Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Whimsy

  • 12-12-12

    Because I can’t resist the date.

    Urban Abstract 2, 2012
    Circles and Levels and Clocklike Movement

    This particular confluence of numerical coincidence won’t happen again this century.  Proper appreciation must be shown.

    Or, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature.  Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more more difficult…”

    It is in our nature to reject coincidence as simply what it is, especially when it comes to cosmic events.  Long ago human beings decided the devices we invented to keep track of time actually meant something to Time itself, as if the universe was somehow required to acknowledge our conceits.

    Still, even as a purely invented coincidence, 12-12-12 is kind of cool.  How many babies will be born today and be considered extra special just because?  If someone happens to win a lottery today, the efficacy of numerically based sympathetic magic will be reinforced, even though it will still have exactly the same relationship as the odds of a coin face coming up with each of a hundred tosses as if the collective numbers of heads or tails somehow imposes necessity on each one (namely, zero).

    On the other hand, any day you wake up with something to marvel on is a win, so I’ll take my small pleasures where I can.

    I’ll be writing up a year-end assessment in a couple of weeks.  Soon it will be 2013—a numerical change about as meaningful as today’s date in the greater scheme of anything.  For instance, it is 2012 in our calendar system (Gregorian—the older Julian is similar, lacking but 13 days, which would make today the last day of November, with today’s numerically alliterative advent still to come) but 5773 in the Hebrew calendar. (A more concurrent calendar is the Holocene, which starts at the beginning of the Holocene Era—ours—by adding ten thousand years.  So it’s 12012 H.E.  I like that.)

    It’s 1434 in the Islamic calendar.  Sometimes I ponder the significance of time lapsed in cultural evolution to try to understand where a given institution is along the line.  In this case, I remember where christianity was in 1400 when seeking to comprehend current attitudes and events.  They were on the verge of the Reformation, with seething splinter groups roiling under the surface about to explode into a family feud they’re still trying to settle.  Hm.

    One of the youngest calendars is the so-called “Minguo” which is from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and dates from the founding of the Republic in 1912.  Their centenary was just celebrated.  It’s 101 in the ROC Minguo calendar.

    We’re fortunate not be stuck using the Unix calendar, which is expressed in seconds.

    The true measure of time is change.  Change in the environment, certainly, but for our purposes, changes in ourselves.  There is no calendar for such things.  Some changes are temporary, some seasonal, others permanent.  They may be profound or just occurrences that seem to have little import.  It’s a question of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

    Passagway
    Passageway

    It’s a common fallacy that our lives are telec, that they have a narrative structure, a beginning and an end in terms of purposes and goals.  If they do, it is a fact that we impose such things, but we’re not born with them.  (Born into them, perhaps, in the case of those who arrive swaddled in family expectations actively imposed.)  We have a start and a finish, which is not quite the same thing.  In between, it’s up to us to find meaning and purpose, make it out of whole cloth if we must, but waiting around for cosmic enlightenment to tell us what we’re here for invites a wasted life.  In an attempt to impose structure and suggest meaning, humans have invented numerous things—like calendars, with attendant rituals and anniversaries.  Out of the matrix of such things many of us find relevance among ourselves and that is not a bad thing at all.

    In truth, each of us brings to such things what we have and are, whether we accept others’ definitions or not.  I wish people Merry Christmas despite the fact that I impute no validity in the defining mythology, because Christmas is what we make it.  I don’t have a lot of patience for people bent on souring everyone else’s holiday by indulging a political or theological hissy-fit—on either side of the Belief Divide.  I have my own resonances with it and take pleasure from the memory and æstethic significance on which I accrued that meaning.  I watch A Christmas Carol every year, drink egg nog, embrace my friends, and nurture a hearth-glow of fellowship.  I do not have to accept the fables to experience a “holiday spirit” every bit as real as those who do—nor do I appreciate those who insist on dumping cynicism and political scatalogy onto the season in an attempt to ruin it for everyone else in a misguided pursuit of some adherence to reason.  Truth and fact are often only coincidentally related, and the truth of the season is something greater than what is contained in the details of a given story.

    The Gift of the Magi is my guiding narrative…for what it may be worth.

    Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Season’s Wishes, etc etc etc.

    Whatever calendar you use, have a good day.

  • Place Marker

    Because I have nothing much to say this morning.

     

    Machine Bones

     

    However, our reading group is doing the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso today.  I will have something to say about that.  Later.

  • Book Recommendation

    This week at Left Bank Books, as December begins and Christmas is upon us, a number of books—Staff Picks (all of us have them, please check out the list)—are being offered at discount for on-line purchase.  For Wednesday, the 5th, my particular pick is…

    China Miéville’s novel Embassytown is, to my mind, one of the best science fiction novels published in the last decade.  Not necessarily the best novel published as science fiction, but one of the best examples of what science fiction at novel length can do.

    Maybe that’s a fine distinction, possibly one without a difference, but what I want to talk about now is what I mean by “science fiction” in this context and recommend a first-rate experience.

    It’s an ongoing debate, and Miéville himself has weighed in on it, namely the definition of science fiction, principally in relation to fantasy.  What it comes down to for me is a question of philosophical utility.  Does the text at hand offer an examination of the “real world” consequences of a philosophical question given the constraints of a universe we recognize as that which is accessible by science?

    A bit long-winded, maybe, but insofar as any fictive enterprise can be shown to deal with the consequences of questions, the defining terms in this instance—or at least the limiting terms—are “philosophical”, “real world”, and “science.”

    Let me deal with this quickly, since I’ve dealt with it at length elsewhere.  By science I do not mean the rigorous application of what we know of science—if that were to be the determinant, 99% of SF would not qualify, and of that which did, a goodly portion would be enjoyable for a relatively small, self-selected audience.  What I mean by this is more on the order of an æsthetic stance vis a vis the narrative, mainly that the background setting and the foreground action conform to the forms we readily identify as “scientifically defined.”  The universe as understood by scientific enquiry.

    Basically, a vision of a “real world” that we can recognize and agree fits with what we can understand as how the universe operates.

    This automatically throws out most fantasy conceits.  (If you take the trouble to redefine your elves and fairies as parallel human species ala evolutionary branching or as aliens, you have retasked your imagery to perform a science fictional exploration.)

    Which leaves what I consider the most interesting and salient of components, namely the philosophical aspect.

    Science fiction is self-consciously philosophical, insofar as it is deeply, principally concerned with questions of how to live in a changed universe.  Not just technologically, but ethically and morally.

    Which brings me to the Miéville and my rather bold claim that it is one of the best science fiction novels of the last decade.

    The conceit dealt with here is the question of language and its relation both to biology and to a universe that evolves, changes, and is largely unexplored.  Miéville gives an alien race whose language is hardwired into their biology.  They do not “learn” it, they are born with it and simply mature into its proper use.

    And they cannot, therefore, lie.

    Enter humans.

    The humans, as is our wont, work to learn to communicate with these aliens—the novel is set primarily on the alien homeworld, where humans have a single, rather naked and fragile colony/embassy— and when they succeed, they nearly destroy these aliens, who in response to the threat very nearly destroy the colony.

    Throughout, there is discussion and examination of language, its uses, and how it relates to both the universe at large and the inner landscape of individuals.  The examination, which in many ways is an abstrusely philosophical one, is absolutely central to the action of the novel.

    And this is what good science fiction does!

    I won’t here go into further detail.  To do so risks spoilers and if you’re in least interested, you will not thank me.  (I will say that Miéville has produced one of my favorite lines in all science fiction.  No, I won’t tell you that, either.  I want you to have the fist-pump experience I did when I read it.)

    I must also add that while in some ways what I have described might easily be seen as a dry, plodding work, the exact opposite is true.  Miéville is a gifted stylist and his prose rush along, carrying the reader through an adventure.

    So for Christmas, for yourself, for a treat, go on-line at Left Bank Books and buy a copy.  Read it, give it away as a gift, feed the SF geek in your life, or introduce someone who has stubbornly refused to see the merit in all this “space stuff” to something of undeniable intellectual worth.  Wednesday, December 5th, it’s 20% if bought online.

    Do it.  You’ll be glad you did.

  • I Love Jazz

    We had a treat recently and I wanted to share a bit of it.

    I like jazz.

    No, that’s not accurate.  I love jazz.  So imagine my delight to be asked to work an event at our local jazz spot, Jazz At The Bistro, selling copies of John Pizzarelli’s new memoir, World On A String, for Left Bank Books, during his quartet’s Saturday night performance.

    There is something about live jazz that just goes right into me.  A good group of masterful musicians, having a conversation on stage, it’s just magic.  Pizzarelli is one of the best guitarists in the business and frankly, I didn’t fully appreciate just how good he is till this event.

    You can play a game listening to a musician of picking out influences.  Who is it this player derived inspiration from?  I heard Les Paul, Joe Pass, Wes Montgomery, Larry Coryell, half a dozen others, but a truly good musician takes all those and makes something new out of them, something all his or her own, and Pizzarelli is at that level.  It was an amazing show.

    So I thought I’d share a bit with the video below.  Oh, and please follow the links above and buy the book and his albums.

     

     

    John, by the way, is the son of legendary guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, who seems to have been around forever and been on damn near everything.

  • Archive

    I have published 529 posts on this blog.

    Absurd.

    I started the Distal Muse as part of an effort toward self-promotion, an effort that has in some ways failed.  But in the years since it was first established (I think it’s first incarnation, as part of a ridiculously complicated site, was 2003) I’ve used it to hone a skill—the short essay—and indulge whims that I frankly have little interest in trying out professionally.  After that original site was replaced by the current one, in 2006 or ’07, I started using it for all sorts of things, including putting up original art.

    I look back over what is here and I’m pleasantly dismayed at the variety.  Not altogether pleasantly nonplussed by some of the content.  But, for better or worse, it’s all mine.

    Some of it, I think, is not half bad.  (May not be half good, either, but that’s a matter of taste.  I think.)

    Since its commencement, I’ve added a FaceBook page and, more recently, Twitter (at my agent’s urging; I’m not really sure how to use that one), to which I link my new posts.  Since one of the purposes of this whole enterprise is to ATTRACT ATTENTION TO MYSELF (to gain an audience, you understand), I thought I’d start using the archive, and link to older posts that may pique the interest of some of the good folks who now subscribe to my various digital presences.

    Obviously, anyone can peruse the archive any time they want, and to my pleasant surprise, some do.  But I thought this might make it easier.

    Yes, I’m trying to get more regular readers.  But I also have a small vanity which chafes at the idea that past work will fade into total obscurity.

    So while I may not post as much new work here as I have been lately (an inordinate amount of which has been political—duh, I wonder why!), I hope folks will indulge in my previous babblings and may find something worthwhile therein.

    Erosions

  • Post Thanks

    I asked Donna this morning, “Is this the first Thanksgiving we’ve spent entirely alone, at home?” She thought for a moment and nodded. “I think so.”

    Just as well.  I seem to have caught a bug that has churned me up a bit the last couple of days.  Not bad, just very uncomfortable, leaving me not in a very congenial mood.

    But it got me thinking on the nature of the day and its uses.

     

     

    We lounged, walked the dog, talked, read a little (I’m finishing up a stack I’ve been working on for a time and this morning completed William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways), talked some more, napped, ate a little.  We did not engorge.  Neither of us felt good enough for a feast, so perhaps we came through the day more clear-headed than in past years.  We watched a favorite movie—Pleasantville (which I still think is one of the finest films ever made, easily in my top 100 if not my top 20)—and thoroughly appreciated each other.

    Our tradition has been to take the first invitation that comes for the day, but this year the one that came with geologic regularity did not come—regrettably, I suspect politics has scuttled that one—and we demurred on another.  No matter, I’m glad it worked out this way.

    I skim on a light froth of gratitude most of the time.  I subscribe in no way to the notion that what I have has come entirely by my own hand.  I have no problem crediting others for their contributions to who I am and what I have done.  I’ve been through periods of ill-advised hubris, thinking myself wholly self-completed, and all it left me with was an ashen taste of disappointed affirmation when I realized how unfair and ungenerous such an attitude can be and how hurtful it is to express it.  I am grateful.

    I am grateful for my friends, of whom I have more than my share and who are among the best people I can imagine (and I have a pretty good imagination).  There is no way to adequately assess how important they are and have been to my life.  We have among us constructed many a worthy moment, torn through seminal evenings with laughter, tears, and unspoken commitment, reinvigorated shattered hopes among each other, and sat through despondencies together like old sailors waiting for the tide.

    I am grateful to live in a place, in a time, where I can think any thought, read any book, make any art, and live according my own principles, and all without having to steal such privilege from anyone else around me.  I live in a house of books and music and art that resonates with songs of imagination and whose walls are only place markers by which the true horizons of my inner life can be appreciated in the comparison.

    I am grateful to have the wherewithal to understand and appreciate what I have.

    I like to think that in some small way my life has meant something, if only to a few people, and that I will not have spent my time frivolously and without effect.  If this single vanity is not self-deception incarnate, then I am grateful to have lived to a purpose.

    I’m grateful for my dog.

    I am mostly grateful to have a companion who shares with me without reservation.  Donna has been the best, insofar as I can understand the term, a soul mate, the one with whom I have both laughed and cried the most, and with whom this life has taken on the contours of its present delights, of which, though I complain often of what I have not yet achieved, there are many.

    Everything else is secondary, transient, novelty, replaceable, but for which I am also grateful.

    To all of you who have added grace and joy and the pleasure of shared experience to my life—to our lives—I thank you and hope the coming year will see a few of your hopes fulfilled.

    It’s a good life.  Appreciate it.

  • Where Is Found A Soulful Mind?

    Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts.  It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.

    We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist.  Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives.  If there is one thing we have all learned in the last half century, though, it is that such institutions—and their products—are expensive.

    Blame for the death of the Liberal Arts is lain at the feet of conservatives, but here is where I would like to start teasing these definitions apart.  Genuine conservatives, those with whom I grew up and became most familiar, were the champions of the Liberal Arts.  This was before the term “Liberal” became inextricably tangled with the concepts of “permissiveness” and “socialism.”  Because of the constant hammering both liberalism and conservatism have taken in recent years from a class of philistine whose twin deities are money and conformity, we have lost sight of what both of those labels originally meant and, worse yet, the kind of country they informed.

    William F. Buckley jr. may have been many things, but poorly-read was never one of them, nor was he an advocate for the kind of close-minded censoriousness that has poisoned the Right today.  Presently, George Will carries the torch of a conservatism fast vanishing in the flood of a reactionary myopia that passes for conservative but is nothing but avaricious opportunism dressed up in an ill-fitting suit of Victorianesque disapproval.

    But then Ebert goes on to remark on his comment log and how refreshingly well-read, educated, and enthusiastic his readers seem to be.  The Liberal Arts is not dead or even dying.

    But it may no longer have a comfortable place in universities, which charge a small fortune for an education with which the buyer not only wants but needs to cash in.  Degrees in philosophy, except for a rare few, pay poorly in a job market grown increasingly cutthroat by dint of the exclusion of the kind of broad outlook once supplied by a Liberal Arts education.  Why bother with Thomas Paine when he died poor, a loser?  Or Herman Melville, who had to quit writing because it didn’t pay well enough to support him?  One could go down the list.

    And yet.

    People read.  Widely.  Minds rove over as broad a range of interests as at any time in the past—more, as there is more to learn, to see, to experience.  It would seem the Liberal Arts is far from dying.  It has only moved out on its own.

    I’ve encountered students who refuse to read.  They want to know only those things that will garner them good salaries and all that this implies.  Success.  Goodies.  “Why read F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Hell, I read Ayn Rand in high school.  That’s my kinda culture. ”

    I have no time for them.  Were I a teacher in a college, I’d flunk them and send them from the hall.  They are as clueless and feckless as they think others are who pay attention to the contents of the mind.

    Tell me this—once you have the six-figure salary and the 2200 square foot condo and the BMW, what are you going to do with yourself in those moments when you’re the only one to keep you company?  Other than winning a footrace, what have you done?  When you look around for something to Do, how will you recognize what is of value, of worth, of substance?

    I know, most people like this could care less.  If they don’t have any culture now, they think, if they think about it at all, that they can always buy some later, when they’re “secure” or ready to retire.

    Unfortunately, by then they may only be able to recognize “value” as the price tag on the frame rather than the world that’s on the canvas.

  • New (ish) Job

    Okay, I’m going to be a bit less here for a while. For one thing, I think I’m fairly toasted from the election season.  My blood pressure hasn’t been this consistently tasked since, I don’t know.  And the aftermath has gone from bad to silly.  Sure, I could probably comment on the silly (oh, the stupid—it hurts precious, it hurrrtsss), but why?  Just seeing it should be enough and I don’t need to get angry all over again every day.

    Look, guys (yeah, you old white farts who seem to think the only two things of value in this country are money and the military), Romney lost.  He lost because people didn’t like him.  Although, to be fair, a lot of people apparently did like him.  Maybe.  Maybe it was just that a lot of people don’t like Obama.  But apparently not enough to vote for Romney.  Anyway, you seem to be trying to find every other reason under the sun (or under a rock) to explain that so you don’t have to face the most likely reason—your policy positions don’t appeal, Romney didn’t have enough “charm” to overcome his deficiencies as a candidate, and a majority of people, in spite of a long campaign of disinformation, defamation, and distraction, think Obama should have another four years to see what he started through.  Romney lost because voters preferred something else.  It’s that simple.  You want to change that for next time?  Do something about the nonsense in your party, grow up, and stop fooling around with issues that piss people off.  Then come back and talk to us.

    Also, it is not the end of the world.  It’s not even the end of the world as you know it.  Obama is not the anti-christ, he’s not a socialist, he’s not going to end liberty (I actually saw that declaration often, that his re-election would be the end of our freedom, and I couldn’t help but wonder: what do you people think is going to happen?  And ancillary to that is: just what can’t you do today that you could do five years ago, other than maybe afford the mortgage on your McMansion? Jeez, folks, get a grip!)  In four years you’ll have another shot at trying out your vision, the election will happen, and people will vote.  America will go on.

    Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about today. Ahem!

    I have a new job.  Newish, anyway.  I’ve been doing some on-again off-again work for Left Bank Books this past year.  They opened a downtown St. Louis location a few years back and it’s been taking a while for people to become aware of it.  So I took walks around, meeting people, letting them know the good news, that they have a full service—independent—bookstore right in their midst.  Now and then, I’d repeat, remind, find some new folks, and it seemed to have a small effect.  Business picked up.

    I’ve now joined them as part of their regular staff.  Part time.  I’m still trying to launch a literary career, after all, and I need time to, you know, be literary.  But how cool is this, that I get to work in a bookstore now?

    Peruse their webpage.  These folks do a lot.  Many, many author events, lots of programs, reading groups.  Now, obviously, to do cool things requires cool people, and they have more than enough.  The last few weeks I’ve been trained by some and they rate high on my cool people meter.

    So if you wonder at my lack of comment here or you can’t get me on the phone as often as you might like, well, this is why.  As we wait for the fuse to catch on the rocket of my best sellerdom (yeah, right), I’ll be there, wandering amid the shelves and offerings and drooling (dryly, dryly, can’t get the pages wet) and wondering why I won’t live long enough to read all the really great books.

    Oh, yeah, I’m still writing stories.  I have a little news on that front as well, but I’ll save it for later.

    So have a good rest of the year, check back from time to time (I’m a little compulsive about this, I will be posting something), and maybe if any of you are in St. Louis, come on by Left Bank.

  • The Following Is Brought To You by the Slut Vote

    From the Department of the Chronically Clueless, we learn that Romney lost the election because of the Slut Vote.  I thought I’d heard everything, but this is a new candor I’d not quite expected.

    I’ve been saying for years that the major driver behind much of the deep core, far right, religiously self-identified GOP agenda is an obsession over Other People’s Sex Lives.  This past year and change, they’ve been making it explicit in surprising, sometimes funny, but usually jaw-droppingly amazing ways, and this is just a continuation of it.  If anyone is inclined to cut them slack over this anymore, it is an exercise in strained tolerance.

    As far as I’m concerned, we had this argument in the Sixties and in terms of how people actually live, it was settled in favor of personal choice and a rejection of what I term Levitical Law.  In other words, all that stuff about the evils of sex is just the neurotic shaming some people who are by virtue of nurture (they were raised that way) or even maybe nature (they are perpetually self-conscious and easily offended by, you know, personal stuff) insist on putting on the rest of us.

    For the record, I like sex.  I don’t think there is anything innately wrong with it.  As a friend of mine once said, “It’s all good, some’s better.”  (Also, for the record, I am talking about consensual sex, not rape, not coercive insistence, not child abuse, but mutually beneficial, consensual sex.)  I do not believe sex should be put in a box or straitjacketed by social convention born out of other peoples’ inability to be comfortable with it.

    In other words, it’s none of your business who I fuck or how and I refuse to accept guilt or shame you think I should feel because you can’t get past your own “Eww!” reflex.

    (Because also clearly, that’s not quite it either, since some of the biggest proponents of the anti-sex league are themselves congenitally indulgent.  As long as “no one finds out” they do everything they tell the rest of us we shouldn’t do.  Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, go down the list.  Also, apparently, the active anti-choicers who find personal redemption by parading in front of Planned Parenthood clinics seem not to understand the concept of other people having rights, as close to 20% of the women with picket signs seem to end up in those same clinics availing themselves of the services they so ardently wish to deny every other woman!  I abhor the politics of hypocrisy.)

    Many years ago I stood in line outside a theater showing an X-rated film.  An earnest young woman was handing out fliers decrying the awfulness of the sinful film being shown.  She got to me and starting haranguing me not to go in.  I asked her, what is it you find so offensive?  It emerged that she herself had never seen the film in question.  I insisted she do so, I would buy her a ticket, after all if you’re going to protest Speech you should know what speech it is you’re trying to suppress.  Scared her to death.  She ran away.  I have no pity.  It wasn’t the film she was protesting, it was, in my opinion, a compulsion to deny an idea—that sex is okay.

    People abuse sex all the time.  Hurting people to get your rocks off is never okay.  I do not for a minute excuse rape.  But I make a distinction between healthy sex and hurting people.  It is the hurting part that we should pay attention to.  Instead, it seems, some people can’t separate the two.  (It is unfortunate and sad that for some folks, sex is never anything but hurtful.  Something should be done to address the circumstances that lead to that.  But taking away the rights and abilities of others to engage in mutual, consensual, wholesome sex is not the way.)

    So I  think my response to the apologists for the GOP who have decided this is why they lost is—fucking right.  Fair, perhaps, is fair—the Right doesn’t want the Left to take away their guns, then the Right should stop trying to take away everybody’s sex.

    Maybe that should be a new Third Party—Sluts for Liberty.

    I think I prefer the Slut agenda to the Prude Platform.

  • Rolling Feast

    Fortune sometimes favors the impulsive.

    For years, we’ve been toying with joining PBS. The cycle of fund drives that present interesting specials on our local station (Channel 9, KETC) both annoys us for the interruptions and for the twinges of conscience triggered because we feel like we’re not doing our share to support it. The question has always been, when to do it?

    Because they always offer gift packages to sweeten the deal and we’ve been tempted. Last spring, though, they came through with something we couldn’t turn down—tickets for a dinner train.

    Both of us like trains, though we have ridden them fewer times than the fingers on one hand. There’s a romanticism about them that appeals to both of us, even though we don’t frequent them. (We took one train trip to Chicago, which was novel and unromantic, and I’ve taken the train from St. Louis to Kansas City twice—well, once, really, since one of those trips was during a time when the line was coopted by freight line after a flood and my ticket was fulfilled by bus—and none of those trips endeared us to the fact of train travel. But the idea lingers on and one day we may well do a cross-country in a sleeper.)  So for our pledge of X dollars, we found ourselves with a guidebook to such trains across America, a DVD about them, and a pair of dinner tickets for the Columbia Star.

    We’d planned to do this in mid-August, but fate intervened in the form of a ruptured appendix and we had to delay until I could actually sit through a three-hour gourmet meal on a rolling vehicle. So it ended up in mid-October.

    Which was kind of ridiculous, really. After all, part of the novelty—we assumed—was the passing scenery. After seven in the evening in mid October, what exactly would there be to see? “Oh, we have floodlights mounted on the cars to light the way,” I was told by the charming scheduler when I asked. Hmm.

    In any event, we were getting special treatment. The tickets were time-limited and we’d delayed past their due date. I explained the reasons and pity was taken. We were slated for October 20.

    It’s a hundred and twenty plus change miles from St. Louis to Columbia, so we arranged to make a weekend of it and stay with out friend John in Jefferson City. The weekend turned out to be spectacularly beautiful, the drive down Highway 50 relaxed, and peppered with scenic delight.

    We ambled from Jefferson City up 63 to Columbia and found our destination easily enough (earlier, Donna had fun playing with Google maps on John’s iPad, finding the location). It was off in a combination of old farmland and industrial development that was still active but had seen more plentiful times. The Columbia Star terminal looked nicely restored and a large parking lot filled with cars and guests as the sun headed down for the day. (The range of vehicles ran from modest—older Nissans—up to opulent—a couple of new Lexus and Mercedes.) (The plural—would it be Lexuses or Lexi?) We walked around the train, admiring it like some great antediluvian beast brought back from a cloud-obscured plateau, uncertain of its provenance but impressed by what we thought we knew of it, both its power and its rarity.

    The dinner train phenomenon, as we learned from the PBS special that brought us to this place, is widespread and one of the chief ways many old, historic trains have been preserved. Some of them run quite a long distance and they are day-long excursions. This one runs between Columbia and Centralia, rumbling at a stately pace for about three hours, there and back, long enough for the repast on offer.

    People continued arriving after we parked, leaving ample time to inspect it. The gathering on the parking lot reminded me of scenes on docks, crowds facing the ships about to take them away. A line of track acted as psychological barrier—a steel rope in the tarmac—keeping onlookers safely separated from the docile beast until its handlers declared it safe to approach.

     

     

     

    But a few minutes before seven, people with clipboards began sorting us out, allowing us to board, directing us to tables within the finely-restored dining cars.

    The lack of scenery beyond the twenty or thirty feet the floodlights illuminated was ostensibly compensated for by the fact that people were placed at tables with strangers—unless you had a larger group—with whom you were forced to either engage pleasantries and become cordially acquainted or stoically endure if you’re not the gregarious sort. I admit to having difficulties in that department and were we to do this again we’d make plans with another couple at least.

    But to be fair, the couple with whom we were paired was pleasant, the conversation, while shallow, was not without moments of shared laughter and some interest. After fifteen minutes, though, it was also clear that we really lacked anything very much in common with them and while it was not awkward it was not the kind of experience one would necessarily wish to repeat.

    But the food!

    Our waitress brought our drinks and then took our opening orders (the main courses were already set in advance) and I decided that this was excellent training for them—serving on a moving platform that rocked (gently, yes, but nevertheless) and none of them spilling a bit, drop, or particle.

    There was a pulled-pork on cornbread appetizer, followed by an acorn squash bisque that…well, I’d never tasted anything quite like it. I could have done with a full bowl of it and been wholly content.

    That would have been a shame, though. The main course—there were several to choose from—was superb. Now, both Donna and I have high standards for prime rib. We were spoiled. All joking aside, the best prime rib either of us ever had was at the long-defunct St. Louis Playboy Club. I’m serious. The chef there could turn prime rib out like ambrosia. We’ve had close before, but never better. This was probably as good. It was wonderful.

    We trundled along through small town Missouri. After our trip to Chicago, I decided that contemporary passenger trains really take you through America’s back yard. That’s pretty much what you see, the back end of what is hidden from the highways and main streets. This was no different. However, some people whose houses stood along the line knew the schedule of the train and were outside, with fires going, a few barbecues still underway, waving as we passed by.

    Our table mates imposed on us to take a picture of them and we asked the same in return, something we almost never do. But I felt that this deserved a bit of commemoration. There was a moment of intimidation when I handed across my Canon 60-D, but I’d already set it up and pointed to the button. The picture was successful.

    We drove back in a state of satisfaction, heads filled with nothing but agreeable impressions and an unspoken decision to do this again. That’s as good recommendation as an establishment can get, the promise of repeat business. It helps that we think the idea behind it—preserving a bit of history—is a worthwhile one.

    But it is the food that makes it worth doing.

    Bon appetite!