Proximal Eye – Page 19 – Mark W Tiedemann

Clarity

February 26, 2013 1 Comment

One of the most perverse aspects of American culture is the contradiction between our self-professed guiding ethos and what many of us actually do. This is the country of the self-made, the independent thinker, the individualist. We build elaborate mythologies extolling the virtues and victories of our heroes, who are all of a piece, wholly their own creatures, dependent on no one and nothing to be what they are. Daniel Boone to Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the self-sufficient American is our national role model. Yet a look at our actual history shows that we as a people are surpassing great joiners. We attach ourselves to collectives, to movements, to institutions, and borrow ideologies from them, speaking with a group voice and shunning those whose independence of thought causes them to criticize whatever party our fellows have joined that gives them a sense of worth. We have been known as the most religious country on Earth, per

Detecting Sauvage

February 15, 2013 No Comments

A couple of years ago I read Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. I still have the one for which he gained considerable fame posthumously, 2666, waiting for me to tackle. I say “tackle” fully cognizant of its implications. For a book like this, one should prepare. Stockpile food and water, coffee (my god, yes, coffee!) and tell friends you’re going on a long trip and to maybe take care of your pets for you. One should be prepared to leave one’s life by way of the page and cut what ties are possible, because it will be a journey. This is not “light reading.” November 2 I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way. So it begins. Might as well say he had been invited to join Life. It’s rare that anyone is “cordially invited” to do so, although there are many opportunities along the course

Breakneck Mousetraps—Past and Future in Cloud Atlas

February 3, 2013 6 Comments

It begins in the past. Not one past, but three, and then a kind of present. Then a future. Two futures, but the furthest is so much like the past as to be functionally the same, only reversed. The great ship of the technologically advanced is the image fading in the center of this novel, as if the reader has risen to a height of inevitability that can do nothing now but sink back through the layers that cannot support it. The hyperbolic arc of human trajectory achieves its limit, turns, and falls back to the point where the mirror reality of that insubstantial future rests. We cannot stay in that future because it is built on anticipation and hope, contending with dread and cynicism, which rob it of any force of inevitability. It looks real, substantial, has within its possibilities everything we know and everything we are and everything we can be and everything we should not be. There

Multitasking

January 31, 2013 4 Comments

How many books do you read at the same time? Once in a while, a book so grabs me that I can’t read anything else till I’ve finished it. (Also, once in a while, I have to read a book that is by its nature a struggle and if I read anything else during the effort I’ll never get through it.) There are days I miss the ability to do multiple things at once—read, listen to the radio, watch television, carry on a conversation. I think we all remember a time when we could do this, but I also wonder if we remember how much we actually got out of it. I know that if there are voices around me now, spoken or sung, reading is impossible. I write to music—instrumental music—but that’s the limit of my cross-discipline multitasking. (I’m writing this to Glen Gould’s performance of Beethoven’s 1st Piano Concerto. I find myself recognizing passages during the pauses between thoughts,

Bound and Determined

January 28, 2013 5 Comments

A staple of YA science fiction is the story of the Young Person who begins quite normal and average and through circumstance becomes entangled in Epic Events and ends up an Important Person. Yes, it’s a coming-of-age arc because the plot requires maturation. In the best of them (from Heinlein to the present) the protagonist isn’t the only one maturing, but the society/culture of which he or she is a part. The events of the story perforce drag the whole civilization along, sometimes kicking and screaming, to a new level in order to deal with the New Thing that must be dealt with. And of course at the end of the novel or trilogy, rapprochement of some kind is achieved, balance gained, and good things are in the offing as a result of the timely, clever, and ultimately mature intervention of the newly-minted adult at the center of the story. (Of course this is not limited to science fiction, but

Apocalypsis

January 21, 2013 No Comments

China Miéville seems to be going down the list. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, police procedural, Kafkaesque urban surrealism…each novel works some new twist on established forms to produce, if not a definitive work, at least an iconic representation of type. Of course, he’s not just trying to recapitulate what’s been done. He’s not just re-presenting particular types. With each work, he seems to be stretching the boundaries—the limits—of the form until they break, and presumably Something New emerges. (And in some instances, he’s turning forms inside out and demonstrating both their deepest flaws and the possibilities of new attributes. For instance, Perdido Street Station would seem to be an urban fantasy adventure. It is set in some Other City, that could be London if certain mythic veins had emerged as dominant in our history as opposed to what did establish itself as the Known. But fantasy requires at its heart an Organizing Principle around which clashes of good and evil

On Tactics

January 16, 2013 1 Comment

I’ve redone my office. This was a much more arduous task than I originally thought (although I sort of had a premonition, I suppose, because I kept putting it off), but is now in the main done. While the geography doesn’t look that different, the feng shui is markedly changed. I have more pacing room, a necessary component to my writing ability. (I also pace when I’m on the phone, a habit that required first very long cords and then, later, portable handsets.) Part of any convulsion like this is the uncovering of Old Stuff. In this case, papers of various arcane and now-meaningless import. Some of it, though, has been a delight to rediscover. Like an archaeologist with a new potsherd or a bone, I’ve found layers of past interest embedded in corners unexplored since my last major make-over. Cartoons, scribbled notes, lists, fragments of stories, and far too many scraps with phone numbers and no names. Hmm. One

Lincoln

January 10, 2013 2 Comments

Hagiography is destructive to truth. The worshipful retelling of past lives by advocates who wish to see their subjects purely in terms of what they mean to the writer personally, eliding that which is problematic, troublesome, or simply unpleasant, while occasionally producing fun books for the uncritical, puts up barriers to the most essential element of honest biography, namely the recognition of what is human in all of us. While that may seem a bit over-the-top to some, consider what happens to certain authors who dare to write candidly about “heroes” with many followers. Often, they themselves become the focus of intense controversy, much of it negative. How dare they, detractors claim, paint a portrait of Exemplary Figure that goes into the foibles, obsessions, character flaws, bad judgments, prejudices, and petty attributes when the significance of Exemplary Figure ought to exempt him (and sometimes her) from any criticism other than the most theoretical or abstract? (This cuts both ways—many people

Mark W. Tiedemann

Author. Blogger. Photographer.

The Proximal Eye