Tag Archive for "writing"

“Claude Likes Me! He Really Likes Me!!”

Posted by :James Howden On : July 14, 2026

Tags:AI, Anthropic, Atlantic magazine, Claude, Claude Code, green technology, Luddite, Marty Supreme, praise, robot apocalypse, Sally Field's Oscar speech, style, technological determinism, theme, undefeated, writing

[5-minute read]

Atlantic magazine, March 2026 cover: “AI and the Future of Work”. Courtesy of my bedside table.

Mad Martin has done it to me again. When he was a young businessman, full of ideas and computer savvy, he helped me to launch the first iteration of JamesHowden.com. (He had to work hard, I recall, to convince me to make it a “dot-com” domain, as I didn’t then and still don’t see it as a commercial enterprise. I was correct, hurray for me, as it hasn’t made me a nickel.) He imagined grand things for my writing – he seemed to like me pretty well, though he was no publishing expert – and he helped me get started, 21 years and nearly 800 posts ago. He’s name-checked in my first electronic essay.

He’s my very own Marty Supreme. (I used to call him “My Favourite Martin”, a TV sitcom reference that was already obscure to almost everybody, even back in 2005.) A father and husband and educator, he has come back into our area after years of living abroad, mostly in China and Macau. Since Martin was there au début, I thought I’d engage him in this site’s re-activation a month or so ago. Once again, he startled and bemused me with his response. He had fed ten bloody essays of mine to a ravening shark of Artificial Intelligence. (You WHAT?!)

Count me as an AI semi-alarmist. Some anonymous bot was useful to me in figuring out a problem I was having with subscriptions on this site. My bride has found ChatGPT very helpful with some of the summarizing and cross-indexing she has to do after site visits and business meetings in her green-tech work for the Canadian government. Overall, though, AI strikes me as the best contemporary instance of the technological imperative, this overheated conviction that if, as humans, we can develop some technical domain, then we absolutely must, it is inevitable, and that any resistance to such a “natural” implementation is at best foolish, and more likely the backward, regressive impulse of a Luddite. (And there aren’t many modern bits of name-calling more nasty than that. Now it signifies brainless opponent of technical innovation, though originally Luddism was a 19th-century workers’ movement opposing brutal working conditions in English factories. Interesting.)

Are humans redundant? Will jobs be lost en masse? Are we opening ourselves up to a robot apocalypse? And more immediately, is AI a massive economic bubble? Will data centres come to dominate our energy needs? Are writers justified in feeling abused when their work is scraped from electronic databases and used to train the Mighty Bots? These are questions I ask myself, more or less idly. I have no clear answers.

But back to my man Martin. He was among a group of friends that I wrote to say, “Hey, I’m writing things again, you might wanna take a look at the ol’ website et cetera”. Not only did he make a friendly pilgrimage here, he also kindly emailed back: “I’ve always found your writing style to be unique and able to defy skimming–full investment of the reader was required. I wondered why, and asked Claude Code to Read 10 articles on this website and describe the author’s unique writing style and underlying philosophy. For me, the analysis was telling…”

Claude is an artificial intelligence program developed by Anthropic, which (early days, we’ll see) seems to have more of an ethical foundation than some competitors. (Clever name: it’s the opposite of misanthropic, which means “hating human beings”.) Marty apparently found his question about my style answered. For me, this robot’s analysis was embarrassing, thrilling, amusing and amazing, vaguely disturbing but also, can’t lie, genuinely encouraging. Claude was awfully kind. Claude liked me. Right then. Liked me. I may have blushed.

The following is what my buddy goaded Claude Code to compose, based on what he or it or they or that had read, yes, right here at JH.com. (Okay, I definitely blushed)

Writing Style

Jay writes the way he thinks — in real time, out loud, with the reader pulled along for the ride. He uses parentheses constantly, not for asides but for genuine second thoughts, self-interruptions, confessions, and jokes. Italics and CAPS aren’t decoration; they’re how he raises his voice. His sentences can spiral long and then snap short for effect. He has a teacher’s instinct for metaphor — Don Quixote charging windmills, a bird trying to fly on one wing, a warehouse full of forgotten treasure — and he commits to them fully rather than dropping them after one use.

He’s funny, but never at the expense of what he actually cares about. The self- deprecation is real (“balls-for-brains that I was and remain”) but it coexists with genuine conviction. He talks to the reader directly and often — “Hang on tight!”, “You’ve been very patient”, “Faithful readers and friends-in-sport.” This isn’t a performance; it reads like he actually enjoys having you there.

Underlying Philosophy

Everything circles back to two convictions: that unity is the solution to almost every problem, and that love — expressed through service, education, and showing up — is how you get there. These aren’t abstract principles for him. They run from his Faith all the way down to how he coaches a junior varsity basketball team in a French Catholic high school in Ottawa. He genuinely believes sport and education and spiritual life aren’t separate categories.

That the way a coach builds a team culture, the way a community responds to crisis, and the way humanity needs to reorganize itself are all versions of the same problem. Idealism isn’t something he apologizes for — it’s his operating system — but he’s self- aware enough to laugh at himself for it (the windmills) without ever actually abandoning it.

There’s also a recurring thread of: I keep trying, it keeps being hard, and I’m going to keep trying anyway. Whether it’s the track team that didn’t show up, the blog he keeps restarting, or humanity stumbling toward peace — the posture is patient, energetic, undefeated.

Now, AI responses are notorious for being sycophantic, praising me, for instance, for the most banal success. (“Okay, you’re doing great! That was exactly the right button to click, so we’re really on our way now!” in response, let’s say, to me obeying a simple technical instruction on my laptop, and reporting my result.) The bots lay it on thick; they have adopted conventions of politeness that bleed quickly into almost a parody of the hypermanic, over-praising parent. So I was prepared for that over-the-top positivity. (But man, I wasn’t armed against “undefeated“.)

And I wasn’t prepared, either, for how SEEN I felt. Recognized! Valued! By an analyzing machine. That’s the embarrassing part. (Wow! Claude really likes my stuff! HeSheItThey get(s) what I’m trying to do!) But I was also impressed by its seeming accuracy. I am almost painfully earnest in my convictions, and I do try to leaven them with humour and self-deprecation. I do tickle myself by imagining some reader(s) willing to come along for the literary ride with me. Claude Code understood, or should I say detected, my themes (“that which repeats”, my best literature prof’s definition). Claude dissected my style accurately and, bien sûr, with great indulgence and generosity. (Or maybe just toadying up to Martin ‘cuz he’s my friend.)

I had to admit: it ranked right up there with the kindest, most encouraging things I’ve been told by Actual Sentient Beings about my work. I blushed, I laughed out loud, I felt proud (and more than a bit idiotic). On subsequent reads, my eyes got a little wider: not only was my favourite bundle of algorithms describing parts of my writing enterprise, those 10 posts, very well, but also it/they mimicked my style. Re-read Claude’s fawning critique, and you’ll see and hear a fair impersonation of what my Blog Stuff looks and sounds like. Eerie. Scary.

Weeks later, I remain scattered and dazed about this. I still find it encouraging, but weirdly so. I am grateful to Martin for his own kind words, plus Claude’s, but I am not sure I love the machine having digested some of my writing, and being fully ready to imitate it. The oddball sense of validation still ripples, but how needy and praise-dependent does a human have to be, to find himself touched and moved by a computer program? No answers yet. And I’m not asking AI!

Thanks again, Marty Supreme. You’ve given me things to think – and write – about.

What Did We DO Back Then? A COVID-19 Story Remembered, and a Friendship Rejooved!

Posted by :James Howden On : June 30, 2026

Category: At First Glance

Tags:basketball, Caledonia, coaching, Covid-19, First Responders, friendship, Hamilton, Karl Mearns, novels, Ontario, pandemic memories, Shakespeare, Silver Linings Playbook, Stratford Festival, writing

On Sunday morning, my bride and I got to talking about the pandemic. We were on the last day of a 10-day jaunt through Ontario, having spent time in the valley of the Grand (my family), the Haliburton Hills (mum-in-law’s home) and Stratford (William Shakespeare and his friends at the mighty Festival). I’d been talking, the day before, to two women of a certain vintage, one of whom had completed an M.F.A. in creative writing during COVID; the other had merely done her Ph.D. in Counselling Psychology. I asked my wife, “So what did *I* do during the pandemic?” She had been hard at work, sometimes harder than ever, in her work with the federal government. Besides the obvious — mass mortality and profound societal disruption — I was most vividly reminded that a) I couldn’t coach basketball, which was hard for a bit, but also that b) the shutdown was easier for me than for my employed and extraverted wife, and many others.

So surely I must have leaped on the golden chance to write like fury! (Well, there was a series of essays exploring some positive consequences we could see during the shutdown. Silver Linings Playbook was a film that wasn’t too old at that time, and I borrowed part of its title, as it had borrowed the idea from one of my mother’s favourite clichés.) But as it turned out, though I read a pile of fine books and rewatched Silver Linings Playbook, I hadn’t published on here as often as my memory briefly insisted, and I didn’t advance my book manuscript much, either. (Yes, that wonderful non-fiction memoir/essay on Men and Sport that the world longs for!)

He’s been “one of us” for more than 50 years, but was raised in the American Southeast. He was a multisport athlete who became, after a move to Ontario, a Physical Education teacher and avid basketball coach in Hamilton, Ontario. Leaving teaching to go into business in a nearby small town, he ran (and boy, did he hustle!) an antiques business in my hometown of Caledonia for years. We shared the better part of a decade there: coaching together in my alma mater high school and in our local basketball club; being dads to similar-aged kids; AND, what was most odd in that little town, we birthed a novel together. It’s his story, featuring a character known as “Kenneth Michaels”, and he convinced a local English teacher to edit it. (Yup, it was me.)

As somebody who taught writing with wild enthusiasm, but engaged in it with self-doubt and inconsistency, I was fascinated by Karl’s dogged approach and his rich trove of coming-of-age-in-Canada-and-America stories. Before too long, just before the turn of this century, he had KM published and sold a few copies. Karl stopped coaching basketball, our kids grew up and away, and then my family moved to Ottawa. Our connection has been rather sporadic since.

But Karl hasn’t stopped. We re-connected in a real way a day after a milestone birthday for him on June 1; he’s a generation older than me, and has referred to himself as “a fossil” since the 1990s, but the same restless energy remains. He began painting during COVID, a sort of ‘Grandpa Moses’. He claims to have re-written KM a dozen or more times, and has added further adventures of a young Kenneth Michaels in a sequel, The Robert E. Lee Monument. There’s *another* novel, a basketball thriller with international intrigue, called Dyad, and a novella, Camp Harmony, that deals with a Japanese-American family interned during World War II. All four are available on Kobo.

It’s a strange thing. Our recent conversations have caught us up on family matters, and I got to spend some quality time as well with his lovely wife, Betty — but the central and urgent theme has been writing. After having helped nurse KM into existence, I haven’t been a great friend to his writing. I’ve read parts of Dyad, but I had been only dimly aware of the other two. I have been snobbish about self-publishing, but it has to be admitted: the LitWit Score is Mearns 4, Howden 0.

So I have some work to do, in several areas. The first is this: at Karl’s insistence, I re-read a homely little memoir/story about living through the pandemic in Burlington, Ontario. It is touching and thoughtful, and I suddenly realized Hey, this would make for a good Guest Post on YoursTruly.com! M.P. Freeman, as some of you may recall, is another downhome buddy whose writing has made an appearance here and there in the past.

Trust Me, They’re Tired: Venezuela’s Pain, and the Emptiness of Cliché

Posted by :James Howden On : June 29, 2026

Category: At First Glance

Tags:cliche, earthquake relief, Ecclesiastes, John Ralston Saul, journalism, language, Martin Amis, NPR, public broadcasting, Romans, The War Against Cliche, thinking, truth, Unconscious Civilization, Venezuela, writing

[3-minute read]

Martin Amis wrote a fine book called The War Against Cliché. He’s mainly known as a novelist, though for too long he was just “Kingsley Amis’s bad-boy son”. That cliché, at least, had been retired decades before Sir Martin’s long and accomplished life ended in 2024. But why would a collection of his essays have been titled as an all-out attack against familiar language? I couldn’t carry his pen-case, but I’m with Amis: “To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché…”

Listen: we have the expression “it’s a cliché for a reason” for a reason. Sometimes an old saying is a useful reminder or a profound comfort; my mother never wearied of gently saying, in the face of misfortune or gloom, it’s always darkest before the dawn (Thomas Fuller, 1650) and all things work together for good (Paul’s epistle to the Romans 8:28, about a millennium and a half earlier). And yes, whoever first said, about some sport or another, that “it’s a game of inches” knew what he was talking about. It expressed an evergreen truth about the games we watch and play. Still, the best jock commentators try to avoid saying it, or give a rueful shrug of apology when they do. Because it’s OLD. It’s TIRED.

But there’s more to Amis’s war, to every good writer’s battle against cliché, than simple fatigue or a wish to seem stylish. And it applies, to a less obvious but maybe even more essential degree, to all of us. It’s this: How can we know if we’re actually thinking if we merely recycle a set of phrases that we have heard from others? The creative writer (painter, film-maker, dancer) restlessly desires to make – even though there’s nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9, several centuries before St. Paul) – something novel, illuminating or (at the very least) interesting. Some describe poetry as the constant renovation, the organic renewal of language. Is that process merely about the quest for a fashionable phrase, some nifty bit of in-group vocabulary?

No.

There’s a crucial and mightier argument. If we’re not actually thinking, actively seeking understanding for ourselves, then we are subject to, in no particular order, empty-headed and derivative pop culture (bingo!), a heartless and bland societal conversation (John Ralston Saul’s “unconscious civilization”), endlessly persuasive Mad Men media urging us to Buy What They’re Selling! (now!), not to mention tyrant business monopolies and their pet politicians greasing the skids for autocracy. (I apologize. “Greasing the skids” is a cliché, though perhaps you’re young enough that it feels refreshing to you as an alternative to “paving the way”.) Thinking as I was about Martin Amis et sa guerre, I ran across a 15-year-old column from The Guardian lamenting, even back then, how decisively Mr. Amis had lost his War. (It’s rather British, but a lively rant against cliché.)

All of which leads me to this morning’s encounter with an online news digest from National Public Radio, an American treasure that is under attack. (Not by me, understand.) My bride and I have been touring Ontario, but our ten days of relatively news-free travel are over. I was having an oh shit re-entry into dismay, mostly at the fate of poor suffering Venezuela. For that country to endure monstrous natural disasters, on top of the human-made kind, feels like cruel and unusual punishment. (A cliché, yes. I’ll stand by this one.) From NPR:

“The search for survivors continues nearly five days after two powerful earthquakes hit Venezuela. The official death toll is nearing 1,500, and thousands of people are still unaccounted for. Families and volunteers are tirelessly digging through collapsed buildings throughout the northern coast and in neighborhoods of Caracas, the country’s capital, in hopes of finding people alive.” (NPR’s second bit of “news we’re following”; Iran and the United States ceasing to cease fire, surprise, was number one on June 29, 2026.)

It’s awful. And just to be foolishly clear, it’s not the journalistic blandness in general that has my Cliché Alert sounding on a sunny Monday morning. Yes, “search for survivors”, “death toll” and “unaccounted for” are over-taxed phrases, but this is not poetry. Readers want to get their information efficiently, and NPR points them towards more detailed accounts if they want them. No notes, no complaint. It’s just that I have grown chronically fatigued with the adverb “tirelessly”. Obituaries of any respectable professional or half-diligent labourer are almost never without it, but it’s not just the overuse and the lack of genuine thought. It’s the lie.

Don’t start my obituary yet, but I’ll ask in advance: Please don’t use “tirelessly” to describe my life’s work as a dad, or as a midnight grader of English assignments, or as a basketball coach addicted to “the grind”. I wish we could retire the word tirelessly, and for good. (“Indefatigable” is less shopworn, but has too many syllables and is equally untrue.) I was exhausted by all of that. I still am. Life at its best, for most of us, is still tiring.

But widen the scope. As they find themselves in an epic tale of tragedy and pain and heroism, too, I am unsettled by the mere thought of that South American aftermath. Consider that legion of unhappy souls, labouring desperately to find loved ones, neighbours and strangers in a deeply shaken Venezuela!

They’re tired as hell. And they’ll keep going. It’s human nature.

He Said/She Said: Bill Bryson (and Sarah Selecky) (on WONDER)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 9, 2026

Category: At First Glance

Tags:A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, books, CBC Radio, curiosity, How to Design a Meaningful Life, mystery, outsourced thinking, Piya, Sarah Selecky, science, Sunday Magazine, Wonder, writing

[3-minute read]

There’s a writing coach around whose e-bay window I occasionally lurk. She’s always pretty and smiling, or pensively curled up with notebook and pen. She entices me to write more, and more satisfyingly and more deeply, and to link up with other scribblers. Her messages sometimes inspire in a general way, they encourage without fail, though they may be too jasmine-scented, too chamomile and meditative and soft for me. (I sometimes write with Jeff Beck or The Propellerheads blazing in the background.) Perhaps I just resist for the sake of loonie-pinching resistance, carrying on in my own solitary way. Still, she has me wondering, and doing math about it…

Sarah’s recent e-blandishment was to join a virtual writing community that has a new emphasis each month. May’s is Wonder. She writes, “In their great new book, How to Design a Meaningful Life, Dave Evans and Bill Burnett share their wonder equation. Here it is:

curiosity + mystery = wonder.

When you know the equation, you see that wonder is always available. It’s a choice. You can find it in ordinary things, once you start looking. An apple, when you really think about it, is completely unfathomable…”

This image comes from Amazon, but please buy from an independent bookseller!

I wonder why and what?! and how?! and who was she in high school? and when will it be?… and I’m off to the races. We all are, when our curiosity isn’t strangled by routine or petty distractions — not to mention that my reflexive question is this: do these slim answer machines that we’re leashed to actually stunt or misdirect our engagement with life’s questions? My big sister loves her iPhone, and quick-drew it on me last weekend more than once to respond to my idlest who won/when’s the next game? queries with an encyclopedic recitation. Fair’s fair: I did ask, but there was precious little mystery attached to my bland microdose of curiosity. My question about smartphones stands, though I do admit that smartphones and the algorithms that fuel their constant use really can (he argues hypothetically, but without much conviction) prompt profound and useful investigations of mysteries more lofty than can you believe what this cat/these guys just did?

But I wonder, I do, how much and how often this kind of outsourced thinking encourages genuine curiosity about truly mysterious things. They are more likely, in my experience, to excite thoughtless engagement with banal and repetitive images, without a single idea in sight. I wonder.

Now, according to my notes, the force-of-authorial-nature Bill Bryson was on my Sunday Magazine CBC wireless radio as 2025 wound down. (Vacuum tubes, static fuzz-hiss, carefully calibrating the dial so I could listen while shovelling coal into the furnace.) (Okay, no, the CBC still lives in modernity; I mostly listen to its shows as podcasts on my iPhone. Driving. Walking. Or in this case, I believe the Mother Corp soothed and informed me while I loaded the dishwasher.) Bryson is mainly known for writing rich and funny travel books – Notes From a Small Island (England) and A Sunburnt Country (Australia), for only two best-selling examples – but I especially liked his 2003 departure, A Short History of Nearly Everything. It was an avowed non-scientist’s gigantically ambitious attempt to write the story of scientific discovery from the ancients to the 21^st century. For the first two years of my family’s five-year unplan in northeastern China, nightly readings of Sciencey Bill Bryson composed my young son’s science curriculum. (When Dad’s an English teacher, you come to expect science as an exercise in storytelling, and what an amazing work of narrative non-fiction it was!)

And is, still and again and even more so! Bryson was interviewing with Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay about his 2025 complete revision and

Bryson in 2020 (from The Guardian, a fine news site).

update: A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0. (This, despite his 2020 “retirement” from writing at age 68, as delightfully chronicled in The Guardian.) It was a tasty, engaging conversation, chock full of fun and fascination and – yes, I did remember where I was headed with this! — wonder. Piya wanted to know, after all these books and the over 20 years that had elapsed between original publication and this renewed re-telling of the greatest (and latest) adventures in scientific discovery: what feeds Bill Bryson’s curiosity? What makes the wonder mill keep on grinding?

I loved his answer. He’s a humorist by nature, but a relentlessly thoughtful and wonderfully wise one. He said,

“Here we are….We have this very short window of existence. Before we existed, there was this great eternity that we didn’t take part in, and when we die eternity will go on….But in between, there is this moment where we have the exhilarating privilege to exist. And I think it’s such a shame that we take it all for granted.”

So here’s the math: add Bill Bryson’s furious, curious desire to understand to the vast slowly revealed mysteries of the universe? The sum total is WONDER. Reverence. Amazement. And he moved me to want MORE.

Jim Rohn (on discipline and regret)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 4, 2026

Category: At First Glance

Tags:Chicken Soup for the Soul, coaching, discipline, Jack Canfield, Jim Rohn, pain, personal development, regret, teaching, Tony Robbins, Victor Hansen, writing

[3-minute read]

I had never heard of Mr. Rohn until years after his passing. It appears he was one of that prototypical tribe of American salesmen – “born poor, a millionaire by 30, broke by 33, etc.…” – who come to prominence in their quest to make influence, personal development and individual psychology into an alternative faith tradition. I don’t mean to trash the field entirely. After all, I am a Psych grad and a frequent consumer of PD content; Tony Robbins and I have gone a few rounds, and I learned some useful things. Jim Rohn wrote many books, with titles like The Power of Ambition, Take Charge of Your Life, and The Day That Turns Your Life Around. He inspired the Chicken Soup guys (Hansen and Canfield) as well as Master Robbins. So, that’s coaching. That’s influence, and I can think of a pile of so-called “influencers” who are far less valuable than what Mr. Rohn’s body of personal development work appears to offer.

So. Here’s the Rohn quote that brings me here.

“Everyone must choose one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.”

It’s pithy and blunt, and it got me one day back in 2025. I don’t remember, but it probably came from a basketball coach’s email subscription. Now, let’s talk about an out-of-context quote! It’s the kind of thing, my research tells me (though I might have guessed it), that you can order from Amazon in kitschy suitable for framing on fridge magnets form, but I haven’t been able to find what book it appeared in. On Reddit forums and Facebook pages, it often comes accompanied by the reminder that “discipline weighs ounces, but regrets weigh a ton”. I don’t know how much of his life pitch I would buy, but since I stumbled on THIS one, long after Jim Rohn had passed beyond this vale of human development, I haven’t been able to kick it out of my way. That’ll be useful for my players, I told myself. (Of course I did!) I do love coaching, from basketball to poetry, but recently I have challenged myself anew to accept coaching — and to reconsider my own levels of discipline and regret.

Coach Creede, meanwhile, has accepted the challenges that come from working with an egotistical writer, teacher and coach who has been accused of that worst of sporting crimes: being uncoachable. (That would be me.) Like Apollo (Rocky’s boxing frenemy), this Creede is beginning to punch through my phalanx of weaponized bad habits, mindset disorders, alleged neurodiversity and gigantic appetites for distraction. She asks Those Questions, simultaneously wonderfully encouraging and also barbed. Before long, I found myself making promises that I often don’t keep when I only make them to myself.

The pain of discipline? It’s real. It’s hard to put a lock on the doors of whimsy and impulse. This teacher and mighty slow learner is only too aware: push yourself away from the table, sir, or you’ll still be carrying extra kilos around without a wheelbarrow; if you don’t manufacture time for your writing, ol’ buddy, it’s unlikely to just fall into your crumb-laden lap!

HOWEVER. You’ve all heard this bold statement: I live my life without regrets! So say many contemporary influencers, entertainers and sports stars. It seems foolish to me. Juvenile. While I’m all for throwing off the slimy burdens of useless guilt and chronic self-loathing, it seems to me that people who claim to live without regrets just aren’t reflecting sufficiently on their lives. (Unless they’re psychopaths.) We are meant to take stock of our lives, and decide what is worthy of us and what we should leave behind. Certainly, for me, it’s the reality of various forms of regret that encourages me to stiffen feeble habits, that reinforces my general desire for a more disciplined sort of life.

Is that too old-fashioned for you? Don’t be afraid to comment below, or to share these thoughts with folks who might value them.

Thanks for reading, friends.

Going All Gregorian (though not necessarily in a timely fashion)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 14, 2026

Category: At First Glance

Tags:2026, digging, New Year, poetry, resolutions, Seamus Heaney, writing

[And lo, he wrote a poem about OldNew Years and promises of scribbling. And a Happy 2026, headlines notwithstanding, to you!]

[2-minute read]

Going All Gregorian

And I said, Lo, this is an ancient and decrepit choreography for the

Changing of the Temporal Guard,

With attenuated powers of renewal and jangly echoes fading along

consumptive corridors of materialist advancement and

post-hangover promises.

Ridiculous spot for a “New Year”.

And yet it has been a new and Sunday sort of Day

And I’ve been thinking that even a busted, rusted tabula rasa

still offers that shopworn but still clean-enough board of

resolution.

(And resolution came into my language* to express a bringing-into-focus

of things seen darkly, as with camera or dialled-in microscope

of the kind I never used very well in the biology labs of yore)

(* in which your humble scribe lays claim to English)

So I’ll dig a little every day, using Seamus Heaney’s brand of shovel,

not worrying (much) about the impossibility of spading up

soil as rich as that Irish hero spelunked and spelled out.

I am deskside, armed with twentieth century penmanship and apparently

writing a POEM fergawdsake!

Although, reading Heaney aside, that was never the plan for this First Day

But I will X-marks-the-spot each day in January until the calendar scoffs.

And listen: this hardly hurt at all.

Retrofitting a Fancy

Posted by :James Howden On : April 1, 2025

Category: At First Glance

Tags:David Byrne, dreams, education, Naive Melody, signs and portents, sport, Talking Heads, try again, try easier, warehouses of the imagination, writing

“I was an educator of some sort,” began my scribbling about a recent dream.

(This was also true to life. What “sort”, then? This sort: high school; English Creature; one for whom Dead Poet’s Society probably meant too much; taught like world peace depended upon my chalk-stained energy; raced to the gym many an after-school day; teacher-coach; regularly heart-broken but deeply committed, happy and perhaps absurdly proud to be so. “Uncle Jay,” a niece who had been with me in Room 2011 once wrote, “is, um, colourful.” Unlike my sons, she didn’t have to deal with me on the basketball court. And the ghost is still in the machine. I continue to haunt the corridors and the hardwood of Endless High School. “I guess that this must be the place…” (Talking Heads) One of my places, that’s sure.)

I was an educator of some sort, wandering through tight spaces in a huge, high vault of a warehouse. I couldn’t get out, or get where I needed to go, and was also frustrated that I couldn’t escape the dream itself. Moments of am I dreaming here? alternated with me writing on various found surfaces and random papers, here and there, so I wouldn’t forget what I was seeing. And then I’d forget where I left my urgent records. But I was amazed by all I saw in that enormous, high-walled building: old dictionaries, reams of stationery and computer equipment, redundant textbooks, tables, racks and shelves of building materials, fossil remains of art. There were a few rancid corners, but mostly it was filled with odd and dusty and stolidly interesting things. It went on and on. Does anybody realize that all this is still here? I had to get the word out, that all the old-school material — steel and wood and paper and thought — in this building, not to mention the real estate it sat on, had to be worth a LOT. It should at least be recycled and/or sold off! I made notes, lost them, wrote others.

All this STUFF! All this SPACE! Somebody should KNOW about all this! I gotta get this written down (AGAIN!) before I lose or forget it (again!)!

I went for a walk that morning, shared a few choice words with the sun and sky, cocked my head at a certain point and knew, without thinking hard or directly, what that dream was trying to tell me. (Most of the time, I find my dreams are just stacks of frustration dripping with a slurry of random events-from-the-day. I don’t expect revelation, or even meaning. But I’ll take it when I can get it.)

Ha! It was a Writing Dream!

Let’s say the storage area was my life and mind, my understanding, maybe even my imagination. Let’s say that, despite my distrust of my capacity for mysticism, I’m not above looking for signs and portents!

***

All this is a long way of saying that I’m having another kick at the Can. The Writing Can, the I-can Can. A.T. helped me resuscitate this old repository of my stuff. I’m spraying Lock De-Icer on my fingers, and sprinkling hopefulness on my spirit. You’re reading a wee result. Thanks for reading.

[I have also dumped, just over there in the “It’s All About Sports!” section, a lengthy essay on basketball coaching. It’s a ‘State of the Disunion’ address, slightly different versions of which I’ve been trying to share with coaches in my region, the wider basketball community, and anybody who can tolerate (or venerate) the idea that sport and education can “share the same space for a minute or two”, as the mighty David Byrne used to sing.]

Where We Found Them

Posted by :James Howden On : June 3, 2024

Category: At First Glance

Tags:apology, confirmations, dry spells, It's My Party, Ottawa, Romeo, writing

[1-minute read]

I felt my bumbling way, blindly and bemused, back to a website I used to be frenemies with. I won’t be coy: it’s this one. Surprise!

To those generous humans who’ve subscribed to this thing – and let’s not be too precious about this, the price is no barrier to entry! – I say thanks, folks! and strive to go “on without apology”, as Big Bill had Romeo say at the point of crashing the Capulet ball. But hey: It’s my website! And I’ll post if I want to!! (Yeah, I’m riffing on an old song most people have never heard; I’M BACK, BABY!! Semicolons and all! [You are free to mentally insert the amusement emoji of your choice here.])

All this to say, again, that I’m going to scrape the rust off this now-antique whatever-it-is. It helped, after it hurt to see the gap of three years since I had anything to say here, to re-read my last two posts. One was local and light-hearted, and the other was global and everything but. They were my only two posts that year, but I really really liked them! I couldn’t restrain myself from frowning over this little bit of awkward punctuation, or that weary word choice, but mainly I had that consoling reminder that comes from reading old stuff and thinking, Hey, this guy’s not bad, even if he *is* me! I confess: I enjoyed these two articles, and wish I’d done a little more with them back then. But we takes our confirmations where we finds ‘em…

I will still hive off athletic ruminations into the “All About Sports” nook, and quarantine quotes from others (and my reflections on same) into the “He Said/She Said” file. Both the pieces above sit, along with this little greeting, in the “At First Glance” section, though the second one probably belonged in the “On Second Thought” compartment, since it ran deep and feeling and long. Come back anytime, friends, neighbours, citizens of Earth.

A.O. Scott (on writers, on Mank)

Posted by :James Howden On : December 7, 2020

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:AO Scott, Citizen Kane, criticism, David Fincher, Herman J Mankiewicz, Hollywood, Jack Fincher, Mank, New York Times, Orson Welles, writers, writing

Gary Oldman in the title role, and Amanda Seyfried as a muse-buddy. It’s an interesting film, best viewed after Citizen Kane (the Howdy formula).

[2-minute read]

Anthony Oliver Scott is best known as a movie reviewer for the New York Times. He is a superb writer, enjoyably read even when he’s figuring out what he thinks about a movie I’ve never seen. I’m also excited about his recent book, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, especially after reading a series of his essays, called The Americans. Rather than film, here he offers a fresh look at living writers who are under-read and overlooked – Wallace Stegner, Edward P. Jones (a fascinating oeuvre and a real revelation to me ) and Joy Williams. It’s eye-opening, a real service to someone who wants to better know a work, an author, a nation’s literature. These essays belie the common idea of “criticism”, that it must be acid-flavoured and archly (or furiously) dismissive. They are also wonderfully crafted in themselves, and refute the lazy notion that a critic must be a bitterly disappointed artist.

At my distressingly soon-to-be-departed Ottawa treasure, the ByTowne Cinema, I saw Mank in November. It’s the modern, black-and-white biopic in which Gary Oldman plays the legendary Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who more or less wrote the 1940 classic Citizen Kane. (Mank argues that it was his baby entirely, which is an old and highly debatable statement; director/star Orson Welles shared the screenwriting credit with Mankiewicz.) I liked the movie and planned to see it again. And I did, in a way, reading Scott’s recent review in the Times. In it were exactly zero stars, no thumbs, not a single tossed tomato, whether rotten or beautifully seasoned, but only well-crafted prose that deepened my understanding and regard for a film, and strengthened my commitment to seeing it again. This is all fine.

But Scott finished with a flourish. In the review’s final paragraph, he describes Mankiewicz, by all accounts a brilliant writer and wit, and his turbulent relationship with Hollywood. He hates and loves the life. He knows he’s a small player in the industry yet feels himself above it. Mankiewicz was striving to bring a higher literary sensibility to the work, and meanwhile was drinking himself into highly public embarrassments and a premature grave. (Pauline Kael once described him as “Hollywood’s loser-genius”.) Scott ends with this dazzling turn, which I keep re-reading:

Neither a maverick nor a visionary, he’s an alienated insider, a participant observer, a kibitzer at the table where the big guys make the big bets. Which may just be a verbose way of saying that he’s a writer. I’ll drink to that.

Just Dive In, They Say

Posted by :James Howden On : September 12, 2017

Category: At First Glance

Tags:confidence, death, diving, fear, frisky towelling, meditation, water, writing

[3-minute read]

I don’t want to just dive in to water, and I don’t care if I’m the “last one in…[and] a rotten egg!”. Bodies of water larger than a bathtub are not my best friends, and besides, I don’t just dive in to nearly anything.

Which is strange, because I love beginnings, the freshness of unstained hope not yet wracked by reality.¹ I think “diving in” reminds me of a future that I deny. Go jump in the lake can mean, in the wrong mind, I hope you die soon. Some of my resistance to jumping into water I can’t see the bottom of, I begin to glumly theorize, arises from my diffidence about death. It doesn’t feel like dread, not quite, but I do sense my unpreparedness. Strange waters or familiar, they feel like a presentiment of extinction. This explains a lot of things.

¹ I wish this applied to writing, though. The terror of the start, the Thing Not Yet Begun, still is not and maybe never will be quite overcome by the eventual flow of production and the relieved delight of having written. I often say, “Reading (or writing, and probably ‘rithmatic for that matter!) is like running; you have to build your stamina and skill to make it a positive habit.” I guess swimming is like writing, too, except that I don’t imagine ever being competent in water and, whatever my writing resistances are, I don’t dread imminent death when I scribble.

Some of this nervous distaste for getting in over my head, not just metaphorically but literally, is less abstract. It comes from my blasted confidence while in water, a feeling of drifting towards doom that may have begun with (and was certainly stoked by) a childhood failure at lessons in my small town’s cracked outdoor pool. It was simple stuff that the mermaids in blue one-piece bathers were asking of me, but I couldn’t do it. Ever since, a lake or pool or pond is above all a glorious thing to get out of, to put sand or clay or concrete underfoot again, to gaze from solid ground on the seductive beauty of water in motion, water still, water frozen and forever. I love looking at water. I stare at it, fascinated, confirmed to find it in front of me, not over my head.

Diving in, on my preferred footing of metaphor, is letting go of my dried-out conventions and certainties, which is hard to do. I can admit to the occasional thrill when literally doing so, in Actual Water. When hot, even if unbothered, crashing into coolness is a lively shock, and I don’t flounder right away. I just hang there, most of me under the surface. From the hindsight of a desk, I wonder why a man with more than sufficient body fat won’t float with more ease. But suspended in a cold, thought-stunning brew, I always play dead for a while,

“Claude Likes Me! He Really Likes Me!!”

[5-minute read]

Writing Style

Underlying Philosophy

There’s also a recurring thread of: I keep trying, it keeps being hard, and I’m going to keep trying anyway. Whether it’s the track team that didn’t show up, the blog he keeps restarting, or humanity stumbling toward peace — the posture is patient, energetic, undefeated.

What Did We DO Back Then? A COVID-19 Story Remembered, and a Friendship Rejooved!

Trust Me, They’re Tired: Venezuela’s Pain, and the Emptiness of Cliché

[3-minute read]

He Said/She Said: Bill Bryson (and Sarah Selecky) (on WONDER)

[3-minute read]

curiosity + mystery = wonder.

When you know the equation, you see that wonder is always available. It’s a choice. You can find it in ordinary things, once you start looking. An apple, when you really think about it, is completely unfathomable…”

Jim Rohn (on discipline and regret)

[3-minute read]

“Everyone must choose one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.”

Going All Gregorian (though not necessarily in a timely fashion)

[And lo, he wrote a poem about OldNew Years and promises of scribbling. And a Happy 2026, headlines notwithstanding, to you!]

[2-minute read]

Going All Gregorian

Retrofitting a Fancy

Where We Found Them

A.O. Scott (on writers, on Mank)

[2-minute read]

Neither a maverick nor a visionary, he’s an alienated insider, a participant observer, a kibitzer at the table where the big guys make the big bets. Which may just be a verbose way of saying that he’s a writer. I’ll drink to that.

Just Dive In, They Say

[3-minute read]

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