitar player a decade or three after my teens. (The first 150 days or so are already posted in the “On Second Thought” section of the site. You should Write Me! if there aren’t a couple more posts up by the weekend.) And the new quote for the week, a day late, is up in the “He Said/She Said” box. So much for the mind, so few photos. Speaking of photos, remind me to offer a link to our Guadeloupe travels; I should also be getting to writing about this cool trip before the memories fade.

Shabbat and Beyond: All the News That’s Good to Read

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

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We were at Paul and Michelle’s last night for Shabbat supper, and after the blessings offered in the kiddush, one of the many topics of intelligent conversation — in and around the expressive needs of four boys between 5 and 12 — was Michelle and Paul’s plans for me. (There are always plans.) So here is Michelle’s latest: she was enlisting my writing — I guess, ’cause it couldn’t have been my capital investment — in support of the OGN Network, a medium of information and insight that carries Only Good News. None of us are getting enough. (Good news, that is.)

And today, shuffling through a deck of last week’s newspapers, I found a superb OGN entry. It was an obituary, actually, for a brilliant and world-embracing scientist named Bent Skovmand, a Dane who had become one of the planet’s foremost agricultural researchers. His mission, self-described and self-imposed, had been to end world hunger. He didn’t quite get there, but his travels and studies allowed him to be part of assembling tens of thousands of varieties of grain and hybridizing more resistant, easily grown and nutritious seed.

His death interrupted what may be his greatest life’s work, and one of the most exciting, almost science fiction-like projects for global betterment that I can imagine. It’s one of those under-reported (I’d certainly never heard of it) stories that is the bright lining behind a dark and fearful canopy: while nuclear arsenals are still capable of massive annihilation, and other less spectacular threats loom over humanity, Skovmand has been heading the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The Trust has set itself the challenge of gathering and preserving the entire world’s agricultural foundation in case of catastrophes local or global that destroy our ability to feed ourselves. This is vision. This is looking forward.

Check this link: it will give you a detailed description of what is variously called the “doomsday vault”, the “Fort Knox of seeds”, being built with Norwegian leadership and international cooperation on a tiny Norwegian island far above the Arctic Circle. There, by 2008, millions of seeds composing the foundation of world agriculture will be safe, not only from nuclear war but also from the worst-case climate change scenario. How do you like them apples (or the 100,000 kinds of rice, or the 1000 types of bananas), Michelle? WONDERful, it is.