ursula le guin
via share by Amy on fb:
we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives.. see through our fear stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being
we will need writers who can remember freedom.. the realists of a larger reality
we need writers who know the difference between a production commodity and that of art
any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings..
the name of our beautiful reward is not profit.. it’s name is freedom
– – – –
video of national award speech via huffington post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book_n_6188922.html
speech et al.. via Maria:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/12/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-award-speech/
Of course, artists must eat — but at what cost does their livelihood come, weighed on whose scale?
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.
I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.
______
as finishing up Chomsky‘s profit over people..
nice.
______
via Maria
I don’t do messages. I write stories and poems. That’s all. What the story or the poem means to you — its “message” to you — may be entirely different from what it means to me.
The kids are often disappointed, even shocked. I think they see me as irresponsible. I know their teachers do.
They may be right. Maybe all writing, even literature, is not an end in itself but a means to an end other than itself. But I couldn’t write stories or poetry if I thought the true and central value of my work was in a message it carried, or in providing information or reassurance, offering wisdom, giving hope. Vast and noble as these goals are, they would decisively limit the scope of the work; they would interfere with its natural growth and cut it off from the mystery which is the deepest source of the vitality of art.
[..]
other readers may find other truths in it, different ones. They’re free to use the work in ways the author never intended.
[..]
A poem of the right shape will hold a thousand truths. But it doesn’t say any of them.
[..]
What my reader gets out of my pot is what she needs, and she knows her needs better than I do. My only wisdom is knowing how to make pots. Who am I to preach?
No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.
[..]
My job is to keep the meaning completely embodied in the work itself, and therefore
alive and capable of change.
I think that’s how an artist can best speak as a member of a moral community: clearly, yet
leaving around her words that area of silence, that empty space, in which other and further truths and perceptions can form in other minds.
______
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (US /ˈɜrsələ ˈkroʊbər ləˈɡwɪn/; born October 21, 1929) is an American author of novels, children’s books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography.
She influenced such Booker Prize winners and other writers as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell – and notable futurism and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She has won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award,Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once.
_______
rip
______
Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) tweeted at 5:26 PM on Tue, Jan 23, 2018:
To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. — LeGuin, THE DISPOSSESSED
(https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/955959904984068096?ref_src=twcamp%5Eshare%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Egmail%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E0)
on hold – thanks library
__________
thanks anarchist library – word for world is forest
_______
Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) tweeted at 3:27 PM on Tue, Jan 23, 2018:
I just learned that Ursula K. Le Guin has died. Her words are always with us. Some of them are written on my soul. I miss her as a glorious funny prickly person, & I miss her as the deepest and smartest of the writers, too. Still honoured I got to do this: https://t.co/U4mma5pJMw
(https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/955930053426274305?ref_src=twcamp%5Eshare%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Egmail%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E0)
_______
Jim Campbell (@JustJimWillDo) tweeted at 5:53 AM – 24 Jan 2018 :
I note that the letter is unsigned as well as being poorly formatted and poorly written.
I would also note that The Left Hand Of Darkness has not ever been out of print since then.
Ok, I also, also note that it’s a pretty damn good read.
Read it. Start with The Dispossessed. https://t.co/9UXtNQz3iH (http://twitter.com/JustJimWillDo/status/956147981375258624?s=17)
_______
Keri Facer (@Kerileef) tweeted at 2:17 AM – 24 Jan 2018 :
Le Guin on rescuing the imagination. https://t.co/cloN6UowVH (http://twitter.com/Kerileef/status/956093474637537281?s=17)
I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.
Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.
Nothing else does quite as much for most people, not even the other arts. We are a wordy species. Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on
A child who doesn’t know where the center is — where home is, what home is — that child is in a very bad way.
Home isn’t Mom and Dad and Sis and Bud. Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at all. Home is imaginary.
Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are.
Reading is a means of listening.
read ing
The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.
i don’t know.. literacy as manual..? am guessing her mindset in regard to literacy is much diff than B lit
_______
Long Now (@longnow) tweeted at 9:39 PM – 23 Jan 2018 :
“You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. We have only what we know we must lose.”—@ursulaleguin https://t.co/DnYHMsWmoYhttps://t.co/43Rc1mpv6T (http://twitter.com/longnow/status/956023730148438017?s=17)
_______
Verso Books (@VersoBooks) tweeted at 3:49 AM – 24 Jan 2018 :
Read China Miéville’s touching tribute to Ursula Le Guin on the blog
https://t.co/r64r0XHnaM https://t.co/wRhKDEhGRt (http://twitter.com/VersoBooks/status/956116794095398912?s=17)
_______
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation
Maria Popova (@brainpicker) tweeted at 6:58 AM – 26 Jan 2018 :
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”
Remembering Ursula K. Le with some of her finest: https://t.co/yu8PklvDl6 (http://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/956888960483110914?s=17)
But the magic of human communication, Le Guin observes, is that something other than mere information is being transmitted — something more intangible yet more real:
In most cases of people actually talking to one another, human communication cannot be reduced to information. The message not only involves, it is, a relationship between speaker and hearer. The medium in which the message is embedded is immensely complex, infinitely more than a code: it is a language, a function of a society, a culture, in which the language, the speaker, and the hearer are all embedded.
Live, face-to-face human communication is intersubjective. Intersubjectivity involves a great deal more than the machine-mediated type of stimulus-response currently called “interactive.” It is not stimulus-response at all, not a mechanical alternation of precoded sending and receiving. Intersubjectivity is mutual. It is a continuous interchange between two consciousnesses. Instead of an alternation of roles between box A and box B, between active subject and passive object, it is a continuous intersubjectivity that goes both ways all the time
Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment.
Successful human relationship involves entrainment — getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous.
Consider deliberately sychronised actions like singing, chanting, rowing, marching, dancing, playing music; consider sexual rhythms (courtship and foreplay are devices for getting into sync). Consider how the infant and the mother are linked: the milk comes before the baby cries. Consider the fact that women who live together tend to get onto the same menstrual cycle. We entrain one another all the time.
Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection..t
The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
wondering about beyond words ness
______
______
on spare time
Go read this –> Ursula K. Le Guin on “Spare Time”, “None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.” https://t.co/p89Ut8DzUH via @brainpicker
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/dlaufenberg/status/960903866555469824
Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.
_________
from ursula via maria – https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/21/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-ursula-k-le-guin/
Who knows
doesn’t talk.
Who talks
doesn’t know
beyond words ness
_________
125
despite her disappointing experience w the girls in her class, fuller was not ready to relinquish her conviction that convo was indeed what best loosened the ligaments of thought and trained the mind to leap
‘words are events’ ursula le guin would write a century and a half later ‘they do things, change things. they transform bother speaker/hearer; they feed energy/understanding/emotion back and forth and amplify it.’
it was fuller who *formalized convo as the supreme intellectual instrument of transcendentalism and made the free flowing exchange of words the electric current that charged the women’s emancipation movement
perhaps it’s time for a diff *form of convo.. ie: 2 convers as infra
_________
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin – Documentary Film by Arwen Curry https://t.co/k2MYJz1IJL ; a feature documentary exploring the remarkable life and legacy of the late feminist author Ursula K. Le Guin
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/1141589721359036417
trailer: [https://vimeo.com/268831999]
magic exists in most societies in one way or another.. i do make up things that didn’t exist before by naming them.. t
power to our imaginations.. via cure ios city
_______
be you. 