Mark W. Tiedemann's Blog, page 95

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 ...

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.

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...

Zelazny and the Perils of Reading at a Young Age

Recently I started readsing 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.  ...

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 my.  I pulled over just behind it.  A house was directly across the two-lane from us.  People were in the yard.  The FedEx...

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 s...

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...

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...

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.

He was A Character.  Folks knew him as The Colonel.  He ...

Outgrowing Illusions

I met my first real live, honest-to-goodness science fiction writer when I was twelve.  It was a sobering experience.  Several illusions dissipated in a cloud of reality and it has contoured my thinking about writers in general ever since—unjustly, since the illusions banished had really little to do with writing.

Children tend to take things at face value, approaching life with a literalness that is too often confused with naivete.  Perhaps this is due to the way in which a child's...

Beginnings of a Lifelong (Addiction) Love

When I became infected by literary influenza (a longterm, chronic condition treatable

by a steady diet of words) I had four sources of books.  The library, of course, both the one at school and the public one; the books my mother had bought through the Doubleday Book Club and had stored in boxes in the basement; the Scholastic Book Club at school; and Leukens' Pharmacy around the corner from my house.

At first my reading tended to be omnivorous, with strong leanings toward books upon
which...