Author: Mark Tiedemann

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Standing On Principle

Now that it’s clear who the contenders are, I thought I’d make a few statements about the upcoming election. I doubt anyone who has read these pieces over the years will be surprised at who I’ll be voting for. But I want to address a problem that plagues us in aggregate and I see it raising its problematic head again. Let me start though with something that may strike you as curious.

My mother is frightened.

My 89-year-old mother is terrified that Trump will win. She was mightily disturbed back in 2016 when he did. Today she has reached a point of near-despair.

To put this in perspective, she was born 1934. She remembers World War II. She remembers fascism and how the country came together to oppose it. She has never not seen Trump as a homegrown embodiment of everything this country fought against back then. Now, you might quibble with me, a so-called Child of the Sixties, and question my sentiments, but her feelings are different, formed in a different time, a time I hear too many of the die-hard adherents of Trumpism claiming they want to take the country back to. (They seem to have their geography wrong, though.) From her youthful experiences, it seems that this is something few then would have supported.

Some would have, that’s true. But then as now it was the same kind of pathology. People wanting to seal off an idea of America and keep anyone that didn’t measure up to the vague and rage-inspired metrics of the self-selected arbiters of what “America” is out. When you break it down, that’s all this is—hatred of the Other. Any other, which is what makes it so frightening.

During the four years of his presidency, I watched and listened, often in dismay, as those who began as supporters and those on the inside spoke up about the dysfunction, the corruption, the low-down meanness of his administration. People from his inner circle, who had been counted among the elect, changed their assessment and yet when they did they were not listened to but were summarily cast out and defined as pariahs, traitors. Those who had been reliable ideologues up till that point suddenly, once they suggested that maybe things were not as they seemed, were wrong, were out of control, lost in a heartbeat the confidence they had enjoyed from supporters not a day before. That was a set of tea leaves we all should have been able to read, that no matter how much one approved of this policy or that, this was a broken administration that would leave ruin in its wake because it was not about the good of the country but the ego of a leader.

My mother hears the echoes. She saw what people like this did to the world. We’ve seen this before and she is dismayed and disillusioned that a country with so much possibility and success in being human would even contemplate choosing that.

Those who would return this man to office rely on the principles of those opposed to them.

I’m already hearing people grumbling that they will not vote because Biden has not lived up to their expectations. They will stand on principle rather than support a man who hasn’t delivered on all his promises. In spite of some understanding of how politics work, knowing that no single leader can simply wave a hand and accomplish what he may want, seeing evidence that the failures are the result of the in-fighting in Washington, they blame Biden. Alone. As if.

It is not possible for a president to simply do what he intends. No president ever has. Not even FDR, which is probably the model on which these wishful assessments are based.

But it is possible for a president to wreck a great deal, especially if he has a loyal congress to rubberstamp his acts. We saw too much of that between 2016 and 2020.

It astounds me that the choice is not obvious. Guaranteed ruin or the chance at moving the ball forward. To say “you didn’t move it forward enough, so we’re going to let the other guy win” is the epitome of political childishness.

That this matters nothing to Trump’s supporters surprises me not at all. They have bought into the whole Government Is The Problem nonsense and any argument that what Biden has done has been working means exactly the opposite of what it means to us who support him. What Biden’s success means to them is the failure of government to be nothing. Until we understand that, until we internalize the bizarre mirror-think of the current Right, we will continue to argue with them without effect. What we want and what they want are so apposite as to constitute separate and mutually incomprehensible languages.

But stand on principle, stay at home. Give the demagogues another shot. Maybe this time the mob will manage to kill some congressmen.

Because what should be crystal clear after January 6th is that Trump has all the makings of one of those dictators who win a democratic election and then never leave. Because they think they only had to get into office and then it would be forever. Per the Constitution, if he wins this time he can’t have another four years. I have no doubt he will try his best to change the rules so that he can stay there. He has all but said it and what he has stated clearly (which too many people, then as now, believe was nothing but campaign rhetoric) should trouble us to our core.

I do not for a moment believe he is smart enough to engineer all this himself. The gray eminences, the moneyed interests, those unelected directors who have enabled him and who whisper in his ear, they’re smart enough. But of course that kind of thinking borders on conspiracy theory and it’s not that. We’ve seen them, we know mostly who they are, and somehow we have been unable to say no to what they do. If it all ends with this election, it will not be that we didn’t see it coming or understand how.

But by all means, stand on principle and refuse to vote or write in some third-party ghost you know will never get elected and enable Trump to seize the throne. Be pure, clear of conscience.

Say what you will about his handling of the office, Biden is a traditional American who believes in our institutions and a basic idea of democracy.  I believe it’s possible he may be the last of his model we will ever see. He will leave it all intact for the next generation. The other guy will not. By word and deed he has shown us that he won’t.

So there’s my position. Just in case anyone wondered.

I’ll leave you to ponder your choices ahead of November.

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Between Who and Who

Nikki Haley stumbled when addressing the Alabama Supreme Court decision about in vitro fertilization. In an interview with NPR, she said that people do not need government getting in the way when it comes to this difficult decision and “that’s between the patients and their doctor.” I heard echoes. Everyone should hear echoes. That is exactly the stance prochoice advocates have been taking for decades. The phrasing is half a step removed from support for personal choice across the board.

In one way, this is a perfect example of tone deafness. Because it is something of which Haley approves—IVF, which she herself used—then the rules are one way, to the benefit of wanna-be mothers who have difficulty conceiving. But when it goes the other way? “Embryos are babies.”

No. And this is why this issue is biting them in the ass, because it’s an ethical shell game. She has made it, along with every other Republican who has scrambled to deny the implications of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, clear that the issue, while in part about abortion, is really a much larger agenda, which can loosely be described as pro-pregnancy. Again, it comes down to trying to fix a social definition of what is allowable and desirable in one direction that has nothing to do with an individual’s rights of personal autonomy. Mixed in is all the usual hypocrisy of having one’s cake and eating it, too, because it has been understood for some time that certain people who would deny a broad access to reproductive choice would want those choices for themselves.

The lack of compensating programs on offer by this cadre of social engineers underscores the reality that they really don’t care that much about the children once they are born—from childcare, schooling, poverty programs, and a whole raft of assistance programs that are consistently rejected by the political prolife movement—points to the conclusion that this has nothing to do with protecting children. It has to do with controlling women. And by extension men as well. The fact that a good deal of the prolife movement is now admitting that it wants to limit access to birth control as well makes this even more obvious.

And doubtless many of them would read that and look at you and say, “Yes, so?”

Haley went on to modify her initial support of the ruling by saying that for her, an embryo is a baby, but that is my personal belief.

Well and good. And my personal belief is that no one should be denied the benefits of living in society based on biology. The fact that I am a male means that I will never have to live restricted by my sex. I cannot become pregnant, therefore all the questions and burdens of that condition will never impede me.

A woman should have the same right to live her life in the same way. Her biology should not determine her status as a citizen and participant in the zeitgeist and the public sphere and most especially not in private.

Reproductive rights—all of them—are between a woman and her doctor. Nikki Haley pretty much said so.

This issue has clung to our political life for as long as it has simply because no one wanted it settled. It was too good an issue to give up during campaigns. The nature of politics is such that even those politicians who allied themselves to the prochoice side likely did not want to see it settled, either, because it was something they could use to strike back at their opponents. A settled issue does no one any good on the stump.

Obviously, this is not the only issue that is so treated, but it is far more personal than the others. And now that it has been pushed toward being settled by one side, the mess has now stripped away the homilies and façades of homegrown Norman Rockwell “decency” that masks all the thorny vicissitudes of trying to live ones life as one chooses.

This is a question between patient and doctor. Not between a woman and the police, the state, or the pompous moralizing busybody down the street.

Finally, as has been true for decades, this has never been about whether reproductive choice is available, but about who will have access. IVF is obscenely expensive. But if you can pay, by Nikki Haley’s thinking, you should get to play. That has always been true. No money? Well, too bad. You should get access to neither IVF or birth control.

That’s the world they’re trying to achieve.

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I Do Not Believe

It was a toss-up what this post would be. Something about upcoming books or…this.

It is said that we are more polarized than we have ever been. I do not believe that. What I think is that in the last 40 years the band-aid has been ripped off and because of the emergence of social media we are now seeing just how polarized we have always been. Look at any period of our history and ask a simple question: were people more tolerant then or was it that anything that might challenge them in their complacency was simply kept buried and they didn’t have to deal with it?

There’s nowhere to get away from it today. Which I think is all to the good, because unaddressed problems, wounds, dysfunctions, and ruptures never just go away by themselves. The rising cry against so-called Wokism is nothing but people who never had to deal with their erroneous assumptions complaining that they don’t want to own their shortcomings. During the last few decades we have seen a resurgence of Lost Cause nonsense in the form of denials that the Civil War was all about slavery. In response, a flood of actual data was presented to show that, no, in fact, it was all about slavery. All of it, at every level, and by the Secessionist’s own admission. The objectors to this historical reality have been living with the solace of muffled history all their lives. It was unpleasant for them to be confronted with the fact that they had accepted misstatements, propaganda, and lies about something they wanted to feel no connection to. Even as they continued to support, implicitly or otherwise, a civic ecology of racism that exists out of all the unaddressed inequities of that soft-focus, romanticized Gone With The Wind* mythology.

The divisions of which we hear today have always been there and we were able to largely ignore them because of the weight of sheer numbers. The oppressed were too few, too weak, and therefore too voiceless to cause discomfort. Except for those times when it became intolerable even for the majority to bear. Eruptions of social justice movements burst forth, often violently, and Things Were Done to mollify the genie. After which things settled back into an uneasy stasis of hoped-for quiet.

There have been strides, changes we can collectively be proud of, but too often it was left unfinished. Too many people have been left out of the solutions and certain people would like to go back to believing everything is fine. The entire MAGA movement is nothing more than a demand for the cosmetics of a misremembered past when people didn’t complain and we could be pleased with our place as some kind of icon of decency…and power. The dissonance of the demand—Make America Great Again—begs the question, especially at a time when we have an unprecedented capacity to do genuine good in the world. And every time we are tasked to do that, the MAGA crowd howls in discontent that we ae somehow less and the country must be rescued and remade according to Hollywood history.

At the base of this is a habit of cognition which, in proper perspective, should not be a problem, but when pushed past the limits of its utility has become a serious problem.  “What do you believe in?” In normal usage, it’s merely a question of conditional acceptance, a placeholder, if you will, until better information can either modify or replace how one understands something. But when used as a litmus test of trustworthiness, it becomes toxic and inimical to the one thing that might save us from destruction, namely our ability to see clearly.

For years I’ve had a problem with the phrasing “Do you believe in science.” I know what it’s supposed to mean and what it often does mean, but I still chafe at it. The usage carries implications that are the exact opposite of what is intended. And it is those implications that those who intend something else know very well and use to subvert the legitimacy of any casual answer. I’ve gotten to where I will not say Yes. No, I do not believe in science. I accept science as a valid and useful tool, I accept the answers it provides, I privilege its product above mere statements of belief. I trust it, yes, but as a process. The question “Do you believe in science?” reduces science to an object, one with innate qualities on par with a deity. It renders ones acceptance of it as a volitional act of surrender to those qualities and its dictates. It redefines the proper relationship and turns it, by degrees, into a faith, a religion.

No, I do not believe in science.

Go down the list. That question, about anything, is generally a shorthand, a quick way to determine the basis for further discourse, but for some people it is a statement of fidelity and admission to an exclusive club.

Long ago, in my adolescence, I became entranced by the speculations of Erich von Daniken. Along with the whole UFO craze, I thought his ideas percolated with a coolness actual archaeology could never hope to achieve. But I was raised by a father who was determined that I never be taken in. By anything. Question. Never accept that we know everything, in particular that I know everything. It is impossible to go through life constantly off-balance by doubt, but always be aware that certainty is conditional. So I did finally go looking to genuine archaeology and found out that the nonsense Van Daniken espoused was little more than the stuff of a good story. I felt betrayed. I liked the notions he put forth, the part of me that preferred a great yarn wanted very much for his implications to be true. I wanted to believe. But I couldn’t, not after I found out the facts. The same thing happened to my affection for UFOs. And Atlantis. And so many other things that turned out to be mere stories woven from a few threads of reality by what I later understood as the practice of conspiracy theory.

How does this relate to our present divisions? When people are trying to ban books, ignoring history, asserting faith over fact, it should be obvious. Our divisions manifest in multiple ways, but are rooted in the desire by one faction to above all believe. It is, perhaps, easier than constantly reassessing. Reassessment always comes with the possibility of having to discard a favorite story as Not Fact.

In the constantly escalating heat of our divisions, one is forced, it seems, to take hard positions just to maintain equilibrium. So I will here state that I Do Not Believe In…anything. Not in the sense meant by those seeking to undermine everything I find of value.

Authority is never absolute and it seems to me that those most invested in proclamations of What Do You Believe want above all to end all questions. Aside from everything else, it is this assertion of absolute authority—in the guise of taking back our country—that I find I cannot support and which the Republican Party is now deeply invested in. Only they aren’t doing it by finding better information, clearer facts, a firmer grasp of reality, but by trying to silence the debate. I cannot accept that and heads the list of the things I do not believe in.

 

 

 

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*Which is itself a species of selective apprehension. There are two ways to watch Gone With The Wind, the most common apparently being as a love letter to a vanished utopia. But there is such a thing as subtext and below the surface throughout that film one can read all the hypocrisy and ugliness that valorized surface covers. In many ways it is a thorough condemnation of the South and the Peculiar Institution and the rose-tinted notion that there was anything beautiful about the antebellum world.

Art

Slouching Toward The End

I’m in the last stages of the current novel I’m writing and I have entered the zone of “I Don’t Want To Do This Today.” I get that way from time to time, especially with a long project like a novel. I’m writing the sequel to Granger’s Crossing and I reached 66, 000 word this morning. My brain is a funny thing in that when I reach the end of a chapter, everything just shuts down for the day. If I manage to squeeze out a sentence or two on the next chapter, I know I will probably rewrite it the next morning. It has ever been this way. Fortunately, when I get on a roll, I can do a chapter every two days.

But this is a different problem, in that I generally do not want to write the next chapter because I am very tired. So the las few chapters will be rushed and thin as I push to get to the end of the book. I know I’m going to do thorough rewrite, so it no longer bothers me, and since I no longer write on dead-line, it really doesn’t matter that much. (I have my own internal dead-line, though, which tends to make me crazy when I can’t get a move on.)  It’s as if on some level my subconscious has decided that I ought to be done already and is ready to relax. It becomes a bit of a fight with my innate laziness and my desire to produce a good piece of work.

This one has been a particularly difficult challenge. See, I wrote Granger’s Crossing about eleven years ago. It never got any traction anywhere, so I shelved it and went on to other things. Over time, I even got rid of some of the books I had on hand to research the period. I put my notes over there, certain files over here, and generally let everything become scattered. So when Amphorae asked to see it and then decided to take it, I thought it would be a good idea to write the next book, just in case.

Which meant I had to reconstruct all that research. As a result, it took longer to get started on the actual book and here it is almost a year later and I’m just now to the point of seeing the end.

Still pretty quick, but if I were still working a day job, I wouldn’t be nearly this far along.

At least I knew (more or less) what I wanted to write about in the second book.

Of course, the plot has gone in unforeseen directions, with details I never imagined, and research requirements that have led me to some odd corners.

But I am at this moment pretty exhausted. I don’t want to be, but I have no control over it. I can well understand how some writers might give up at this point, feeling that they have lost the golden thread. And truth be told, there are some projects that are not worth the effort, but it’s hard to know which those are. I have habituated myself to slogging on. I will finish. (Actually, the current book is shaping up to be kind of cool in several unexpected ways.)

I have added a new item of advice for those times when I may be dispensing it to newish writers. Specifically, if you’re writing historical fiction, do not wait a decade before starting on a sequel. entropy is real, and it works on the imagination as well as the filing system. Had I back then just gone ahead and put some of this on paper, it would have been much easier. I think.

On the other hand, I may just be a bit better of a writer now than then, so…

Trade-offs are part of the process. One, for instance, is that while I’m working on this I’m working on nothing else. I don’t want to risk pulling out of the headspace for an historical to try to do science fiction just now. I don’t know if that might not result in a conceptual train wreck. I’m close enough to the end of the book now, though, that I don’t feel too bad, and since I just placed three new short stories (all written before I dived into this) I feel I can spare the attention.

The question now is….do I just go ahead and write the third one when I’m done?

Decisions.

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Small Revelations

It is never too late to know yourself better. In truth, working on understanding the inner workings of one’s psyché is—should be—an ongoing process. For all sorts of reasons, not least of which is to have some grasp of your own reactions and how you affect those around you, that work to understand is vital.

Unfortunately, it’s not the most amenable process to any kind of ordered plan. Revelations, discoveries, realizations come when they will, and often not at convenient moments.

We’ve been rewatching some episodes of Queer Eye. We like that show quite a lot, it’s impressive (though early on I wondered at the work they managed to accomplish in a week, which seemed…incredible) and we’ve gleaned useful insights over the course of its (so far) seven seasons. Last night we were watching one and unbidden a thought popped into my head that sent me down a twisted path of self-analysis.

One of my habits—and one I wish I could dispense with—is a tendency to revisit my past. Usually, it’s nostalgic self-indulgence. Remembering good times (or just interesting times) can be a pleasure. But the bad habit part is when I start to obsess over a period or incident I wish had gone differently. Opportunities lost, chances not taken, encounters that did not go well, outcomes that left me uncomfortable. From time to time, I find myself running things over and over as if I could somehow find a way to make them right. I am aware of the pointlessness of this, but at such times I seem helpless before the imaginative reengineering my memories demand. It’s not so much that it wastes time, but it definitely wastes emotional energy, and often leaves me feeling sapped and dissatisfied.

Last night, I had something of an insight. This kind of dwelling is, I think, all about the unfinished and unrealized part of such memories. These are things you were invested in, there was skin in the game, you had your sights set on an outcome that was never achieved, and what your subconscious is doing is trying to see them through. In the process, you relive parts of the past, and it always ends up being just as unsatisfying and frustrating as it was in the first place. That goal is not to be reached and some part of you is geared still toward reaching it. Walking away is not an option because, damnit, it’s not finished.

That it is impossible (mostly) to do that, it goes into a file that comes back at triggering of certain events. There are conversations that I have had again and again in my head that will never resolve the way I want them to, but that only makes them harder to break off and step away from.

I don’t know how common this is, but I suspect some variation of it runs through society and we see people caught up in reliving the past. Often it is at worst annoying. Sometimes it turns into a toxic recycling that continues to disrupt well beyond any utility we might derive in puzzling out the “what went wrong” at the heart of such memories. That need to finish it may be the hook that keeps us coming back and going over it one more time.

I don’t know if realizing this will result in less of this for me, but we’ll see. I just wanted to share it, just in case others may find the observation…helpful.

Art

Going Forward

I started this post last night and it turned into something rather unpleasant. So I trashed that one, went to bed, and here I am. I am on the same page with the late Stephen Jay Gould with regards to calendrical silliness. It is simultaneously one of the most useful and absurd things humans ever invented. Imposing order on the seasons, allowing for cooperation across distances, the timing of events so chaos is kept at bay—wonderful. But the idea that certain dates mean something in cosmic terms? The whole industry of horoscopy, while mildly entertaining, is a window into human gullibility.

But heck, if you enjoy it and no harm is done, go for it. I use meta-dating myself, but mainly for personal matters, like anniversaries or knowing when to cook certain things or go certain places, or, most importantly, knowing when the people around me are going to start acting oddly, usually in extra-cheerful ways. Oh, yeah, it’s that time of year again.

I both get it and don’t get it. My family long ago stopped paying serious attention to holidays. Partly, this was economic—one doesn’t always have the money to do the holidays the way everyone likes—but partly this was a mild refusal to follow the herd.

But I get the utility of making plans and setting goals and calendars can be very important for that. (Besides, I’m a writer—deadlines are real.) Guttenberg, he of the movable type revolution, prior to superstardom as a printer, had been something of get-rich-quick opportunist and had tried to mount of big festival. Word went out, artisans and vendors were to show up, and everybody could make a lot of money—except he got the date wrong and it was all a fiasco. He moved on to the next thing, probably because he really owed some people money. If he’d had a better calendar, we might not have gotten mass printing when we did. (That story may be apocryphal, but many such things happened for less famous people, and it took a revolution in time-tracking to sort it finally into what we have today.)

One thing I intended to write about last night was all the things my fellow humans dote on that I simply don’t get. The list was not long, but the complaining was turning nasty. Not what I wanted to leave out there for the start of the coming year. I wanted to be more upbeat, which can sometimes be difficult for me. One on one, here and there, I’m not a dour fellow, but anyone who has read my posts here should be aware, when my gaze turns global, I can be a buzzkill. There are things people embrace that I don’t get, but usually I don’t care. I only react when the evangelizing starts and my ambivalence is called out by those who think I’m missing something or simply wrong or even stupid. I don’t have to like what you like for you to continue to like it. But if you’re going to call me on it, then I will explain, sometimes at length, why I think you may be, well, off-base.

The other day we listened to a report on art fraud. Some of the prices mentioned were jaw-dropping. I’m sorry, but $50,000,000.00 for a painting? I think it fair to say that this has nothing to do with how beautiful the painting is. There are painters who will never sell a piece for four figures and may be wondering where their next month’s rent is coming from who are likely just as good as (and sometimes better) than that long dead “master” some people with too much money bid on. But beyond that, I had to wonder—why is the provenance so damned important if you enjoy the work at hand? I mean, if you bought it because you like it…

I feel that way about many things. But I realize that other factors get piled on top of such a simple idea and people will find ways to make money on everything.

I believe in my heart that there should be some things kept outside the precincts of profit-making.  Food, healthcare, housing. Beauty. Nature. Education.

We, as I’m sure anyone who actually owns a house has experienced, have been getting cold calls from these “I want to buy your house!” enterprises. I resent them. How dare they. If I want to sell my house, that should be entirely my decision from the get-go. I will reach out, I will call the brokers, I will initiate the transaction. But what we have now is a high-pressure environment driven by people who need your property to generate their bottomline and it is a given that everyone wants to sell what they have. They are making money on the churn, the turnover. A piece of property sitting there comfortably off the market is an offense to their notion that everything has to be constantly in motion, monetarily speaking. But they lose the simple idea that for many people these are not houses but homes and they should be kept apart from all that until the owner is ready. By acting as they do, they “adrenalize” people into making decisions that in the long run hurt us all, because it erodes the idea of constancy and security. It’s only a few steps removed, actually, from abusive eminent domain, which I believe is a corrupt and twisted system that has drifted a long way from its original intention.

There. That’s the kind of thing I was doing on multiple fronts in that discarded essay. I had several things (sports, beer, country-and-western music, junk-throat singers, and on and on etc etc) on the dissecting table and it got…bitter.

I’ve had enough bitter. The last decade has been more than filled with disappointments and let-downs and delays and baffling absurdities and death. For a while, in my younger days, I thought we were getting better at this living thing, but it’s easy to feel we ran off the rails. In so many ways we haven’t. There are so many truly wonderful things happening, all over, and it saddens me that all the ugly hides it and steals our hope.

So going forward, I want to privilege the wonder over the horror, and find ways to damp the horror. Constant bad news is depressing and being depressed, among other things, leeches energy, and we end up too tired. As I said, on a one-to-one level, I’m not an unhappy guy.

But 2023 handed out some difficult to manage stuff. My dad died, being the chief one. We all knew it was coming, and in many ways it was a relief, but months later I find myself from time to time wishing I could have one more argument, share one more cool thing, talk to him one more time.

Going forward, then. I wish everyone to have a clearer road and to find something new and achieve something desired and to have more days of optimism than pessimism. We should expect better, not just hope for it. Make it better where possible. We’ve got a year ahead of us in which changes can be made and hope recharged. Most importantly,  we have each other. Be generous with hugs and smiles and willing ears. Many of us have more than we think. Share.

And don’t let the bitter boil your brain.

 

 

Art

Considerations Going Into 24

It has been a year of highs and lows, as are most years, but generally we pick one by which to characterize the whole. I can’t do that this time, because it is all of a piece.

The highs? A new novel appeared in April, Granger’s Crossing, the first in what may turn out to be a series. I have ideas anyway. I could stand a bit more love for it, not to mention reviews, both at the link and on Goodreads. But after a seven year gap, to have a new book out is amazing.  Likewise, my Secantis Sequence is about to be reissued in ebook format (paper copies will be available, I’m told) and that is something I never expected to see. When I have a proper release date I will post it here and elsewhere. And I was approached by the State Historical Society of Missouri, who contacted me about hosting my papers. This removed a nagging weight from my shoulders. The other day I handed over two more bins to them. I’m still assessing how this makes me feel, but it’s all positive.

What else…I found a new gym, where I’ve been experiencing better workouts than in the past several years. We made a couple of major improvements to the house. No major trips, but we did get to see some very good friends in Kansas City we hadn’t seen in several years. And I’ve been connecting with my mother. Not that we were out of touch, but the months since dad passed have been rocky. She seems to be handling it better than one might expect, but I’ve been getting together with her once a week for a couple of years now and she’s been telling me stories I’d never heard before. I’m happy to report she has more friends in her neighborhood than she knew and while perhaps not thriving, she’s doing quite well. She just turned 89.

We’re approaching the final year of Donna’s fulltime employment (fingers crossed) and that will take some planning. We intend traveling a damn sight more than we have been.

Our friends are all doing well, some in much better places than they had been.

Retirement has been a cliché-ridden experience—not knowing how I ever had time for a job kind of revelation—but I have been accomplishing more.

Lows? Well, expectations on certain fronts are still not being met, and I am getting….tired. I no longer jump out of bed of a morning ready to take on the world. And when I do settle down to work, there’s a bit of a drag in the back of my brain, like “why are you still bothering?” Goals have not been reached, a couple of them now bordering on the never-to-be-achieved. It would be so helpful to have a good agent—or just now any agent. After 35 years as a professional writer, I find myself still in the position of a beginner when trying to get representation—only, a beginner with baggage. A paradox, I know, but there it is. There are projects I have on hold that quite possibly I’ll never get to at this point.

But the big low was dad passing. I’ve written about that, so no need to go over it again, but from time to time I find I still have a conversation or two I’d like to have with him. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing with dire psychological consequences, we made our peace with each other, said our says, and we were good. Just…I think he’d be really pleased with the new novel and it would have been nice to talk about it with him.

I will be 70 next year. As they say, more of my life is behind me now than before me, barring some revolutionary medical breakthrough that might give us another 50 plus years. (Even if such a thing is developed, I’m cynical enough to know it won’t be available for people in my income bracket.) I’m supposed to be wiser now than ten, twenty, fifty years ago, but I’m not at all sure how to gauge that. The shock of living to now is realizing how unwise too many of my fellow humans are, and how their unwisdom affects those around them, even tangentially. That could very well be hubristic on my part, which is why I distrust claims of wisdom. My dad, who was one of the sharpest people I ever knew, used to say that he wasn’t very smart. A completely baffling assertion, I always thought, but I can understand now why he might say that. He and I, we may well be smart, but we’re not smart enough.

One of the reasons I write—or, more accurately, one of the reasons I write what I do—is to understand. In my youth, I read science fiction because it presented a clarity about the world I did not find in literary fiction. It offered possibilities, likely answers, or at least asked the right questions, and I could put a novel down and feel like I understood something better than I had before.  An illusion, of course, a byproduct of the inherent didacticism in the genre, but it would be nice to have that feeling again, just once in a while. I think fostering that feeling has a benefit, in that for a short while it enables the chance to act positively in a world seemingly determined to negate every good thing we attempt. It offers the possibility of right action, and for the duration of that feeling we might do some good, at least more effectively than from a vantage of gloomy surrender to the morass of the world’s contradictions. I write to find that clarity and maybe offer it to others. It is not an answer—there are no solutions in such a space—but a clearing of fogs so we see better what might be done.  I write what I do to find that for myself. I’m trying to explain the world to me.

An endless task, but after all this time still the only worthwhile path I know.

2024 will bring challenges and more muddle and into that path if someone shines a light or offers a hand or shows you a possibility, then be cheered that you are not the only one walking it and searching.

Meanwhile, be well, be safe, and love each other. Above all, love each other.

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Swift Impressions

Let me state up front that I do not listen to Taylor Swift. Until this past year or so I have been barely aware of her. It is the osmotic dynamic in which we live that I know anything about her at all. So when she became the Time Magazine Person Of The Year, I was amused but frankly unstartled.

I say “unstartled” intentionally, as in I was not blind-sided, shocked, or negatively put off balance. Mildly surprised, maybe, but hell, given the record of Time’s Person of the Year, anything is possible. (Hell, Kissinger was one, on the same cover with Nixon. Then there’s Rudy Giuliani…) All it represents is an assessment of impact on the culture. Taylor Swift is a pop star. She’s the first one to be so honored, but a cursory look at her impact suggests many reasons. The fact that she inspired record numbers of young people to register to vote alone says she’s more substantial than her detractors like.

Those detractors, now. I’ve been seeing, out of the corner of my awareness, for quite some time the nonsense heaped upon her. She is a single woman, who apparently, in the unfortunate phrase, “can’t keep a man.” As if that describes anything noteworthy, other than how some people clearly can miss the point. This seems to be the biggest thing, an insult somewhat disguised as pity. Really, though, it’s the kind of thing said of people who make the sayers uncomfortable.  She’s single. So what? She runs her own business. Hm. She’s very successful. “But she’s—”

What? Unapologetically herself?

Her music is not what I choose to listen to anymore, but I will say, speaking as an an amateur musician, that she has chops and her compositional skills are far more sophisticated than people give her credit for.

But I suspect for a lot of her detractors it is her politics that disturb them. Combined with the nonsense about there being no man, it borders on an insistence that she’s an uppity woman with opinions who needs to be brought to heel by a man.

If Dolly Parton were 26 years old today, we might be hearing exactly the same things about her from the same quarters.

Here’s one of the things about a woman like Taylor Swift which I think bears a bit of examination, because I think it is what makes her both popular and derided, depending on who’s talking at the moment. Taylor Swift is unpossessable. The assessments by those disturbed by her would seem to swirl around this central characteristic. (She’s even re-recording early music to stick it to the record companies that tried to diddle her on ownership and royalties. She will own herself and her art, thank you very much.) If this is, indeed, one of the “issues” in play, then by all means, she deserves the accolades, and good on her. I think it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway to make it clear, that if this were a man, none of this would be an issue at all. In fact, it would be regarded as “normal.” Whatever that means.

The fact that I, who care almost nothing about her, know these things is a direct consequence of the impact she’s had, and that’s the point of the Person of the Year designation.

I’m going to go back to listening to what I usually do now.

Art

From There To Here, the Curious Path to Granger’s Crossing

It’s a good question: how does a veteran science fiction writer come to write an historical mystery-slash-love story? Especially one set in a period and place wherein, as far as I can find, no one else has bothered to set fiction. 

There are clear parallels between historical fiction and science fiction (clearer still between historical and fantasy) in that, depending on how far back and where you go, world building becomes a major component, and science fiction is very much about world building. Though the emphasis on that has of late verged on too much. We still have to create character, develop plot, and have something meaningful to say.

Like most people who grew up learning anything about St.Louis and its origins, I knew the basic story. In 1763, Lafayette and Company came up the Mississippi River and established a trading post on a bluff which quickly became the town of St. Louis, named in honor of Saint Louis the IX (though it didn’t hurt, I’m sure, that Louis XV was still king of France). The Chouteaus developed the place into a vital confluence of trade and in 1804 it became one of the main entry points for the westward expansion of the United States after Napoleon sold the territory of Louisiana to Jefferson in a fire sale at bargain prices.

Like most students of my generation, that was about it. Things became more interesting in the 1960s when one of our mayors, Cervantes, went on a campaign to celebrate “our Spanish heritage.” Like many people living here at the time, I scratched my head and said “what Spanish heritage?” After all, this is St. Louis, there are streets with French names, towns to the south have French names, it was the Louisiana Purchase, we lived in a French Catholic city with universities named for French Jesuits…and on and on. Mayor Cervantes was going on about something that ran counter to our sense of self. What Spanish heritage?

Well. Like anyplace that has been around more than a minute, the history is far more involved—and interesting—than that which we learned in grade school. But I had to arrive at it by decades of roundabout study, which leaves me wondering why history is so often taught the way it is. Prior to my research, early St. Louis history for me began with the Founding and ended with the Purchase, with a brief note about Lewis and Clarke. Next time it entered my notice was with Dred Scott and then, almost as briefly, the Civil War. Next up was the building of the Gateway Arch. We are too often contemptuous the history of our birthplace and generally know more about other cities than we do of our own.

My entry point, though, was stranger than most, perhaps. 

Many years ago, I worked as lab manager in a photo shop. Shaw Camera. One of the two best jobs I ever had. We were a custom black & white lab and we had a host of amazing customers. One of them was the city water department, which possessed a huge archive of photographs going back easily to the mid-19th century. They embarked on a project to have their glass plates printed and new copy negatives made.

One day they brought in a series of plates of the construction of Eads Bridge. They were surreal in the way a lifelong SF reader might find them, stirring connections to Jules Verne. The pictures of the bridge, rising from the waters of the river, the early stages of the anchors, the steel. I made a separate set of prints and gave them to my friend, SF writer Allen Steele, and we spent an evening going over them and speculating and doing some story construction based on those images. The idea of writing a novel based around that place and time took root. I started doing research.

That novel has yet to be written, but I did a lot of research into St. Louis of the 19th Century. (I still have some hopes of getting around to that book, so I still have all the research.) In the meantime, other projects came up.

I developed an idea for an alternate history novel set in St. Louis. I won’t here detail all the byways that took, but I did write that one, plus two more. While working on it, I continued my research. Since it was alternate history, I went all the way to the Founding to make sure my divergent history made sense.

And in the course of that stumbled on the colonial period.

Did you know there had been a battle of the revolutionary war fought in St. Louis? I didn’t. At best I recalled something adjacent having to do with George Rogers Clarke and Vincennes, but had no idea anything directly involved St. Louis.

And that’s where the Spanish heritage came into it. If it hadn’t been for the Spanish lt. governor, De Leyba, the battle might have been a non-event. The Spanish were the allies of the American rebels and De Leyba insisted St. Louis fight.

It was a one day affair, mainly. There are a number of personal journal accounts, many of which contradict in certain details. And there had been an assault across the river at the same time against Cahokia. The battle itself was interesting, but did not in itself suggest a whole novel to me. But there had been an American presence and…

Step by step, sidewise and widdershins, the elements of what became Granger’s Crossing came together. I was toying with switching genres and thought to do mysteries. I wrote two, one contemporary, the other historical. For a long time, neither attracted any interest.

But the more I looked into the period, the more interesting it all became, and multiple stories suggested themselves. The first is almost entirely fictional. But the background, the setting, is as close as I could make it to what was actually there. 

St. Louis at that time was a village, hovering around a thousand people. Three major north-south streets, farmland shooting west, a pond and stream along which a mill was eventually built, surrounded by now-gone mounds left by a native civilization long absent, and just south of the Missouri River, it became the center of the fur traffic in the midwest, overseen by a number of prominent people, but dominated by the Chouteaus, who were a political as well as financial dynasty. It was the town to which French settlers moved in the wake of the Seven Years’ War from the east side of the Mississippi, and younger than Ste Genevieve to the south, which was eventually inundated by the river and forced to move inland. From its founding in 1763 almost to the advent of the Purchase, the population remained roughly the same, but that is deceptive, since it was a trade center and a good number of people came and went, both trappers and Indians, occasionally driving the population up considerably in some months.

Spain took over because when France lost the war, Louis XV ceded the Louisiana territory to them rather than see it fall into British hands. Since the British then dominated Canada and started building forts in the north, there was bound to be conflict, and in 1780 a half-hearted bid was made by the British to take St. Louis. That would have seriously crippled Spanish trade. They failed. The habitants of St. Louis fought them off, even though outnumbered. The fact is, the combatants the British fielded were not regulars but largely local Indian tribes that, while ostensibly fighting for the British, were there for their own reasons, and when victory was neither quick nor easy, they left the field.

Into this, I introduced my main character, Ulysses Granger, a young lieutenant in the Continental army, seconded to Clarke’s militia as an observer, along with his best friend, Ham Inwood. When Ham goes missing, Granger comes looking for him, and finds his body, clearly murdered rather than a casualty of combat.

Due to the necessities of war, it is three years before Granger can return to start trying to find out what happened to Ham.

That was the point of departure for the novel. 

I said that historical fiction shares a common trait with science fiction. The further back in time one goes, the more alien the world encountered. Granted, people are people, but customs and resource contour our reactions, and in truth claiming that “people are all the same” is a facile and almost worthless aphorism when trying to reconstruct a time and place. Quite a lot of how people lived ends up being conclusions drawn from conjecture and reconstruction. You have to sit back from studying what is available, close your eyes, and try to build the world suggested.

The temptation to overlay contemporary ideas of right and wrong should be fought. Not that certain principles would not be found harmonious across time, but they would not necessarily manifest the same way, and certain questions likely would not even arise.

In the end, though, it is fiction, and it must speak to us now. Just as when one goes the other direction to imagine a future that may or may not happen, care must be taken to remember that change is a constant, and what we take for granted now may not remain relevant tomorrow.

I found a few books that proved very helpful in pointing my the right directions. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil by Patricia Cleary; Beyond the Frontier: A History of St. Louis to 1821 by Frederick A. Hodes; Francois Valle and His World by Carl J. Elkberg; Founding St. Louis by J. Frederik Fausz. Those dealt primarily with St. Louis. I used a number of broader histories to place it all in the broader context of the Revolutionary War, but those books, with their excellent references, took me through and into details that helped make the novel better, and I than them for their work.

So now the book is in the world. I am working on a sequel, set a couple years after the events in Granger’s Crossing, this one based on an actual murder, though I am delighting in looking somewhat past what was recorded and creating what I hope will be a richer mystery. 

And then there are the other novels which led me to this one. It’s been a strange path to get here. One of the pleasures has been to answer that question from my childhood: “What Spanish heritage?” Indeed.

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Intellectual Parasitism

This will be brief. Sometime around 2010 a term entered common usage—Woke—which basically meant be alert and aware of racial prejudice in all its manifestations. It took hold and came to stand for general awareness of discriminatory conditions and practices across a wide range of social interactions. Being alert and aware and, a step further, choosing to speak out about a variety of all-too-commonly held beliefs that slowly, deeply poison our daily discourse, from anti-LGBTQ statements to all manner of anti-Progressive resistance from certain quarters. In the short decade since, it is being weaponized as a pejorative on behalf of the very attitudes and mouthpieces the term was intended to call out. The Right is very good at this sort of thing. Look what happened to the term Liberal. To some people it’s another word for devil-worship and pederasty.

And people who repeat the detractions and attack Wokeism (as they call it) seem blissfully unaware that what they are railing against is merely a call to vigilance. They throw the accusation of Woke as if they know what it means. Well, they know what it means to them, perhaps, but it always puzzled me that they themselves would have to be functionally Woke in order to even recognize the thing they’re opposing. I don’t believe they are. I don’t believe they understand what they’re denigrating at all.

I’m reminded of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  Someone, somewhere, has gifted them with the intellectual equivalent of that delightful fungus and they go forth issuing challenges and putting up barriers and challenging anything that runs afoul of their pet aphorisms and they do so at the behest of the parent organism that has infected them. The basic scenario is this: Person A makes a blanket statement about Those People. The statement is worse than useless, it parrots something they may have heard growing up, but they’re comfortable with it because most of their life it has gone unchallenged. Person B says “That’s not true. In fact________”  What follows is a string of actual data which shows the original statement to be a load of dingo berries. Person A responds “That’s a load of Woke B.S.” and triumphantly withdraws from any potential dialogue that might threaten the comfortable zone of thoughtless categorization they use in lieu of actual intellection.

I have witnessed this. Almost never is any substantive rebuttal offered and direct engagement is refused.

Someone like Ron DeSantis told them Woke is evil and, unquestioningly—because the hapless ant walks around with a host of substanceless heuristics that allows them to walk through life without doubting their own intelligence—they go forth and refuse to learn. Instead they have a new heuristic in their arsenal of defenses that prevents any possibility that they might reconsider a longheld prejudice and rethink their attitudes,

Zombies in service to ignorance. And rather than take any steps to find out if that is the case, they will simply turn it around and accuse those questioning them of being exactly what they are—zombies in service to ignorance.

Look: even if you end up reaffirming that thing you believe, doing a little work to find out if it’s true never hurt anyone. But refusing even to look in the evil telescope or open the forbidden book is the kind of behavior that leads to the collapse of civilization.

But it may not be your fault. Poor little ant, you’ve got a parasite.