Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • Shaw

    Given the subject of the last post, I feel this is appropriate.  Add a little light to the dark.

    Tomorrow—June 23—is the 15th anniversary of the closing of Shaw Camera Shop.  I was there on the last day (and at least one day afterward) and saw it shut down.

    I grew up there.

    As I’ve noted, I became interested in photography when I was fifteen.  Dad gave me his vintage Canon rangefinder, bought me a small lab—Acura enlarger, a few trays, tongs, mixing bottles, a plastic film developing tank, a safelight—and I was off.  Interestingly, I now recall, we bought all the darkroom stuff at, of all places, Famous-Barr.  They had a complete photographic department then.

    Soon after I began making my first messes, photographically-speaking, we started hanging out at Shaw Camera.  It was close and had more goodies than the other close one, Jefferson Camera.  Besides which, we almost immediately took a liking to Gene and Earline.

    Physically, it filled the ground floor of a large two-story building near the intersection of Shaw and Vandeventer.  The corner building contained a liquor store—Bus Stop Liquors.  Catecorner across Vandeventer was Irv’s Good Food, which was immortalized in Glenn Savan’s novel, White Palace.  It was the classic greasy spoon diner.  The cook was an ageless fellow right out of a Woody Guthrie world named Earnie.  On the other two corners were gas stations, one of which closed down (the one directly across the street from the Shop) before I started working there.

    It was also right up the street from Missouri Botanical Gardens, which became a major customer.

    The neighborhood was old and, as they say, “in transition”, so for years it was a mix of urban yuppie and down-and-out Section 8.  Highway 44 was visible from the front window.

    The store part was bright—a long counter that turned in an L about midway in, with glass cabinets behind a central rack on which were photofinishing order envelopes, the phone, various catalogues, right next to a counter containing the bins for finished work and the cash register.  The back half contained two rows of shelf space on which one found supplies of all sorts.  When I first walked in there, it was a cornucopia of cool stuff.  If you wanted to start up in photography—the whole thing, shooting and printing—Shaw was the place to go.

    Along the right-hand wall, midway, you came to an alcove.  A door within opened to another large space which housed their collection of cameras and other assorted collectible equipment.  (The collection was world class and included an all-mahogany 8 X 10 view camera from the 1880s.  It drew the attention of serious collectors, including once Martin Barre of the band Jethro Tull, who wanted to buy it outright.  Earl wouldn’t come down enough for him, though.)  This room had three corked walls.  One was taken up with a white background against which Gene shot passport pictures.  The other two were used to hang pictures.   Customers could display their work.

    Proceeding down the center aisle, back in the main shop, you reached a wide access that could be barred by a heavy accordion steel gate.  They’d been robbed once.  Bad enough that the thieves stole camera from the shop, they had gone back into the lab and opened every single box of paper, exposing it all, putting the shop in serious trouble.  The cameras were insured, the material wasn’t.  The small area immediately through this access contained the lunch counter and the copy stand.  To the right were two doors—one to the bathroom, the next to the office.

    To the left was another wide access, which led to the lab space.

    The building had once been a bakery, so this entire back area was done in polished white brick.  (A great uncle of mine had actually worked in the bakery, in the 20s.)  A separate room had been built square in the center of this huge space, and inside that room was the darkroom.  Three enlargers, standing alongside tray set-ups.  Everything was done by hand.  No automated printing machines at all.

    At one time this section had been leased out to a film sound-striping operation, wherein the sound recording part of movie film was added to raw film.  This was a separate business from Shaw.  Part of the chemistry these folks used was carbon tetrachloride.  They spilled some one day—a whole bottle.  They took their time cleaning it up and the fumes drifted into where Earl was working.  At that time she wore contact lenses.  The carbon tet vapors his the lenses and shattered them.  Earl had no corneas after that and when we knew he she wore very thick glasses through which her eyes looked truly weird.  That she could see at all was amazing, that she could see as well as she could defied reason.  The film-striping company was asked to leave after that.

    Just for reference, here is an old photograph from a newspaper article about the shop and Earline, from 1964.

    earl-copy.jpg

    This was before I knew her and before the accident.

    I went to work for them in 1972 as part of the first Distributive Education program at my school.  Actually, it was before that, in the summer.  I’d hoped to keep the job all that year.  But I was a terrible employee.  At 17, I simply didn’t know what I was supposed to do.  Not the lack of training, that was a given.  But the idea of holding a job, of being a self-starter, of being responsible—I didn’t get it.  So they fired me.  I deserved it.

    I had three more jobs between then and when they rehired me in January of 1976.  By then I’d figured out how to be an employee and Earl took a second chance on me.  Apparently it paid off, because I worked there until June of 1995.

    Most of our work at the time was custom.  Fine prints for particular people.  We did only black & white.  Color work we jobbed out and we had a couple of labs for that, most of which are gone now.  For the amateur photofinishing there was Rainbo Color.  Custom transparencies, Master Slide.  They later added custom prints as well.  Eventually, there was a lab that did cibachrome prints, Novacolor.  And, of course, there was the Great Yellow Father—Kodak.  But we did the black & white.

    A couple years after I went back to work for them, we got into the yearbook business.  For a few years we were printing all the work for the three largest yearbook photographers in St. Louis—Vincent Price, Hal Wagner, Lyle Ramsey (I think, memory may be playing tricks with me)—and had to add new equipment and hire new people.  Earl was still lab manager, but more and more the daily management was left to me, while Gene handled all the retail.

    As I mentioned before, they adopted me.  When they realized how serious I was becoming about writing, Earline gave me an IBM Selectric for a Christmas present.  (Later she gave us our first computer, a first-generation MacIntosh, which proved…inconvenient.)  Annual bonuses were normal.  Trips to the country regular.

    We laughed all day in that place, even though we worked our butts off.

    When I started seeing Donna and introduced her to them, they took to her immediately and folded her into the family.  Donna used to ride the bus to and from her job and she got out early enough to come by the shop.  She would come back at the point in the day when all the prints had to be dried.  This was in the days, still, of what we used to call “real paper’—fiber-based, not resin-coated—and we used an enormous drum dryer.  You’d lay a row of prints on the apron as it moved toward the polished ferrotyping drum, against which they would be squeegied.  The drum, which was a good four feet in diameter, turned slowy and by the time they came round they would be dry and fall off into a tray.  Donna would just come on into the back and start drying prints.

    I think back to that time now and find a thick chord of nostalgia.  Good times.

    I worked there through an expansion that saw us making quite a bit of money.  We started doing the b&w for several camera stores through Rainbo Color Lab.  For a time I think we printed every black and white image sold in St. Louis.  The roll-call of the stores is telling about how much has changed.  Jefferson Camera, O.J.’s, Clayton Camera, Kreumenacher’s, Vazi’s, St. Louis Photo, Dicor, The Shutter Bug, Sappington Camera, Creve Coeur Camera, Schiller’s…

    Of the bunch, I think Clayton Camera still exists and Creve Coeur and Schiller’s, all very much changed.

    Earline had had her first bout with cancer in the mid-Sixties—uterine.  When I went to work for them the second time, shortly thereafter, it came back as breast cancer.  She fought that off.  But then it came back again as a weird manifestation of lung cancer and that was when she began to lose.  It metastisized and when it reached the brain she died.  I occasionally still have dreams about her.

    She’d started as a street photographer at 14.  She was self-educated.  When I went to work there in 1976, she was learning Russian.  Just for the hell of it.

    The demise of Shaw Camera Shop still causes a touch of bitterness.  It didn’t have to happen.  I’d offered a number of ways to change with the times, most of which, for reasons I won’t detail here but which were profoundly short-sighted and stupid, were ignored by the new owners.  Little by little, customers went away and we didn’t replace them.  Eventually, it just couldn’t be sustained.

    Today if you go by there you’ll find it’s home to a lawn ornament/antique shop called Gringo Jones.  They’ve gutted the insides, but, as I finally worked up the nerve to go through there last year, you can still see where everything was, a kind of archaeological trace.  The liquor store is gone, too, but that had closed down while we were still open and was taken over by a botanical shop called The Bug Store, which is still there.

    Irv’s Diner is long gone and where one of the gas stations was is now the forecourt of a research center owned by the Garden.  Where the other gas station had been is a parking lot, also owned by the Garden.  It’s a thriving neighborhood now.

    Like many good things, I didn’t realize how much I liked working there until long after I didn’t anymore.  I haven’t even touched on the wide range of characters we had for customers, a catalogue of unique people I doubtless mine in my writing.  Many if not most brought smiles when they came in.

    Occasionally, up on The Hill, St. Louis’s designated Italian neighborhood, you can still walk into a restaurant or a store and see a print we did hanging on the wall. One irony was that after two years of trying to break into publishing novels (and failing) I had to go back to a dayjob.  I got one very quickly, at Advance Photographic, which was less than half a mile up Vandeventer from where Shaw had been.  To my surprise and amusement, about half their black & white customers were my old customers.  So for a brief time there was a bit of continuity.

    But that’s gone, too, now.  All that remain are a lot of photographs, memories…and a very substantial piece of who I am.

  • Dad

    My dad.  I have a lot of mixed feelings about him, as every child does even if they don’t admit it.  Most of mine are positive.

    To be clear, he is still alive.  He’ll be 80 next month.

    In his own way, he encouraged me in just about everything I ever did.  The problem usually was that I didn’t appreciate his encouragement.  Partly this stemmed from a profound misunderstanding between us of the reason for his encouragement—or perhaps I should say the purpose behind it.  See, Dad was a Depression Baby.  Even in today’s economically stressed climate, most people born during or after World War II really don’t grasp all that meant.  For one thing it didn’t mean the same thing for everyone.  But for everyone of that generation, it meant something that drove them to make sure their children and grandchildren never had to live through such a time, or such conditions.

    The irony of this—which I think was largely successful—is that the children of these people can’t grok the essential nature of their fears.  Oh, you can think your way to it—after decades of wrestling with some of this I believe I can describe it and write about—but at the time of life when they are trying their damnedest to both impart their values and protect loved ones from the severities of the Depression, there is a profound mismatch of perception and apprehension.  My parents both wanted me to be safe from what they went through—but they also wanted me to share the value they placed on money and caution and common sense and success.  To succeed in one meant the failure in the other.  I did not for years understand why my dad got so angry with me over how I went about choosing what to do with my time.

    For what we had, my parents lavished me with largesse.  I took an interest in art, materials appeared.  I took an interest in music, a 1964 Thomas organ arrived in the house, state of the art with a Leslie speaker built in.  I took an interest in photography, a lab arrived, then cameras, then more cameras, then supplies.

    And there was Dad, peering over my shoulder, encouraging and sometimes driving me to master these things.  It often led to horrible days of screaming and crying and nastiness.  He could not tolerate mediocre work or ambivalence or sloppiness or…

    Or the fickle attention span of a child.

    What I did not understand until about a decade ago was this: all these things showed up, underwritten, sponsored, encouraged because he was trying to make sure I had a skill by which to earn my way in life.  Whatever I wanted to do, he wanted me to do it at a level where I could make money at it.  All of it was aimed at a career.

    I was a kid.  I wanted to play.  We ended up dealing with each other at crossed purposes.

    Had I known this then, I suspect I would have kept my interests to myself.  I did finally do exactly that when I took up writing.  That was the one thing I did not share with Dad.

    But all the haranguing and yelling and insistence on quality that had preceded it ended up going into the work on the page.

    I can say now that all he did I know he did out of love.  He was trying in the best way he knew how to protect me.  To make sure I’d be all right.  He just neglected to tell me that’s what he was trying to do.  I accepted all the things he and my mother provided as any child might, as expressions of indulgence.  As toys.  And I played.

    Unfortunately, none of what he tried to help me do came to fruition in the manner he expected.  He might have been happier had I become a studio musician, but learning to play in the traditional manner (lessons, constant practice of boring music, etc) left me cold and frustrated.  I didn’t really start playing well until I got involved in a rock’n’roll band and of course that was music he couldn’t stand.  (Even so, when he realized what was going on, he and mom actually went looking at portable keyboards and started learning what I would need if it turned into something.  I nipped that in the bud by being secretive about it.  No way did I want another two or three thousand dollar millstone around my neck.  But they would have done it.)

    The photography turned out to be different.  He pretty much left me alone to pursue it the way I wanted to.  And in my usual approach, I jumped head first into the most difficult parts, ignoring the tedious basics.  Sure I wasted a lot of film, a lot of paper and chemistry, but in two and half years I was doing fairly high-quality work.

    As an example, here’s a portrait I did of Dad that actually got some outside attention while I was still in high school.

    dad-website.jpg

    This piece actually got entered into a state art contest.  It made it all the way up to second place at that level and one result was to change the mind of the head of the art department about the value of photography.

    At the time this image was made, Dad posed for a lot of pictures.  He was still working as a machinist.  Hard, intense labor at the time.  These were the days before numerical control machines.  He had to do the calculations by hand, load the steel stock by hand, operate the machines by hand.  He was immensely strong at the time.  He’d come home covered in sweat and grime, shower, sit, eat dinner.  And then ask what I’d been up to and did I need help with anything.

    He has always been there ready to help.  So what if he got the method wrong?  It wasn’t all wrong and the results were nothing to complain about (at least, I hope not).

    After getting out of the shop—because he was the only one to volunteer to take the training when the company he worked for bought their first numerical control lathe—he worked just as hard to ascend a management ladder and ended up head of an engineering department with nearly a hundred engineers under him.  He built an entire factory from the ground up for a single project and came in under budget and ahead of schedule.  He taught himself four computer languages and learned the complex ins-and-outs of procurement for an international corporation.

    He was retired—asked to do so, offered a big bribe to leave—because, despite all this, he only had a high school diploma.

    As I said, he’ll be 80 soon.  Physically, he’s much diminished.  But the mind is still as sharp as ever and he still challenges me.  And once the stories and novels started appearing, he was not at all shy about bragging on my behalf.  (“I don’t know much about this literary stuff,” he told me once, “but your mother does and she’s says you’re a damn good writer.”  Which meant he thought so, too.)

    I found this photograph recently, scanned it, cleaned it up a bit.  I thought I’d share a bit about my dad.  He was and is Something Else.  I love him.

  • Resume du jour

    It’s June.  A smidgen over a year ago (May 29th, 2009) Advance Photographics closed its doors and I have been unemployed since.

    In that time I have written half of the sequel to my alternate history novel, Orleans, and a complete new novel, a murder mystery called  The Drowned Doll.  I’ve written blog posts for both here and Dangerous Intersection and occasionally for my MySpace page (which is getting more and more neglected in favor of Facebook, through which I can stream this blog).  I wrote book reviews for a good chunk of 2009 until two of my review outlets basically dried up and went away.

    I’m also now, as I’ve mentioned before, beginning to learn Photoshop in a meaningful way and toying with entering the vast realm of full digital photography.

    Along with that I have continued to serve on the board of the Missouri Center for the Book and have become its president again as of this past March.  My life is nothing if not bubbling with activity.  None of which, however, is paying me a damn thing.

    We bought a new bed.  After nearly 30 years with a waterbed, age and comfort demand something else, so we replaced the king size freeflow with a high end Serta (queen  size) and have thereby also gained much floor space in the bedroom, something we’ve been chafing over the lack of for some time.

    Our stove finally died.  With a great brilliant spark, the control panel for the ancient monstrosity announced forced retirement, so we must now buy a new stove.  This is a mixed thing, both an occasion for celebration and a pain in the butt for the untimely expense.  We’re also getting some painting done.

    I had to repair the ceiling in my office.

    I am attempting to write a new short story.  I may have mentioned that some time in the last decade, since devoting myself almost entirely to novels, I’ve misplaced my ability to do them and now I wish to hunt that ability down and capture it again.  I have a deadline, which helps somewhat.

    Like so many today, my job prospects are dim.  What I spent 35 years doing is an obsolete skill (traditional, wet process photofinishing).  My admittedly impressive publishing oeuvre does not seem to impress people looking for editors or technical writers.  My academic credentials, being nonexistent, limit me in terms of getting interviews.  I am in a position wherein I must make my writing work.  I must.  I want to, there’s no question there, but with four completed novels currently unsold (due to factors of which I have no concept) and no ready ideas on how to move any of this forward, I’m in an awkward position.  As each of the novels currently in circulation are attached to series, all of them will entail sequels when they sell.  It would seem unwise for me to write yet another novel at this point.

    So.  I’m open to suggestions.  Right now I’m going to go to the gym.  Before I go, though, I thought I’d go ahead an post my resume.  Just in case anyone may read this who may be interested.

    Have a nice day.

    ____________________________________________________________________________________

    Mark W. Tiedemann
    P.O. Box 160160 St. Louis, MO 63116
    mwtiedemann@earthlink.net
    ____________________________________________________________________________________

    Strategic Planning                    Communications
    Organizational Development                Press Relations
    Public Affairs & Presentation                Public Speaking
    Staff Recruitment                    Workshop Management

    ____________________________________________________________________________________

    Participated in the determination of organizational policies regarding issues of program requirements and benefits, as well as longterm goals.

    Organized public events, including speaker liaison, facilities, and scheduling.

    Established relationships with other agenices and organizations to facilitate common goals.

    Directed activities of professional and technical staff and volunteers.

    Spoken to community groups to explain organizational goals, policies, and programs.

    Recruited, interviewed, and hired or signed up volunteers and staff.

    Represented organizations in relations with governmental and media institutions.

    Prepared written presentations, including newsletter material, in support of organizational goals.

    Oversaw board meetings, setting agenda, and directing input from members to facilitate optimum productivity, and establishing policies consistent with the achievement of organizational goals.

    ____________________________________________________________________________________

    Published author since 1990.  Ten novels, fifty-five short stories in various national publications, book reviews, occasional articles.  Bibliography available on request.

    Missouri Center for the Book (http://books.missouri.org) .  Elected president in 2005, I have worked to revitalize the organization and have successfully increased its board membership, public visibility, and overseen the establishment of the new Poet Laureate position for the state of Missouri.  Prior to becoming president, I developed and produced a variety of public programs for the organization.

    Advance Photographics: 1997 to the present.  Duties include all aspects of traditional photofinishing, with an emphasis on b & w processing, color printing, and copy work.

    Self employed freelance writer: August 1995 to July 1997

    Shaw Camera Shop: December 1975 to July 1995.  Custom b & w photofinishing, all aspects, including lab manager from 1982 onward.

  • Myself As Antique

    We started cleaning the garage this weekend past.  Made a lot of headway.  We tackled boxes which we haven’t touched since we moved in, almost 19 years ago.  Time flies when you have other things to do.

    This morning I continued.  There were a few boxes of assorted odds and ends that I needed to cull through.  In doing so, I found this photograph.mark-1977.JPG

    Donna has only seen me without a beard once.  She didn’t like the effect, mainly because int he years during which I’d had a beard I somehow misplaced my chin.  Anyway.  This was back when I was a trim young fella on the make, as it were.

    The historical context of this photograph is rich.  Firstly, it is the young me.  That’s about as interesting as that gets.  Secondly, the setting.  Shaw Camera Shop.  4468 Shaw Avenue, St. Louis.  It had been in business since the late Forties and it was, hands down, my favorite job.  I was the lab tech and later lab manager.  I worked there for 20 years, made fast friends (many of whom are gone) and played out some of the great dramas of my life partly within its confines.  It was a black & white custom lab and at its peak we were doing the printing for several color labs, most of the independent camera stores in St. Louis (of which almost none remain) and three of the local yearbook companies.  Lots of pictures.  This shot shows me behind the front counter, the film cabinet behind me.

    Thirdly, the print itself is of modest historical interest.  It was shot on Kodak Instant Print film.  There was a time when Polaroid held the monopoly on that kind of technology.  You wanted to take pictures without bothering to send the film to a lab, you used Polaroid.  Kodak muscled in while Polaroid suspended production during a strike.  They—Polaroid—subcontracted the manufacturing to Kodak till the strike ended.  During that time, Kodak got a chance to really take Polaroid’s process apart and a year or so after Polaroid resumed production, Kodak announced a new product—instant print film.  They claimed it was all their own.  Polaroid sued.  And won.  So this print is an example of a short-lived phenomenon.  (It wasn’t very good—I’ve put some effort into making this one easier to look at and sharper, but there’s only so much you can do.)

    Shaw Camera Shop is long gone.  The owners for whom I worked, who I loved like a second family, had problems—Earline had battled cancer for decades and finally lost and Gene just didn’t want to continue anymore.  I was just beginning my writing career and knew if I bought the business I’d have to give that up.  So Gene sold it to someone who was ill-suited to running it and he ruined it.

    Today, the building houses an antique store, Gringo Jones.  Last year was the first time I’d set foot in the place since a few weeks after it closed up as a lab.  The new owners pretty much gutted the interior to suit their needs, but I could still walk unerringly through to where everything had been.  I doubt I’ll do that again, though.

    Anyway, it was a pleasant surprise to find this.  I have other pictures of Shaw and myself from that time.  I didn’t, of course, realize just how much I liked that job until it was gone.  But the memories are still there.

  • Zelazny and the Perils of Reading at a Young Age

    Recently I started reading Roger Zelazny’s  Amber series.  I’ve been hearing about this for decades, how great it is, and till now it’s one of the few things of Zelazny’s that I’ve resisted reading.

    See, it’s pretty much fantasy, in form if not conceit.  I can see a way to describe the world he created here in quantum mechanical terms and render it SF, but frankly it’s a typical sword and sibling fantasy.  Genealogy and combat.

    But it’s Zelazny, so while reading it one is having a good time.  He was always dependable that way, he was never dull.  This, however, is not his major work.

    But it got me thinking about him again.

    Roger Zelazny caused me, as a kid, to defend myself.

    I attended a parochial school—Lutheran, to be exact.  This was a peculiar situation since my parents, at the time, were more or less Mormon.  The choice of Emmaus Lutheran School came about through a combination of idiotic districting restrictions in the public schools, which would have sent me to a school several miles away when there was one only five blocks away, and their general dissatisfaction with the public school system.  You see, I was a poor student.  They thought it was perhaps a disciplinary problem, one which the public schools, at that time, were by law not allowed to address.  Corporal punishment had been banned in the schools.  (Of course, this didn’t matter to some teachers: I had witnessed a student beaten and humiliated by a gym coach when I was in the first grade.)  They assumed—and I suppose this was true to some extent—that I was playing when I should have been paying attention and that my attention could be gotten by threat of spanking.

    (The reality was less than and more than their surmise.  In truth—and I can only say this in hindsight—public school damaged my interest in learning.  My birthday is in October, roughly five to six weeks into the school year.  When my mother first tried to enroll me, I was only four years old.  They wouldn’t take me, despite the immanence of my turning five.  I had to wait a year.  When I turned six, they pulled me out of kindergarten and put me in first grade, “where I belonged”.  The first grade teacher expected me—and the half dozen others who suffered the same fate—to simply catch up, without any remedial tutoring.  Needless to say, this put me off the whole thing.  That and the fact that classes were boring combined to make me a rather bad student.)

    In fact, I only ever received a spanking in school once, and that for something I didn’t do.  Nevertheless, the threat was there and if this contributed to my somewhat better performance, then so be it.  Personally, I don’t think so.  For one, my grades didn’t improve all that much.  For another, the class sizes were smaller and we did get more attention from the teachers.

    Along with this, though, came religious instruction.

    Somewhere between my entry into this school in third grade and graduation I became an insatiable reader, especially of science fiction.

    Reading alone would have made me odd.  But, like all misfits, my peculiarities came in multiples.  I was a bit puny, always had been, and abhorred pain, which made me an easy target for bullies.  In time I was the brunt of most class jokes.  In fifth grade I needed glasses.  Not only were they black horn-rims, they were bifocals.  To make matters worse, I didn’t like—or understand—cars, sports, or rock’n’roll.  Socially, I was a cipher.  Today you’d say nerd.  (No pocket protector, though; never had one of those.)  But on top of all that, I read.  All the time, whenever I could.  At recess I’d sneak upstairs to a spot on the stage I’d found where no one could find me, and read.  I never was found, even though teachers were looking for me, too.

    Needless to say, I got teased about the reading.

    My best friend sat in front of me in seventh grade.  Greg was very tall for his age and was one of the two boys in the school that no one ever challenged.  We’re still friends.  I tried to get him to read some of my books, but none of them really interested him.  He never questioned my reading, though, until one day his curiosity overwhelmed him.

    I just happened to be reading Lord of Light at the moment Greg chose to turn around and ask  “Why do you read so much?”

    I just looked at him.  I have no idea what went through my mind, but I can make some good guesses.  The thing to say—the truth, which, as good christians, we were taught was next to God—would have been “Because I like it.  It’s fun.”  But this was demonstrably Not True, since very few others of my peers thought it was fun.  Reading was hard, like homework.  Why would you do it if you didn’t have to?  Besides, another good christian virtue was to avoid things that had no other function than pleasure.  We did a lot of things because they were “just” fun, but we knew better than to admit to them.  It was okay to have fun as long as some other, more salient purpose was simultaneously fulfilled.  So I said “Well, I learn things.”

    Greg looked skeptical.  “Like what?  I mean, what are you learning from—what is that?  Lord of Light?”

    “Uh…”  I gazed at the cover of the book, an Avon edition with a black cover and a neat little illustration that looked semi-Indian.  What was I learning from it?  I grabbed at something.  “Well, I’m learning about the Hindu religion.”

    Greg laughed and snorted derisively.  He snatched the book from my hand and studied it.  “This is science fiction.  Why would you be learning about Hindus in this?”

    I was running out of things to say.  I reached for the book and he held it annoyingly out of reach.  He started reading the cover blurb out loud, laughing, mispronouncing words.

    Attracting attention.

    Mr. Obermann, our teacher—and the school principal—suddenly snatched it from Greg’s hand.  Mr. Obermann looked about ninety, but in a George C. Scott kind of robust way.  He glared at us for a few seconds and returned to his desk.

    I watched him for a time—it was supposed to be a study period—and saw him looking the book over.  He frowned deeply and looked at me.  Then he called me to the front of the class.

    “What is this?” he asked, tapping the book.

    “A novel.”

    “What about?”

    Not again.  I have since learned that many very good books, when reduced to paragraph long descriptions, sound ridiculous, but I didn’t quite understand this then.  I tried to explain.  He cut me off, opened a desk drawer, and dropped it in.

    He did not return it to me at the end of the day.  When I asked him about it he said something about material I had no business reading.

    So I told my parents about it.

    My mother took the time to come to school the next day.  She insisted I sit in on her meeting with Mr. Obermann.  She wanted to know why I had not had my book returned and he started explaining about the unsuitability of the subject matter and so on.  Mom interrupted.

    “You’re telling me you don’t want him learning anything about other religions?”

    “This is a Lutheran school.  That’s what we teach here.”

    “I see.  Do you also teach intolerance?”

    Mr. Obermann reddened.  “Mrs. Tiedemann—”

    “I’ll thank you not to censor my son’s reading.  If he can’t handle it, he won’t read it.”

    I was sent back to class then, so I don’t know what else transpired.  My book was returned with an admonition not to bring it to school anymore.

    Given how uncomfortable Mr. Obermann became, I made a practice over the next several months of bringing other, hopefully radical books to class.  And reading them.  In retrospect I suppose my parents were right.  I needed a strict, disciplinary environment in which to improve my learning skills.  Thanks to Zelazny, I learned an important lesson.  It took me years to realize exactly what it was, but the seed was planted there.

    If someone tries to make you defend what you read—or that you read—remember that slogan from Harley-Davidson:  If I have to explain it, you wouldn’t understand.  Just give them a book and tell them to try it out.

  • Assorted Updates

    It’s Tuesday.

    I spent a good deal of yesterday cleaning house, catching up on necessary but boring details, and talking to someone about photography.  Check this out.  Very nice work and Jennifer is very knowledgeable.  I put a permanent link to her site on the sidebar over there on the right.

    Digital.  It has changed more than the way we write, get news, or play.

    In the midst of all this, I may have neglected to report here that I am once more president on the Missouri Center for the Book.  I suspect there is a bit of masochism involved in this, although on whose part I’m not prepared to speculate.  Tomorrow I head back to the state capitol, Jefferson City, to participate in the Letters About Literature Awards.  This year is an especially good one for Missouri because…

    …we have a national winner in this year.  Imani Jackson, a 6th grader at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Jefferson City, was chosen as a National Honor Winner in Level I, for her letter to Maya Angelou about the poem Phenomenal Woman.  This is a big deal.  This program is now in all 50 states and often the number of letters tops a thousand in a given state, sometime going to two thousand or more.  Nationally, two Winners and four National Honor Winners are chosen at each level, in addition to the state awards. Imani will receive a $100 Target gift card and a $1,000 grant for the library of her choice as a prize.

    In the last couple of years some of the data coming out of studies concerning reading has been startling and encouraging.  Sharp rises, even among those demographics often seen as “troublesome.”  People in general are reading for pleasure more, and a lot of young people are.  One might jokingly quip about Twilight and Harry Potter being the main cause of the jump, but I don’t think so.  Those books may be “gateway” books.  The thing is, these levels are sustained.

    So I’m entering this last year of my participation in the Center with some optimism that the work we do, collectively, is having an effect.  (Yes, this is my last year—our by-laws require board members to leave after nine years, and for me that’s next spring.)  What I’m hoping to achieve this year is to get into place all the things I’d wanted to do last time.  Independent funding, the new website, maybe begin a new membership program, and solidly establish the annual Celebrations so they can grow into a state book fair.  We’ll see.

    It would be helpful if I could get a book sold in the meantime…

  • Reading Lists

    I started keeping lists of the books I’d read when I was fifteen.  I don’t know how many people used to do this, it may be a habit peculiar to myself, but the list has come to comprise a catalogue of sorts as time has passed and hundreds of titles become thousands and memory runs into itself.  I stopped doing this between eighteen and twenty-three for reasons forgotten and probably never very clear.  Now, of course, there are reading list websites, like Shelfari and Goodreads, so I suppose it’s more common than I once imagined.

    That first list, though, held surprises, one in particular that has become part of an on-going internal debate.  It concerns Robert A Heinlein.

    The name can’t be spoken anymore without certain responses, either pro or con, among avid science fiction readers.  Even a few people I have known who read very little SF have read Heinlein and have an opinion.  Interestingly enough, the non-SF readers with opinions about Heinlein echo my second opinion about him, which is not—at least, not directly—political.

    I didn’t like Heinlein when I was fifteen.  (That is not the opinion, but bears directly upon it.)  I was by then acquiring tastes in reading which I would carry with me for the rest of my life, for good or bad, and when I made that first list it was partly with the view to determine who represented those tastes.  Of course, I didn’t really think about that clearly then, but in an intuitive fashion that lay behind the project.  Who had I read a lot of and secondly why had I read a lot of them?

    I’d read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  To this day, though, I can’t read the Tarzan novels.  I first encountered ERB in the Mars novels, the John Carter series, and I had read most of them by then.  Loved John Carter.  (Not so much Carson.)  And, of course, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne represented a substantial portion of the list.  I had also read a lot of Doc Smith, someone I adored then and can’t get through now.  Among the rest of what I then consciously thought of as a separate genre, the other science fiction writers I’d read made up a mixed bag.  I had read Piers Anthony—the earliest one of his I had found was Sos the Rope—and I had read Isaac Asimov, by then all his Foundation novels, I, Robot, Pebble In The Sky, and a couple of the “Lucky Starr” books.  Among the others of whom I’d read more than one title were Ray Bradbury, Gordon R. Dickson, Keith Laumer, Alan E. Nourse, Roger Zelazny, and Poul Anderson.  Others, I’m sure, most especially Andre Norton, who, it seemed, had written more books than god, but for the most part my list consisted of single authors.  Bob Shaw, Robert Silverberg, John Brunner, Avram Davidson, Martin Caidin, Robert Sheckley, and so on.  It was quite a list, actually, with quite a few titles destined to become, if they weren’t already, classics.

    But I had read more Robert A. Heinlein than any other single author.

    This puzzled me, because I remember at the time not liking his stuff very much.  Not being overly disciplined, I tended to avoid things that I disliked, and since no one was holding a gun to my head to make me read SF—or anything else for that matter—it baffled me that I’d worked my way through so much of this guy’s stuff that really put me off.

    I hadn’t read many of his so-called Juveniles—Have Space Suit, Will Travel sticks most clearly in my mind, as well as The Rolling Stones.  No, mostly I’d read his earlier novels, like Beyond This Horizon, Sixth Column, Methusaleh’s Children, Orphans In The Sky, The Door Into Summer, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Puppet Masters, and Revolt In 2100.  I’d read a lot of what he’d published in the Sixties and when I was fifteen I read Stranger In A Strange Land.  (I’d tried to read that one even earlier, when I was eleven or so, because it, like all the rest of science fiction in the library, was shelved in the Children’s Section, no kidding.  But it was, truly, out of my ability.) Each time I picked one up, though, I remembered it being a struggle to get through.  My head felt caught in a vice, my throat burned, and I couldn’t wait to get from chapter end to chapter end so I could put it down.  Until then, if anyone had asked, I would have declared Heinlein at the bottom of my list of favorites.

    Part of the problem—a problem I have to this day, although it is no longer an impediment like it was then—was the number of Heinlein novels written in first person.  I didn’t like first person.  I still prefer third person.  First person puts me off.  I like to imagine myself in the title roles and every time I encountered that declarative “I” it let me know that it was someone else’s story.  For me, despite what so many wide heads claim, it is not “more intimate” but less.  Still, Heinlein didn’t write in first person all the time, not even, I think, most of the time.

    No, something else annoyed me about Heinlein then.  With perfect hindsight I can tell you what it was.

    He made me think.

    Critical thinking is not natural.  Look around you.  I’ll risk sounding like Heinlein here, but all one need do is look at the proliferation of pseudoscience and mystical nonsense to recognize this fact.  Everyone thinks, certainly, but critical thinking is a particular form and not easily learned, nor natural.  This is a paradox when it comes to reading, because all manner of interpretive mechanism in the mind comes into play and thinking, critical thinking, is on some level essential, but very few novels take the time to show you the process.  Most novels bury that part and concentrate on just telling a good story and letting all the gears and such remain hidden.
    Heinlein didn’t let a reader off the hook so easily.  Heinlein’s characters, for good or ill, were almost all consciously engaged in the processes of their stories.  Most of them were dynamically self-reflective.  They confronted problems and, step by step, thought their way through it on the page, so that you, trapped in the momentum of the story, had to think right along with them to the conclusion of the problem.

    It gave me headaches.  I didn’t like that.

    But I read more of them by the time I was fifteen than any other single author.

    The irony, of course, is that this didactic approach offered in itself the very tools one could later use to realize how flawed Heinlein’s own works became.  To my mind, whatever else Heinlein may have been or what he has been labeled since, he was a true subversive.

  • Outgrowing Illusions

    I met my first real live, honest-to-goodness science fiction writer when I was twelve.  It was a sobering experience.  Several illusions dissipated in a cloud of reality and it has contoured my thinking about writers in general ever since—unjustly, since the illusions banished had really little to do with writing.

    Children tend to take things at face value, approaching life with a literalness that is too often confused with naivete.  Perhaps this is due to the way in which a child’s expectations—often of the most sophisticated construction, like fiction—collide so painfully with reality.

    Whatever the cause, I went to Carpenter Branch Public Library with a head full of expectations, most of which were based with tortuous logic on the artifacts singularly important to me up to that point—television and books.  My father had seen the notice in the newspaper a week earlier and told me about it, knowing full well my love of science fiction and my complete disregard for newspapers.  (To me, then, the only useful part of a paper was the movie section or, on the weekend, the tv guide.  Oh, yes, the comics, but even these failed to hold my attention.  I had comic books in genres absent from the daily comics page.  At the profoundly serious age of twelve I believed that comics intended only to be laughed at were for kids.)

    The evening of The Event, a week night, saw me being dropped off at the library by my mother.  I was to wait when it was over if she hadn’t returned from the supermarket.

    Carpenter Branch Library is, still, a rather Gothic structure of granite resembling slightly a English castle or some American architect’s idea of one.  It’s blocky and solid and very serious-looking.  There were then two sections.  (It has since undergone a major reconstruction and while it has the same basic idea, the two sections have been combined into a single space and some of the charm has been lost.)  The main building housed the “adult” library.  A smaller annex, reached by way of a short hallway with stained glass windows, was the childrens section.  Interestingly, all the science fiction in the library was shelved here, right along with Winnie-the-Pooh, Encyclopedia Brown, and others.  There was fantasy elsewhere, but I knew next to nothing about that.  Lin Carter hadn’t even begun his Adult Fantasy series for Ballantine.

    About a dozen, maybe fifteen of us gathered for The Event.  I knew none of the other kids.  No one from my school had come, which was just as well as far as I was concerned.  It was obvious several of the others knew each other.  I was asked a couple of times about favorite books and authors and had I read much of tonight’s speaker, but I was inordinately shy and my responses did not invite further conversation.

    Chairs had been set out and a librarian asked us to take seats, our guest would be out shortly.  We settled down and waited and finally he came out of an office to one side.

    My expectations of the world…well, I certainly expected to grow up to be very different than I saw myself then.  I was small, rather puny, and had been an easy, perpetual target for class bullies since I’d been in school.  I took comfort in the fables of empowerment in which I immersed myself.  One of the reasons I loved science fiction then, though I did not consciously understand this, was that much of it depicted worlds in which physical prowess was all but superfluous.  I did, however, read plenty that had to do with just such prowess.  I watched a lot of it on tv, loved movies about such characters, and had unfortunately built an image of the creators that conformed to their characters.  Even then I had stirrings of desire to one day be a Writer and of course I would be a writer like one of these, my idols, who were the Gray Lensman, Lazarus Long, Ned Land, the Dorsai, the Legionnaires of Space.

    Out stepped the first writer I had ever seen “in the flesh” and all my illusions died.

    I asked no questions that night.  I spent most of the session trying not to let my disappointment show.  Thick glasses, portly, no chin to speak of, and wearing an ordinary suit and tie.  I don’t remember a single thing he said.

    What I do remember was his enthusiasm.  It was familiar.  I understood it.  He loved science fiction.

    Over the next several weeks I rewrote him in my imagination.  He received a make-over.  But more important, it sank in past all the other nonessentials that here was an adult—a grown-up, dull, boring, responsible—who loved science fiction.  Loved it!  All the other adults I knew either didn’t understand it or thought it was a waste of time.  One of my teachers actually opined that it was somehow blasphemous because it suggested that we weren’t Jehovah’s one and only single most important creation.  In fact, most of my peers thought I was weird for reading the stuff.  Oh, they liked the movies and the tv shows, but books?  (To be fair, many of them would have found reading for pleasure regardless of genre a singularly bizarre idea—these were largely blue-collar kids who pretty much regarded school as something they had to “get through” before they could do what they wanted, and reading was for sissies.  The fact that I read was bad no matter what.  That it was science fiction was just sauce for the goose.)

    As time passed I stripped away everything else about that night and kept the one thing of value gripped tightly.  It was a validating experience.  I wasn’t weird or broken or from another planet.  And I could look forward to an adulthood in which I could still love science fiction.  It was possible.  After all, I’d met an adult who loved it.

  • Beginnings of a Lifelong (Addiction) Love

    When I became infected by literary influenza (a longterm, chronic condition treatable
    by a steady diet of words) I had four sources of books.  The library, of course, both the one at school and the public one; the books my mother had bought through the Doubleday Book Club and had stored in boxes in the basement; the Scholastic Book Club at school; and Leukens’ Pharmacy around the corner from my house.

    At first my reading tended to be omnivorous, with strong leanings toward books upon
    which favorite films had been based.  But these weren’t that easily obtainable then.  Jules
    Verne and H.G. Wells were the most prominent examples—they along with many other
    writers whose works comprise the category Classics.  My mother’s collection contained
    mostly contemporary mainstream—contemporary to her youth and late adolescence, writers we seldom hear of these days.  Sometimes I wonder if any of them will be read in centuries to come and which, if any, will become the basis of new canonical debates.  Some were prominent writers at one time: Paul Gallico, Frank Yerby, Kathleen Winsor, Mildred Savage, Paul Horgan, Edison Marshall, Norah Lofts.  I haven’t seen their names on anything, reprint or otherwise, for a long time.  I went to a parochial school, so the books in that library were limited by the strictures of religious sensibilities.  As to the Scholastic Book Club, it seems to me now that they consistently underestimated the sophistication of its customers.  Still, I made considerable use of it.  Flyers were passed around in class periodically with an order form attached.  After a couple years, it got so the orders came in two boxes.  One contained the books everyone else ordered, the other box was all mine.

    There was very little science fiction available through these sources.  Even the public
    library I went to had little at first.

    But Mr. Leukens stocked the stuff.

    Summer days soon entailed almost daily walks down the block, around the corner, up
    to the next intersection, and across the street to the pharmacy.  This was the real thing.  He even had a soda jerk and you could buy honest-to-goodness Cherry Cokes and hand-dipped malts, served by a high school student in a paper apron and cap.  Along one wall—to the left as you entered—stood the magazine rack.  This one was made of wood, but the design hasn’t changed fundamentally since.  Leukens’ stocked a lot of science fiction magazines, which you could read there if you bought something at the fountain.  I pored over the pages of Worlds of IF, Galaxy, Venture, Analog, and  F&SF.  The word at the time was “keen”.

    But to the right of the big glass door, just as you came in, was a circular rack filled
    with paperbacks.  I have no idea how orders were handled then—I gather Mr. Leukens had very little say in what paperbacks he received and certainly there was no logic to what you found in wire slots—but he seemed to have a source for some of the neatest books.

    The summer of ’67, when the country was beginning to be impacted by the emergent
    Youth Culture and the Summer of Love was on-going, I bought my very first Isaac Asimov book, plucked from the circular rack in Leukens’ Pharmacy.  It was Foundation and Empire, the Avon edition with the Punchatz cover.  I didn’t know what a trilogy was, but the back cover copy alluded to two more books related to this one.

    The book simply felt important to me.  There is an aesthetic to the physicality of
    books rarely talked about, but everyone acknowledges, even publishers, else why so much money and effort taken on covers?  But there is a smell, a feel, things only incidentally related to the text, but details that can shape a book’s reception.  This book represented everything I wanted in those terms.  I didn’t realize this at the time, but it turned out that way.  This, I thought, was what a book—especially a science fiction book—was supposed to be.

    Then I read it.

    What is the process of imprinting that goes on between a reader and a text?  What is
    it that creates a reader, transforms someone passive into someone active in the pursuit of reading?  I have no way to reconstruct the experience, only the memory that it was a
    complete one.  I took that book home, having spent all of seventy-five cents on it, and read it over the next few days and became a science fiction fan.  The magazines hadn’t done it, much as I liked them.  I still read westerns and comic books and war stories and if you’d asked me then what my favorite television shows were I’d have given a list of ten or twelve, not even half of which were sf.  Certainly Star Trek was on at the time, but I’d missed the first season because of parental disapproval (my mother thought it would give me nightmares) so I can honestly say that, while my aesthetic had been prepared by a lot of science fiction, it wasn’t until this encounter that I became utterly enamored of the genre.

    It took me nearly a year to track down the other two volumes.  I haunted Leukens’
    Pharmacy waiting for them to arrive.  I had no idea how unlikely it was that he’d actually
    get them in, only faith that if I waited long enough they’d turn up.  In the meantime, I rarely left the pharmacy emptyhanded.

    Years later the incongruity of it all struck me with a large dose of melancholy.  The
    pharmacy is gone now, of course, part of a vanishing feature of our culture.  Leukens’
    Pharmacy was a hold over from a mythic American past.  Ironic that I had encountered the future within its fading reality.

  • Fiction On-Line?

    So the new novel is finished and in the mail.  My agent has it now.  From there, who knows?

    Anyone who has kept up with me here knows that the last five years have been, well, dismal publishing-wise.  The situation became even more complicated in 2008 when the global economy fell into the toilet and publishing began to look like a front-line regiment in WWI.  Everyone in the field watched in horror at the casualty figures as an industry that had seemed to be doing pretty well began hemorrhaging at the pores.

    Naturally, I’ve been trying to think of What To Do Next in order to stave off professional oblivion.  Writing one more novel that will likely end up sitting on someone’s desk for X number of years, unread, unrejected, and unbought (obviously) seems silly, unless I write it for pure love.

    One notion is to do what a few others have done to some success.  Put up a novel here, on my website, for free.

    Free?

    I need readers.  I need a fan base.  I need to get my work in front of people who might really like it.

    So I’d like to hear what everyone thinks.  (Yes, I actually have such a beast, about two-thirds completed.  With enough interest, I would certainly finish the book sooner than later.)

    I’ve never gotten a lot of commenter feedback here, so I don’t even know how many of you read me on any kind of regular basis.  This might be a good time to make yourselves known and tell me what you think.