landingtree | Entries tagged with author: le guin ursula

I did this a disservice by rereading only the second half of it. This is because, on a dreary day, I let the tail wag the dog and listened to a podcast episode about the first two stories in the book before rereading it, so I will wait a bit longer before I read 'Finder' again.

This leaves me having read three stories. Spoilers follow!

I like 'The Bones of the Earth', without needing it to exist particularly. I like that there is a holy place of the Old Powers of the Earth on Gont. Several of these stories are putting women back into the roots of history, and I like the place of Ard in this story, forgotten by two degrees, yet vital: a woman who taught an old man the magic of the earth, who in turn taught the young man whose more visible work was remembered. It's a 'complicating the origins of something you thought you knew' story which neither bothers me nor seems like a revelation: it fits, I nod and move on.

I like 'On the High Marsh', the animals, the great mountain Andanden. Maybe it's my favourite of the three, but I have least to say about it.

I had forgotten almost everything about 'Dragonfly' and was pleased to reread it. I like everything it sets up. I like the character of Dragonfly, swearing the air blue at the pack of dogs her father keeps (because that's just what's normal to her - and yet as we see in 'The Bones of the Earth', another sign of how she's coming at power orthogonally, since Roke mages must be careful never to swear). She's raised in bleak seclusion, certain she wants to be elsewhere and other than anything her upbringing has shown her, not yet knowing the way but going through the door that opens for her. And I like the character of Ivory, who is that door, a petty, cruel fool and manipulative asshole who you can imagine growing out of it, and who in the course of the story keeps wanting to see Dragonfly as a sexual object and keeps being startled by how that isn't sufficient to anything, not even his own desires.

The story resolves in a way that feels abbreviated, more like a prologue to The Other Wind than its own whole thing, and makes Dragonfly herself feel suddenly more like an enactor of Plot than the person we've been getting to know. The story is about her wanting to find herself out, and the ending is less her discovery and what she learns, than the confirmation of the fact that she shall learn. On the other hand, the Roke bit of the story seems very much like the other hand of 'Finder', which I did not just reread.

I like how this collection continues to ring changes on the rest of Earthsea: the wounded mage and the farmer's widow in 'On the High Marsh', the various Kings (one of them a mineral and one a chicken). At the same time, I have a general sense that Tehanu was the crucial book and these three stories are all a sort of methodical and good working out of revisions already implied. Tehanu ends in a place where great change is coming which is to say that day-to-day life is possible, and 'Dragonfly' ends in a place where great change is still coming, but now it's nearer.

The massive tome of all the Earthsea books is on reserve at the Library so I shall get to The Other Wind before long, and the later short stories that I never read.

In danger of becoming overwhelmed by my to-read pile - a state in which I'm constantly reading the first chapters of good books without much joy and then putting them down - I've once again sectioned off eighteen books and decided not to read anything else until I've finished these. This is the kind of exercise I seldom finish but find value in starting. I seem to adjust to the presence of books on my shelf as normal and uninteresting, so just changing the order the books are in gives me the same pleasant "New treasures!" feeling as opening a parcel. (Pakij!)

I am alternating sixths of Crime and Punishment with shorter books, beginning with Tehanu.

This is the first time I've reread any of the second three books of Earthsea. I plan to go on to both the others (which is already an amendment to my eighteen books rule!) because I'm currently listening to the Shelved By Genre podcast, which has got up to this book in their Earthsea-reading.

I remember as a teenager reading these books for the first time, thinking 'What would an Earthsea book look like that wasn't about mages?' This memory now confuses me; I don't know what I then read in Tehanu, because this book now seems to me like Le Guin asking and answering the same question. In some ways it's a book about lacking power. It's not that the first three Earthsea books don't complicate their happy endings, their grand quests; but they are involved with a hope of finally achieving balance, achieving piece, making things right. Tehanu starts with 'But what do we do with things that can't be right, not ever?' It starts with a child whose burns no magic can cure, whose burns were inflicted by cruel men, in the patriarchy that Le Guin put into Earthsea when she reached for some of fantasy's default settings.

I was interested to see she'd written this book after Always Coming Home. That's another book I've never reread, but I recall it being an attempt to feel out the shape of a society almost wholly beyond the ills of our present world, in which patriarchy is remembered in a scary fable told to children. Tehanu is not that story. Tehanu is starting squarely inside patriarchy, with characters feeling their way tentatively toward what might follow it. Some of its thoughts on gender and gendered power seem very limited to me for that reason. At the same time, I like the way it leaves the series turning toward an unanswered question. It's interesting that this was ever billed as The Last Book of Earthsea, given the degree to which it seems to be setting up sequels; I have very few memories of the sequels and am keen to reread them, but in the meantime I rather like to imagine the open sea beyond this book, the sequel-less-ness we might have gotten.

The book feels strangely choppy to me, different chapters taking place in such different modes such that I find myself remembering it as a bundle of different pieces; it's also Le Guin at the height of her powers, writing with efficiency and elegance, such that I find myself remembering it as a whole world. It depends on the minute.

( Spoilery thoughts )

This year I'm doing the Writing for the Page masters course at the Institute of Modern Letters; basically, it's a course in which ten people end up with a draft novel each by November. More on this later! But I keep not getting around to writing about the course, so here are some excerpts from the reading diary it asks students to keep. It's a rainy, windy day, thirteen degrees out, i.e. cold enough for my liking, and I just cycled home exuberantly, singing in the Mt Vic Tunnel (all the cars honk and I have to join in somehow).

~

08/03/2023

...and I've started Everything For Everyone – an oral history of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a structurally fascinating utopia. It makes the conclusion of Nothing To See jump out at me as especially pessimistic – presenting, instead of [spoilers], a period in the near future when communal action overthrows the flailing Capitalist nation-states and fixes the world. The book's authors project themselves into the future: this is a project that will be undertaken by these real people, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, in another fifty years' time. Politically the book's focus on mutual aid networks and social reproduction theory* appeals to me, though my pessimism warns that nothing will ever go this well; narratively, the conceit of the book as a scholarly introduction followed by a collection of interviews allows a beautiful collection of voices and perspectives. We'll see how this one sticks the landing, and what my Trotskyist family members think about it. (Prose-wise, in the wake of Barzun it is again the case that I want to nitpick individual words).

12/03/2023

Another chapter of Everything For Everyone today, and a really interesting conversation with my activist sister about it. She says the revolution it's depicting strikes her as plausible, for the most part: people have been saying 'One day capitalism will finally eat itself' for a while, and it hasn't happened yet, but it's still a coherent thing to imagine happening. Meanwhile, I enjoy the quality this book shares with Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, a favourite work of mine: the future arises from the present in really weird ways. Today's trivial-seeming social club is tomorrow's only source of intercontinental communication. Also, I have heard from a lot of people,** Americans and other, who are sick of the centrality of New York in the discourse; this book is very deliberately global in scope. New York's in the title, but chapter two is about Palestine and that social club I mentioned arises from ships that circle the Indian Ocean. (I'm interested to see how this would chime with Robinson's New York 2140, which I suspect of being an active counter-inspiration, though on very little evidence).

13/03/2023

Today I read Leese Webster, by Ursula Le Guin and James Brunsman. It is a picture book about a spider living in an abandoned palace who begins to make her webs into art. I suspect it of also being about writing, but what's that Le Guin said about message versus applicability? A good fable is a multi-purpose tool like a bowl, you can put a lot of different things in it and it's still the same bowl, ready to be re-used. I read this book while looking for Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, a book whose applicability to my novel project I understood; still haven't found that book, but I went home from Victoria Library with six unrelated things none of which I'd been looking for, and having read a Le Guin story I'd never heard of. Serendipity is one of the things this course is for.

*[note: I have not actually read any social reproduction theory, but it came up in the conversation which recommended me the book, so: based on what I deduce social reproduction theory to be from the first third of this book alone, it appeals to me!]

**[note: two people. Guess I like to sound confident in this diary, huh.]

Spring: the person who weedeats our lawn came today, and the smell of grass is all around our deck. I've cleared around the herb patch, and prevented the neighbors from entirely destroying our grape vine in their compost-heap-building zeal; the potatoes my sister

seahearth planted are still alive amid the weeds, the guava she bought but didn't plant (on account of starting to dig a hole for it and finding a whacking great concrete post there) survived complete neglect from the rest of us and I've now planted it: apparently three weeks of living in lockdown is the length of time it takes for me to start caring for the garden. (Of course the day I planted the guava the weather turned freezing and a wind came up; we'll see how it does).

Plans: I'd flown back from staying with friends in Dunedin the morning New Zealand's second lockdown started, which was very lucky timing; lucky, also, that I went into the lockdown feeling remade by good conversations, very ready to be contained at home with a new writing schedule and audio recording plans. Exactly the kind of plans I make every fortnight or so, except these ones have pretty much been working for a month and a half. Contributing factor: my flatmates R and N dislike their jobs and seemed generally less stressed and happier while they were working from home - in fact, during lockdown both of them decided to quit those jobs, though neither of them have reached the point where that actually happens yet - and the flat was more social than it's been in ages. (I keep wanting to use the word 'sintered' for things, because it's a good word, 'form fragments into a solid by heat or pressure without causing them to melt'. Faience is sintered vitreous frit. Our flat has been somewhat sintered).

Today has been a partial failure in terms of writing productivity - which is to say it would've been an above average writing day three months ago. (My imagination turns up a fantasy monster, and then half a paragraph later my recent reading/listening* says, "What do you mean by 'monster', Jack, is it anything coherent, what kind of being is this?" and I wander off down google rabbit holes until I'm reading about the use of gendered language to describe cats, which is all useful in its way, but not as useful as I planned. On the other hand I've been inclined to wander about the house singing and dancing, which is always nice. That mood when I sing something wrong and find myself thinking not, "That was wrong, sigh," but, "That felt wrong, which must let me tell me what would feel right, aha, yes it does."

(I should inquire of the downstairs neighbors whether they dislike loud overhead singing. We're not even really at the 'borrow a cup of sugar' level so much as 'nod amiably when we meet in the garden, occasionally discuss grape vine', and the fact that my flatmate R's ex has serendipitously moved in down there means that we're unlikely to arrange any shared meals or similar - but as someone who's so far lived upstairs from three households and downstairs from none, it would be worth my checking in about daytime volume levels).

and Books: for the last couple of months I've been reading only books I already own, specifically only books from the three shelves at the end of my bed -- that bookcase turned out to divide neatly, when I set about sorting it, into three read shelves and three unread shelves. This is an answer to a sense of mismatch between my eternal desire to acquire more books and my actual rate of reading books. Also, I've been carrying most of these around for three houses now, and gone through so many winnowings that the ones which survive I'm really consistently interested in or excited by. (Or, in some cases, feel a vague sense of duty towards: all the better to be pushed to actually read those or else choose to get rid of them).

Favorite so far: Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, it's been one of those books that I've been assuming I'd like when I got around to it for at least five years, and not doing so, because all I knew about it was 'near-future sf mosaic novel' and those are apparently not my 'read this book soon' keywords. 'Maureen F. McHugh' is now one of my 'read this book soon' keywords.

Other favourite: Tanith Lee's Forests of the Night. Retellings of fairy tales that never quite were; retellings of fairy tales that were, but didn't have so many vampires before. The author's note to one story, 'The Tenebris Malgraph,' says it was inspired by a dream, and it's remarkable how much it has that feel: it hangs together as a narrative, but also, wait, fishing mutated fossils out of an irradiated lake as a pastime for the rich owners of private yachts? Yes, that makes total sense, surely the story doesn't need to go into any explanations. With those moments when you look at something in a dream and know something about it which a straight description wouldn't explain. Also bits of strikingly effective poetic language (and some other bits which don't hit that mark for me at all; I do see why I read one story from this book two years ago and stopped). Reading this story caused me to stay up three hours writing an entire first draft of a story myself, which has no relation to the content of this one but some, perhaps, to its atmosphere. Also, Lee tends to throw in an unusually wide range of plausible human reactions to things, as exemplified by the story where a demon turns up outside a house full of servants who are having a dull, bad day, and they all cheer up immensely because now they have something to do, and run around busily sprinkling holy herbs and chanting exorcisms for the rest of the morning. I've had that sort of day, where a sudden minor crisis turns out to be more fun than whatever I was going to do instead - though the story is no comedy, and the demon not, in the end, minor. People don't tend to come out of the stories in this book uncomplicatedly happy.

I was disappointed, but then realised I shouldn't have been, to not especially like Delaney's Babel-17 or his Empire Star. The problem is, I started with the books he was writing twenty years later. Interesting things are going on in both of these,** and I'd probably have done better picking either of them up before reading Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, a book I like so much it's easy for me to forget what hard, dull going I initially found it. At first, Delaney's descriptions didn't make me imagine anything. But then I got myself on board that book, and liked it so very much... I will probably like both of these more if I read them again.

And I feel relatedly but less so about The Lathe of Heaven, a book I really like, more than either of those two Delaneys, but also it's odd to come back around to an early non-favourite Le Guin book.

What's now on the to-be-read shelves? A bunch of Penguin classics, probably old family copies, which fall victim to the way I tend to judge books by their covers: these are small and worn and hard to read the titles of from across the room. (But so was China Mountain Zhang). Books I expect to like but haven't gotten around to yet, an Anthony Price mystery, Deeplight, some Margaret Mahy - including the essay collection of hers which set this reading project off, because I found it in a second hand shop having not known it existed, and suddenly thought, "Right! I now have so many good books in my house that I'm bringing the shutters down, no more, this is sufficient." And one history of China and one of Wales, which I've had since I was a teenager, and the Popol Vuh, the Mayan book of the dawn of life and the glory of gods and kings, ditto, and some books I bounced off once (like The Covert Captain, a good-seeming queer historical romance which I should definitely read in a state of not having broken up with anyone two days ago) and some books I expect to enjoy most if I read them aloud, but I don't actually have that many moments of, "Hey, I feel like reading aloud to myself," which is the mood in which I mainly read poetry and also, apparently, Hobbes' Leviathan, which I picked up in a bookshelf for the Terra Ignota connection expecting to put it right back down again, and then bought when I discovered how magnificently cranky Hobbes is.

...also I keep buying new books. I am not reading them, I am only buying them. The original theory was that I'd keep a running book rec list and not get any of them till whenever I finish these three shelves, but then lockdown happened, I discovered how many books are cheap on TradeMe and, well, I haven't been counting but the replacement rate of unread books is still at least 1.

*Friends at the Table Friends at the Table Friends at the Table

**I've noticed myself using 'interesting' in a slightly weaselly way to say 'I'm not going to think about or articulate anything just here, but I think I probably could have.' Here, 'interesting' is shorthand for 'I started to write a paragraph about a cool idea that gets referenced on a slightly ungainly number of Empire Star's pages, and then wondered if that ungainliness hadn't been deliberate, realised I'd have to reread it to tell, and stopped.'

For the past few months I've been reading Ursula Le Guin short stories aloud to a Discord group -- and, after a while, I started making notes. I'll post these every so often, to remember what I thought of them later.

'Sur'

A group of South American women form an expedition to the pole before anyone else does, but feel no need to let posterity know. I hadn't read this before, and like it very much; it considers, among other things, what happens to expedition prep when early polar explorers have thought twice in their lives about housekeeping. Le Guin read lots of the actual -- or, as this story reminds me to say, recorded -- early polar explorers, stories of men journeying together through the intimacy of wilderness; gender permutations of ice journeys turn up also in The Left Hand of Darkness.

'The Author of the Acacia Seeds'

This was very satisfying to read, because a linguist who hadn't read it before was listening. “Why hadn't I?” she said. “It's great!” Le Guin is good at making non-human perspectives feel human; this story is about the art and linguistics of the non-human, beginning with ants.

'The Fountains'

First of the Orsinian Tales, which so far I've only myself read a handful of. A very short story, constructed around a single spare image; its symbolism regarding republics and kings mostly missed me.

'Direction of the Road'

Another clever 'What kind of being is speaking?' story, which I shouldn't spoil, because I'd forgotten how far into the story you get before the answer is provided.

'April in Paris'

A very early one: vivid, happy, funny, heteronormative.

'Things'

Oh dear. This is beautifully done, and what I had remembered about it was that its characters were working to escape the end of their world, that the work seemed futile, and wasn't: effort and care can get you far enough. A nice story to read around Christmas in a dark time, thought I.

I'd forgotten that my vivid memory of the positive part of the story comes mostly from the story's negative space: consists, in fact, of a slight relenting in its understated, terrible darkness. It was harrowing. I am sitting here in New Zealand in summer, out of lockdown, safely harrowable, and I'm very sorry I chose to read it to people in North America's midwinter.

'Unchosen Love'

Whereas I would have waited ages before reading this story because what I remembered about it was dark, if leaflemming (who has read more Le Guin for much longer than I have) hadn't very usefully sent me a list of stories he considered happiest when I said, “It turns out I don't know which ones are which, help.” On the world of O, the standard form of marriage involves four people; this is the story of an intense relationship between two men, one of them fiery and expansive from a fiery and expansive family, the other mild, at sea, not knowing how to ask for the things he wants, and alarmed by all the possibilities. This is the story of how their relationship walks along the edge of a precipice and steps down off the other side, safe.

'The Rule of Names'

The first Le Guin leaflemming read me? Probably not, because, Catwings. But the first of the short stories, and I love it. Even though the difference in what actually happens between this and 'Things' is less than you'd think, though the tone's a world away. Proto-Earthsea, source of its name-magic.

'Darkness Box'

Made no notes at the time, so not sure what my fresh thoughts were. Fable-ish and powerful. Oh, and I was reminded that I stole much more of this than I'd thought I had (a boy on a beach where the usual rules of consequence are suspended) for a story I wrote in my teens that I now suspect may have been terrible.

'Coming of Age in Karhide'

At Scintillation two years ago I had a wonderful time listening to

redbird read this; it's one of the most immersive readings I've ever heard. I didn't sink into the story in the same way this time – perhaps it's that Le Guin's perspective on sex and gender is uncanny-valley for me now, perhaps it's just the luck of the reread-cycle: anything I like well enough to read again and again puts on many different colors.

'Winter's King'

This feels like all the substance of a novel done in twenty-four pages, full of elegant leaping. Leaping is one of Le Guin's great skills; here, in 'Things', in 'Unchosen Love', half the work is done by leavings-out. Before doing these readings I hadn't read any Le Guin for ages, and up till this point I've periodically thought, “Well, I like these stories, but do I really like them more than all the other stories I could be reading aloud?” Some of the stories I chose up to this point I liked less than I remembered, but this is the first I've liked dramatically more. Early Le Guin's feelings about kings look back in again from 'The Fountains,' bolstered by more years of craft.

It's also set on Gethen, first drafted before she'd realised that Gethenians were androgynous; which makes it, pleasantly, a story whose exploration of gender is entirely background. (I must reread The Left Hand of Darkness. In terms of when I first read them, its thoughts about gender had already been overtaken by the culture I grew up in; it didn't make me think anything new; whereas The Dispossessed made me wander around for a week feeling puzzled that ownership had ever struck me as normal).

'Semley's Necklace'

Read next, because it's another of the Ekumen stories which deals with what NFL travel does to time. A mythic tragedy whose players mostly don't know they're in a science fiction story. I quite like it.

'Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb'

I like this better than I remembered! A nod to Invisible Cities, carried along on its voice, fun to read aloud.

'Nine Lives'

A clone story, and I read it just after starting C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen: in terms of thinking about cloning and identity and socialisation, 'Nine Lives' read like a sapling next to an oak tree; but it was written two decades earlier. Maybe it's the same oak tree. That weird thing where the characters do the equivalent of having a deep philosophical conversation about the grand and hard to-grapple-with implications of escalators, what they'll do to the human psyche, whether they'll be used by mystics to go right on up to heaven, looked back on from a society that no longer thinks the concept of escalators is all that weird.

Unfortunately here the escalators in question are human. The friendship between protagonists Pugh and Martin is nice, a working squabble-filled intimacy which Pugh has to think about twice before naming it what it is, love; but the degree to which the clone is othered by them, is treated as an example, poked and prodded and called crazy for grieving, well, I hate it. And the worldbuilding-background famines, what happens offhand to the Irish due to lack of birth control and overpopulation, is jarring at this point; so's the old Le Guin thing of the neuter 'he'. (Also, perhaps more essentially, one of the people I was reading it to pointed out that the story is simply too long, because it was sold to Playboy, and had to fit their length requirement. Also that this is the story which Le Guin allowed to be published without her first name, concealing her gender, which she later regretted).

'Schrodinger's Cat'

A delightful surreal story. I don't know what to make of it, in fact, I make nothing of it, I just enjoy that it exists.