Proximal Eye – Page 17 – Mark W Tiedemann

Quantum Branching…As Literature Embraces Science Fiction, the Past is Again and Again

November 5, 2013 1 Comment

Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Life After Life, is a remarkable achievement. It’s several hundred pages of exquisitely controlled prose contain the story of Ursula Todd, who is in the course of the story, born again and again and again. Each life, some so very brief, ends in a tragic death, accidental, malevolent, heroic, painful, and each time she starts over, comes to the point where that mistake was but is now sidestepped, turned away, avoided. She lives multiple times, each one different, and yet she remains herself. The novel opens with a shocking scene—Ursula, a young woman living in Berlin, enters a café wherein she finds Adolf Hitler, surrounded by sycophants, enjoying his celebrity. She pulls a pistol and takes aim, Then she is born. It is 1910, in the English countryside, and snowing heavily. The scene is reminiscent of Dickens. She is born. First she dies from strangulation, the umbilical cord wrapped around her with no one around who

Future Historicity

October 9, 2013 No Comments

History, as a discipline, seems to improve the further away from events one moves. Close up, it’s “current events” rather than “history.” At some point, the possibility of objective analysis emerges and thoughtful critiques may be written. John Lukacs, Emeritus Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College, understands this and at the outset of his new study, A Short History of the Twentieth Century, allows for the improbability of what he has attempted: Our historical knowledge, like nearly every kind of human knowledge, is personal and participatory, since the knower and the known, while not identical, are not and cannot be entirely separate. He then proceeds to give an overview of the twentieth century as someone—though he never claims this—living a century or more further on might. He steps back as much as possible and looks at the period under examination—he asserts that the 20th Century ran from 1914 to 1989—as a whole, the way we might now look at,

Greatless Illusion

September 16, 2013 1 Comment

The third book I read recently which resonated thematically with the previous two is one I have come somewhat late to given my inclinations. But a new paperback edition was recently released and I considered buying it. I hesitated as I was uncertain whether anything new or substantively unique was contained therein to make it worth having on my shelf. I have other books along similar lines and while I am fond of the author, it seemed unlikely this book would offer anything not already covered. Christopher Hitchens was a journalist and essayist and became one of our best commentators on current events, politics, and related subjects. Even when I disagreed with him I have always found his arguments cogent and insightful and never less than solidly grounded on available fact. So when he published a book of his views on religion, it seemed a natural addition to my library, yet I missed it when it first came out. Instead,

Monstrous Partiality

September 8, 2013 No Comments

In keeping with the previous review, we turn now to a more modern myth, specifically that of our nation’s founding. More specifically, one component which has from time to time erupted into controversy and distorted the civil landscape by its insistence on truth and right. But first, a question: did you know that once upon a time, in Massachussetts, it was illegal to live alone? There was a law requiring all men and women to abide with families—either their own or others—and that no one, man or woman, was permitted to build a house and inhabit it by themselves. John M. Barry details this and much more about early America which, to my knowledge, never makes it into history classes, at least not in primary or secondary schools, in his excellent book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. Discussion of the Founding—and most particularly the Founding Fathers—centers upon the Revolutionary

Light Fallen

September 2, 2013 No Comments

I’ve read three books in tandem which are connected by subtle yet strong filaments. Choosing which one to begin with has been a bit vexatious, but in the end I’ve decided to do them in order of reading. The first is an older book, handed me by a friend who thought I would find it very much worth my while. I did, not, possibly, for the reasons he may have thought I would. But it grounds a topic in which we’ve been engaged in occasionally vigorous debate for some time and adds a layer to it which I had not expected. William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light is about myth. It is also about history. It is also about grinding axes and challenging paradigms. The subtitle declares: Mythology, Sexuality & the Origins of Culture. This is a lot to cover in a mere 270-some pages, but Mr. Thompson tackles his subject with vigor and wrestles it

End Times

July 31, 2013 No Comments

The Sixties. Depending on what your major concerns are, that period means different things. For many people, it was revolution, civil rights, the peace movement. For many others, it was music. For Michael Walker, it was evidently the latter. In his new book, What You Want Is In The Limo, he chronicles what he considers the End of the Sixties through the 1973 tours of three major rock groups—The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Alice Cooper. His claim, as summarized in the interview linked above, is that after Woodstock, the music industry realized how much money could be made with this noisy kid stuff (which by Woodstock it no longer was—kid stuff, that is) and started investing heavily, expanding the concert scene, turning it from a “cottage industry” into the mega-million-dollar monster it has become. 1973, according to Walker, is the year all this peaked for the kind of music that had dominated The Sixties, made the turn into rock star megalomania,

Is the Novel Still Dying?

July 26, 2013 4 Comments

In 1955, Normal Mailer was declaring the death of the novel. A bit more than a decade later, it was John Barth’s turn. There have now been a string of writers of a certain sort who clang the alarm and declare the imminent demise of the novel, the latest being a selection of former enfants terrible like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. Philip Roth did so a few years back, adding that reading is declining in America. The irony of this is that he made such claims at a time when polls suggested exactly the opposite, as more people were reading books in 2005 (as percentage of adult population) than ever before. In my capacity as one-time president of the Missouri Center for the Book I was happily able to address a group of bright adolescents with the fact that reading among their demographic had, for the first time since such things had been tracked, gone precipitously up in

Life On The Dark Side

June 26, 2013 1 Comment

There is a moment in Dennis Lehane’s Live By Night in which the protagonist, Joe Coughlin—Joseph to his father, the man against whom Joe gauges himself all his life—realizes that he is not what he wants to be, what he always asserted himself to be. “How many men have you killed?” Estaban asked. “None,” Joe said. “But you’re a gangster.” Joe didn’t see the point in arguing the definition between gangster and outlaw because he wasn’t sure there was one anymore. “Not all gangsters kill people.” “But you must be willing to.” Joe nodded. “Just like you.” “I’m a businessman. I provide a product people want. I kill no one.” “You’re arming Cuban revolutionaries.” “That’s a cause.” “In which people will die.” “There’s a difference,” Estaban said. “I kill for something.” “What? A fucking ideal?” Joe said. “Exactly.” “And what Ideal is that, Estaban?” “That no man should rule another’s life.” “Funny,” Joe said, “outlaws kill for the same reason.”

Mark W. Tiedemann

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