Mark W. Tiedemann's Blog, page 53

War On Christmas?

By now most people know about the flap over FOX News person Megyn Kelly’s absurd remarks concerning the ethnicity of (a) Santa Claus and (b) Jesus.  Actions within the DMZ of the annual War On Christmas have reached new levels of ridiculous.

I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but…

Santa Claus is white?  Really?  After all this time, we’re going to have that debate?

If you must know, Santa Clause is your favorite uncle dressing up in a red suit and bellowing joyously at a key moment in your life.  What color is he?  What nationality?  Whatever you answer, then you know what color Santa Claus is.

Santa Claus is not St. Nicholas.  Not because an argument cannot be made that the legends of St. Nikolaos of Myra (or Bari, depending which one prefers) can’t be construed as the model for the modern Saint Nick, Sinterklaas, aka Santa Claus, but because Santa Claus, culturally, is something else altogether by dint of centuries of “drift” and the compiling of other attributes of distinctly non-Christian provenance.   Like Christmas itself, the two long ago became Something Else.  (The modern Santa Claus is more descended from pre-Christian Germanic Odin than anything Christian.  Christmas itself, as we practice is, is from the Yule celebrations of the same pagan tradition.)

Jesus…well, really, does this actually need explaining?

But the question is, does all this constitute any kind of “War On Christmas”?  I don’t see Christmas suffering a bit.  It is now as has been since I can remember a time of family, of friends, of fellowfeeling, of charity, corny music, decorations, and the setting aside for a day, a week, a month of petty differences to embrace one another.  I haven’t seen much evidence that we’re doing any less of this than ever before.

What there is some struggle over is the idea that some people have it wrong and that those who think they have it right have some kind of obligation to shame the rest of us into accepting their version above any other.  Failing that, they then take it upon themselves to take our indifference to their dogmatic myopia as evidence of a war on Christmas and launch a counterattack by pissing and moaning about…

Well, frankly, about style.  As far as I can tell, they don’t like what other people’s Christmas looks like.  For one, we seem to have these other traditions all mingled in—Hannukah and Kwanza—distorting and “sullying” their vision, as if it’s all some kind of banquet hall and they object to the decorations.

I suppose what really bothers me this time is the flat out racism in evidence.  Santa Claus is white, get over it.  Jesus is white, historical fact, too bad about all you other people who think it might be otherwise.

Seriously?

Let me ask, in all seriousness, what color is the human heart?  I don’t mean the muscle, I mean the essence of our sentiment.  What color is that?  Because I was raised to believe that both Santa Claus and Jesus were all about the human heart, about healing it, about nurturing it, about celebrating it, which makes it an essential aspect of our commonality.  After discarding much of the silliness of both icons, I still find inspiration and succor in that basic truth.  I think that part is a good idea and how it is celebrated is irrelevant alongside the idea that it is celebrated.

And that has no color.  No ethnicity.  No politics, no religion, no ideology.  Just you and me and who we love and who we wish to love and the desire that love be the universal attribute by which we know ourselves.

So if there’s a war on Christmas, it is being prosecuted by those who keep insisting that there can be only one way to celebrate it.  Such people are truly small of spirit, and now it appears they’re bigoted as well.

Which is really sad.  Look at the opportunity being passed up in this, of getting outside your tiny enclave of conspiracy-driven paranoia and siege mentality and finding out that maybe those people down the street you’re not sure about are really kind of cool and interesting.  Being so publicly obsessed withe tropes instead of getting down with the True Meaning of the Holiday is just dumb and more than a little hateful.

Christmas is what we make it, out of the feelings of sharing and discovery and renewal.  It’s about being open and forgiving and generous and for one day out of the year setting aside differences and realizing that, in a very basic way, there aren’t any.  It’s about letting in the idea that we can be better together than alone and that shared joy multiplies and that there ought to be no limits on that.  It’s a Technicolor time.

It shouldn’t be whitewashed.

Status Update

It’s winter.  Officially.  Stuff is falling from the sky, sticking to things, and it’s cold.

A couple of things of recent note.  This past weekend, one of my coworkers at Left Bank Books got married.  She held it in the bookstore, after closing on Sunday, and another coworker officiated.  I shot photographs.  It was wonderful.

That morning, I went to the gym and had a surprisingly good workout.  Last year, I was aiming at doing a thousand pounds on the leg press.  I reached 930 lbs before my little abominal abdominal incident put me right back down in the whimpy weights.  Sunday I did 900 lbs.  I don’t think I’ll make a thousand by years’ end, but I feel not at all bad about this.

I have a few more stories to edit for my short story collection, which now has a (tentative) release date—May 10th, 2014.  I’ve seen the cover art already and it ranks with my favorite covers, done by a local artist named John Kaufman, who deserves a look.  I am delighted that the collection will be sporting such a cool cover.

My friend Nicola Griffith‘s new novel, Hild, was release in November—11-12-13—and is doing very well.  I myself have sold half a dozen copies already and it’s on my Christmas Season hand-picked list at the store.  Go check it out, your brain will thank you.

I have been working for the last several weeks on the third volume of my alternate history trilogy, the Oxun Trilogy, and I have run headlong into a number of problems (one of which is that I’m trying to get a novel started during Christmas season when time is at a premium).  I’ve written the first two or three chapters now four times.  I am poring over my research, poking at it, trying to find a way in.  Finally, I had a breakthrough and realized that I’ve been starting the damn thing in the wrong place.  Note to aspiring writers: this is often the problem with stories that will not advance beyond a certain point.  Not the only problem, but a big one.

Of course, this realization has necessitated acquiring a whole slew of new books specifically about—Napoleon in Egypt!  If anyone out there reading this has a suggestion for a fairly detailed history of specifically the scientific mission, I would appreciate it.

Given the above, I’m doing something with this novel that I almost never do—outlining.  I don’t think I have the time to wing it and correct it all later.  I need to know very well where I’m going and when.

Earlier conceptions of the book required an outline of a different sort, and that is still there, but this is different.

Christmas at Left Bank Books is generally a time of insanity, madness, massive customer presence, and long hours.  Which means I may not be making many posts till next year.  I thought I’d let anyone interested know what’s going on.

If I don’t get to say it later, Have A Happy Holiday!

Playing With Pictures Instead of What I Should Be Doing

I saw a friend’s new avatar on FaceBook this morning, so I went to the app to see about doing it for myself.  Nothing I came up with satisfied, so I decided it was time for a new AUTHOR PHOTO. Open Photoshop and…

Well, that came out kinda scary.  I was going for a pencil drawing look, but it made me look like some kind of unpleasant, woke-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-humanity dude.  Even the nice blue eyes didn’t soften it up much.

So I went for something more traditionally “authorial” and came up with this:

Which for now is probably the best photograph of me done since my friend Drea took a bunch of shots back in 1995, when I had delusions of massive authorhood.  I still like those, but the truth is I just don’t look like this anymore:

Time.  What are you gonna do?  But I really like the new one, so for the foreseeable future I think I’ll use it for promotions and such.    Now I have to go write some fiction.

Small Business Saturday

This happens every year.  I participated last year at Left Bank Books and I’m going to do so this year.

Here is the relevant page.

Local authors, personally selling favorite titles to walk-in customers.  Of course we’ll be selling our own, but we have all chosen a handful of personal favorites to suggest.  And if you can’t take a writer’s opinion about what is good writing, then who can you trust?

This is an opportunity to come in and meet, in a less formal setting, some local authors, chat, one-on-one, and boost local business.  Look at the line up we have this year.  Ridley Pearson, Eric Lundgren,  Curtis Sittenfeld, Antony John, Heather Brewer, Michael Kahn.  (Me.)  St. Louis has a wealth of auctorial talent.

I’m putting this out there because I would really appreciate a turn-out.  Come in and get some early Christmas shopping done.  Tell your friends you chose this title or that at the recommendation of an author of your acquaintance.

While you’re there, I can tell you about a couple of things coming up that I’m involved with.  I’m starting up a reading group, hosted by the store.  First meeting will be January 4th, a sort of let’s-get-together-and-meet before the book discussions start up.  I’d like to tell you about that.

I’d also like to tell you about my forthcoming projects (and yes, I will be posting about them here, but a little face time would be good, don’t you think?) and of course I’d love to tell you about the books I’ll be promoting on the day.

So this is notice for my readers nearby, in the St. Louis area:  The 30th of November, the Central West End location of Left Bank Books, between 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM.  Come in, meet an author, buy some books.  I’d love to see some of my friends, my casual readers, even—dare I suggest it?—some of my fans (if I have any).  It will be fun and we can talk books.

Okay?  We’re good?  You’ll show up?  Great.

About Hild

http://theproximaleye.com/2013/11/11/...

That Which I Hold Sacred

I’ve seen this a few times now and each time I am taken somewhere wonderful and know what it is to be inside joy. I’m in tears every time. It makes me feel so damn good to be human!

This is where it’s at for me.

Boycotts and Bully Boys

I’m not going to the theater to see Ender’s Game, not because I’m boycotting it or Mr. Card, but because I don’t care enough about it to spend coin on it.  Of course, that can be said of 99% of the movies released in the last couple of decades—we don’t go to the movies anymore.  It’s a habit we got out of shortly after buying a house.  Priorities, y’know?

Not that I don’t eventually see them.  (We finally saw The Time Traveler’s Wife this past weekend, long after it’s theatrical release.  A couple of weeks back we saw Cloud Atlas at a friend’s house.)  We get there, eventually, but we aren’t driven by the mass energy of the zeitgeist.  It has benefits.  Seeing things well after the initial hype and scurry allows for a calmer, less media-driven appreciation.  We see it when we’re ready.

I doubt I’ll ever be “ready” to see Ender’s Game in that for decades now I’ve encountered a low-level of discussion about the novel and, more recently, its author, that “distance” is not something achievable in the sense of seeing it when controversy is not hanging in the air, like the smoke from a dozen cigars shortly after their users have left the room.  Ender’s Game is one of those novels that have acquired a kind of cultural mass, a displacement quotient, around which debate, reaction, argument, and controversy orbit.  Dune is one of those, but for different reasons.  (Outside the genre examples of this abound—think Catcher In The Rye, Ulysses, Atlas Shrugged.)  The mention of them in the right group triggers what eventually become standard, predictable set-piece conversations, and one counts status points and self-defines socially/politically/culturally by one’s stance vis á vis how one feels about the subject.  They take on lives of their own.  You could almost put them down on guest lists or schedule them as part of the entertainment over dinner.

I read Ender’s Game in the early 1980s, I don’t remember exactly when.  I remembered the novelette from which it was expanded as being one of the better stories in Analog in the Seventies.  My reaction?  I enjoyed it thoroughly.  It was a good ride.  I went on to read several more Orson Scott Card novels, eventually losing interest in him.  I felt the sequel to Ender’s Game—Speaker For The Dead—was a superior novel, much more substantive than the first.  I did not then nor do I now think either was Card’s best work.  I went through a phase of OSC and moved on.  (He wrote a series of superb short stories early in his career, which are still, some of them, masterpieces.)

Now the movie is coming out and so has Mr. Card, apparently, and guess what?  He’s become a lightning rod of controversy because he is not much like his landmark stories.  He is a very openly homophobic man and apparently one of those who talks blithely about governmental overthrow if the country doesn’t go the way he thinks it should.

(I say “blithely” because we hear this all the time and often from people who are so engaged with things as they are that it is difficult if not impossible to take them seriously.  It has all the significance of a child threatening to run away from home or stop breathing if things don’t conform to expectations.  It’s a way of attracting a certain kind of attention.  Someday the rest of us may learn that the best way to deal with this is to ignore them.)

How many other people does this sound like?  We may personally know someone who thinks and talks this way.

And most of the time it never comes up.  The plumber might be a Tea Party idiot, but since we never talk politics with him, we never know, and hell, he does good work.  If someone else informs us that he is a political idiot, do we automatically stop using his services?

Boycotts are being called for with regard to OSC.  In one instance, pains have been taken to distinguish between this and any kind of censorship.  It’s not his ideas being boycotted but the man himself, by denying economic support.  A fine line, that, and there is a difference, because ideas can’t be so constrained according to the moral calculus of our political standards, but we can always choose freely what we do or do not spend our money on.  The difference is real, of course, but so is the fact that in public action ideas tenaciously refuse to be teased free of their purveyors, so to attack the one (economically) is to impact the other (dialectically).

I won’t be joining any boycotts.  To my mind, a boycott is personal.  I choose what to spend my money on and that makes it personal.  By joining an organized boycott, it no longer is personal, not in the same way.  It’s political, and mass political movements have a tendency to lose the kind of finesse and nuance the personal necessitates.  Because your personal viewpoint necessarily becomes subsumed in the politics of a movement and dissension from the movement aut0matically becomes suspect by the larger group.  Conformity evolves, individualism becomes confused then lost, and what began as a specific protest of a specific thing becomes a cookie cutter that divides the public from the private in a regrettably destructive way.

Further, this is coming painfully close to book banning.  I know, no one is calling for that, in fact so far everyone is very carefully denying that is what is going on.  But it’s not very many steps between boycotting one movie, one book, one author and boycotting a body of work and then arguing that said body of work should not be “supported” (available) and removing it from…

So it goes.  Suddenly the socially conscious, liberal minded, civil rights oriented boycotters morph into thought police.

How likely do I think that is to happen here?  Not very.  But that’s not argument against refusing to participate in the boycott.  Just because in this instance it won’t happen doesn’t make the process any less odious.

This is a purely personal viewpoint.   I won’t join or support a popular boycott like the one being called for against Orson Scott Card because by doing so I lose a certain amount of control over what I might mean by not spending coin on him or his work.

And besides, Card himself stated it—such protests put more money in his pocket, because controversy attracts profits in this game.  Catcher In The Rye might never have become the phenomenon it did had it not been banned.  The wrong kind of attention was paid it and boom! it’s a cultural icon.  Regardless the quality of the book.

My personal opinion about Ender’s Game has been consistent since a few years after originally reading it when I realized that it was—is—manipulative, button-pushing, and fundamentally flawed.  It depicts scenarios of responses to bullying that are devastatingly gratifying and wholly implausible and unsupportable.  It is a well-written rollercoaster ride that I enjoyed at the time of reading that later left a bitter aftertaste.  I thought it only worth praising because of its sequel, which is a novel of redemption and expiation, a startling portrayal of guilt and responsibility and an argument for tolerance.

Which is ironic, since the work portrays a level of empathy and compassion the public statements of the author belies.  The man who wrote Speaker For The Dead is not the same as the one who seems bent on revolution in order to prevent gays from being able to live as equals in a human society.

Unless…and this is a wicked thought, but not inconsistent with some of the great monsters of religious thought down through the ages…unless the whole purpose of Speaker For The Dead  is to argue that such redemption is the whole point of the series.  That Ender is not sorry for what he (unknowingly) did to the Formics so much as willingly embracing his rôle as a Shiva Christ.  His fate, his destiny is to shoulder that responsibility, not avoid it—not wish he had never done it—but to immerse himself in the total package of destroyer and mourner.

And one cannot mourn what is not lost.  So the Formic had to perish so he, Ender, could be St. Stephen.

Which makes it not so much an argument for tolerance, belated or otherwise, but an argument that the goal of human enlightenment is to wallow in the shame of unbridled destruction.

(In a way, this is much like the many cults of the Native American the United States has embraced in the last century and a half, cults that romanticize and eulogize the vanished Indian, appraisals that could not exist the way they do without the very destruction of the Indian they seem to mourn.  The Indian had to die in order for this peculiarly American form of self-flagellation to be enjoyed and enshrined in film.)

Not something, to my mind, which should be shoved off the stage, boycotted into oblivion.  That is something that needs to be discussed, at length, so we can recognize it when we encounter it.

Mid Life

That’s optimistic.

So recently I turned 59.  It doesn’t feel much different from 58, or that from 57, but since I often still feel 35, it occasionally jars.  I have little to complain about, save for a nagging sense of lack of time.

I’d been toying with getting an electric guitar for years.  A frivolity I could not quite talk myself into for a long time.  I have a terrific acoustic guitar which I do not play as well as I should, but which gives me a great deal of pleasure pretending to play well.

There are some things you just can’t mimic on an acoustic, though.  It’s like trying to play Deep Purple on a spinet pianola.  It lacks gravitas.

So an opportunity came my way and I threw common sense to the wind and bought a delightful Epiphone Les Paul.  Not the one I’d had my eyes on for many years, but it’s a Les Paul.  (Yeah, yeah, I hear the purists kvetching over in the corner, but it ain’t a Gibson, like that makes all that much difference.  Well, it does, by several hundred dollars.)

Which necessitated getting an amplifier.

I have a good friend in Jefferson City who is something of a musician (actually, he’s a very good musician and graces me with a willingness to jam on our infrequent visits) who knows people.  Sound people.  I told him what I’d gotten and he said “Come on out and we’ll fix you up.”

Fix me up indeed.

I’ve been out of the music biz too long, I didn’t even recognize the name—a Line—but it’s a gem.  50 watts, all the bells and whistles (well, at least more than I’ll master in the next several years) and by pure serendipity the color scheme matches my axe.  It came with a pedal board, too, which, for the price I paid, astonished me.

I have every intention of getting down to it and learning some songs.  I’ve been playing it almost every day since I brought it home.  It is loud.  We have installed it in my office, so I can close the door, and Donna can enjoy it through the walls and floor.  It’s more than I need.

I did not buy the Ferrari.  I’m having a much more modest midlife, er, crisis.  More a midlife ruffle, really.  Despite my complaining, I’m a reasonably happy guy.  Hell, I’m still alive, which after last year’s little contretemps is a very positive thing.

I’ve been finding online lessons.  Stumbled on a guitar player of some considerable merit who does instructional videos, although I can barely keep up.  (He tends to assume you already know the rudiments.)  So I thought I’d put one here just to show you how far out of reach my aspirations go.

Till I started surfing for this kind of thing I’d never heard of this guy.  (Told you I’ve kind of been out of it for a while.)  Turns out he did a turn with Asia.  Yeah, Heat of the Moment Asia, but an incarnation with only one original member, Geoffrey Downes.  I’m trying to imagine what they must’ve sounded like with this guy.

Anyway, I’m dipping into his how-to vids.  He reminds me a lot of Ian Anderson.

Anyway, I must now get back to the start-up of my second half-century.  Stay tuned.

Revisions

I’ve been a bit dissatisfied with my blog of late.  I keep finding themes I like, then when the updates come through and I click on them, the pages disappear.  I’d have to go into the guts of things on my server and delete the old and re-install it, the damn thing won’t just update like it should.

But I get to try out new looks as a result.  I’ll try this one for a while and see how I like it.  My archive links have disappeared, which really annoys me, but I’ll figure it out.

I get a day off tomorrow.  I’ll write something more meaningful then.  Till, then…

Spoiled Children

“If I don’t get my way I’m gonna hold my breath till I turn blue and die!”

Or some variation thereof.

Am I talking about children?  Of a sort.  I’m talking about congressional Republicans, actually, because that’s about what this current confrontation amounts to.

Very simply, there is a rock-solid block of opposition to President Obama that can only be described as perverse.  Nothing he does is acceptable to a certain cadre of these folks, even if it was originally an idea from the GOP.

When the ACA was being constructed, they derailed single payer, brought in industry deal-breakers, did everything they could to make sure their constituents (read: Big Pharma, Big Med, etc) continued to receive inordinately large slices of the health care spending pie at the expense of a sane program, and, under Obama’s direction, assembled this lurching Frankenstein critter themselves, and have been bitching about it ever since.  They did not want to pass any kind of national health care program, in fact they wanted to take apart the existing ones (MediCare and, most especially, MedicAid), and maybe they thought Obama would veto the beast they built.

He didn’t.  It actually has a lot in it that has turned out to be popular.  That which may be less so or may not work well, will be corrected over time, just like every other program of this sort.  MediCare/MedicAid was a stumbling mess when it was first enacted, but over time it has been modified until both programs work fairly well.  (It took a Republican to recomplicate matters with MediCare Part D, but…)

But the fact is, this is the law.  Not only that, it passed Constitutional muster.  It is the law.  Not only that, the GOP ran partly on repealing the ACA, and Obama was thoroughly re-elected.  It is the law.  The people, in aggregate, have spoken.  It is the law.

Now, it’s not like we haven’t repealed laws before when they proved bad or ineffective.  It’s not like we haven’t changed laws to make them more in line with our expectations.  It’s not like if the ACA isn’t dealt with right now, there will never be a chance again to do something with it.

But there’s a method, a process, a protocol.

I have never liked the back-door method of defunding or underfunding programs voted on in order to keep them inoperative and cause them to function so poorly that people will support their repeal.  It’s a cheat.  It happens quite a lot.  This may be the most high profile example of the attempt yet.  It’s a tantrum thrown by children who haven’t gotten their way.

Sometimes you can debate who started what fight, but the fact is the House has voted over 40 times to repeal “Obamacare” and has lost each time.  How any of them imagined filibustering the entire government over this was in any way defensible beggars the imagination.  To then turn around and say that the President won’t negotiate is ludicrous.

Look, it doesn’t matter if you don’t like the ACA or the idea of it, the fact is we voted on this and it is now the law.  Put your grown up pants on and live with it until, by due process, you can change the law.  Due process.  The system has spoken and you lost.

Boehner, for his part, is an ineffective speaker.  He cannot control his own caucus.  He’s terrified of losing the speakership, so he’s now in a position in which he has to distort the entire process to accommodate less than 40 representatives who are the well-known tail wagging the baffled dog.  In fact, he’s now putting forth such distortions of the truth that it’s laughable.

Obama cannot yield.  This cannot be established as an acceptable tactic.  This is the very definition of minority rule.

All because…

Well, there are a number of theories, but overall it seems because a faction has determined that, though they are a part of it, Government is incapable of doing anything beneficial and the only way to go is to kill it.  We’ve heard that before, from Grover Norquist, but even he is looking at these folks with trembling knees.

They bitch about Entitlement.  What is this if not the full flower of Entitlement?  They feel entitled to school the rest of us on what this country ought to be like.  As if that were not bad enough, they either have no viable vision for what the country should be like or their history is so flawed as to be laughable.  Or cryable.  They know nothing.  They come from districts so jerrymandered that their constituents might as well be clones.  They look at all opposition and see a reflection of their mindset without realizing that they are the ones who will or won’t do everything they accuse their enemies of.  They see the world in terms of conspiracy, in terms of destiny, in terms of some version of history that one might find in the cheapest sort of political thriller, unresearched and fecklessly inept.  They stand up for values of which they have no understanding.

They are acting like spoiled children who never learned how to play with others.  Even their Wall Street supporters are beginning to look at them with alarm.

They didn’t get their way.  Now nobody will get what they want.

I take some small comfort in realizing that this, too, will pass, and they will enter the history along with other factions of discord and ineptness.  I’m just waiting for their “Have you no shame” moment.

And if they don’t know what that is, well, that’s a big part of the problem right there.