Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Personal

  • Where It Comes Down For Me

    I grew up in a sexist culture.

    No, really. I was born in 1954. I grew up in the stew of sexism and was made very aware of it because it was being challenged throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I came of age during the heyday of Male Privilege, when the default assumption was that men were the smart ones, the strong ones, the ones who shouldered all responsibility, and women basically came along for the ride because, well, we needed them for babies and cooking and occasional interludes of sex and, well, because they looked good. Strong, independent women were weird, unnatural, and intended to be conquered by a stronger man who, paradoxically, didn’t actually need them but decided, for some reason, to protect them because while they were getting along fine without him, that simply couldn’t last because women couldn’t sustain themselves and it was great that one was independent for as long as she was, but it was really a man’s duty to take care of her, so…

    It sounds absurd when you break it down like that, but really, that’s what it was. Women couldn’t do anything without a man.

    Except they usually took care of the family finances, maintained the house, made most of the health care decisions, and, oh yeah, raised the next generation of males who thought women were helpless.

    Women who insisted on their own sexual needs were characterized charmingly as sluts, whores, trash, “mannish”, or some variation that included unnatural in the mix. Much to the consternation of everyone, Playboy changed all that, for better or worse, by basically putting it Out There that women were pretty much like men in that they liked sex and, oh yeah, had a right to it, just like men. (All the academic and political activism in the world didn’t move the culture half so much as Playboy did, which has caused another kind of push-back, but that’s another story.)

    By the time I was in my twenties I’d watched my culture turn itself inside out over this and come to a place where it seemed any sane, rational person would be repulsed by the standards of that quaint and rather scary prior era. I thought—mistakenly—that the debate was settled.

    Debate? Women are people.

    Again, to some this might sound silly so simply stated, but that’s what it came down to and where it comes down for me. Women are people. First. They have dreams, aspirations, ambitions, hopes, talents, traits, expectations, and rights just like any man. That seems perfectly natural to me. I like that idea, I like the kind of world it implies.

    But it seems some folks can’t seem to accept that. The first time I was aware of any counterargument was Phyllis Schlafly, who seemed intent on convincing women that there was something wrong with them if they wanted careers in lieu of families, that they were defying some natural order by refusing to get down on their knees and worship men the way women had been made to do for millennia. The more I found out about her, the more I found her position not only unpalatable but also hypocritical, since she herself never gave up any of her goals or ambitions for motherhood. After a while I realized that this was a perverse form of noblesse oblige, the aristocrat telling the peasant what to do and why they couldn’t have what the aristocrat had.

    Still, this was a mere ripple. Things were improving.

    And then something really unexpected happened. An argument was found that made the whole issue seem to have nothing to do with women’s civil rights or status as people, but with the entire culture’s responsibility to something that had never heretofore been an issue in this particular way. The argument made it seem like any woman insisting on her rights was in danger of being a murderer.

    Well. It became clear after a while that although the rhetoric seemed to be focused on questions of what constituted a human life, the tactics and strategy demonstrated that it was just the same old bunch of ancient, tired arguments from privilege that women ought to have no such rights, that they ought to be little more than incubators and sex slaves.

    Here is a video which pretty much sums the issue up for me and afterward I’ll tell you why.

    For me, the issue comes down to this. I am a person first, a man coincidentally. Odds were pretty much even up that I might have been a woman—but I would still be a person. And by that token, I have to say that if you tried to treat me the way some people are trying to treat women, I would absolutely be in your face about it. It would be my decision to reproduce, to use my body for that purpose, no one else’s, and anyone else’s qualms about how I conduct my personal life matter not at all. This should not be a political issue. No one has a right to live off the body of another. That would be a gift. Gifts only count if they’re given willingly.

    Those who would deny women the right to live as they choose have themselves decided—by proxy, on behalf of people they don’t even know—that history means nothing, that rights are conditional, and that their, for wont of a better term, sense of modesty trumps everyone else’s freedoms. They have shown time and again that what they say is the issue really is not and in the last year have made it absolutely clear that their priorities have nothing to do with the “sanctity” of life but rather with an idealized aesthetic of what they consider “appropriate” behavior.

    I just wanted to be clear.

  • Jon Lord, Deep Purple, Legacies

    I said I’d do a longer piece on Jon Lord, so.

    In the aftermath of his death, I bought a couple of old Deep Purple cds I never had. By old I mean from the Sixties. The Book of Taliesyn, Shades of Deep Purple, Deep Purple. These three albums, the band’s first, were recorded with what is known as the Mark I line-up, which did not include Ian Gillan, who became the most recognizable voice of the band in the Seventies, during their most successful period.

    What is fascinating now, in retrospect, is just how much a shift they made after they fired Rod Evans (vocals) and Nick Simper (bass).* The original Deep Purple was very much headed in the direction of what we now call Prog Rock. Not just in the wild sound effects they employed, but in the really intricate song-writing. The whole aesthetic approach of this early manifestation of the band embraced the novelty and innovation that defined bands like The Nice, Jefferson Airplane, Yes, and early Genesis. The break when they reorganized around Ian Gillan’s greater range and angrier delivery and Roger Glover’s far more fluid and, yes, heavier bass work is striking, not only for the differences manifest between songs like The Shield or Hush and the next-period thunder of Speed King, Hard Lovin’ Man, or Fireball, but also because of the album that came between the last Mark I Purple and In Rock—namely, Concerto for Group and Orchestra.

    This album goes directly to what I consider the most significant aspect of Deep Purple, namely the incredible musicianship of Jon Lord. This is a Lord composition and it is a mature, fully-realized bit of what we call Classical Music (given that we tend these days to lump all the various schools of such music into that one bin—Baroque, Rococco, Classical, Romantic, NeoClassical, etc) that also incorporated rock motifs, elevating what at the time was still, despite the work being done by many gifted writers and performers to raise its stature, regarded as “kid’s music” or, more generally, “pop” or, less kindly, trash. Going back to the the first three Purple albums, you can hear the forerunners here and there throughout in the experimental elements and classically-tinged keyboard work of Mr. Lord. It is historically an astonishing piece of work, rendered even more so by the fact that after that, the new line-up of Deep Purple dove head-first in the hardest of hard rock, the music pitched at a roar and scream.

    And yet, here and there throughout the next four albums—In Rock, Fireball, Machine Head, Who Do We Think We Are?—we hear that same sensibility flavoring the stew. Lord’s solos, while full-blown blues-idiom statements, would shift into energetic renderings of Bach, Vivaldi, Rachmaninoff, inserting passages of refined musicianship that fit in with, augmented, and yet stood apart from the thunder and shouts around them.

    As good a set of musicians as Deep Purple comprised, it was the sensibilities of Jon Lord, I think, that made them stand out.

    (I have to admit here that I never really loved Ritchie Blackmore’s guitar work. It’s fine for what it is and I’ve changed my mind about his actual abilities, especially after listening to the Taliesyn album. He could keep up with Lord, truly. I just didn’t care for his approach. But it was another distinctive voice within the Purple mix. I confess that both Tommy Bolin and present-day Steve Morse play more to my liking (especially Morse, whose work with the Dixie Dregs and later with Kansas established him as one of the best in the business), but there is also no arguing that Blackmore’s style is almost instantly recognizable. But I listened more in spite of him than because of him.)

    Deep Purple became a bit of a cliche by the end of the Seventies. Smoke On The Water was so overplayed as to become its own parody. But despite periods of never listening to them, I always return, drawn to the power, yes, but always to those keyboard runs and the above-average musicality, which I identify with Lord’s continual influence.

    What brought me finally to the realization that this was one of the finest composers on the planet was the series of albums he did all of his more or less straight classical compositions, starting with The Gemini Suite, which in many ways was a second try at the Concerto. The format is the same (modeled on, I believe, Bartok’s Concerto For Orchestra) but the music is all new. Lord did a number of these and after his retirement from Deep Purple in 2001 or so he devoted all his time to composition and recording his symphonic music. In albums such as Boom of the Tingling Strings, Durham Concerto and others, he has left us a set of musical experiences quite apart from the driving rock he also did with great ability and obvious passion. (He said of his later works that he composed music, not labels.)

    Jon Lord was only 71 when he passed away, from complications of pancreatic cancer. His voice still speaks and I would urge everyone with any serious interest in music to go find his later recordings and be amazed.

    As much as I love his classical works, though, I think this is how I will always remember him.

    ___________________________________________________________________

    * Rod Evans, in these early recordings, displayed a common approach among a certain kind of rock’n’roll vocalist that was a sort of homage to Elvis. His exaggerated stylings can come across almost laughable in certain instances, but he was a credible singer within a certain range. He later became a founding member of Captain Beyond in league with a couple of Iron Butterfly alumni where his vocals leveled out and he displayed his qualities to much better and more honest effect. With the collapse of that band, Evans soon retired from music.

    Nick Simper fared less well, though he worked more steadily, in and out of a variety of bands that never quite “made it.” The longest run after Deep Purple was a band called Fandango. Simper still gigs, though.

  • A Need To Notice

    Selective blindness is something everyone suffers.  Depends on priorities.  It becomes a major problem when an entire society experiences it, which happens too often.  So, just a little reminder…

     

    Granite Bed

  • who did we think we were?

    Jon Lord died yesterday.  He was 71.

    Don’t know who Jon Lord was?  Pity.  But, then, you probably do, even if the name doesn’t evoke anything.

    Jon Lord was the keyboardist for Deep Purple, the hard rock band that made music history in the early 1970s for their loudness, their energy, and their instrumental dexterity, especially Jon Lord’s who regularly threw in passages from Bach or Beethoven or Scarlatti in the middle of heavy, driving blues-based rock tunes.

    Then there were the songs themselves—Hush, Wring That Neck, Kentucky Woman, Child In Time, Highway Star, Space Truckin’, My Woman From Tokyo…and of course Smoke On TheWater.

    But then! Oh, surprise surprise, the man had musical chops that far exceeded what anyone might expect from a rocker.  Concerto For Group and Orchestra was a full-blown orchestral suite with the London Philharmonic and Deep Purple.  Later there was the Gemini Suite which was a similar idea.  Other blends of rock instrumental and orchestral composition followed until, late in his career, Lord retired from the band to do nothing but compose and the results were amazing pieces of late Romantic symphonic work of deep complexity, exuberant melody, and a lush tonal palette.  He was a composer’s composer.

    I will do a longer appreciation of him later.  For now, this is a place marker to note that this was one of the artists who set my aesthetic goals in music, someone I “wanted to be like when I grew up”—at least musically.  He was an amazing talent.  He left behind an incredible body of work.  Go acquaint yourselves.

  • Why I Won’t Be Voting For Romney

    It may come as a shock to some folks, but—

    No, that’s being coy. I don’t think anyone who knows me would be shocked by my admission that I will not be voting for Mr. Romney this fall. What always dismays me, however, is the reaction that gets from some people. They give me a look, an attitude, a combination of disbelief and betrayal, an expression that is the epitome of an exasperated “But…why?” As if I could not possibly have any valid reasons for such a stance.

    Well. I have to say, it’s not because I’m particularly in love with Obama.

    I admit in 2008 I cast my ballot for Mr. Obama with a bit more optimism than my usual cynicism allows. I actually thought there might have been a chance that something new would come out of this one. I wasn’t wholly disappointed, but…

    I also admit that I understand enough about how politics work that the business-as-usual parts of the last three-plus years do not dismay me. Merely disappoint me.

    Obama said he would get us out of Iraq. I approved. As far as I’m concerned, it was a boneheaded act of petty vengeance combined with a big dose of insider opportunism that put us in there in the first place. It provided nothing but an opportunity for Bush to wave the flag and pretend to be Doing Something while Cheney’s cronies dipped their collective beaks in the public trough to drink of billions of still-unaccounted-for money. Even if the nuttiness of the invasion had been handled better, it was clear what was going on when all the people in Iraq who might have made the whole thing work to the benefit of all concerned were summarily pushed aside and pissed on so KBR could get all the no-bid contracts and face absolutely no local resistance to the milking they gave both Iraq and our treasury.

    Obama got us out of Iraq. He did say he’d have us out of Afghanistan by now and that has yet to happen, but we’re drawing down.

    He said he’d go after Osama bin Laden, no matter what. He did that and got him. He pissed off Pakistan. Oh my. Pakistan has been the seething pit of all this nonsense with Al Quida and the Taliban all along, so I’m not inclined to lose any sleep over their hurt feelings, but I am very irritated at our drone program and all the unnecessary and ill-advised killing that has resulted.

    Obama said he would go to bat for the middle class and the working class. He saved the American auto industry. Bush saved the banks that caused the depression. (Yes, I say depression, and I further say we’re not out of it yet. Everyone else is afraid of the D word, but let us face reality. Despite the “official” unemployment rate, actual unemployment is well north of 15%, I suspect close to 25%, but as usual we don’t count actual unemployed, only those still drawing unemployment insurance.) Obama of course is being blamed for TARP, which was a Bush program, and I’m not sure I would not have felt a lot better if he had torpedoed it and let the damn banks flounder. But I am not an economist, so what do I know?

    I am very irritated that he kept many of the same people who put us in this economic fix for his own economic team—Summers, Geitner, et al. (Yes, they were part of Bush’s team, too, and some were on board with Clinton for his ill-considered gutting of our regulatory laws, cheering us on into greater profits for fewer people.)

    He has kept much of the Patriot Act, which I believe to be a wholly unConstitutional infringement on American rights and liberties.

    Yes, he saw a health care reform through, and many of its components are pretty good, but it is not what we really need and he did not, in my opinion, really push for it, but I suppose that’s a quibble.

    There are other things I’m not terribly pleased with about Mr. Obama. But the truth is, much the same can be said by any reasonable person about any president. Still, I would prefer certain priorities to change.

    So with all that I am displeased with my president, why, it may be reasonably asked, would I vote for him again as opposed to Mr. Romney?

    There are very simple reasons.

    Mr. Romney is an advocate of trickle-down economics. He may not call it that, but from everything he has said that’s his focus.

    Top down policies have not worked. We can imagine that by cutting the rich a break and giving tax breaks to large corporations might benefit us all by allowing them more money to invest, and on paper it sounds great. But seriously, look at the last three decades. That is not what has happened and we keep doing the same damn thing. Deregulate, more tax cuts for the top in the hope that they will spend it on this country. We have more unemployment, working and middle class wages have been stagnant for thirty years, our infrastructure is decaying, the bottom half is getting worse off. It simply has not worked. I will not vote for him because he advocates a failed policy. Period.

    Mr. Romney claims he intends to repeal “Obamacare.” He modified this claim by saying he wants it repealed and “something that works” put in its place.

    He has not said what that would be and I find the hypocrisy both unsurprising and galling. Many of the features of the Affordable Healthcare Act are the same as those he signed into law in Massachussetts and now repudiates, including the individual mandate. (As a minor point, I find the Republican harping on “Obamacare” annoying. Technically, Congress wrote that law, if we will all recall, not Mr. Obama.) But more to the point, I simply don’t believe him. Big Pharma and Big Insurance did not want health care reform. They’ve been making plenty of money on things as they were and had absolutely no incentive to change anything. They fought tooth-and-nail against the Affordable Care Act, they torpedoed single payer, they will certainly be right there at the table making sure that nothing gets put in its place if repealed. The GOP has made it clear that they want no government controls over private enterprise whatsoever. So I don’t believe Mr. Romney that he would do anything to put a better, or even a different, law in place. He will sign the repeal, if it happens, and we will revert to accelerating costs and insurance premiums spiraling out of control.

    Mr. Romney is one of a long line of people who claim that having been businessmen makes them ideally—or at least better—suited to run the country. He is, like all of them, wrong. The country is not a business and bottom-line thinking is a good way to hurt, damage, and destroy people through public institutions. Right at the moment, he cannot even give a good account of why he maintains offshore accounts. (This is done to avoid taxes. No matter what else is claimed, offshore accounts that are not simply part of a globally diversified portfolio are there as tax havens. I don’t care how you feel personally about taxes, this is a cheat, and I have no respect for it.)

    The other reasons I do not intend to vote for Mr. Romney have less to do with him than with his party, which I feel is broken. They have come out four-square against compromise. This is insane. This is a country of 300-plus million people, all of whom have needs that are not universal. There is overlap, but not homogeneity. The only way to govern such a country is through compromise. To refuse to consider it is tantamount to saying that differences don’t matter and people who don’t fit in should receive no regard. If such a party ends up in control of Congress—which I think is likely—then I want a Democrat in the White House to at least stick his thumb in the dyke of insanity.

    How can I say that?

    The GOP has conducted a series of campaigns against certain institutions and ideas which I find essential to the kind of country I want to live in. They’re union busters. They’re economic elitists. They’re frankly warmongers and for the worst possible reason—they’re afraid of foreigners. And they have embraced a constraining view of public morality that I find bizarre, one which as a consequence would see gains in equality for women reversed.

    Here and there, but in growing numbers (because moderate Republicans keep leaving the party), they are anti-education. Texas, as one example, is at the forefront of revisionist history and the purging of legitimate science from classrooms. And they are more and more stridently theocratic.

    Now, many people find nothing wrong with any of that. There are many people who cannot stand to hear America criticized, so expunging certain episodes from history books seems like patriotism to them. Many object to the ideas of Darwin, so deleting evolution from science classrooms seems like a good idea. In the same vein, many think our biggest problem is that we as a nation don’t pray enough.

    You are all entitled to your opinion. I happen to believe truth and fact should trump wishful thinking and “belief.”

    But I wanted to explain why I will not be voting for Mr. Romney. The reasons are very simple. I do, in fact, wish I had a better choice who I thought had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. I am very tired of voting against something by voting for something less than I really want. But there it is. Mr. Romney and the GOP have a vision for this country which I believe will be very destructive. It will be very good for certain people, but not for all the people, and the president in particular has to represent All the People. I don’t believe Mr. Romney will do that.

    I don’t think he has any idea who all the people are.

  • Reflections On the 4th of July: A Personal Statement

    I am not given to setting out pronouncements like this very often, but in light of the last several years I thought it might be worthwhile to do so on the occasion of the 236th anniversary of our declared independence.

    I don’t think in terms of demonstrating my love of country. My affection for my home is simply a given, a background hum, a constant, foundational reality that is reflexively true. This is the house in which I grew up. I know its walls, its ceiling, its floors, the steps to the attic, the verge, and every shadow that moves with the sun through all the windows. I live here; its existence contours my thinking, is the starting place of my feelings.

    The house itself is an old friend, a reliable companion, a welcoming space, both mental and physical, that I can no more dislike or reject than I can stop breathing.

    But some of the furniture…that’s different.

     

    I am an American.

    I don’t have to prove that to anyone. I carry it with me, inside, my cells are suffused with it. I do not have to wear a flag on my lapel, hang one in front of my house, or publicly pledge an oath to it for the convenience of those who question my political sentiments. Anyone who says I should or ought or have to does not understand the nature of what they request or the substance of my refusal to accommodate them. They do not understand that public affirmations like that become a fetish and serve only to divide, to make people pass a test they should—because we are free—never have to take.

    I am an American.

    I am not afraid of ideas. My country was born out the embrace of ideas, new ideas, ideas that challenged the right of kings to suppress ideas. Ideas are the bricks that built these halls. I claim as my birthright the freedom to think anything, entertain any notion, weigh the value of any concept or proposition, and to take refuge in the knowledge that wisdom comes from learning and the freedom to learn is among the most hallowed and sacred privileges we have inherited as a country. The greatest enemy of our republic is the fear of ideas, of education, and by extension of truth and fact. Those who see no harm in removing books from libraries or diluting fact with wishful thinking and teaching our children to accept things entirely on faith and never question will weaken the foundations, damage the walls, and corrupt every other freedom they themselves boast about and then fail to defend.

    I am an American.

    I do not need to demonize others to make myself feel safe or superior or even right. I do not need to pretend that I am innately “better” than anyone else to prove my own worth. America was founded on the idea that all of us are equal in potential value. I do not need to oppress, undercut, strike, or otherwise impede others so that I can claim the dubious and ultimately meaningless label of Number One.

    I am an American.

    Sometimes I wear my sentiment on my sleeve, display my emotions at inappropriate times. I often side with unpopular causes, cheer those who aren’t going to win, get unreasonably angry over unfairness. I believe in justice and I don’t have any trouble with the idea of making an extra effort for people who can’t afford it for themselves. Other times I am stoic, even cynical. I accommodate a world-weariness far beyond the scope of my heritage. I do not believe in providence. Things will not just “work out in the long run” and the bad are not always punished and the good too often are crushed. I know the world doesn’t care and has no interest in level playing fields or evening up odds or anything other than its own ravenous acquisitiveness. It’s an uphill battle against impossible odds, but it’s the only one worth fighting, and I have an unreasonable belief that as an American I have a responsibility to help fight it.

    I am an American.

    I take a childish pride in many of the attributes and details of my heritage. We build things, we invent things, we have moved mountains, changed the course of rivers, gone to the moon, created great art, changed the face of the earth, broken tyrants on the wheel, and made the world yield. At the same time I am embarrassed at many of the other details of my heritage. We have hurt people unnecessarily, killed and raped, we have damaged forests, poisoned rivers, waged war when there were other avenues. I like the idea that I can work my way out of poverty here, but I hate the idea that we idolize the rich when they put barriers in the path of those like me just because they can. It’s not the money, it’s the work that counts, but sometimes we forget that and those with less must school those with more. That we have done that and can do that is also part of my heritage and I am glad of it.

    I am an American.

    I am not bound by ritual. Tradition is valuable, history must never be forgotten, but as a starting point not a straitjacket. Those who wish to constrain me according to the incantations, ceremonies, and empty routines of disproven ideologies, debunked beliefs, and discredited authority are not my compatriots, nor do they understand the liberty which comes from an open mind amply armed with knowledge and fueled by a spirit of optimism and a fearless willingness to look into the new and make what is worthy in progress your own.

    I am an American.

    I do not need others to tell me who I am and how I should be what they think I should be. I elect my representatives. They work for me. They are employees. If I criticize them, I am not criticizing my country. If I call their judgment into question, I am not undermining America. If I am angry with the job they do, I do not hate my country. They should take their definition from me, not the other way around.

    I am an American.

    If my so-called leaders send soldiers in my name somewhere to do things of which I do not approve and I voice my disapproval, I am not insulting those soldiers or failing to support them. They did not send themselves to those places or tell themselves to do those things. My country has never asked one of its soldiers to kill innocents, torture people, lay waste to civilians, or otherwise perform illegal, unnecessary, or wrong deeds. Politicians do that and they are employees, they are not My Country. Greedy individuals do that, and they are not My Country. No one has the right to call me unpatriotic because I condemn politicians or businessmen for a war they make that I consider wrong, nor that I am not “supporting out troops” because I want them out of that situation and no longer misused by the narrow, blinkered, and all-too-often secret agendas of functionaries, bureaucrats, and bought stooges.

    I am an American.

    My success is my own, but it is impossible without the work done by my fellow Americans. I acknowledge that we make this country together or not at all and I have no reservations about crediting those whose labor has made my own possible or condemning those who seek to divide us so they can reap the plenty and pretend they made their success all by themselves.

    I am an American.

    Which means that by inheritance I am nearly everyone on this planet. I am not afraid of Others, or of The Other, and those who would seek to deny political and social rights to people who for whatever reason do not fit a particular box simply because they’re afraid of them do not speak for me. I reject superstition and embrace reason and as a child I learned that this is what should be the hallmark of an American, that while we never discard the lessons of the past nor do we let the fears and ignorance of the past dictate our future.

    I am an American.

    I accept the rule of law. This is a founding idea and I live accordingly, even if I dislike or disapprove of a given example. If so, then I embrace my right to try to change the law, but I will not break it thoughtlessly just because it inconveniences me or to simply prove my independence. My independence is likewise, like my Americanness, something I carry with me, inside. The forum of ideas is where we debate the virtues and vices of the framework of our society and I take it as given my right to participate. Cooperation is our strength, not blind commitment to standards poorly explained or half understood. Because we make the law, we determine its shape and limits. The more of us who participate, the better, otherwise we surrender majority rule to minority veto, and law becomes the playground of those who learn how to keep the rest of us out.

    I am an American.

    Such a thing was invented. It came out of change, it encompasses change, it uses change. Change is the only constant and too-tight a grip on that which is no longer meaningful is the beginning of stagnation and the end of that which makes us who we are. Change is annoying, inconvenient, sometimes maddening, but it is the only constant, so I welcome it and understand that the willingness to meet it and work with it defines us as much as our rivers, our mountains, our cities, our art. A fondness for particular times and places and periods is only natural—humans are nostalgic—but to try to freeze us as a people into one shape for all time is the surest way to destroy us.

    I am an American.

    I do not need others to be less so I can be more. I do not need others to lose so that I can win. I do not need to sabotage the success of others to guarantee my own. I do not have to take anything away from someone else in order to have more for myself.

    America is for me—

    My partner, my family, my friends, the books I love, the music I hear, the laughter of my neighbors, the grass and flowers of my garden, the conversations I have, the roads I travel, and the freedom I have to recognize and appreciate and enjoy all these things. I will defend it, I will fight anyone who tries to hurt it, but I will do it my own way, out of my own sentiments, for my own reasons. Others may have their reasons and sentiments, and may beat a different drum. That’s fine. That is their way and we may find common cause in some things. This, too, is America.

    “All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It’s a breed — selected out by accident. And so we’re overbrave and overfearful — we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.”
    John Steinbeck, East of Eden

    “There’s the country of America, which you have to defend, but there’s also the idea of America. America is more than just a country, it’s an idea. An idea that’s supposed to be contagious.”
    Bono

    “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
    John F. Kennedy

    “When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.”
    Adlai Stevenson

  • Upon Finishing A Novel

    Oculus, the sequel to my alternate history Orleans, is finished.  I sent it off last week to my agent.  (Which means that, in fact, I will have to do another pass when she gets through making notes, etc, but for now I am content.)

    They’re all a slog at some point.  The only novels I ever wrote that weren’t were the second Robot Mystery, Chimera, and the one Terminator novel I wrote, Hour of the Wolf (which wasn’t supposed to be the title—that was the working title I slapped on it because I have to have a title before I can write a piece, but given the impossible schedule and the fact that the publisher needed it, like, THEN, they went with the title as is).  Don’t get me wrong, they were both hard work, but they went relatively smoothly from beginning to end.

    However, this one was a slog because the first draft was really rather not good.

    Anyway, it got better and I sent it off.  Now comes the decompression and the preparation for the next project.  Cleaning the office, becoming reacquainted with the dog, having some kind of food that takes more than two minutes to prepare.

    I have written 21 novels, beginning to end.  Ten of them have been published, six of them probably never will see the light of day again.

    It’s difficult to describe to people who don’t do this what it’s like.  The total immersion in the world of your fiction, and having now written other things besides science fiction I can tell you that it doesn’t matter.  The world of your novel is A World and you have to live in it while you’re building it.  So far I haven’t found myself confusing the fictional realm with the “real” world, but I have found myself ignoring a great deal of what’s around me.  There have been a couple of times I’ve felt like someone emerging from a shelter after a nuclear war, wondering how much the world has changed while I was underground.

    It’s also, for me, an act of faith.  Having the confidence or the optimism that a book will turn out worth while after all the work can be based on experience once you’ve written enough of them, but it’s still a gamble.  You could very well write a piece that is wholly inaccessible to anyone else.  While you’re inside it, making it, it becomes, at least for me, problematic as to whether or not it will appeal to anyone else.  It’s always a pleasant surprise when it turns out others like it.

    Next week, I dive into the major rewrite of another, this one a historical—straight history, with a mystery—and the rest of my summer will be devoted to making it as good as it can be.  I do, however, intend to do a few other things this summer besides just tour the precincts of my fictional realms.

    I’ll also have a special essay for the Fourth of July.  Something I’ve been working on for a bit.  Just a little heads up.

    Ah.  There’s something else needs tending.  See you later.

  • The Golden (Silver?) Good Ol’ Days

    I just finished skimming through a fascinating little bit of fannish history, Earl Kemp’s Who Killed Science Fiction?  Fannish in the sense of science fiction fandom.  It has a rich and varied history and the concerns within the genre are as fraught with angst, ennui, and ambition as any literature.

    I am always a bit bemused when I read about this sort of thing, because I came into science fiction through the rotary rack at my local drug store.  (Literally—Leuken’s Pharmacy, on the corner of Shenendoah and Compton, a good old fashioned drug store with a soda fountain, a magazine stand, and two circular racks for paperbacks, two blocks from my house.)  I had no idea about where these books came from, who wrote them, how, not to mention the whole publishing industry and its workings.  I used to think authors were “gray eminences” who occasionally deigned to write a new book and “gift” it to the public.  The notion that they did it for money or to meet a contract deadline or anything so mundane never occurred to me.  It was a wholly mysterious process, with arcane rituals and secret rites.

    Nor were all books created equal in my mind.  For some reason—purely aesthetic—I early on decided that the best science fiction, the stuff with true weight and merit, was all published by Avon.  They did Asimov’s magisterial Foundation Trilogy, after all, and that was Significant Literature!  They put out a lot of Zelazny and some Silverberg.

    But I knew nothing about fandom.  Occasionally I’d see a notice in the back of one of the magazines I read—If, Galaxy, Amazing, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vertex, Venture—for a convention somewhere, usually a “World Science Fiction Convention” (!), but I thought they would necessarily be by invitation only (where all the gray eminences met to determine the future offerings, etc) and I’d never go to one.

    Kemp’s little tome is the result of a survey he sent out around 1960, asking the title question, among others.  Damn.  I started reading the magazines regularly around 1963 or ’64, so if already in 1960 there was concern over SF being dead, then…

    Most of the seventy-odd respondents thought SF was not dead at all, but was in the doldrums.  This was right after the so-called Golden Age has ended (roughly between 1938 and 1954 or so) and there was apparently a sense that the Next New Thing hadn’t arrived yet and maybe it wouldn’t.  It was right on the cusp of New Wave and a few years before Campbell changed the name of Astounding to Analog.  There’s the sense of people sort of milling around, waiting for Something To Happen.

    Well, it was five years before Dune and seven years before Dangerous Visions, two books that arguably changed the field.  In a way they represent two extremes, the last great epic of traditional SF and the compendium of All The Wild Shit coming down the pike.  (Both books are almost continually in print to this day, and while Dune has become more a media and franchise phenomenon, Dangerous Visions and its sequel is still a touchstone for serious literary study and the taking-off point for the changes in approach and trajectory that drove everything until Gibson, Sterling, and Cyberpunk worked another set of changes on a field that has always been as good as its most recent thing.)

    The general consensus throughout the responses was that magazine SF was not dead (and there did seem to be an over-emphasis on the magazines, which at the time were still seen as the major outlet for SF.  Book publishers had not yet really crowded into the field as they did by the end of the decade, although some were putting out quite a lot, like ACE) but it was sick as hell.  I’ve sat in on similar conversations over the last three decades of my own involvement in fandom and I was struck reading this by the similarity in tone and even in content of the arguments.  (Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy, thought everything was fine except for too much psi.)

    Kurt Vonnegut chimed in with a particularly venomous assault, that not only was it dead but he would be glad to help find the corpse so it could be properly buried.  He wrote a note to Kemp later apologizing and blaming his attitude on his isolation from the field.  Vonnegut made his bones in SF and took many opportunities to diss it because he didn’t want to be regarded by the critics—and therefore his potential audience—as a hack.  Fair enough, but sometimes I wonder if something else was going on there.  He could have distanced himself without pissing all over the whole genre.  Or maybe not.  I have to bear in mind that the critical arena is not what it was then.

    The last section of the book contains revisitations some 20 years later, when science fiction was going through an enormous boom.  Some of the pessimism of the earlier responses had to be explained.

    A lot of of them credited Star  Trek  with the “revival” of science fiction.  It did bring a much larger audience into the field.  It did open the door for many of those new readers to discover that, as good as they thought Star Trek was, the stuff between two covers was much better.

    That all changed again in the 80s with the massive upsurge of Fantasy, all, in my opinion, in the wake of Star Wars, which did something very similar—brought many tens of thousands of new fans eagerly into the field.  But in this instance, a different realization occurred that led to a collapse of science fiction.  Instead of discovering that the material in the books they were now buying was better than Star Wars, they found that it was utterly different—and that they really didn’t like it.

    Star Wars—and I’ve said this before, often—is not science fiction (even though Lucas rather hamfistedly and stupidly tried to retrofit it as science fiction in the “first” three movies) but heroic quest fantasy in space.  Or, simply, Fantasy in Skiffy drag.  Audiences went from this to the less reifying work of writers like Brin, Bear, Clarke, Benford, Cherryh, et al and it must have been like a cold shower.  Science fiction requires thought, analysis, its virtue is in the explication and championing of reason, logic, and science, and while there are heroes aplenty in SF there’s not a lot of destiny or “born to the throne” heroes who just Are.

    As fast as they blew up the SF bubble, they left it for all the Tolkein clones that began to dominate the publishing field by the late 80s and still command a hefty market share.

    Science fiction, it seems to me, has always been a minority taste.  It appeals to people who also find science appealing.  It has always had a fairly solid core of supporters and as a percentage of the publishing market has remained fairly constant, with certain boom times punctuating a more or less steady, dependable foundation.  Science fiction offers marvels, of course, but they are, the best of them, marvels still grounded in an idea of reality.  And reality is tough.  It takes work to survive and thrive.  A good sword arm won’t do you much good when a meteor has holed your ship and all the air is leaking out and you have to figure out how to fix it.  Orbital mechanics couldn’t care less that you’re of the House Royal as your ship starts spiraling down to a nasty end because you didn’t do the math right for re-entry into atmosphere.  Science fiction says “Yes, the future can be wonderful—but it will still be Real and you’ll have to deal with it the same way you deal with what’s real now.”

    So, who killed science fiction in my opinion?

    Lot of assumptions in that question with which I do not agree.

  • It’s Black and White

    Years ago I got to have a long talk with the illustrator Kelly Freas and we found common ground in believing that black and white is a superior artistic medium to color.  I’m a sucker for fine b&w drawings and my first love in photography was Ansel Adams.

    Oregon, 2001

    I pulled out some old proof sheets, from our road trip back in 2001, and started scanning in a few negatives. These were 120 format, 2 X 2, which I like for the sharpness and lack of grain.  Sometimes I still miss having a darkroom, the smell of the chemicals, and the magic of watching an image appear in the tray, little by little, growing before my eyes, details filling in.  As much as I’ve been enjoying working with digital—and certainly I don’t really miss the messiness of traditional photofinishing—I wonder where kids find the “magic” of that first print.

    I’ve been doing more color with digital as well and I need to shift that back to black & white.  There’s a clarity, a “cleanness” to black & white that color never quite achieves.

    I thought I’d share a couple of these with you today.

     

    One thing working with these has given me, though, is an urge to do that trip again.  I got some great shots and I’ve done far too little with them.  I could spend the next two years doing nothing but scanning and processing the photographs in that file.

    But I’d start with the black & white first.

    Have a good weekend.

  • Petty Stuff, Harlan Ellison, and Therbligs

    I am inspired to write this because of two things, one significant, the other merely annoying.  I start with the merely annoying.

    I’m hopelessly behind the curve tech-wise.  I can barely make my way around the internet, and if something melts down on my computer I run in panic from the room wondering who to call to fix it.  Partly, this is a result of being too busy the last three decades to keep up, partly it is a response to the incessant demands of the digital marketplace to constantly, eternally acquire the latest gadget, the newest thingie, the most recent incarnation of Nousmasticator 3.1, all of which is both time consuming to install and maintain and often pretty damn expensive.  As a child I remember jokes about people who had to buy a new car every year, which later morphed into the “planned obsolescence” of Detroit product that required a new model after sixty thousand miles, but the auto industry never had a thing on the computer world.  I resent it.  Perversely, I’ve refused to keep abreast.  This is classic surgical removal of probosci to articulate displeasure with one’s demeanor.

    And it’s petty.

    This morning a notice for an available upgrade appeared in the hopper of my blog and I haplessly accepted it.  My blog promptly disappeared.  After messing with this, on the phone and by email, for over an hour, I discovered that for some reason the upgrade trashed the files of the existing blog template, rendering it unusable.  Since my system indicated that I still had the damn thing in my archives, I was unable to upload a new version and had to install a brand new theme.  You’re looking at it now.  And actually I kinda like it.

    But that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have had to go through all that nonsense.  I do not need another little Gordion knot of dyspeptic resentment toward the nature of the modern world binding itself into my psyche along with all the other little bits of tedious, petty anoetic effluvia cluttering up my memorative gestalt.

    Which brings me to the other inspiration for this piece.

    Recently, I received in the mail volume 6 of Harlan Ellison’s On The Road lectures.  (An aside, briefly, to suggest you avail yourself of some of these, especially if you are an appreciator of the spoken word and good repartee—they are collections of Harlan’s public presentations over his long career and they are a delight.  They are available by mail through here.)  The liner notes of this one comprise a longish essay by Harlan in which he discourses on one of his attributes.

    He is, he claims, a petty man.

    This is also part of his acceptance speech for the Grand Master of Science Fiction Award, given him by SFWA in 2006 (included in this collection, along with Neil Gaiman’s excellent prefatory words).  He’s copping fair on a characteristic he expresses some regret over, some wonderment about, a puzzle, a burden, an inextricable part of his nature.

    My initial reaction was big deal, aren’t we all?  Then I thought he might have been laying the groundwork for distancing himself, the man he is, from the work he has done, leaving behind nothing unadmitted and owned up to for future biographers, chroniclers, and literary archaeologists (and, let’s face, academic parasites) to “discover” and base a “reassessment” on which will completely miss the point.

    In one of the best author biographies I’ve ever read, Julie Phillips, in her chronicle of the life of Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree Jr., manages to do something rare and remarkable, which is to study the source of fiction without suggesting that the fiction is useful for some kind of psychoanalysis.  She examines the forces in Sheldon’s life that led her not only to adopt a deep cover pseudonym from which to write but to write the kinds of stories she did, but at no point does she suggest the stories are what they are only because Sheldon was troubled, flawed, paranoid, suicidal, whatever.  In Phillips’ hands, the stories are something apart, works of art, certainly created out of the life that shaped them, but once created took on separate status, to be regarded on their own terms and not taken apart or essentially deconstructed based on who Sheldon was (or who we might think she was).  Sheldon wrote the way she did out of her own essence, true, but she nevertheless created something distinct from herself that should be taken on its own terms, for what it is, not for who made it.

    Harlan has as vivid a public presence as himself as his work does as itself.  It’s evident, reading over his essays, that he has mined himself for the substance of his stories, for the raw matter that he then shapes into dramas.  It is legitimate to say that he assays autobiographical themes in many of his best stories, even as it is a mistake to see the stories themselves as autobiographical.  He’s done what good artists do—lived, reacted, felt, put the result into his art, saying to us “I am human, I have felt these things, witnessed these things, concluded these things, and because you, too, are human you will know what I’m saying to you.”  He is not saying in his fiction “This is who I am” but more importantly “This is who we are.”

    But because we live in a culture obsessed with celebrity and the insistent need to bring everyone down to the level of those who prance shamelessly upon the stages of talkshows where their least indiscretion is blown up into a life-changing, earth-shaking moral verdict, it is too often the case that biography trumps creation in the mind of the Public Beast.   Separating the artist from the work is a problem, because the work, while inextricably part of the artist, is not the artist.  The work is the work.

    With that in mind, I read the essay thinking that this was something Harlan was trying to do.  “I know who and what I am and I’ll tell you about it here and now so you don’t have to let its discovery later poison the work I have done.”

    I’ve since reread the essay and listened to more of the CD and I don’t think that’s what he was doing.  At least not primarily.

    He relates an instance of coincidental karma concerning another writer and cosmic payback.  Within the context of his theme—I am a petty man—he suggests that petty gets what petty gives.  It is perhaps an examination of the conundrum some people are that the more they have, the more they succeed, the higher up whatever ladder they’ve been trying to climb they get, it is the little things that never let them fully be as complete as the work they do.

    We’re all petty.  Not so much that we do petty things, but that we have petty thoughts and petty concerns.  Myself, I have a roomful of memories in my hindbrain of embarrassing, unkind, thoughtless things I’ve said and done that I just can’t seem to be rid of.  Most of the time I don’t think about them, but every once in a while, when I’m least expecting it, one of these damn things pops up in my mind and taunts me with the fact that there is nothing I can do to change it!  It happened, it’s done, it’s part of history, and I can never undo it.  I obsess over them for a while, imagining myself behaving differently, using different words, taking a different course, or just paying closer attention at the time.  I’m a writer, I can imagine whole novels of better responses, better motives, better outcomes.

    But there’s nothing I can do and apparently I can’t even forget them.

    Like time and motion studies, I analyze them for clues of my essential cluelessness, which I will also never be able to change, because I didn’t understand it at the time.  Or maybe I did but I still didn’t think it was a bad idea.  Or I knew, but couldn’t figure out how, at the time, to avoid the mess it was about to be.  I rework them in my head, trying vainly to optimize the therbligs of my past and utterly helpless to do so.

    I consider my continual obsessions with these things petty.  The events themselves were petty, inconsequential in the greater scheme of my life, and I imagine that the other players may well not recall them at all.  But I can’t let them go.

    They do turn up in my fiction.  Not the events themselves, usually, but the fact of the pettiness, the nature of the embarrassment or resentment or anger or stupidity.

    And it doesn’t help to Know Better.  It is part of my nature.

    Confessing doesn’t help either.  I could detail here some of the things that occupy these worthless interludes of longed-for repair, but it wouldn’t do me a bit of good.  I’ve learned that sharing embarrassment doesn’t really lessen it, but it does lessen the anxiety you might have that people will judge you for the events in question.

    I suggested that a word had been left out of Harlan’s claim.  It should have read “I am a petty man too.”  He might just as easily have said “I am a compleat human being, having my full measure of all that is human.”  That has the advantage and drawback of distracting people from his point, because, while true, it allows for a generous reception and validation of that “compleatness” as an altogether admirable thing.

    I think he wanted people to focus on a specific point.  “I am a petty man” is the same as saying “It is human to be petty” and therefore, “we’re all petty.”

    From time to time, here and there, more or less.

    Let me tell you something not petty about Harlan Ellison.

    Donna and I attended his last convention, MadCon 2010, in Madison, Wisconsin.  We were in the hotel lobby when he came in.  It was the first time we had seen each other since 1996.  Prior to the convention, when it wasn’t a sure bet that he would make it, due to health issues, I sent him a few photographs I’d taken at that prior occasion.  They weren’t great pictures, but I thought he might want them for his archives.  In fact, they were pretty much not good.  When he realized who I was, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Tiedemann, those were the worst pictures in the world.  Terrible.”  In front of a small audience.

    By Sunday, he was dancing on his last nerve, and still signing autographs.  I’d given up trying to get one and just lingered at the periphery, and for whatever reason he looked straight at me and said, “Tiedemann, go.  Just go.”

    I riffled my brain to figure out what I’d done, but he had The Look, and I knew better than to argue, so Donna and I went to dinner.

    Afterward, we came back into the hotel.  The lobby was empty except for Harlan and Susan.  Whereupon he sat down with us and we had half an hour of very good, private conversation.  He was generous, interested, and, I think, appreciative, at least of the chance to quietly talk to just one or two people, away from the crowds and the demands of Being On.  Whatever, it was special and very, very human.  (No, I won’t tell you what we talked about, it’s none of your business.)

    As I said, petty gets as petty gives.  As far as I’m concerned, Harlan can cop to being petty if he wants, and he would know, but that is simply not my take on him.  He gets no petty from me because he’s never given me any.

    In the final analysis, we should strive to regard people by their best.  If we can’t, at least we should remember that no one is a homogeneity.  We are all amalgams.  And from certain amalgams, strange alloys, bright, alien, and dark, emerge in gnostic forms and Damascene patterns, texture of nous and passion…