Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • Boston, 1989

    One of these days I will get the Art section of this website straightened out.  If you go there now, you’ll find a lot of photographs, but several of them when clicked on expand to huge size and you only see a corner of the image.  I found that if you click on that again, it reduces to screen size.  Still, it’s a bit of a pain.

    Meantime, I can always post an image here now and then, and for no other reason than I like to.  Like this one, taken in Boston circa 1989.

    boston-1989.jpg

    I’m proud of my photography.  Quietly, almost too shyly.  I love the medium, always have, and some time in my childhood I became acquainted with the work of Ansel Adams.  The older I get the more I appreciate his artistry and I doubt I’ll ever match it.  But I’ve done a few pieces that I think are not too bad.

    I had my first gallery show in July.  The reception evening was a surprise.  The place was never empty, and most of the people who came through I did not know.  I felt very pleased.  We didn’t sell anything, but I hadn’t expected to.  Now that the bubble is burst, though, I may try to do that again.

    I’ve been taking photographs actively since I was 15.  That’s nearly 40 years now and I have tens of thousands of negatives.  The technology has changed and the industry is digital and I need to crack the books and learn it.  I’ve been dipping a toe in the (non) waters of digital imagery, hence the photographs posted here and on Facebook.  I have a lot to learn and I should get on with it before I run out of either time or interest.  But even if I don’t, I can still put a few up here for wandering visitors to enjoy.

  • When I Was But A Wee Thing

    I found a very old packet of photographs the other day, going all the way back to nearly the beginning. They were snapshots taken the day of my Christening. This would have been, according to the date written in the booklet, November of 1954. I pulled the one of my parents and me, did a little clean-up with photoshop, and here it is.

    me-mom-dad-b.jpg
    Mom was a fox, dad had moviestar good looks—maybe B picture, but who cares? Mom was absolutely crazy about him and he has never lost his complete fascination with her. They have never regretted a single day they’ve spent together as far as I know (barring the usual ups and downs every relationship has) and they are good companions. At this point, they hadn’t been married quite eleven months. Me? I’ve been privileged to be along for the ride and I credit them with teaching me how to love my own Donna. “You have to like each other,” Dad told me once. “Love comes and goes, but when you’re not in love, you have to like each other.”

    That was the absolute truth.

  • Dante’s HMO

    Now for something less sturm und drang (which is ironic, since just now it is thundering and raining outside) and more reflective.

    We’re still attending the Dante reading group.  Yesterday we did Canto XIV of Purgatorio and indulged some lively conversation over the meaning and intent.  It’s become fairly obvious (long ago, back in  Inferno it was obvious) that Dante was not talking about the afterlife, not in any serious way.  All of this is a critique of the world and its denizens.  It is a thoroughgoing strafing and scourging of the component parts of the world through which he moved.  He was doing what science fiction does, talking about the present world through the distorting lens of the fantastic.

    There are equivalent personalities in Inferno and Purgatory.  There seems to be a question of degree, however, and an additional component of self awareness that has put the denizens of Purgatory—the Purgs in our group shorthand—and the Infernals where they are.  We have just completed Pride and are in the midst of Envy, and certainly there are those in Inferno who suffer from the same faults.  The difference is the Purgs know they have a failing, the Infernals embrace their flaw as if it is only right and natural.  The person of Chaco for one is convinced he’s heaven-bound just as soon as the bureaucratic cock-up that’s put him where he is gets cleared up.  The Infernals, you realize, are exactly where they want to be.

    This is a point I think Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle missed in their otherwise delightful take, Inferno.  They portrayed the denizens of hell as people being punished and are aware of being punished, unable to do anything about it.  But it becomes clear with close reading of Dante that this is precisely not the case.  Chaco, and his ilk, like the way they are, they have no problem with themselves, it is the world that they see as the problem.  They would tear down creation to make it conform to their view of how things should be.

    Whereas the Purgs have no such conviction.  They are flawed and feel incapable of doing anything about it.  They know there is a problem, but can’t seem to identify it, or feel powerless to effect change.  Theirs is a more complex dysfunction, and it is compounded by a confusion with the systems they have lived and worked within.  They are loathe to drop the forms they have grown both comfortable and diseased embracing.

    And Virgil, who is outside this entire construct being a pagan, pre-Christian, tells Dante:

    That was the iron bit meant to hold man within his proper bound.  But you men swallow bait and hook and all, and then your ancient enemy yanks you in—small profit to you then, the rein or call.

    Stepping outside for a moment, which is Virgil’s freedom, this suggests that mankind has been sold a bill of goods, a slick salesman has had his way with us, and we bought it.  Bought into it.  And we’re stuck with it.  There are wonders enough in life and elsewhere, but we’re too busy tending the Great Machine to pay attention—or to think we can abandon what doesn’t work in the hope of finding…better.

    If Dante hadn’t written this in the 13th century, one might see it as an almost modern critique of the corporate system.  But why not?  The same flaws inform modern institutions, drive people to ignore their own best interests, create the same monsters of singular obessive control.

    Seen from this perspective, I have to say—I can’t resist saying—that the entire health care debate seems custom tailored for a Dante-esque interpretation.  Kind of fitting.  And frightening.

  • Can’t Get No Women So I’ll Die Blues: An Absurdity

    George Sodini never got it right, apparently.  He posted a kind of diary entry on the web explaining how not right he got it.  “The biggest problem of all is not having relationships or friends,” he wrote.

    According to his confession on the web, he hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1984 or a date since May of 2008.  Hadn’t had sex for 19 years.

    “Women just don’t like me,” he wrote.

    So he came up with a solution.  If he couldn’t get his life the way he wanted it, he would end it.  He acquired firearms, ammunition, he set down a plan.  He intended to off himself and end his pain.

    Only problem with that is, he decided to take a bunch of women with him.

    He was 48.  So the last time he’d had a girlfriend, he’d been (roughly) 23.  You can see images of him on his webpage if you choose to look.  He wasn’t bad looking, he kept himself fit, he looked every bit the so-called “Eligible Bachelor.”

    So what went wrong?  Or, more probably, what never went right?

    And, finally, do we care?

    We might have if he had done himself in at home, alone.  Bullet in the brainpan, up through the mouth by way of the soft palate.  Days would pass, someone would notice that he hadn’t shown up.  If he’d truly been without friends, maybe the smell would have alerted someone.  Body found, the notice on the website as explanation.  Sympathetic pondering by people who may have thought he’d had so much to live for.  The irony of such deaths is that those people around the victim who really did care come forward and he would never know.

    But instead, he goes out like a kamikaze, gunning down women he did not know—knew of, perhaps—in a fitness class.  Vengeance for his unchallengable loneliness.  All merit for sympathy gone.  Gutless wonder till the end.

    Do I have any sympathy?

    Let’s see…

    Until I met Donna, almost none of my girlfriends stayed with me more than three months, the vast majority less than one month.  I called somewhere around 86 girls to ask to go to my senior prom, and not one accepted, so I didn’t go.  86.  (I found out later that there were 4 I didn’t call who would have gone, but I either lost staying power by number 86 or they weren’t on my list to begin with, it’s hard to remember.)  Sex?  Problematic.  I actually did have sex with a number of girls who then refused to go out with me.  Not because of bad sex (though, frankly, how good could it have been?) but because I was a Nobody, a Nonentity.  They did not want to be seen with me.  Had nothing to do with me, I know, it was a status thing and let’s face it, teenagers can be brutal.

    I was frustrated enough after the end of what till then had been my most serious relationship—a woman I had asked to marry me, who subsequently (after initially accepting) trashed our relationship in the most thorough and humiliating manner—to consider suicide.  Not to worry, obviously I didn’t do it, nor has it ever crossed my mind again, no matter how bad things have gotten.

    It is very difficult to be optimistic with a track record like I had.  But all things are relative.  I did have dates, I did manage to have something of a sex life, I always had female friends, and I for damn sure always had very good friends in general.  Not many, but this is something in which quality is the only determining factor.

    In the middle of your self-pity, such benefits don’t register.

    Mainly, my major problem was a matter of communication.  I didn’t know how to do that with females.  The whole idea that I could talk to girls the way I talked to guys was completely and totally alien to my experience—I’d tried that and it didn’t work.   (I wasn’t really doing a great jobh talking to guys, either—when you have a communications problem, it tends to be all-encompassing, but if you have a couple of good buddies it just seems like the problem in uni-dimensional.)

    Yeah, I wanted to have sex with every girl I tried to talk to.  It got in the way.  They wanted to talk  (perfectly reasonable) and get to know me, and then maybe there would be some activity.  I couldn’t stop obsessing on all the stuff I wanted but couldn’t have, so all my conversation was stilted and artificial.

    Did I know that at the time?  Not really.  I mean, someone could explain it to me, but did it really register in a way that would have changed my behavior?  No.

    It was something I needed to learn to do.  And internalize.  And I needed to get past the stereotypes.

    Stereotypes?  From where?  Oh, movies and television, of course.  Those guys talked cool and made witty remarks, why couldn’t I?  Well, I could.  But it was artificial.  All I got was rolled eyes and see-ya-laters.

    But you learn.  You pay attention.  You try and try again, not in the same way, but in the different ways suggested by the information you get from listening!  ‘Cause, like, it’s not about you.

    But it took me a long time to figure this out and yes, it was frustrating to watch all these other guys my age making out all right and being completely unable to figure out what I was doing wrong.  But I figured it out.  Eventually.

    And I didn’t shoot one woman.  Ever.  I didn’t even shoot myself.

    Why do I tell you all this?

    Because frustration is no excuse.  Because I can sympathize with someone who just keeps trying and failing.  Because I’ve been there, feeling unloved, unwanted, a self-pitying lump of despair, staring in the mirror and wondering where the boils are that keep turning all the women off.  But mainly to say that with Mr. Sodini, no matter what he proclaimed on his website, it wasn’t what he claimed it to be that tipped him over the edge.  That was just the excuse.

    One of his neighbors told police  “He was so antisocial we really didn’t learn anything about him.”

    He was the man who had bought the expensive suit, got the fashionable haircut, wore expensive cologne, went to the party and stood there waiting for people to notice how wonderful he was.  But he never talked to anyone.  And when everyone pretty much went on doing what they’d been doing all along and ignoring him, he went away miffed.

    He was broken in more ways than an inability to keep a girlfriend.  It would interesting to find out why his girlfriends left and why he rarely dated anyone long enough to develop a relationship.  We might find that he was too self-centered.  Too disinterested in anyone else.  Because usually, when people aren’t interested in you, it’s because you’re not interested in them.

    But I come back to the fact that after all the frustrations in my life, all the slights, stabs in the back, insults, chronic disregard, and general shittiness with which so many people trreated me, I never killed a one of them.  It never even occurred to me to do that.

    By the words on George Sodini’s confessional, he had apparently had enough of living the way he’d been living and decided to commit suicide.  But like some ancient warlord, he wasn’t going to ride the death barque by himself—he needed an entourage.

    I find nothing sympathetic in the man.  His response to life’s basic ambivalence was one more wrong thing done.  “If you don’t date me I’ll kill some strangers!”  Very attractive, I’m sure that will turn it around for you.  “It’s all women’s fault and to prove it I’m going to shoot a bunch of women who don’t know me and won’t sleep with me!”  Yeah, that’ll make your luck change, I’m sure.

    Killing someone else because you can’t get your act together renders you pretty much unfit for any consideration other than as an example of the ultimate loser, the epitome of a screw-up, the zenith of denial that you are the architect of your own life.  Sure, you have to obey the zoning laws, but otherwise how that structure looks is all up to you.  If it’s a ramshackle wreck when you’re done, you can’t blame anyone else.

    The thing about being young and awkward is, you learn.  You grow up, you learn, you get over it.  No one is born with the ability to do all right, we all learn it.  Some faster than others, level of ability varies…

    The only failure is to quit.  And the surest way to ignominy is to quit by destroying others.

    Men are killing women all over the globe, for all manner of excuse.  But mainly because the women left.  They left these men, their families, their villages, towns, cities, countries, because they couldn’t stand the adolescent neediness and control, because they are hnuman beings who want something better.  Women leave.  Men hate it when they do.  And some men will kill them rather than give them the option of leaving.

    But none of these men ever seem to consider that they are the reason these women are leaving and if they want it to change, they must change.  If they can.

    Blaming someone else for your shortcomings is an ageless game.  It is pathetic.  It deserves no sympathy, but it is, indeed, pathetic.

  • On Knowing Your Limits

    Something that annoys me no end is people who make promises they don’t keep.  Not people who are prevented from keeping them or due to circumstances beyond their control find they simply cannot do it.  No, as aggravating as that might be, life happens.  The circumstances deserve our ire, not the people—not if they’ve made an honest effort.  No, what I’m talking about are people who can do something, know how, but as they make the promise know they probably won’t.  Bad scheduling, bad planning, bad whatever—or just lack of real interest.  Or the habit traditionally known as Biting Off More Than You Can Chew.

    Many years ago—decades, really—a local youth activist tried to draft me into service by writing a comic he intended to locally produce and distributed.  He knew I wrote, I was just beginning to garner a bit of a reputation, he thought it would be a good fit.  I demurred.

    “I don’t want to commit to something I might not have the time or inclination to do,” I said.

    He understood.  In fact, “I wish more people would be that honest about their limits.”

    I knew what he meant, but had no idea it would become part of my own personal landscape of trials and tribulations.  But I remembered that and I’ve been scrupulous about not making unfullfillable commitments.

    What happens is, of course, that someone says “I’ll do that” and you then feed the information to that person, get him or her set up enough to take the ball, and you go pay attention to all the other thousand to million details demanding your attention.  But all of sudden one day you turn around and discover that nothing has been done by this person.  They have completely dropped the ball and you then are left scrambling to repair the damage, build the bridge, make the call, write the report, and so forth.  The arrangements you’ve made based on their commitment fall apart because now you’re over-scheduled.  It’s a mess.

    It would have been better had that person said “I don’t think I can do that.”

    I don’t have a problem either saying that or hearing it.  The inability to do something, for whatever reason, honestly admitted up front before any time or resource is wasted does not offend me at all.  What offends is the unwillingness or inability to state that up front and said individual makes an unkeepable promise.  That promise did not happen in a vacuum.  Things get built around it and based on it.  So when the promise is broken, that section crumbles and everything else is put at risk.

    (Yes, I have right now a particular something in mind, but I won’t air that laundry here.)

    Sure, you disappoint someone by saying no.  For about a minute.  The disappointment that comes later when you can’t fulfill your promise lasts a bit more than a minute.  It can last a lifetime.

    Now, there are all manner of external reasons why promises get derailed and the person who made those promises ought not be held accountable.  If they take on the responsibility and make an honest attempt at fulfilling it and Other Shit gets in their way and renders their task impossible, that’s not on them.  You might get angry and argue that they should have found a way, but that doesn’t bear on the issue of whether or not they broke a promise.  They showed up, ready to play, and then it rained.  Or  someone else didn’t bring the tools.  Or they got hit by a bus.  Or their best friend did, and that commitment trumps yours.  You can work with that if you know it’s happening.  What I’m talking about is the person who steps up and says “I can do that” and then goes off and doesn’t do it.  Because.

    Because they really didn’t have the time or they really didn’t know how to do it or they simply lacked interest.

    So why did they make the promise to begin with?  Because they didn’t want to look like a bad person.  They hate saying no, they wanted to impress you, or, worse, they didn’t really think it was that important.  Any number of reasons, most of them boiling down to a statement something like  “Oh, you really wanted that done?  Sorry, I didn’t realize you were serious.”

    As a corollary to this, the next most annoying thing is to be told “I’ll get back to you” and then never, ever hear back.  It’s a species of Being Ignored that drives me personally right up a telephone pole.  Just exactly what is so damn difficult about picking up the phone, making a call, and saying “I really can’t/don’t want to/won’t do that?”  It’s polite.  Maybe there’s an aversion to saying No, as above, but this manifests as evasion rather than flat out honesty.

    But plans get ruined by such inconsiderate failures of self-knowledge and integrity.  Sometimes plans involving many other people.  Telling me you can’t, or won’t, is infinitely better than promising me to do something and then not showing up.  I can shrug off the first.  The latter has a flypaper tackiness that takes years to peel off.

    Granted, sometimes it’s hard to know your limits.  It’s hard to know that you really don’t want to do some things until you get into them and see what they are.  But as time and life hand you experience, you should get a clue.  Then it’s just a matter of acting on that knowledge.

    Learn your limits,  Know them.  Then let others know.  It’s polite.  And it saves a tremendous amount of clean-up later.

  • Choice Evening

    Donna and I arrived a few minutes after six.  The evening—the physical manifestation of July 17th—was wonderful.  Mid seventies, straggly cloudlets in darkening blue sky, a pleasant breeze.  Early for the usual nightlife that flows up and down Park Avenue on a Friday night, but there are a few folks choosing restaurants.  There’s a custom glass shop across the street, customers still perusing.

    I’d changed clothes twice, trying to decide what level of chic or cool I wanted to reach.  Had to wear the hat, the Bogard, which Donna had made me buy several years back and which I love.

    Only the owners are in the Gallery as we step through the door.  Greetings, there’s wine.  I pour a glass—plastic cup, really—and step out into the main gallery.  My photographs range across one complete wall, with three spill-overs on another.  Jane, the gallery manager, puts on some music—light jazz.

    And people start to arrive.

    A lot of friends show up, and Donna points out later that a lot of them never saw this much of my photography before, many of them having met us wehn writing had become the dominant pursuit.  Only Tom showed up, who has been there through multiple ambitions—even helped with a lot of it.  But most of these images were new even to him.

    Then strangers arrived.  People are looking.  The place gets crowded.  Questions get asked.

    I’m a bit of a hit, it appears.  No offers for purchases, but that may come later.  For three hours people keep showing up, leaving, a couple of them come back.  All the wine gets drunk but for two glasses, which the owner and I finish.  The last people out besides us is a local photographer who is favorably impressed and we talk knowledgeably about certain difficulties in printing.

    We go home and I’m in a kind of warm bubble.  Even if no one buys anything, it was worthwhile.  Choice evening.

    pebbles.jpg

  • Because It’s Only A Week Away…

    I thought I ought to post the notice about my upcoming photography exhibit here.  Am I excited about this?  Does a dog chase squirrels?

    Marbles Gallery exhibits “Edge on…” photography by *Sally B. Simpson *and* Mark Tiedemann* with a free public opening reception on Friday, July 17 from 6-9 p.m. The exhibit will run from July 3-31. Open hours before yoga classes or by appointment. Marbles Yoga Studio and Art Gallery is located at 1905 Park Avenue in Lafayette Square. For additional information call 314.791.6466 or visit www.marblesyoga.com .
    ###

    grounded-on-an-inland-sea.jpg
    Marbles Gallery exhibits “Edge on…” photography by* Sally B. Simpson *and* Mark Tiedemann *from July 3 – 31.

    *Opening Reception: *

    Friday, July 17 from 6-9 p.m.

    Marbles Yoga Studio and Gallery

    1905 Park Avenue in Lafayette Square

    Meet the artists, enjoy a glass of wine

    Free and open to the public

    *Sally B. Simpson* photographs under natural lighting situations, with very little or no use of camera filters to capture the beauty and simplicity of everyday subjects using a variety of camera types, including /the medium format 120 film toy camera, the Holga. Intrigued by places and subjects that exhibit a haunting sense of abandonment, as well as images that evoke a strong sense of familiarity and simplicity, Simpson chooses to photograph with her Holga often. With its cheap construction, images produced from the Holga often yield photographs with characteristic light leaks, blurs and vignetting, adding depth and individuality to each photograph.

    With a decade of experience, Simpson’s award winning and published photography includes a collection of Route 66 color images that were exhibited at the Route 66 State Park Visitor Center in 2007. Today, Simpson, a St. Louis native, is currently working on her AFA in Photography as well as her Certificate of Proficiency from the St. Louis Community College at Meramec.

    Multitalented writer, musician and photographer, *Mark Tiedemann*, premiers his black and white art photography inspired by the work of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and other members of the f64 Group. During his commercial photography career as a proficient black and white lab technician, he has continuously recorded and printed but never shown his own work.

    In 1990, Mark achieved a childhood of dream of becoming a published author and to date has published ten novels and over fifty short stories. He is a regular contributor of essays to DangerousIntersection.org and a book reviewer for Science Fiction Age, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Sauce Magazine, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Born and raised in St. Louis, Mark Tiedemann recently served for four years as president of the Missouri Center for the Book where he oversaw the establishment of the first Missouri Poet Laureate position.

    Open before yoga classes. Call 314.621.4744 to confirm additional hours or for an appointment www.marblesyoga.com

    Marbles Yoga Studio and Gallery

    Exhibiting St. Louis area artists in historic Lafayette Square

    ###

    Jane

    Jane Ollendorff
    Art Director, Marbles Gallery
    1905 Park Avenue, Lafayette Square
    St. Louis, MO 63105
    314.791.6466
    marblesart.jane@hotmail.com
    www.marblesyoga.com
    exhibiting local artists

  • July Memory

    Back in 2001, Donna and I took a vacation that has become, for us, a high bar, a hall mark, the Gold Standard of vacations.  We flew into Oakland, CA, rented a car, and for next several days wandered up toward Seattle.  We visited many places, saw many amazing things, ate some wonderful food, and ended the automotive part of the trip in Seattle where we stayed with our very good friends, Kelley and Nicola.

    Arriving in Washington state, Donna wanted to take the ferry into Seattle, so we drove into Bremerton.  Just in time to catch the ferry.  I took this shot of the clever, hungry, graceful gulls that followed the boat all the way.  People would throw bread crumbs or whatever up into the air to watch one of these birds pluck the morsel out of the sky.  The trip was magic and remains one of our best memories.

    gulls-2001.jpg

    We’d been to Seattle before and took lots of photographs.  So, interestingly enough, once we arrived at their house, I stopped taking pictures.  The gulls were more or less the last images I shot during that trip.  Not a bad endcap, all in all.

  • Life Sometimes Takes You…

    Mind you, I am not defending Governor Sanford, not really.  But I have to admit to be pleasantly surprised at his current stance, vis a vis his affair.

    “I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate,” he said in an interview.

    So many public figures indulge in affairs, get caught, and then drag the whole thing out in a back yard lot, pour gasoline on it, and set it ablaze in a spasm of self-loathing apologetics.  I suppose the most dramatic was Jimmy Swaggart, weeping openly on television, going through a self-flagellation of Medieval proportions, at least psychologically.

    And he was “forgiven” by his followers.

    It seemed for a time that Sanford’s supporters were getting set to forgive him.  “Okay,” they seemed to say, “you have a fling, it could happen to anybody, but now you’re back, you’ve abased yourself, your wife is going to forgive you, we can go on.”

    But wait.  Now he has come out a gone off-script.  He was in love with  Maria Belen Chapur, and still is.  They met in 2001, at the onset of our eight-year-long Republican convulsion over public morality and national meltdown in global politics.  The Republican Party named for itself the “high ground” of moral probity, condemning liberalism as somehow not only fiscal irresponbsible but the ideology of license and promiscuity.

    Democrats have been caught in extramarital affairs, no question.  But most of them did not sign on to any puritanical anti-sex purgation program.  The Republicans, who stand foursquare in opposition to gay marriage, sex education, pre-marital sex, contraception, divorce, pornography, and just about anything that suggests an embrace of physical pleasure outside the narrow parameters of a biblical prescription for wedded bliss (all without obviously understanding just what biblical standards actually are) seem to be having more than their share of revelatory faux pas in this area.  They are the party now of “Do What I Say Not What I Do”—a parenting stance that has long since lost any credibility.

    Polls and surveys and studies suggest that conservatives generally have a bigger problem with pornography than do liberals.  Likewise, it seems conservative men of power screw around a lot more than do liberals in similar positions.

    I think this is because there is an unspoken assumption among conservatives in power having to do with “perks.”  You can see this extending all the way back in history.  The man with the power gets to play more.  In fact, they might suggest to colleagues in the know that a little “extracurricular action” is necessary to keep things sane.

    John Edwards, for all his faults, is more typical of liberals/democrats.  He screwed up.  But he didn’t go out in public crying his eyes out about how he’d lost his way.  He said he intended to try to patch things up with his wife, sorry if the public is disappointed, and I’m outta here.  Crass as it seems, his wife has been very ill.  Say what you want about marital commitment, the stress cancer puts on a relationship is not something most people understand and if the man indulged inadvisedly in sex outside his marriage, well, that’s between him and his wife.  End of story.  We can condemn, understand, forget, forgive, or deal with it as we will, it is no longer any of our business.

    It’s not like Newt Gingrich, who (planned or not) had his sick wife served with divorce papers in the hospital so he could marry his mistress.

    But Sanford now…he’s gone off-script as I say.  He’s owning up.  He’s not really apologizing for the affair.  He’s sorry it came out, he’s sorry the situation is what it is, but frankly, he isn’t sorry it happened.

    And honestly?  That’s a bit refreshing.

    We indulge a myth in this culture about True Love that’s pretty unsupportable in real life.  It happens.  But it’s almost never—almost—the way we tell ourselves it’s supposed to be.  Falling in love with your high school sweetheart, marrying, and being happy in that relationship till we die…it does happen.  But it is not the norm and it’s not fair to hold it up as the Gold Standard, because you just can’t know where life will sometimes take you.

    Besides, a big part of that myth is that we can only ever fall in love with one other person.  An ancillary part of that is that we can only ever be in love with one person at a time.  It’s not true.  Maybe it would be better if it were.

    But standing up acting like a victim—which is what most of these people like Sanford and Swaggert and the rest do—and throwing themselves on the mercy of the public, a public that can have no real idea what was going on in these people’s lives, is worse in my opinion than the initial indiscretion.  Because when you do that, you throw your lover on a bonfire and make him or her out to be a terrible thing.

    Sanford’s not doing that.  Sanford is basically saying “You know, I don’t like it that my life is about to explode over this, but I met someone and we have a connection, and I’m not sorry about it.”

    What?!?  How can you say that?

    Because—out of everything else he might have said or done—it’s the truth.  And for that, I applaud the man.

    The dirty secret about the Republican mindset regarding this, with a few exceptions, is that they’re not nearly so angry with him for having done it as they are for getting caught.

    And he didn’t actually get caught.  He took a week off to go see someone he loves.  Very publicly.  Maybe the press was sniffing around, maybe not, but if so he stole their thunder.

    Molly Ivans,who was such a breath of fresh air and common sense in a realm where neither is in any great supply, once responded to a question about sexual misconduct and the performance of civic duty more or less this way.  I’m paraphrasing.

    “It would be nice to think there’s a connection between private sexual conduct and the ability to do your duty in public office, but there just isn’t.  Some of the most lecherous men have been great politicians.”

    Should Sanford resign over this?   If it were me, I’d fight it.  I’d look at my detractors and say “How dare you judge me for something a significant number of you would either like to do, have done, or are doing.”  But it seems unlikely he’ll be allowed to be effective now.

    It’s a small thing, perhaps, this one spot of honesty in all this mess, but I think it’s an important one because for once it’s not feeding into the self-deceptive self righteousness that is our national myth about True Love.

    There is True Love.  But it doesn’t always come along at a convenient time and it doesn’t only happen just once.  And—this is the most important thing—it is not reducable to a consumer package to be paraded and auctioned for Air Time and Ratings.

    Just sayin’, you know?

  • Plans…

    The book I’m working on is the second of a trilogy.  Back when I became seriously engrossed in science fiction—the second time, not the first; the first was at age 10 or 11, when everyone is supposed to fall headfirst into this wonderful amalgam of weirdness— in the late 70s, early 80s, there was a running joke in the field that for a bunch of science geeks, SF writers couldn’t count because we didn’t seem to know that there were only three books in a trilogy.  I think it was Piers Anthony who began getting joked about this way.

    I never intended to write series.  I have a problem with most series work, even reading it.  I get bored with the same characters in x number of successive novels.  I have attempted from time to time to write a number of short stories with the same characters, but it has never gotten past two stories.  And when I originally constructed the Secantis Sequence it was with the idea that the books shared a common background but no common characters.

    (It turned out that I did have one character that I intended to carry over, Sean Merrick.  There are in boxes three complete Sean Benjamin Merrick novels which will likely never see the light of day.  In a very minor way, minor, mind you, he is my Lazarus Long character.)

    As time has advanced and I find myself trying to figure out how to write something that will both sell and stay in print, I am coming inexorably to the point of committing serious series.  Much as I like and usually prefer to have novels as stand-alones, especially as I get older, it is equally clear to me that Readers like consistency.  It’s a relationship thing.  You meet someone, you have dinner, take in a show, the conversation is really good, and later…well, readers have grown weary of one-book-stands, apparently, and like to settle down.  At least it’s not a monogamous desire.

    So I have devised works of late that will go to sequels and/or series.

    With the same characters.

    Orleans should it ever be published will introduce everyone to Claire St. Griffe, who is what I have termed a voyant—one who can shift her consciousness into another’s mind.  I have a nifty skiffy rationale for this, it is not fantasy, but it is just barely SF.  This is an alternate history as well and I finished it a few years ago.  It has been seeking a publisher since.

    Having gone recently (as reported here) to a conference concerning a central character to this trilogy, I decided upon the eve of the day job’s end to start working on book two.  Oculus is well under way.  The third volume will be called Orient and the working title for the whole project is The Oxun Trilogy.  Have fun looking that one up and wondering how it will tie in.  If I handle it right, it’ll be cool.

    Now, I have it in mind to establish a premise wherein I could conceivably write more Claire St. Griffe novels if the need arises—like a publisher waving vast sums of money under my nose—at which point the newer books will comprise a different series.  Same character, different background.

    Meantime, there is the historical I finished last year, The Spanish Bride.  Now I fully intend that this be a real honest-to-god series, with several novels, and I have the hubris to believe I could pull this off.  Main character is a man named Ulysses Granger who is a (secret) officer in the Continental Army.  After the Revolution is concluded, he moves to St. Louis to find out who murdered his best friend there three years earlier.

    This book is also finished and looking for a publisher.  Should it sell, I have the outlines for the next two.  I could do ten novels in this series, there is certainly enough historical material at hand to do twenty.

    I have just put a proposal together for another trilogy.  I don’t want to talk about that just now, though, so forgive me.

    The Secantis Sequence?  Sure, I have outlines for two more.  I always did intend doing a direct sequel to Peace & Memory, a diptych so to speak.

    What would all this do to the stand-alones I have in my files waiting to be written?

    Don’t know.  It’s a problem I’d like to have just now, being committed to two trilogies and a possible long term series.  I have brief synopses for at least three stand-alone novels.

    Right now, I have to admit, I could happily jettison any one or four of these plans for the one or two that get picked up and work.

    As I said, I’m well into Oculus and having a ball with it.  I’m writing this just now as sort of a record of my state of mind.  Right now, career-wise, I am not where I want to be, but I’m doing the part I like to do.  I have a library full of books to read and the one I’m writing is about to require that I read at least two of them I haven’t yet touched for background.  Paris in the 1920s.  Hmmm, he hmms as he rubs his hands together.  Crazy stuff.  It is, you know, they were crazy people back then.

    So I’m blathering.  It’s my blog, I get to blather.

    Tomorrow I finish chapter seven.  Then, the world!  Bwahahaha!

    (Clears throat to indicate abrupt self-consciousness.)

    Anyway, have a good one, whatever it is.  More later.