Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • Slogging Through

    I’ve been going through this novel like a reaper, cutting and slashing, removing viscera, changing things around.  It’s fun so far.  The request was to knock between 50 and 100 pages out of the manuscript, which roughly equates to between twelve and twenty thousand words.  So far I have flensed the text of seven thousand.  This may sound like a lot, but the book was nearly 140,000 to start with, so it can lose a little weight and probably be much better for it.

    The weather has been beautiful and since I am working in my front room, by the big picture window, it’s been pleasant.  At the rate I’m going I ought to have a new draft of the book in a few more weeks.  At which point I have a half dozen other things in need of tending.

    Meantime, as well, I’m slogging through Paul Johnson’s Birth of the Modern: 1815 – 1830.  It is the estimable Mr. Johnson’s contention that these were the years which gave birth to our modern world, the period during which everything changed from the old system to the new, and, 400 pages in, he’s making a good case for it.  Of course, any historical period like this is going to have some sprawl.  He’s had to go back to just prior to the American Revolution and look forward to the Civil War (using a purely American point of reference, even though the book is attempting to be global).  I can think of worse markers than the end of the Napoleonic Era for an argument like this and he is certainly one of the more readable historians.  Occasionally his observations are a bit surprising, but in the main this is a credible piece of work.

    I read his Modern Times a few years ago and found it very useful, even though some of his interpretations of major 20th Century events I found surprising.  As always, it is necessary to have more than one source when studying history.  Interpretation is a bay with hidden shoals and can be perilous.  But this one is a good one.

    Just updating.  Go back to what you were doing.

  • Rewrites and Retirement

    For the next several weeks I’ll be engaged in rewriting a novel, one I thought I’d finished with a few years back. One of the frustrating things about this art is that often you cannot see a problem with a piece of work right away. It sometimes takes months to realize what is wrong, occasionally years. You work your butt off to make it as right as possible and then, a few years and half a dozen rejections later, you read it again and there, in the middle of it (sometimes at the beginning, once in a while at the end) is a great big ugly mess that you thought was so clever when you originally wrote it. You ask yourself, “Why didn’t I see that right away?” There is no answer, really. It looked okay at the time (like that piece of art you bought at the rummage sale and hung up so proud of your lucky find, but that just gets duller and uglier as time goes on till you finally take it down with a sour “what was I thinking?”) and you thought it worked, but now…

    This is what editors are for. This is what a good agent is supposed to do. This is the value of another set of eyes.

    Anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing. And I have the time because last week I “retired” from the board of directors of the Missouri Center for the Book. I served for nine years, five of them as president. Per the by-laws, after nine years a board member must leave for a time. This is vital, I think, because burn-out is like that manuscript you thought was so perfect—sometimes it take someone else to notice that everything’s not up to par.

    During my tenure as president, a few changes were made, Missouri got a state poet laureate with the MCB as the managing organization, and a cadre of new board members revitalized the whole thing. Look for some good programs to come out of them in the next few years.

    What I find so personally amazing is the fact that I got to do this. I mean, be president of essentially a state organization. Small budget, sure, but it is connected to the Library of Congress and we do deal with the governor’s office and what we do has relevance for the whole state. I started out doing programming for them and for some reason they thought I should be in charge. Well, that’s a story for another time. Suffice to say, I have no qualifications (on paper) for that position. None. The first year I got the job I characterized my management approach as throwing spaghetti. Something was bound to stick.

    It was an education. And I got to work with some very talented people and made some friends who are inestimable. My horizons were expanded and I was able to play in a sandbox of remarkable potential.

    The timing couldn’t be better, though. I have this novel to rewrite and, as it is the first part of a projected trilogy, I thought I’d go ahead and finish the second book after I fix the first one. Yes, there are things in the offing which I shan’t discuss right now—as soon as I know anything concrete, you will, should you be reading this—and Donna has graciously cut me another several months’ slack to get this done. She is priceless.

    Meantime, I may be posting here a bit less. Not much. But a bit.

    Stay tuned.

  • Epithets

    This will be fairly brief. I found myself once again disappointed in a fellow critter. I don’t know his name so I can’t “out” him, nor would I even if I did. Up until last week, I rather enjoyed encountering him when I walked Coffey—he was always smiling and always had a treat for her. But I am now taking routes at times designed to avoid him.

    I thought I’d heard all the racial epithets going around, but he had a new one and as we walked about two blocks together he used it and complained about the people to whom he referred in a general “Them” rant that turned me off.

    I grew up in South St. Louis at a time when the city was struggling to come to terms with its racial mix. We had some violence here in the late Sixties and I remember after Dr. King’s assassination that several of our neighbors “stood guard” by sitting on their porches with rifles, shotguns, and pistols, “just in case.” Just in case never happened, so no one got shot, but the black-white tension was palpable and even today you can feel it despite the fact that St. Louis is becoming a fairly integrated city. It has been a long time since I’ve heard certain terms out of doors, in mixed groups and I certainly never expected (perhaps naively) to hear a brand new one.

    Somehow I never really internalized the bigotry, but I have to confess that at times I felt it, more from those around me than anything from within (although I experienced the first waves of public school integration in the early Sixties and had an event that could very easily have set a pattern of discrimination). My grandmother was a self-righteous racist who talked about a slave-owning branch of the family with a weird kind of nostalgia, but I grew up and got over it and by the time I left high school I simply didn’t think that way anymore.

    It helps being an outsider from the major groups and cliques.

    So when I encounter it now, I am usually startled. I have to shift mental gears to accommodate what I’m hearing and it’s always disagreeable at best, often repulsive.

    Here’s how I think—people can be assholes. Leave it at that. Your ethnic origins have nothing to do with it. White assholes, black assholes, brown, yellow, what have you, assholes are assholes. It is both pointless and ignorant to identify an entire group on the basis of one or two assholes, especially when the salient feature of disregard is a behavioral trait shared by all—an asshole is an asshole. I treat people as individuals. Granted, in certain conversations, general statements of certain groups about common group characteristics can be valid, but none of that is genetic and to conflate race into the mix for the purposes of discrimination or the venting of animosity is childish, crude, and flat wrong.

    The thing is—and perhaps this is a generalization, but I’m speaking now of the long list of personal encounters I’ve had with people who indulge this kind of thing—people who feel compelled to belittle others through the use of epithets are often themselves failures in one way or another and all they’re doing is trying to make themselves have value by comparison with those they regard as their natural inferiors.

    There are no “natural” inferiors.

    I just wanted to say something about this. I find it sad that we still—still—haven’t gotten over this, and maybe we never will completely, but damn.

  • The Debate, part one

    The talking heads have been bloviating for decades now about the function of government vis a vis a so-called Welfare State.  The Right claims that having the government “take care of” people is a violation of the American tradition of independence and self-reliance and will sap our resources, both fiscal and moral.  The Left has argued that such government programs are there to protect people who have few resources from the depredations of the wealthy and an economy that fluctuates as a normal element of its functioning and that it is the responsibility of the better-off to aid those who are left without recourse in such a system.

    That’s the basics of the debate.  The Right says no, people should look out for themselves.  The Left says many people can’t and it isn’t right to let them starve in the streets.  The Right says it has no desire to see anyone starve in the streets but rejects the idea that others are responsible for the perhaps bad choices of individuals who have been unable to take advantage of an open system.  The Left counters by pointing out the system is not as open as the Right believes and built in to its workings is the inevitability that a certain number of people simply won’t be able to participate.  Even if the Right then agrees, they assert that it is not the job of the State, using tax payer money, to off-set this imbalance.  The Left says it is if people vote for it and even if they don’t there’s a moral imperative involved.  The Right counters that the State is not the instrument for pursuing moral imperatives.

    Well.

    Let me be up front here—I think the Right has it wrong.  They base their philosophy, if that’s what it is, on an idea of equality that is unsupportable.  In the narrowest sense, they argue that our system is open to the extent that everyone has an equal shot at some measure of success and if they fail it is either because they were lazy, foolish, or unlucky.  The government can functionally do nothing about any of that.

    The argument falls apart on its face.  Equality in this country is a principle concerning representation before the State.  The State in this sense is the community as a whole, both public and private.  The ideas that we are not born to a Station in life which determines at the outset how far an individual might go through his or her own efforts.  It was never intended as an assessment of talent or a measure of will or a guarantee of achievement.  It is only a promise of access.  Because people are not equal as individuals.

    They aren’t and there’s not much point in arguing about it.  Intelligence, physical attributes, proclivities, all these things vary widely throughout any population group and to argue that, if somehow we could take away all social obstacles, everyone would be exactly the same is absurd.

    The Right seems to argue that because this is true, the rest of us have no responsibility for the fundamentally unequal achievements of any one, or group of, individual.   They discount social obstacles.  Not completely, because when an individual rises above a certain level, reaches the precincts of success, and has done so from straitened beginnings, many on the Right like to point to that individual as an exemplar of succeeding in spite of the circumstances of his or her life.  So there is a tacit recognition that social conditions matter, but only as an ennobling aspect to a Horatio Alger story.  The question really is why those conditions keep so many others down, but that, as much as the successful individual’s achievement is credited to personal qualities, is a matter of personal failure, not attributable to anyone else.

    Which seems to make success and failure a matter of choice.  Exclusively.  Ergo, the tax payer, through the medium of the State, has no responsibility for such failures.

    This can only be true if the assertion of equality is true as an innate quality.

    The reality is quite different.  Opportunity is not equally distributed.  It depends on where you are born, where you go to school (if you go to school), who your friends are, your religion, your ethnic group, your gender, your health, the laws in place in your community, the local economics, how much money your parents have, local environmental conditions.  What you are able to do is determined as much if not more by those parts of your life in which you have no say whatsoever as any kind of innate ability, quality of mind, or willful intention.

    Yes, there are many examples of individuals born into situations which would seem to guarantee failure who succeed.  They are remarkable and should be recognized.  But the Right has elected to see them as the normative factor rather than the vaster numbers of those from the same background who did not succeed.  Why?  They claim that the exceptional is the nominal and blame the true nominal conditions on personal failure on the part of all those who are not exceptional, then defend a status quo in which no community responsibility is justified to address the conditions which act as both barriers and weights on people left behind by the exceptional.

    Why?

    One argument put forward is that the tax burden to redress social conditions is onerous and ends up punishing success.  But this argument only has merit if the individual so encumbered has no obligation to the community that allowed his or her success.  This leads us to a further statement, Libertarian in nature, that says personal achievement does, in fact, owe nothing to the community, that simply the decision to act is something unique and the effort to succeed is separate from anything the community may provide or contribute, making the successful entrepreneur, for instance, a completely self-made individual.

    If true, then morally the argument is sound.  That individual could claim that what he or she has made has been made entirely apart from the community, that the community then takes advantage of that work and therefore owes the builder, and the builder owes nothing in return.  Certainly not to those who failed to achieve on their own.

    This is sophomoric philosophy at best, the credo of selfish people.

    Why?

    I’ll let this stand for a few days for anyone who might read it to mull over.  Comments are welcome.

  • The Nebs

    The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of SFWA. The awards will be announced at the Nebula Awards Banquet (http://www.sfwa.org/nebula-weekend/) on Saturday evening, May 21, 2011 in the Washington Hilton, in Washington, D.C. Other awards to be presented are the Andre Norton Award for Excellence in Science Fiction or Fantasy for Young Adults, the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Solstice Award for outstanding contribution to the field.
    Short Story

    • ‘‘Arvies’’, Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine 8/10)
    • ‘‘How Interesting: A Tiny Man’’, Harlan Ellison® (Realms of Fantasy 2/10)
    • ‘‘Ponies’’, Kij Johnson (Tor.com 1/17/10)
    • ‘‘I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno’’, Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed Magazine 6/10)
    • ‘‘The Green Book’’, Amal El-Mohtar (Apex Magazine 11/1/10)
    • ‘‘Ghosts of New York’’, Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith)
    • ‘‘Conditional Love’’, Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 1/10)

    Novelette

    • ‘‘Map of Seventeen’’, Christopher Barzak (The Beastly Bride)
    • ‘‘The Jaguar House, in Shadow’’, Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 7/10)
    • ‘‘The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara’’, Christopher Kastensmidt (Realms of Fantasy 4/10)
    • “Plus or Minus’’, James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine12/10)
    • ‘‘Pishaach’’, Shweta Narayan (The Beastly Bride)
    • ‘‘That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made’’, Eric James Stone (Analog Science Fiction and Fact 9/10)
    • ‘‘Stone Wall Truth’’, Caroline M. Yoachim (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 2/10)

    Novella

    • The Alchemist, Paolo Bacigalupi (Audible; Subterranean)
    • ‘‘Iron Shoes’’, J. Kathleen Cheney (Alembical 2)
    • The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
    • ‘‘The Sultan of the Clouds’’, Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 9/10)
    • ‘‘Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance’’, Paul Park (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1-2/10)
    • ‘‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window’’, Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine Summer ’10)

    Novel

    • The Native Star, M.K. Hobson (Spectra)
    • The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
    • Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
    • Echo, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
    • Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
    • Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)

    The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

    • Despicable Me, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud (directors), Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (screenplay), Sergio Pablos (story) (Illumination Entertainment)
    • Doctor Who: ‘‘Vincent and the Doctor’’, Richard Curtis (writer), Jonny Campbell (director)
    • How to Train Your Dragon, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (directors), William Davies, Dean DeBlois, & Chris Sanders (screenplay) (DreamWorks Animation)
    • Inception, Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)
    • Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright (director), Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright (screenplay) (Universal)
    • Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich (director), Michael Arndt (screenplay), John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee Unkrich (story) (Pixar/Disney)

    Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

    • Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
    • White Cat, Holly Black (McElderry)
    • Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK)
    • Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch (Amulet)
    • The Boy from Ilysies, Pearl North (Tor Teen)
    • I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Gollancz; Harper)
    • A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow)
    • Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

    I’ve actually read a couple things on this list, but for the most part, as usual, the nominations serve mostly as a shopping list for me.  These and the Hugos tell me what I ought to be looking at, at least in SF.

    But what is more dismaying about this one is how many of these names I don’t recognize at all!  I am woefully out of touch.  Granted, I’ve never been one to keep up with what is current, my reading habits mitigate against it (the reason I like to own my books is because I just never know when I’m going to feel like picking one up and, you know, reading it), but I at least used to know who the players were.

    I’m not going to sweat it, though.  Too much work.  I have the new Gene Wolfe, Home Fires, which I’m seriously looking forward to.  Also the newest Iain M. Banks, not to mention the second half of Connie Willis’s giant two-parter, Blackout/All Clear.

    Anyway, I thought I’d post these for those who may be interested.

    Me?  No, I never made a final ballot.  Preliminary once.

  • Dust Motes

    Cleaning my office, which serves double duty as a guest room.  We have company coming in this weekend and that’s always a good excuse to clean up.

    So while I’m moving things around, listening to very loud music (Deep Purple, Who Do We Think We Are? which I think is one of the great underappreciated rock’n’roll albums of all time), thoughts are buzzing around my head.

    Already this morning I posted a response to someone on a group discussing Science vs Religion—a topic fraught with the potential for all kinds of angsty in-your-face defensiveness—wherein I once more found myself in the position of turning an argument around on someone who had decided that I had insulted him by insisting on evidence and common sense and the practice of looking at alternative explanations that might undercut a cherished experience.  In this case, we were discussing ghosts.  When I pointed out that the described experience fit well with what is known as hypnogogic hallucination, I was summarily told that if I said that to the experiencer’s face, I’d likely get a kick in the groin.  Hardly a mature response.

    But then it went on to question why someone like me—a materialist—can’t just stop being insulting by insisting that what people experience is explicable in material terms.  It never seems to occur to some people that every time they tell me that I need Jesus or that I’m bound for hell or that my life must be empty and meaningless because I don’t believe in god, that they are being insulting to me.  Built into this level of religiosity is the automatic assumption that they’re right and I’m wrong and that’s the end of it.  They don’t see this as hubris or arrogance because it comes from, they believe, an outside source—god or whatever—and that all they’re doing is conveying the message.

    Well, sorry.  We can all be arrogant on someone else’s behalf and beg off the charge of arrogance because we’re just the messenger.  Displacing responsibility for being rude and offensive is a handy dodge—oh, it’s not me, it’s The Lord’s word!—but the fact remains, you choose to hand out the insult.  That you don’t see it that way is forgivable until it has been pointed out to you how it’s insulting.  After that, you’re just being an ass about it.

    This is not to say people can’t discuss this without being insulting.  I have a few friends who are devout believers and we often bandy the philosophy without ever getting personal or insulting.  I have to say, though, that without those few people who are demonstrably intelligent about the subject, I would probably categorize all such folks as raving loonies with poor social skills.

    To be fair, I know some atheists who are just as offensive.  And while I can understand where it comes from, it never wins any points.

    I try—and I’m only human, so lapses occur—ardently to deal with the subject, not the individual.  There does come a point when the question arises “Why do you believe this stuff?” and it does veer off into the personal.  But it’s the ideas I criticize, not the people.

    Unless by acting upon their beliefs they cause harm.  Then I get personal.  Boy, do I get personal!

    Insulated religious communities, such as some of the splinter Mormon sects who practice polygamy, as far as I’m concerned, are deluded.  Not because they believe in god, but because they feel that belief gives them leave to treat certain people like shit.  Mainly women, whom they view as property.  These little pockets are, for all intents and purposes, little feudal kingdoms with one or a few men at the top dictating to the rest.  I understand the leaders well enough—no matter how they couch their justifications, they are power-hungry bigots who’ve figured out how to feed their addictions.  What I fail repeatedly to understand are all the others who follow them.  What drives someone to surrender their conscience, their will, their choices to be ruled over by a self-serving tyrant?  Unless they like the arrangement they have within the hierarchy, which then makes it just as self-serving to follow, and becomes collusive.  Because it’s a top down, tiered society, and there always seems to be somebody lower down, ending finally with the women and the children, who end up having no say.  The ties that bind are like electrical lines dispersing power.

    We’re watching a wonderful thing happen in Egypt.  Democracy might break out in one of the most populous countries on the planet.  They have validated the dictum that people allow themselves to be ruled, that all the power a tyrant has is only what the people give him.  Ultimately, this is true.  The question is always, how abusive do things have to get before the people have had enough.

    It’s the next stage that’s worrisome.  The Muslim Brotherhood is waiting in the wings, no doubt, for an opportunity to establish Sha’ria law.  Once that happens, democracy is done.  Sha’ria is autocratic, brooks no debate, and is not amenable to differences of opinion that stray too far—like, for instance, equal rights for women.

    Yet to oppress the Muslim Brotherhood is also wrong.  That’s part of what has ultimately undone Mubarak.  It’s hard.  Even here we have to relearn that lesson periodically, that just because we disagree with someone and that someone is disagreeable, we don’t have the right to suppress or oppress them.  It’s more detrimental in the long run to force someone to shut up than any damage they can do by speaking their piece.

    If Egypt transforms in the next year into a genuine secular democracy, then we may begin to see the entire Middle East take the same steps.  Iran would likely be the next one, and in that instance it would be a transformation 30 years overdue, since after ousting the Shah that’s where they were heading.  Within a year, the clerics assumed full authority and democracy in any practical sense was gone.  They were able to do this because no one wanted to defy people speaking for god.  Once you hoist that banner, people get chary of challenging your authority, because they might be challenging god.

    That is the harm in such beliefs.  I won’t deny much good comes from religion, but in so many instances the tenets of religions have predisposed people to support autocracy, tyranny, and act counter to their own best interests.  The assumption that a given leader is speaking for god and therefore must be telling the truth or could not do anything against the good is naive.  By the time everyone figures out that he’s just using the people’s credulity to gain power, it can be too late.

    None of which has any bearing on the truth of the basic assertions.  Whether there is a god or not has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m describing.  What it does have to do with is whether or not one is willing to set that aside in matters of public policy, wherein any use of religion often ends up being a cynical ploy to obtain power or enact laws that may not be for the best.

    Anyway, such are the kinds of things that flit through my mind while I’m cleaning up.  Dust motes dancing over synapses. Time for another side of rock’n’roll.

  • Scene From A Frozen Moment

    Winter is not my favorite time of year.  When I was a kid it was different.  Snow was fun (and we had a lot of it then—global warming deniers notwithstanding, a “normal” St. Louis winter used to begin with snow in mid December, between ten inches and two feet of it on the ground pretty much continually through the end of January, sometimes well into February; the last time we had something approximating a traditional St. Louis winter was maybe 1986) and I built snow forts and had snowball fights with the best of them.

    Then I started driving and got a job.  Not so much fun anymore.

    But despite my curmudgeonly resentment of precipitate winters like this one, I am forced to admit that there is great beauty to be found and the eponymous Winter Wonderland has marvels to offer.

    ice-on-japanese-maple.jpg

    Now, if only it didn’t last so long…

  • Because Things Are Forgotten

    This is a completely personal anecdote, so take it for what it’s worth.  This is about a defining moment for me in my education as an egalitarian.

    Equality is something we talk about, we assume to be the case for everyone, and never really question.  Here, it’s the air we breathe.  It’s not true.  We are not all equal.  And in spite of our all our lip service to the idea of equality under the law or the equality of opportunity, we all know, if we’re honest, that we’re still trying to get to that level.  Probably it’s a function of how well we think our lives are at any given moment.  “If I’m doing all right, there’s no problem.  What are those people over there complaining about?  I don’t see anything wrong with my life.”

    Well.

    This is about gender equality.  It’s one of the most under-considered things in our present world. When I say that, what I mean is that here, in the West, where we have all but won that particular war, where it is normal to see women in roles that 50 years ago would have caused near-scandal, we have so normalized it that it has become a political topic for talking heads instead of a heartbreaking reality of barriers and stigma and sometimes death, as it is in many places still throughout the globe.

    I saw a PBS special last week about early television and on it Angie Dickinson was talking about her series Police Woman.  Breakthrough television.  It had been the first dramatic tv show since the mid-60s to be headed by a female in prime time.  It was shortly before Charlie’s Angels and a decade after both Honey West and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.  During the interview, Dickinson commented that the feminists had been angry with her because she hadn’t used the show as a statement for the cause.  She defended herself by declaring that she was feminine not a feminist—as if being a feminist were somehow a bad thing, a dirty word, a slur.

    Which seems to be the case these days among a certain segment of women, many of them too young to remember what it was like when women couldn’t do anything they wanted to.

    Here’s my belief—any system that works to stifle an individual’s dreams and goals and sense of self simply because of a biological condition of being (gender, race, etc) is a system in need of reform at best, overturning at worst.  If you say to someone “You may not do this or that because you’re (a) a girl, (b) the wrong color, or (c) differently abled that an assumed norm” then you are being a bigot.

    Back in high school, I took a fancy one year to the idea of becoming an architect.  I took mechanical drawing one year, then the next architectural drawing.  I ended up dropping it.  But both classes were entirely male.  This was 1971 and 1972.  I didn’t question it.  Probably like a lot of boys then, I kinda sorta had the notion that girls didn’t do certain things because they didn’t want to.  I don’t know where I got that idea, but to my unformed mind it was the only thing that actually made sense to me.  The only reason I didn’t do things was because I had no interest in them.  All the cultural referents supported this rather passive belief and I didn’t question it.  Not really.  I’d already dismissed the idea that girls were incapable of doing the same things as boys because I’d been reading Heinlein and Schmitz, but that was science fiction and the future.  I hadn’t made the connections yet.

    I said both those classes were entirely male.  That’s not quite true.  My architectural drawing class had one girl.  But I didn’t know about her for nearly half of the first semester.

    The classroom was a long room with four ranks of drafting tables, all facing the front and the chalkboard.  At the rear was a small room that probably had been a cloak room at one time but now acted as a supply room for the class and was also where the blueprint machine was set up.  Our class was taught by a Mr. Hoppe, who was a short, energetic man with an almost comic stentorian delivery that reminded me a bit of Don Adams.  He liked to roam the aisles, lecturing us about having something when we left high school that would “put folding money in your pocket!”  I liked him.  Everybody liked him.  He was about five-foot-four, dark hair, cleanshaven, with bifocals.

    What I did not know was that he was teaching a female.  He had her set up in that utility room with her own drafting table.  I thought this was odd.  What, she didn’t want to hang out with the rest of us?  Was she stuck up or something?

    Then one evening I had to go to his classroom to drop off some paperwork, after school hours.  Mr. Hoppe wasn’t there, but three other guys from the class were.  I heard them laughing from the utility room.  I went back and there they were, with this girl’s work spread out.  One of them was sitting at the drafting table reworking some of the drawings while the other two were laughing at what he was doing.

    What was he doing?  He was ruining her work.  This wasn’t the equivalent of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.  No, he was meticulously redoing her drawings and inserting mistakes.

    Let me say right here that her work was superb.  I have a talent for drawing and a good imagination and I thought I would make a good architect, but there were some things that just made that unlikely.  One was neatness.  My drawings were generally a mess—smudged, bad lines.  The other was lack of patience, but that’s a problem I have with everything.  But her work was pure art.  Clean, easy to read, detailed, just….beautiful.

    “What the fuck are you doing?” I blurted out.

    Two of them just stared at me, but the one doing the reworking said, “Teaching the bitch a lesson.”

    “You’re gonna get her a bad grade,” I said.  I still didn’t get it.

    “Yeah, well, she’s got no business doing this.”

    And I still didn’t get it.  I left and the next day I reported it to Mr. Hoppe.  All hell broke loose.  The three guys were booted from his class.  One of them—the one who’d been messing with her work—vowed to get even.  (He tried later, it didn’t work.  It cost him a black eye and a sprained ankle.  This was during my physically fearless period and he frankly never saw what was coming when he called me out.)

    This went on all the time, I found out.  Mr. Hoppe was delighted that someone had finally said something, because he told us all, that day, that this girl was his best student, he knew she wasn’t making those boneheaded mistakes, but he’d never been able to catch the vandals.

    He actually gave us a feminist lecture.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect it was.  Not because he was a feminist, I don’t think, but because he respected ability above all else.  And she had it, he said, and we should be ashamed of ourselves if we thought it was right to stand in her way just because she was a girl.  He’d been forced to keep her out of the regular class room because time again she would not be left alone to do her work.  The “guys” always sabotaged what she did, either by flirting or by making fun of her or by insulting her.

    I admit I was innocent.  I didn’t understand this at all.  It completely overturned what I thought had been going on.  I mean, I knew a lot of girls who didn’t want to do “guy things” and made a show of it, so it just didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t their choice.  That it wasn’t always their choice.

    What changed for me that day took years to fully manifest.  As I think back on it, there were a few other girls who had wanted to do certain things that girls “just didn’t do.”  I knew one who wanted to take shop. The whole school denied her access to the courses.  One girl I remember raging at the administration and then a week later announcing to us that she was transferring to a private school where she could pursue what she wanted.

    Young women today have different experiences with the world, so often you find them raising their eyebrows at old-school feminists railing at some injustice.  An electric crawl goes up my back when I hear some young female proudly declare that she’s not a feminist and would never be.  I know on some level they’re equating it to fashion, that feminists don’t dress well and never use make-up.  The superficiality of their reaction is probably based on something not much deeper.

    It does get tiresome to listen to some old fart going on about how things used to be.  But I hope the old farts never stop.  How else are we to remember what we’ve gained?

    My feminism eventually became a marrow-deep belief that we must treat each other like PEOPLE first, male and female maybe not quite second, but never let the gender distinction override our common humanity, and likewise with every other distinction you can name that makes no difference.  We all have dreams and ambitions and no one has a right to tell us we can’t have them because we were born with the “wrong equipment.”

    This personal reminiscence has been brought to you by a triggered memory.  Have a good day.

  • Blind Spots

    It’s almost sacrilege to admit to disliking certain things.  People who regard themselves as culturally aware, artistically sensitive, aesthetically sophisticated must occasionally find themselves faced with work that has such apparent popular appeal among those they consider simpatico which they frankly do not care for or do not understand or both.  Uttering their honest opinion can be the equivalent of farting in church.

    So they suppress that opinion, perhaps nod politely and even go so far as to find some pseudo-intellectual way of understanding the thing disliked so they can at least be seen as trustworthy within their circles.  It really is a case of the Emperor’s new suit.

    I suppose what we’re talking about is a blind spot.  Sometimes you just have a kind of aesthetic aphasia, you really can’t see (or hear) what everyone else is so on about.  You could put it down to taste, but that’s a mild word, connoting a kind of passive difference of opinion.  It fails to describe your true reaction or, more tellingly, the possible sham going on around certain artists.

    Years ago I had a conversation with the artist Rick Berry, whose work I both admire and occasionally love, about one of my blind spots—Jackson Pollack.  I gave him my opinion, that this is crap masquerading as art because by now a lot of reputations have been built upon the propagation of the idea that this is somehow Great Art.  I look at a Pollack and I see squiggles.  I watch films of Pollack working and I see advanced fingerpainting in action.  I realize this is a kind of heresy and I’ve often received looks ranging from pity to revulsion for expressing this feeling.

    Berry nodded.  He said he’d felt the same way for years.  Then one day, walking through a museum, past a Pollack, he glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye and ended up sitting in front of the painting for a couple of hours.  Since then, he’s grown to love Pollack.  I asked him if he’d come to the conclusion that Pollack was, in fact, a great artist, and he said  “I don’t know, but I know I like it.”

    That is unassailable.  It is absolutely personal, it is absolutely subjective, and has nothing to do with any universal qualities in a given piece of work or possessed by a particular artist.  I make a distinction myself between work I think is Good and work I simply like.  They are often the same, but occasionally I like something that I can in no way defend as good.

    However, I sometimes wonder at the adulation poured on certain artists for work that is simply mediocre if not an outright scam.  Adulation that transcends the simple metric of “I like it” and goes on to become bodies of apologia, written by people who seem compelled to find a reason, a justification, for liking something that has little to recommend it except as an eccentric appeal.  These people start the avalanche that eventually becomes part of the liturgy of cultural in-group vetting.  To not think this or that is tremendous, brilliant, a work of genius is to be revealed as philistine, sub-par, suspect, common.

    This morning I was reading an introduction to a collection of short fiction and the writer listed a string of what he considered geniuses in their fields as a way to place the author of the collection.  Interestingly, I found myself nodding at every name listed—but one. And I thought, what the hell is HE doing in this group?  John Cage.

    I know he is the darling of a kind of avant-garde set, but come on.  It’s noise.  He even admitted he was not very adept at actual music.  His “found” soundscapes, while occasionally interesting, lack, to my ear, even the virtue of clever arrangement.  It’s cacophony, chaos, crap.  That it’s frowned upon to point this out in certain groups does not make it less true.  I suspect that in this case it’s not so much that I am failing to “get it” but that there actually isn’t much there to get.

    Other blind spots?  I already mentioned Pollack.  My opinion of Picasso has changed over the years.  He really was a very good, very talented artist, but frankly I think he became more a parody of himself over time and much of his work was a running joke, a game to see just how much the art world would take before it threw up its collective hands and declared the work garbage.  I find many of the abstract artists of the second half of the Twentieth Century tiresome.  Form has a function, after all, which is to make something comprehensible.  Breaking rules is all well and good but I think you should know the rules and be able to use them before telling the world that they should be dispensed with.

    I’ve written about my aversion to certain musicians, but that really is a matter of taste—I just don’t like the sound of certain voices, but that’s not a criticism of what they’re attempting to do.  (But I draw the line at Tom Waits—the man cannot sing, period.)  I categorically loathe Country, especially C & W, but again, that’s taste.  I recognize ability, structure, form, etc, and can hear good musicianship—I just don’t care for the genre.

    But there are composers I’ve frankly never understood the appeal—Charles Ives.  Certainly a great deal of educated command of his medium, but to what end?  A precursor to Cage?  Noise.

    The sculptor Richard Serra.  Please.  Rusted plates of iron arranged in clumsy assemblages and purported to be art?  If nothing else, it all looks unfinished, like work begun and abandoned.  But mostly, the art, I suspect, is in the selling.

    In my own field, I will never understand the praise heaped on Kurt Vonnegut Jr.  I find him tedious and, frankly, insulting.  I do not read at a fifth grade level and I have never been able to get past the intrinsic condescension in his choice of style, which is to pitch his tone and vocabulary at that level.  He managed the feat of becoming a best-selling writer while ridiculing (a) the genre in which he began (science fiction) and (b) telling his audience how stupid they were.  The brilliance of his vision, of his stories, I can see in the films made from his novels, but they are not so wonderful to justify, in my mind, his approach, which undermines what he tried to do.  At least for me.

    The blind spot that has gotten me the most negative reaction is one that I have had since I first saw the work.  Can’t help it.  But when I say this, the reactions are often profound and sometimes horrified.  How can I say this?  How can I not see?  How can I fail to recognize the genius?  How can I not love that work?

    Vincent Van Gogh.

    To my eye, work done by a marginally talented four year old with fat crayons.  Sometimes the claimed brilliance of color looks flat and lifeless to me.  That he couldn’t sell any it in his lifetime surprises me not at all.

    But the industry that has been built on the corpse of this unfortunate man since strikes me as nothing less than the perfect flower of aesthetic cannibalism.  A marvelous job of selling has been done in the 121 years since his death.

    (I’ve seen his early work, and his sketchbooks, and what I see is a man whose mental condition slowly robbed him of the skill and ability to do the work he should have done.  I like some of his early canvasses and he clearly had the skill, but the late period work which everyone praises leaves me thoroughly unmoved.)

    Blind spots.  Maybe.  My other big one is poetry, which by and large has no affect on me.  Once in a while I hear a piece that strikes me as clever or moving, but the vast majority of poetry does not speak to me.

    The thing that intrigues me, though, is this: the social phenomenon of elevating matters of taste to measures of status and worth.  By this mechanism, people become trapped in conditions where they feel unable to express what they really feel if it runs counter to the current vogue.

    It is true that art should be free to myriad forms of expression and we should be free to enjoy any and all of them.  That something like the Paris Salon of the mid-19th Century ought not condemn artists to a purgatory of exclusion because they do something different.

    But we should also be free to call nonsense nonsense, crap crap, and declare the Emperor naked and defrauded.

    The above has been an expression of personal opinion.

  • Schools

    I spotted this over at John Scalzi’s Whatever and it brought back some memories.

    A woman in Ohio has received a felony conviction for deceptively sending her kids to a school in a district where she didn’t live.  Her father colluded in this.  The article linked doesn’t go into the reasons she did what she did, but I can imagine some of them, and it would have entirely to do with quality of school experience.

    Fifty years ago, my schooling experience—and I phrase it that way because I’m talking about much more than just what you learn in the classroom; it’s a total package, going to socialization and self-image and the whole magilla that a lot of people condemning American public education, depending on their political slant, don’t want to think about—was in the process of being thoroughly fucked up.  Had I not been an avid reader at an early ago outside of school…

    Not knowing the particulars of the Ohio case, I’ll just talk about mine.  I’ve detailed some of this before, but it’s worth going over it again as a reminder.

    My birthday is in October.  Back in the day, my mother dutifully tried to enroll me in school for the school year during which I would have been five.  But at the time of enrollment, I was only four.  They refused me.  “Bring him back next year,” they told my mother, who tried, I imagine, valiantly to explain the problem, which was that I’d end up functionally a year behind.  But the district was adamant.  Bring him back when he is five.

    So I had a whole year of not going to school when many of my friends were.  Not to worry, I didn’t give that much of a damn.  I was pretty much a loner anyway, even then, because, for whatever reason, I didn’t quite fit with everyone else.

    The following September, we’re back at the school, and this time they accepted me.  I entered kindergarten.

    And six weeks later, when I turned six, they pulled me and five others who had the same calendrical malfunction out of kindergarten and moved us directly across the hall into first grade.

    Our first grade teacher—I remember her vividly, a tallish Nordic blonde with a thin face and large, pale blue eyes—made it clear from the beginning that she regarded the six of us as a nuisance.  “Get with one of the others and catch up,” she said.  “I’m not spending any time making up for you’re not being here at the beginning of the year.”

    I could read already and, if I recall correctly, so could Debbie Blake, but the others?  Don’t know.  I quickly became absorbed into my own problems, which became legion in my young mind.  Within a month I could honestly say that I hated school.

    Not just the teacher and the sudden load of curricula which the six weeks of kindergarten had not prepared me, but the whole experience.  My new classmates made me feel slow and stupid and began a pattern of torment that last the next eight years.  My teacher, who apparently recognized that I was probably above average, began a round of parent-teacher meetings designed, I thought, to humiliate me—“he’s a bright child but not performing up to his potential.”  I just didn’t understand.  And it didn’t improve.  I suspect that nine months of kindergarten I should have gotten bore directly on the socialization I was now forced to “catch up” with in a couple of weeks.

    My parents moved during my third grade year.  It put me in a new school district.  I actually had made no real friends to miss, so it was no big deal to me.  But.

    The district line ran, apparently, down the center of my street, and that put me in the Grant School district instead of the Shenendoah district.  Shenendoah was four blocks away.  Grant was a mile and a half.  Grant—I did not know this at the time, but my parents did—had a bad reputation.  (Shenendoah soon would, but not yet.)  I was already obviously having trouble at school from bullying and such and my parents were reluctant to send me to a school, so far away, where the problems might be worse.

    But also—and I didn’t find this out until much later—my performance disappointed them and my dad, for one, thought I had a discipline problem.  Corporal punishment had been outlawed in the public school system.  Dad was a believer in the spanking.  My poor grades and lack of attention in class, he thought, were directly related to an inability on the part of the teachers to effectively discipline me.  So, public school was probably not where I belonged.

    I was summarily enrolled in a private school, Emmaus Lutheran, about ten blocks away, and I entered the fray midway through third grade and there I stayed through eighth.

    My performance did not improve. Nor was I ever spanked for poor discipline.  That, it turned out, was not the problem.  (The bullying soon resumed and continued.  Enough about that.)

    I continued reading on my own and by a curious quirk of circumstance my dad began a long stretch of dinner table dialogues with me that can only be described as philosophical primers—my parents were lapsed Mormons, I was attending a Lutheran school, dad was determined I not swallow the party line whole, and we argued and debated our way through the rest of my grade school, all in an attempt to keep me from being brain washed.

    My next school problem came my senior year of high school.  High school improved somewhat.  Because of the round of different teachers, my performance in one class did not poison it in another, and I could be selective about what I chose to pay attention to.  My grades went up because, frankly, I was more interested.  The bullying had stopped (although I had more fights my Freshman year than the previous two) and I began to acquire the armor of the loner who will not be messed with.

    Roosevelt High School was what could best be described as a blue-collar industrial school.  It had been built and its traditions established when the expectation was that most of its graduates would end up driving trucks for Anheuser-Busch or going into some other local industry.  It was struggling to come to terms with a changed mission during the Sixties and hadn’t quite succeeded.  I became deeply fascinated with photography.  They had no course in it.  I was already interested in writing, but the Journalism class was one year and only half a credit.  In other words, both my fields of interest were pretty much unsupported.

    Senior year, I entered a work-study program which gave me a morning of class work and let me off to work part time in the afternoon.  My very first job ever, acquired over the summer, didn’t survive past October.  I “contrived” to game the system to stay in the program and pretended to have a job.  I was also cutting a lot of classes and days that year—sheer, unadulterated boredom (plus I think I had mono that year, but since I never went to the doctor I can’t say for sure, but it was pretty awful).  In any event, because I’d taken senior English in summer school (to avoid getting a particular teacher who would undoubtedly have flunked me for personal reasons) and because I had carried a larger course load (somehow) the previous year, I had more than enough credits to graduate that January, getting out early.  I plead lethargy for not having done it.  I’d finally gotten a situation where I didn’t mind it so much and didn’t have anything else to do.

    But.  I answered a job ad at the state hospital in February.  It was for a photography trainee.  Note—this was 1973.  The job would have been under the resident photography at the hospital as an apprentice.  I would have been trained to do portraits, copy work, photomicrography, color lab work, the whole bit.  The guy loved me.  Saw my work, the interview went like a dream—and the starting pay was four dollars and hour.  Trust me, for an 18-year-old at the time, this was a fortune.

    The only hitch was I didn’t have my diploma.  I explained the academic situation and begged a grace period so I could get it, since I had fulfilled my qualifications.  I went back to school to do that and was told No.  I had not taken that option in the fall, I was stuck with completing the school year.

    I begged.  Both of them.  The school wouldn’t yield, the photographer refused to hire me, telling me that I really needed that diploma and that he’d be doing me a disservice by allowing me to quit school without it.

    Bureaucracy.  I was, basically, fucked.

    Who knows where that might have led?  A path cauterized.  I do not regret it.  I’ve had a ball living the life I’ve led.  But I still get incensed over schools standing on their petty rules at the expense of a child’s educational experience.  It makes their bookkeeping easy and can often result in damaging the child’s future.

    Was the photographer right?  I have never been required to prove I graduated high school, anywhere, by anyone.  They take your word for it.  In my field, it was what you could do that mattered more than where you’ve been educated.

    So I’m thinking this woman in Ohio was trying her best to meet some impossible requirements.  Depressed housing market (let’s assume) and she couldn’t sell her house in order to move, the job she had was where she lived, the school she wanted her children in was in another district…not to put to fine a point on it, but all the opponents of vouchers and charter schools should be aware that this is part of the reason a lot of people are looking at those options as agreeably as they do.

    And just as a side note, sort of tangentially, consider that idiot governor in Texas recently pronouncing on what he sees as “frivolous” educational options.  To quote Governor Perry:

    Well, there is a lot of fat to cut from our public schools, especially those in our biggest urban areas like Houston and Dallas. I am concerned that some the highly diverse Magnet public schools in this city are becoming hotbeds for liberalism. Do we really need free school bus service, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian-Pacific Heritage Month, ESL, special needs and enrichment programs like music, art or math Olympiad? I think we should get back to the basics of the three Rs, reading writing and arithmetic. I mean when is the last time a 6th grade science fair project yielded a cure for a disease?

    It doesn’t work well, so let’s fuck it up some more, shall we?  Take all the stuff that’s worthwhile and cut it, so we can educate a bunch of truck drivers, processed food workers, and cheap laborers who can compete with illegal immigrants.  (I’m being sarcastic there, please note.)

    You know what I would do if I were king?  I would change the entire school system to this: fund it at at least half the level of current military spending.  All schools would be open 24/7.  Kids could go at any time and find classes in session.  Kids could go to any school they chose (within reason).  I would also make all schools safe havens, staffed with paralegals, nurses, and law enforcement so kids from abusive homes could feel protected if they had to get out.  I would pay whatever it took to feed a child’s imagination.  I would also extend that to make parents mandatorily involved and provide counseling for those parents who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.  The schools would be geared entirely for the benefit of the children, not the parents, not local businesses, and certainly not the bureaucracy.  I would put advanced curricula in the primary schools.  A lot of kids might not “get it” but there will always be those who will catch on quickly, even kids from backgrounds most people might think unlikely.  But I would expose all these kids to meaty material from the get-go instead of waiting till they get to college—if they get to college, which for many of them might be too late.  I would bar all recruiters of any kind from the schools and I would bring in a regular round of professionals in as many fields as I could to do workshops.

    That’s what I would do if I were king.  We’re nickle-and-diming out kids into stupidity and penalizing some parents who try to do the right thing for their children.  For every educational worker who pushes the envelope to improve the system, there seem to be a hundred know-nothings bitching about the cost and arguing over what’s being taught.  This has got to stop.

    Okay, end of rant. I feel marginally better.