Category Archives: Art

Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin

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Photo by Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian

(Editor’s note: in light of the recent passing of Ursula K. Le Guin we should appreciate even more the wisdom and insight communicated through her novels as well as in this article from last November, one of Le Guin’s last published in-depth interviews.)

David Streitfeld interviews Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Los Angeles Review of Books

GREAT HONORS ARE flowing to Ursula K. Le Guin. Last year, the Library of America began a publishing program devoted to her work, a rare achievement for a living writer. The second and third volumes, containing much of her classic early SF, are now out. Her collected shorter fiction has been published in two volumes by Saga Press. In 2014, she received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This year, once again, she was on the betting list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Le Guin lives quietly in Portland, Oregon, with her husband of many decades, Charles.

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DAVID STREITFELD: How’s your health?

URSULA K. LE GUIN: Okay.

How’s your mood?

Okay. [Laughs.] One slows down increasingly in one’s upper 80s, believe me. I’ve dropped most of my public obligations. I say, “No, thank you,” a lot. It’s too bad. I love reading at Powell’s Books. I’m a ham. Their audiences are great. But it is just physically impossible.

Much of the work in these two new Library of America volumes was done in a short span of time — a few years during the late 1960s and early ’70s. You were on fire, writing The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) practically back to back. That was a period when you also wrote the first Earthsea novels.

I worked just as hard before that and just as hard after. The work of that period isn’t all my significant work. There’s pretty good stuff after.

You were also raising three young children.

I had a child under age five for seven or eight years. Number three came along slightly unexpectedly, about the time number two was beginning to go off to kindergarten. I could not possibly have done it if Charles had not been a full-time parent. Over and over I’ve said it — two people can do three jobs but one person cannot do two. Well, sometimes they do, but it’s a killer.

How did you pace yourself?

I was very careful in those years not to work to a deadline. I never promised a book — ever. I left myself what leeway I could in what I did when. My actual time to work on my writing was going to be limited to what was left after the needs of my kids. I don’t want to be pollyannish, but the fact is both jobs were very rewarding. They were immediately rewarding. I enjoy writing and I enjoyed the kids.

I remember you once said that having kids doesn’t make the writing easier but it makes it better. Still, it took a lot of juggling.

When I discovered I was pregnant the third time, I went through a bad patch. How are we going to do this whole thing all over again? Pregnancy can be pretty devouring. But it was an easy pregnancy, a great baby, and we were really glad we did. There was all this vitality in the house.

It was clearly a time of great fecundity in all sorts of ways.

Apparently I could do it on both fronts. I was healthy and the kids were healthy. That makes such a difference. But it all didn’t seem remarkable. I was of a generation when women were expected to have kids.

When did you write?

After the kids were put to bed, or left in their bed with a book. My kids went to bed much earlier than most kids do now. I was appalled to learn my grandchildren were staying up to 11:00. That would have driven me up the wall. We kept old-fashioned hours — 8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m. I would go up to the attic, and work 9:00 to midnight. If I was tired, it was a little tough. But I was kind of gung-ho to do it. I like to write. It’s exciting, something I’m really happy doing.

Does being in the Library of America make you feel you’ve joined the immortals? You’re now up there with all the greats — Twain, Poe, Wharton.

I grew up with a set of Mark Twain in the house. Collections of authors’ work were not such a big deal. And my agent was hesitant about the contract, since the pay upfront was less than she’s used to settling for. She’s a good agent. Her job is to make money. What I did not realize is that being published in the Library of America is a real and enduring honor. Especially while you’re still alive. Philip Roth and I make a peculiar but exclusive club.

The first book of yours in the Library of America came out last year. It was called “The Complete Orsinia,” and had some of your less famous work.

I bullied Library of America into doing it first. I didn’t realize I was bullying them, but I was. They were very good-natured about it.

Malafrena (1979), the novel that is the volume’s centerpiece, takes place during a failed revolution in the early 19th century in an imaginary European country somewhere near Hungary.

It’s one of my works that is neither fantasy nor science fiction. So what do you call it? It’s not alternative history because it’s fully connected to real European history. There is no name for it. That’s my problem, I do nameless things.

It’s been a long journey for some of these books. Fifty years ago, they were originally published as SF paperbacks.

I’m not remotely ashamed of their origins, but I am not captivated by them either the way some people are. Some people are fascinated by the pulps — there’s something remote and glamorous in the whole idea of a 25-cent book. I am in the middle of rereading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Michael is enthralled by the whole comic book thing. That is perfectly understandable and I enjoy his fascination, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I am into content. Presentation is something that just has to be there.

Fifty years ago, science fiction and fantasy were marginal genres. They weren’t respectable. In 1974, you gave a talk entitled “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?”

There’s a tendency in American culture to leave the imagination to kids — they’ll grow out of it and grow up to be good businessmen or politicians.

Hasn’t that changed? We seem inundated with fantasy now.

But much of it is derivative; you can a mash lot of orcs and unicorns and intergalactic wars together without actually imagining anything. One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice. You can’t tell a story unless you’ve listened to a lot of stories and then learned how to do it.

You’ve been concerned recently about some of the downsides of the imagination.

I feel fine as far as literature is concerned. The place where the unbridled imagination worries me is when it becomes part of nonfiction — where you’re allowed to lie in a memoir. You’re encouraged to follow the “truth” instead of the facts. I’m not a curmudgeon, I’m just a scientist’s daughter. I really like facts. I have a huge respect for them. But there’s an indifference toward factuality that is encouraged in a lot of nonfiction. It worries me for instance when writers put living people into a novel, or even rather recently dead people. There’s a kind of insolence, a kind of colonialization of that person by the author. Is that right? Is that fair? And then, when we get these biographers where they are sort of making it up as they go along, I don’t want to read that. I find myself asking, what is it, a novel, a biography?

How do you feel about ebooks these days?

When I started writing about ebooks and print books, a lot of people were shouting, “The book is dead, the book is dead, it’s all going to be electronic.” I got tired of it. What I was trying to say is that now we have two ways of publishing, and we’re going to use them both. We had one, now we have two. How can that be bad? Creatures live longer if they can do things in different ways. I think I’ve been fairly consistent on that. But the tone of my voice might have changed. I was going against a trendy notion. There’s this joke I heard. You know what Gutenberg’s second book was, after the Bible? It was a book about how the book was dead.

You’re now a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

I almost wasn’t. It’s so embarrassing. Either the letter got lost in the mail or I tossed it thinking it was junk, but in either case I never got the invitation. They waited and waited and waited and finally got in touch with my agent, who immediately got in touch with me. I wrote them and said, “I wasn’t pulling a Dylan.” But they must have wondered.

It’s another honor, a significant one. What does it mean to you?

To paraphrase Mary Godwin’s line about the vindication of the rights of women, it’s a vindication of the rights of science fiction. To have my career recognized on this level makes it a lot harder for the diehards and holdouts to say, “Genre fiction isn’t literature.”

Do they still say that?

You’d be surprised.

You once clarified your political stance by saying, “I am not a progressive. I think the idea of progress an invidious and generally harmful mistake. I am interested in change, which is an entirely different matter.” Why is the idea of progress harmful? Surely in the great sweep of time, there has been progress on social issues because people have an idea or even an ideal of it.

I didn’t say progress was harmful, I said the idea of progress was generally harmful. I was thinking more as a Darwinist than in terms of social issues. I was thinking about the idea of evolution as an ascending staircase with amoebas at the bottom and Man at the top or near the top, maybe with some angels above him. And I was thinking of the idea of history as ascending infallibly to the better — which, it seems to me, is how the 19th and 20th centuries tended to use the word “progress.” We leave behind us the Dark Ages of ignorance, the primitive ages without steam engines, without airplanes/nuclear power/computers/whatever is next. Progress discards the old, leads ever to the new, the better, the faster, the bigger, et cetera. You see my problem with it? It just isn’t true.

How does evolution fit in?

Evolution is a wonderful process of change — of differentiation and diversification and complication, endless and splendid; but I can’t say that any one of its products is “better than” or “superior to” any other in general terms. Only in specific ways. Rats are more intelligent and more adaptable than koala bears, and those two superiorities will keep rats going while the koalas die out. On the other hand, if there were nothing around to eat but eucalyptus, the rats would be gone in no time and the koalas would thrive. Humans can do all kinds of stuff bacteria can’t do, but if I had to bet on really long-term global survival, my money would go to the bacteria.

In your 2014 acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation medal, you said, “Hard times are coming.”

I certainly didn’t foresee Donald Trump. I was talking about longer-term hard times than that. For 30 years I’ve been saying, we are making the world uninhabitable, for God’s sake. For 30 years!

And then, right after the election, you came up with a new model of resistance that elevates not the warrior but water: “The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going — carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant by choice and uses force only when compelled.”

It’s rooted firmly in Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching. He goes very deep in me, back to my teenage years.

Is this a notion that comes out of an earlier work?

Most of my real work was fictional, where you don’t express things like that directly. You build it in. Like in my novel The Lathe of Heaven (1971). George, the hero, is kind of watery. He goes with the flow, as they used to say. I was dubious about publishing that piece about water as a blog entry. It was so direct, and sounded like I was trying to be some sort of guru.

You are direct.

I like to hide it in fiction when I can. But I hardly ever write fiction anymore.

For a year or two, you thought you never would again.

But then I suddenly went and wrote a little story called “Calx” for Catamaran, and then in September a long story called “Pity and Shame.” I should have remembered what all good SF writers know: prediction is not our game.

Are you getting weary of being honored and lionized?

Always remember, you’re talking to a woman. And for a woman, any literary award, honors, notice of any sort has been an uphill climb. And if she insists upon flouting convention and writing SF and fantasy and indescribable stuff, it’s even harder.

And now?

I don’t think the rewards have been overdone. I think I’ve earned them. They are welcome and useful to me because they shore up my self-esteem, which wobbles as you get old and can’t do what you used to do.

Saturday Matinee: Natural City

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“Natural City” (2003) is a dystopian science fiction film from South Korean director Min Byeong-cheon. The plot focuses on two cops, R and Noma, who (not unlike Blade Runners) must hunt down renegade cyborgs. The rogue cyborgs are designed for roles ranging from military commandos to companion “dolls” and have a limited 3 year lifespan, though black market technology enables the transfer of a cyborg’s mind into the brain of a human host. This breakthrough compels R into finding Cyon, an orphaned prostitute who could potentially host the mind of Ria, a doll he’s fallen deeply in love with and who has only a few days left before expiration. Eventually, R must make a difficult decision testing his split personal and professional loyalties.

Watch the full film here.

The Cost of Resistance

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(Museum of the Revolution, León, Nicaragua)

By Chris Hedges

Source: TruthDig

Resistance entails suffering. It requires self-sacrifice. It accepts that we may be destroyed. It is not rational. It is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the pursuit of freedom. Resistance accepts that even if we fail, there is an inner freedom that comes with defiance, and perhaps this is the only freedom, and true happiness, we will ever know. To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life. It is the supreme act of love. It is to carry the cross, as the theologian James Cone reminds us, and to be acutely aware that what we are carrying is also what we will die upon.

Most of those who resist—Sitting Bull, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.—are defeated, at least in the cold calculation of the powerful. The final, and perhaps most important quality of resistance, as Cone writes, is that it “inverts the world’s value system.” Hope rises up out of defeat. Those who resist stand, regardless of the cost, with the crucified. This is their magnificence and their power.

The seductive inducements to conformity—money, fame, prizes, generous grants, huge book contracts, hefty lecture fees, important academic and political positions and a public platform—are scorned by those who resist. The rebel does not define success the way the elites define success. Those who resist refuse to kneel before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed.

The inversion of the world’s value system makes freedom possible. Those who resist are free not because they have attained many things or high positions, but because they have so few needs. They sever the shackles used to keep most people enslaved. And this is why the elites fear them. The elites can crush them physically, but they cannot buy them off.

The power elites attempt to discredit those who resist. They force them to struggle to make an income. They push them to the margins of society. They write them out of the official narrative. They deny them the symbols of status. They use the compliant liberal class to paint them as unreasonable and utopian.

Resistance is not, fundamentally, political. It is cultural. It is about finding meaning and expression in the transcendent and the incongruities of life. Music, poetry, theater and art sustain resistance by giving expression to the nobility of rebellion against the overwhelming forces, what the ancient Greeks called fortuna, which can never ultimately be overcome. Art celebrates the freedom and dignity of those who defy malignant evil. Victory is not inevitable, or at least not victory as defined by the powerful. Yet in every act of rebellion we are free. It was the raw honesty of the blues, spirituals and work chants that made it possible for African-Americans to endure.

Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider.

Resistance requires eternal vigilance. The moment the powerful are no longer frightened, the moment the glare of the people is diverted and movements let down their guard, the moment the ruling elites are able to use propaganda and censorship to hide their aims, the gains made by resisters roll backward. We have been steadily stripped of everything that organized working men and women—who rose up in defiance and were purged, demonized and killed by the capitalist elites—achieved with the New Deal. The victories of African-Americans, who paid with their bodies and blood in making possible the Great Society and ending legal segregation, also have been reversed.

The corporate state makes no pretense of addressing social inequality or white supremacy. It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as social control. Our cells of resistance have to be rebuilt from scratch.

The corporate state, however, is in trouble. It has no credibility. All the promises of the “free market,” globalization and trickle-down economics have been exposed as a lie, an empty ideology used to satiate greed. The elites have no counterargument to their anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critics. The attempt to blame the electoral insurgencies in the United States’ two ruling political parties on Russian interference, rather than massive social inequality—the worst in the industrialized world—is a desperate ploy. The courtiers in the corporate press are working feverishly, day and night, to distract us from reality. The moment the elites are forced to acknowledge social inequality as the root of our discontent is the moment they are forced to acknowledge their role in orchestrating this inequality. This terrifies them.

The U.S. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. The kleptocrats are pillaging and looting like barbarian hordes. Programs instituted to protect the common good—public education, welfare and environmental regulations—are being dismantled. The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. Poverty is a nightmare for half the population. Poor people of color are gunned down with impunity in the streets. Our prison system, the world’s largest, is filled with the destitute. And presiding over the chaos and the dysfunction is a political P.T. Barnum, a president who, while we are being fleeced, offers up one bizarre distraction after another, much like Barnum’s Feejee mermaid—the head and torso of a monkey sewed to the back half of a fish.

There is no shortage of artists, intellectuals and writers, from Martin Buber and George Orwell to James Baldwin, who warned us that this dystopian era was fast approaching. But in our Disneyfied world of intoxicating and endless images, cult of the self and willful illiteracy, we did not listen. We will pay for our negligence.

Søren Kierkegaard argued that it was the separation of intellect from emotion, from empathy, that doomed Western civilization. The “soul” has no role in a technocratic society. The communal has been shattered. The concept of the common good has been obliterated. Greed is celebrated. The individual is a god. The celluloid image is reality. The artistic and intellectual forces that make transcendence and the communal possible are belittled or ignored. The basest lusts are celebrated as forms of identity and self-expression. Progress is defined exclusively by technological and material advancement. This creates a collective despair and anxiety that feeds and is fed by glitter, noise and false promises of consumer-culture idols. The despair grows ever-worse, but we never acknowledge our existential dread. As Kierkegaard understood, “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”

Those who resist are relentlessly self-critical. They ask the hard questions that mass culture, which promises an unachievable eternal youth, fame and financial success, deflects us from asking. What does it mean to be born? What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? How do we live a life of meaning? What is justice? What is truth? What is beauty? What does our past say about our present? How do we defy radical evil?

We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death”—the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. Those who are ruled by rational abstractions and an aloof intellectualism, Kierkegaard argued, are as depraved as those who succumb to hedonism, cravings for power, violence and predatory sexuality. We achieve salvation when we accept the impediments of the body and the soul, the limitations of being human, yet despite these limitations seek to do good. This burning honesty, which means we always exist on the cusp of despair, leaves us, in Kierkegaard’s words, in “fear and trembling.” We struggle not to be brutes while acknowledging we can never be angels. We must act and then ask for forgiveness. We must be able to see our own face in the face of the oppressor.

The theologian Paul Tillich did not use the word “sin” to mean an act of immorality. He, like Kierkegaard, defined sin as estrangement. For Tillich, it was our deepest existential dilemma. Sin was our separation from the forces that give us ultimate meaning and purpose in life. This separation fosters the alienation, anxiety, meaninglessness and despair that are preyed upon by mass culture. As long as we fold ourselves inward, embrace a perverted hyper-individualism that is defined by selfishness and narcissism, we will never overcome this estrangement. We will be separated from ourselves, from others and from the sacred.

Resistance is not only about battling the forces of darkness. It is about becoming a whole and complete human being. It is about overcoming estrangement. It is about the capacity to love. It is about honoring the sacred. It is about dignity. It is about sacrifice. It is about courage. It is about being free. Resistance is the pinnacle of human existence.

Saturday Matinee: The Brotherhood of the Bell

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The Brotherhood of the Bell is a 1970 made-for-television movie produced by Cinema Center 100 Productions and starring Glenn Ford. The director Paul Wendkos was nominated in 1971 by the Directors Guild of America for outstanding directorial achievement in television.

The film relates how a successful Economics professor, Dr. Andrew Patterson, discovers that an elite fraternity he had joined 22 years before in college is really a callous banking and business cabal that obtains wealth and power for its members through nefarious practices.

Saturday Matinee: Kim Dotcom – Caught in the Web

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The larger-than-life story of Kim Dotcom, the “most wanted man online”, is extraordinary enough, but the battle between Dotcom and the US Government and entertainment industry, being fought in New Zealand, is one that goes to the heart of ownership, privacy and piracy in the digital age. Three years in the making, this independent film chronicles a spectacular moment in global online history, dubbed the ‘largest copyright case’ ever and the truth about what happened.

Watch the full film here.