Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • Anniversary…of sorts

    I dug up an old diary a few months ago.  From time to time I’ve tried to keep one of these, sometimes going so far as to try for journal status, but I just can’t seem to sustain it.  So there are these relics lying about that occasionally unearth that give me a glimpse into what daily weirdness I was into back in 19—

    The 20th Century.   That’s when I did a great deal of this sort of thing.  I suppose ultimately that my own life bores me while I’m living it.  Or maybe I’m too busy living it to record it.  Whatever.  But this one is from 1988, which was a Very Important Year for me.

    Here is the entry for February 20.

    Paul’s Books—Billy Budd, DesCartes, ets.  Gravois Bootery.  Gym,

    Well, well, well!  Call me a red-tailed gibbon!  Clarion—the fools—accepted me.  They have no idea what they’re letting themselves in for.  Nor do I.

    Twenty-one years ago (yesterday, technically, but I didn’t have time to write this till today) I received my acceptance from Clarion.  As you may see from the link, they’re in San Diego now, but then it was in Michigan, MSU specifically, in East Lansing.  It was a very nerve-wracking time.  I’d sold exactly four short stories up till then, one of which had been to a pro magazine, fetching a handsome check, but never saw publication because the magazine went belly-up.  (Actually, the story was eventually published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but in an altered version.)  I was getting desperate.  I didn’t know why I couldn’t sell.  So I applied to Clarion, figuring that if they rejected me I’d give up.

    They took me.  I went, I learned, I started selling stories.  Now it is 21 years later.

    I’ve just finished a substantial rewrite on a novella, per request.  It’s such a thorough rewrite that it might as well be a new story.  If the editors in question take it, it will be my first new sale in a few years.  But working on it has served to remind me, viscerally, why I like writing so much.  So I’m jazzed again.  I’ll try to maintain it through more stories and a new novel or two.

    So happy anniversary to me.  Clarion made a difference.  It’s a good date.

  • New Words

    I’ve been working on a novella lately and this past week I found myself fully immersed in it.  I found the groove, so to speak, and have been barreling ahead with considerable glee.  It’s the thing about writing I most love and the thing that hasn’t been there for several months, not since I finished my historical and mailed it off in May.  Even before that it was sporadic.

    But I’ve slipped into the stream on this one and I owe it to a couple of perceptive editorial remarks from the people to whom I’d like to sell it.  That part I haven’t had for years now.  The last time I receive decent editorial feedback was from the folks at BenBella, who published Remains.  They did a thorough and remarkable job editing that book and made it better than my original.

    I haven’t placed much of anything in the last few years.  My numbers really suck for most of my novels and because of the tracking system now in place everyone knows it.  I’m thinking that one of these months I will pass into the oblivion of being deleted from the system, so I might get a fresh start.  But I am running out of patience for that.

    One of the things I’ve had enormous difficulty with since about 2004 is short fiction.  Just haven’t been able to finish a short story.  My hope with this novella is that the block will break and I can start doing short stories again.

    I tend to think in Big Ideas, and generally a short story doesn’t have the carrying capacity for them, so they kind of wallow and sink before I can bring them into dock.  This novella does has a Big Idea, but at 25,000 words it had the size to carry it.  I hope so, anyway.  I have half a dozen short stories at least in various stages of completion and I would like to have the mental space to finish them and get them out.

    But for the moment, I’m having fun with a new story.  Stayed tuned.

  • Reading On The Rise

    According to this report, reading is on the rise in America for the first time in a quarter century.  It’s difficult for me to express how pleased this makes me.

    Civilization and its discontents have been in the back of my mind since I became aware of how little reading most people do.  To go into a house—a nice house,well-furnished, a place of some affluence—and see no books at all has always given me a chill, espeically if there are children in the house.  Over the last 30 years, since I’ve been paying attention to the issue, I’ve found a bewildering array of excuses among people across all walks of life as to why they never read.  I can understand fatigue, certainly—it is easier to just flip on the tube and veg out to canned dramas—but in many of these instances, reading has simply never been important.  To someone for whom reading has been the great salvation, this is simply baffling.

    Reading, I believe, is the best way we have to gain access to the world short of physically immersing ourselves in different places and cultures.  Even for those who have the opportunity and resource to travel that extensively, reading provides a necessary background for the many places that will be otherwise inaccessibly alien to our sensibilities.

    A book is a significant encoding of someone’s mind.  A life, if you will, which is why I tend to see bookburning as a form of homicide (euphemistically, mind you, but that’s about how strongly I feel about it).  When you read a book—and in this instance I mean a book of fiction or memoir or essay, something written in response to a desire or need to communicate something of the self (as opposed to instruction manuels or the like)—and comprehend what is there, you are sharing something profound with another human being whom you may never—can never, sometimes—meet.  The characters live when you let them, they walk around in the imagination, they show you things and take you places and teach.

    Oh, yes, they teach.  They give us the opportunity to know different kinds of human being, in different ways, and while we might not embrace those ways or people or wish to emulate them, we can know them.  Deep reading opens the world for us.

    Movies and television do not do this.  Not that they can’t, mind you, but because we are passive receptors to what passes pre-digested before us, our participation—our active interrogation of the text, if you will—is barely brought into play.  Where in reading we must participate by “decoding” what is on the page and partner with the author is bringing the images to life in our own imaginations, film does all that for us.

    For those who are deeply read or deeply sensitive, what can be derived from film and theater can certainly be rich in its own way, but I have found over time that those who read as much as they watch have richer reactions to what passes on the screen, have better conversations about what they have just seen, have more to bring to the piece than those who do not read.

    Reading builds intellectual muscle in ways that cannot be done by other media.

    This is, perhaps, mere personal prejudice, but I think not.  I think the broad, multifaceted internal lives developed by the habit of reading over time makes us better able to understand more of the world around us.

    Granted, one could spend one’s life reading nothing but one kind of thing, being stuck in a rut with a single strand of literature, and thus trapping the very process which reading ought to enable…

    But to not read at all seems to me a self impoverishment.  A tragedy.

    So for me this NEA report is nothing but excellent news. For the first time as a reader and writer and an advocate of reading, I am hopeful that I will not be continually in a shrinking minority.

    It’s a good day.

  • Attic Thoughts

    Doing the Shelfari thing has been both fun and frustrating.  I always prided myself on my memory, but it amazes me to discover just how porous it really is.  Titles keep occurring to me at odd moments now that I’ve got my hard drive working on all this recall.  Plus the annoyance of remembering titles but being unable to recall having actually read the book.

    For instance, there is a host of books which were required reading in high school that I may well have gotten out of reading because I had read so much other material that the extra credit book reports forgave my lapses re the syllabus.  A Separate Peace for instance.  I know there was a session on it my sophomore year, but I don’t think I actually read it.  There are others.  And many of them I do not own anymore, so I can’t browse them (at least at the moment) to see if that triggers the memory.

    Then there are novels I know very well I read but don’t have a single line from them.  Most of these are in the “classics” category.  For example, I know I read Madame Bovary but…and I have that one and as I go through it, my mind is a blank.  Willa Cather is the same way.

    On the one hand, this is kind of thrilling, because it means I can reread those novels as if they were brand new to my experience.  On the other hand, do I really want to?  I have read Henry James, I know I have.  Turn of the Screw to be sure, but only the wispiest traces remain in memory.  I was left with such a foul taste from him, though, that I doubt I would want to revisit him.  There are others in that category.  Gogol.  Dostoevsky.  Solzhenitzin.  The Russians are less because I found them impenetrable than simply bleak and depressing.

    On still another hand, I’ve been recalling books I had totally forgotten about until I put my mind to remembering them.  The Mary Stewart Merlin trilogy, for one thing, which I remember now with great fondness, but which hadn’t crossed my mind in 25 years.

    The shelf is now over 1600.  I’ll probably ardently pursue titles until I hit 2000, then lay off for a time.  Even that would leave a great deal unremarked.  I don’t find that too shabby at all.

    But perusing the lists, it is so clear where my preference lay.  It is predominantly science fiction.  No surprise, really.  But there are some classics of SF that I haven’t read, either.  A Canticle For Liebowitz, Alas, Babylon, The Left Hand of Darkness…these books are now or once were on my physical book shelf, but I simply never got around to reading them.

    So much to look forward to.  I can’t afford to die till I’m a hundred at this rate.

  • Face Book

    Busy morning.  I like it when I find myself working in a groove that doesn’t give me time to think about what isn’t working.  Not today.

    Over a foot of snow is now lying like a serene comforter over everything outside.  Fluffly, white, very beautiful—if you don’t have to go out in it.  I am a snow humbug.  After learning to drive and struggling through a few winters way back then, I quickly lost my love of snow.  Pain in the ass.  Would be nice to look at, but go out in it?

    Anyway, yesterday I had a snow day from work.  So I took care of a lot of pending stuff, including laundry.  This morning I’m finishing up the pending stuff.  I wrote a new book review and emailed it off to my editor.  And I am busily building a…

    FACEBOOK PAGE!

    Yes, indeed.  One more bit of distraction to make the writing of great literature a bit more difficult to get to.

    Not really.  Once the shiny wears off, it’ll be much like the other online pages I now have, like my MySpace Page and my Shelfari Page and my LinkedIn Page…

    I’d been told, though, that all the “serious” people were on Facebook, as opposed to MySpace, and I must admit that so far that seems to be true.  I’ve found many more of the sorts of folks I’d wanted to link to on MySpace but couldn’t, because they weren’t there, here on Facebook.  So cool.

    I really should just sit back now, though, and see how many friend invites I actually get.  I’ve cast my net to many and sundry and various to at least establish a friend list, but I ought to go write some fiction and let this thing churn.

    On another front, I finished a couple of new books for review.  Jack McDevitt, who is a very nice man and a reliably entertaining writer, had Ace send me his most recent, The Devil’s Eye.  It was a quick, enjoyable read, smart people’s SF, and I intend to do a few paragraphs for the Post.

    I finished Ian McDonald’s collection Cyberbad Days last week.  I already wrote two reviews of it and sent one off.  I’ll add it to the one I do for Jack.  I need one more for the roundup…

    Have to go to work today.  The sun in shining, it’s a tad warmer.

    I’m rambling here.  But what the hell.  Last night we watched episode #2 of Lie To Me, the new series with Tim Roth as a specialist in lying.  All the scientific acumen of his cinsiderable gifts are applied each week to determine who is lying and, more importantly, what about.  I can’t help wondering how much grief this show might cause among people who, after a few episodes, will start applying some of these techniques in their own lives.  Calling someone out for a lie can be a dicey proposition.  Even when we know they’re lying, how often do we know why?  And how often would calling them on it do the slightest bit of good?

    I don’t know.  I’ve wrestled with this one for decades.  But it’s an amusing show.

    The thing about these new shows—and there are several of them that all rely on the heightened experience of a trained observer, like Bones, The Mentalist, Eleventh Hour, House—is that while I applaud the foregrounding of rational observation and and a hardnosed skeptical approach to life these series embody, you have to realize that the degree of observational skill these characters bring to the task is the equivalent of an expert martial artist.  Most people are not that observant.  And even when they are, how many people know how to correctly interpret what they’re observing?  It’s the thing that made Sherlock Holmes both fascinating and alienating.  Holmes explained early on in the series that he refused to remember any detail that did not directly bear on his chosen pursuit—which meant he was, in this instance, unaware that the Earth moved around the Sun and, now that Watson had told him so, he intended to forget it as quickly as possible.  It made him strange, weird, offputting, and Conan Doyle played on that skillfully.  It’s the one thing the Basil Rathbone portrayals got wrong and expunged and the thing that Jeremy Brett brought to the forefront, which makes the Brett portrayal superior.

    In the case of House, who is in many ways a direct copy, it just makes him obnoxious.

    And not really a very good doctor…

  • Peter Banks

    You wonder where they go sometimes, and then you stumble on a recording on an obscure label (of course, all labels seem obscure these days) and you think, “Damn!”

    I treated myself to a new album this week.  Peter Banks, Reduction.

    Who?

    Peter Banks.  Let me do a little raving about Peter Banks.

    Way back when my hormones and my ears synched in perfect openness and my future musical tastes became established, I discovered a small band (at the time) that I have since come to think of as seminal.  Yes.

    No, really, the band Yes.  I’ve written about my affection for Yes elsewhere.  For the purpose of this article, let me repeat only a couple of details.  Yes becamse emblematic for me of everything that might be possible in the rock idiom (even though later I came to believe that they really weren’t a rock band, but only used the aesthetics of rock to advance a broader kind of music).  The first tune I heard, late one night on the radio, was a short little thing called Sweet Dreams, which sort of nailed my brain to a plank and infused me with a euraka-like recogntion.

    The guitar player on that cut was Peter Banks.

    I have come to realize that some musicians are just rough fits for certain bands.  There were two players in the early Yes that went on to do amazing stuff—Peter Banks and Tony Kaye.  Kaye was the original keyboardist for Yes.  (He reappeared later, with the Trevor Rabin line-up on 90210.)

    Now, the first two Yes albums featured both these musicians.  Banks left, replaced by Steve Howe.  Kaye recorded the third Yes album—called The Yes Album—and then left to be replaced by Rick Wakeman.  History proceeded.

    You wonder about people like Banks and Kaye. Both left a band that later broke into the mega bigtime.  What happened to them?

    Well, the two of them formed a unit that many people heard as a kind of Yes rip-off, a band called Flash.  Flash had a couple of hits, they were popular on the college radio circuit, and did a lot of touring.  There was a Yessish flavor to their music, but really it was more that Banks, the leader, took the path that Yes veered from when he left.

    I have Peter Banks’ first solo album, which had such players on it as Phil Collins, Jan Akkerman, John Wetton, and others.  All instrumental, which is exactly my kind of thing.

    Kaye left Flash, founded a band called Badger, which did a few albums, then a band called Detective, and then became a session player.  I lost track of him until he reemerged with the reconstituted Yes in 1983.

    Banks sank even further out of sight for me.

    Then I stumbled on an independent cd called Instinct in 2001 or ’02.  Instrumental again.  I noticed a few other discs, and all I could think was “Where did these come from?”

    So I broke down and bought another one, this one, Reduction.  I’m listening to it now.

    This will be one of my regular rotations for writing.

    Here’s the thing.  Banks didn’t play this well when he was with Yes.  I’m sorry, but he didn’t.  He didn’t find his own voice, his skill level, until he left.  Then it was like, where did this guy come from?  The playing he exhibited with Flash was rawer, gutsier than what he did with Yes.  The playing on his solo albums is intrictae, sophisticated, nuanced.  Nothing like what he did with Yes.  Perhaps nothing like he could do with Yes.

    I have the same reaction to Tony Kaye when I hear his other work.  He was a basic keyboardist in Yes, competent but nothing memorable.  With Flash, with Detective, with Badger, the guy would really play.  When he rejoined Yes, it was like all that surprising skill disappeared.

    Peters Banks seems to be doing all his albums in his own studio, completely solo, these days.  So here and there you find some excess, some bars that perhaps ought to have been cut, a track that lasts maybe a minute too long, things like that.  But nothing that, for me, diminishes from the work.  This is a musician who has finally found his groove, so to speak.

    Usually with bands you have the opposite reaction—there are musicians who simply never sound as good in any other context, that once removed from The Band they lose something.  In this case, it may be that Yes and what it tried to accomplish was so specific that only the absolute perfect musicians for that aesthetic would work, and everyone else could only ever be just placeholders until the right players could be found.

    Whatever.  There are a couple other Banks albums out there.  Not much.  But if they’re as good as what I’ve heard so far (I’m listening to Reduction as I write this) then I won’t complain.  Too much.

  • Cadigan, Pat Cadigan

    Pat Cadigan is a masterful storyteller.  One of her strengths is background nuance.  You know, filling in the bits and pieces of a world so that it stands up on its own and walks convincingly?  Layered on top of that are plots and characters that are among the most idiosyncratic and memorable in science fiction.

    Besides which, she can be so damn funny, which science fiction sorely lacks.

    Anyway, rather than post another blistering bit about the soon-to-over Bush presidency (and yes, I did watch his farewell speech and all I can say is, “Wasn’t that mercifully short?”) I thought I’d put out this link to an interview with the estimable Ms. Cadigan.

  • Reading And Gender

    There is a very interesting piece over on Deep Genre about girls and reading.  Check it out and the comments.  I’m still turning it over in my head, but I’ll have something more to say about it in a few days.

  • The End of Hell

    Yesterday, our reading group did the last canto of Dante’s Inferno.  We reached the center, climbed the hairy haunch of Satan, and emerged to a place where above could be seen stars.  I’m told each volume of the Commedia ends with stars.

    There is in this final fabrication a very science-fictional scenario which can easily be read as a depiction of a singularity.  All motion has ceased except for the flapping of Satan’s wings and the gnawing of his three mouths on the bodies of the ultimate betrayers, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.  (As in most other places in the Inferno, Dante mixed post Christian Era figures with Classical forms.  He is talking about Reality, not denominations.)  Ice is everywhere, there is a brief description of the center of the earth being the point where all weight is drawn equally.  Time stops.

    Dante seems to have grasped the notion that Absolutes embody extreme conditions, that the core of absolute evil will be a thing where the normal laws of motion, of sight and sound, of behavior all exhibit impossible manifestations.  All is in suspension.

    Imagine cutting your finger.  Imagine the razor edge of a blade sliding through the flesh.  Now imagine that moment, frozen in time, always being the single sensation you experience, constantly, without beginning or end.  Eternity.  Pretty bad.  Now imagine being constantly eaten.

    Now consider:  Dante’s theme is that all these people have done this to themselves.  Satan didn’t put them here, hasn’t manufactured these punishments.  The inhabits did it all on their own.  They are trapped in their own constructions.

    To escape, all they have to do is imagine a way out of their own concepts and then accept it.

    They can’t.

    That is the blade through the flesh, tautologically locked into a continuous feedback loop.

    Dante was not, furthermore, positing that the “truth” these folks turned their back on has much of anything to do with god or ecclesiastical law.  It is entirely to do with their concepts of what constitutes Reality.  By Reality, we mean that which we do in the world.

    What has become clear through 34 cantos is that Dante was concerned not with the tropes of his poem, but with the realities of the denizens he introduces as he and Virgil descend toward Malebolgia.  This is not a religious work.  In this sense, it more closely approaches science fiction than fantasy.  The ghost in the machine which dominated the lives and decision-making of all these souls permeates the narrative like a Turing Test, set to determine which are aware, which are not, and which are aware of the alternatives and refuse to accept them.  Like some pernicious form of nano technology, these people have built their own torments.  Inferno is a parody of the Earth, of life, stripped down and fine-tuned to give the inhabitants what they have acted like they’ve wanted.  Traps, cul-de-sacs, isolation chambers, pain generators…

    And the curious element that recurs throughout is how little they pay attention to anything outside their own small place in the pit.  Many resent Dante coming into their midst, seeing them, but then seem to forget about them as soon as Virgil takes Dante onward.

    Inferno is a piece of psychology.  And the lowest pit is reserved for betrayers who used the excuse of the greater good in order to turn on a friend or leader.

    Dante was a believer in self-retribution.  No matter what fate these folks suffered in life—and many landed in prison or were murdered or otherwise brought to ugly ends—the ultimate punishment is always the damnation of their own inability to see past their own corruption.  It is that which condemns them, which sequesters them.  You get the deep feeling that any of them could leave if they could just see.  But they can’t.  They are morally blind.

    Some seem to prefer where they are.  They do not want to be “saved.”

    Extending this, it would seem that Dante was of the (then heretical) opinion that achieving Paradise was something within our own grasp simply by making a choice.

    Choice.  The ultimate punishment exhibited in Hell is Satan’s own.  He had questioned god’s decision to give humanity free will.  He argued that if given the authority he could guarantee humanity’s worship of god, that he would make the ideal boss.  He apparently didn’t get the whole notion of free will.  And in the end he reins over (or under) a realm occupied by people incapable of choosing any other path than the utterly solipsistic one  that brought them here.  He is stuck in the hole, plugging the way between what is now Hell and Purgatory, eternally in the presence of people who are there because they simply lack the capacity to be anywhere else.  They are chained to their devotions.

    It is now January 5th.  2009.  We have witnessed the meltdown of everything we thought was a successful business model in this country—in the world—and there are no doubt people who have lost everything who don’t understand what brought them to this hill.  They had choices along the way to stop taking profits and invest in something real, but they couldn’t get off the ride.  Someone else, they assumed, would pay the price.  Well, someone else did.  But so did they.

    Metaphorically, I find the parallels fascinating.  It’s almost tempting enough for me to attempt a fantasy to take advantage of the insight.  But then again, it’s not that deep of an insight.

    What I will be interested in is what lies ahead, in Purgatorio.  Will it be peopled by the collateral damage of all the machinations of those in Hell?

    Meantime, I’m writing a new science fiction novel.

  • 2009

    We begin with some quotes…

    It is always an impertinence to claim to write about a community.                Bikha Parekh

    The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust.                                                                Harlan Ellison, forward to The City On The Edge of Forever

    …it was not logic that carried me on; as well one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather.  It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it.                                               John Henry Newman, Apologia

    Good luck to all.