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Archives for December 2017

Choosing a martial arts club

December 20, 2017 By Guy Windsor 2 Comments

It has been a very long time since I showed up to a martial arts club as a beginner, but over the summer I found myself looking for a regular martial arts class that fit my schedule, and in which I had no experience. I stumbled upon Jushinkan, here in Ipswich. I asked about beginners’ courses, but they said to just show up, so I dug out my old gi and toddled along to class.
I hadn’t really thought about it, but it turns out that in my head there was already a list of things to look for in a martial arts school or club. I realised this when the instructor (Richard, an 8th dan, who is so old-school that he doesn’t even do email) hit every single point on my unconscious checklist. He asked me whether I had any experience (I said yes, but not in this art); any disabilities or injuries he should know about (none), and told me that it was ok to sit out any exercise I felt would be bad for me. I felt welcome, and under no pressure to perform.
Richard ran us through some naginata, spear, and sword kata. He said things like:
“this is not self-defence” 
“this is stylised, for kata. The applications might look like this, or this”
“now if that doesn’t work, try this”
“this is a last-ditch I’m probably going to die but I’ll try this anyway situation”
“no, grip me really hard as if your life depended on it, so we can see if this really works”. 
Hitting the items on my list like he’d read my mind.
With about forty minutes left of class time, he handed the class over to a young man (about half his age) who “is much better than me at ground fighting, so he’s going to cover this stuff”. Absolutely no standing on rank whatsoever.
And the person I was paired off with was not just very skilled, but an artist, alive to the nuances of the actions. 
After my second class I was sure I’d be coming along regularly, so I took the instructor aside and told him what I do for a living. His reaction was enthusiastic delight, and the hope that I’d perhaps teach a class for them sometime, because they are always looking for new approaches.
If training is any use at all, it changes you. The demeanour of the more senior members of a club is a pretty good guide to how a club is run and what effect the training has on your character. Every other member of the class on that day (and on most days since) were very experienced: I’m usually the only one on the mat without a black belt. And everyone, without exception, has been friendly to the newbie, and highly skilled. The other night a couple of young women came to watch class, one of them in a hijab. One of the club’s founders, Brian Rogers, another 8th dan with about 40 years experience, spent the entire evening going over the absolute basics with them. Nobody found it remarkable.
I have learned a great deal so far, especially about joint locks, takedowns and ground fighting, but that is perhaps the least important aspect of the club and the style. It is much more important to me that I could recommend it to anyone without even thinking about how they will be treated if they show up.
If you are lucky, you’ll be wondering why I bothered to write this post: surely that’s how all martial arts clubs are run?
It isn't, but it should be.

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Filed Under: Other Martial Arts

Historical Sword Documentation Project

December 15, 2017 By Guy Windsor 1 Comment

The Oakeshott Institute looks after legendary sword collector and author Ewart Oakeshott's extraordinary collection of swords.
They have launched their Historical Sword Documentation Project which will provide detailed 3D models of genuine historical weaponry. Starting with the items in their care they will catalog these pieces and provide contextual materials. This will allow scholars and enthusiasts to experience these items in ways that have not been possible in the past, even with the item in hand.
If you're not excited about this, I have to wonder why you're reading my blog.
In short, they will be measuring swords and pieces of armour, and making 3D models (you can see an example here).
Craig Johnson measuring a helm
This is the same team behind Arms and Armor, who made my favourite training rapier, training longsword, sharp rapier, smallsword… need I go on? One of the things I love about their work is that it comes from detailed measurements and latex casts of original weapons. This current project is an extension of that attention to historical detail.
This is a very exciting addition to the scholarship of arms and armour, one that provides new insight and a great opportunity to learn about swords and armour… and you can help! They have a Patreon page, where you can support their work with a little (or a lot!) of your hard-earned cash. Go check it out: https://www.patreon.com/oakeshott

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Filed Under: Projects

Game of Thrones and the Medieval Art of War (Book Review)

December 12, 2017 By Guy Windsor Leave a Comment

Dr. Ken Mondschein’s new book Game of Thrones and the Medieval Art of War is an unusual read. On the one hand, Ken is clearly a HUGE Game of Thrones fan, and has immersed himself in the books and TV show, and thought about them very deeply. On the other, he is a jouster, martial artist, fencer, and professional academic historian. As a result, he goes into depth and detail about things like the economic factors affecting armour development in Westeros, just as he might about how the same factors affected armour development in Italy.

The book has chapters on chivalry, armour, weaponry, swordplay, economics (actually my favourite chapter), women warriors, culture, and atrocities, and it also has a very useful bibliography that will expand my to-read pile to an unfortunate degree. The book is well written, though it could be better proof-read; there are quite a few niggling little typos. I’m extremely pedantic about such things, so they bothered me more than they might bother you.

I learned a great deal that I didn’t know about medieval warfare reading this, but I am not its target market; I read the first GoT book, and abandoned the series when almost everyone I liked spending time with died at the end of it. I loved the TV series (I’ve watched every episode), but I’m not a fan in the proper sense; it’s light entertainment for me, I don’t care about it the way I do about, for instance, Star Wars.

My conclusion is that if you are not a GoT fan, then the continual intrusion of a fictional world into what would otherwise be a brilliant primer on medieval warfare would be annoying. If you are a GoT fan, then this book will get you to look at the world that George R. R. Martin has created with new appreciation for the depth of thought that Martin put into it. You will also learn a lot about how similar forces played out for real on the battlefields of the middle ages. This might also be an excellent gift for a GoT fan in your life who you’d like to wean onto historical research. If was to give it a star rating, it would be 5 out of 5 for GoT fans, and 3 out of 5 for those who aren't so bothered about the goings on in Westeros.

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Filed Under: Books and Writing

Fascists are poisoning HEMA. Here’s one small thing I’m doing about it.

December 8, 2017 By Guy Windsor 64 Comments

I recently got my latest book, The Theory and Practice of Historical European Martial Arts, back from the editor, and am working through it. There are always last-minute changes to make, but they are usually minor additions or rephrasings. This time, there is one major change: I have decided to stop using the term HEMA altogether. It stands for Historical European Martial Arts, and a sad and disgusting number of white supremacists, nazis, and other scum have latched on to the “European” bit (at the expense of the historical, the martial, and the artistry) and are bringing the term into appalling disrepute. I will not share examples of this behaviour because I see no good reason to spread poison, but trust me, it’s out there.

The Nazis in Germany in the 30s did the same thing to all sorts of elements of European culture, from co-opting Norse mythology, to taking a perfectly innocuous symbol (the swastika, which you will see on monuments and book covers before the 1930s) and making it forevermore associated with evil incarnate.

The principles and practices I cover in the book are by no means only applicable to European styles and sources. They could be used for any art— indeed, my friend and colleague Dr. Manouchehr Moshtagh Khorasani is using the same sort of approach in his reconstruction of historical Persian martial arts. So the “European” bit is entirely unnecessary, and seems to promote division rather than unity. I don’t practice the arts I do just because they are European.

It’s not as if there was any such thing as a general European martial art anyway, other than perhaps gunnery; I teach Italian rapier, Italian medieval knightly combat, French smallsword, German sword and buckler, and so on. Every source comes from a specific time, place and culture; to call them European would be uselessly general.

So fuck them. They can have the HEMA label. The E is redundant. We could call what we do Historical Swordsmanship, but that would exclude the boxers, knife fighters, WWII combative practitioners (the only style I can think of that definitely killed Nazis!), wrestlers, jousters and all the rest that don’t use swords. We could call it Western Martial Arts, though the “Western” is perhaps misleading too; Polish sabre is Eastern European; to me it would feel odd to call it “Western”, though it is when considered in relation to Asian martial arts.

In the interests of specifying the historicity of what I do, its martial nature and its artistic beauty, I’m calling my book The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, and dropping all references that would seem to imply these arts are valuable because they are European.

In the global fight against fascism that faces us today, it is probably the tiniest, feeblest, blow. But we have to start somewhere. I don’t think we can reclaim the term HEMA any more than we can reclaim the swastika, but it’s just a four letter acronym. It’s what we do that counts, not what we call it.

In case there were any doubt about my stance on this, here’s a photo of a class I taught recently. Race, sex, religion, country of origin? Irrelevant. Community fostered by a shared joy in the Art? Priceless.

UPDATE: There has been a ton of commentary on this on various social media platforms, which can be distilled down to the following stances:

  1. Yay! Glad Guy said that.
  2. Okaay, but we must FIGHT to keep the term HEMA and not yield the E to the fascists
  3. Fascists are bad, but this is not helping at all
  4. There are fascists in HEMA? Where?
  5. Are you calling ME a fascist? (for the record, I'm very carefully not naming anyone)
  6. Guy is a dick.

Let me point out that the only action I am taking is re-naming my book, and adjusting the content to reflect the fact that historical martial arts are not all European. I take the point that my proposed course of action may not be effective (time will tell); and I also understand that many decent people are very invested in the term HEMA. Personally, I'm not and have never been; when I started out we called what we did Historical Swordsmanship, or Western Martial Arts. I think my point stands that HEMA is not a very good descriptor for the Art, and I'm sympathetic to the “don't give the fascists an inch” standpoint. But nothing I've seen so far has lead me to want to change my mind (and undo the last few hours of edits!).

Regarding the last point, I'd rather be hated for who I am than respected for who I'm not. If trying to do something to counteract the far right loses me the respect of some people, then I'd rather not have their good opinion. If you approve of the sentiment but not the tactics, then by all means, let's talk tactics.

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Filed Under: Reflections

Hyvää Itsenäisyyspäivä!

December 6, 2017 By Guy Windsor Leave a Comment

The view from my kitchen window in Helsinki

Today, Finland celebrates its 100th anniversary of independence. They paid a terrible price for it, both in the civil war that followed the declaration, and in resisting the Soviet invasion during the Second World War. The Finnish conduct of the Winter War was an incredible effort of skill, heroism, and sheer sisu (guts, bottom, sheer stubborn refusal to quit). Finland was the only country that Stalin invaded that did not fall. My favourite book on the Winter War is A Frozen Hell by William Trotter. Every martial artist should read up on this, because the problem of an overwhelmingly strong and aggressive opponent is common to all arts.

But that price bought them, eventually, a stable prosperity and a culture of education, arts, and technology, to be proud of.

Finland was my home for many years; I've spent far more time in Finland that in any other country in my life, and I'm sad not to be there today. My mum was visiting over the weekend, and on my wife's suggestion, I got out my trumpet (for the first time in years), and we played Finlandia together.

 

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Filed Under: Personal

The problem of incomplete quotations

December 4, 2017 By Guy Windsor 1 Comment

You've probably heard phrases like “Information wants to be free”, or “What gets measured gets managed” before, usually to justify a particular political decision or business process, but they have slipped into more general use. Here's the problem: both of them are incomplete.

“Information wants to be free” comes from Stewart Brand. Cory Doctorow tells the story well in his awesome book Information Doesn't Want to be Free“, which is vital reading for anyone interested in copyright, intellectual property, and especially those as the apply to the Internet.

“BACK IN 1984, Stewart Brand—founder of the Whole Earth Catalog—had a public conversation with Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak at the first Hackers Conference. There, Brand uttered a few dozen famous words:
“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Cory goes on to make the point that information's desires are irrelevant, but that's another story (go read the book!). You can see from this excerpt that the original thought is not a moral point, it's an economic one: information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower” not “because it ought to be free on principle.”

I would point out here that I don't sell the information I have about the arts I practice. I sell my time when teaching, and the time and money that goes into my books; but the Art itself is free, because I see it as your natural birthright. This is why I distribute all my original source material (photos of old fencing books mostly), free.

“What gets measured gets managed” is perhaps the most famous thing that Peter Drucker ever wrote (and he's probably the most famous business theorist in the world). The problem is that there is no evidence that he actually wrote that (if you find it in one of his books, please do let me know!). The first version of this idea that I can find is from the scientist Lord Kelvin, who said this in a speech in May 1883:

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

This makes perfect sense for a physicist, but is not much use to the average business owner, I would say, who is probably not interested in advancing to the stage of science. The other major problem with the quote as it stands is that it ought to come with the corollary: “whether it needs to be or not”. In other words, a fetish for measuring stuff can very easily lead you into quantitive analysis of entirely the wrong things. For instance, if you are selling books over the internet, as I do, then the major metrics are: traffic to the sale site; conversion rate (what proportion of that traffic actually buy); and the revenue generated from those sales minus the cost of generating that traffic. That's it. The weak link is almost always the conversion rate, and it's usually more useful to improve that than to just increase traffic. Tracking (for example) Facebook shares and likes is pointless, as the books aren't bought on Facebook. Metrics that might be useful for an ice-cream van (such as the weather) are entirely irrelevant to me, so I don't track them. How do you know what should be measured? My yardstick is this: will this data affect my decisions directly? If not, then I don't track it. The only purpose of data is to drive decisions.

It is frighteningly easy for a pithy quote to become embedded in your mind, driving thoughts and actions. I highly recommend examining the source and context for any such mantras you may have in your life, to make sure they are drivers that you actually want.

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Filed Under: Reflections

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