Proximal Eye – Page 14 – Mark W Tiedemann

Moral Crisis and The Reality of God: Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow

August 22, 2015 No Comments

Sometimes it is very much worth the wait before reading certain books. Too early an exposure and the substance could be misapprehended, misinterpreted, misconstrued, or simply missed. Such, I feel, is the case with Mary Doria Russell’s superb The Sparrow, which came out in 1996. I bought a copy shortly after it appeared in paperback and it has remained, unread, on my shelf since. Until this month. Why? I don’t know, really. I started it a few times and something in the opening pages either left me unengaged or daunted. Whatever the reason, it waited till this year, and perhaps that was as it should be. I knew enough about the novel to tell people that it is a natural successor to James Blish’s excellent novella, A Case of Conscience, which has many of the same elements. A Jesuit as member of a first contact mission to an alien world and the moral conundrum arising from certain inevitable questions. Interestingly,

Easy Habits and the Consequences of Belief

June 10, 2015 1 Comment

At first glance, the two books could not be more different. Subject, tone, everything seems different. Not at odds so much as…nonoverlapping. Which is ironic, since both deal, in their separate ways, with that very idea, the separation of areas of knowing. Probably because I read them so close together I recognized their shared concerns as clearly as I did. Whatever the reason, it struck me as obvious in so many ways that I began to recall all the other books over the last few years that could be likewise gathered within this same subset, all on distinct topics and yet all based on, to some degree, an analysis of the same human propensity to disregard evidence when it contradicts belief. Let me begin with the more general of the two. Jerry A. Coyne is an evolutionary biologist. Compared to others with public profiles, he has published few books. Three, to be precise. His latest, Faith Vs. Fact: Why Science

Traditions and New Eyes

May 16, 2015 1 Comment

I recently finished rereading a book from last year, preparing to read the sequel. I should cop to the fact that my reading has rarely been what you might call “timely” and I’ve gotten worse over the last several years. When I wrote reviews for actual pay this was not as much a problem, because I had to read current material. But left to my own devices, I pick and choose from my to-be-read pile at random, pretty much the way I buy books to begin with. So I might read an old Agatha Christie concurrently with a newer physics tome by Kip Thorne after having finished a very new history of the sinking of the Lusitania, then pick up a newish novel while at the same time rereading some Ted Sturgeon… So it goes. So I am very much “behind” almost all the time. I served as a judge for the PKD Award one year and managed to read

Motives and Revelations

May 7, 2015 1 Comment

There is a remarkable scene—one of many—in James Morrow’s new novel, Galapagos Regained, wherein the final straw is broken for Charles Darwin and we are shown the moment he decided to back his radical new view of nature and its processes. Wholly fictional, no doubt, yet based on reality, Darwin has come to London to confront a young woman who has betrayed his trust while working in his household. The confrontation with the fictional Chloe Bathhurst is not the one that matters. Rather, it is the confrontation Darwin is having with the edifice of a loving god. His daughter is dying—tuberculosis—and the scientist in him knows there is nothing to be done, that an indifferent nature cares nothing for her goodness, her innocence, and any human claim on justice and fairness is but the empty babblings of a minor species only recently transcendent upon the ancient stage of life. Darwin is angry and resentful. The transgressions which resulted in his

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

Mark W. Tiedemann

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