Category: history

Give Up Expectations

Posted on December 28, 2012December 28, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

As I previously noted, the reading group (study group, really) to which we belong just completed Dante Alighieri’s Commedia.Â After seven years of more or less twice-monthly sessions, canto by canto, poring over etymologies, dictionaries, lexicons, and tossing ideas around in a whirlwind of interpretation, we came to the end, with more stars, and one may hope a better understanding of a text that has been at the center of Western Literature for centuries.

Hope, I think, is the key.Â Which is to say, the meaning of that word in the famous line everyone seems to know even if they don’t always know from where it comes.Â …

The Scroll At Year’s End

Posted on December 26, 2012December 26, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I read around 80 books, cover to cover, this year.Â Currently I’m in the middle of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and odds are I won’t quite manage to finish it by the 31st (annoying life-type stuff keeps getting in the way and I do not want to zip through it; too many delicious bits to risk zipping past) but I will say a couple things about it at the end of this.

Of the historical nonfiction I read this year, a chunk of it went into the second volume of the trilogy I’ve been working on for a while (which, before you ask, still has not found a publisher, but I’m going to start the third volume next year anyway).Â …

Insanity

Posted on December 16, 2012December 17, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

Doubtless whatever I say, someone will find fault, take offense, withdraw into positions, place guard dogs at the gates and lookouts in the towers.

We are a people enamored of the idea of violence.Â We like the idea that when it gets down to the proverbial nitty gritty we can and will kick ass and take names.Â Americans are tough, not to be messed with, ready to exact justice by knuckles or 9.mm.

Until something like this happens and then we recoil from our own defining myths with a collective “but that’s not what we meant!”

Adam Lanza murdered 26 people in a grade school, 20 of them 1st graders.Â …

12-12-12

Posted on December 12, 2012December 12, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

Because I can’t resist the date.

This particular confluence of numerical coincidence won’t happen again this century.Â Proper appreciation must be shown.

Or, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature.Â Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more more difficult…”

It is in our nature to reject coincidence as simply what it is, especially when it comes to cosmic events.Â …

Games, Women, Growing Up, Remembrance

Posted on December 7, 2012December 7, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I want to talk a little bit about women.

I like to count myself as a feminist. Unapologetically. I would like to believe that I’ve been one more or less forever, and maybe on some level that’s true (and if so I credit early exposure to science fiction, which I’ll talk about later**), but really what I could point to as early feminism was more a matter of an idealized attitude about fair play, not any kind of studied assessment concerning women’s rights and so forth. My progress toward self-conscious feminism took a while.

First, a video:

Okay, it is that negative reaction she experienced which (a) I don’t “get” in any visceral way and (b) I find continually, almost universally shrugged off as “harmless” by people who otherwise would never dream of behaving that way.…

American Epochs

Posted on December 6, 2012December 6, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I’m just noodling over an idea, perhaps not even an original one, but I’ve been acquiring and reading a number of books this last few years on American history, and given the tenor of this past year of national politics, I’ve been toying with the idea of “periods” of American history.Â That is, definable epochs fundamentally different from that which went before.

What triggered this particular thread is on the desk in front of my now. Kevin Phillips’ new book, 1775: A Good Year For Revolution, recently published by Viking.

In his preface, Why 1775, he writes:

Seventeen Seventy-Five…stands for the somewhat forgotten and widely misunderstood first year of the American Revolution.Â …

Where Is Found A Soulful Mind?

Posted on November 15, 2012November 15, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts.Â It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.

We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist.Â Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives.Â …

War On Women

Posted on November 12, 2012November 12, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

My previous post, over-the-top as it was in some ways (yet heartfelt and, I think, not misdirected) spurred a few remarks about the so-called War On Women.Â There are people who claim this is a myth, a straw man argument, a distraction, that there is no war on women, only the mouthings of a few extremists with no real authority and, really, nothing has or will change.

I can agree to an extent that maybe War On Women is perhaps an overstatement, because—and it’s a fine distinction—I don’t really believe most of the politicians engaged in it care one way or the other.Â …

A Final Thought (Maybe)

Posted on November 9, 2012November 9, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I’m listening to Bartok.Â The Miraculous Mandarin, a recording by the St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting.

Earlier I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR.Â A report caught my attention about—you guessed it—why Mitt Romney lost.Â Or, more to the point, why he almost won.Â It had to do with something I find utterly baffling about the American political consciousness.Â I don’t know, maybe it’s true everywhere.

Basically, that during most of the campaign Romney ran on issues and did little to “let people know him personally.”Â This, according to the report, was the cause of his low approval numbers.Â …

2016

Posted on November 7, 2012November 7, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

As usual, Florida is still undecided, a mess. According to NPR, though, it is leaning heavily toward Obama, despite the shenanigans of the state GOP in suppressing the vote.

I didn’t watch last night.Â Couldn’t.Â We went to bed early.

But then Donna got up around midnight and woke me by a whoop of joy that I briefly mistook for anguish.

To my small surprise and relief, Obama won.

I will not miss the constant electioneering, the radio ads, the tv spots, the slick mailers.Â I will not miss keeping still in mixed groups about my politics (something I am not good at, but this election cycle it feels more like holy war than an election).Â …

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