Category: Personal

Art

It Was Thirty Years Ago (Plus One)…

Not that I think anyone is especially interested in me as subject for biography, but once in a while I stumble on something that brings back a flood of memory and I feel compelled to say something about it.  Recently a friend of mine wrote in his blog about the Twenties being the most painful time of life, at least of his life, and it got me thinking.  All pain is relative and certain periods possess character, and characteristic pain.  The Twenties are painful insofar as most of us assume—and have it assumed on our behalf—that we know what we want, know how to get it, and, most importantly of all, that we know who we are.  I think it fair to say that few of us are astute enough at that time to know that who we are is something that changes constantly, and that who we are at Twenty is definitely not who we were (we hope) at Ten, or Twelve, or Fifteen.  By the time we’re over Twenty-One, we may assume that we have shed all the more awkward and embarrassing characteristics of our pre-Twenty-One self.  It’s an illusion, but a powerful one, and may have utility as a survival mechanism.

With that in mind, here’s a photograph of me from 1979.

me-1979-copy.jpg

Firstly, a disclaimer.  The original is black & white.  I’ve been having some fun with Photoshop lately and I couldn’t resist colorizing this a bit.  It’s not particularly good, but it is rather useful to me in certain ways.

You see here the image of a supremely confident and, what is more, happy young fellow.  I still have that camera.  The setting is of some local interest—that is the building that became Off Broadway, a night spot which I believe still exists (at least the building is there with that marquee) and is still open.  Not sure about the latter.  I’d become acquainted with the man who was doing the rehab.  There were big plans afoot for the place and he thought it would be a good idea to record the progress.  So I spent a few week ends in the shell during construction making images of the work being done.

Eventually, the plan was, we’d have a series of before-and-after images and I’d produce 16 X 20s for them to hang to show how the old, broken-down structure had been transformed into the delightful venue the patrons were then enjoying.  It was a good project and for a time I was having a great deal of fun doing it.

Then everything fell apart.

See, the key ingredient to all this was the person who shot this image.  The woman who, at the time, I was madly in love with and had made plans with.  Plans for the rest of our lives.  I was giddy with joy at the prospect.  It was through her I’d met these people and developed this project and she worked with me on it.  We were, at the time this image was made, having one hell of a good time.

By the forthcoming October it was all over.  Crashed and burned, and the demise was about as painful and brutal as could be imagined.

So in this sense, I can agree with my friend’s assessment that the Twenties were in some ways the most painful period of my life.

I’d attached myself to this woman in a fit of desperation.  I didn’t think it so at the time, of course, but the fact was I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life but a very sharp sense that whatever it might turn out to be what I’d been doing was a dead-end and I did not know how to get out of it.  I’d been pretty much alone, in terms of what is known as “meaningful relationships” since…

Well, forever.  I had had a steady girlfriend for only one not-quite-year-long period right after I got out of high school.  Before that, I staggered through adolescence always wanting, unable to figure out how to get, exactly that—a girlfriend.  Ignorance is not always bliss.  For a host of reasons, most of which I understand now but couldn’t figure out then, I drifted through my teen years oblivious to the rituals and subtleties of dating and all that.  I was one of those benighted, highly-intelligent idiots who just “didn’t get it.”  As I entered my Twenties, it appeared that this would continue to be the case.

So I seized an opportunity, attacked the situation with the kind of blunt force by which I did everything then, and tried to “break out” of the rut I saw myself in at the time—and it very nearly landed me in a marriage that, in hindsight, would have been disastrous.  I have since recognized that my thick-skulled obliviousness to the ins-and-outs of boy-girl fraternizing was a boon to my future.  I would likely have fallen into the “accepted norm” of such things and woken one day to find myself miserable in a completely different way.

So the pain of various periods of life quite often turn out to be excruciating learning curves we must ascend.  Obstacles overcome and so forth.  And really, no decade is consistently one thing.  The “painful” period of the Twenties, for me, only lasted till I was 25.  That’s when I met Donna and things took a decided turn for the optimistic.  The second half of that decade, for me, was hardly painful at all.  In fact, it was quite blissful.  Part of the benefit of the first half of that decade was that I could recognize the bliss while I was going through it.  I was able to appreciate what I was living through because of what had gone before and for that I am very grateful to all the crap I endured while trying, clumsily and obstinately, to shed the ignorance that very nearly became a cage.

The only thing I wish now is that I’d had a chance to finish that photographic project…

Absurdity

Labels

Conservative.

Liberal.

We act as if we know what these labels mean.  Conservatives are traditionalists, fiscally opposed to anything that smacks of gambling, private, often religious, and pedantic on what they consider “appropriate” in either government or personal conduct.

Liberals, on the other hand, are often taken for progressive, willing to spend social capital to repair perceived problems, tolerant, agnostic if not atheist, and overly-concerned with a definition of justice that ought to be all-encompassing rather than what they perceive as sinecure for the privileged.

Well.  Over on Facebook I posted a brief quote (my own) to boil down the actual underlying distinctions.

Conservatives are those who don’t like what other people are doing, Liberals are those who don’t like what other people are doing to other people.

It was meant to be taken as humorous.  But I’m not being entirely flip here.  When you look at it, and try to define the common factor in much that passes for conservative posteuring—of any country, any background, anywhere—it always comes down to one group trying to stop another group from Doing Things We Don’t Approve.

I heard a news report this morning (on NPR—I unabashedly don’t pay attention to any other news source, I find them all utterly biased) from Pakistan about the university scene there, and one bit caught my attention—at a campus in Punjabi, conservative students who find men and women sitting too close together interfere and move them apart.  At a game of Truth or Dare, conservative students pulled participants out and beat them.

How does this apply here?  Well, here’s a clip from P.Z. Meyers’ Pharyngula to illustrate:
Rising Sun School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there’s the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form a club for non-religious students…well, you can guess what happened. All their signs were torn down and destroyed, and the students were threatened by their peers. There were also letters to the editor of the local paper.

My daughter comes home today and informs me they have started a new club in Rising Sun High School. The club is known as NRS, which stands for Non Religious Society.

The members of this club have proceeded to hang posters along the halls of the school. When a student tore the posters down, because they offended him, he got suspended from school. Apparently the students are not allowed to touch these posters.

To say I was shocked is putting it mildly. My daughter does not hang posters of her Catholic religion throughout the school, and I expect the same type of respect from others. We cannot control what others think or their beliefs, nor do we want to. But I will not have this type of atrocity taking place without having my voice heard.

My daughter has my permission, if she sees these posters around school, to put up her own. I challenge the principal to say one thing about this. I guarantee you do not want a religious war taking place, as I have God on my side and you’ll lose.”

Perhaps no one was beaten, but I think the point is well-made.  To be fair, so-called Progressives have a history of barring certain speakers they disagree with from campuses and the like, but I don’t often see such in-your-face geurilla tactics from left-leaning groups in this country.  It happens, sure, but it also happens under an assumption that it’s not sanctioned.  But also, it happens usually as part of an effort on behalf of some other group than the liberal group doing the protesting.

When you get right down to it, conservatives as a group seem driven by a desire to constrain conduct with which they disapprove—personal conduct.  Perhaps this is a consequence of the way arguments are framed.  But I think not.  Conservatives, by definition, are concerned with preserving things they like about the way they live.  Hence all manner of social protest on the part of conservatives against things that will, they believe, change the way they live—climate change deniers are conservative, anti-abortion advocates are conservative, anti-tax groups are conservative, so-called Strict Interpretation constitutionalists are conservative.  And so on.

But are Liberals actually any different?  Liberals, it seems to me, become conservative once they have achieved their goals and suddenly find themselves in positions to defend the way things now are.  Consider:  free market advocates are now conservatives, but if you go back far enough you discover that this was a liberal idea.  At one time, the notion that all children have some right to a college education was a liberal idea, but now it has become an entrenched part of business in such a way that the whole educational apparatus is geared toward the degree as an essential element in the economy, so much so that challenges to the way teaching is done, to the idea that education ought to be fundamentally changed, are viewed as dangerously progressive.  At one time, the idea of organized religious groups becoming politically active was a way Left notion, but it is one that has come to exemplify conservative ideology.

Liberals tend to displace their personal defense to causes that may not, but could possibly, affect them.  They advocate on behalf of the disenfranchised (while conservatives often seem to consciously dismiss the disenfranchised as having nothing to do with them); they take up causes that are more philosophical in appearance; time and attention is given to people who do not have what the advocates have, namely political power, some economic security, or a voice in the community.  The more thoughtful Left thinkers seem to realize that but for the grace of good fortune they themselves could be living on the street at the mercy of unfriendly authorities, and so make arguments on behalf of those who already are there.  Conservatives seem to feel that those so benighted as to have fallen into such penury have only themselves to blame and dismiss the whole idea of fickle socio-economic shifts that could easily displace the currently secure.

I say “seems to be” a lot, because obviously on an individual level things get a lot more complicated.  It all resolves to which part of the whole one chooses to look at.

There are a couple of points at which both sides have it wrong.  For instance, in the matter of the disenfranchised—economically, politically, socially—conservatives seem to believe that one’s condition is one’s own responsibility and therefore nothing to do with those who have, according to their lights, already lived responsibly.  Therefore, so the thinking goes, “I have no responsibility for Those People.”  The liberal tends to believe the disenfranchised are inevitably disempowered due to the structure of social mechanisms, and their condition is therefore not their fault.  “Society has all the blame.”  Of course, this displaces personal responsibility on the part of the liberal to a kind of group thing.  The bottom line is, responsibility still gets shuffled from here to there and very little gets done in the way of solving the actual problems, which are combinations of the two views.

Another observation I’ve made in the past concerning our two major political parties ties in to this:  Republicans tend to see citizens as those who own property.  Democrats see anyone who lives here legally as a citizen.  Defense of corporate personhood is a Republican ideal, which support business, which is property.  A rough descriptor, but it plays out remarkably in local politics.  In Missouri, several years ago, the Motor Voter registration movement was strongly opposed by Republicans, supported by Democrats.  Can’t have people with no financial stake in the country voting, for goodness sake.

I find both sides often equally off-base.

But I find myself siding more often with liberals and the Left because of the apparent obsession conservatives exhibit over Other People’s behavior.  The example from Pakistan has direct equivalents here, and it always comes down to conservatives trying to deny expression to people whose preferences in life-style they abhor.  The entire gay marriage movement is opposed by conservatives.  Why?  What is it they think will actually happen if gays are permitted to marry?  I don’t buy the whole idea that they think it’s unnatural.  I think they dislike the idea of altering their invitation lists and trying to explain to their kids why Tommy and Bill are “getting hitched.”  It is this conservative activism that comes across in things like the Texas School Board’s changes to their base curriculum, altering history and science because they don’t like the way things are changing.  Conservatives don’t appear to really have a problem with contraception for themselves—else where are all the enormous right-wing families, with seven, eight, or nine kids?—they just don’t want Other People to use it to live in ways conservatives find unseemly.  Especially their kids.  The opposition to Evolution is preponderantly conservative because it requires a shift in attitude that seems to reduce the influence of religion and the whole notion of humanity as The Superior Species.   Climate change is aggressively denied by conservatives because if true it means they will have to change the way they live.

It amounts to a denial of reality.

On the other hand, liberals indulge equally in different sorts of denialism.  Anti-vaccine advocates, I think, are mostly progressives.  Certainly cultural relativists who are unwilling to make definitive statements about obvious boneheadedness and outright evil in other cultures  (female circumcision, purda, etc) are little better than head-in-the-sand do-nothings.  Nonsense causes, like homeopathy, herbalism, and the like tend to attract people of liberal bents.

But I think it’s useful to try to dig down deep to the foundational distinctions to see what is really going on.    The one thing that needs to change is the all-encompassing unwillingness, on the part of right and left, to say and listen to things that make us uncomfortable, or disagree with our cherished ideals.  You cannot know how to determine the real, the actual, and the relevant by confining your information to one channel that agrees with you all the time and censoring the other fellow who has a point to make.  We’ve been doing that for much too long and it has been responsible, as much as anything, for the unprecedented divides we see today.  Conservatives aggressively tear down posters while liberals passively refuse to permit a speaker to come, but both actions amount to the same self-imposed deafness.

We live in an absurd age, when you come right down to it, driven more by labels than any time before.

Art

What You See

One of the challenges I’ve always confronted as a visual artist is the fact that the image I conceive in my mind rarely is matched by what I’ve been able to produce as an artifact.  Some photographs I’ve made I have been inordinately proud of.  The ones I’ve liked best are those that have emerged sans expectations.  I’ve “seen something” and made the image, only to discover later, in the lab, what it was I saw.  But by then, it’s changed, because memory plays fast and loose with reality, and the picture I ended up making was its own thing.

Disappointment usually followed when I preconceived something at the time the shutter snapped and later I just couldn’t get that perceived image out on paper.

I’ve been making my first forays in the digital realm and dipping my toe into Photoshop.  There is so much control one has through this program that it’s potentially narcotic.  One could become lost in the ability to change, alter, enhance, and distort endlessly.

Because I’ve done photography for as long as I have, I’m already putting the breaks on in terms of Out There exoticism.  But I’m finding the ability to bring an image more into line with what I originally conceived (or what I am imagining at the moment of manipulation) to be…wonderful.

For instance:

sylvan.jpg

The original capture was a vertical shot.  I “saw” something in this otherwise ordinary stand of trees.  Cropped close, horizontal now, and manipulated for color saturation and contrast, I have something approaching that initial perception.  The ethereal rendering or what might be termed timelessness in the forest is a direct result of what I’ve been able to do in Photoshop.
This is very cool as far as I’m concerned.  This could be much fun.

career

Myself As Antique

We started cleaning the garage this weekend past.  Made a lot of headway.  We tackled boxes which we haven’t touched since we moved in, almost 19 years ago.  Time flies when you have other things to do.

This morning I continued.  There were a few boxes of assorted odds and ends that I needed to cull through.  In doing so, I found this photograph.mark-1977.JPG

Donna has only seen me without a beard once.  She didn’t like the effect, mainly because int he years during which I’d had a beard I somehow misplaced my chin.  Anyway.  This was back when I was a trim young fella on the make, as it were.

The historical context of this photograph is rich.  Firstly, it is the young me.  That’s about as interesting as that gets.  Secondly, the setting.  Shaw Camera Shop.  4468 Shaw Avenue, St. Louis.  It had been in business since the late Forties and it was, hands down, my favorite job.  I was the lab tech and later lab manager.  I worked there for 20 years, made fast friends (many of whom are gone) and played out some of the great dramas of my life partly within its confines.  It was a black & white custom lab and at its peak we were doing the printing for several color labs, most of the independent camera stores in St. Louis (of which almost none remain) and three of the local yearbook companies.  Lots of pictures.  This shot shows me behind the front counter, the film cabinet behind me.

Thirdly, the print itself is of modest historical interest.  It was shot on Kodak Instant Print film.  There was a time when Polaroid held the monopoly on that kind of technology.  You wanted to take pictures without bothering to send the film to a lab, you used Polaroid.  Kodak muscled in while Polaroid suspended production during a strike.  They—Polaroid—subcontracted the manufacturing to Kodak till the strike ended.  During that time, Kodak got a chance to really take Polaroid’s process apart and a year or so after Polaroid resumed production, Kodak announced a new product—instant print film.  They claimed it was all their own.  Polaroid sued.  And won.  So this print is an example of a short-lived phenomenon.  (It wasn’t very good—I’ve put some effort into making this one easier to look at and sharper, but there’s only so much you can do.)

Shaw Camera Shop is long gone.  The owners for whom I worked, who I loved like a second family, had problems—Earline had battled cancer for decades and finally lost and Gene just didn’t want to continue anymore.  I was just beginning my writing career and knew if I bought the business I’d have to give that up.  So Gene sold it to someone who was ill-suited to running it and he ruined it.

Today, the building houses an antique store, Gringo Jones.  Last year was the first time I’d set foot in the place since a few weeks after it closed up as a lab.  The new owners pretty much gutted the interior to suit their needs, but I could still walk unerringly through to where everything had been.  I doubt I’ll do that again, though.

Anyway, it was a pleasant surprise to find this.  I have other pictures of Shaw and myself from that time.  I didn’t, of course, realize just how much I liked that job until it was gone.  But the memories are still there.

culture

Zelazny and the Perils of Reading at a Young Age

Recently I started reading Roger Zelazny’s  Amber series.  I’ve been hearing about this for decades, how great it is, and till now it’s one of the few things of Zelazny’s that I’ve resisted reading.

See, it’s pretty much fantasy, in form if not conceit.  I can see a way to describe the world he created here in quantum mechanical terms and render it SF, but frankly it’s a typical sword and sibling fantasy.  Genealogy and combat.

But it’s Zelazny, so while reading it one is having a good time.  He was always dependable that way, he was never dull.  This, however, is not his major work.

But it got me thinking about him again.

Roger Zelazny caused me, as a kid, to defend myself.

I attended a parochial school—Lutheran, to be exact.  This was a peculiar situation since my parents, at the time, were more or less Mormon.  The choice of Emmaus Lutheran School came about through a combination of idiotic districting restrictions in the public schools, which would have sent me to a school several miles away when there was one only five blocks away, and their general dissatisfaction with the public school system.  You see, I was a poor student.  They thought it was perhaps a disciplinary problem, one which the public schools, at that time, were by law not allowed to address.  Corporal punishment had been banned in the schools.  (Of course, this didn’t matter to some teachers: I had witnessed a student beaten and humiliated by a gym coach when I was in the first grade.)  They assumed—and I suppose this was true to some extent—that I was playing when I should have been paying attention and that my attention could be gotten by threat of spanking.

(The reality was less than and more than their surmise.  In truth—and I can only say this in hindsight—public school damaged my interest in learning.  My birthday is in October, roughly five to six weeks into the school year.  When my mother first tried to enroll me, I was only four years old.  They wouldn’t take me, despite the immanence of my turning five.  I had to wait a year.  When I turned six, they pulled me out of kindergarten and put me in first grade, “where I belonged”.  The first grade teacher expected me—and the half dozen others who suffered the same fate—to simply catch up, without any remedial tutoring.  Needless to say, this put me off the whole thing.  That and the fact that classes were boring combined to make me a rather bad student.)

In fact, I only ever received a spanking in school once, and that for something I didn’t do.  Nevertheless, the threat was there and if this contributed to my somewhat better performance, then so be it.  Personally, I don’t think so.  For one, my grades didn’t improve all that much.  For another, the class sizes were smaller and we did get more attention from the teachers.

Along with this, though, came religious instruction.

Somewhere between my entry into this school in third grade and graduation I became an insatiable reader, especially of science fiction.

Reading alone would have made me odd.  But, like all misfits, my peculiarities came in multiples.  I was a bit puny, always had been, and abhorred pain, which made me an easy target for bullies.  In time I was the brunt of most class jokes.  In fifth grade I needed glasses.  Not only were they black horn-rims, they were bifocals.  To make matters worse, I didn’t like—or understand—cars, sports, or rock’n’roll.  Socially, I was a cipher.  Today you’d say nerd.  (No pocket protector, though; never had one of those.)  But on top of all that, I read.  All the time, whenever I could.  At recess I’d sneak upstairs to a spot on the stage I’d found where no one could find me, and read.  I never was found, even though teachers were looking for me, too.

Needless to say, I got teased about the reading.

My best friend sat in front of me in seventh grade.  Greg was very tall for his age and was one of the two boys in the school that no one ever challenged.  We’re still friends.  I tried to get him to read some of my books, but none of them really interested him.  He never questioned my reading, though, until one day his curiosity overwhelmed him.

I just happened to be reading Lord of Light at the moment Greg chose to turn around and ask  “Why do you read so much?”

I just looked at him.  I have no idea what went through my mind, but I can make some good guesses.  The thing to say—the truth, which, as good christians, we were taught was next to God—would have been “Because I like it.  It’s fun.”  But this was demonstrably Not True, since very few others of my peers thought it was fun.  Reading was hard, like homework.  Why would you do it if you didn’t have to?  Besides, another good christian virtue was to avoid things that had no other function than pleasure.  We did a lot of things because they were “just” fun, but we knew better than to admit to them.  It was okay to have fun as long as some other, more salient purpose was simultaneously fulfilled.  So I said “Well, I learn things.”

Greg looked skeptical.  “Like what?  I mean, what are you learning from—what is that?  Lord of Light?”

“Uh…”  I gazed at the cover of the book, an Avon edition with a black cover and a neat little illustration that looked semi-Indian.  What was I learning from it?  I grabbed at something.  “Well, I’m learning about the Hindu religion.”

Greg laughed and snorted derisively.  He snatched the book from my hand and studied it.  “This is science fiction.  Why would you be learning about Hindus in this?”

I was running out of things to say.  I reached for the book and he held it annoyingly out of reach.  He started reading the cover blurb out loud, laughing, mispronouncing words.

Attracting attention.

Mr. Obermann, our teacher—and the school principal—suddenly snatched it from Greg’s hand.  Mr. Obermann looked about ninety, but in a George C. Scott kind of robust way.  He glared at us for a few seconds and returned to his desk.

I watched him for a time—it was supposed to be a study period—and saw him looking the book over.  He frowned deeply and looked at me.  Then he called me to the front of the class.

“What is this?” he asked, tapping the book.

“A novel.”

“What about?”

Not again.  I have since learned that many very good books, when reduced to paragraph long descriptions, sound ridiculous, but I didn’t quite understand this then.  I tried to explain.  He cut me off, opened a desk drawer, and dropped it in.

He did not return it to me at the end of the day.  When I asked him about it he said something about material I had no business reading.

So I told my parents about it.

My mother took the time to come to school the next day.  She insisted I sit in on her meeting with Mr. Obermann.  She wanted to know why I had not had my book returned and he started explaining about the unsuitability of the subject matter and so on.  Mom interrupted.

“You’re telling me you don’t want him learning anything about other religions?”

“This is a Lutheran school.  That’s what we teach here.”

“I see.  Do you also teach intolerance?”

Mr. Obermann reddened.  “Mrs. Tiedemann—”

“I’ll thank you not to censor my son’s reading.  If he can’t handle it, he won’t read it.”

I was sent back to class then, so I don’t know what else transpired.  My book was returned with an admonition not to bring it to school anymore.

Given how uncomfortable Mr. Obermann became, I made a practice over the next several months of bringing other, hopefully radical books to class.  And reading them.  In retrospect I suppose my parents were right.  I needed a strict, disciplinary environment in which to improve my learning skills.  Thanks to Zelazny, I learned an important lesson.  It took me years to realize exactly what it was, but the seed was planted there.

If someone tries to make you defend what you read—or that you read—remember that slogan from Harley-Davidson:  If I have to explain it, you wouldn’t understand.  Just give them a book and tell them to try it out.

Life

People At Their Best

Yesterday, April 29th, I witnessed people being great.

Returning along Highway 50 from Jefferson City Missouri, I was passing through Osage County when I spotted a dumped motorcycle to my left.  The bike—a newish gold something-or-other—lay on its side, trailing a scatter of broken parts back to a man who was on knees and elbows, clearly hurt.

A FedEx truck was ahead of me.  I pulled over just behind it.  A house was directly across the two-lane from us.  People were in the yard.  The FedEx driver sprinted to the house to tell the folks about the accident.  I ran toward the man.

By the time I reached him two more cars had stopped and a group of people converged on him.  He had gotten to the grass and rolled over.  A bloody mess, at first glance he looked in very bad shape.  He was still wearing his helmet, moaning and trying, ineffectively, to take it off.  He kept saying  “I can’t breathe…”

An older man had his cell phone out, dialing 911.  A woman, who seemed to have some training, possibly a nurse, helped him unstrap the helmet and pull it gently off, whereupon he lay on his back, legs pulled up, arms sort of help up, covered in blood.  The “nurse” cautioned him not to move.  Someone else had brought a plastic sheet, which she directed a couple people to hold above him to shield his head from the sun.

I started asking questions—“Can you feel everything?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said,  “everything hurts.”

“No tingling?”  No.  “Open your eyes and look at me.”  His pupils looked normal, but that’s not always a reliable telltale.

“Oh, I didn’t hit my head,” he said.  “Everything else, but not my head.”

I looked at his helmet.  “Your helmet says otherwise,” I told him.  Half of it was badly dented and scraped all along the faceplate.

“What happened?” someone else asked.

“I think a blow-out,” he said.  “I tried to hang onto it and slow it down…”

I went over to the bike.  By now about eight people were there, two semis parked along the highway.  One man was doing a good job of directing traffic through the momentarily constricted access.  More cell phones were out.

The debris appeared to be all peripherals—mirrors, plastic molding, packs of cigarettes, a cassette tape, mangled sunglasses.  The rear tire was missing a long chunk of tread where it had blown.  He was lucky in that it was the rear tire.  If the front had blown he would have lost it immediately, at sixty-plus miles per hour, but there were no skid marks.  He’d managed to slow it down a lot before it dumped and he’d dumped it on the shoulder.

When I returned to tell him this, ambulances were on the way.  He was laying on a rock and wanted to move off of it, but everyone kept him in place, not knowing what else might be broken.  He was coherent.  He was a good rider, evidently, and had controlled the spill marvelously from what I could see.

The ambulance arrived, along with a truck from the local fire department.  The crow began to disperse.  As one of the trucks started rolling, the driver tossed the man directing traffic one of those bright orange and yellow safety vests.

With nothing more to do (and having done almost nothing anyway) I took my leave.  Traffic was slowed and obeying what I now saw were two men, one on each side of the slight hill where all this was occurring, directing.  Those who had done whatever they could have and no longer needed to be there were starting their vehicles and moving out in an orderly manner.

All those people had seemed to appear out of nowhere, and very fast, and just did this thing.  They helped, if only by being willing to stop.  It felt very good to be a human just then.

career

Assorted Updates

It’s Tuesday.

I spent a good deal of yesterday cleaning house, catching up on necessary but boring details, and talking to someone about photography.  Check this out.  Very nice work and Jennifer is very knowledgeable.  I put a permanent link to her site on the sidebar over there on the right.

Digital.  It has changed more than the way we write, get news, or play.

In the midst of all this, I may have neglected to report here that I am once more president on the Missouri Center for the Book.  I suspect there is a bit of masochism involved in this, although on whose part I’m not prepared to speculate.  Tomorrow I head back to the state capitol, Jefferson City, to participate in the Letters About Literature Awards.  This year is an especially good one for Missouri because…

…we have a national winner in this year.  Imani Jackson, a 6th grader at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Jefferson City, was chosen as a National Honor Winner in Level I, for her letter to Maya Angelou about the poem Phenomenal Woman.  This is a big deal.  This program is now in all 50 states and often the number of letters tops a thousand in a given state, sometime going to two thousand or more.  Nationally, two Winners and four National Honor Winners are chosen at each level, in addition to the state awards. Imani will receive a $100 Target gift card and a $1,000 grant for the library of her choice as a prize.

In the last couple of years some of the data coming out of studies concerning reading has been startling and encouraging.  Sharp rises, even among those demographics often seen as “troublesome.”  People in general are reading for pleasure more, and a lot of young people are.  One might jokingly quip about Twilight and Harry Potter being the main cause of the jump, but I don’t think so.  Those books may be “gateway” books.  The thing is, these levels are sustained.

So I’m entering this last year of my participation in the Center with some optimism that the work we do, collectively, is having an effect.  (Yes, this is my last year—our by-laws require board members to leave after nine years, and for me that’s next spring.)  What I’m hoping to achieve this year is to get into place all the things I’d wanted to do last time.  Independent funding, the new website, maybe begin a new membership program, and solidly establish the annual Celebrations so they can grow into a state book fair.  We’ll see.

It would be helpful if I could get a book sold in the meantime…

Life

Bumps In The Road

No, nothing bad has happened.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I just wanted to say a few words about things that get in our way.

Like worrying.

Worrying about money, worrying about friends, worrying about health.

This past week I checked into the hospital to have a couple of tests.  The sort of things people over a certain age ought to do if they’re smart, screenings.  I’m 55, so certain matters should now concern me more than they used to.

My grandmother was a world class hypochondriac.  Not that there weren’t things wrong with her—she had medical problems, but she tended to compound them in her imagination and play them up into gargantuan malaises to which even Job might have succumbed and given up hope.  I’m fairly certain that at one time she suffered a condition known as trigeminal neuralgia, which is a horrible nerve disorder that manifests as the mother of all migraines.  Once people thought it had to do with their teeth and would, suffering from the problem, have all their teeth removed.  That’s what my grandmother did, but it didn’t stop the pain, which gradually just went away, as is also common with the condition.

But she was a drama queen with her health issues, most of which I am fairly certain were minor things blown up into mega-concerns.

I have fought becoming like this.  I do just the opposite.  I ignore aches, pains, little things that could be symptoms of larger problems, determined by force of will to yield nothing to imaginary sickness.  It occurs to me from time to time that I might be successfully ignoring real things.

So I took Donna’s advice and had the tests done.

Well.  My cholesterol is out of whack, but everything else is normal, bloodwise.  And I seem to have a hiatus hernia and a minor ulcer in my esophagus, perfectly treatable.  I’ve got pills for both problems.  I had to wait a couple days for the biopsy from the ulcer to come back to make sure there were no cancer cells.

I’m fine.  My only real problem is…I’m 55.

And I don’t like that particularly.

But, I have more energy today and expect this to continue.  I’d been worrying without actually acknowledging that I was worrying.  And that has a really detrimental effect on work and play.  Somehow, back down in my unconscious, I probably had begun to think something was really wrong.  And, with the perversity of the psychological, something was wrong—my unacknowledged imagination.

Of all the other things that can get in the way, this is one of the most annoying and subversive, the way your own mind can, without your permission, screw you up and hamper creativity and follow-through.  Embarrassing, really.  One likes to believe one has a better handle on one’s own psyche.

I have become the president of the Missouri Center for the Book again.  As before, I’m throwing myself into the effort.  I’ve got a year this time before per our by-laws I must absent myself from the board.  Getting these little potential hypochondriacal inconveniences  taken care of now before they really grow into roadblocks was just what I needed to do.

So, I am fine.  I am going to live.  If anyone is disappointed by that, too bad.

See you around.

Art

Reading Lists

I started keeping lists of the books I’d read when I was fifteen.  I don’t know how many people used to do this, it may be a habit peculiar to myself, but the list has come to comprise a catalogue of sorts as time has passed and hundreds of titles become thousands and memory runs into itself.  I stopped doing this between eighteen and twenty-three for reasons forgotten and probably never very clear.  Now, of course, there are reading list websites, like Shelfari and Goodreads, so I suppose it’s more common than I once imagined.

That first list, though, held surprises, one in particular that has become part of an on-going internal debate.  It concerns Robert A Heinlein.

The name can’t be spoken anymore without certain responses, either pro or con, among avid science fiction readers.  Even a few people I have known who read very little SF have read Heinlein and have an opinion.  Interestingly enough, the non-SF readers with opinions about Heinlein echo my second opinion about him, which is not—at least, not directly—political.

I didn’t like Heinlein when I was fifteen.  (That is not the opinion, but bears directly upon it.)  I was by then acquiring tastes in reading which I would carry with me for the rest of my life, for good or bad, and when I made that first list it was partly with the view to determine who represented those tastes.  Of course, I didn’t really think about that clearly then, but in an intuitive fashion that lay behind the project.  Who had I read a lot of and secondly why had I read a lot of them?

I’d read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  To this day, though, I can’t read the Tarzan novels.  I first encountered ERB in the Mars novels, the John Carter series, and I had read most of them by then.  Loved John Carter.  (Not so much Carson.)  And, of course, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne represented a substantial portion of the list.  I had also read a lot of Doc Smith, someone I adored then and can’t get through now.  Among the rest of what I then consciously thought of as a separate genre, the other science fiction writers I’d read made up a mixed bag.  I had read Piers Anthony—the earliest one of his I had found was Sos the Rope—and I had read Isaac Asimov, by then all his Foundation novels, I, Robot, Pebble In The Sky, and a couple of the “Lucky Starr” books.  Among the others of whom I’d read more than one title were Ray Bradbury, Gordon R. Dickson, Keith Laumer, Alan E. Nourse, Roger Zelazny, and Poul Anderson.  Others, I’m sure, most especially Andre Norton, who, it seemed, had written more books than god, but for the most part my list consisted of single authors.  Bob Shaw, Robert Silverberg, John Brunner, Avram Davidson, Martin Caidin, Robert Sheckley, and so on.  It was quite a list, actually, with quite a few titles destined to become, if they weren’t already, classics.

But I had read more Robert A. Heinlein than any other single author.

This puzzled me, because I remember at the time not liking his stuff very much.  Not being overly disciplined, I tended to avoid things that I disliked, and since no one was holding a gun to my head to make me read SF—or anything else for that matter—it baffled me that I’d worked my way through so much of this guy’s stuff that really put me off.

I hadn’t read many of his so-called Juveniles—Have Space Suit, Will Travel sticks most clearly in my mind, as well as The Rolling Stones.  No, mostly I’d read his earlier novels, like Beyond This Horizon, Sixth Column, Methusaleh’s Children, Orphans In The Sky, The Door Into Summer, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Puppet Masters, and Revolt In 2100.  I’d read a lot of what he’d published in the Sixties and when I was fifteen I read Stranger In A Strange Land.  (I’d tried to read that one even earlier, when I was eleven or so, because it, like all the rest of science fiction in the library, was shelved in the Children’s Section, no kidding.  But it was, truly, out of my ability.) Each time I picked one up, though, I remembered it being a struggle to get through.  My head felt caught in a vice, my throat burned, and I couldn’t wait to get from chapter end to chapter end so I could put it down.  Until then, if anyone had asked, I would have declared Heinlein at the bottom of my list of favorites.

Part of the problem—a problem I have to this day, although it is no longer an impediment like it was then—was the number of Heinlein novels written in first person.  I didn’t like first person.  I still prefer third person.  First person puts me off.  I like to imagine myself in the title roles and every time I encountered that declarative “I” it let me know that it was someone else’s story.  For me, despite what so many wide heads claim, it is not “more intimate” but less.  Still, Heinlein didn’t write in first person all the time, not even, I think, most of the time.

No, something else annoyed me about Heinlein then.  With perfect hindsight I can tell you what it was.

He made me think.

Critical thinking is not natural.  Look around you.  I’ll risk sounding like Heinlein here, but all one need do is look at the proliferation of pseudoscience and mystical nonsense to recognize this fact.  Everyone thinks, certainly, but critical thinking is a particular form and not easily learned, nor natural.  This is a paradox when it comes to reading, because all manner of interpretive mechanism in the mind comes into play and thinking, critical thinking, is on some level essential, but very few novels take the time to show you the process.  Most novels bury that part and concentrate on just telling a good story and letting all the gears and such remain hidden.
Heinlein didn’t let a reader off the hook so easily.  Heinlein’s characters, for good or ill, were almost all consciously engaged in the processes of their stories.  Most of them were dynamically self-reflective.  They confronted problems and, step by step, thought their way through it on the page, so that you, trapped in the momentum of the story, had to think right along with them to the conclusion of the problem.

It gave me headaches.  I didn’t like that.

But I read more of them by the time I was fifteen than any other single author.

The irony, of course, is that this didactic approach offered in itself the very tools one could later use to realize how flawed Heinlein’s own works became.  To my mind, whatever else Heinlein may have been or what he has been labeled since, he was a true subversive.

Life

Grandpa

I don’t talk a great deal about my grandparents.  I never knew my paternal grandfather—he was estranged from the grandmother before my dad even met my mother—but the rest I knew.  Grandma Tiedemann was a tiny woman who was a dynamo, very proper and yet indulgent of her descendants.

My maternal grandparents I knew very well—we lived downstairs from them for many years.  Here’s a photograph I made of Grandpa, some time in the mid Seventies.

grandpa.jpg

He was A Character.  Folks knew him as The Colonel.  He gardened.  He was shamelessly curious.  Often he would say exactly what was on his mind, regardless of the situation or the company.  Around this time he took to walking three blocks to the local butcher shop, where he would take up a chair by the meat counter and regale people as they came in to buy their lunch meat, steaks, chicken, and sausages, just striking up conversations out of the blue, and managing never, to my knowledge, to offend anyone.

Whatever I may have learned in growing up of tolerance and respect, Grandpa was a large part of the lesson.  Not in anything he ever said, but just that fact that in his daily actions he really did see no distinctions between people.  Everyone was the same, everyone was unique, everyone had a story.  I never once heard him utter a racial epithet of any kind, categorize people according political, religious, or ethnic characteristics, or refuse to be friendly and kind to anyone.  He was garrulous, decent, almost always smiling, and he adored my mother.  He was a cool old man.  (When I was very small I called him Potter, apparently, though I don’t personally recall.  Later he was “Grampa.”)

Grandma, on the other hand, was almost exactly the opposite.  She was very “Southron” in attitude, quick to put people down (and then forget she’d done it), judge, and complain.  There are many things about her that were not admirable.

But Grandpa was devoted to her.  I didn’t realize that for a long time, but in retrospect I recall all the telltales of what must have been a blazingly passionate love that had settled into the kind of reliable, ever-present support and trust and care we often hear about but rarely see.

Just wanted to share that.