Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • A Moment For A Promotional Message

    Tomorrow night, Tuesday, February 28th, I’ll be reading at a venue that is somewhat a departure for me.  It will be at a little ongoing literary rumpus called Noir At the Bar—here’s a blog post to give you a taste—in University City, on Delmar, at a little place called Meshuggah’s.  I’ll be there with three other readers—Kevin Lynn Helmick, Caleb J. Ross, and Gordon Highland—and what makes this unusual for me is that Noir at the Bar is, as the name suggests, for NOIR.

    Now, yeah, I write mysteries.  After all, my three Asimov robot novels were “robot mysteries.”  Remains is as much a mystery novel as a near-futre SF novel.  Realtime was a police procedural of sorts.  But I haven’t published any straight mysteries.  And having attended a few of these events before, I can state unequivocally that my work is very different from theirs.

    Or maybe not.  We’ll see.  But I am the first science fiction writer invited to attend, so it will be interesting to say the least.

    I thought I’d write something new for it, but since I’ve been eyebrow deep in finishing the current novel I haven’t had time, so I’m taking a few possibles along to see what will be the best fit.

    If any of you in the St. Louis area want to come by and lend some support, I can promise you something different.  It’s a good crowd and the stories are…unique.

    So: Meshuggah Cafe, 6269 Delmar, St. Louis, MO, 63130 tomorrow night, 7:00 PM.

  • New Look, Errata, and a Policy Statement

    I’ve seen some blogs that change their look every month. Frankly, it’s too much bother, but once in a while…

    So, here’s a new look.  I’ve noted a few comments about the difficulty of reading white-on-black (or pale blue-on-dark blue, etc), so I found one that reverses that and reads pretty well.  I’ve also found one that allows me to put my own images in the header, and that I may change more regularly, but for the foreseeable future, this is what the Muse is going to look like.

    I suppose I should make a few other comments to go along with that.

    I promised a post on the content of the Moyers-Haidt video and that’s still coming.  I’ve been working steadily on finishing a novel and I’m within striking distance of the complete first draft.  Oculus is the sequel to Orleans, which is currently in the hands of my estimably cool agent, Jen Udden.  Once I finish this, I will hand it to my wonderful partner and first-reader, Donna, who will take a red pen and scrawl viciously all over it so that I may take the shredded remains and build from them a better book.  While she’s doing that, I will be doing a number of things, among which include cleaning my office (which is a shattered and broken No Man’s Land, unfit for human habitation), doing some more work for Left Bank Books (link on the sidebar, go visit), working on more writing (surprise!) and penning more annoying commentary to post here on matters political, philosophical, personal…

    Speaking of which, I recently endured one of the pitfalls of having strong opinions and the ability to voice them that, when it involves relative strangers, usually scrapes no skin off any body parts.  I hope I’m wrong, but I seem to have lost a friend as a consequence of one such post.  Politically, we were quite far apart, but managed what I thought was a fairly solid relationship—based on music, good food, good wine, things like that.  After a few political conversations, we had, I thought, opted for detente and simply didn’t discuss it.  But when you have a public face, that becomes a bit difficult to manage.  What do you say to people?  Don’t read this if you know we disagree fundamentally?

    My attitude is caveat emptor.  You come into my online home, feel free to froth and fret or even agree wholeheartedly.  Feel free to take umbrage, throw money, tell me I’m wonderful or the scum of the earth.  It is a public forum.  I won’t back down from my principles or beliefs.  If such offend to the extent that you feel compelled to collect your marbles and never visit again, so be it.

    I will say this, regarding the broader arena of public discourse: I can become furious over a stated position and manage to regard someone as a friend.  I’m willing to talk about anything, with just about anyone, as long as the dialogue is honest and honestly engaged.  I may go away wondering how such opinions over this or that can possibly be held by a thinking human being, but I promptly caution myself that I am no judge of absolute right or wrong and no doubt some react the way to me.  But I will ask that my writings be read completely and taken for what they say and judged according to their content.  Factual mis-statements, hyperbolic distortions, and hissy fits do nothing to further anything and I will call anyone on them.

    As I would expect them to call me on the same.

    So.  If you know in advance that your sensibilities may get rubbed raw by what you may find here, and you come anyway, react as you will, but know it’s on you.  There are plenty other places on the intraweebs to go visit, many of which may offer solace rather than sandpaper.

    That said, all are welcome.  I have a FaceBook page with over four thousand “friends,” many of whom I doubtless disagree with on some topic.  I do not unfriend anyone who disagrees with me.  That’s childish.  I believe we should engage other viewpoints.  The polemical in-group isolation that has arisen from the self-selection of media has caused enormous damage to our public discourse.  It has become far too easy to avoid opinions and beliefs and even facts that make us uncomfortable or that we wish were not true.  I try not to do that.  It is limiting and potentially destructive.  What we are doing thereby is creating entirely separate languages.  Words that mean one thing to one group mean something entirely different to another and because they no longer converse with each other on any regular basis, such meanings concretize and become barriers.

    Anyway, I hope you all like the new look.  The mission, however, remains the same.

  • Writers On Religion

    This a collection of excerpts from interviews with a wide range of writers, some science fiction, some fantasists, several so-called “mainstream,” on their belief—actually disbelief—in a deity.

    I think the most difficult thing for many people to grasp is the idea of purposelessness, the concept that the universe simply Is and has no other purpose for its existence. Humans like to have a sense of where they’re going, what they’re supposed to do when they get there, and why. To say that these answers must come entirely from within is, to put it mildly, a bit unsettling, especially as in the first part of one’s life someone has kept stressing that there is an innate purpose, that “nothing happens without a reason,” and that this purpose comes from what we call god, a being who first made the universe entirely with us in mind that we might live according to some plan. I admit, this would be very comforting. Life is a confusing collection of event and reaction and it would be nice if there were an instruction book. Barring that, simply trusting that it all leads to something is one way to get through a day, a year, a life. To then have the idea that this is not the case dropped on us is understandably discommoding.

    But is it? I found it liberating, since now I no longer had to worry about living up to a standard kept mystically hidden. And I could do my own work figuring out what “it all means.”

    Anyway, I found this thoughtful and interesting, so…enjoy.

  • 2012

    So we survived the night.  The mad hordes banging on the steel shutters disturbed our sleep not at all.  This morning we looked out at the devastation and counted ourselves among the fortunate survivors, nevertheless aware that this year—this year—is the one to fear most…

    I never make resolutions and usually I don’t even make plans.  Over the last many years I’ve found that all I accomplish is an increase in guilt when I fail to live up to my promises to myself.  I have enough self-deprecation already, I don’t need to make an annual celebration out of it.

    But that doesn’t mean I don’t have things I want to accomplish.

    I think I’ll keep most of it to myself.  Anyone keeping up with this blog has a pretty good idea what my ambitions are, and they don’t really follow an annual cycle.  If there is one thing, though, that needs to change, it is my deep conviction that much of what I wish to do will never happen.  I surprised myself between 1990 and 2001 by doing exactly what I had till that decade thought I’d never manage—publish.

    The fact is, I have always held back from myself the kind of faith that opens up possibilities.  I’m ready to accept successes when they happen, but I always seem to keep myself from believing they will.  Sometimes—often—this can result in self-sabotage.  Never intentional, always unconscious, but effective all the same.  And I don’t know why.  Thirty or forty years ago, untried and with nothing to show for any effort, it made a kind of sense.  I hadn’t proved anything to myself or anyone else.

    Starting in 1980 that changed and I have a track record now.  So it’s maybe time to start believing in myself.  At least more than I have been.  And enjoy it.

    So here’s a few things I’d like to try to do this coming year.

    One, publish a new novel.  At the very least get a contract for one.

    Two, take a long vacation or two with Donna and travel to some new places.

    Three, maybe actually mount a decent photographic exhibition.  It’s long overdue, I have a lot of good work that will, if I don’t do something about it, disappear into oblivion without anyone ever seeing it.

    Four…

    Well, four, have a better time.

    So, irresolute but with purpose, I welcome 2012 and wish you all the very best in the coming 12 months.  I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

    And thank you for paying attention and giving a damn.

  • The Ancient Past

    Over the weekend my mother presented us with something that surprised, pleased, slightly embarrassed, and produced a slew of other less-definable reactions.  Mothers do this sort of thing, I’m told.  We have no children to whom we might have inflicted this on, so I’m unable to say what must go through a parent’s mind on such occasion.

    But it’s sweet and important and after my initial “What the hell…” reaction I was really very pleased.  She came out with a big file folder full of “stuff” from my grade school years.  Among the items were class portraits and…well…

     

      Yes, this is me, circa 1965.  Note the three-piece suit?  I was very much into my James Bond period at this time and dressing well was part of it.  Obviously I didn’t wear a suit every day—this was special—but when I did, I took Sean Connery as my model and did it up right.

    Of course, I didn’t really know how to wear it.  Posture was still a work-in-progress and my hair has only ever been in control one year, about two years after this when I went through my heavy Brylcreem phase, with pompadour and everything.

    And of course note the smirk.  I have no idea what I was thinking at the time, to produce such an expression, but doubtless it had little to do with what was going on around me.  Doubtless I was trying to exude some semblance of cool, something I’ve never possessed in any measurable degree, but in my own head I certainly was.

    Now here is the next year’s version—same school, mind you, Emmaus Lutheran School.

     

    Note the sartorial change.   This would have been my Man From U.N.C.L.E.  phase—that or Lost In Space—and turtlenecks were the fashion of the moment.  Now this I likely would have worn most days.  I had some notion then that clothes made the boy, hopefully into the version of the boy desired.  Illya Kuryakin cool, someone not to mess with, in the know, capable and maybe a touch dangerous.

    Yeah, right, with that face.  Dangerous.  Uh huh.  Cute kid, isn’t he?  In 1966 I would have been 11 or 12, depending on the time of year this was taken, and I don’t recall that anymore.  I look at that face now and I wonder what happened to that kid.  He actually looks happy.  And I suppose most of the time I was fairly happy.  Not in school, though, but I learned to play a part, and I was playing one there, I’m sure.  The pictures were always for that, I remember, the chance to get down in the record what I thought I was and what I wanted to be.  It never worked, I always ended up looking like any other hapless kid, goofily unaware, and absurdly pleased to be getting my picture taken.

    But that smirk…that, I think, stayed with me.  Take a look at this one from almost 30 years later.

     

    A friend shot this for me as a promo image for the writing career I was convinced I was about to have.  You can still kind of see that kid there, cocky, a little divorced from reality, and somehow knowing something the photographer or the audience doesn’t.  A bit more practiced, obviously, and the freckles are gone.  In a way I kind of miss the freckles.  (For many years I actually found freckles erotic—I’d had a couple of girlfriends who had them in ample supply, fair-skinned and somehow the freckles just…anyway.)

    Now, along with the pictures, I found in my mother’s file a couple of report cards.  Mind you, this was from a parochial school, and for the most part I was unsurprised.  I was a poor student.  Mostly Cs and C-s.  The surprising grades were in Religion, which generally were Bs and As.  I tell people when it comes up that at one time I was a righteous little christian and evidently it showed in my classroom performance.

    What else? There was one composite, one of those sheets with thumbnails of the whole class, and I was asked if I remembered them all.  This was the 4th Grade and I did amazingly well.  I think I named 80% of them.  There were a few I didn’t recognize, and a couple I did but could not put names to.

    There were also merit badges and such from my Boy Scout days.  I didn’t do well in that, either.  I had a merit badge in fire safety, marksmanship, basketweaving (yes, basketweaving—don’t ask), first aid, and a couple others, plus achievement patches from state Jamborees.  I’ll tell you about those sometime—the second one I attended was cause for me quitting the scouts.

    It felt more like a record of someone else’s life, to be honest.  Not me.  I’ve worked to distance myself from that kid in a lot of ways.  He did not impress me at the time, though he hid it well.  But I have to wonder how much is still in here, still influencing, still informing who I am and what people see.  I mine my own past for material to build stories with and I have utilized my childhood often.  I am still surprised sometimes by what I find.

  • Books, 2011

    It seems unlikely I’ll finish another book before this Sunday—if I do it will probably be Stefanie Pintoff‘s second Simon Ziele mystery, A Curtain Falls.  I read the first in the series, In The Shadow of Gotham, not too long ago and enjoyed it.  It’s a period mystery, set in 1905, and features a progressive police detective from New York—Ziele—who teams up with an amateur criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, who is attempting to construct a science of criminal behavior.  Ms. Pintoff avoids many pitfalls by keeping the level of expertise firmly locked in 1905 and Sinclair makes as many if not more wrong conclusions as right, but it was an entertaining piece of work and the evocation of 1905 New York was excellent.  Somewhat more engaging than a similarly period series by Rhys Bowen, the Molly Murphy mysteries, which are also rich in period detail, but a bit more of a stretch about an Irish immigrant who falls into the detective business rather by accident and then tries to make a go of it. These are set during and after the McKinley presidency and one book even deals directly with his assassination.  For a peek into the more bohemian parts of New York, they are wonderful.  Ms Bowen sells the conceit well, but once you put one of them down you have to wonder just how likely it would be.

    I found myself reading a lot of mysteries this past year.  As I’ve been moving into that genre—two of the novels in the hands of my new agent are mysteries, one a historical, the other contemporary, and I have every intention of continuing them as series (and even the alternate history is largely a mystery thriller)—I decided I needed to become better acquainted with what’s being done.  I read a couple of the more obvious ones—Laura Lippmann and Tess Gerritsen made the list, as did a couple of Michael Connelly’s and one James Patterson—but I also found some less obvious ones (at least to me).

    One series I’ve become quite taken with is Margaret Maron‘s Deborah Knott series, beginning with Bootlegger’s Daughter.  I’ve read eleven of these, all this past year.  They are charming.  Deborah Knott is the only daughter of a man who was once the biggest bootlegger in North Carolina and adjoining states.  He’s out of the business—sort of—and she has become an attorney.  By the end of the first novel she’s decided to run for a local judgeship and through the rest of the series she is a judge.  This is of the “stumble into murders” kind of cozy mystery writing.  It’s as much about the people of the area and the history as it is about solving a murder and the first-person narrative is comfortable and evocative.  I found myself devouring one of these over a weekend like popcorn.

    I also continued reading Laurie King’s Mary Russell books, ending this year with The Pirate King, which is a comedy.  Not quite as successful as the rest of the series, but not bad.  I caught up on her Kate Martinelli novels, too.

    Among the other mysteries this past year I read another of Cara Black‘s Paris mysteries featuring Aimee LeDuc, private investigator.  This one was set on the Ile St. Louis and I read it as much for that as for the mystery, since I have upcoming scenes in one of my novels set there.  If you like Paris and you like tough female detectives of the Honey West pedigree, these are worth the time.  (I recall the first one of these I read annoyed me because it involved a WWII Occupation mystery.  Some of this is becoming a stretch by now—these people are getting ancient and dying and I have to wonder how credible contemporary plots concerning survivors from 1942 can continue to be, but…)

    I mentioned I read a James Patterson.  I’ve been hearing so much about this guy that I decided I had to read one.  I won’t even mention which one, it was terrible from the first chapter.  Cliched writing, facile plotting, and predictable…everything.  I put it down wondering, what is supposed to be so great about this guy?  But he comes out of a marketing background and the sheer volume he produces—much of it now with other writers—must simply overwhelm the public.

    However, both Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly did not disappoint, although in Lehane’s case the level of mayhem seemed borderline cartoonish.  Nevertheless, he held my attention, quickened my pulse a couple of times.  Connelly proved solid, at least in the one I read, Blood Work.  In Lehane’s case, I found a curiosity, a historical novel, The Given Day, which is on my list for next year.  So as this is about what I read in 2011, you’ll have to wait.

    I also continued my Ross McDonald reading with The Drowning Pool.  I have a bunch more of these to read, but they are so far all gems.  Ross McDonald is I think underappreciated.  He was a master of the noirish and hardboiled style.  Which segues into a classic I read which I’d never read before, James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce.  I don’t know exactly what I expected, based on The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, but it wasn’t this, and it was a surprise.  It’s not a mystery—at least not in the detective sense—and yet you can fully feel the noirish elements come through in this story of a woman during the Depression who boots out her philandering husband and then has to make a go of it on her own.  She subsequently becomes a very successful restaurateur, but her attempts to live up to the standards her daughter—a true enfant terrible—thinks she should embrace end up bringing her down, even as the daughter grows up to get just about everything she wants.  At the end Mildred is back with the husband and you get the sense that she’s going to build it all up again—and this time make it stick, since the daughter has finally been banished.  I put it down with a “Jaysus” reaction.

    I can also recommend new writer Rebecca Cantrell‘s series, beginning with A Trace of Smoke about a female reporter in pre-war Berlin.  This would be a decent companion piece to Philip Kerr’s  Bernie Gunther series.

    I read my first Val McDermid novel, A Distant Echo, which I highly recommend.  It details the consequences of a false police accusation on four friends over the years.  They find the corpse of a barmaid in a cemetery, but as the police have no leads going anywhere else these four become the prime suspects.  Of course, nothing connects them to her murder, either.  But the press gets ahold of it and their lives all take unexpected turns.  Then, years later, someone starts killing them and two of them work to solve the crime.

    Among the non-mysteries I read this past year were also a couple that I ought to have but never got around to.  I read Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, which is a kind of tour-de-force of kitchen sink writing that ties Bach’s music into the unraveling of the genetic code, all through the lens of a woman trying to solve the puzzle of a scientist who should have been one of the luminaries of the discovery of DNA but instead suffered the end of his career and ignominy.  Tight, colorful writing, bizarre connections.  It reminded me of Thomas Pynchon, only more controlled and with a readily-discernible plot.

    I also read Charlotte’s Web for the first time ever.  I am woefully under-read in childrens and YA literature.  During the time of my life I should have been reading this, I was deep into comics and then my mother’s book-of-the-month club books, which were all adult.  At the same time I discovered science fiction and, well, that’s one category of Jeopardy I always fail.  Along with that one I also read—for the first time ever—The Phantom Tollbooth.  I doubt this is going to signal a spree of children-and-YA reading, but both of those books were well worth the read, especially the Juster.

    I only read one Dickens this year, The Old Curiosity Shop, which has to be one of the most maudlin of his novels.  I kept thinking about Little Nell “Will you bloody die already!”  But I can see how this would have been a show-stopper when it came out.  It may be one of the best treatments from the period of addictive behavior, especially of gambling addiction.

    I finally read Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, which has been on my shelf for a decade at least.  It’s not an easy one to get into, but once you realize what’s going on—a trio of telepaths who don’t quite realize that this is what they are finding solace with each other through the changing landscape of wartime and post-war London—it is marvelous.  Moorcock is deceptive in that he has written some real crap (The Blood Red Game should be avoided).  But he is a truly fine stylist and a first-rate imaginative intellect when he chooses to be and Mother London is a fine novel that should be considered a classic.

    And speaking of London during the war, I read Connie Willis’s massive opus, both volumes—Blackout and All Clear—and can recommend it to anyone who is seriously into WWII history.  She has clearly done her homework and her decision to write about the Blitz from the viewpoint of the residents, albeit using her time traveling historians as vehicles, has produced a fascinating take on London at the time.  (I must say, though, that one of Willis’s hallmark plot devices—the continual miscommunication and near misses of people trying to find each other—which has worked effectively in the past, is growing wearisome by now.  We get it, reality does not follow a neat plot logic, people fail, messages don’t get delivered, etc etc—but enough is enough already.)  This may be the end of the Mr. Dunworthy stories, though.  May be.  This is time travel, after all.

    I read a couple of newer novels that I want to recommend, both more or less science fiction.  The first is The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer.  This is a steampunk take on The Tempest.  Sort of.  I don’t wish to get into it too deeply, but I was taken with it primarily because it is steampunk without zombies!  I am growing tired of the monster-of-the-week in genre fiction.  Vampires, now zombies.  Dead things that move around do not fascinate me and too often they entail grue for the sake of grue.  Enough already!  (I put aside two steampunk novels that looked otherwise intriguing because, within 10 pages, there are zombies.)  To me, good steampunk is in the vein of The Difference Engine.  And Palmer delivers.  The writing is elegant, the world evocative, the symbolism and metaphors nicely deployed.  Not the best it could be, but high up on my scale.

    The other is by a good friend of mine, Carolyn Ives Gilman.  Isles of the Forsaken is a novel with which I’ve been familiar for a long time.  It was the first manuscript Carolyn gave me for a critique.  It has finally come out—though this is but the first half—and it is wonderful.  Set on a world that is like but not like ours, during a period much like the hegemony of Great Britain in the 19th Century, it is about the clash of cultures.  Bear in mind, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy is pretty much dependent on the reader’s expectations.  This is fine stuff.

    I didn’t read much science fiction this past year.  Out of the 79 I read cover to cover, only 16 were definitely SF.  I can recommend Leviathan Wakes by James S. Correy—a very good thriller, a shitkicker, well-written and realized.  First one of a series (of course—I miss they dominance of the stand-alone anymore).  I also read Keith Roberts’ Pavane, a classic alternate history, and a fine, fine piece of writing it is.

    The other SF novel I’m recommending is Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires.  It’s been a while since Gene has done a straightfoward science fiction novel (if any of his work can ever be called straightforward!) and this one is a subtle study of mismatched personalities and desires that will not be thwarted.  It’s love story with a relativistic time-dilation element complicating it.  Now, I tend to like almost anything Gene does, so take this recommendation in that context, but I think it may be one of his best.  He has pulled back from the epic vistas of some of his earlier SFnal efforts, like The Book of the Long Sun and such and centered this through one viewpoint character and closely-controlled scenario that is almost claustrophobic compared to his other work.  But it works.

    I read some flops, but I won’t go into them here—except for the comments on Patterson above—because I’m not sure if the books were really bad or if they just bounced off.  (One of them I thought a derivative bit of schlock, phoned in by an author who has done excellent work in the past, but just took a stroll on this one.)  There was another that was a convoluted bit of experimental strain that couldn’t decide if it was a mystery, Kafkaesque, Pynchonesque, or an exercise in abstruse symbolism.

    I will read less next year.  I already know that.  I have several bricks on the pile that will require long hours and extra attention.  At least, it is my plan to get through some of them, but we’ll see how that works out.

    Among the others that I enjoyed and can recommend I offer: Counting Heads by David Marusek,  Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, The Gift by Lewis Hyde, On Mozart by Anthony Burgess, and Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson.  Allen Steele has a new one out, Hex, set in his Coyote universe and well worth the read.  Scott Philips also has a new one out, The Adjustment, which is a fine example of Scott’s idiosyncratic noir style.

    Notice that the book links included all go to Left Bank Books.  I’m going to be doing that from now on, at least where I don’t link directly to an author’s page.  Support your local bookstore.  You’ll miss them when they’re gone, so don’t let them be gone.  Believe me, there really isn’t much Amazon can offer you that a good independent bookstore can’t, and that sucking sound of local tax revenue leaving your community and your state is the sound that accompanies our current fiscal woes.

    End of sales pitch.  I’ll talk about the other things in 2011 later.

     

  • Many Lives

    This is just very yeah.

    When asked why I write, I have many answers, but this captures the entire inner gestalt of why.

    Not getting to live all the lives I wanted to. I know what she means. I assumed at one time I would be a writer, an actor, a musician, a producer-director, and all the other things that attach to these ambitions. In a way, I did get to do them, but not the way I thought I would.

    Anyway, this is marvelous.

  • Tilting At Icons: Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011

    Unless you’ve been living on Mars or under a layer of primordial loam these past few decades, you know who Christopher Hitchens is. He has died. He was an unapologetic pragmatist, atheist, and iconoclast to the end. For an extended obit, go here.

    I only knew Hitchens through his work, of which I’ve become quite impressed and even fond in the last few years. He did not tilt pointlessly at windmills. Rather, he spoke truth in the face of sham, questioned revered assumptions, and generally made us all twitch over some specious bit of received wisdom we thought reliable. And he did it in ways and under conditions that often ran counter to public courtesy. “Speaking ill of the dead” was never something he avoided, especially when death seemed about to bestow what in his opinion was an unearned and poorly-considered status on someone. For instance, Jerry Falwell. When most other commentators were suspending whatever critical commentary they might have indulged simply because the man had died, Hitch continued to go after him, unwilling to allow his death to gloss over what Hitch considered monstrosities of ego and policy. Here he is jousting with Sean Hannity:

    He had a talent for giving as good if not better than he got from some of the most practiced mouthpieces in the media, rarely ever being shut down or bested in highly-charged, barbed exchanges with pundits attempting to just shut him up. His language skills matched a razor-sharp intellect and he had no qualms about speaking his mind, usually in a way that allowed little purchase for facile counterpolemic.

    Here he is at length, discussing his book God Is Not Great, which brought him into line with Richard Dawkins as one of the most hated of the so-called “New Atheists.”

    Before all this he had the temerity to attack one of the most unexamined and misunderstood of our modern icons, Mother Theresa. He got a lot of flack for his unflinching analysis of her cult and her hypocrisies. Even non-Catholics balk at saying much of anything negative about her, which is a curious effect of the kind of image-making Theresa used and was used on her. The rush to beatification had all the earmarks of desperation—the need for a popular public figure of piety to bolster the flagging reputation of Mother Church—and it seems to have worked even for those who would otherwise have nothing to do with Catholicism. Mother Theresa has become the byword for a kind of innocent generosity, a pure aching love for humanity that ignores specifics and embraces the general as if the most simpleminded of approaches to problems has a special sanctity. Hitch was one of the few who dared to actually look at the practice of her organization and present the contradictions and, indeed, the grotesqueness at the heart of her philosophy.

    He also baffled many of his supporters by doing something I admire above all else. He held views that he deemed right regardless of the political spectrum along which they fell. So he could be a socialist and a hawk. He could be a severe critic of the military-intelligence combine and a patriot. His politics was all over the map in terms of Left-Right and to me it showed the silliness of doctrinaire positioning. He had no patience with idiocy, no matter the side to which it was attached.

    Through all this, he was also a generous and polite debater. In a lengthy exchange with Al Sharpton he was never less than cordial, even if unyielding on his principles. He showed us how to do it and not be a bully.

    Unless he felt he was being played.

    Even when I disagreed with him I admired him. I would say Rest In Peace, but he would not have accepted the implications underlying the sentiment.

    I’ll miss him.

  • Speech, Money, Personhood

    Senator Bernie Sanders is sponsoring a Constitutional Amendment to deny corporations the right to be considered persons. His speech is worth a listen.

    What amazes me is that this needs to be explained at all. This is one of those no-brainers that anyone on the street ought to be able to understand without much thought. Obviously a corporation is not a person.

    But in the esoteric realm of political philosophy, we entertain all manner of chimera for the purposes of achieving certain ends. What we have demonstrated in the Citizens United case and previous court pronouncements regarding money as speech is that when yo break something down far enough, you find you can reassemble it just about any way you want.

    Among the many factors that have gone into this debate, the one that seems the slipperiest is the idea that money is speech. This is actually a tricky argument and in many ways very persuasive, since money is the means by which we conduct our lives. On its most basic level, with regards to speech, without money there is no publishing, therefore the dissemination of speech is sorely hampered.

    Yet no one mistakes a printing press for the words it reproduces.

    I said that very carefully. A printing press produces no words at all. A writer—a human being—does that and the press merely reproduces them. It is a significant distinction. Without the press, the words still exist. Somewhere.

    Here’s the thing. Money is not speech. It is a tool. Period. Speech transcends money. For one thing, you can’t horde speech. You can’t stockpile and then dump it in such a way that it will buy something. Speech is not traded in stock markets.

    You can suppress speech, but it doesn’t go away. You can withhold it, but then it does nothing, serves no purpose. You can’t exchange one set of words for another and derive greater value. Speech does not have the structure or limitations of money, nor is it susceptible to vagaries of finance.

    Speech transmits ideas—all ideas—while money simply is an idea, one idea, which not everyone shares. Speech in its purest form cannot be owned. Yes, you can copyright a particular form of speech, but the fact is anyone can do that for their particular forms, and those forms are the expressions of individuals. You can’t prevent someone from using speech by keeping it from them. No one is homeless or hungry because they don’t have enough speech*.

    To assert that money is speech is to cheapen actual speech and turn it into a market commodity. A democracy cannot function that way.

    Which is, of course, the whole point. Those most ardently in support of money-as-speech don’t trust democracy, for all the reasons that separate them from those who have no money. The CEO in the board room can’t abide the fact that some homeless person’s speech has the same fundamental value as his, that in terms of rights and freedoms they are equals simply because speech as a freedom is not bankable.

    On the other hand, I recognize the appeal of being able to define personhood any old way you choose—because if you can do that, you can later take that definition away from whoever you want.

    *Of course, you may be ignored and your speech overlooked because you’re homeless and hungry. It is not the speech that determines your condition, but the other barriers and circumstances, most of which have to do with money.

  • No Politics

    Not this morning.  It’s hard, I know, because so much is going on that I could  comment about, but…

    The novel revision I mentioned a couple of posts back is done.  Done and at my agent.  I did a top to bottom revision, adding in the new material that desperately wanted to be included, and except for yesterday it all went remarkably well.

    Yesterday, though…yes…Murphy was in residence.

    We went to the gym and then Donna had an errand to run, so I descended to the dungeon  office and began.  I’d already started the final work on the last chapter a couple days earlier, but I had Other Things To Do on both Tuesday and Wednesday that kept me away.  That was fine, it gave my subconscious time to work out some kinks and so I was more than ready to work on the remainder.

    It was good stuff.  I say that because much of it is gone.  I practically rewrote the entirety of the last chapter and I was very carefully laying in the new material and deleting the old as I went.  But I became caught up in the work—it happens—and neglected to hit SAVE as often as I should.  (Yes, I have a timed save, but it was not quickly enough to prevent what happened.)

    Revisions complete, I had a large chunk of old text to delete and I proceeded to highlight it for destruction and—

    It crashed.  Don’t know why or how but suddenly WordPerfect complained (it never does this!) and shut down.  When I rebooted I found everything intact, but now I had this little box telling me that since it hadn’t exited properly, in order to preserve the back-up I had to open it and rename it, which I tried to do, but something was preventing it from “taking” so I tried cutting and pasting to get the changes into the original and then it crashed again and—-

    The long and the short of it is, I lost my revisions on the last chapter.  All of them.

    By which time Donna was home and I was fuming.  No, that’s not quite it.  I was in a blood-red, Conanesque rage, stomping around the house, yelling, cursing computers and the spawn that created them, almost but not quite punching things.

    We had lunch. I returned to the deeps, sucked it up, and started over.

    In all this, I had forgotten the dog.  Coffey still needed her walk and I forgot.  I’m a bad owner.  Donna came down and asked if I wanted her to take Coffey and after a few minutes of guilt-ridden negotiation, she did.

    And I finished the last chapter.

    Then I went on to make the final corrections to the epilogue, saved the puppy, and sent it to my agent.  (And then another weird thing happened to it, but that’s all straightened out now, so never mind.)

    When I began the revisions, the manuscript was just a hair under 90 thousand words.   It’s gained 4,000 and a lot more cohesion.  In my humble opinion, it works now, whereas before it merely sufficed.

    You might get the impression from the foregoing that I don’t enjoy my work.  Quite the contrary, the reason I tolerate these little instances of Murphyesque meltdown it because I love it.  I slept the sleep of the righteous last night, and this morning I am thinking back over the work and smiling.  Though I know I have at least one more pass to get through with it, when Stacia gets done making all her notes and edits, at this point I am pleased with the product.

    What I now have to do, which is long, long overdue, is clean the dungeon office.  I have piles of stuff everywhere.  It’s been a few years since I’ve done a really thorough cleaning in here, which includes new bookshelves, sorting through notes that have lost all significance, finding things I’ve forgotten I misplaced, and just generally making the room livable.  When I work on a novel, there is a kind of conservation of chaos at work—as order increases in the story upon which I labor, a commensurate increase in disorder occurs in the immediate environment.  So as the novel nears completion, its maximum point of order, the room falls apart in near ruin.

    In the last few years, I have written one and a half new novels and rewritten two from top to bottom, without pause.  You can imagine the task before me.

    So…is Gingrich still the GOP frontrunner?