Month: December 2012

Favorite (To Me) Posts of the Year

Posted on December 31, 2012December 31, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I’ve never done this before, assuming a certain shelf life to what I write here, but maybe I’ll start.Â Now, this is completely self-indulgent, so you are warned.Â Here are my personal favorites of the Distal Muses for 2012:

2012

The Last One

Narratives And The American Landscape

Music On A Saturday Night

Le Guin Again

Honor and Duty

Petty Stuff, Harlan Ellison, and Therbligs

The Golden (Silver?) Good Ol’ Days

Reflections On The 4th of July: A Personal Statement

Jon Lord, Deep Purple, Legacies

I’ll leave December alone.Â The last one is, I think, appropriate to end the overview.…

2012

Posted on December 30, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I was never so glad to see an election done than this past one.Â 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.Â 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.Â I sensed the acrimony, the bitterness, the ugliness, but most of it made no real sense.Â …

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 …

…And the Winners Are

Posted on December 27, 2012December 27, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

I should be writing fiction instead of writing about it, but I must continue my year-end summations.Â I’m off tomorrow, so I intend to get down to serious stuff.

Anyway, I read some pretty good novels this past year.Â Much as I admire, respect, and feel a duty to read broadly in nonfiction, when it gets down to it, fiction is what I live for.Â (Well, Donna comes first, sure, but as we’ve been writing a novel with our lives…ahem)Â Fiction takes me away.Â It opens things up, offers newness in a way nothing else does.

As I get older I find myself reading more slowly, soaking in the sentences.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 …

Mayan Sunset

Posted on December 21, 2012December 21, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

Daylight.

Vast dome of god-magma, spare us!

(Whew!)

That was close.Â Had we chosen a different calendar, things might have gone differently.Â The Great Cycle, though, has been completed and now, we stand upon the apron of a new Age.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a slim volume back at the turn of the century about Millennialism, calendars, the human urge to impose order upon the innately disordered.Â He wrote lovingly about what is basically our habit of taxonomic assertion.Â These things go here, those over there, and by all means we must keep this stuff apart.…

Addenda Tragicus

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

I mis-reported something in my previous post.Â I said Adam Lanza did this with a pair of pistols.Â At that time, that was the report I had, from early news items that did not mention the assault rifle.Â But he used one after all, so a correction is in order.Â I also said 26 people had been killed, but that was students and teachers and did not include Lanza’s mother, who he killed at home and was apparently the first victim, nor Lanza himself.

I said “we are a people enamored with violence” and yes, I meant Americans, but obviously that is no real distinction, and the bizarreness of such incidents is hardly confined to us.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 …

Place Marker

Posted on December 9, 2012 By Mark Tiedemann

Because I have nothing much to say this morning.

However, our reading group is doing the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso today.Â I will have something to say about that.Â Later.…