Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • Little Lost Book

    We returned home one year from a worldcon (world science fiction convention, for those who may not know the nomenclature)—I forget which year—and promptly I lost a book. Or a box of books. You see, we’d early on gotten into the habit of mailing our purchases home rather than try to take boxes of books on the plane. (The first worldcon we went to in 1984 resulted in about three hefty boxes going back, all of which cost around a hundred and fifty dollars. Today that much would fit in one (small) box.) This system worked pretty well until this time. I think it must have been Chicago in 2000.

    We—I—misplaced a box. So I thought. We were rearranging the house once again, moving things from one place another, and along the way I thought this one box of books had disappeared. Oh, it was in the house, certainly, buried inadvertently, and one year it would reappear. But it never did, not even through subsequent house cleanings.

    Over time the contents of this box took on mythic status. I only recalled one title that was in it, Dan Simmons’ Crook Factory, but I knew there must be others in there from maybe George R.R. Martin or Greg Bear or Emma Bull or a collectible hardcover by some SF luminary. It was a small box that acquired supreme status.

    Well, this morning I found it. Or, rather, I found the one title I specifically remembered, the Dan Simmons. Not in a box with other books from a worldcon, but in a plastic file box filled with old Scientific Americans. One book.

    As soon as I saw it I realized that the rest of the box did not exist. I’d put this book in with these magazines to get it out of the way while I did…something. It then ended up at the bottom of one of the closets in my office, and would have remained there had I not got it in my head a few weeks ago to completely purge this space.

    The bubble burst, all those other volumes—which, tellingly, I could not recall—have vanished in memory. They never existed.

    Now, I have lost stories of my own before, put somewhere to wait until I got back to them…those are not mythical, and some of them were masterpieces which may never see the light of day again.

  • Pack Ratting

    Apropos of nothing, I have just finished putting (in order) all my LOCUS Magazines.  I have nearly a complete run from 1982 to the present.  They all but this current year fit in three 38 qt. Rubbermaid storage containers.  Did I say I put them in order?

    I’m keeping my LOCUS collection.  I also have two other magazine collections I’m thinking of keeping (though I have no idea why, really).  I have a nearly complete run of OMNIs from Issue One to about 1989, when the magazine got really too stupid.  I also have a set of a magazine called GEO, which originally belonged to Earline, the woman who trained my as a photofinisher.  They’re handsome editions, like a real high-end National Geographic.

    Anyway, pack ratting is a disease which so many of us share that it is not considered a disease.  I’m trying to get over it.  It may sound morbid, but at 53 I’m beginning to ask myself just how much of this crap I’m ever going to actually use before I die.

  • Equality and History

    This will be brief.  Going along with my last couple of quotes concerning the election and all that it implies this year, I thought I’d post one of my very favorite quotes.  This comes from a wonderful book about the Heroic Myths of the Greeks, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso.  I recommend this to anyone struggling with mythology and origin motifs and the history of so many things Hellenic we take for granted.  Anyway, this quote is one of those “obvious” things we usually forget about when dealing at a fever pitch with, you know, equality.

    Equality only comes into being through initiation.  It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn’t be able to conceive of the idea if it weren’t structured and articulated by initiation.  Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it—and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite.

  • Old Stuff

    Still cleaning things out, emptying closets.  Unearthing a lot of Old Stuff int he process.  I’ve never been good at keeping journals or diaries, but I’ve tried from time to time.  Occasionally, when I go through one of these housecleaning fits, I find them, sad fragments, disconnected sometimes by years, even decades, a few weeks, maybe a couple of months consecutively recorded, and now…

    I’m finding things from before Clarion, before 1988, when I was still trying on my own to break into writing—into publishing, I should say.  Spiral notebooks filled with cryptic notes, phone numbers, names now forgotten, and story fragments, as well as the personal expression of profound frustration.  It can be enlightening, amusing, embarrassing.  I kept a lot of stuff—old manuscripts, first, second, and nth drafts, thinking that when I became Famous some university would take all my Personal Papers.  You read about that from time to time—“The English Department of the University of Falsetto has acquired the Papers of the late Milton Toastmaster, world-renowned novelty and short story splicer…”

    But I’m sipping coffee now and leafing through a couple of long forgotten notebooks and chuckling wryly (yes, he says, one does hear the wryness) at the ambition and cluelessness.  It’s the story ideas that I thought I’d never forget, the paragraph or two jotted down acting as place markers in memory for when I could flesh out the piece.

    For instance:

    I, Demon

    In The Way of All Things it is said that each god has a demon who pursues him.  The god fights and while he fights he tries to do such things as gods must do.  The demon wins—always.  But as he kills the god, the demon in his turn becomes a god.  And so it goes.

    And immediately following this, a snippet of dialogue:

    “Insurance companies will own us all one day.”

    “Not me.”

    Ideas never pursued for whatever reason—probably because I just didn’t have the Stuff to follow through.  For another instance:

    Shop of Midnight Dreams

    There was a time you could walk into our shop and get anything.  No, not like an antique shop—that’s all second, third, and fourth hand, mostly garbage.  No, we provided all new.  If you needed a wool sweater like Spencer Tracy wore in Captains Courageous, well, we made you one.  It’d fit, too, guaranteed.  A captain’s wheel table with a glass top?  That, too, and fingerprints would never show on the glass.  I remember once Stella whipped together a spinning wheel that spun gold—that was a special one, you don’t get to do that often.  The wheel won’t work for anyone but the person it was made for and we trusted her not to abuse it.  My own favorite was a lost meaning.  A couple on rough times had lost the core of what they were together; it was all wrapped up in a memory.  I found it and gave it back to them.  That was one of the hardest but one of the most gratifying.  We could do anything once.

    It’s all different now.  You see, Mr. Waymaker retired.  Sold the business.  I guess I can’t blame him who’d want to stay around if—

    I know where that one came from, but I have no idea where I thought I’d go with it.

    Another binder yielded a concerted effort at journaling from 1985.  The January 21st entry reads:

    I’ll be perfectly honest—just this once: I haven’t got the faintest idea why I want to be a writer.  But, then, this is only this morning.  I have an incredible cold (the same one I’ve had now all winter, I do believe; I can’t get rid of the damn thing!) and I wrote two pages of purest garbage in my novel before trying to jump start the car.  The car started.  Success!  The novel is moving of its own power to an inexorable conclusion of blood and violence through an inexorable trail of very dull and badly wrought prose.  It’s strange: I’m watching myself screw it up and can honestly see no way to stop it.

    That year it probably would have been Compass Reach.  Seems some things only become more sophisticated, but not much different.

    I kept a lot of lists in these things—stories finished, stories submitted, stories yet to be born.  There are titles listed I have absolutely no recollection of.  I sometimes, I remember, jotted down titles in an imagined short story collection and then tried to imagine the contents of the book as thought it were finished.  Thought I might trick my hindbrain into giving me the story to go with the cool titles.

    I find a lot of notes about Donna.

    Other people, less so, but one of these “journals” contains the piece I wrote the day Earline Knackstedt died.  Earline was one half of the Gene and Earline team that owned Shaw Camera Shop, at which I worked for 20 years.  While she was alive and they owned it, I think I loved that job.  Earline fought cancer for a long, long time, and finally succumbed in April of ’85.  It was devastating.  Not so much the initial news, but the slow, gradual realization of what her absence meant.  It changed my life.  Instead of buying Shaw Camera, I became more dedicated to becoming a writer, and I knew that owning a business would end that dream.  Three years later I applied to and was accepted at Clarion and went from there.

    It’s the last couple days of July now.  Supposedly, at least two editors I know of have promised to finish reading Orleans and make some kind of decision.  I expect to be rejected.  It’s not even a considered thought, just what it.  Give me another year or two, and it really will be as if I’m starting all over.

    I have “started over” dozens of times be the evidence of this Old Stuff.  I ought to be good at it by now.

    If the rain has stopped I must go walk the dog.  To be continued…

  • Joy, Chagrine, and a Pretty Good Life

    I’m deeply into major clean-up mode.  It’s long past time.  Procrastination is the root of all dross and accumulation.  We buy bigger dwellings because, as George Carlin pointed out, we need someplace to put our Stuff.

    I am of mixed feelings about this, though.  I’ve been emptying the two big closets in the basement.  A great deal of this has been little more than taking things out of one box, which was only half or less full, and putting them in another box with similar things that also was not full.  Almost as much, there’s been a lot of throwing out.  (I found a shitload of catalogues from Meisha Merlin that have summarily gone into recycle.  Past is past.)

    It’s sweaty and sometimes poignant work.  Yesterday I found a box of Donna’s Stuff from before she met me.  We need to go through it together, but I looked through a couple of things, and promptly sent her an email telling her how grateful I am that she gave all this to me—her life, that is.

    People are packages of memories and experiences.  Uncharitably (although often correctly) a lot of this is called “Baggage.”  Try as we might to close some doors, all that Stuff is still there, and contributes to the whole.  We wouldn’t be who we are now without it.

    I know, that Freshman level Psych 101.  But that doesn’t make it less true.  Acknowledging that truth is important, because we need to remember—at least as a concept if not in detail—that the people we love had lives before we met them and that even if things became wonderful after said meeting, that doesn’t reduce what went before to anything somehow less.

    I didn’t need to know the details of Donna’s life before me.  She told me anyway.  That was a gift.  I reciprocated.  We’re complicated people.  It took years for understanding to develop into meaningful mutual appreciation and support.  It’s a work in progress.  At several points along the way, things threatened to go terribly wrong, and we almost parted company.  Lessons in how we should never take someone for granted, even though that is occasionally a kind of goal, the emblem of a smooth fit, the ideal of a seamless relationship.  We live with the legacy of bad fiction—love is never having to say you’re sorry.  That is not true.  We stumble over sensitivities and make mistakes all the time.  We hurt each other.  Do we mean it?  Of course not, but we’re human.  Some days are better than others.  More negligence than anything malicious, but nevertheless people who love each other need to apologize just as much (or more) than those who don’t.  But you shouldn’t have to apologize for what went before, for who you are or who you were.  Past is prologue.  Maybe.

    Not just the pleasure of re-recognition, cleaning house is fraught with the possibilities of embarrassment.  You find things you’ve forgotten about and, now revealed, you try to imagine what you may have been thinking when you did that!  Old ambitions emerge from the murky depths of the back of the closet and in the light of a new day stare back at you and declare “Yeah, you were this crummy.”

    I found several boxes of old photographs, images I thought, at the time, were just fine.  Just absolutely brilliant and should I ever get around to going public with them, they would blow the zeitgeist.

    Well.  We have all gotten better over time.  Oh, some of them were pretty good, but I was not the whiz I thought I was. Makes me wonder what else I thought I was pretty good at.

    Too much yet to do.  A lot of old paper.  That’s what we seem to collect the most of, paper.  Notes, old stories, magazines, cards, letters, scrawled missives that meant something at one time.  Memory doesn’t retain all, which was one reason we wrote some of this Stuff down.  But the key is missing and interpretation is difficult at best.

    What was I thinking?

    But I also found a lot of photographs of us, smiling, laughing, doing…something….who knows?  But the warmth returned immediately.

    I complain a lot, I know.  Things aren’t the way I want them to be.  But the truth is, I’ve had a Pretty Good Life.  I have great friends and a skull-full of great memories.

    And all this Stuff to remind me.

    We’ve been in this house since 1993.  We still haven’t actually finished decorating.  A great deal is still on stand-by.  I’m making a start at finishing some things.  Procrastination is the root of….

    But the past requires sometimes that we sit down and look at it.  Smile, laugh, maybe cry a little, and wonder occasionally Who Are These People?  In keeping with a major nostalgia kick, I pulled out a record and put it on the turntable—a record I have not listened to since before I met Donna.  The Babys, Head First.  The tone arm just lifted off the vinyl.

    Not at all sure I’ll listen to it again any time soon.  As with much that is past, it stirs mixed feelings.  (Yes, I remember why I bought it—one of the few records I bought for reasons other than that I liked the songs.  But I’m glad I kept it.)

    It’s been a pretty good ride so far.  Can’t wait for the next turn.

    Back to cleaning now.

  • Merit and Fear

    We like to believe, as Americans, that this country is a meritocracy. The idea—Horatio Alger, Thomas Edison, McGuyver, all emblematic of this notion—that the best qualified rise to the top, that those who can display and apply ability, skill, and intelligence are the ones who are selected—either by themselves or through the recognition of society—to do important jobs and that this, as opposed to elitist canards like family or school affiliation or looks or race, counts for more in this society. We like to believe that we judge people by their competence, not other things. It’s a driving national myth.

    We like to tell ourselves that such people are Heroes.

    Like most myths, there’s an element of truth to it. It is certainly the case that the opposite of such ability gets derided once exposed and the people who are less capable lose whatever consideration they’ve received. Eventually. Under the right circumstances.

    But we all know that as a guiding ethic, merit is like anything else, and does not hold universal sway over our sentiment.

    Perversely, many people display what can only be described as fear of people who are genuinely competent and talented, depending on the circumstances. All one need do is look at the condition of regard in which science is held by many people and the way professionals are often mistrusted and we’ve all seen instances where the person at the party who actually knows a thing or three—and dares express that knowledge—often as not ends up not invited back.

    It’s a complex and contradictory attitude Americans have toward ability. We admire and respect it—until it contradicts a long-held belief or runs afoul a prejudice or makes us feel, in ourselves, a bit stupid.

    It is probably more cloyingly and illogically represented in our general attitudes toward race.

    Let me put it as bluntly as possible—in American history, how often has genuine merit been rewarded if the potential recipient is not white? Or male?

    This is largely rhetorical. Most people very well know the answer—seldom, and often when such a person does stand out, attempts are made to diminish his or her achievements. We have been persistently whittling away at this problem for a long time now and we may be forgiven if from time to time we seem to feel it has been solved. It takes a shock to remind us how far we have yet to go.

    In fact, part of the aftershock ought to be a recognition that this is a problem somehow wired into human nature, and that if we solve it for one group, it will simply move to another.

    What kind of shock am I talking about?

    Let me point you to this from John Scalzi’s Whatever. Go read it, then come on back here.

    A couple of things I note—one, the reporter in question is herself clearly a minority. So one wonders why she would be duped into reporting this in this way without being outraged. The other is, the unattributed assertions made in the report.

    But the main problem goes back to the merit argument.

    These two people—Barack and Michelle Obama—are representative of our mythical Competent People ideal. They’ve Done It. They are deserving of our respect for their achievements and therefore deserve to be considered on their abilities.

    However.

    They seem to be of the wrong group. Hmm. How did that happen?

    Wrong group? Do we still think that way?

    Well, you know, maybe not, but we have this other national ideal that tends to undermine the first one, and that is Winning Is Everything. We talk about fair play and sportsmanship and all that, but we don’t believe in it, not when the possibility of losing is in the mix, and this is a presidential race. In politics, all the stops get pulled out, and if one of the weapons is to be race, well, then, perhaps the engineers of such tactics are not themselves blatant racists, but they have no qualms about using discredited tactics in the all-important attempt to win, merit aside.

    Because you really don’t see people very often graciously stand aside for the better qualified. It would be nice if you did, it would say so much to the next generation about what is important. But we’ve debased that coin for 200 + years.

    Equally important, though, is the question of why those who put this out there would believe it would have any impact.

    Because it will. Because a lot of Americans, though they might never say it, still fear the ramifications of such a possibility.

    Which is why I will believe no poll this year. I believe people will be ashamed to admit their prejudices and tell pollsters that they will support Obama, but once they’re inside the voting booth will stop and ask themselves if they’re really ready to see a black man as president.

    Unfortunately, this is America. We may surprise ourselves. Or we may see the upcoming election one in which the next president is the one who simply lost least.

    Joanna Russ, a teacher and science fiction writer and savvy thinker, published a book in 1983 called How To Suppress Women’s Writing. It is a lucid textbook on cultural oppression. The subjects are women and writing, but the methods and tendencies she lays out apply to virtually any sub-group and occupation. It is worth finding and reading. It delineates the subtle—and not-so-subtle—ways in which we as a culture steal merit from those we don’t wish to see possess it. In the prologue, she writes:

    In a nominally egalitarian society, the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the “wrong” groups have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can’t. But, alas, give them the least reall freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then—since some of the so-and-so’s will do it anyway—develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done, these strategies result in a social situation in which the “wrong” people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or whatever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so we can all go home to lunch.

    Some will do it well, and then you see the tactics of disenfranchisement take a few steps up the scale of panic and ugliness. Never mind that Hank Aaron actually broke Babe Ruth’s record, he’s black, and shouldn’t have been able to, but since he was about to anyway he had to be prevented. Death threats ensued. Washington Carver was a brilliant chemist, certainly, but look what he did! All his research was based on, well, peanuts. What can one expect from a black man? (It wasn’t, but even so, the denigration ignores the achievement.) Frank Yerby was a brilliant novelist, but he was fluke, the exception that proved the rule that blacks couldn’t write anything other than about themselves. He moved to Spain finally to get away from the racist belittlement of his work.

    The list goes on and on. Add now this absurd, obscene attempt to paint Michelle Obama as exactly the same as every white bigot’s worst fear of a welfare queen sitting in the White House.

    Merit is ignored. Ignored long enough and thoroughly enough, and it cannot shine through.

    At least, so such purveyors of intolerance wish.

    It might not work this time. If it doesn’t, it would be nice to think that, for a change, merit counts for more. But it may also be that further attempts like this will trigger another American ideal, that being our almost reflexive sympathy with so-called underdogs. If that puts Obama in the White House, well, goody for us. But it would also be success that ignores merit. It will be a serendipitous achievement based on our national dislike of bullies.

    What then will be learned from it all?

    If we were, as we would like to believe, concerned with ability and competence above all, then it is inconceivable that George W. Bush could have been elected, even in the first place. Both his opponents are by any measure his superiors in ability.

    The truth is, we value comfort more and Bush, in his own way, is comforting to many people. He’s not our better. He’s “just like us” in presentation and, sadly, ability. He doesn’t make us feel inferior (by now, probably, quite the opposite) and he doesn’t challenge us to rise above mediocrity. With Bush you could share a beer and talk about baseball. With Obama? In truth, you probably could, but more likely if the subject moved on to something real—like taxes or foreign policy—most of us likely couldn’t keep up. He understands these things in a way that most of us don’t.

    Not because we can’t. Because we have neither the time or patience to really understand them.

    How can I say that?

    Well, the evidence. If we did understand such things, we wouldn’t have had to put up with Bush for eight years.

    And we wouldn’t be afraid of Obama.

  • Coffey (revisited)

    Another repost. It’s a few days early for Coffey’s anniversary—June 18, 2005—but I’ve got a busy week next week, so I’m putting this up now. I will say, that after a rocky start, Coffey settled into a fine companion. She still has too much energy, but she’s a sweet animal and so good-natured as to be a model of canine affection. Anyway, on to the main thing…

     

    It’s time. It’s been more than a year, hell, it’s been almost two
    years, since our friend Kory passed away. The memorial
    piece for her has been up…well, too long. I’ve been busy.It’s been
    a hell of a time since Kory died.There’s no way to assess such a loss. You go on. It doesn’t feel good,
    you can only deal with it. One of the ways I dealt with it—or tried
    to—was through writing, but to be honest this past year or so has
    been pretty rotten on that score. I’ve got a mountain of material that
    needs polishing, finishing, mailing. I finished a first draft of an
    alternate history, which needs rewriting, and I have a finished draft
    of a new Secantis novel, which also needs attention. I have no new
    contracts, I have nothing in any shape to actually submit, and all I
    can say as excuse is that things have been not so good.

    That only works for a while. Me, I get bored with too much self-pity
    and frustration. I start doing other things. I became president of the
    Missouri Center for the Book this year, a decision I’m still trying to
    decide was worth while. It has, I’ll admit, been an education. I
    started writing articles for local papers—not much, it’s terra
    incognita     for me—but it was something.

    We paid off the house. That took a hell of a load off.

    And we got a new dog.

    That’s right. I would like to introduce you all to Coffey.

    Before you conclude that “Coffey” is close to “Kory”, well, you’re
    right, it is, but we didn’t pick the name. Or rather, I should say, we
    stumbled on it and she responded so whole-heartedly to it that we
    thought she must have been named something close to it.

    But Coffey is appropriately named. That’s her color—coffee bean—with
    some frothy cream-white mixed in here and there. We rescued her from
    the Humane Society. As we went through the pens, she was the only one
    who didn’t seem neurotic. She had a real “Yeah? Whadda you want?”
    attitude, but she was very playful. After an hour of negotiation with
    Donna—we hadn’t intended bringing one home on the first damn
    visit—we picked her up.

    I’ll be frank—I thought it was a mistake that first week. She’s 32
    lbs, very strong, and aggressively playful. She had some trouble
    differentiating between her tongue and her teeth. Mouthy, as Donna
    said. Now, Donna had been volunteering at the Humane Society for a
    long time. Consequently, she was more experienced than I with a wide
    range of dogs. She wasn’t put off. And it seemed that we had gotten
    lucky in some respects. Coffey was thoroughly house broken. She did
    understand certain commands. But others…well, we’re still working on
    “Stay!” and we’ve had her now for six months.

    The label at the Humane Society claimed she was a “pointer mix”. Yeah.
    Mixed with, I thought, boxer, but then I saw the pit bull in her. I
    thought “Shit” and promptly started doing some research on pit bulls.
    Turns out, I had bought into the myths like most people. Pit bulls
    generally turn bad because there are so many owners who think they’ve
    just bought the ultimate macho animal and proceed to train them that
    way. Pit bulls are actually what could be termed “people crazy”. Love
    people.

    Coffey’s day is made if she gets to meet a new people. She’s goofy and
    playful and, as it has evolved, very affectionate. And about the right
    size.

    Despite her inordinate strength. Oh, yes, she’s a handful, all right.
    And I almost took her back. But we’ve stopped the mouthiness, we’ve
    begun teaching her to walk properly, and she’s settling in nicely.
    She’s younger than claimed, too, so we got more puppy than we wanted,
    but it’s too late. We’ve got a relationship.

    She doesn’t like my crazy work schedule (neither did Kory) and now
    Donna has a new job and her hours are long and crazy, but Coffey is
    adapting. I think this will be fine.

    And the other day she brought one of her toys into my office and laid
    under my desk while I worked. This can be a really good thing.

    Oh, yeah, and I am working again. Imagine that. Maybe it’s connected.

    Anyway, I wanted to introduce you all to the new Resident Alien Life
    Form—Coffey.

    Since writing that, I’ve finished another novel, the historical mystery, but I still haven’t sold anything. I’m also into my fourth year now as president of the MCB, which, after long struggle, has turned a corner and will be Something. Also, I’m less sure about the pit bull I saw in Coffey. The older she gets, the more pointer she looks. She’s a beautiful dog, though, regardless.

    Anyway, next post will be something new. Thanks for your time.

  • Anniversaries

    This is another repost from a long-ago Distal Muse. But I’m adding a bit to it. Yesterday was Donna’s birthday.

    Anyone who knows me, knows that Donna is the love of my life. There really is no other way to describe it. Ours was a slowly-built relationship, a curious and unlikely collaboration that resulted in…well, we’ve been together for 28 years. I think that should say enough. She has supported my efforts, enjoyed the results, and more often has been the sole source of smiles in an otherwise grim time. She’s my best friend, among other things.

    One of the things she wanted was a dog. We’d been living in apartments, of course, and both of us worked full time—me more than full time, with the writing taking up a good deal of “spare” time—and I was reluctant to bring an animal that needed care and attention into that. But when we decided to buy a house, that was on the list of things I promised we’d get.

    It was not the easiest thing in the world. Neither of us was really prepared for all that it entailed and we made mistakes and lost sleep and—

    See, we both of us take responsibility seriously. We neither of us are the kind of people who would buy a dog, put in the yard, and pay attention to it only when it needed food, like many people seem to do. However it would play out, the fact was that the dog would part of the family.

    What follows is the post I wrote four years ago to commemorate the passing of our first dog, Kory. So, without further preamble…

    May 4th, 2004. At 5:20 PM we let go of a good friend. It was time. Kory was an eleven year old shepherd-beagle mix, who normally weighed in at 55 lbs.
    Donna always joked that she was shepherd, beagle, cat, and kangaroo. When younger, her jumping ability was astonishing. From a standstill she could reach our shoulder height
    easily.

    This section is about important encounters in my life as a writer. I have to include Kory because of how richly she enhanced our lives. We rescued her from the Humane Society. We think she was the runt of a litter–certain habits she got over only slowly (and some not at all) suggested abuse at an early age. If so, someone had been uncommonly
    cruel, because she was less than three months old when we adopted her.

    She picked us. Anyone who has ever gone through this process knows what I mean. There was simply no denying that she was going home with us. After a rocky start and a lot of sleep deprivation, Kory settled in to become a fabulous companion. Gentle, attentive, and a comprehension of English that astonished us to the last hour of her
    life.

    The best time for me personally was 1995 to 97. I had a chance to take those two years off from a regular day-job and try to be a writer. Kory kept me company all day. I write in the morning. She would come down after Donna left for work and lie under my desk until
    lunch time. Then we’d go for a walk, eat, take a nap, clean house. She supervised.

    She was sad when I had to return to the day-job grind. But she adapted. We trained her to walk off the leash. She waited at every intersection till we gave the word to cross the street. She was friendly to strangers, disinterested in other dogs, and always on the
    lookout for squirrels and rabbits to chase. She never caught one, and I’m not sure she was really interested in catching them–she just liked to chase them.

    Last year she stopped eating and starting losing weight. After a couple of visits to vets, we learned that she had a thyroid tumor. It had metastisized already, so there was no point in operative. We thought we had a few months at most. But we figured out how to get her to eat again, and she lasted till the date above. A whole extra year. But in the last month, she took a turn for the worse. No energy, greater weight loss. She was not having a good time.

    We were with her till she was gone.

    Kory liked the idea of me being a full time writer. She encouraged it. She made us laugh. She took care of us. She was family. She’s part of our history, the substance of what makes us who we are. She will be missed. She will always be with us.

    Yes, we eventually got a second dog. I’ll put up the post about her later. But I wanted to put this one back up and to say that we now think back on Kory with only a touch of sadness. The stories make us laugh. She was a fine member of the family.

    Despite the timing of her death, on Donna’s birthday, we had a good day yesterday and will continue to have good anniversaries. Things end. Even memory fades. But the way things impact you linger. Kory left us better people. And that’s a hell of a nice birthday gift.

  • Sex, Gor, and The Good Stuff

    The subject of John Norman’s Gor  came up recently in a letter from a long-lost cousin.  He wrote me about SF and different tastes and he mentioned this peculiar series and I thought, Damn, I haven’t thought about that since 1997.

    I can name the year and even the week fairly precisely because I was in San Antonio Texas for the worldcon that year and ended up sharing an autographing session with John Norman.  I’d arrived at the table first, saw the name tags, and thought It couldn’t be…

    But it was.

    For those who may not know of Gor, this was a series of novels published through the Seventies which I can only describe as a combination of Conan and The Arabian Nights as if written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in collaboration with the Marquis de Sade.  Chains, leather, large bosoms, and a lot of improbable adventuring figure in them, although I was told by a friend that some of the Jungian psychology and mirror-world construction throughout the series was quite sophisticated.  I wouldn’t know.  I tried to read perhaps three of them—never finished any one of them.  I hasten to add, it wasn’t the bondage that turned me off—hell, I was 14 when I picked the first one up and any kind of gratuitous sex was appealing at the time—but it was the illogic of the plots and the sword-and-sorcery setting, even though it was written as if it were science fiction.  By my third or fourth attempt, the sex was beginning to bother me, but let me not pretend to a sophistry I did not possess at the time.  I didn’t know what bothered me about it, not till much later, only that it did.

    The sex in these books shares something with a certain strain of Romance.  Women are forced to have the sex they apparently “really want” through the mechanism of a slave culture.  They’re tied up, they have no choice, and then discover that they like it.  What this shares with certain romances is the underlying liberation from personal responsibility.  No doubt this is true for certain people—I’ve been with a few—who really want to get down and dirty, but they don’t want to accept the responsibility of it being their idea. The conceit of “being taken” appeals because it frees them from blame.

    As if blame ought ever to be part of sex…

    For the males in these books, there is a similar loss of responsibility, since if things don’t work out they can sell the females—or get rid of them in some less pleasant fashion (they are property, after all).

    I use the terms “males” and “females” quite intentionally.  These are not men and women—they don’t have the stuff to merit such descriptors.

    All in all, these are wish-fulfillment fantasies of the first order, and after having spent an awkward half-hour with Mr. Norman I think I can say that with some degree of certainty.  Whether the wish-fulfillment is a device deployed in the novels to appeal to a target audience or an element of his own personality would be difficult to say, but I’m not sure such a distinction matters.

    Norman fell out of favor and of course he was soundly attacked by feminists, and he made the mistake of defending the sexual ethics of his series.  I remember that it was an embarrassing screed.  It underscored the old rule of comedy—never explain the jokes.

    The Gor novels are available, I discovered, from e-reads.com.

    There are 26 of them now.

    I remember that they had originally come out from, I think, Ballantine.  Then DAW picked them up.  The series was dropped due to flagging sales.  People had grown weary of them, which happens to many series, for many reasons.  Norman had decided that he was the victim of political correctness.  That is such a convenient excuse!  In this case, though, the numbers backed up DAW.

    The thing that bothered me about the sex in these books I later came face to face with in my own life in a very unpleasant way.  I believe sex must be mutual.  Absolutely.  Power games have no place in it.  Both parties—or all three, four, five, or whatever the arrangement may be—must be there of their own accord, willingly, and with the clear knowledge of what they are there for.  Seduction for me is only valid if it is part of an already understood dance—in other words, seduction is foreplay.  The idea that it is to convince a somewhat unwilling party to do something they aren’t sure they want to do I find somewhat distasteful.

    Long ago I was involved with a woman with whom I was, to use the cliche, Madly In Love.  I mean, I had it for her as deeply as it is possible to have it for someone.

    But.

    Turned out that we were fundamentally incompatible.  It happens.  It’s sad and occasionally tragic.  But one of the things that ultimately turned me off was her seeming desire to be dominated sexually.  She wanted me to “take her.”  I didn’t figure this out for a long while, not till other problems manifested, and then she threw it in my face as an insult, that I was somehow deficient.

    It took some time before I understood that this was a pathology.  By “taking her” the burden of the relationship would have all been on me.  If it went bad, well, it would have been my fault, not hers.  My insisting that she be an equal participant ran afoul of that.

    Twisty?  You bet.  How much simpler, one could think, to be in Mr. Norman’s universe where that was a given—woman are to be taken, and it still ain’t your fault.

    I would like to assume the mantle of mature self-awareness here and say that I saw this as morally suspect and ethically bankrupt.  But the truth is, it was a major turn-off.  I can’t abide the idea of sleeping with someone who may want to be somewhere else.  Yielding shouldn’t be a valid concept in sexual relations.  How good can anyone feel about him or herself when they person they are having sex with probably doesn’t actually want them?  That the only reason they’re there in the first place is for reasons having nothing to do with mutual desire?

    On the other hand, it’s not too hard to see why such pathologies emerge.  Sex is potent stuff.  It’s dangerous.  The pleasure derived is in direct relation to the risk involved.  Putting up boundaries, hiding behind games, negotiating terms all make sense when one is not sure about what one wants.  Sex is as good as the risk taken, though, so for it to be worthwhile at all, one must be vulnerable, and that is not easy to do.

    The problem with fantasies like Gor is the pretense of no-risk sex.  The women are tied up, they’re not allowed to complain, the men get to walk away after a good spend, and there are no down-sides.  What was Erica Jong’s term?  The zipless fuck.

    I’m not condemning here what used to be called casual sex.  Strangers meeting, screwing, parting, never to meet again…in and of itself, I can’t see a problem with it as long as everyone involved knows what they’re there for and why.  It’s just another variation of mutuality.  And no less risky than the committed sex of long-term lovers.

    What I’m condemning, I think—if I’m condemning anything—is the attempt to “clean up” sex.  Clean up in the same sense as attempts to create a “clean” atomic bomb.  So there is just the initial explosion and no fall out.  Remove the risk, make it a computer game, render the consequences null.  Make it “safe.”  And remove responsibility from it.

    As if that would somehow make it better…?

  • Back

    We came back from New Mexico last Thursday. The plane was slightly late getting off the ground, but we were only fifteen minutes’ behind upon landing. It was one of the more pleasant plane trips I’ve had—as uneventful as one could hope for. My sprained ankle is almost healed, but it wasn’t when we flew out, and the cramped space between seat rows meant I had to keep my feet rigid for almost two hours, which played havoc with my ankle. On the return flight I managed to get a seat in the emergency exit row, which is more spacious, so I could stretch my legs. Helped a lot. I still can’t walk normally down steps, but I’m not hobbling anymore. I even went to the gym yesterday.

    The week before leaving for vacation, we had a foot of snow on the ground. Walking the dog, I slipped. This time, it caused damage—a seriously twisted left ankle. Damn thing swelled up to twice its normal size, I couldn’t bend it, I really did think (briefly) I’d broken it. But it’s healing fast. The bad luck really annoyed me. I joked that I would be pretty much healed by the time our vacation was over. Actually, I was doing fine during the trip.

    We stayed in a casita (little house) on the south end of Madrid, NM. Madrid is a strip of town along highway 14, just south of Santa Fe, speed limit 20 mph all the way through. The speed limit is not a tourist trap. Many dogs wander loose around the town, as do the locals. They’re good dogs, every one of them friendly and used to a lot of strangers, but the road curves and it would be easy to hit one. Or three. It would be easy to hit one of the locals, too, colorful as they are. Madrid has a cinematic claim to fame—it is featured in the recent film Wild Hogs, with John Travolta, Tim Allen, etc., and the town has embraced it in the form of t-shirts and coffee mugs and fading posters. I’ve never seen the film. From what I gather, the inhabitants are ambivalent, except for the increase in tourism it brought, and Madrid is one of those places that needs tourists. The main strip is almost entirely galleries and craft shops. There is some fine art to be found here, stuff I would actually spend coin on.

    It’s surrounded by New Mexico hinterland—ranches, mainly, flat land that gives way to hilly land that is confined by low mountains. Beautiful. Our friend Terry lives on a place called the Horse Shelter, which has a web site. I’ve known Terry for more than 30 years and have watched her drift from one profession to another, each one done with a care and professionalism I admire, none of which held her for a variety of reasons, until now, far from where she began, she has decided to work with horses for the rest of her life. She seems to do it well—the animals like her.

    This is our second trip to New Mexico. I remarked the last time that I thought I understood why so many science fiction writers seemed to live there—the place looks like Mars in places. But this time, we drove southeast, to Roswell, through Lincoln County, which is wholly not Mars-like. Then we headed north toward Taos and, in a completely different way, it also is not Martian.

    We didn’t get to Taos. Heading up 285, well north of Albuquerque, we encounter department of transportation trucks blocking the highway. Six feet of snow above us. We had to turn back. We never made it to Taos, but the drive was still wonderful.

    I am still, despite my antipathy, a photographer. If I get a few good images from a trip, I feel it was a success. Because of my ankle, hiking in the wilderness was pretty much out of the question, but I still shot a lot of film, and there are places in New Mexico that ridiculously photogenic. I may post a few new pieces in the Art section, where you can see other shots from our first New Mexico trip.

    The chief problem with this vacation is the chief problem of all vacations—too short. To do all we hoped to do, at least three more days would have been required. And then, of course, we would find other things to tack on that we’d have to do. All of which ends up giving a reason to go back again.

    But for now, here I am, on a Monday. I have another chapter to rewrite, another book to read for review, and I have to go in to my day job. Donna has already left for work (she threatened to go in over this past weekend, but decided not to) and I have to get dressed to walk the dog. There is no snow on the ground now, so I won’t slip on ice and injure something else. But the mornings seem so short anymore.

    It really is time to write that bestseller and get on with another vacation.