Proximal Eye – Page 12 – Mark W Tiedemann

Taste and Quality

April 29, 2015 No Comments

Obliquely, this is about a current debate within science fiction. However, the lineaments of the argument pertain to literature as a whole. I offer no solutions or answers here, only questions and a few observations. Make of it what you will. Reading experience is a personal thing. What one gets out of a novel or story is like what one gets out of any experience and being required to defend preferences is a dubious demand that ultimately runs aground on the shoals of taste. I once attended a course on wine and the presenter put it this way: “How do you know you’re drinking a good wine? Because you like it.” Obviously, this is too blanket a statement to be completely true, but he made his point. If you’re enjoying something it is no one’s place to tell you you’re wrong to do so based on presumed “objective” criteria. That $200.00 bottle of Sassicaia may fail to stack up against

Seeing At f.64

February 16, 2015 1 Comment

I have been involved in photography since I was 14 years old. My father gave me his Korean War-era Canon 35mm, a knock-off of a Leica model D, and I began a somewhat haphazard career which never quite went where I thought it would or should. By the time I was 21 I had replaced that Canon with a pair of Minoltas, a Mamiya Universal (2 1/4 format), and a Linhof 4X5 view camera, plus the darkroom accoutrements to go with it all, including a massive Besseler 45M enlarger (which I still have) and pretensions of being a modern manifestation of a member of the Group f.64. All I really knew about this group were the photographs and some names, and not even all of them. Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham. Names to conjure with. Sharp, full-tonal range images of landscapes, portraits, and details of objects made sublime by the attention of these artists of the lens. In time

Now A Word From Paradise Island

January 26, 2015 1 Comment

Of all the unlikely confluences you might stumble over in life, here’s a set: what do Margaret Sanger, lie detectors, and superheroes have in common? If you answered “Wonder Woman!” you would be correct. And if you could answer that before Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman came out, you would be in rare company knowing that. Wonder Woman was the creation of one William Moulton Marston, of the Massachussetts Marstons. If that familial pedigree escapes you, don’t feel bad, you didn’t miss it in history class. The Marstons had come down a ways from their 19th Century heights, enough so that William was forced to apply for grants to finish his degree at Harvard in 1915 in psychology (Ph.D. earned in 1921). Psychology was still a relatively “new” science and Harvard was in the vanguard. Marston attached himself to the recently founded Harvard Psychological Laboratory and eventually ended up running it. But only for a short while.

Survival, Strategy, and Shakespeare

January 10, 2015 1 Comment

Of all the things imagined surviving past a global apocalypse, Shakespeare may be an obvious choice but not one often noted in the scores of stories and novels devoted to the idea of starting over. That is, after all, the chief impulse behind such stories, that the slate is wiped clean and humanity has a chance to begin again. A few works have gone further, most notably Nevil Schute’s On The Beach, to wipe humanity completely off the stage, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But for the most part, someone must trod upon that newly set stage to continue the story, and who better to serve notice that this is exactly what such stories are about than Shakespeare. “All the world’s a stage…” Shakespeare haunts Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven like Banquo’s ghost from beginning to end. The novel begins with the death of Lear—more precisely, the actor portraying Lear on stage in a theater in Toronto the very

Sword, Double-Edged, Metaphorical Steel

January 2, 2015 4 Comments

I finished reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword weeks ago and have been turning it over in my mind ever since trying to decide on the best way to talk about it. As sequel to her surprisingly popular Ancillary Justice, it is exceptional and unexpected. Yes, it carries forward the story of Breq, the lone surviving aspect of what was once a vast AI, a ship possessing a cadre of ancillaries which formed the extensible components of its intelligence. Yes, it continues on with an examination of the universe she established and the civil war that is in the process of breaking out. Yes, we find a continuation of many of the narrative devices and their concomitant concerns. No, it does not actually go where one might expect such a sequel to go. This begs the question of expectations, however, which also has to do with whether or not art is obligated to meet specific expectations. Surprise, after all, is supposed

Roundup 2014

December 30, 2014 No Comments

Time for a year in review. I am bound to say, though, that my reading once more has been disappointingly thin. When I am working on a novel, time for leisure reading necessarily goes down. Reading for research goes up, but that rarely requires me to finish an entire book. I look at my reading list for the year and the only titles I ever include are those I’ve completed, so on such years I appear to be under-achieving. That said, I completed 42 titles this year. (To be sure, I’ve probably read, by volume, closer to 90, but most of those I did not finish. For instance, I am still plodding my way through Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. I’ll likely have to start it over.) There were several that were rereads for me. Unusual in that I seldom if ever reread a book. I don’t read fast enough to feel good about covering old ground when

Time and Motion

December 16, 2014 2 Comments

William Gibson is, if nothing else, a careful writer. You can feel it in the progress of any one of his novels and in the short stories. Careful in his choice of topic, placement of characters, deployment of dialogue, style. He sets each sentence in place with a jeweler’s eye to best effect. The results often seem spare, even when they are not, and have invited comparisons to noir writers, minimalists, modernists. Entering upon a Gibson novel is a step across a deceptively simple threshold into a finely-detailed maze that suggests multiple paths but inevitably leads to a conclusion that, in hindsight, was already determined had we but noticed just how sophisticated a writer it is with whom we’re dealing. His last set of novels, the Bigend Trilogy, was not even science fiction, though they felt like it. The application of a science-fictional perception of how the world works produced a dazzling bit of dissonance in which the ground itself

Ends, Beginnings, Rebirths, Beliefs: Two Works of Science Fiction and a Fantasy

December 3, 2014 No Comments

In recent months I have read two classic novels which, curiously enough, deal with matters of a religious nature. I’ve decided to review them together for a number of reasons, one of which is both are part of the syllabus for my monthly reading group at Left Bank Books. Another reason for the review now is that I have finally, and not without some reluctance, seen one of the new generation of Biblical epics recently released, Noah, with Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. There are points of interest in this deeply flawed film which I will touch on after dealing with the novels. The first novel is James Blish’s superb A Case Of Conscience, published originally in 1953 as a novelette and later expanded to novel-length and published in 1958 (the same year, coincidentally, that Pope John XXIII was elected to his chair). The questions posed by the story are simple enough even if the answers are nearly impossible: what

On Enduring Interest

September 7, 2014 1 Comment

There’s a kind of novel that usually I avoid. You know the kind I mean—a miasmic dunking in the minutiae of neurotic characters who do very little out of the ordinary, suffer, come together, break apart, and end up in an ambiguous condition wherein presumably some sort of enlightenment has been achieved. Turgid not because the writing of such tomes is necessarily bad but, really, it’s just like real life only artistically rendered, and who wants to spend four or five hundred pages with people and their problems that in most respects seem just like ours? For similar reasons we do not seek to know everyone we could, because there are people we really would rather not. But then there are people we want to know, people we do know, people who are necessary and wonderful to our lives, people who have impacted us in ways that have made us who we are. No, we didn’t choose them, it doesn’t

On Heinlein and Expectations

July 10, 2014 10 Comments

William Patterson Jr. finished and delivered the second volume of his copious biography of Robert A. Heinlein not long before he passed away of a heart attack. He was too young. After reading his opus, he may well have had another book about Heinlein in him which we will now not see. I base that on the fact that while volume 2—The Man Who Learned Better: 1948 to 1988—is filled with the minutiae of a crowded life, there seems little in-depth analysis and assessment of Heinlein’s work. Given the few and scattered remarks about the shortcomings of other books of criticism published during Heinlein’s lifetime, one might reasonably expect such an assessment from a writer of evident skill and insight. It is not out of the realm of probability that he may have intended such analyses for a third volume devoted exclusively to such an assessment. To be sure, there are brief passages about several of the books of a

Mark W. Tiedemann

Author. Blogger. Photographer.

The Proximal Eye