Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • Dead Stuff

    This may be social suicide, but I’m going to say it anyway.

    I don’t like zombies.

    Not too thrilled with vampires, either.

    I mean—hell, they’re dead.  Dead.  And motivating.  The contradiction alone is…

    I am tired of zombies, though.  And vampires.

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    In the last several months, I have picked up at least two novels I was very much looking forward to reading because their premises looked really cool.  I put both down because zombies got dragged into them, and I thought unnecessarily.  Zombies are cool right now, though, and apparently a lot of people like reading about corpses shambling around trying to eat the neighbors.  Never mind that they don’t seem to move very fast and an octagenarian with a hip replacement could outrun one, but…

    Now, I liked Michael Jackson’s  Thriller.  I even liked the zombie dance in it.  I thought it was a neat twist on an old theme.  But it’s an old theme and while even I wrote a story that sort of dwelt on the possibilities of vampirism explaining certain religious rituals, it was a short story and I didn’t make a career out of it.

    To be fair, I have never been much of a horror fan.  I don’t find having the crap scared out of me particularly fun.  Some do.  Certainly a lot of people in my life have had fun scaring the crap out of me, but that’s another story.  So I was never a wolfman fan or a mummy fan or a Dracula fan or any of that.  I could appreciate these things as one time motifs for a specific work of fiction, but to turn them into cottage industries…

    I even liked Buffy, but not really because of the vampires and such.  I thought it was funny.  (And Willow was hot.)  Angel not so much.

    I find the fannish obsession with dead things a bit disturbing.  Necrophilia is not healthy.  But each to his or her own, I say.  Not for me to judge.

    But I do dislike it ruining otherwise good fiction because it’s, you know, trendy.

    I wouldn’t mind having a good explanation for it.  I like to understand things.  Knowledge is power, after all, and even for the purposes of self defense…

    Anyway, there.  I’ve said it.  I don’t like zombies.  And I would really like them not in what appear to be otherwise perfectly good steampunk novels that I would otherwise read with delight.

    I do wonder how many others feel the same way…

  • My Obligatory Piece About Ayn Rand

    From time to time, here and there, someone brings Ayn Rand up as some kind of role model.  Lately it’s even in the national news, thanks to the Tea Party and an apparently not very good film of Rand’s seminal masterwork, Atlas Shrugged.  The uber conservatives now crowding reason out of the halls of congress with their bizarro legislation and their lectures from the floor and on committees about how their toilets don’t flush right so why should regulations on light bulbs be passed are the children of the Dragon’s Teeth cast randomly by Ms. Rand and her philosophical cult followers.  It amazes how people who profess to believe in a philosophy of independent thought can sublimate themselves so thoroughly to the dogmas of that philosophy and claim with a straight face that they are free thinkers on any level.  The phrase “more Catholic than the pope” comes to mind sometimes when crossing verbal swords with these folks, who seem perfectly blind to the contradictions inherent in their own efforts.  Rand laid out a My Way or the Highway ethic that demanded of her followers that they be true to themselves—as long as they did as she directed.

    Ayn Rand’s novels, of which there were three (plus a novella/parable I don’t intend to discuss here), moved by giant leaps from promising to fanciful to pathetic.  There are some paragraphs in any one of them that are just fine.  Occasionally a secondary character is nicely drawn (Eddie Willers is possibly her most sympathetic and true-to-life creation) and from time to time there is even a moment of genuine drama.  But such bits are embedded in tar pits of philosophically over-determined panegyric that drowns any art there might be.

    But then, her devoted fans never read them for the art.

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    What Rand delivers in both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is a balm to the misunderstood and underappreciated Great Man buried in the shambling, inarticulate assemblage that is disaffected high I.Q. youth.

    The give-aways in both novels involve laughter.  The opening scene in The Fountainhead characterizes Howard Roark for the entire novel, prefiguring the final scene in the novel, which translated to film perfectly in the weird 1947 Gary Cooper thing.

    Howard Roark laughed.

    He stood naked at the edge of a cliff….He laughed at the thing which had happened to him that morning and at the things which now lay ahead.

    Of course, the thing that had happened to him that morning was his expulsion from university for not completing his assignments.  You can pretty it up with philosophical dross, but basically he didn’t do what he was required to do, instead opting for self-expression in the face of everything else.  Hence the misunderstood genius aspect, the wholly-formed sense of mission, the conviction of personal rightness, and the adolescent disdain for authority no matter what.

    But his reaction?  To laugh.

    Any other kid in the same situation generally goes skulking off, bitter and resentful, harboring ill thoughts and maybe an “I’ll show you” attitude that may or may not lead to anything useful.

    But not a Rand character.  They laugh.  It’s Byronic in its isolated disdain for rules or logic or anything casually human.  It’s a statement of separation.

    It’s also just a bit psychotic.

    The other scene is from Atlas Shrugged in which Dagny Taggart falls into bed with Henry Reardon.  Both are depicted as mental giants, geniuses, and industrial rebels.  They are self-contained polymaths who make their own rules.  And one of the rules they now make for themselves is that adultery is the only sensible choice for two such kindred beings.

    And as they’re tumbling into an embrace?

    When he threw her down on the bed, their bodies met like the two sounds that broke against each other in the air of the room: the sound of his tortured moan and of her laughter.

    Of course, this most poignant moment is preceded by a long paragraph of Dagny explaining to Hank Reardon that she was going to sleep with him because it would be her proudest moment, because she had earned it.  It’s really rather ridiculous.  It’s the kind of thing that, if done at all, would most likely occur at the end of an affair, when both parties are trying to justify what they’d done, which is basically commit adultery because, you know, they wanted to.

    But it’s the laughter that characterizes these two people in these moments.  Crossroads for them both, turning points, and what do they do?  They laugh.  You can’t help but read contempt into it, no matter how much explanation Rand attempts to depict them as somehow above it all.  For her it’s the laughter of victory, but in neither case is there any kind of victory, but a surrender.

    Later in Atlas Shrugged Reardon gives her a bracelet made of his miracle metal and upon snapping it closed on her wrist, she kisses his hand, and it is nothing short of a moment from Gor.  Dagny gets traded around through the novel until she ends up with John Galt, and no matter how much Rand tries to explain it, the scenarios she sets up for each transition turn Dagny into a groupie.  She becomes by the end of the novel the prize each of them men gets when they’ve done a particularly impressive trick.

    Rand attempts to portray their interactions (if you can call them that—really, they’re more contract negotiations, which means Rand owes an implicit debt to Rousseau) as strenuously righteous achievements.  No one just has a conversation if they’re a Rand hero, they declaim, they negotiate, the issue position statements.  They are continually setting ground rules for the experience at hand, and while maybe there’s something to this (we all indulge this sort of thing, from earliest childhood on, but if we tried to do it with the kind of self-conscious clarity of these people nothing would ever happen), it serves to isolate them further.  They are the antithesis of John Donne’s assertion and by personal fiat.

    Only it isn’t really like that.

    The problem with being a nerd is that certain social interactions appear alien and impenetrable and the nerd feels inexplicably on the outside of every desirable interpersonal contact.  People like Rand attempt to portray the group to which the nerd feels isolated from as deliberately antagonistic to the nerd because they sense the nerd’s innate superiority.  This is overcomplicating what’s really going on and doing so in an artificially philosophical way which Rand pretends is an outgrowth of a natural condition.  The messiness of living is something she seeks to tame by virtue of imposing a kind of corporate paradigm in which all the worthwhile people are CEOs.

    As I said, it’s attractive to certain disaffected adolescent mindset.

    But it ain’t real life.

    I have intentionally neglected the third novel, which was her first one—We The Living.  I find this book interesting on a number of levels, one of the most fascinating being that among the hardcore Randites it is almost never mentioned, and often not read.  The reasons for this are many, but I suspect the chief one being that it doesn’t fit easily with the two iconic tomes.  Mainly because it’s a tragedy.

    We The Living is about Kira Argounova, a teenager from a family of minor nobility who comes back to Moscow after the Revolution with the intention of going to the new “classless” university and becoming an engineer.  She wants to build things and she knows that now is her chance.  Prior to the revolution, she would never have been allowed by her family or social convention—her destiny was to have been married off.  That’s gone now.  We never really learn what has become of the rest of her family, but we can guess.  And Kira is intent on pursuing her dream.

    But she can’t.  Because she is from minor nobility, she soon runs afoul of the self-appointed guardians of the Revolution, who oust her from the university just because.

    She ends up a prostitute, then a black market dealer.  She becomes the lover of an NKVD agent and uses him.  She is already the lover of a wannabe counter-revolutionary who can’t get his game on and ends up in self-immolation.  The NKVD agent self-destructs because of the contradictions she forces him to see in the new state and Kira goes from bad to worse and finally makes an attempt to escape Russia itself and ends up shot by a hapless border guard at the Finnish border.  She dies just inside Finland.

    It is a strikingly different kind of novel and it offers a glimpse of where Rand might have gone had she stuck to this path.  Sure, you can see some of the seeds of her later pedantry and polemic, but the bulk of the novel is heartfelt, an honest portrayal of the tragedy of dreams caught in systemic ambivalence.

    One can understand the source of Rand’s fanatic love of the United States—she grew up under the early Soviets, and there’s no denying that this was a dreadful system for a bright, talented, intellectually-bent young woman—or anyone else, for that matter—to endure.  The freedom of the United States must have been narcotic to her.

    But she fundamentally misunderstood the American landscape and identified with the glitzy, large-scale, and rather despotic “captains of industry” aspect rather than the common citizens, the groundseed of cooperation and generosity and familial observance and openness that her chosen idols took advantage of rather than provided for.  She drew the wrong lessons and over time, ensconced within her own air-born castles, she became obsessively convinced that the world was her enemy and The People were irredeemable.

    Sad, really.  Sadder still that so many people bought into her lopsided philosophy.

    She made the mistake so many people seem to make in not understanding that capitalism is not a natural system but an artifice, a tool.  It is not a state of being but a set of applications for a purpose.  It should serve, not dictate.  She set out a playbook which gave capitalism the kind of quasi-legitimate gloss of a religion and we are suffering the consequences of its acolytes.

    However, it would seem the only antidote to it is to let people grow out of it.  There’s a point in life where this is attractive—I read all these novels when I was 15 and 16 and I was convinced of my own misunderstood specialness.  But like the adolescent conviction that rock’n’roll is the only music worth listening to and that the right clothes are more important than the content of your mind, we grow out of it.

    Some don’t, though.  And occasionally they achieve their goals.  Alan Greenspan, for instance.

    And even he has now admitted that he was wrong.  Too bad he didn’t realize that when he was 21.

  • Between

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    I completed a massive rewrite the other day and sent it out.  When I say massive, I mean big, a whole novel.  There’s a lot riding on this and I find myself fidgety and on edge in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time.  It was an older book, one I thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) was done, complete, just fine.  What I found was proof that I need a good editor.

    But the work is done and it’s out the door and all I can do now is wait for the yea or the nay.  Not sure what I’ll do if the answer is…

    Everytime I get to the end of a major project, I find myself at sixes and sevens, loose ends need chasing down, and I don’t quite know what to do with myself.  Formerly, some of this time and excess energy was spent by going to a job.  That’s not an option now.  I used to go through a frenzy of cleaning house as well and I will likely do some of that today.  But later.  This morning, after breakfast, I opened Photoshop and noodled with a few images.  Having multiple creative streams is a good thing when you’re in a situation like this.  The above image is one result and I’ve decided to sandwich this post between two pictures.

    Not to be melodramatic, but in some ways I’m facing a turning point.  I have to do Something.  Almost 30 years ago I set my goal to become a published writer.  Much to my amazement, I succeeded, but the effort birthed the desire to do this as my main work, which means I have to keep publishing.  Whether we like it or not, we need money to live, otherwise I could quite contentedly (I think, I tell myself) write for my own pleasure and use this medium or others to put the work out and not worry about income streams.  But it’s not just the income and anyone who writes for a living knows very well that this is true.  After a five year spurt of publishing intensity, things have ground to a virtual halt.  There are a number of reasons for this, some of them entirely my fault.  But I have to turn it around and soon or walk away.

    I’m not at all sure I can and remain whole.

    Of course I have this older art, photography.  I can, with some difficulty, get a freelance business up and running.  There’s music, too, although I am years from the kind of proficiency that would adequately supplement my income.  Tomorrow I’ll be playing guitar at the anniversary party of the business of a friend.  An hour or so of my ideosyncratic “stylings” as a favor.  For fun.

    These spans of dry time between projects require distraction lest I tumble into a tangle of self-pity and despair.  It never lasts, I’m not so stoically romantic that I can sustain the dark time of the soul connected to artists denied their opportunity.  For better or worse, I seek happiness and am constitutionally incapable of living long in depression.  If not today, then by Monday I’ll be at work on something new or a new twist on something old and I’ll be trying again.

    And for the time being I feel like the rewrite just finished is pretty good.  I have confidence in it.  I will let you all know if the news is…

    Well, whatever it is.

    Have a good weekend.

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  • Post Manuscript Depression

    Sort of.  I have just completed a marathon session (about four weeks straight) of disassembling and revising a novel I thought I’d completed years ago.  The rewrite came at a request.  I may have news, but not now.  That’s for later.

    I don’t know about others, but when I finish a big project like that, I tend to have a day or two of complete confusion.  I don’t know what to do with myself.  For several years, I cleaned house afterward, which occupied the time I might spend brooding, used whatever left-over energy from the writing process, and performed a domestically useful job.  But I’ve been home now for almost two years, the house is fairly clean as a matter of course, which leaves only major jobs to do (my office ceiling needs repair, I have to build new bookshelves again, and the garage still requires attention) and I frankly don’t want to do any of that.

    After the work is done, I tend to feel depressed.  Not gloomy, just enervated.  This morning I straightened out my desk, cleaned up some unused files on the computer, and puttered.  I have to walk the dog yet and see about lunch.  Much of the day will be spent waiting.

    Waiting for what?  Good question.  There are phone calls I’m waiting for, but none specifically for today.  Emails as well.  I came close, I think, to botching something yesterday of some importance because I got tired of waiting.  Waiting requires a state of mind I do not possess.  I can act like I possess it, play-act the role of the calm, confident individual to whom things will, by dint of zen gravitas, inevitably come.  But that’s not me, not really, not ever.

    I have a model kit that has been waiting for me to build it for several years now.  Yes, I said years.  I acquired it because I had it as a kid and really liked it—the H.M.S. Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship—but I didn’t build it then.

    There were three model kits I clearly remember having as a child that I did not assemble.  My dad did.  There was a balsa wood and paper bi-plane that actually flew (a Jennie, if I recall correctly); a beautiful 1933 Mercedes Benz touring car; and the Victory.  I didn’t build them because my dad wanted to see them “done right.”  So he built them while I watched.

    Well, watched some of the time.

    Admittedly, he did an amazing job on all three.  When he finished, they were spectacular.  He even did the rigging on the Victory with black thread (the kit at the time did not include the rigging, but he found a guide for how it should look).  I really liked that ship.  So I always thought I’d someday get that kit and build it myself.  Just to say I’d done it.

    I’m a sloppy craftsman.  I admit it.  I have no patience for fine, meticulous detail work.  And model kits used to puzzle me no end because I have never found joy in the actual building, which is what you’re supposed to discover.  The “purpose” of such things is to teach the appreciation of assemblage, of patience, of doing a job of some duration and doing it well.

    Screw that, I wanted the finished product.  I would probably have been happier if I could have bought the damn things already completed.  But they didn’t come that way, so…

    My models were always characterized by poor joins, glue runs, and, if I painted them, bad finish.  But I was happy—I had the thing itself!

    So why am I a writer?  (Or a photographer, for that matter?)

    Because I want the finished product and I want it to be just so.  I have to do it myself.  I have forced my natural lack of patience into a straitjacket of control that occasionally slips, but which I yearly gain in competence.  Because ultimately the only way to get what I want is to practice something for which I have no natural affinity.

    Which leads me to my current depression.  What I ought to do is sit down and carefully consider my next project.  My impulse is to just open a file and start banging away on a new story.  But I don’t have one that appeals to me just now and I have all this other stuff that needs doing.

    And I know that, although this rewrite is “finished,” there will likely be corrections once Donna gets through the manuscript.

    It might be a good time to start that model kit.  But I have no place just now to work on it.  I need to clean a space for that.  Bother.  Might as well just walk the dog and eat lunch.

  • Slogging Through

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

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

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

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

    Just updating.  Go back to what you were doing.

  • Rewrites and Retirement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Stay tuned.

  • The Nebs

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

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

    Novelette

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

    Novella

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

    Novel

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

    The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

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

    Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Blind Spots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Vincent Van Gogh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The above has been an expression of personal opinion.

  • Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Bureaucracy.  I was, basically, fucked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Okay, end of rant. I feel marginally better.

  • A Little Bit About Writing

    I’ve been nattering on about politics and related matters for a while now.  It’s crazy-making because no matter how much sense you might make, or think you’re making, there are a lot of people who basically say “I don’t care, I want it my way!” and ignore everything else.

    So I thought I’d talk about writing.

    I’ve had a hell of a week in that regard.  Let me explain.

    Many folks already know that I had a major (I thought) computer issue earlier this week.  It happened this way.  During the really cold months of winter, rather than turn on the space heater I have in my office, I move my writing upstairs, on a laptop.  The change of venue often kicks loose some ideas, it’s a bit sunnier, and we save on the electric bill.  No real inconvenience, I basically save my work to a floppy (yes, a 3.5 inch floppy, Virginia, they are still made) and carry the floppy back downstairs to transfer the file to my main computer when the story is ready to either print out or submit, at which point I save it to the main hard drive and my handy external hard drive.  So a given file, in this scenario, is saved in four places.

    Monday morning was a perfect storm, so to speak.  I’d been working on a novella for about three weeks, a major rewrite, with someone waiting for it, and I finished it Sunday.  Monday morning, early, I made a couple of last-minute grace note touches, saved the final to the floppy, then told the laptop to save it all to its hard drive.  I took the floppy downstairs for the transfer.

    First problem.  Cannot open file.  The disc is corrupted.  I tried a couple of things, but no go.  So I grab a clean floppy, head back upstairs to make a new copy, only to find on arrival that the laptop is dead.  Inert.  A few pounds of useless plastic.

    Now, this is an ancient laptop, as these things go.  It was a gift from a friend to begin with and I use it seldom, although I have written most of two whole novels on it.  (When our first dog, Kory, was dying, I wrote my one and only Terminator novel on it in the living room, next to her, to keep her company.  I know, multiple ironies in that.)  It wasn’t new when I got it—it had Windows 95 on it—but it’s had a cushy life and hasn’t given me any trouble.  Till now.

    Panic, as they say, ensued.  After several more attempts to open that damn file, I resorted to profanity and insane rage against a universe that seemed out to get me.

    I posted my problem on Facebook and got the first of many bright glimmers.  People gave advice (although a lot of it centered around saving my work online, which requires technology I do not have with that particular laptop—it’s not connected or, in any practical sense, connectable), condolences, etc.  (Thank you all again, it was very kind and I needed the chin up boost.)

    A couple of friends called to offer their services.  Suggestions were made to call the Geek Squad.

    I called the Geek Squad, but the $300.00 service call fee stymied me.  I simply don’t have that kind of money just now to spend on spec, on a story that might not sell in the first place, etc.  And we are talking about one story.  Everything else was backed up.

    One friend offered to unship the hard drive and see about transferring its contents to another P.C.  I was set to do this—I would have dropped it off tonight—when another friend called to discuss it and made a simple suggestion.  “Did you pull the battery?”

    “It’s been plugged into the wall all this time, what difference would that make?”

    “Well, most laptops boot from the battery, even if they are hooked to AC.  Pull the battery and it might boot directly from AC.”

    I pulled the battery.  The thing came right back on.  Problem solved.  (Thanks again to Justin Olson.)

    I have two typewriters in the house.  I have my original Remington Noiseless and I have an IBM Selectric, which needs minor repair (which I now intend to get).  I can go right back to the so-called stone age if I feel I must, even though more and more markets are going to strictly email submissions.  But on paper, typed out, I only have to worry about fire or flood to lose the manuscript.

    However, I won’t go that far yet.

    So yesterday, I went back to the gym for the first time in two weeks (working steadily on that novella, in the groove, skipping all nonessential activity) and came home intending to get ready for the next story, and I get a rejection in the mail.  Snail mail, yes, from one of the few magazines still doing it the old fashioned way.  I had submitted the problem novella the day before, so I had made my goal of getting it finished and out the door before another rejection came in.

    Now I am sitting here procrastinating by writing this.  I have a piece of fiction upstairs that has been through three complete drafts already and I am about to gut it totally and do it from a completely different character’s point of view.  Why?  Because it hasn’t been working.  It doesn’t sing, it can’t dance, even though all the parts are there.  It is not wonderful.

    Two things when a story does this—either you have begun it in the wrong place or you are telling it from the wrong perspective.  The first is tactical.  The second is psychological.

    The most dramatic approach to story includes telling it from the perspective of the one or ones who have the most to lose.  The ones who are in the greatest danger, the ones risking the most, the ones who by virtue of just showing up will be in the heart of the conflict because the conflict is theirs.  This is hard to do.  It’s natural to avoid pain and discomfort and writers are no different, so often we pick a main character who is safe or at least safer than the others.  There’s a comfort about this character not getting badly hurt.  But it makes for flaccid fiction.

    So all week, given the mood I was in, I’ve been thinking about this story as it has been written and trying to find a way to make the main character really hurt.  And everything I come up with feels like artifice.

    This morning I wrote the first line from the viewpoint of another character.  The one who really has the most to lose.

    I then came here to write this, because I can already sense the knots I’m about to twist my psyche into writing about this guy.  And I’m avoiding—

    What?  Pain?  Not mine.  His?  Well…

    It’s kind of like bungee jumping.  You know it’s going to be exhilarating, but bringing yourself to take that first step can be very difficult.  Stepping off into nothing, trusting that the way down will bring you what you want—that’s counter intuitive.  Hell, that’s scary.

    But once you step off…

    Time to go back to the edge.