Proximal Eye – Mark W Tiedemann

Reading Review, 2025, With Observations About the Future

January 9, 2026 No Comments

I read 55 books cover to cover in 2025. So many things got in the way, but also I read a handful of bricks, and my research reading was extensive. My count of cover to cover is exactly that, those books I started and finished. I read Isabel Wilkerson’s excellent and disturbing study of the roots of systemic discrimination, Caste. Why the West Rules…for Now by Ian Morris; Christopher Fowler’s Book of Forgotten Authors; David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years; American Colonies by Alan Taylor; Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time… I also read Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany—a reread, for my book group—and Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle, for the first time. I have the rest of that series and I may continue, but in truth I was both pleased and disappointed in it. I expected…something else. I’ve been working through Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott series, out loud, with Donna. A reread for me and I’m happy

Reading With Intent

September 7, 2025 No Comments

Stress acts capriciously on our inner landscapes. What seems easy, comfortable to do, in times we consider normal becomes fraught in times of tension. Daily burdens can take on new weight, contours, and the requirements of coping change accordingly. When it sometimes feels that civilization itself is under threat, what constitutes useful response takes on meanings and demands that have no stable context. What do we read in the face of chaos? Because reading is not one thing, but a practice that sprawls through our lives like water underground, our assessment can become fragmented. Giving ourselves permission to read what we normally would is an issue. Is it responsible, we might ask ourselves, to read for pleasure when the world is about to be set afire? Shouldn’t what we read be contributive to our choices of resistance? Does that brick-thick epic fantasy constitute a betrayal of civic responsibility when the reality of oppression presses up against us? All these questions,

Autumnal Summations: Dhalgren Part Six

July 23, 2025 2 Comments

The final section of Dhalgren is also the most difficult to parse. Not because the action is hard to follow, but because of its presentation. Delany has interleaved marginal notes alongside the main narrative, some of these notes quite lengthy, and at times presenting a parallel narrative that highlights or comments upon the main text. We are given to understand this as direct transcription from Kid’s notebook. By now we have come to accept, though not explicitly told, that the notebook had been his all along. Which offers the suggestion that this is not the first time Kid has been in Bellona. The Ourobouros ending/beginning underlines this idea, because we are here taken back to where we began. Which makes Bellona ultimately a labyrinth, perhaps the Labyrinth, populated by fabulous monsters who may take turns at center stage with each revolution of the narrative. We can play a game guessing which is what—minotaur, Grendel, the dragon?—but in the end it

Dahlgren’s Dasein, Part Five

July 22, 2025 2 Comments

“Dasein possesses a logos, not to be understood in the usual way as reason or language, but as an ability to collect and remeber the manifestations of Being, which constitute the World…Dasein is thus a collecting-point where beings come out of conealment and make themselves present. These two notions, of coming out of concealment and being present are key to Heidegger’s metaphyics.” The History of Philosophy, A.C. Grayling “We are looking for the answer to the question of the meaning of being in general, and above all the possibility of radically developing this basic question of all ontology. But freeing the horizon in which something like being in general becomes intelligible amounts to clarifying the possibility of the understanding of being in general, an understanding which itself belongs to the constitution of that being which we call Da-sein…One thing has become unmistakable. Our existential analytic of the Da-sein up to now cannot lay claim to primordiality. Its fore-having never included

500: Dhalgren Part Four

July 16, 2025 1 Comment

Having reached 500 pages, I would like to make the case for Delany’s main subject. In this middle section of the novel, we see Kid undergoing changes that, in some cases, are disturbing. Initially, he was depicted as a kind of basic good guy, a mensch, who was struggling with a significant question of identity. He responded to situations, reacted, attempted to find a way to fit into a thoroughly discordant environment. He intentionally came to Bellona, it was a goal (if not the goal) and since arriving he has bounced from one situation to another trying to locate himself within a context which, while appearing to constantly shift and mutate, is actually quite stable in its dishabille. Recognizing that stability gives a clue as to the nature of the narrative and the apparent transformations Kid undergoes. What is more likely is that aspects of Kid’s personality—his nature, if you will—emerge as he becomes familiar with this new landscape. He

How The West Was Shot: Dhalgren Part Three

July 12, 2025 1 Comment

Throughout Dhalgren Delany plays with resonances and echoes that sometimes slip past without conscious impact. One of the repeated devices is the insertion of an authorial voice from time to time, where in the midst of things there is a stopping to comment on—not the plot, at least not usually—the subtext. They can read like Kidd (and in the next hundred pages, he loses a d and becomes “the Kid” or just “Kid”) having an internal dialogue, but gradually we hear a different voice. And then, in the midst of one of the more energetically violent scenes, wherein Kid joins the pack of Scorpions in their raid of an abandoned department store, Kid glimpses someone in a mirror and gives a description that is clearly not Kid. Anyone who had met or knew Delany at that time would have recognized the description. The author comments on his work but here is actually seen by one of his characters. Twenty or

The Next Landscape: Dhalgren Part Two

July 4, 2025 1 Comment

A hundred or so pages on we begin to see how Dhalgren is science fiction as opposed to a form of magic realism (sans magic). The extraordinary advent of two moons in the briefly cleared sky above Bellona. And not just two moons, but the puzzle of how one can be near full and the other a crescent. Delany says nothing about their relative size other than the fact that both are obviously globes. (This is important because it shatters the easy surmise that this is somehow Mars—Phobos and Deimos would not be so large, nor would their relative positions lend explanation to the difference in phases. Of course, the idea that this might be Mars has already been precluded by no one, ever, observing that gravity is different in Bellona than on Earth.) What this does is signal that on crossing the bridge into Bellona, Kidd left “our” world—the world he catalogued in the first page by the list

On Reading Dhalgren, Part One

June 28, 2025 2 Comments

Possibly in a moment of insanity, my reading group chose to do Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren this year. This is one of those touchstones in one’s reading life that challenges, daunts, requires. I possess a first edition…I think. A Bantam paperback original, a Frederik Pohl Selection from 1975. 879 pages. I’m currently reading it for the second time. Like other novels of such storied complexity, it’s an achievement to get through once. Other such novels include James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravitys Rainbow. I might throw in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and possibly Don DeLillo’s Underworld. It’s not just that they’re long—I’ve read a number of James Michener bricks and none of them posed the same sort of challenge, as well as other famously long novels, like Forever Amber and Gone With The Wind and From Here To Eternity—but that they are dense. Meaning that there are layers of subtext, metafictional excursions, discursive passages that actively demand more from

Mark W. Tiedemann

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The Proximal Eye