Mark W. Tiedemann's Blog, page 59

Bolano's "Savage Detectives

http://theproximaleye.com/2013/02/15/...

Guns and Popes

2013 is shaping up early to be one of those singular years in which people will be asked “Where were you when…?”

Two things of note at the moment, both of which have the slimmest of connections—or maybe not, depending on your perspective: this is the first largely popular effort in support of gun control since the late Sixties, at least rhetorically, and, if the polls are to be believed, demographically; and the first resignation of a sitting pope since 1415.

Connected?  In terms of the kind of faith some people bring to certain givens, perhaps.  But in both cases, core ideologies are being challenged by external pressures that have grown so great as to impose change.

External pressures?  In a word, reality.

Let’s start with the Pope.  It came as a shock even to the non-Catholic world, his resignation.  After eight years, he’s had enough.  He is an old man—Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927—and aside from everything else that is not an easy job.  He became pope during a time of internal strife and public ignominy over the child sex abuse that has been an ongoing problem for the Catholic Church for decades now.  What, from all I can see from the outside, he tried to do was continue to reassert a traditional model of Catholicism on a body religious that has been fractured and mutating since Pope John XXIII and his Vatican II reforms.  Every subsequent pope since has been trying to put certain genies back into a bottle that is cracked if not broken.

The failure of the Catholic Church to deal with the abuse scandal, however, points up another problem that predates even John XXIII and goes to the image the Vatican has of itself, namely that it is in some very real way a separate authority from the secular world in which it operates.

John XXIII was in very significant ways trying to address that very issue through Vatican II, namely that till then the Church had held itself so apart, ideologically and philosophically, from the world that it did not feel obligated on any level to admit to changes in that world which had a bearing on how it conducted itself.

I go on a bit about John XXIII because of the ironies nascent within his reign.  See, he was the second Pope John XXIII, and I think it many ways he chose that name because the first of them had been technically an antipope.  That’s relevant in this instance because of the media fillip about Ratzinger being the the first pope since Gregory XII to resign—and Gregory XII reigned as pope simultaneously with the first John XXIII.

As well as simultaneously with Benedict XIII.

Three popes? This was at the end of a century or more of intense change throughout Europe, culminating in the Western Schism (1378 – 1417) which came to a close when all three of the sitting popes—one in Rome, one in Avignon, one in Florence—abdicated and a new election was held and Martin V became pope.  The question central to orthodoxy, of course, is how could such a thing possibly occur since by convention popes are elected at the influence and direction of God.

The other part of this has to do with the resignations themselves, which were hardly voluntary, but coerced.  John XXIII himself was imprisoned afterward and had to be ransomed.  The last pope to decide for himself to step down was Celestine V, who quit the job five months after having it thrust upon him in 1294 when he realized how inept he was politically.  The man—Pietro Angelerio—had been a monk and hermit and found himself, at age 79, impotent to have his decrees enacted or enforced.  He quit.  (Dante placed him in the antechamber to hell for cowardice, because the one who followed Celestine V was Boniface VIII, whom Dante places firmly in Inferno.)

None of this reveals divinity but political deal-making and squabbling.  However, by tradition everything to do with the papacy becomes the direct will of God (who moves by mysterious ways we are told).

Clearly, though, the actions of the Vatican since the second John XXIII bear all the hallmarks of a secular state that has turned conservative and is trying to reimpose some kind of authoritarianism upon an increasingly willful populace who have problems Rome has been unwilling to admit exist much less attempt to address in any concrete way.  It has all come to a head with the child sex abuse scandals.

To be clear, no one except the least informed suggests that this is a problem solely of the Catholic priesthood.  The fact is, in terms of numbers, priests who do this are no more numerous than in any protestant denomination—in fact, there may be a bit less—and the numbers aren’t high.  Not in terms of priests.  In terms of victims, there may be considerably more than in other denominations because of the internal policies of the Catholic Church, and it is there that the distinction has force.  Because the Church, even when they found out, left these priests in place, sometimes for decades, and imposed its authority on the victims to silence them, first by playing on their Catholicism and then later with threats or pay-offs.  In a protestant church, if a minister is found out doing this, the police are called and he’s arrested.  He is handed over to the state authorities because he has committed a crime.  Rome does not recognize such authority with regards to its officers (priests).  This is, for them, an internal affair, and they will handle it, thank you very much.

Except the world has changed and this is wishful thinking on their part.  Yet, they stick to their core ideology in face of this changed world, trying to pretend that they still represent, in their practices, something relevant.  They may very well, but not at the expense of ignoring what is around them.

The Catholic Church long ago constructed a narrative in which they try to live, one which serves the ideology that defines them.

Likewise, organizations like the NRA are currently constructing a narrative which serves the ideology that defines them.  Like the Church, they have elected to ignore reality and focus on a core set of premises which may at one time have served a purpose but which have become ever more problematic in a world that no longer functions the same way.

There is a faith element to both situations that is striking in how transparently at odds they are with the world we live in, but it is a faith held primarily by those who are insisting that their vision is the correct one in opposition to the context in which they operate.

The answer to gun violence is more guns?  Really?  The answer to pedophile priests is continued immunity from prosecution and more confidence in the institution that is shielding them? Really?  The answer to these is to do exactly the opposite of what is being asked for, indeed demanded, by the people who are feeling most victimized by dysfunctional practices?

What is obvious in both cases is that we are seeing widespread retrenchment and a hardening of ideological bastions against an assault that by any metric should be viewed as an opportunity for better and more constructive communication and involvement.  They are both responses to perceived threats.  The demand for accountability for child abuse by priests is viewed as an attack on Church authority instead of what it is—a demand for justice.  The demand for better controls on firearms is viewed as an attack on a presumed right of personal defense (and an implicit right to counter government abuse by violence) instead of what it is—a demand that people who should not have access to deadly force should in fact be kept from such access.

But furthermore, on both sides, there is a growing consensus that there ought to be a space in which safety can be taken for granted not gained by a willingness to assert personal force.  People want to know, with surety, that they can go to church and be safe, because that’s what church means.  They also want to know they can live in their neighborhoods and send their kids to school in safety and not have to worry about being ready to draw down on some nutjob gunning for an apocalyptic crescendo.  These are not just reasonable expectations, they are in large part what most people mean when they think of civilization.  It is not right that they be made to feel somehow marginalized because the institutions on which they should be able to depend are willing to sacrifice civilized behavior to defend an authority that, frankly, is not even under threat.

But when every comment, criticism, or conversation is seen as just such a threat instead of an attempt to find common ground, it is obvious that those defending the core ideologies are doing so with more and more irrelevance to the world around them.

The NRA started out as an educational organization and when they did that they were very good at it and very effective.  The organization was a good citizen.  But bit by bit their mission mutated from education to advocacy and their tone has become more and more stridently absurd, all in reaction to the boogie man of tyranny and at the expense of a valued place at the table.  The gun, for them, is becoming more important than people and public safety.  All because they have been constructing a narrative based on a false premise of an American past more faithful to bad Westerns than actual history.

We’ve heard the motto more and more lately, an armed society is a polite society.  This is patently false to anyone with a modicum of historical grasp.  Some of the most polite societies have been unarmed and some of the most violent and crude have been armed to the teeth.  There is a reason dueling was outlawed from the 15th century on by every country that aspired to be called civilized.  Might does not make right, not in the arena of public discourse—it only makes for arrogance, tunnel vision, and inequity.  Because right cannot be asserted by force, whether physical or intellectual.  Right must be demonstrable in and of itself, through actions and a willingness to admit error.

Something the Catholic Church has, in fact, been learning to do, but which it still hasn’t quite gotten a good handle on.

There is another way in which the two things are connected.  Some genies are too big to put back in their bottles.  John XXIII started a series of reforms designed to bring the church into sync with the world, to meet the needs of people in the modern age under circumstances that have unquestionably changed.  The Church seems to have been trying to deny this vision ever since, by electing ever more conservative popes who toe ever more conservative lines (the last reformer, John Paul I, met with a very early demise, and there are valid questions to be answered about the circumstances).  They are fencing with schism as a result and have certainly paid a price in attendance.  Likewise, the sheer quantity of firearms in this country and the culture in which they exist represent a genie of a different sort, just as unlikely to be put back in a bottle.  The landscape has changed.  In that sense, the gun lobby is defending something that doesn’t need defending.  It is what it is.  A new approach is required.  A reform of the culture.  We need desperately to tell ourselves a new narrative.  Because without that, all we’ll have is more of the same.

 

Memento Vivere, Memento Mori

A good friend of mine put this image up on his Facebook page:

 

 

This was taken at my friend’s wedding in 1979.  I was his best man and this is the only time I’ve ever worn a tuxedo.  (I’m on the right…yeah, the short one…)

Seeing this brought forth a cascade of memories, many of which aren’t all that great, but all of which are absolutely vital to who I am today.  See, this is a marker of the moment my life changed.  The next several months put me on an emotional roller coaster that finally stopped some time in early 1980.

Look at that face.  I thought I was a cool guy, at least near the surface.  I wasn’t, but then, really, who is in every aspect?  Or even in most?

That’s Greg.  He married his Judy that day, a wonderful person, and they’re still together.  (There is another photograph in their album of all of us, including Judy’s sister, lined up in the hall after the ceremony, waiting for people to file by.  It’s funny and revealing.  Greg, Judy, her sister, all of them are crying.  I’m on the far end grinning like the fox who just got away with a fresh chicken.  In my mind, I was having a good time and feeling coy because it wasn’t me getting hitched!  False bravado, really, though I believed in my independence—but I was intensely lonely, refusing to acknowledge it.)  I’m not that short, he’s just that tall.

Fresh-faced, I suppose you would call that.  I still had some notion of being a world famous photographer then.  I remember watching the wedding photographer and being thoroughly unimpressed.  Notice this shot isn’t especially sharp?  But in truth, I was still a-forming and had no idea what I wanted to be.

I had just finished my first novel not very long before. (This is the one that Shall Never See Daylight.  All we writers have one of those.)  I thought I could eventually Do It All.  Photography, writing, music.  Yeah, I still had some extremely vague notions of picking up music again somewhere along the way, but that wasn’t really going anywhere.  I’d been teaching myself guitar the previous couple of years, writing some absolutely wretched songs.  (The lyrics, anyway.  Musically I don’t think they’re too bad, but I wrote some incredibly bad lyrics.)  Not sure which of these was going to make it for me, but I had time.  I thought.  I had time.

But then things kind of went pear-shaped on me.

I won’t go into detail.  Yes, there was a woman.  Yes, there were late nights and soul searching.  Yes, there were likely half a dozen more clichés.

Basically, I was following my usual learning curve, which is rather like a ski jump.  Plunging headlong into things, full-tilt boogie as we used to say, and assuming a stable landing.  I’ve always been like this.  I don’t do things methodically, in reasonable steps.  I go along fecklessly convinced of my completeness until I realize I want something else, then eschew any systemic approach to the new thing and dive in.  Take big bites.  Grab what you can with both hands.

I said I was lonely.  That year—and maybe seeing Greg and Judy get married drove it home—I realized I was going down a blind alley.  If I stayed on the path I was taking, I would be a bitter old man with nothing to show for all of the flailing and sweat.

Or so I thought.

I did not know what else to do, so I just declared a change in direction, reached out for what I thought I wanted, and hung on for the ride until I crashed.

Crash I did.  By October that year I was a mangled wreck.  I grew a beard, walked endlessly around the city, often into neighborhoods I had no business entering.  There were some ugly scenes.  I came out the other end hollowed out and cynical.

I started writing again.  In fairly quick order I wrote four more novels.  Not very good ones, they too will remain in boxes, never to see the light of day.

Sometime early in 1980 I met Donna.  Turns out, I wasn’t as hollowed out or cynical as I thought.

I’m toying with finally shaving off the beard.

Symbolically, metaphorically, the man (youth, boy) in this picture pretty much died that year.  I am not him.  I was not him by 1980, but I contained his history, and since whatever new person I was had nothing of his own yet, I used that history on which to build anew.  Not in any conscious way—who is ever that self-possessed?—but the results were an amalgam of what once was and what would soon be.

Seeing this picture reminded me that I spent that year trying in very large ways to Be More, to Live Fully.  I didn’t know how.  The instruction manual so many people seemed to have was written in a sanskrit for me.  So I launched myself into unknown territory and got badly burned and busted up.

It would be nice to believe that the best parts survived, but that is perhaps not for me to say.  But I wouldn’t have done it differently.  If I had, what followed would have been other than what I have, and I like what I have.

Salute.

Place Keeper

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.

Cloud Atlas review

http://theproximaleye.com/2013/02/03/...

Scouts’ Honor

My relationship with the Boy Scouts of America was not the most pleasant.  I was an oddity, to be sure.  I think I was at one time the only—only—second class scout to be a patrol leader.

Second class.  For those who may not have been through the quasi-military organization, the way it was structured in my youth was you entered as a Tenderfoot.  There were requirements for advancement.  Skills had to be learned, benchmarks achieved, and then, having passed through them, you matriculated to Second Class.  You were something of a scout, then.  It was assumed by your fellows that you knew a thing or three, wouldn’t get lost in the woods, knew how to police a campsite, etc etc.  Next up the rung was First Class, which signified a new level of competence and achievement.  The requirements were more stringent, trying, harder, and in many instances more useful, at least in the advent of civilization’s collapse and you made it into the wilderness.  (Likely you still wouldn’t last a week if those were the only skills you brought to the challenge, but they were better than nothing.)  First Class was where the really serious achievements could be made.  Once you fulfilled the requirements for the next level, you went up to…

Now, here I get confused.  Eagle Scout?  Or Life Scout?  Something like that.  The reason I don’t remember is because I never got there.  See, I never made First Class.

Now in a fair world, I’d have no carp, because I couldn’t fulfill the requirements.  I couldn’t swim and by the rules you had to in order to make First Class.  As far as it goes, very reasonable.  I was terrified of the water, and despite the lessons we all went to, I just couldn’t do it.

The problem was, there were other requirements which the other members of my troop did not have to fulfill because, well…the scout master just signed off on them.  (One was hiking a set amount with a pack.  The troop didn’t own a pack nor half the stuff that was supposed to be in it, so our scout master just signed off.)  Not many, but because we were basically an inner city troop, it was deemed that opportunity—or lack thereof—allowed for some sliding.  The rest of my peers made First Class.

Here’s my problem.  I went ahead and did all the rest.  I found the opportunity, got ahold of the necessary stuff, and did it all.  Except the swimming.

I did not get signed off on.  The extra credit, so to speak, made not one bit of difference.  I couldn’t swim.  No special consideration.

But special consideration—given, I think, mainly to save the adults a lot of work—was dispensed to the others.  In my 12-year-old mind, that constituted blatant unfairness.  Nevertheless, my complaints went unredressed, and months later I was elected patrol leader.  Buffalo Patrol.  My mother made our pennant.

I was a creditable boy scout.  I knew a bit about woodcraft already from hunting trips with my dad.  I could find my way with a compass, I could read a map, I could police a campsite, I could manage all the pesky but cool Daniel Boone stuff.  But I was never going to advance up the ladder into the stratosphere of superior scouthood because, well, I couldn’t swim.

But they didn’t kick me out.

There were other problems I had with them, institutional conflicts which I ran afoul of without knowing what was going on.  Years later, I understood.

The Boy Scouts are all about conformity.

The uniforms, the rituals, the youthful boyish comraderie, the classifications for advancement, the dedication to the troop above the individual, all of it was designed to impose a standard form ideal manliness on the scouts.

Now, by itself this is nothing unusual, nor if handled in a benign way a necessarily bad thing.  Civilization needs a certain amount of conformity in order to function.  It’s a dance, to be sure, between individuality and group coherence, one we wrestle with all the time.  But in order to be effective and beneficial, it kind of has to be both fair and honest with itself.  Just what is it we’re conforming to?  If everyone knows what that is, then everyone is (theoretically) free to participate or pass.  It’s only when you hide your intentions or won’t admit to them that problems emerge.

Which brings us to the current spate of trouble the Boy Scouts have been having for a couple of decades now.  They wish to disapprove of homosexuality.

Well, it is a private organization, which is something I think a lot of people forget.  Therefore, they have the freedom to be what they wish to be.

Except almost all boy scout troops are school-affiliated.  As long as they’re with a private school, again, it’s their call.  But if they’re attached to a public school—and I assure you, boy scout troops use school facilities, they get at the least tacit support from the school—then we have a wee bit of trouble over discrimination laws.

Still, I’ll set that aside for the moment.

I hope they choke on this.  Firstly, what they’re saying is the only boys they want are “red blooded all American heterosexuals who like girls!”  Wait, do they say that?  By discriminating against a “gay lifestyle” they damn well are.  The hypocrisy of course is that they give no brief on straight sexuality, either.  By long tradition, what they’re about in this regard is what might be called “wholesome manhood” which once meant that we simply do not tolerate sexuality of any sort.  The idea is that these are boys, they aren’t supposed to be concerned with sexual orientation or anything else concerning carnality.  “Wholesome manhood” is an ideal that pretends sex doesn’t exist until marriage and then you keep it to yourself.

By openly discriminating against a sexual orientation they are coming out in tacit support of a preferred model of human sexuality.  They can’t escape this because the only basis for distinguishing between gays and straights is sexual preference.  Which, by long practice, the Boy Scouts of America are there to suppress on both sides of that spectrum in favor of Wholesome Manhood.

At best, this is hypocrisy.  At worst, it’s fraud.

(One of the charming rituals I endured, as did all the boys in my troop and, I presume, all over the world, was a hazing called “Being Pantsed.”  This entailed being ganged up on as a Tenderfoot by all the others and being stripped of your trousers and forced to try to get them back in your underwear.  Of course, this is not supposed to have a sexual connotation, but the embarrassment was acute and went straight to issues of sexual modesty at a vulnerable time in a child’s life.  Most people who have endured this just laugh it off. Fine, upstanding youth, just larking about.  No subtext.  No connotative secondary implications. Hm.)

So if the Boy Scouts see it as their mission to educate young boys to be on the surface nonsexual, how come that wouldn’t apply equally to a gay boy?

Anyway, the second problem I have with this is that it is defining someone by one trait.  That gay scout might be the best trailblazer in the district, known more about outdoor survival than any dozen others, and be capable of earning fifty merit badges in a year, and yet all this “scout-worthiness” means nothing beside the horror of his sexuality.  Judging him by one thing.

As was I.  I couldn’t swim.

Of course, I wasn’t kicked out.  I suppose because they all assumed that, in spite of that inability, there was no question that I liked girls and, surely they guessed, wanted to do thoroughly Unwholesome things with them.  (Not really, I don’t consider sex unwholesome.  Their standard, not mine.)

Right now the issue is raging over an openly gay scout master.  But again, he’s being judged by one single trait—a trait the entire moral edifice of the Boy Scouts is traditionally not even willing to recognize in straights.

The Boy Scouts is a private organization.  But it is one which we as a culture have long handed our confidence and trust to, one which we have accepted as if it were a public institution, which status they have quite willingly accepted without bothering to correct.  The Boy Scouts like being identified with other public institutions and all things American.

Until now.  Now that they have been revealed as the particular kind of conformists they are, they remind us of their private status and hide behind it.

Fairness is one of the virtues they teach.  And honesty.

In my experience, they’ve never been either.

Other Stuff, Sundry and Otherwise

I posted a new piece over at my Other Place, The Proximal Eye.  A few folks have expressed a bit of amazement that I began another blog.  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.  Being paid for those words is, of course, part of the plan, to which the new blog is a necessary long term component.  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.  Don’t know how long it’ll last, but we’ll see.

That aside, so far I’m enjoying it.  For one, the people working there are, without exception, terrific.  Eclectic, sure, but then what am I?  I can only hope to aspire to the level of eclecticism on display in the intellectual variety of the Left Bank crew.  If you live in St. Louis and have not paid the place a visit, well, what’s taking you so long?  Get your ass in there and marvel.

Now for another act of self-discipline.  I’m cutting this short, right here, now, and turning to my other writing—fiction.

Eat. Sleep. Read.  (Come in to the store, you’ll understand.)

Also, make time enough for love.

 

 

Multitasking

http://theproximaleye.com/2013/01/31/...

Sundry Stuff

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.

Pardon Me While I Reorder My Kingdom redux

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…

Never simple.  Be that as it may, I have photographed the mayhem and will document the results for a later post.  I’m relating this now to let people know that I have not fallen off the planet, only that I will be somewhat preoccupied for the near future and may not be posting very much here.  (Though I’m planning a new Proximal Eye post as I write this.)

I trust the results will be both productive and entertaining.  (For you, not for me.  I hate moving furniture, and last night Donna decided I needed a new carpet.  Well, I do, but that means moving even more stuff!  Grrr!)

Wish me luck.