I’m still perusing my new Edward Weston and Ansel Adams books. Sigh. I lurves me good black & white. Not that this image is particularly good, but it’s my most recent.
I’m working on a new novel. Well, not new new, but new enough. And reading. And right now watching pesky snow fall and wishing I didn’t have to go into work this afternoon.
So this is another marker till I have something meatier to post. Enjoy and stay warm.
I haven’t done a new picture of Coffey in a bit. She graciously agreed to sit for this portrait, responding with uncanny sensitivity to my vague suggestions for pose and poise, finally opting to just be herself, waiting for something more energetic to happen.
Back in August some friends sent me a lovely orchid as a get-well gift. Gorgeous flowers. Naturally, they died, and we thought, that’s the end of that. We’d heard how delicate orchids were.
But we did not discard the empty stalk, just moved it to another room on the off-chance. Much to our delight, the “delicate” blossoms have responded to a modicum of benign neglect, and once more we have great beauty made even more wonderful by it’s complete unexpectedness.
I’ve also been combing a new book of Edward Weston photographs and feeling the urge to do new photography. It’s been a while, so…
I put up a review of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas over on The Proximal Eye. The long and the short of it here is, I liked it. I liked it a lot. Go read.
I’m doing a little light reading now for the next few days while I get myself geared up to do a new novel. (Henning Mankell, Dennis Lehane, maybe Greg Egan…) The great office renovation is about over and I can work comfortably in here now.
For those of you with your heads tucked into your shells, it snowed last night. Bah fucking humbug. We stayed in, I wrote, I needed to do Other Things outside, but if I don’t have to I won’t do them in the snow.
Tomorrow there will be work-related interruptions to my lazing about. See you after that.
I posted a new piece over at my Other Place, The Proximal Eye. Â A few folks have expressed a bit of amazement that I began another blog. Â After all, I’m constantly complaining of lack of time.
But I’m a writer, first and foremost, and call me shallow (you did! how dare you take me at my word…?) but getting words out in front of people is what being a writer is mainly about. Â Being paid for those words is, of course, part of the plan, to which the new blog is a necessary long term component. Â That will become clear.
I’m getting ready (soon, soon) to start work on a new novel.  Part of the delay is getting settled into a new schedule, since I have a Day Job once again.  Didn’t I tell you?  Yes, I work for Left Bank Books.  This is a heady combination of smart and unwise on my part.  I work in a bookstore now!  I have a book habit.  This is like employing a junkie in a pharmacy.
But after a few hefty purchases, I’m beginning to exert discipline. Â Don’t know how long it’ll last, but we’ll see.
That aside, so far I’m enjoying it. Â For one, the people working there are, without exception, terrific. Â Eclectic, sure, but then what am I? Â I can only hope to aspire to the level of eclecticism on display in the intellectual variety of the Left Bank crew. Â If you live in St. Louis and have not paid the place a visit, well, what’s taking you so long? Â Get your ass in there and marvel.
Now for another act of self-discipline. Â I’m cutting this short, right here, now, and turning to my other writing—fiction.
Eat. Sleep. Read. Â (Come in to the store, you’ll understand.)
Also, make time enough for love.
January is nearing its end. How’d that happen? I thought…
Anyway, I put a new review up over at My Other Blog, the Proximal Eye, about Joe Haldeman’s latest. Right now, though, I’m reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which has been recommended to me countless times by now and it seems half the people I work with at Left Bank Books are currently reading it. So Friday I finally sat down with it and started and as of this morning I’m halfway through. I’ll tell you what I think of it when I finish, but so far I’m suitably impressed, especially now that I’m into the Skiffy section with the clones.
I used to cringe when someone from the “mainstream” decided to go slumming and write a science fiction novel. They’ve seldom done a good job in the past, but that seems to be changing. It would be easy to say “How could it not?” given the world we live in today. Barring space travel and androids, we live daily with much that was promised us, as exemplified in Star Trek. (When I read about 3-D copiers my hair stood on end, a genuine “shit…” response.) But we moved into it so smoothly, albeit so quickly, no one seemed to notice that we were living in the future!
Maybe more people noticed than I thought. A lot of writers who in the past I would never have expected to do it well have done credible to excellent science fiction or at least SF-related fantasy that my flinch reflex when a new one comes out is relatively small now. Mitchell is handling it very well.
Meantime, I’m just about through with the rearrangement of my office, so much so that I’ve been slacking off and trying to write. I have a couple of short stories in the works that are eluding resolution (one of which is actually called that) and I have a pair of novels to write this coming year.
So it’s the last week of January and I’m having no luck slowing things down time-wise so that I can actually do the work.
Stay tuned. All will be well. Promise.
During the recent kerfluffle with this blog—you know, when it disappeared for almost three weeks?—I fretted that I’d lost a huge amount of material. But my ISP people saved the site and restored it.
Almost. Below is a repost from January 7th (the day before it all crashed) which seems to have been the only casualty. I recovered this from, of all places, Goodreads, which apparently reposts entirely the blogs to which it is linked. So if you think you’ve read this before, well, maybe you have.
#
What I thought would be a simple matter of swapping one desk for another has turned into a major endeavor. I wanted a new work desk for my new computer for the new year. I’ve been toying with this for some time and I finally received the necessary nudge (in the form of a new flatscreen monitor of great size and wonderfulness) to act upon the intent.
Naturally, (because this is how my life operates) it has become a complete office make-over.
This while at the same time I decided to start a new blog (on the sidebar, under My Pages, The Proximal Eye) dedicated to book reviews and related ephemera and when I have begun to feel the itch to start a new novel and I must get back to the gym on a regular basis and and and…
Wish me luck.
Please excuse the “brief” hiatus. Once in a while, I have Issues with all this internet falderol and this time it resulted in a protracted absence of the Distal Muse, for which I apologize. I take full responsibility for the crash, although it did seem to take an inordinate amount of time for my ISP to resolve it.
No matter. The Distal Muse is back up now.
In the intervening weeks since everything went blank, things have happened. Primarily regarding this site, I have begun a new blog. (Yeah, right, like you need another excuse to spend time away from your fiction, but go ahead, Tiedemann, it’s your time, spend it any way you please.) (Thank you, I will. Now go back to your corner.)
I have set up a sister blog called The Proximal Eye, dedicated to literature, film, art, questions of culture. Reviews, basically. I already have a few posts up. I wanted a venue a bit less mixed than this one, which may have begun with the intention to discuss a finite number of things, but which has become my online soap box, megaphone, pulpit, podium, and editorial page. Anyone wishing to link to my posts on books, film, and music would have to do so to the individual posts, because the Muse may not be entirely suitable for all situations. Anything I might post here, therefore, that fits within the parameters of cultural objet d’arte I will cross post to the Eye.
Now that I have that cleared up, welcome back to the Muse. In the next few days I’ll put something up to get myself current with whatever other interests, irritations, and insights I might have been unable to vent spleen upon in the past few weeks.
Thank you for your patience.
The spam changed right after New Year’s Eve. For now, no one is offering to give me a longer tool or more staying power. Instead, it’s all weight loss. Everyone has a program, from Rachel Ray to Madonna, with Angelina Jolie somewhere in the mix.
Weight loss. Hm! Let me tell you about weight loss. Surgery will do it every time.
But I’ve been over that. Thing is, I’ve kept it off. And somehow I managed to get through the entire holiday season without eating myself into a stupor, which I normally do, because everywhere you seem to go someone is shoving food at you. All those cookies, and never mind the brownies, the pies, the cake…
Avoided it all.
And I’ve been back to the gym. I still have a way to go to get back to where I was before August, but I’m getting there, I’m getting there, I am.
I dreamt last night that I was reshelving books—my own—and filling in gaps. I don’t actually have many gaps. I put up another section of shelving along the fiction wall and it’s damn near full already. I have more books in boxes that may never see a shelf again. What am I going to do with all these things when I get closer to the end?
Look at me, trying to write more of them. Well, there’s ego for you, assuming you have anything to say anyone else wants to hear. (I have noticed a corollary between the ability to speak well and write well—an inverse relation, in which improvement in the latter seems to diminish the former. Not sure I like that—no, I definitely don’t like that, but the alternative explanation has to do with age, and I don’t want to go there, either.)
I’d like to take a paragraph here and thank friends, especially those of long acquaintance, who have made life marvelous, and one of whom gifted us with an after-Christmas Christmas that has stretched our smiles almost to their limit. We have good friends, and have made some new ones in the last couple of years. The list is longer than I was raised to expect and makes me feel rich. Peace to you all and thank you.
It’s one of those numerically clever days. 1-3-13. 1313. (1313 Mockingbird Lane…anyone remember that? Who lived there…)
Seemed like a good excuse to write something—first post of the new year.
No matter what, things are going to be different, or somebody owes me an explanation.
Travel far, travel well. Be safe.
Oh. And a picture…
I was never so glad to see an election done than this past one. The only comparable year in my experience was 1968 and I can’t honestly say that comparison is viscerally valid, as I was 13 most of that year, 14 right before the election, and most of the issues washed over me leaving me unfazed. But ’68 was the year of Nixon and Humphrey and George Wallace, Vietnam, the Counter Culture and the Anti-War Movement, and a resurgent Republican Party in opposition to LBJ’s Great Society. I sensed the acrimony, the bitterness, the ugliness, but most of it made no real sense. Looking back, I can see that it was very much a revolutionary year and now I can make at least an intellectual comparison. 2012, politically, was a war.
I just finished reading Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, part of his epic series Narratives of Empire.  Lincoln chronicles, novelistically, the Civil War from the viewpoint of Washington and inside the Lincoln White House. I have read enough period history to recognize the essential accuracy of Vidal’s setting and the nature of the events. It was tonic for me since it is a full court display of a truly ugly period of political history. We have encased Lincoln in the amber of the past and rendered him “safe” for our nostalgic alchemy, but it is always instructive to learn about what really went on. For sheer vileness, one would be hard pressed to find another period in our history to top it. All the thoughtless charges this past year that Obama was destroying the country, that his re-election would signal the end of liberty, the gutter-level spite in even the most passing of commentary—especially by those in the upper levels of our political institutions—are rendered commonplace by gaining even a smidgen of knowledge of earlier times. Lincoln, who is now regarded as one of if not the best president we ever had, was at the time regarded even by his supporters as a first-class mediocrity, called “the original gorilla” by subordinates and a Press that was never, seemingly, satisfied with his performance. His own cabinet was comprised of men who, each of them, thought they could do a better job. Whereas Obama is only feared as someone who would take away liberty, Lincoln did (the suspension of Habeus Corpus chief among his actions) and yet, here we are, 150 years later, having a hard time wrapping our collective heads around the utter humanness of his presidency.
Still, we didn’t live through the Civil War, we lived through 2012, and personal experience matters differently.
My reasons for not voting for Romney I made plain. What I found so disconcerting this past year is how little reason impacted those who were bent on ousting Obama. Once I left the realm of contentless rhetoric and starting talking policy, eyes glazed over, mouths became slack, the body language of my conversents acquired the fight-or-flight posture of someone beginning to perceive a physical threat. I can only conclude from my small and thoroughly unscientific sampling that most of the people I knew who intended to vote for Romney cared not at all about such things. Policy made no difference other than as a prop to a personal disdain for Obama. Without doubt, I’ve lost acquaintances over this.
Worse, the response to losing has been one of the most bizarre congeries of absurdities in recent memory. The complete denial of reality startled me. It has been an antic, carnival year in politics.
Interrupted for me personally by my first encounter with mortality, namely an attack of appendicitis that laid me up for nearly two months. The first week of August I developed a “fluttering” in my belly that resembled stomach flu, but wouldn’t settle out. By the time I got to the emergency room, it was a full blown agonizing Thing. My appendix had perforated and I was in Barnes Hospital for a bit over a day. A few weeks later, I was back in because, one, the wound had become infected, and, two, I had developed an abscess. Two months after the initial event, I was pronounced healed. Two months of soup and sleep and reading books and contemplating vulnerability.
For whatever reason, I do not consciously consider myself the object of much affection, so it always surprises me (pleasantly) when people display it toward me. (I don’t really understand this in myself, since I am in many ways a rather self-centered person, but this never seems to extend to expectations that anyone else pay attention to me…desires, certainly, but not expectation…) The degree of sympathy and well-wishing that came during my convalescence both humbled and delighted. Thank you, my friends.
As I said, this did afford me an opportunity to read and I plowed through several books I might otherwise not have managed.
I began a new job this year, at Left Bank Books. Back in 2011 I started doing work for them of an unusual sort—what we call downtown outreach. Left Bank is our oldest independent bookstore (1969) and four years ago opened a second location in downtown St. Louis, which proceeded to be ignored. Well, it takes a while for a new business (or a new location) to acquire recognition, but in this economy they couldn’t really afford to wait. So we tried something and I started going around to the businesses downtown to introduce them to the fact that they now have a full-service bookstore right there. Many folks knew about Left Bank Books, but only remembered the Central West End location. Naturally, they were thrilled to learn there was one within walking distance.
I sort of doubt I had much to do with their increased sales this past year, but it didn’t hurt. After a few months of my meeting with office managers, building managers, hotel concierges, and the like, sales took a turn for the better.
As of October, I started training as a bookseller. I’m still doing some of the outreach, but now I have some steady hours (much needed!) and the bonus is I’m getting to know a bunch of very smart, very passionate, very cool people.
Donna also got a new job. In a weird way.
At the end of 2011, she was dismissed from USSEC, the Job From Hell. The less said of that the better. The money, as they say, was great, but everything else sucked. Frankly, that job was killing her (and not doing me much good either). Entirely due to office politics, which she hates, she was set up to take a fall and fired.
Cause for Great Celebration and Gleefulness!
We’ve been becoming reacquainted this past year. Except that the search for a new job turned out to be far more labor intensive than either of us anticipated.
However, she went back to doing what she loves to do—temping. Of course, the problems with temping are simple: not enough pay and no benefits. But she likes doing it!
Solution came in the form of an actual job offer from a temp agency to be a regular staff employee. She works directly for the agency, takes what assignments they are now dedicated to getting her, and best of all she has benefits. This is in most aspects a dream job for her.
We’re planning an actual vacation. First one in several years. (Long weekends aren’t actual vacations, we’ve learned this the hard way.) But the best part is, she’s happy.
On the writing front, things are…much the same as they have been. I finished the second volume of my alternate history trilogy (officially the Oxun Trilogy, consisting of Orleans, Oculus (now done), and Orient (forthcoming) and my agent loved it. I have some revisions to make on it, but nothing major.
And we’re waiting. I’ve decided to go ahead an write Orient this coming year anyway, just to have it finished.
I have placed a short story collection with a small local press. Official announcement yet to come.
And I’m trying to write short fiction again.
My photography is continuing to improve (digitally) and I’ve taken my first steps into RAW. Musically, well, I was playing fairly well until August…
The components of my youth are changing, passing away, metamorphosing. Too many deaths of heroes, too many changes in landscape, too much maudlin reminiscence. I won’t detail such things here. Go back over my posts these last dozen months and you will see what I have mourned and remembered.
All in all, 2012 was a net improvement over the last few years in several ways, though I admit I have to think about it to see most of them. The bout of appendicitis has been a bit of a wake-up call, with solemn contemplations of time left and mortality and reassessment. I had blithely been living as though I had plenty of time left to do Everything I Want To Do, but even before August I was admitting that this wasn’t true. August underlined it and put an exclamation point on it.
We do not make Resolutions normally. I long ago knew that such things were little better than To Do lists that often get overwritten and superseded by circumstance. But this time…
2013 will be different. I don’t know how yet, but.
So be safe, be warm, love each other. See you all on the flipside.
