Jack Vance: No Place At Saponce

May 30, 2013 / Mark W. Tiedemann / 6 Comments

Jack Vance wrote idiosyncratically in a field of idiosyncracy. The very lushness of his prose bespoke an era well past its prime that, when sought, could never be found. Azure, jeweler’s brass, roseate and softly crystalline. Contradictions made to coexist and cross-inform. Footprints trace a path along the the receding shore of a sea once filled with more deliberate monsters than now, the waves gilded by a fading sun that somehow shines proudly if wearily, attesting to empires whose ruins are more wondrous than any new powers might contrive.

He often wrote of the stuff of melancholy, while avoiding melancholy itself. One could see how tales told about these times and places might turn maudlin for greatness lost, but not yet, not now. Now we must see what fascinations recomplicate in a present not yet to form a past still waiting.

Was it science fiction? Fantasy? Did it matter?

Suis generis is sometimes used only when imagination fails to pigeon-hole, where appreciation falls short, and the thing judged is greater than those judging. Works can signify its proper definition, but more often individual writers are better gauges. Jack Vance wrote science fiction (The Last Castle, Araminta Station) and fantasy (Lyonesse, Maduouc), and amalgams of both (Mask: Thaery, Dragon Master, The Dying Earth) that even within their clearly defined provinces did not quite fit with expectation. He was an altogether sensual writer more concerned with moving the reader slantwise into a state of mind to perceive in unique ways places that ran counter to any norm than might be applied.

Deep in thought, Mazirian the Magician walked his garden. Trees fruited with many intoxications overhung his path, and flowers bowed obsequiously as he passed. An inch above the ground, dull as agates, the eyes of mandrakes followed the tread of his black-slippered feet. Such was Mazirian’s garden—three terraces growing with strange and wonderful vegetations. Certain plants swam with changing iridescenses; others held up blooms pulsing like sea-anemones, purple, green, lilac, pink, yellow. Here grew trees like feather parasols, trees with transparent trunks threaded with red and yellow veins, trees with foliage like metal foil, each leaf a different metal…

He established a quasi-mystical ground for what might loosely be called science-fantasy, worlds where physics and genetics obtained but suggestively and where the motivations of alien minds twisted landscapes into ur vistas against which struggles for power played out in atypical fashion.

In The Languages of Pao power resides in grammars, linguistics the key to control, and a strong and unusual acknowledgement that cultures are latent repositories of destiny. In The Last Castle a comfortable ruling class is suddenly face with the fact that their servants have become more powerful than they and because thought was never given to them as more than labor, any basis for negotiation is completely unknown.

Vance seemed to write most eloquently about the days just before declines begin. A last Indian Summer played out sometimes across galactic stages. He was never less than grand.

The impact of an artist can be seen in his or her heirs, those who internalize their vision and produce new works. Gene Wolfe paid homage to Vance in his Book of the New Sun even as he did something wholly his own and in some ways superior. Vance was certainly not the first to try to combine science fiction with fantasy, but he was one of the most successful, and writers like Roger Zelazny, Lin Carter, and Michael Moorcock benefited from the results.

There is a bit of Tolkein to be found strewn throughout his prose, but Vance began publishing before Tolkein’s epic appeared, so the apparent influences are coincidental only. They shared, if anything, a sense of the vastness of time and the importance of even forgotten history. Vance’s stories are weighted with the awareness of pasts.

Vance retired from writing several years ago. Eyesight failing, health precarious, he withdrew. Now he has gone. Other writers of his generation—Heinlein, Asimov, de Camp, Silverberg, Williams—seem to have garnered more attention. At least more vocal advocates. But each of them held Vance in high regard and the enormous body of work Vance has left us seems to be tenaciously inspiring new works and reassessments and gaining new readers.

“There is your home; there is Saponce. Do you wish to return?”

She shook her head. “Together we have looked through the eyes of knowledge. We have seen old Thorsingol, and the Sherit Empire before it, and Golwan Andra before that and the Forty Kades even before. We have seen the warlike green-men, and the knowledgeable Pharials and the Clambs who departed Earth for the stars, as did the Merioneth before them and the Gray Sorcerers still earlier. We have seen oceans rise and fall, the mountains crust up, peak and melt in the beat of rain; we have looked on the sun when it glowed hot and full and yellow…No, Guyal, there is no place for me at Saponce…”

Guyal, leaning back on the weathered pillar, looked up to the stars. “Knowledge is ours, Shierl—all of knowing to our call. And what shall we do?”

Together they looked up to the white stars.

“What shall we do…”

Veering Into The Present

May 8, 2013May 8, 2013 / Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

An attractive pitfall of popular history is the Pivotal Moment. The writer centers on an event or an idea that signals a shift in the course of history, leading somewhere other than where it had been heading. The Donation of Constantine, the First Crusade, the invention of moveable type, Galileo’s confrontation with the Church, Newton’s codification of the law of gravity, things like that. The point being made is that these events are so tectonic that Everything Changes.

The pitfall is not so much that they are wrong but that they are taken as solely responsible, isolated moments, forks in the road. It is easy to ignore or forget everything else around them. Focusing only on the Emperor Constantine can suggest that without him, Christianity might not have become the official religion of Rome and thus history might have taken a different course. (Personally, I think Constantine’s moving the capital of the empire east was far more significant as something he alone could have done, or caused to be done.) It overlooks the fact that Christianity had become a tremendous movement by then. Had Constantine been of a mind to resist it, he might have delayed its ascension for another emperor, but it would have become what it did in any event. Constantine was being politically astute. (After all, he left Rome to the Church even as he moved the center of imperial power to the new city of Constantinople. It’s telling that he chose to isolate them geographically.) The Crusades were important as expressions of political currents leading to a contraction of Rome’s vision of itself and certainly set the stage for subsequent events in the Levant, but not even the death of Richard the Lionheart changed all that much in even British history.

Newton might be arguably more important, at least for the calculus, but such things were in the wind. Leibniz, rival and competitor to Newton, invented a calculus, and while the debate goes on as to who was first and which was better, such a mathematical tool was going to emerge.

Picking pivotal events, therefore, is a challenge. Placing them in context is a duty and one it is often tempting to underplay. It makes a better story if the singular event is the hero, as it were. But it can sometimes make for bad history.

Stephen Greenblatt avoids that problem admirably in The Swerve: How The World Became Modern. Even though the title is a bit hyperbolic and suggests the kind of history more consistent with a tabloid approach, what one finds within it first-rate history written for a general audience about a rather arcane subject: the way ideas can change entire cultures.

The story is about the discovery of a manuscript, De Natura Rerum, an epic poem by the Roman Lucretius (99 B.C.E. to 55 B.C.E.), an acolyte of Epicurean philosophy who died just before Rome became an Empire instead of a Republic. De Natura Rerum—“On the Nature of Things”—is a a surprising work in that it espouses ideas which we think of now as wholly modern. That the universe is composed of atoms, that time and space are unbounded, that life evolves, that matter is all there is. If one squints, one sees the foundational ideas of contemporary physics in all this. Physics and cosmology.

But it continued on to suggest that pleasure is the highest moral purpose, that doing that in life that increases one’s pleasure and the pleasure of those around us, is the primary aim of a moral life.

It’s easy to see how this might run afoul the kind of moral philosophy that has dominated Western culture since before the rise of Christianity. But Lucretius was not advocating hedonism, but the more constrained program of Epicurus, the 4th Century B.C.E. Greek philosopher who advocated philosophy based on the two standards of ataraxia and aponia, namely peace and freedom from fear (ataraxia) and the absence of pain (aponia). To do this, one must lead a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends and occupying the mind with constructive and pleasing contemplations and treating the body to that which brings pleasure. Though the name has been linked to self-indulgence, hedonistic abandon, and all the ills of unrestrained pleasure-seeking, what Epicurus had in mind was something very different, and defined by moderation. The kind of self-indulgence we assume attends such a life he did not see as peaceful, pleasurable, or free from pain.

He also believed that when we die, nothing survives. The soul is an aspect of our physical existence like anything else and fades to nothing once the container ceases to function.

Lucretius wrote a poem of purportedly great beauty in support of this philosophy.

It is a common misapprehension that the Greco-Roman world of that time would have embraced all this eagerly. The fact is, Christianity rather easily took root in the Roman Empire because it bore much in common with ordinary Roman morality. Epicurus was almost as disdained under the Caesars as his ideas were later despised under the popes. Christianity succeeded largely because of its commonalities with pagan culture, a culture which found Epicurean ideas almost as off-putting as any later devout Catholic might.

A culture which fully embraced the spiritual side of attitudes toward the material world that relegated this life to a condition of transient, burdensome necessity, pain, and suffering which must be borne with the faith and dignity of an acolyte who seeks a better existence in an afterlife, fully convinced that nothing in this realm matters. A culture that had no use for the idea of atoms, that believed the universe to be bound tightly in a very local set of spheres, and with a time limit on its existence that was easily comprehensible—a few thousands of years. People wanted the comfort of believing existence to be closely bound, finite, with a way out.

Lucretius’ poem faded from memory. Rome’s collapse was as much a result of neglect as of catastrophe, and by the 9th century, much of the written legacy was sequestered in monasteries, scattered, mouldering, often ignored, certainly unstudied. It required that civilization rise back to a certain material level before interest in ideas, old manuscripts, and the past could matter.

Enter Poggio Bracciolini, Florentine, scholar, humanist.

Humanist meant something a bit different in the 14th and 15th centuries than it does today, but it is possible to see the connection. Poggio was one of that group of avid collectors who scoured the monastic libraries for old books. Most of them were copies of even older books, the remnants of a vast ancient world epitomized by the Library of Alexandria, most of which seemed to offer glimpses into a Golden Age. Aristotle had long been seen as the basis for rationalizing certain troublesome aspects of Christian theology. The flood of recovered books from the Reconquista has been both benefit to a slowly recovering European civilization and troublesome bane to a Church that saw itself as the final arbiter of what it was proper to know, to consider, to believe.

Poggio worked for a succession of popes. In his “spare” time, he hunted manuscripts, and helped return them to circulation. He found Lucretius’ tome in Germany, a 9th century copy. According to Greenblatt, he may not even have realized what it was. He’d only heard it mentioned with respect and some reverence in other ancient manuscripts.

The Swerve reveals the events surrounding the poem’s creation, loss, rediscovery, and subsequent dissemination throughout a culture that was on the verge of becoming something other than what it had been. The ideas embraced in the eloquent lines are ideas with which we are more than familiar today. Indeed, they are common coin in debates on the right and the good and resonate in the foundations of modern science. Greenblatt suggests that it was this book—its reintroduction to a wide audience—that caused the veer into what has become a secular civilization.

He is careful, however, to contextualize his assertions. Something like this, it seems, would have had to be invented if it hadn’t been found. Its arrival at the onset of the Renaissance was fortuitous. Coming along when it did—when science was beginning to coalesce out of the mish-mash of alchemy and reactions to Aristotelianism, when people like Bruno, Galileo, Newton, and many others were present to respond—hastened events, gave focus to certain schools of thought, fed the furnace that was recasting conceptualizations of nature and the universe. It lent the weight of a more complete philosophical conception to the fragmented components of what would one day become the modern world.

It is perhaps surprising (and somewhat disillusioning) that the arguments spawned by De Natura Rerum are still being waged today. Reading Greenblatt’s examination of the central ideas of the poem and the subsequent responses to it is itself a lesson in historical context, because we can look around and find exactly the same kinds of debates—and sometimes bitter battles—going on around us.

But it is also encouraging. Ideas survive. People keep them alive, even over centuries, millennia. Greenblatt is, in his own way, continuing that fragile, necessary, and yet astonishingly powerful tradition, passing on to the future what is important not only for today but what has been important all along.

Primary Influences

April 21, 2013April 21, 2013 / Mark W. Tiedemann / 3 Comments

Reading and writing are inextricably linked, but it’s a lopsided relationship. One can be a voracious reader without ever feeling the need to write, but being a writer by necessity demands voracious reading. There are some who seem to believe they can write without having to read extensively (or at all!) but I imagine this is a self-correcting delusion. It may be a more obvious problem in this age of self-publishing ease, when one’s shortcomings can make unfortunate and sometimes wide spread public displays, but the simple absence of any kind of artistic æsthetic on which to base the work is fatal to the endeavor.

Besides, what would be the point other than a profound narcissism. Part of the fantasy of “being a writer” is to join a fraternity whose past membership has provided the delight you hope to offer, a delight you have presumably found in reading.

I imagine that for some writers, the desire grows gradually, a cumulative response emerging after many books. Specific texts are less important than the experience itself. For others, there’s a turning point, a moment when the reading experience in a given work sparks the “I want to do this!” response that grows, if nurtured, into a lifelong obsession.

I can pinpoint my own turning point.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire was the book that decided me. I bought it at the corner drug store in 1968. Mr. Leukens had a spinner rack from which I’d been obtaining paperbacks for almost a year by then. I can say quite honestly and without embarrassment that it was the cover that caught my attention. That Don Punchatz rendering radiated “significance” in a way other covers failed to achieve.

I’d been reading science fiction in one form or another for as long as I could remember. Comic books, mostly, but once I’d obtained my library card, the occasional SF novel came home with me. A lot of them seemed…well, stodgy compared to the movies. I admit to being disappointed with science fiction that was set in more or less the present day. I was a kid, after all, I was after the gosh wow! more than the cerebral pleasures that are the chief attribute of the form, at least in those days. I wanted Forbidden Planet and John Carter not stuff stuck on Earth.

Asimov I knew from another novel, Pebble In The Sky, which I had read earlier in the year. I still wasn’t connecting authors with preferred experiences, at least not as a guide to find more of the same. Partly this was because I had no reliable way of getting more by a given author. Leukens Pharmacy was my primary source and the fact is he had no control over what ended up in that spinner rack. It was hit or miss.

That month, the only one of the trilogy available was the second volume. (I didn’t even know what “trilogies” were yet.)

Gradually, I came to regard Avon as the imprint that provided me with the kind of material I most wanted. Along with the Foundation books, I got a lot of Robert Silverberg, B.N. Ball, James Blish, and later they published the Science Fiction Hall of Fame collections. Their books had a particular “feel” and quality that seemed lacking (or at least different) from other imprints. (So in a peculiar way I was initially more aware of publishers and editors than authors.)

Asimov sold the first Foundation story to John W. Campbell in 1941 and went on to write all the stories that comprised these three books by the early 1950s. I read them out of order. The middle book first, then the first one, finally, after months of searching, the last one. The covers above are from a slightly later edition, but basically the same ones I eagerly sought and devoured.

They were everything, at the time, that I wanted from science fiction.

But what was that?

I was 13, almost 14. My reading had been chaotic though wide and I had a smattering of history (not nearly enough to form any cogent opinions of events) and I had the sense that a lot of fiction, especially in the movies, was disconnected from all that went before whenever the events of the story took place. Right off the bat, Asimov offered a simple, elegant way to imply a concrete history by the epigrams of his fictional Encyclopedia Galactica (an obvious but nevertheless effective play on Encyclopedia Britanica and American). That “scholarship” existed on which the chronicler of these wholly fictional and fantastic events could draw provided a basis of “authenticity” that completely sucked this reader in.

What followed was a self-consciously analytical treatment on the way history might work. The premise is Cartesian—if one knows enough about enough, then one can make reliable predictions. The sheer control offered by Seldon was profoundly seductive.

And then, of course, there was the Empire, spanning the entire galaxy, thousands of worlds, a massive civilization bound together by hyperdrive and the Imperial center on Trantor. Trantor itself was such a startling idea, an entire planet completely covered by a single city.

Gaal Dornick’s arrival on Trantor, on later reflection, was the arrival of any young man from a more rural part of America to New York via Grand Central Station, and the awe of such a massive construct. (Samuel R. Delany rather elegantly recapitulated this in the opening scenes of his Atlantis: Three Tales with the actual New York.) In a way, Dornick’s reaction is very like the reaction of a new reader who suddenly “gets” it.

Considerations of cost and the unlikelihood of achieving any fraction of the kind of homogeneity, political or otherwise, never entered into it. Asimov had loosely based his Galactic Empire on the Roman Empire and that itself was a highly improbable collection of provinces under a single banner. If you could accept the one (which had actually existed) you could accept the other, especially since as the story opens the Empire is beginning to crumble. By this device, Asimov acknowledged the latent impossibility of a “galactic empire” by letting us watch its demise from sheer social and political entropy.

New things are born from the ruins of the old, and the rest of the series is about these new things. What I found so appealing was the inherent historicity of the Foundation stories.

Of course, the idea of mathematically predicting future events with the kind of precision suggested in these stories is fantastic at best. The notion behind it is not fanciful, there is something to the dynamics of large groups in motion that lends itself to patterning. Asimov simply worked a variation on actuarial math and raised to dizzying heights. It is a criticism of which he was well aware, one I already agreed with since I’d begun with the middle volume—the one in which The Mule appears to completely overturn everything Seldon had constructed. The fey element, the unpredictable, the unaccountable. Asimov subverted his own premise.

But that opened the narrative up to a more sinister thread, one which has also been geared into history: the secret society, the hidden group which from time to time people believe to be the real rulers. In this, Asimov was still playing with the plausibilities of accepted historical narrative.

It was easy then to accept that Asimov was writing about the collapse of the Roman Empire—and the perfectly agreeable desire to shorten the inevitable “dark age” following the fall of such a huge and apparently monolithic construct. But as one grows older and continues the kind of necessarily broad and voracious reading essential to being a writer of any worth, such simple comparisons erode. The falls of empires probably always follow certain patterns, but in the details they differ. I now suspect Asimov, if he was being intentional in his subtexts at all, was writing about the vanity of empire rather than of any particular one, and the costs of such things to those who become dependent. Asimov was a refugee, born in Russia. Perhaps too young to remember anything of his early childhood there, no doubt he heard the stories, and of course there was World War One, the first death blow of a European Order that went back a millennia at least. By the time Hitler was trying to establish a new Roman Empire (at least in terms of territory if not intent), it was obvious that the old regimes were done for, and the future was about to be in the hands of the bureaucrats, apparatchits, and opportunists in a way never before seen. In such a world, the idea of preservation itself might be seen as the only worthwhile enterprise—the preservation of knowledge, which would make Seldon’s Encyclopedists the first moral actors in a post Imperial age.

I think Asimov was writing about the world he lived in rather than either the Roman Empire (or Republic) or the Galactic Empire. Naturally, insofar as science fiction is always really about the present, viewed through the distorting lens of a future tense. But more than that, because he was establishing priorities. Empires rise and fall—the Foundation itself becomes an empire (much as America did after WWII, if not in fact at least in influence) and all empires become pieces on a larger chess board in a game played by those behind the scenes—but what matters is the continuity of knowledge and access to it for all those people who must survive the changes in political fashion.

I couldn’t possibly have recognized all this when I first read these books. Some of my peers, and certainly many of the adults around me then, dismissed them as they did all SF as “mere” entertainment, idle speculation, and, at worst, a waste of time. But for me, what may or may not have been latent in the text was sufficiently present to inspire. The seriousness with which Asimov approached his subject was very different in tone and effect from, say, Doc Smith. Insofar as I have ever been scholarly, the Foundation series spoke to me on that level, and triggered the response that led me to start writing my own stories.

It’s telling that in Asimov’s autobiography, In Memory Still Green, he claims that he had no idea what he intended to do after writing and selling that first Foundation story. But he had put a hook at the end of it which demanded a second story, thinking himself clever that he had in some way trapped Campbell into having to buy the sequel in order to answer the question, without quite realizing that he then had to deliver. He goes on to claim that he never could work from an outline, not then and not later. Maybe not on paper, but there was an outline in his head somewhere that provided a reliable template.

Of all the SF I read back then, I find few I can reread with any pleasure. This is one of them. It still enthralls me. I can still see the vast deeps between the stars and the terrible force of history unfolding and enfolding across time the matrices in which we nevertheless decide for ourselves what we want and struggle to accomplish.

That, at least, is my story.

Knowing Who To Follow

March 30, 2013March 30, 2013 / Mark W. Tiedemann / 5 Comments

Choosing the right character to carry the story is one of the essential jobs of constructing a solid narrative. Often that character will seemingly do the work for the author in the telling of his or her story. Everything follows from viewpoint. If the wrong one is chosen, the work can still be finished, the story told, but it can be an arduous task and, except in the hands of the most skilled, the effort shows in the finished product.

From certain writers we expect the right choices as given. It never occurs to us to question them the way we might question a less seasoned author. Reputation is based on the repeated nailing of all the important factors. Such respect can be so ingrained that when a mistake is encountered, a wrong choice made, and the narrative doesn’t flow as it feels it should, there’s a tendency to blame ourselves. We’re not reading it with sufficient attention, we’re not getting all the cues, we have failed to pierce the caul of metaphor and see into the purpose of the work in hand. We are deficient, not they. If we are bored, it is because we are boring, never that the author to whom we grant such status has bored us. We are philistines, unworthy of the temple secrets.

Sometimes, this is true. There are such works that are so densely construed and meticulously articulated that they require superior attention, often more than a couple of readings, and demand that the reader bring something substantive to the text before page one is even begun.

There are also works which pretend to be like that. They can be difficult, opaque, and on the surface pointless. Often, rather than admit the possibility that the work is flawed, we may find ourselves inventing the nous and telos of such a work, doing ourselves what the writer actually failed to do, or at least failed to get right. If nothing else, the elegance of the sentences, the lexicon and vocabulary alone, convince us that this work must be good. We couldn’t write anything so self-evidently beautiful, concise, lush…artful.

Doubt is also an essential element in literature. The writer doubts in the act of writing, because there are many choices that must be continually made, from the macro to the micro. There are doubts the reader has as the story unfolds, questions to be asked and, we hope, answered. But also the basic doubt—is this book worth our time?

The work must earn our trust, assuage our doubts. Being kicked out of a narrative, something we’ve all experienced, even with the best work, is an aspect of unanswered doubt. The writer loses us when the work fails to keep interest high and doubts low.

With some writers, those with Reputations, this process gets reversed, and a work that might otherwise be set aside had it been written by a lesser light then consumes us in a quest to find the flaw in ourselves that causes us the discomfort of entertaining the possibility that this work is not what it should be.

In a recent piece in Salon.com, Robert Lennon tackles this idea. We are told certain works are worth our time because they are the epitome of what we should aspire to, both as writers and as readers.

A case in point—with regrets—is William Gass’s new novel, Middle C. The prose are fine, there is a playfulness with language reminiscent of Pynchon and Gaddis and, occasionally, Fowles, and some passages are beautiful. The whole does not live up to the potential of its components.

This is a difficult realization. Gass is one of those with Reputation. His essays are acknowledged masterpieces, his novel The Tunnel is considered a 20th Century classic. Middle C is his self-professed Last Novel. The conceit that launches the narrative—a man who changes cultural identities in order to survive the coming catastrophe of World War II, and then continues to drag his family from one set of personae to another, trying to stay one step ahead of those who may force him to conform to moral conditions he cannot abide—is fascinating, and the stage is set beautifully. Distantly reminiscent of Gaddis’s The Recognitions, fraud and imposture inform the lives of his family throughout. The attempt to find a place while simultaneously seeking an identity with which they can comfortably live, set against the backdrop of a post-war America that seemed to change both its sense of self and its expectation with each passing fad should have produced an electric work of neon clarity.

Instead, the protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, is so intent on passing unnoticed through everything and among everyone that he never becomes his own Self, but remains a potential buried within the layers of subterfuge and fraud he uses to get by. If it was Joey’s intention to keep everyone out, Gass allows him to succeed, and we are left with a skilled cipher who never engages with anything. His passion is music, but, presciently, one of his early instructors tells him flat out that he pretends to play well, that he does not let himself know the music, and so will remain a talented mediocrity.

Gass seems to have chosen the wrong character to follow. We know everything we are going to know about Joseph Skizzen by page 50.

Now had he gone with Joey’s father, we might have had a narrative with some unadorned vigor. Rudi Skizzen took chances, acted, moved, and seems to have possessed a moral center that, while manifesting in rather unexpected and abstruse ways, drove him. Had Gass followed him when he abandoned his family to head for Canada…

But we don’t have that book. We have the careful examination of the near wreckage of his family as they try to get by. Not succeed. They don’t try for that (except the sister, Debby, who embraces the plasticity of America and seems to become a Happy Suburbanite—not much a choice, perhaps, but wholly hers and made without apparent regret) but turn inward to self pity and a constant fear of being found out.

Joey Skizzen—Professor Joseph Skizzen—does not wish to be noticed. When people notice you, he suggests, then you are expected to do something, to live up to their criteria. This is well and good if you have a set of criteria of your own and work to live up to them, but Joey’s phobia removes from him any desire, apparently, to have any expectations at all of himself. He just wants to pass through, get by, be left alone.

The reader doubts, especially when confronted with a book by someone we are expected to appreciate, that his or her reactions have any merit when those reactions are negative. At best, this leads to a bit of wasted time spent muscling through a novel searching for what we are told to expect. At worst, we take our inability to gain intellectual purchase in the novel as proof that our intellect is wanting, that our taste is lacking, that we are ourselves the philistines at the gate. It is hard to realize that sometimes even a great artist produces flawed and occasionally fatally flawed work.

I was reminded of another work while going through Middle C, namely James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, which also told the story of people trying to change identities and pass as other than they were and dealing in various moral frauds in order to achieve questionable short-term ends. The difference was that in Cain’s work all of them had something to lose, all the way up to the end, which made the work a first-rate tragedy. In Middle C all the loss happens early, nothing is regained, and instead of tragedy we find farce.

There are some fascinating passages in this book, and the ideas with which Gass is playing are rich. But the path he followed seems to take the long way around and doesn’t go where the beginning would suggest it should. No one ought to feel inadequate as a reader in the face of such a work.

Detecting Sauvage

February 15, 2013 / Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

A couple of years ago I read Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. I still have the one for which he gained considerable fame posthumously, 2666, waiting for me to tackle.

I say “tackle” fully cognizant of its implications. For a book like this, one should prepare. Stockpile food and water, coffee (my god, yes, coffee!) and tell friends you’re going on a long trip and to maybe take care of your pets for you. One should be prepared to leave one’s life by way of the page and cut what ties are possible, because it will be a journey. This is not “light reading.”

November 2 I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

So it begins. Might as well say he had been invited to join Life. It’s rare that anyone is “cordially invited” to do so, although there are many opportunities along the course of our living to join at a more engaged level. Too many people pass these opportunities by, either because they do not recognize them or because they do and would rather not.

November 3 I’m not really sure what visceral realism is.

Of course not. He goes on to say he’s only 17. How many of us ever know so early what life is? But Bolaño sets out to show us.

He never explains it. He simply takes us through a long journey, immersing us in the viscera of other lives who are all desperately trying to be real. None of these people know what they’re doing, what they’re after, what they hope to get out of whatever it is they’ve gotten into. But they go, and that’s the entire point of the several hundred pages of what amounts to a hero’s quest for the internally tangible.

Most of them fail.

They try to find it in art, doing radical experimental poetry, through sex, having affairs that, while not exactly forbidden, are at least not likely to be fulfilling, through violence, through alcohol, through fleeing their country, through poverty and work and opportunistic spiritual muggings. They are purposeful while lacking a purpose, at least beyond short term stand-ins for purpose. They hurt, get hurt, love, suffer, burn out, and none of them end up where they began, although there seems to be a return.

One character is named Ulises and this is not capricious. If anything, Savage Detectives is a recapitulation of The Odyssey. Years of travel to find home. But, like Odysseus, they come back, some of them, to find home has left as well. You get the sense that one or two of them finally understand that home is something you carry with you, not a geographic location, but it’s hard to tell because the mysteries they strive to uncover and reveal mutate in the hard light of day. Just about the time you see them find something and say “That’s it! That’s the thing!” it’s gone, slipping away with serpentine grace and telec perversity.

You come back from your own journey, having stayed true to the quest, and feel…reworked. You’ve been through living and followed the clues to answers that have only the suggestion of questions. For some, it might feel like a cheat. In that regard, Savage Detectives is kin to novels like Gravity’s Rainbow, The Sunlight Dialogues, and, yes, Ulysses.

But I suspect it really had more in common with Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Bolaño seems to have fractured the character of Larry in several pieces and sent them all on the same kind of quest, to find Meaning, only to have it all turn pointless on them. Larry expresses the realization in himself that he had gone about it backwards when he admits that he thought Sophie would be his reward for having lived a good life. (Sophie, sofia, wisdom, and in a way, Larry achieved it, but Bolaño has a darker view.) It’s the living that’s the reward and we ignore that at our peril.

Of course, living can be a punishment as well, and it may be that you can’t have one without the other.

I still have 2666 there, waiting. Daring me. I have some vacation time coming…

Multitasking

January 31, 2013January 31, 2013 / Mark W. Tiedemann / 5 Comments

How many books do you read at the same time?

Once in a while, a book so grabs me that I can’t read anything else till I’ve finished it. (Also, once in a while, I have to read a book that is by its nature a struggle and if I read anything else during the effort I’ll never get through it.)

There are days I miss the ability to do multiple things at once—read, listen to the radio, watch television, carry on a conversation. I think we all remember a time when we could do this, but I also wonder if we remember how much we actually got out of it. I know that if there are voices around me now, spoken or sung, reading is impossible. I write to music—instrumental music—but that’s the limit of my cross-discipline multitasking. (I’m writing this to Glen Gould’s performance of Beethoven’s 1st Piano Concerto. I find myself recognizing passages during the pauses between thoughts, but the rest just flows by, creating a kind of aural creative cushion, a continuity that fills in the gaps left by interrupted imagination.) I rarely read to music.

But I do generally have three or four books going at the same time.

Right now I’m reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and at the same time working my way through Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia. (Does that count as a kind of musical background? Nah!) In between, I’ve been reading short stories in current issues of Asimovs SF and I’m about to start research into Madame de Stäel for the next book in the trilogy I’ve been working on.

The trick is to mix them up. I almost never read two novels simultaneously. History and a novel, essay collections and a novel, science, politics, etc. From time to time they color each other, to interesting (but I’m not sure to superior) effect. I recall once reading Michael Moorcock’s marvelous The War Hound and the World’s Pain and C. V. Wedgewood’s history of the Thirty Years War more or less at the same time. Whatever else I might have been reading got overwhelmed by the totality of those two books. Sort of like reading Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead and a biography of Admiral Halsey together, or just a good history of World War II in the Pacific.

While we read with our entire brain (especially fiction, in which the internal creation of images is strongest), it seems we can compartmentalize detail. I wonder sometimes if when I put down one text and pick up another, what I’m doing is giving my subconscious an opportunity to process the first text. It feels curiously relaxing sometimes to go from one to another, like changing up an exercise routine.

I am a slow reader. I read roughly 80 books a year, cover to cover (probably if I added in the total page count of articles, short stories, partial reads, and such it might get closer to 120, but nevertheless) and it can sometimes take me a seemingly inordinate length of time to get through a book. (Having done two works now with a reading group—Ulysses and Dante’s Commedia—the upper range now stands at seven years to get through a text.) Many factors are involved, the chief being the time to sit down and read. Life interferes. Where once it seemed I had a whole day to go through a book, now I read them in 20 minute to 2 hour chunks. And the depth of the text places its own constraints on how quickly it will be absorbed. (I can read a standard murder mystery in a couple of days, but I’m looking at a book on my shelf that I know will take a month at least—Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, a history of the United States from 1815 to 1848. The older I get, it seems, the more attention I find I must give to such books. I zipped through William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in high school and did it in less than a week.) “Processing time” is more necessary, but the urge to keep reading is abated only by picking up a different book for a while.

I have yet to confuse texts. I always manage to keep whatever I’m reading this way separate. That might change were I to read similar books simultaneously. (In fact, I do recall confusing sources during a period of intense research into the Civil War, wherein I switched from one text to another regularly in an attempt to glean a collective comprehension of the period.)

Almost all of my reading, however, is linear (as probably is most people’s). There are some I’ve known who open books at random and read in the middle, then the beginning, then somewhere else (though not novels, but I wonder how this might work in history?) but not me. Beginning to end. Yet I keep them all separate—multi-linearity?—which might seem difficult, since I put one down to pick another up and each return is like starting over. Yet…

It makes for an interesting, often fascinating journey. Dancing down the Yellow Brick Road on the way to Versailles at the height of the Sun King’s reign and finding the legation from Vega waiting in the trans-Plutonian consulate fora. Metternich and Monroe are over there in corner, at the end of the buffet, discussing the Euro with Aragorn while Peregrin and Meriadoc introduce Nero Wolfe to delicacies from Canopus. There are serious issues under discussion among the gathered dignitaries, not least of which is the true location of the Maltese Falcon and whether or not the heirs to the Dukes of Burgundy have right of return, for which cause Chingachgook represents them to the Culture Minds who may or may not intercede. The whole arrangement of the imaginative universe could be altered. Everyone is waiting for arrival of the next book in the series. in the meantime, we read widely to grasp the multiverse in which existence itself is given meaning…

On Tactics

January 16, 2013January 16, 2013 / Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

I’ve redone my office. This was a much more arduous task than I originally thought (although I sort of had a premonition, I suppose, because I kept putting it off), but is now in the main done. While the geography doesn’t look that different, the feng shui is markedly changed. I have more pacing room, a necessary component to my writing ability. (I also pace when I’m on the phone, a habit that required first very long cords and then, later, portable handsets.)

Part of any convulsion like this is the uncovering of Old Stuff. In this case, papers of various arcane and now-meaningless import. Some of it, though, has been a delight to rediscover. Like an archaeologist with a new potsherd or a bone, I’ve found layers of past interest embedded in corners unexplored since my last major make-over. Cartoons, scribbled notes, lists, fragments of stories, and far too many scraps with phone numbers and no names. Hmm.

One thing I remembered saving and now have in front of me is an essay by Charles Elliott, How To Read Proust, published in the October 1984 issue of The Smithsonian. I xeroxed it and punched holes to include it in a notebook, but here I find it, mixed in with a lot of other paper that I’ve now discarded.

I have not read Proust. I have friends who have read Proust. Proust, much like Joyce, is a rite of passage. To have read Proust seems to put one in a special category of people, Those Who Have Read Books Everyone Knows About But Few Ever Read. They are among the artists whose name alone conjures impressions of high art apart from specific titles. “Have you read Joyce?” Why, yes. “Ah.” The conversation need go no further. A sign has been given and answered and a recognition of kindred æsthetes has occurred, and you may now continue discussing Other Things with a knowledge that Deeper Meanings will not go unacknowledged, even in the most mundane of topics. “Have you read Proust?” No. “Oh.” A different apprehension, a shift in approach. Conversation may proceed, but it will not be the same as what might have been engaged. (Claiming, quickly upon the realization that the sign has not been properly answered, that one has read, say, Pynchon or even Gibbon may restore the level of mutual appreciation, but not the particular frisson of potential mutuality.)

The essay is both comic and serious. It discusses tactics to be employed in the reading of “difficult” books, sprinkled with epigrams from Virginia Woolf, who endeavored to read Proust. And continued to endeavor. “Every one is reading Proust…I am shivering on the brink” reads the first one, from 1922.

What follows is a catalog of useful techniques for dealing with daunting prose. Deep reading is immensely rewarding, but let’s be honest—it can also be a challenge. A lot of work, in fact. Mr. Elliott (who was an editor and vice president at Knopf, and knew, no doubt, a few things about daunting prose, both good and bad) strikes at the core of the problem by concentrating on exactly that—concentration. How often are we reading along, working our way through a densely-articulated page, and suddenly find that we’ve been missing whole swathes of story because our attention drifted over to what we’re having for dinner later or the argument we had last week or what color we might want to paint the walls? We start over. At some point the mind rebels and refuses to allow the kind of attention necessary to parse the lines we think we very much want to read. Faulkner comes to mind.

(I find posture the most important and when I’m doing research outright discomfort can be useful. It has been decades since I’ve been able to read lying down.)

Reading, whether we like to admit it or not, is often dependent on mood. Books enjoyed one day might be impenetrable on another, simply because our internal ‘scapes have shifted, tectonically, and blocked our ability to appreciate what’s in front of us. (It’s the same with people—we all know those with whom we must be in “the mood” for.) Sometimes, the proper arrangement of our component cognition waits years before access is granted. (I tried to read Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany four times over the course of ten years before one day it just opened to me.)

Sometimes we just have to find the right posture.

No one should be embarrassed about being unable to read something. There are plenty of books, of all types, levels, styles, subjects, and depth is something we learn to plumb. (“Being deep” however is no excuse for the waters to be murky.)

I may yet one day read Proust. I’ve read Joyce, yes. (Also Pynchon, Fowles, Gardner, and Burgess.) To get the most out of such books you should be prepared to dive deep, but that takes practice. And we all have fallen asleep while reading. Practice, yes—but a few worthwhile techniques or tactics couldn’t hurt, either.

Such reading can sometimes be like cleaning a room and finding all kinds of stuff you forgot (or never knew) was there. The deeper the pile, often the more surprising the discovery.

But if it’s a major project, sometimes taking a corner at a time is better than just overturning the entire landscape and thinking you can put it all back together.

“I followed my new diversion of book binding. I am covering Proust in little shiny squares of gummed paper.” Virginia Woolf, 1934.

Rules of the Road

January 5, 2013January 6, 2013 / Mark W. Tiedemann / 8 Comments

Books have speed limits.

Some you can breeze through, a quick run along a sunny straightaway, windows open and wind in your ears. Others demand that you slow down, pay attention, move with care.

For the slow-but-dedicated reader, if there is a special plea or prayer upon picking up a new, dense book, it should be “Please don’t waste my time.” I’m one of those readers who feels a compulsion to finish what I start. I seem constitutionally incapable of just putting a book aside part way through and never coming back to it.

Oh, I’ve done it! Years later, though, if I stumble across that book, ignored in a box or on the shelf of someone to whom I’ve loaned it, I experience a moment of guilt, a regret that I somehow betrayed it, and that it may take umbrage for having been dallied with and left for another. “So…a restless spirit haunts over every book, till dust or worms have seized upon it, which to some may happen in a few days, but to others later…” according to Jonathan Swift. Death to a book is to be ignored.

But we are mortal and have only so much time. I have a crabbed admiration for people who can decide within ten pages that what follows is not worth their time and can put it aside without a twinge of conscience. (Crabbed because another part of me keeps wondering what they’re missing.)

“Please don’t waste my time.” For me, part of the problem is an inability to know if a book will be a waste of time. Possibly some paragraph or a chapter or even a line from a character will make the whole thing worthwhile.

I read in anticipation. This is true of all books. I’m looking for something. Surprisingly, I find it more often than not, and in this I have to count myself fortunate. I have read books not worth my time and most of them I have forgotten. But something of them lingers and sometimes I recognize them again, at least as a type, and before I make the mistake of reading the first chapter (if I get past page 30 I’m trapped, I must go on) I avoid what I sense is coming.

My own discipline notwithstanding, that is my main rule of this particular road: Don’t waste my time. I can always be proven wrong, but there are certain books I’m not interested in reading. Certain kinds of books I should say. I don’t want to hurt their feelings, I don’t want to feel betrayed. Books are like people—some are compatible, others should be avoided.

I’ll likely never read another Stephanie Meyers book. Ever. (I read The Host—don’t worry, I was paid to, for a professional review—and I found it exceptionally dull, too long for its weight, derivative, and a cheat. That’s the worst reaction I’ve had to a novel in decades.) On the other hand, I will likely read everything Iain M. Banks publishes.

I recently read Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon and it’s the perfect example of a book with a speed limit. Slow down, pass with care, deer crossing ahead. A paradox, because it is a broad, multi-laned road with no posted limits. But zipping through it would be to miss everything. Autobiographical in the sense that Heat Moon is the narrator and the trip recorded was his hegira around the continental United States—but not in the sense that it is about him. While it is impossible that his own self and life could be kept entirely out, it’s about the road and its impact on the traveler he was. The main character is the journey. The sights along the way demand attention. You do not speed read a book like this, which is reflected in the stated purpose of his travels on the back roads, state highways, and some seldom-used tracts in parts of the country most of us have no idea exist. If you want to go fast, take the superhighways. And see nothing.

But if you’re interested in landscape, in impressions of setting on character, on the topography of perception and topology of awareness…

That’s the kind of book I intend to talk about here.

Another rule of the road for me is going to be the advocacy of writers and of local bookstores. Writers do what they do because they—most of them—love it. It can be a difficult relationship, to be sure, but the deeper the love the better the result. Which by extension invites the further relationship with the reader. Where you first meet is actually important. Buying from big chains is like engaging a series of one-night-stands. Buy your books locally, get to know your bookseller, and by extension support the writer.

The Proximal Eye

Words About Words

Classic