You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘books’ category.
I have just finished reading this book. I feel as if Neil Gaiman has offered us his autobiography. Not his memoirs, with the details that satisfy and feed a hunger for gossip and false intimacy, like junk food for the soul. An autobiography: the story of who he is. Like most true stories, it becomes the story of the reader’s life as well. It is a very tender feeling: like being presented with an honor, an invitation, a challenge, a gift.
ETA that the Rev. Sean Parker Dennison has written a very moving post about this book and his own “beautiful lie.” Another gift from another fine writer.
I’ve been putting my thoughts about linked ideas, images, and events in The Dispossessed into what the software, MindMeister, calls a “Mind Map,” here.
Whole sections haven’t been transcribed from my mind to the map, such as the multiple valences of possession, but it’s fun and helpful to get it into this form. What would you add?
Looking forward to class tonight, 7:30 in the UUCPA Fireside Room. Directions here, campus map here.
Cross-posted to the UUCPA blog, which is where comments may be made.
Tim Bartik, who I wish lived near Palo Alto instead of in Michigan so he could be there tomorrow night, has been contributing really interesting and careful comments on The Dispossessed at the UUCPA blog, and his last one, written on February 24, was so helpful in clarifying my own thoughts that I want to post my response here as well.
Forgive the length of this response, but you’ve helped me understand a real key to this novel. I’ve been thinking about your previous comment, which made me realize for the first time the connection between The Dispossessed and Le Guin’s essay (which I cannot recommend highly enough) “The Stalin in the Soul,” and how I would concisely sum up my scattered thoughts, and before I got back to the internet you did it:
“as long as he or she can find an audience that is willing to pay for that art”
That’s the rub, isn’t it? That’s why our freedom isn’t free. Not only because many great artists never make their art, or many people never get to see it or hear it, because they are busy working in an office or factory; but because many potentially great artists censor themselves for the market. They make what will sell instead of what their art calls them to make. That is an outcome of our economic system. It might be a price worth paying, in the last analysis, but we mustn’t treat it lightly.
Le Guin’s essay describes two novels: a great one that is written and never published in the author’s native land, because it is repressive and censors him in life and death; another great one that is never published in the author’s native land because he never writes it, being too busy writing what will sell to ever get around to his true art. The first author is Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of We, and the second is anyone in the US, including herself. As she says, we’re free “not only to write fuck and shit, and to spell America with a k,” but “to write what we please,” and yet we often don’t. She’s a little hard on her imaginary author, making him concerned with riches and fame. Most artists surrender their freedom just to eat and pay the rent, so their selling out is more understandable.
You are right that Bedap is right–Shevek doesn’t accept it in chapter 6 but he comes to–but I think you are describing the repression on Anarres slightly inaccurately. The bureaucrats can assign Tirin to the Asylum, but they can’t send him there. There are no laws, no police; he can refuse to go. But he goes, under the pressure of his community. The distinction is key, because we also pride ourselves on the fact that no one is going to throw us in jail for expressing ourselves. But do we do it?
If we don’t–and most so-called artists don’t, most of the time–then what is keeping us from doing it? A kind of unfreedom. And if we say, “Well, we’re free really, as long as we find someone to pay us,” we’re being like the Anarresti who “keep their initiative tucked away safe” (chapter 10). We’re refusing our own freedom. And then how free are we? Less free, in a sense, than Zamyatin, who wrote his book at least, even under Stalin.
I’m not saying there’s a better alternative to what we’ve got. I’m not sure whether there is, though I hope so. What I’m saying is that we tend to hide behind our democracy, assuring ourselves that we’re all free, and not acknowledging the walls that our economic system puts up. For every artist I know, I know five other people who would create art if only they didn’t have to earn a living. And don’t ask me how many “artists” I know whose great novels never get out of their heads because they are too busy producing what their publisher tells them can earn them the next advance. I’m sure it’s a lot. Most of them. And let’s not even get started on physics. You create it for the military, or for sale, or you fit it into the ever-narrower realm of “pure research” enabled by the ever-poorer universities. For that matter, I know many ministers who are not pursuing the community ministry they are called to, which would be tremendously beneficial, because they don’t know any way to get paid for their ministry except by congregations.
Last night, when I heard UKLG speak at Berkeley, her interlocutor asked her about her passion for Virgil, since she has such leftist-anarchist politics and he’s a poet of empire. She said she’d thought of lefty excuses for him, which got a laugh, and then she said seriously, “He had to be. If you don’t have copyright, you need a patron, and his patron was the emperor.” Art has to be paid for. (Copyright is just a part of it, something she’s concerned with at the moment since it’s under assault.) One thing she fantasized in The Dispossessed was a society in which artists are supported the same way as anyone else: the only justification they need present for their receiving food and housing and medical care and time is that they are doing the work they need to do, and that they join in the tenthday rotation and do some kleggich like everyone. They don’t need to find a patron; they don’t need to sell their art. They just need to create it. And then, because she is an honest thinker, she identifies what might not work about this: even Odonians start to ask, implicitly about the art, the compositions, the physics maybe, “What is it good for?” (“music isn’t useful,” Bedap points out)–which makes them no different than Dearri, the stupid businessman at Vea’s party. If it doesn’t further their narrow ideas of Odonianism, so they block it. They miss the true Odonianism, of course, which is based on the conviction that if each person follows their calling the society will thrive.
She is very subtle in how she talks about what undermines a revolution. This novel is not Animal Farm. People aren’t shot or driven out of the community by force. Tirin is not SENT to the Asylum; no one can send anyone anywhere, on Anarres. His Stalin is in his soul. But social pressure is often enough to drive someone mad and punish him for his madness. So what’s our equivalent? What imprisons us, who are so free? Isn’t the purpose of Le Guin’s novel to get us to ask that? And she suggests one answer: part of it, a big, big part of it, is money.
Again, disabling comments here so as to consolidate them at the UUCPA blog. “The Stalin in the Soul” is a very short essay collected in Le Guin’s The Language of the Night and also in a collection called The Future Now.
Two more questions in advance of my class on The Dispossessed next week.
(1) As a teenager on Anarres, Shevek sees a film about Urras, the home planet that’s a lot like ours–multiple countries, all with governments, some of which are capitalist and some communist. The film juxtaposes a famine in the country of Thu where the bodies of starved children are being burned with the wealth and plenty only 700 km away in the nation of A-Io, noting that these exist “side by side” (pp 33-34 in the Avon paperback edition). Do you think this is a fair criticism? Can it be applied to our world? How would you defend us, or would you make the same criticism?
(2) If you suddenly discovered that Anarres existed and you could move there, would you trade the benefits of living in a society like ours for those of that society? For example, would you give up the various things you own, and the possibility of owning more, in exchange for life in a society where you have almost no private possessions and “no one eats while another starves”?
Cross-posted at the UUCPA blog, and I’ve disabled comments here so that all comments are in one place; please make them over there.
I’m facilitating an Adult Religious Education session on the novel The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin, on February 28. I know some people will come who haven’t read it, but you’ll get a lot more out of the class if you have, so you might want to get a hold of the book now.
As promised, I’m posting questions about it ahead of time. This first one is more along the lines of a thought experiment and can be carried out whether you’ve read the book or not.
As you go through your day, wonder what it would be like if no one in our society had money or private property–if everything belonged to everyone. (On Anarres, one of the novel’s invented worlds, if you want a new shirt, you walk into a clothing depository and pick one up.)
For example, if you go to a restaurant tonight: If this were Anarres, what would happen when you walked into a restaurant? Who is cooking, how does the food get there? Would there be a restaurant? Etc. This is repeatable wherever you are and whatever you are doing.
How does it feel to imagine this different economy? Freeing, frightening, fragile . . . ?
By the way, Ursula LeGuin will be speaking in Berkeley on Tuesday, February 26. I’ll be there.
Cross-posted at the UUCPA blog. I am closing comments here* so that responses are gathered in one place–click on over to the UUCPA blog to add your comments.
*Except Stacy’s. That got through before I remembered to close comments. 🙂
Today* is a momentous anniversary: 200 years since the publication of Pride and Prejudice. As my friend Deb cleverly remarked, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that some literature is timeless.”
Until a few years ago, I had only read Pride and Prejudice and Emma, so I recently read all the rest of Austen, with that mix of pleasure and dread that one gets from reading a wonderful writer who produced tragically few books.
Pride and Prejudice is packed with passages that strike one as extremely quotable as one is reading, but aren’t really, because the context is essential. This is hilarious, but only if you know the characters (Jane and Elizabeth):
“Will you tell me how long you have loved him?”
“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”
Yeah. If you’re shocked by the venality, it’s time you read the book. But here’s a quote that will do even if you’ve never read it:
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”
I would have loved to know Jane Austen, but I would have hated to get on the wrong side of her.
*Yesterday! Darn! I would’ve mentioned it in the Sunday service!
On the nightstand: Zone One, Colson Whitehead, self-assigned as research into the zombie-lit phenomenon. Will definitely have to read more Whitehead soon, especially as he has a novel all about John Henry.
On the nightstand but bumped by the above: I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith. I miss Cassandra, but I’ll get back to her in a few days.
In the car: One of Our Tuesdays is Missing, Jasper Fforde, read by Emily Gray. My first foray into Fforde. Now I understand why other book-devouring friends rave about him. The Bookworld is such an obvious idea I can’t believe I never thought of it myself, and it’s so well executed that I’m starting to believe it’s real. Also, he’s very, very funny.
Daily: one Dickinson poem.
The four make an eclectic collection, even collision, of stimuli.
I was surprised to learn that a friend’s reason for not reading much fiction is that the end is usually predictable. It had never occurred to me that some people might read in order to find out what happens at the end. My desire to know how it all turns out can keep me turning the pages, but the real excitement comes from what happens along the way. And while that definitely feels like a “can’t stop, must find out what happens” impulse, “what happens” is most often about character, not plot per se. So Emma wouldn’t be less compelling if I knew who was going to marry whom in the end; the thrill of revelation is in all the intricate interplay of the characters, how a word placed here puts a weight there, how an encounter at point A presses on a lever at point B. I still don’t know how Austen does that, which is just one reason her writing never gets old.
But then, I also love to reread can’t-forget-who-dunnits like Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, just for the pleasure of watching how the magician does the trick.
Ray Bradbury, by Liftam. Public domain.
There was a period in my life when I read every Ray Bradbury story and novel I could get my hands on. He had a huge effect on my imagination, my sense of what was possible in stories and in life.
I recently reread one story from The Illustrated Man, “Kaleidoscope,” and it has gotten better and more meaningful. When I was young, I thought it was about an accident in space: several astronauts are suddenly about to die. An action flick, disturbing, but far away–it was about someone else, those adventurers out in dangerous places. On rereading it, I was startled. In the intervening years it had turned into a story about myself and all of us, who after all are also floating in space, all without knowledge of when or how we’ll meet our end. Dealing with our regrets, our bitterness; seeking to make peace with each other as best we can, and give something to the world before we are done.
It’s a beautiful piece of writing, and for it and so many others, I’m grateful to Ray Bradbury. He might have felt, like Woody Allen, that he wanted to live on in his apartment rather than in his work, but for my part I’m glad he’ll always be on our shelf, up at the top of the science fiction section.
Somewhere along the line I’ve surprised myself by becoming a reader of contemporary literature. Surprised, because when I meet people who only read new fiction, it seems so disconnected from history to limit oneself that way, as if no one who’s now dead had anything interesting to say. I love 17th century poetry and 19th century novels. But of the books I’ve read in the past ten years or so that stand out in my mind and demand to be re-read and savored, many were written in my lifetime:
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
American Gods, Neil Gaiman (in fact, almost everything I’ve read by Gaiman)
The Dispossessed; The Left Hand of Darkness; The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. LeGuin (in fact, almost everything I’ve read by LeGuin)
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
Alias, Grace; The Blind Assassin; Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood
We Bombed in New Haven, Joseph Heller
A Door into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski
The Lacuna and Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
Slam, Nick Hornby
Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
Also, I read quite a lot of children’s literature (for my own pleasure, not just my daughter’s), and it is almost all contemporary.
What era do your favorite books tend to come from? And, looking at the list above, do you have any books to recommend I should read next?
Sermons in Stones 
There’s something familiar about The Hunger Games
March 26, 2012 in books, social commentary | 3 comments
I haven’t seen nor read The Hunger Games–haven’t seen it because I haven’t read it, and it’s going to be tough to get it from the library until the movie furor dies down, so I don’t expect to do either for awhile. However, I gather it’s about a government that compels young people to fight each other to the death, even if they have no personal animus and might even respect and care for each other.
This does not sound like fiction to me. It sounds like real life. It sounds like war.
Share this: