Proximal Eye – Page 3 – Mark W Tiedemann

Culture and Community

January 9, 2025 No Comments

I intend to make some fairly arrogant-sounding statements here, having to do with impressions of American culture (or lack thereof). Don’t misunderstand—we have culture. Lots of it. So much we usually don’t even know it. But we do not have a culture. Probably this is a good thing. The whole Melting Pot idea may be best served by not having a monolithic cultural ideal to which we require people to attend, whether they want to or not. The incredible variety of cultural possibilities here is astonishing. I would not wish to change that. That said, it hurts to realize how so much of what passes for daily “culture” seems little more than an afterthought. This morning I listened to a program about Aaron Copland. If you do not know who he was, that is precisely the point of this essay. You should. Yes, I am being prescriptive. As an American, especially if you are someone who likes to soapbox about

Year in review

January 1, 2025 No Comments

I read 94 books in 2024. Not what I was shooting for, but not by any means unsatisfying. Upon retirement, I imagined myself spending at least two or three hours a day poring over all the books and devouring the things I’ve always intended to. Well. That didn’t happen. But as things get more settled, I might exceed my goal of 100 a year. (The highest number I ever reached was my senior year of high school. I had taken a speed reading course the year before, I was cruising through texts at an average of 2000 words a minute, and I cut class most of my senior year. I spent most of those days at the local library—seriously—and got to where I was doing a book a day. I plowed through many of the so-called classics that way and I might have read 300 books that year. Now, I can’t read that fast anymore and I’m much happier for it, because

One Size Fits Who

December 21, 2024 No Comments

We all have a list of books we feel we should read, should have read long ago, and somehow passed by. My own includes such classics as Catcher In The Rye, A Canticle For Liebowitz, A Separate Peace…and until recently, The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit. The title alone suggests and entire era, a movement, a period in history to be both remembered and forgotten. A cultural cul-d-sac that an entire generation rebelled against. Even in my own experience, it suggested a lifestyle of formal acquiescence to a stifling conformity that set an example to be either embraced or scorned. And yet, I wonder how many of us knew nothing about the story. So this year I did due diligence and read it. It was not what I expected. Published in 1955, it’s the story of a war veteran trying to make a life in the exuberant possibilities of post-war America. He works for a foundation, his work is appreciated, but the fact

So Together, So Alone: Souls In Orbit

December 18, 2024 No Comments

As William Gibson once suggested, the future is here, it’s just unequally distributed. We live in the dreams of past wishful thinkers, what with all the technological marvels surrounding us and permeating our daily lives. We’ve become blasé about much of it. Many of us walk around with the equivalent of a tricorder in our pocket and I heard an interview the other about an eight-year-old in Gaza hunkering down in the midst of chaos with her laptop and cellphone. We walk the hallways of tomorrow and often fail to appreciate the wonder of it all. But the oldest of media can bring it home how wide our world has become and leave us with an ancient estrangement about ourselves and our place in the now. Words on paper. Stories. People coping with the strange and trying to make it “normal” even as they acknowledge how utterly amazing it all is. Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is about a group of astronauts during their

Ad Stellas Per Musica

October 19, 2024 No Comments

Jason Heller’s Strange Stars is an overview of music of the 1970s that referenced, overlapped, or otherwise advanced science fiction. As such, it gives us a unique musical history that sidesteps much of what dominated the Seventies, but which was central to what made that decade unique in contemporary, pop, youth, and/or rock music, however one registers the soundscape of the period. His take-off point is Davie Bowie’s appearance as a kind of avatar of unapologetic science fiction concepts through music, especially his Ziggy Stardust persona. Given the chronology, I can’t argue with that, even though at the time I was only marginally aware of Bowie, and when I did notice him I was not especially impressed. But Heller touches on many of the bands and performers who did exemplify that strain of music for me. Reading Strange Stars, I’m reminded of how much it is possible to miss, even while—or perhaps because of—living through it all. For instance, George

Latent Miller

September 21, 2024 No Comments

There is an appeal to the idea of being somewhere at the beginning, of wishing to live at that time and be involved in those things. The start of movements, the first iteration of a new art form, the establishment of a new mode of expression. We look up to those pioneers and imagine what it must have been like, and, if we’re honest, sometimes envy them the advantages they enjoyed by being first. An illusion, of course. There was always something before them and what they did, even if the world paid too little attention to make it special. Those giants we praise were simply at the right place at the right time, when recognition coalesced around a particular example of an art that finally came—somewhat—into its own. Whitney Scharer’s novel, The Age Of Light, offers some of that nostalgia. Quite a lot of it, really, as she deftly puts us into the heads of the principle players of the

Formative Times and Moving Forward

September 14, 2024 No Comments

It is true, the music that first inspired you tends to be the touchstone for the rest of your aesthetic life. Those songs encountered when the hormones begin their rampage through your limbic system and set all your neurons dancing form the core of what you seek and appreciate going forward. For perhaps five years, what you listen to will anchor you. Five years between, say, 13 and 18. Or 15 and 20? Give or take, that half a decade will be the source you return to till senescence sets in. If one is very lucky, that music will be excellent. I suspect the difference between someone who keeps listening to those pieces over and over for the next 50 years and someone who goes on to find new music, expanding from that initial thrill, is entirely dependent on the quality of that initial exposure. Yes, I’m going to indulge in a bit of snobbery now. Sorry. I believe there

Simulation and Literary

August 16, 2024 No Comments

The question nags, even when it would seem settled (by some, at least): what qualifies a work as “literary”? In a recent discussion about Justin Cronin’s The Ferryman, the question came up again. It seems to arise mainly in relation to genre fiction, which by those who traffic in such comparisons is decidedly not literary. At least until it is. But what does that actually mean in terms of the book in your hands? Always and ever, just as in the assessment of wine, if you’re enjoying it, it’s fine. It can be argued that the best gauge for whether something is “good” or “great” or “literary” is whether it can be read with pleasure multiple times. What about a given text would support that? Let’s assume for the time being that there really is a definable difference between Literary fiction and Genre fiction. Fine. A good starting point to make that distinction would be to ask what the book

Mark W. Tiedemann

Author. Blogger. Photographer.

The Proximal Eye