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Ursula k le guin blog 


 Ursula K. Le Guin 

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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
You can browse the archive by year here.
12. A Riff on the Harper Contract
New language in the termination provision of the Harper’s boilerplate gives them the right to cancel a contract if “Author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals, or if Author commits a crime or any other act that will tend to bring Author into serious contempt, and such behavior would materially damage the Work’s reputation or sales.” The consequences? Harper can terminate your book deal. Not only that, you’ll have to repay your advance. Harper may also avail itself of “other legal remedies” against you.
From a blog by Richard Curtis.

	
* *

Dear Mr Rupert Murdoch,
Forgive me, for I have sinned.
Because I did not read my contract with your wonderful publishing house HarperCollins carefully, I did not realise my moral obligations.
There is nothing for it now but to confess everything. Before I wrote my book Emily Brontë and the Vampires of Lustbaden, which you published this fall and which has been on the Times Best Seller List for five straight months, I committed bad behavior and said bad words in public that brought me into serious contempt in my home town of Blitzen, Oregon. In fact the people there found me so seriously contemptible that I am now living in Maine under the name of Trespassers W. This has nothing to do with the fact that some parts of my book come from books by Newt Gingrich and other people, in fact quite a lot of them, but everybody borrows from great novelists, because information wants to be free. It was nothing really materially damaging, only just the money and i.d. I stole from the old man with the walker and some things I said about some schoolgirls with big tits back in stupid Blitzen. I have really suffered for my art. I hope maybe you will forgive me and not terminate me and make me pay back the money because I can’t because I already had to give most of it to some stupid lawyer who said I had defaulted on a loan and was behind in my child support which is just a lie. That stupid brat never was mine. I am sure you will understand better than anybody else could that the only actual crime I have committed was writing my book. And I believe you will see that it was expiated by your giving me the contract for it and publishing it and making a lot of money out of it. So it is all right, I hope. I really hope so because I have nearly finished the sequel Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Zombies of Sex-Coburg and my agent says it is going to be a blockbuster as soon as it comes back from the person who is rewriting it. You would not want to miss it I am sure! And here in Maine I am paying strict regard to public conventions and morals just like you do. I would not go to a Democrat Convention if they paid me and crime is the farthest thing from my mind. I would feel so terrible if I damaged the reputation or sales of my Work, or your reputation. You are my Role Model.
Please believe me your loyal and obedient author,
Trespassers W. 
18 January 2011
14. Egypt
I have not wanted to write directly political blogs, having no real confidence in the rightness or the usefulness of my opinion. And the virtue of most blogs is that they expose an opinion to the give-and-take of discussion, but I duck and cover from that. I don’t have the energy, the will, or the conviction to take on a public argument about anything other than the Google Settlement. But I can’t keep silent about what’s been happening in Egypt without feeling that silence is a betrayal of something very great that I have honored all my life.
I am bitterly disappointed in President Obama’s withdrawal from his first, apparently spontaneous support of the uprising, his agreement that Mubarak must go and go now for there to be a real movement towards democracy. Once again he vacillated and came down on the side of “compromise,” which in the circumstances means compromising America’s moral position.
The man who told us Yes, we can, now seems almost to have taken for his motto: WWWD?
The men who replaced the Commie Bogey with the Bogey of Islam huddle about him whimpering that the various corrupt Middle Eastern autocracies we fund are all that has stood between us and universal jihad for 30 years and we must go on propping them up with “moderate” policies, i.e. billions of dollars in aid and weapons and oil payments, or the tide of terrorism will descend upon us all.
That the crowds in Tahrir Square are not immoderate, that they are not religiously but politically motivated, that what they are demanding is not the rule of the imams and ayatollahs but democratic process, self-rule, freedom — this means nothing to the people who make their money and get their power out of the three American wars, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and against terrorism. Whatever would we do if we didn’t have all those wars? Take the billions spent on “defense” and spend it on schools and public works and health care and stupid stuff like that where nobody gets killed? Well, the military and corporate war profiteers will see to it that that doesn’t happen, by letting just enough of the profits keep trickling down to their advocates in Congress.
If the American president had delivered a clear message of moral solidarity with the peaceful crowds in Tahrir Square and then stood by it, if he were talking now not just with old-crony-Suleiman but with Mr El Baradei and the leaders of the Egyptian Army and the Moslem Brotherhood, that would do more to defuse radical Muslim terrorists, and to weaken the half-demented regime in Iran, than anything else we could do.
If we want to see Israel survive, Egypt offers us a chance to try to force Mr Netanyahu and his party back from the brink to which, in a death-instinct as determined as that of any jihadist, they keep dragging their people closer and closer.
Old Egypt is offering us a new and great opportunity: to break free from out-dated, noxious alignments and policies in the Middle East, to speak out for freedom from tyranny, to support a people reaching for democracy, to remember what being on the right side is like. The opportunity won’t last long. They never do.
— UKL 
9 February 2011
11. The Tree
January 2011
We took down the Christmas tree this morning. It was a very pretty little fir, three and a half or four feet tall, a tabletop tree, said the woman at the florist’s next to Trader Joe’s, where we bought it. We put it on a wooden box in the corner window of the living room, as I believe a Christmas tree should be seen from outside and also should be able to see outside. To be exact, I don’t think a tree can see, but it may be aware of light and darkness, of insideness and outsideness. In any case it looks right with the sky over it or through its branches. Before we decorated it, it stood there, sturdy, plain dark green, a complicated higher organism, a very definite presence in the room. When we had an artificial tree, its nonentity made me realize what I feel about a living tree, not only the splendid, big, tall Christmas trees we used to have when I was a child and when my children were children, but a little one too—that it is as much a presence in a room as a person or an animal. An unmoving presence that says nothing, but is there. A very taciturn visitor from Norway, perhaps. Speaking no English, entirely undemanding, wanting nothing but a drink of water every few days. Restful. A pleasure to look at. Holding darkness in it, a forest darkness, in the green arms held out so calmly, steadily, without effort.
Our Norwegian visitor leaned out into the room a little—we couldn’t get it quite vertical with the screw pins in the base—but nobody could see it from the side anyhow, as it stood between the writing desk and the bookcase, so we didn’t worry. It was beautifully symmetrical without having had half its branch-tips sheared off with a hedge trimmer, as lot trees so often have. It certainly was a lot tree. It had never been in the forest I saw in it. It had grown on some slope not far from Mount Hood, probably, along with hundreds or thousands of other young firs in straight rows, one of the dreariest sights in our farmlands, almost as soul-blighting as a clear-cut. It is often a sign of the small farmer giving up crop-growing, crowded out by agribusiness, or the nonfarmer putting in a tree lot as a tax write-off. Our tree had not known forest. It was a forest tree all the same. And it had known rain, sun, ice, storm, all the weathers, all the winds, and no doubt a few birds, in its day. And the stars, in its night.
We put the lights on the tree. We put the old golden bird with the ratty tail on top. The small gold glass snail-shell ornaments we bought for our two-foot tree in Paris in ’54, a dozen of them and a dozen gold glass walnuts—one walnut left, and nine snails, one with a hole in its tissue-fragile shell—go on the top branches, because they are small and weigh nothing and you can see them there. The bigger glass balls, some of which are so old they are crazed and translucent, go lower down; the bigger they are the lower they go, it is a rule of life. The little beasts, tigers and lions and cats and elephants, dangle on loops from the branches; the little birds sit up on them, clutching with unsteady wire claws. Now and then a bird loses its grip and is found upside down under its branch and has to be reseated.
The tree looks very nice, a proper Christmas tree, except the LED lights are really much, much too bright for it. They are small but violent. Old-fashioned frosted lights, too big for this tree, would suit it better, with their soft, diffuse glow which you could hide among the branches. And some of the colors of the LEDs are terrible; a screaming magenta is the worst. What has magenta to do with Christmas, or anything else? I’d take off all the magentas and airport-landing-strip blues and have it green red and gold, if I could, but the strings come with five colors, and they don’t seem to sell replacement lights; you have to buy a whole new string, which will, of course, have the same five colors. I made little tubes of tissue paper and slipped them over the small, fiercely glaring bulbs, but it didn’t make much difference, and it looked kind of crummy. All the same I left them on.
So Christmas came, and the tree shone each day and each night until I unplugged it before going to bed. I know you don’t really have to turn the lights off, LEDs burn so cool, but safety is safety, and habit is habit, and anyhow it seems wrong not to let a tree have darkness. Sometimes after I unplugged it I stood with it and looked at it, silent and dark in the dark room, lit only by the glow of the small electric candle behind it that illuminates the sign in the window that says PEACE. The candle cast faint, complicated shadows up on the ceiling through the branches and needles. The tree smelled lovely in the dark.
So Christmas went, and the New Year came, and on the day after New Year’s Day I said we ought to take the tree down, so we did. I wanted to keep it one more day after we took the lights and ornaments off. I liked the tree so much without any decorations. I didn’t want to lose that quiet presence in the room. It hadn’t even started to drop needles. But Atticus is not one for half measures. He took the tree out into the garden and did what had to be done.
He has told me that when it came time for his father to kill the pig he’d raised by hand all year, he’d hire a man to do it, and would leave the house and not come back till the sausage was being made. But Atticus did this deed himself.
After all, the tree had already been cut from its root; its life with us was only a slow dying. A real Christmas tree, a cut tree, is a ritual sacrifice. Better not to deny the fact, but to accept and ponder it.
He saved me some of the dark branches to put in water in a bowl in the front hall. When the trunk dries out it will be good firewood. Next Christmas, maybe.
10. On Prospero’s Island
My husband was not bothered by Prospero being “Prospera” in the new film of The Tempest. I was bothered by it. This bothers me.
The botheration has nothing to do with the quality of Helen Mirren’s performance. She is a very fine actor, her heart is in her part, and she knows how to speak the poetry. (Some of the younger actors in the film don’t; they just don’t get the beat.) Once or twice she looked so dishevelled and harried that the word “menopausal” came into my mind, which it shouldn’t have; but that was costuming, makeup, more the director’s fault than the actor’s. Mirren was splendidly in control, as she must be, control being the mage’s great and perilous gift. She showed affection for her daughter most convincingly — a matter of body language and expression, mostly. And in the great speeches, the camera’s closeness to her worn face and clear eyes lent touching immediacy to her strong, straightforward rendition of the words. If Shakespeare was saying farewell to his art, his own magery, in this play, as it seems he surely was, Mirren has the age and the authority to make that farewell most poignant.
But all the same, it bothered me that she wasn’t the Duke of Milan but the Duchess, not Miranda’s father but her mother, not a wizard but a witch.
So what?
What difference does it make?
Do I believe a woman can’t be a great mage? Am I an Archipelagan quacking “Weak as woman’s magic, wicked as woman’s magic”? (a line that still gets quoted as if to show that my fiction exists to deliver my opinions and that what my characters say is my opinion.) No, that’s not it. Making the mage a woman didn’t bother me because I think a woman isn’t up to the job. Far from it.
What bothers me about Prospera is this: she isn’t Prospero. She isn’t the same person. She’s somebody else.
Of course every actor who plays the part is a different Prospero. But I believe there are limits to how far you can change the physical being of a character in a play without putting both the character and the play at risk.
A famous example of such limit-testing by an actor (and an interesting reversal of this one) is Sarah Bernhardt’s playing Hamlet when she was a middle-aged woman with an artificial leg. She didn’t turn Hamlet into a woman; she played the Prince not the Princess of Denmark. So the experiment was a different one. But she tried to prove that the limits of gender, age, and physique were not limits to her genius.
Some surviving reports by the witnesses of her Hamlet make polite efforts to admire, but have a kind of stunned, disbelieving tone. It was just a bit too much. It didn’t work.
It’s sad to think about. By all accounts Bernhardt was a genius, and she still had her golden voice, her passionate temperament, and her adoring audience. So why couldn’t she play the greatest role in English drama? It wasn’t fair...
It isn’t fair.
Fair or unfair, I question the wisdom of radically changing a Shakespeare play just as I’d question the wisdom of chipping at the Venus of Milo to make her thinner so as to suit modern ideas of beauty, or repainting the Sistine Ceiling to brighten it up, or performing the Halleluiah Chorus in waltz time.
I can do some thought experiments on this subject. For instance, a male Rosalind in As You Like It.
Yes, I do know Shakespeare’s women’s roles were played by young men, the convention of the time. It hasn’t been the convention for several hundred years. And it doesn’t explain much about his women except their convenient propensity, which Rosalind shares, for dressing up as boys. (If you want to see a wonderful momentary glimpse of what the reality was probably like, get the 1940’s film of Henry V with Laurence Olivier and watch the transformation of the French princess into the boy who acted her in Shakespeare’s time.)
I didn’t get far with my thought experiment of a male Rosalind. I got stuck as soon as he dressed up as a girl.
I got a little carried away with my thought experiments. For example, Richard III played by a blond, blue-eyed, six-foot, gorgeous young hunk, to show that the Tudor myth about his being a monster was a bunch of lies. . . The problem is that everything Richard says and does in the play is magnificently, mythically monstrous. He is the Tudor myth. He is Shakespeare’s Richard. He can and should be fascinating, but to make him pretty would be idiotic. Even Olivier succeeded in looking sort of ugly when he played Richard, which shows what a good actor can do with unpromising material.
But I should stick to gender reversals. So, how about making Kate the Shrew into a man, and Petruchio the Shrew-Tamer a woman? Has it been done?
If it were done, would it show or prove anything beyond the director’s egoism and the actors’ virtuosity? The Taming of the Shrew is an explicit comedy of injustice. As such it makes us laugh and rage, teases our complacence, goads us by its endorsement of male triumph and female submission, and through its partiality may lead us to look at facts we’d like to deny and lies commonly accepted as fact. To change the genders of the main parts would diminish it to a portrait of a couple of odd bods, a bullying woman and a sharp-tongued but weak guy.
Arguably, gender is important in As You Like It and the Shrew because Rosalind and Kate are young women, sexual beings in passionate heterosexual relationships. Whereas Prospero is the widowed father of a fifteen-year-old daughter. Anybody that old doesn’t have any sex, really, right? He’s fifty, he’s past it, what gender he is doesn’t matter, right?
So then how about King Lear? Lear’s even older than Prospero, maybe even sixty, seventy...
Serious consideration of the proposal of a Lear sex-change leads me to declare that there’s something at stake in the gender of this character beyond mere sexuality. I find the idea of Queen Lear intensely silly. Though for all I know she’s blundering half-naked across a blasted Hollywood heath towards me at this very moment, bellowing “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!”
The relationships in Lear’s highly dysfunctional family have a lot to do with gender, since gender has a lot to do with power, and power, again, is what the play is about. The exercise of it, the sharing of it, the lust for it, the loss of it. And the renunciation of it. Lear handles and mishandles his power as a man, having been taught certain ideas of what it is to be a man, as all men are taught. His daughters seek power as women, who’ve learned what it is to be a woman — as all women learn — and how a woman can get power through manipulating men. Cordelia is as much a manipulator as her sisters, though she is motivated by self-respect and affection as they are not. She wants to shore up her father’s power, not to take it from him, but her behavior is as gendered female as his is gendered male. None of them can break out of the expectations and limitations their society has set around them.
We in the 21st century, some of us at least, have a little more freedom as regards gender, larger expectations. So we grieve to see Lear and Cordelia trapped in a narrower, meaner definition of what a man is and can do, what a woman is and can do. We know that gender is not destiny; we know that the idea of gender as binary leaves out an endless number of actual and possible variations and combinations; we know that gender as we commonly experience it is to a great extent a social construct, often an extremely cruel and stupid one. And so we can lament at seeing Shakespeare as a man of his time caught in the prejudices of his time.
But I don’t see that that ability to make a moral judgment gives us any reason or right to change his plays. Reinterpret them, endlessly, yes. Rewrite them, no.
Though very few words were changed in this Tempest, to change the sex of the main character of a play was a major rewrite.
Prospero is an imaginary person, who exists only in the words the playwright wrote for him to speak. He is the words he speaks, and they belong to Shakespeare.
Prospera is another imaginary person, one not invented by Shakespeare. But she speaks Prospero’s words. And so she bothers me. Is she a person or a ventriloquist’s puppet? If she is genuinely a character, why has she co-opted another character’s speeches?
A gorgeous movie with Helen Mirren playing a powerful magician-queen on Hawaii’s Big Island full of frustrated monsters and airy spirits and sweet music and the best poetry in the world — if somebody could write that script and shoot that movie, I’d go see it, sure!
But when I see The Tempest, I want to see The Tempest. I want to see Prospero. I’ve known him for years and years, and every time I see him played by a different actor I learn a little more about who he is, see a different side of him. I love and admire the man, cross-grained as he is.
In this Tempest he wasn’t there. Somebody else was there.
I liked her; I’d like to meet her — somewhere else. Only not there. Not on Prospero’s island.
— UKL 
3 January 2011
9. Confidential reports from FBI agents to the Bureau, intercepted by Wikileeks (Welsh Information Kontrol Institute):
As instructed, trained Subject 443 with machine gun and live ammo and got him worked up to enter his fourth-grade classroom with dud gun we have provided to quote “kill my asshole teacher and all them asshole kids what are always laughing at me,” however am requesting further review of this project in view of fact that Subject 443 although of part Muslim ancestry may be undesirable subject for media attention due to fair complexion, blond hair, blue eyes, and Anglo-Saxon-sounding name. Please advise.
— 003
Have attempted to carry out Project Egregious as instructed, but have failed to implement suggestions that the subjects carry out jihad against vile American infidels at their work place, possibly because languages spoken by subjects appear to be Zulu and English and I deliver the suggestions as instructed in Pakistani. Subjects appear uninterested and at times irritated. Will continue making suggestions until I receive further instructions. Please advise.
— 774.0
Urgent. Subject 088 has turned me in to local police force as “would-be terrorist,” accusing me of plotting to blow up City Hall, which is what I was encouraging him to do with a fake bomb, unfortunately I was instructing him in detonation practice with small real bombs which are now in his possession. Local officials of county jail where I am incarcerated refuse to listen to me, describing my i.d. as “easily faked” and making remarks such as “Yeah we know how you A-rabs love the USA” and “Tell that to your fucking terrorist pals, wog.” Please advise at earliest opportunity.
— .63
8. The Sissy Strikes Back
November 2010
I’ve lost faith in the saying “You’re only as old as you think you are” ever since I got old.
It is a saying with a fine heritage. It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking aka the American Dream. It is the bright side of Puritanism: What you deserve is what you get. (Never mind just now about the dark side.) Good things come to good people and youth will last forever for the young in heart.
Yup.
There is a whole lot of power in positive thinking. It is the great placebo effect. In many cases, even dire cases, it works. I think most old people know that, and many of us try to keep our thinking on the positive side as a matter of self-preservation, as well as dignity, the wish not to end with a prolonged whimper. It can be very hard to believe that one is actually 80 years old, but as they say, you’d better believe it. I’ve known clear-headed, clear-hearted people in their nineties. They didn’t think they were young. They knew, with a patient, canny clarity, how old they were. If I’m 90 and believe I’m 45, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. Even if I’m 70 and think I’m 40, I’m fooling myself to the extent of almost certainly acting like an awful fool.
Actually, I’ve never heard anybody over 70 say that you’re only as old as you think you are. Younger people say it to themselves or each other as an encouragement. When they say it to somebody who actually is old, they don’t realize how stupid it is, and how cruel it may be. At least there isn’t a poster of it.
But there is a poster of “Old age is not for sissies”—maybe it’s where the saying came from. A man and a woman in their seventies. As I remember it, they both have what the air force used to call the Look of Eagles, and are wearing very tight-fitting minimal clothing, and are altogether very fit. Their pose suggests that they’ve just run a marathon and aren’t breathing hard while they relax by lifting 16-pound barbells. Look at us, they say. Old age is not for sissies.
Look at me, I snarl at them. I can’t run, I can’t lift barbells, and the thought of me in tight-fitting minimal clothing is appalling in all ways. I am a sissy. I always was. Who are you jocks to say old age isn’t for me?
Old age is for anybody who gets there. Warriors get old; sissies get old. In fact it’s likely that more sissies than warriors get old. Old age is for the healthy, the strong, the tough, the intrepid, the sick, the weak, the cowardly, the incompetent. People who run 10 miles every morning before breakfast and people who live in a wheelchair. People who work the London Times crossword in ink in 10 minutes and people who can’t quite remember who the president is just now. Old age is less a matter of fitness or courage than of luck equals longevity.
If you eat your sardines and leafy greens and wear SPF 150 and develop your abs and blabs and slabs or whatever they are in order to live a long life, that’s good, and maybe it will work. But the longer a life is, the more of it will be old age.
The leafy greens and the workouts may well help that old age to be healthy, but unfair as it may be, nothing guarantees health to the old. Bodies wear out after a certain amount of mileage despite the most careful maintenance. No matter what you eat and how grand your abs and blabs are, still your bones can let you down, your heart can get tired of its incredible nonstop lifelong athletic performance, and there’s all that wiring and stuff inside that can begin to short-circuit. If you did hard physical labor all your life and didn’t really have the chance to spend a lot of time in gyms, if you ate mostly junk food because it’s all you knew about and all you could afford in time and money, if you haven’t got a doctor because you can’t buy the insurance that stands between you and the doctors and the medicines you need, you may arrive at old age in rather bad shape. Or if you just run into some bad luck along the way, accidents, illnesses, it’s the same. You won’t be running marathons and lifting weights. You may have trouble getting up the stairs. You may have trouble just getting out of bed. You may have trouble getting used to hurting all the time. And it isn’t likely to get better as the years go on.
The compensations of getting old, such as they are, aren’t in the field of athletic prowess. I think that’s why the saying and the poster annoy me so much. They’re not only insulting to sissies, they’re beside the point.
I’d like a poster showing two old people with stooped backs and arthritic hands and time-worn faces sitting talking, deep, deep in conversation. And the slogan would be: Old Age Is Not for the Young.
7. A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters
November 2010
I have come to see male group solidarity as an immensely powerful force in human affairs, more powerful, perhaps, than the feminism of the late twentieth century took into account.
It’s amazing, given their different physiology and complement of hormones, how much alike men and women are in most ways. Still it seems to be the fact that women on the whole have less direct competitive drive and desire to dominate, and therefore, paradoxically, have less need to bond with one another in ranked, exclusive groups.
The power of male group solidarity must come from the control and channeling of male rivalry, the repression and concentration of the hormone-driven will to dominate that so often dominates men themselves. It is a remarkable reversal. The destructive, anarchic energy of individual rivalry and competitive ambition is diverted into loyalty to group and leader and directed to more or less constructive social enterprise.
Such groups are closed, positing “the other” as outsider. They exclude, first, women; then, men of a different age, or kind, or caste, or nation, or level of achievement, etc.—exclusions that reinforce the solidarity and power of the excluders. Perceiving any threat, the “band of brothers” joins together to present an impermeable front.
Male solidarity appears to me to have been the prime shaper of most of the great ancient institutions of society—Government, Army, Priesthood, University, and the new one that may be devouring all the others, Corporation. The existence and dominance of these hierarchic, organized, coherent, durable institutions goes back so far and has been so nearly universal that it’s mostly just called “how things are,” “the world,” “the division of labor,” “history,” “God’s will,” etc.
As for female solidarity, without it human society, I think, would not exist. But it remains all but invisible to men, history, and God.
Female solidarity might better be called fluidity—a stream or river rather than a structure. The only institutions I am fairly sure it has played some part in shaping are the tribe and that very amorphous thing, the family. Wherever the male arrangement of society permits the fellowship of women on their own terms, it tends to be casual, unformulated, unhierarchical; to be ad hoc rather than fixed, flexible rather than rigid, and more collaborative than competitive. That it has mostly operated in the private rather than the public sphere is a function of the male control of society, the male definition and separation of “public” and “private.” It’s hard to know if women’s groups would ever gather into great centers, because the relentless pressure from male institutions against such aggregation has prevented it. It might not happen anyhow. Instead of rising from the rigorous control of aggression in the pursuit of power, the energy of female solidarity comes from the wish and need for mutual aid and, often, the search for freedom from oppression. Elusiveness is the essence of fluidity.
So when the interdependence of women is perceived as a threat to the dependence of women on men and the childbearing, child-rearing, family-serving, man-serving role assigned to women, it’s easy to declare that it simply doesn’t exist. Women have no loyalty, do not understand what friendship is, etc. Denial is an effective weapon in the hands of fear. The idea of female independence and interdependence is met with scoffing hatred by both men and women who see themselves as benefiting from male dominance. Misogyny is by no means limited to men. Living in “a man’s world,” plenty of women distrust and fear themselves as much as or more than men do.
Insofar as the feminism of the 1970s played on fear, exalting the independence and interdependence of women, it was playing with fire. We cried “Sisterhood is powerful!”—and they believed us. Terrified misogynists of both sexes were howling that the house was burning down before most feminists found out where the matches were.
The nature of sisterhood is so utterly different from the power of brotherhood that it’s hard to predict how it might change society. In any case, we’ve seen only a glimpse of what its effects might be.
The great ancient male institutions have been increasingly infiltrated by women for the last two centuries, and this is a very great change. But when women manage to join the institutions that excluded them, they mostly end up being co-opted by them, serving male ends, enforcing male values.
Which is why I have a problem with women in combat in the armed services, and why I watch the rise of women in the “great” universities and the corporations—even the government—with an anxious eye.
Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?
If so, will they change the institution so radically that the men are likely to label it second-class, lower the pay, and abandon it? This has happened to some extent in several fields, such as the practice of teaching and medicine, increasingly in the hands of women. But the management of those fields, the power and the definition of their aims, still belongs to men. The question remains open.
 
As I look back on the feminism of the late twentieth century, I see it as typical of feminine solidarity—all Indians, no chiefs. It was an attempt to create an unhierarchical, inclusive, flexible, collaborative, unstructured, ad hoc body of people to bring the genders together in a better balance.
Women who want to work toward that end need, I think, to recognize and respect their own elusive, invaluable, indestructible kind of solidarity—as do men. And they need to recognize both the great value of male solidarity and the inferiority of gender solidarity to human solidarity—as do men.
I think feminism continues and will continue to exist wherever women work in their own way with one another and with men, and wherever women and men go on questioning male definitions of value, refusing gender exclusivity, affirming interdependence, distrusting aggression, seeking freedom always.
6. The Lynx
November 2010
Last week my friend Roger and I went out to Bend, the eastern Oregon city where a lot of retired people in search of sunlight and a dry climate have been settling since the 1990s. From Portland the shortest road is over Mount Hood and through the vast Warm Springs Reservation. It was a bright late October day, with the big broadleaf maples making masses of pure gold in the evergreen forests. The blue of the sky got more intense as we went down from the summit into the clear air and open landscapes of Oregon’s dry side.
Bend is named, I guess, for the bend of its lively river, in which it sits. The Three Sisters and other snow cones of the Cascades tower up over it in the west, and the vast expanses of the high desert sweep on out eastward. In recent years the city grew and thrived with the influx of settlers, but it hit hard times with the recession. Too much of its prosperity depended on the construction trades. Downtown is still pleasant, but there are gaps, with several fine restaurants gone, and it looks as if some new resorts out toward Mount Bachelor are paralyzed at the platting stage.
We stayed at a motel there on the west side of the river, which is built up at intervals, with bits of juniper forest and sagebrush plain in between. The long, wide boulevards go winding around in curves, crisscrossing each other at three- and four-exit roundabouts. It appears that the people who laid out the roads wanted to imitate what happens when you drop noodles on the floor. Though Tina at Camalli Books had given us careful instructions with all the road names and all the roundabout exits on the way to and from our motel—and though a western skyline of 6,000- to 10,000-foot mountain peaks would seem to provide adequate orientation—we never once left the motel without getting lost.
I learned to dread the Old Mill District. As soon as I saw the sign saying OLD MILL DISTRICT I knew we were lost again. If Bend were a big city instead of just a far-flung one, we might still be there trying to escape from the Old Mill District.
Roger and I were there to do a reading and signing of our book Out Here at the bookstore Friday evening and at the High Desert Museum Saturday afternoon. The museum is on Highway 97 a few miles south of town. A bit farther on is Sunriver, one of the earliest and biggest resort developments. Roger suggested we have lunch there. Given the money that flows through those residential resorts, I was expecting something on the gourmet side; but the bar and grill served the same huge piles of heavy food that you get at a bar and grill anywhere in America, where the idea of a light lunch is a pound or two of nachos.
I haven’t stayed at Sunriver but have spent a few nights at other high-end resorts in the area. They are laid out artfully to blend into the austere and beautiful landscape. Built of wood and painted or stained in a repetitive range of muted colors, the houses are unobtrusive, with plenty of space around them and trees left standing between them. All the streets curve. Straight streets are anathema to the resort mind. Right angles say City, and resorts are busy saying Country, and that’s why all the boulevards west of the river loop and swoop about so gracefully like noodles. The trouble is, since the juniper trees and the sage bushes and the buildings and the streets and the boulevards all look pretty much alike, if you don’t remember just where Colorado Drive connects with Century Drive before the roundabout exit to Cascade Drive, if you don’t have a good inner or external GPS system, you get lost.
Staying a couple of years ago at one of these resorts in a granny flat in somebody’s condo, I could get lost within 100 yards of the house. All the curvy streets and roads were lined with groups of houses in tasteful muted earth tones that exactly resembled the other groups of houses in tasteful muted earth tones, and there were no landmarks, and it all went on, over and over, sprawling out, without sidewalks—because of course the existence of such a place is predicated entirely on driving, on getting to it, from it, and around it by car. I don’t drive.
Bend is, I believe, the largest city in America with no public transportation system. They were fixing to do something about that when the bottom fell out of the building trade.
So after getting lost a couple of times walking, because I couldn’t tell which tastefully muted house on which curving road was my house, I was uneasy about going out again. But if Granny didn’t go for a walk she was trapped in the granny flat. And that was pretty bad. When you first walked in, you thought, Oh! Very nice!—because the whole inner wall was a mirror, which reflected the room and the big window, making it look large and light. In fact the room was so small it was almost entirely filled with bed.
The bed was piled with ornamental pillows. I counted them, but have forgotten how many there were—say 20 or 25 ornamental pillows, and 4 or 5 enormous teddy bears. When you took the bears and pillows off the bed so you could use the bed, there was no place to put them but on the floor around the bed, which meant there was no floor space, only pillows and bears. There was a tiny kitchen on the other side of a divider. No desk, no chair, though there was a blessed window seat to sit in, with a big view of trees and sky. I lived in the window seat, making my way through the bears and pillows when it was time for bed.
A door, which could not be locked, led down a corridor to the owners’ apartment, which was occupied. I put my suitcase and 8 or 10 of the pillows and the hugest, most obese teddy bear against the door as a barrier against absent-minded intrusion by my unknown hosts. But I didn’t have any real faith in that bear.
Roger and I kept passing that very resort on our noodly way to refinding our motel, and I winced every time I saw it, afraid we might somehow get into it and get lost in it again.
I feel vaguely guilty about preferring a mere motel to a carefully planned, upscale residential resort. But the guilt is vague while the preference is clear and categorical. I like motels. Exclusivity isn’t my bag. “Gated communities” are not communities in any sense of the word I understand. I know that a great many of the people who own or time-share or rent places in these dry-side resorts go there not for the exclusive company of other middle-class white people but for the marvelous air and light of the high desert, the forests, the ski slopes, the spaciousness and silence. I know. That’s fine. Just don’t make me stay in one. Especially not one equipped with giant teddy bears.
But all this is merely preparation for getting to the lynx.
The lynx lives at the High Desert Museum. Briefly, when he was a kitten somebody pulled out his claws (“declawing” a cat is the same as pulling out a human being’s fingernails and toenails or cutting off the last joint of each toe and finger). Then they pulled out his four great cat fangs. Then they pretended he was their itty-bitty kitty. Then they got tired of him, or got scared of him, and dumped him. He was found starving.
Like all the birds and animals at the High Desert Museum, he is a wild creature who can’t survive in the wild.
His cage is inside the main building. It is a long enclosure with three solid walls and one glass wall. It has trees and some hiding places, and is roofless, open to the weather and the sky.
I don’t think I’d ever seen a lynx when I first met him. He is a beautiful animal, chunkier and more compact than a mountain lion. His very thick dense fur of a honeybuff color has a flowing scatter of dark spots on legs and flanks and goes pure white on belly, throat, and beard. Big paws, ever so soft-looking, but you wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of one of those paws, even if its fierce, hooked weaponry has been torn out. Short tail, almost a stub—when it comes to tail, the mountain lion has it all over the lynx and bobcat. Lynx ears are rather queer and charming, with a long tip; his right ear is a bit squashed or bent. A big squarish head, with the calm, enigmatic cat smile, and great gold eyes.
The glass wall doesn’t look like one-way glass. I’ve never asked about it. If he is aware of the people on the other side of the glass, he doesn’t let them know it. He gazes out sometimes, but I have not seen his eyes catch on anything or follow anyone on the other side of the glass. His gaze goes right through you. You are not there. He is there.
I found and fell in love with the lynx during the last evening of a literary conference a couple of years ago. The writers at the meeting had been invited to a banquet at the museum to meet and mix with people who supported the conference with donations. This kind of thing is a perfectly reasonable attempt to reward generosity, though, knowing what writers are like, it must often be terribly disappointing to the donors. It is also an ordeal for many of the writers. People like me who work alone tend to be introverts and, indeed, uncouth. If piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano.
During the hour of wine and cheese before dinner, all the donors and writers milled about the main hall of the museum, talking. Being no good at milling and talking, and noticing a corridor off the main hall with no people in it, I sneaked off to explore it. First I found the bobcat (who must wake up now and then, though so far I have only seen him asleep). Then, getting farther away from the chatter of my species, going farther into dimness and silence, I came on the lynx.
He was sitting gazing out into the dimness and silence with his golden eyes. The pure gaze of the animal, Rilke called it. The gaze that is purely gaze: that sees through. For me, at that moment of feeling inadequate and out of place, the unexpected, splendid animal presence, his beauty, his perfect self-containment, was refreshment, consolation, peace.
I hung out with the lynx until I had to go back to the Bandar-log. At the end of the party I sneaked back for a moment to see him again. He was sleeping majestically in his little treehouse, great soft paws crossed in front of his chest. I had lost my heart for good.
I saw him again last year when my daughter Elisabeth drove me around eastern Oregon for four days (a grand trip, of which I hope to put a record in words and pictures on my site, if Elisabeth and I can goad each other into getting it together). She and I saw the displays and the otters and the owls and the porcupine and everything else at the museum, and ended in a long contemplation of the lynx.
And last week, before the reading, while Roger was doing all the hard work getting the books to sign into the museum, I could spend another half hour with him. When I came, he was pacing about, very handsome and restless. If he had a tail that was worth lashing he would certainly have been lashing it. After a few minutes he vanished through a big metal cat flap into some kind of back room not on view to the public. Fair enough, I thought, he wants some privacy. I went on to look at the live butterfly exhibit, which of course was lovely. The Oregon High Desert Museum is one of the most perfectly satisfying places I know.
When I came back down the corridor the lynx was sitting quite close to the glass, eating a largish bird. A grouse, was my guess. At any rate a wild bird, not a chicken. He had a tail feather hanging down from his chin for a while, which might have reduced his dignity in the eyes of beholders, but he does not acknowledge beholders.
He worked at his bird with diligence and care. He discussed his bird, as they used to say of people eating lamb chops. He was quite absorbed in discussing it. Lacking all four fangs, he was pretty much in the position of a human lacking incisors: he had to go at it sideways, with his molars. He did this neatly. It slowed him down, I am sure, but he never grew impatient, even when all he got was a mouthful of feathers. He just put a big soft honey-colored paw on his lunch and went at it again. When he got seriously inside the bird, some children who came by squealed, “Eeeyew! He’s eating the insides!” and some other children who came by murmured with satisfaction, “Oh look, he’s eating the guts.”
I had to go away then and do the reading and signing, so I could not see him finish lunch.
When I came back after an hour or so for a goodbye glimpse, the lynx was curled up comfortably asleep in his treehouse bedroom. One wing and a beak lay on the dirt near the glass wall. On three tree stumps, the servants of the lynx had laid out three dead mice—an elegant dessert presentation, as the fancy restaurants say. I imagined that later, when the museum closed, when all the primates had finally gone away, the big cat might wake up and yawn, and stretch himself lithely down from his treehouse, and eat his desserts one by one, slowly, in silence, all by himself in the darkness.
 
There is a connection that I am groping for, a connection between the resorts and the lynx. Not the noodly streets that took us from one to the other, but a mental connection that has something to do with community and solitude.
The resorts are neither city nor country; they are semi-communities. Most of their population is occasional or transient. The only day workers are gardeners, janitors, people doing upkeep. They don’t live in the nice houses. Most of the people that do are there not because their work takes them there but to get away from their work. They’re not there because they have common interests with others there but to get away from other people. Or to pursue sports such as golf and skiing, which pit the individual against himself. Or because they long for the solitude of the wilderness.
But we aren’t a solitary species. Like it or not, we are the Bandar-log. We are social by nature, and thrive only in community. It is entirely unnatural for a human being to live long completely alone. So when we get sick of crowds and yearn for space and silence, we build these semi-communities, pseudo-communities, in remote places. And then, sadly, by going to them, swarming into the desert, all too often we find no true community, but only destroy the solitude we sought.
As for cats, most of their species are not social at all. The nearest thing to a cat society is probably a troop of active lionesses providing for the cubs and the indolent male. Farm cats sharing a barn work out a kind of ad hoc social order, though the males tend to be less members of it than a danger to it. Adult male lynxes are loners. They walk by themselves.
The strange fortune of my lynx brought him to live in an artificial environment, a human community utterly foreign to him. His isolation from his natural, complex wilderness habitat is grievous and unnatural. But his aloofness, his aloneness, is the truth of his own nature. He retains that nature, brings it among us unchanged. He brings us the gift of his indestructible solitude.
5. Exorcists
November 2010
The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States are holding a conference on exorcism in Baltimore today and tomorrow. Many bishops and 60 priests are there to learn the symptoms of demonic possession—you may be possessed if you exhibit unusual strength, talk in a language you don’t know, or react violently to anything holy—and the rites of exorcism, which include sprinkling holy water on you, laying hands on you, recitations, invocations, and blowing in your face.
The church updated the rite in 1999, advising that “all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.” This seems rather like issuing directions for driving a car while cautioning that all must be done to avoid the perception that a moving vehicle is being guided.
I’d advise weightlifters and people learning a foreign language to avoid Baltimore this weekend. I don’t know how to advise people who react violently to anything holy. I don’t know who they are, because I don’t know what kind of violent reaction is meant, and because “what is holy” depends entirely on your perception of sacredness. If I am shaken by unutterably strong emotion when I watch a pair of eagles dance with each other on the wind, or when I hear the first notes of the theme of the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, am I possessed by a demon? I don’t know, but I’m staying away from Baltimore.
I think the people who should hurry there are the four male Catholic judges of the United States Supreme Court, all of whom are adherents of the policies of Pope Ratzinger and members of the ultra-reactionary Catholic group Opus Dei. Exorcism lessons should enrich their repertory no end. The fifth Roman Catholic on the Supreme Court is a woman, and thereby excluded from doing the “work of God.”
4. Someone Named Delores
October 2010
A sentence in a story has been troubling me. The story, by Zadie Smith, was in The New Yorker recently (October 11, 2010). It’s in the first person, but I don’t know whether it’s fiction or memoir. Many people don’t even make the distinction, now that memoir takes the liberties of fiction without taking the imaginative risks, and fiction claims the authority of history without assuming the factual responsibilities. To my mind the I of a memoir or “personal essay” is a very different matter from the I of a story or novel, but I don’t know if Zadie Smith sees it that way. And so I don’t know whether she’s speaking as a character in fiction or as herself when toward the end of her tale of a seemingly unrepaid loan to a friend she says, “The first check came quickly but sat in a pile of unopened mail because these days I hire someone to do that.”
The implacable editor in my hindbrain promptly inquired, You hire someone not to open the mail? I silenced the meddling reptile, but the sentence continued to bother me. “These days I hire someone to do that.” What’s wrong with that? Well, I guess it’s the “someone.” Someone is no one. The nameless nobody hired to answer the mail of a somebody with a name.
So at this point I’m beginning to hope that the story is fiction and thus that the narrator is not Zadie Smith, because this doesn’t sound like the voice of a writer highly sensitive to class and color prejudices. It reminded me, in fact, of the dean’s wife, when I was a lowly assistant professor’s wife, who couldn’t leave “my housekeeper” out of her conversation for five minutes, she was in such a state of admiration of herself for having the grand house that required keeping and the housekeeper to keep it. But that was silly, naive, like Mr. Collins continually mentioning “my patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh.” The statement “these days I hire someone to do that” has a harsher ring to it.
And so what? Why shouldn’t a highly successful writer hire help and say so? And what skin is it off my nose?
Envy, of course, in the first place. I am envious of people who hire a servant with perfect assurance of righteousness. I envy self-confidence even as I dislike it. Envy coexists only too easily with righteous disapproval. Indeed perhaps the two nasty creatures live off each other.
And then, annoyance. There’s an “of course” implied in “I hire someone to do that,” and there’s no “of course” about it. But people think there is, and this kind of talk encourages them to think so—which annoys me.
It’s a widespread illusion: a writer (a successful writer, a real writer) doesn’t do her own mail. She has a secretary to do it, as well as helpers, amanuenses, researchers, handlers—lord knows what—maybe an editor’s hole in the east wing, like the priest’s hole in old British houses.
I imagine writers commonly had secretaries a century ago. Henry James did, sure enough. But Henry James was not exactly your average writer, right?
Virginia Woolf didn’t.
Among writers I know personally, only one has a secretary to do mail. To me it seems a perquisite of the extremely successful, and of a magnitude of success that daunts me. Privacy to be with my family and do my work was of the first importance to me. So when I began to need help answering my letters, I found it extremely difficult to convince myself that I needed it badly enough to justify my hiring “someone,” bringing a stranger into my study, setting myself up as a boss.
I always had trouble calling Delores my secretary, it sounded so pompous (echoes of “my housekeeper . . .”). If I had to speak of her to strangers I said her name, or “my friend who does mail for me.” But I knew that this latter phrase was one of the mildly devious devices by which we handle guilt, the ways we try to reintroduce humanity into the relationship of hirer and hired, which inevitably, to whatever slight a degree, involves inequality, the raising up of one and degradation of the other. Democracy, by strenuously denying the fact of inequality, does enable us, to a surprising extent, to act as if it didn’t exist; but it does exist, and we know it. So our job is to keep the inequity of power as small as possible, and refuse to let our common humanity be reduced, however slightly, even by a careless word, by an assertion of unequal worth. My envy of writers who hire a person to handle their mail and annoyance at people who assume that I have such help are really quite mild, but they are painful now, because I did have “someone,” but I have lost her.
Delores Rooney, later Delores Pander, was my helper and dear friend.
Thirty years ago or so, I finally got up my courage and asked around for a professionally competent and discreet person to give me a hand with my letters, which were getting beyond me. Our mutual friend Martha West, who had worked with Delores as a secretary in an office, recommended her. She was then working as manager-agent for a dance company. We rather nervously gave it a try.
I had never dictated anything to anybody (outside Beginning French courses, where you very slowly and clearly read a dictée in French to the students, who very slowly and inaccurately write it down). Delores had taught herself shorthand and was a whiz at it—a skill now, I suppose, almost entirely lost—and she’d taken lots of dictation from lots of dictators. She coached me in composing a letter orally, and encouraged me with praise; she was an excellent teacher. And also she’d worked and lived with artists, painters, dancers, and was used to artistic temperamental peculiarities, having a few of her own.
We got to doing letters quickly and easily, and I soon began to draw on her as a collaborator in composing the letters—what to say and how to say it. Does that sound all right?—What if you said this instead of that?—What on earth am I going to write to the man who sent me the 600-page manuscript about fairies on Venus?—This one’s a whiner, you don’t have to answer him . . . Delores was always better than me at kind answers to kooks, but she was tough-minded too, and encouraged me not to answer a letter that was troublingly weird or made unreasonable demands. She got to be so good at replying to the eternally repeated questions that I could hand her a letter and just say “idea for Catwings” and the true tale of how I happened to think of cats with wings was all ready in her computer—though she varied it slightly according to her mood and the age of the inquirer. She had a gracious, graceful tone in discouraging problematic requests by explaining why I couldn’t personally reply just now. She covered for me beautifully. She loved to answer children’s letters, even when they were the mechanical kind some teachers make kids write. The open kindness and generosity of her spirit lent all my correspondence a quality it would never have had without her collaboration.
She never came more than once a week, usually only once every three or four weeks. I’d do the most urgent business correspondence and let the rest and the fan mail pile up. She got a computer before I did, and it eased her work a great deal. When I got one, it didn’t make much difference at first. But when email really got going I began to be able to deal with all the real business myself. Still Delores and I together handled nonurgent business, the fan letters from readers, and what we called the Gimmies: the letters everybody who becomes visible to the public gets, asking you to do this, give to that, endorse this book, speak at that good cause, etc. Even if you can’t possibly say yes to them, most such letters are well intentioned and deserve a civil no. Delores said no thank you in every possible way, always politely. It was a great burden off me. She said that the Gimmies were boring but just various enough to be entertaining too.
As for fan mail, letters from readers have always come to me on paper only, my crude but effective way of keeping the volume down. The letters people write me—often with pen and ink, or in pencil, crayon, glitter, and other media if they’re children—are ever amazing, giving me immense pleasure and reward, but they are also never-ending. I knew there was no way I could handle the load if I tried to read and answer them on my website or on email. But I have always felt that such letters deserve a reply, however brief, and for years Delores was my invaluable aide in answering them.
We loved each other as friends, but didn’t have extensive contact outside our work sessions. She was a busy woman: she soon became the writer Jean Auel’s secretary four days a week, and was agent and manager for her husband, the painter Henk Pander; when her parents grew old and sick she looked after them, and late in life she adopted and brought up her granddaughter. Our friendship was expressed mostly during and in our working relationship. I always looked forward to Delores coming, and we always spent half the time talking, catching up. Once, when I was scared by a stalker, she and Henk gave me wonderful immediate support.
As the years went on she seemed to grow shyer and more withdrawn from her friends than she had been, I do not know why. She told me once that she liked coming to work with me because we laughed together.
Her computer began to get out of date, and her life was complicated by various issues; her energy was being overtried. She couldn’t or didn’t want to figure out how to help me with e-correspondence the way she did with paper mail, which she took home along with dictated answers or suggested notes from me. So I came to do all the email and most of the letters, leaving her only some Gimmies and no-thank-yous and those fan letters that needed only acknowledgment.
Delores’s joy in life had been visibly flagging for a long time when she was diagnosed, last year, with cancer. At first it seemed local and curable, but proved to be metastasizing. It killed her in a few months. There was a brief and lovely respite or remission for a few weeks late in her illness, when we were able to visit with her quite often, and laughed together as we had used to laugh. Then the cruel disease closed in again. She died a few months ago, attended with great tenderness by her husband.
I find it extremely hard to talk about people I loved who have died. I can’t now make a proper tribute to that complex and beautiful woman, or say more than that I miss her friendship in every way.
Without her, I’ve had to give up the effort to answer fan mail, at least temporarily. As for the Gimmies, some of them get answered, some of them don’t. I suppose I could hire someone to do that.
But I doubt that I will. I can’t put my heart into it.
3. The Absent Silence
A year or two ago I was asked to review a novel by José Saramago, and in looking up facts about him on Google I found over and over the same quotation from him —
God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.
It’s from his Lanzarote journals, which aren’t available in English. He quoted it himself last year in one of his own blogs (translated as The Notebook). I wanted it again just a couple of weeks ago for my introduction to the electronic edition of his novels being prepared (hurrah!) by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I wasn’t sure I remembered it exactly, and The Notebook was up in the attic with Charles, and so I went confidently to google it. I thought I knew how it started, so I tried “God is silence.” That got me some hits, but nothing from Saramago. I tried “God is the silence.” That got me the same page as before. So I tried “Saramago quotations” and variants on that. They all took me to a page with lots and lots of quotations from Saramago — singly, in sets of 20, in sets of 43 — but in hurriedly looking through them, I didn’t find the one I was looking for, certainly the most famous single thing Saramago ever wrote. At this point, paranoia raised its stupid little yellow-green head.
Saramago was an atheist, not of the professional Dawkinsian type, but a man to whom the whole God business made no sense, though it interested him. His antipathy was reserved for the profiteers and power-mongers of religion, such as the mufti who authorised marriage for girls of ten, the imam who approved stoning women accused of adultery, the pope who has found it so hard to condemn pederasty among his priests. His speaking out on such matters made him enemies, of course. I mean, the man was a godless commie foreigner. Really. He was.
So I sat there entertaining paranoid thoughts: Had some zealous crusader gone through Google’s material on Saramago and removed the offensive quotation? I knew this kind of thing happens on Wikipedia, but in a wiki people look out for censoring and tampering and can make it unhappen just as promptly. How Google works, I didn’t know, but I knew it’s not a wiki. I didn’t suspect Google of initiating censorship, but wondered if it was vulnerable to sneak-in censorship. A worrisome thought to think about an information service so many of us rely on. So, instead of going on looking for the quotation as I should have done, I wrote a little blog about the mysterious absence of the quotation.
My First Reader read it and said, “But you didn’t try ‘God is the silence of the universe.’”
Oh.
So I asked Google for “God is the silence of the universe“ (and put it in quotes) and there it was, about a ten thousand times, pages and pages of God is the silence of the universe.
So much for paranoia. No crusaders. Just my own (lazy) incompetence at googling.
But the mistake sometimes leads the mind to the place it really wanted to go...
By embarrassing myself (and thanks to my First Reader) I began to consider something I’d only very vaguely known and hadn’t given much thought to: the fact that how Google gets and handles its information is an industrial secret.
Understandably. If how Thomas’s get the nooks and crannies into their English muffins is an industrial secret, how Google comes to know everything that is known certainly deserves to be one too.
And yet it is disturbing. (Paranoia?)
I know that people far better equipped to discuss this whole matter have discussed it at length. Undoubtedly I could look up such discussions through Google. At this point I’m not ready to read them. I need to think about it in my own terms first.
Putting it into language familiar to me: it’s as if a great library, say the Library of Congress, refused to tell where they got their books and how they got their books and who chose the books and whether all the books they had were in the catalogue and available or some were held back, kept secret.
Of course there’s no point in libraries doing that. A public library has no industrial secrets, not being in business for the money. A public library is a public trust. And the “trust” in that old-fashioned phrase is, has to be, mutual, reciprocal. The public trusts the library not to censor, change, or withhold valuable books or information, as the library trusts the public won’t force them to censor, change, withhold, or destroy books or information. And if the library, at the request of the public, does withhold some material from some people (as in finding ways to keep exploitive pornography from children using the library) this is done (if it’s rightly done) openly, with knowledge and consent on both sides.
But a great corporation, even one sworn to do no evil, makes no such bargain with the public. There is no reciprocity. Trust is not mutual. It’s understood that the public interest, if considered at all, comes second to the interests of the corporation — profit, growth, and power. So the corporation can and will keep its secrets, even though what it is dealing in is information, even when its business is making knowledge accessible, open, free — the very opposite of keeping secrets.
What a strange, paradoxical situation! It is quite beyond me. I can’t help but wonder if it might also be beyond even the intelligent and competent people who run Google. Do they really know what they are doing? And if they don’t, do they know they don’t — or is that too a secret, kept even from themselves?
— UKL 
27 October 2010
2. Miners and I-Pods
In Roger Cohen’s New York Times column on October 18, I read that a set of I-pods had been donated to entertain the thirty-three Chilean miners in their underground ordeal, but the devices were not given to the men, whose awareness of their situation and consciousness of one another might be crucial to their survival as a group. As Cohen put it, “The donated iPods were not sent down to the miners for fear they would prove isolating and break the life-saving camaraderie of ‘Los 33.’ Salvation can still depend on seeing those around you.”
This was interesting, this practical application of the idea that people absorbed in their electronic devices may be profoundly insulated from reality. Most of us admit that people talking on cell phones are thus insulated or isolated: They’re unaware, conscious only to a limited degree of people around them, cars on the street, etc. But denial is strong; the gross discourtesy of so many cell-phone users is condoned, there’s endless resistance to banning the use of cell phones by drivers. Have the Chileans a different view of all this? Are they a bit less complacent about what happens to us when we’re plugged in? I wanted to learn more — who sent the I-pods, but more importantly who decided that the miners were better off without them.
When I googled Chilean miners I-pods, I learned at once that it was Steve Jobs who sent the I-pods. But from the information I could find on the Net, it appears the gift arrived only after the men had been brought up into the light. All the stories are dated October 14, and each simply repeats the others. None of them is factually specific or adds any details, except for a couple that mention that PSPs, toys on which you play electronic games, were sent down to the men while they were still in the mine.
So I am left frustrated, as one so often is by the strange fragmentedness of news these days, and by a sense that the whole picture is out there somewhere but you don’t know where to go to get it. I’m reluctant to believe that a Times op-ed writer swallowed a hokey story whole, but I’d sure like to know where he got it; and whether the I-pods did in fact arrive while the miners were still underground but were withheld from them until they got out; and if so, who made the decision, and how they explained it.
— UKL 
24 October 2010
1. In Your Spare Time
October 2010
I got a questionnaire from Harvard for the sixtieth reunion of the Harvard graduating class of 1951. Of course my college was Radcliffe, which at that time was affiliated with but wasn’t considered to be Harvard, due to a difference in gender; but Harvard often overlooks such details from the lofty eminence where it can consider all sorts of things beneath its notice. Anyhow, the questionnaire is anonymous, therefore presumably gender-free; and it is interesting.
The people who are expected to fill it out are, or would be, almost all in their eighties, and sixty years is time enough for all kinds of things to have happened to a bright-eyed young graduate. So there’s a polite invitation to widows or widowers to answer for the deceased. And Question 1c, “If divorced,” gives an interesting set of little boxes to check: Once, Twice, Three times, Four or more times, Currently remarried, Currently living with a partner, None of the above. This last option is a poser. I’m trying to think how you could be divorced and still none of the above. In any case, it seems unlikely that any of those boxes would have been on a reunion questionnaire in 1951. You’ve come a long way, baby! as the cigarette ad with the bimbo on it used to say.
Question 12: “In general, given your expectations, how have your grandchildren done in life?” The youngest of my grandchildren just turned four. How has he done in life? Well, very well, on the whole. I wonder what kind of expectations you should have for a four-year-old. That he’ll go on being a nice little boy and learn pretty soon to read and write is all that comes to my mind. I suppose I’m supposed to expect him to go to Harvard, or at least to Columbia like his father and great-grandfather. But being nice and learning to read and write seems quite enough for now.
Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. Mostly the fears predominate these days. When my kids were young I could still hope we might not totally screw up the environment for them, but now that we’ve done so, and are more deeply sold out than ever to profiteering industrialism with its future-horizon of a few months, any hope I have that coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous, and has to reach far, far forward into the dark.
Question 13: “What will improve the quality of life for the future generations of your family?”—with boxes to rank importance from 1 to 10. The first choice is “Improved educational opportunities”—fair enough, Harvard being in the education business. I gave it a 10. The second is “Economic stability and growth for the U.S.” That stymied me totally. What a marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, “You can’t have both,” and didn’t check a box.
The rest of the choices are: Reduction of the U.S. debt, Reduced dependence on foreign energy, Improved health-care quality and cost, Elimination of terrorism, Implementation of an effective immigration policy, Improved bipartisanship in U.S. politics, Export democracy.
Since we’re supposed to be considering the life of future generations, it seems a strange list, limited to quite immediate concerns and filtered through such current right-wing obsessions as “terrorism,” “effective” immigration policy, and the “exportation” of “democracy” (which I assume is a euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don’t like and trying to destroy their society, culture, and religion). Nine choices, but nothing about climate destabilization, nothing about international politics, nothing about population growth, nothing about industrial pollution, nothing about the control of government by corporations, nothing about human rights or injustice or poverty . . .
Question 14: “Are you living your secret desires?” Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none, my desires are flagrant.”
But it was Question 18 that really got me down. “In your spare time, what do you do? (check all that apply) And the list begins: “Golf . . .”
Seventh in the list of 27 occupations, after “Racquet sports” but before “Shopping,” “TV,” and “Bridge,” comes “Creative activities (paint, write, photograph, etc.).”
Here I stopped reading and sat and thought for quite a while.
The key words are spare time. What do they mean?
To a working person—supermarket checker, lawyer, highway crewman, housewife, cellist, computer repairer, teacher, waitress—spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive, cooking, keeping clean, getting the car fixed, getting the kids to school. To people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such.
But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have but “spare” time?
I am not exactly retired, because I never had a job to retire from. I still work, though not as hard as I did. I have always been and am proud to consider myself a working woman. But to the Questioners of Harvard my lifework has been a “creative activity,” a hobby, something you do to fill up spare time. Perhaps if they knew I’d made a living out of it they’d move it to a more respectable category, but I rather doubt it.
The question remains: When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it?
And what’s the difference, really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?
Kids used to have a whole lot of spare time, middle-class kids anyhow. Outside of school and if they weren’t into a sport, most of their time was spare, and they figured out more or less successfully what to do with it. I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh, lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings . . . I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. 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.
The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.
An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be 81 next week. I have no time to spare.
0. A Note at the Beginning
October 2010
I’ve been inspired by José Saramago’s extraordinary blogs, which he posted when he was 85 and 86 years old. They were published this year in English as The Notebooks. I read them with amazement and delight.
I never wanted to blog before. I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in her nose). I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be “interactive,” that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too introverted to want to do that at all. I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.
So, though I have contributed a few bloglike objects to Book View Café, I never enjoyed them. After all, despite the new name, they were just opinion pieces or essays, and writing essays has always been tough work for me and only occasionally rewarding.
But seeing what Saramago did with the form was a revelation.
Oh! I get it! I see! Can I try too?
My trials/attempts/efforts (that’s what essays means) so far have very much less political and moral weight than Saramago’s and are more trivially personal. Maybe that will change as I practice the form, maybe not. Maybe I’ll soon find it isn’t for me after all, and stop. That’s to be seen. What I like at the moment is the sense of freedom. Saramago didn’t interact directly with his readers (except once). That freedom, also, I’m borrowing from him.
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 Ursula K. Le Guin 

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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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26. Against Eisenhower
From “Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past,” by Stephen Schlesinger, in the New York Times, June 3, 2011:
Eisenhower’s attack on Guatemala was brilliantly executed. A faux invasion force consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize the fledgling democracy into surrender. Arbenz stepped down from the presidency and left the country. Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit’s lands. For three decades, military strongmen ruled Guatemala.
The covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala’s fragile political and civic institutions might grow. It permanently stunted political life. And the destruction of Guatemala’s democracy also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras.
This is kindly, honest, grandfatherly “Ike.”
This is the president who for decades has been praised for telling us as he left office that we should beware of giving “the military-industrial complex” too much power or letting it direct our national policies.
To destroy democracy in Guatemala he used American military or paramilitary force in the interests of an enormous American corporation, United Fruit. After employing militarism to serve industrial capitalism for eight years, his pious warning against both seems incredibly hypocritical.
Yet on it has been built a whole tower of adulation of Eisenhower as a far-seeing statesman, above party politics.
He was nothing of the kind. He was an Army general, accustomed to using violence to gain his goals, accustomed to the undemocratic, unquestioning obedience of the military, and fiercely opposed to any control over industrial capitalism, let alone any social alternative to it. He was the Cold Warrior par excellence. He saw “creeping socialism” everywhere. He was the grandfather of present-day reactionary Republicanism.
He might not like some of its present forms, the open religious and racial bigotry, the fiscal irresponsibility; but these demagogues are his political descendants, and though he might wince at their hate talk and shameless lying, his own policy was built on xenophobic fear (called “anti-Communism”) and protected by deception and hypocrisy.
I have felt for a long time that Eisenhower’s election (in 1952, defeating Adlai Stevenson in a landslide) was a cross-roads. We took the road that led us away from a rational future towards a mythical past; that led us away from hope, which is such hard work, towards fear, which is so easy; that led us to give up social justice as a guiding principle in favor of short-term-profit capitalism. Nixon, Reagan, Bush all came to power along that road, and each took us farther along it.
Another notable thing Eisenhower said as he left office was to the effect that “the future lies in packaging.” Not what is produced, not why or how it is produced, not who it is produced for, but how it is packaged — disguised — presented, represented, misrepresented, in order to be sold.
So here we are, suffocating under mountains of discarded plastic packaging — our armed forces engaged in three wars which bring profit to international corporations while bankrupting America — and our citizens still hearing that they can’t be safe unless they live in terror. Welcome to Eisenhower’s future.
— UKL 
13 June 2011
25. Petty Expectations
Part One. Critical Expectation: Genre and “Literary” Fiction
I’ve been pondering, tracing connections, wondering about expectations. The first object of my brooding is a pair of sentences from a book review by Terence Rafferty:
“In a horror story or a mystery novel, the flow is all toward narrative resolution, and is — or should be — swift and fierce. Literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way. [“Reluctant Seer,” Terence Rafferty, NYT Sunday Book Review, 4 Feb 2011]
This little paragraph contains several assumptions, or expectations, that I find no less questionable for being very familiar.
The distinction Mr Rafferty draws between literary and genre fiction, though cherished by many critics and teachers, was never very useful and is by now worse than useless. The opposition — genre rushing hell-for-leather and plotbound to resolution, literature meandering sweetly like a brainless tot in a folktale forest — is absurd.
I seldom read horror, outside Edgar Allen Poe, but I do read mysteries. Mr Rafferty says their flow must be “swift and fierce.” “Fierce” appears to be decorative, “swift” is the operative word. But is it accurate? Some mysteries move swiftly. Many mysteries don’t. Some of my favorites move almost glacially, plodding along from detail to detail gathering irresistible impetus. Like glaciers, they’re in no hurry, but you don’t want to try to stop them.
At some point in every slow-paced mystery the pace will quicken suddenly. That is a great part of the art of pacing: variety. Some people crave the relentlessly “swift, fierce” pace of the pop thriller, but it’s by no means the only way to tell an exciting story; and to many of us it becomes, within a very few pages, merely tiresome.
All novels (except perhaps those by Marguerite Duras) have to move forward, and plot-driven novels have to move with some apparent, though often indirect, onward impetus; but the movement certainly need not be “all to narrative resolution.” In narrative, impetus and pace are their own reward. What is essential is continuity — keeping the story going. (None of its many devoted readers for the last 260 years would ever have got through Clarissa if its interminably prolonged story weren’t told with unfailing (epistolary) continuity, as well as considerable variety of pace — given that its general rate of progress is that of a coach drawn by one ailing horse on a very bad road in January.) Where the story goes is much less important, during the telling of it, than that it goes.
Even in mystery, so formally plot-driven and end-directed, resolution is by no means always the goal. The end of a mystery is very often a let-down. The end of most novels is a let-down. As Leonard Woolf remarked, the journey not the arrival matters. I’ve lost my copy of Aspects of the Novel and am trying to recall E.M. Forster’s definition — “the novel is an extended prose fiction that ends disappointingly”?
Authors whose novels move forward sometimes with great swiftness, even “ferocity,” and sometimes move deliberately, even appearing to loiter, include Austen, Tolstoy, Dickens, the Brontes, Melville, Kipling, Hardy, Tolkien, Patrick O’Brian, Mark Twain (in the two great novels), Henry James (in the earlier novels), Virginia Woolf (notably in To the Lighthouse), Owen Wister, Conan Doyle, Arnoldur Indridason, Karin Fossum.... oh, this is ridiculous! Variety of pace without loss of impetus is characteristic of every good novel I can think of.
Unless you read only for ceaseless cut-to-the-chase, I’ll bet that whatever novelists you admire as being really good writers, “genre” or “literary,” vary their pace, and yet never cease to move their story forward, however quietly and sinuously.
And never for one moment do they “lose their way.” They may mislead you — confuse you, even lose you — but they know where they’re going, and if you stick with them you’ll find out where it is.
Finally, I disbelieve in the existence of “stray beauties” in a good novel (unless the phrase means naughty ladies). What is beautiful in a good novel hasn’t strayed in accidentally. Beauty in the novel is bone-deep, essential.
Everything in a good story or novel is essential.
Part Two: Reader Expectation and the Young Adult Fantasy
A friend of mine submitted his young adult fantasy novel to a publisher. After initial encouragement, the editor had the kind of talk with the author that authors don’t want to have with an editor. This is how my friend reports what the editor said:
“Your book does not meet reader expectation for a YA fantasy. YA readers expect fantasy to be plot-driven, not character-driven. They expect the protagonist to be self-confident, to meet distrust only from other people. They expect the magic in the book to be overt and direct, not subtle or metaphorical. They expect no moral ambiguity: all characters or magic powers should be clearly good or clearly evil. They expect the story to move very quickly with no slowing down at any time. A novel that does not meet reader expectation will not sell.”
The editor’s final reason for rejecting the book: “Your book isn’t fantasy, because it’s open to interpretation. It’s literary.”
This editor’s verdict is almost certainly based on the opinions of his Marketing or Sales departments, whose interest in fantasy is limited to the mindless yearning to repeat Harry Potter over and over and over forever. However, the basic misconceptions here — fantasy cannot be literature; literary novels are open to interpretation, young adult novels are not — are probably the editor’s very own.
I first began to meet this mindset from editors when I submitted my last two YA fantasies, Voices and Powers, a few years ago. It was nowhere near as rigid, however, as what my friend ran into. Now, it seems, there is an orthodoxy: Fantasy for younger readers must have no toxic taint of psychological depth or moral subtlety, and be driven forward mechanically by plot, not by the natures and passions of their young protagonists. The story must allow of only one interpretation: Good Fights Evil and Wins the War, thus remaining ethically simplistic to the point of infantility. YA fantasies cannot use metaphor. Fish cannot swim in water. No, sorry, that is from another edict. YA readers expect fantasies to contain nothing they have not already read in other fantasies. We the Publisher know what the readers expect. We are God? No, but we know what we’re going to give them, and they needn’t expect anything else.
Well, so, there’s a separation of “genre” from “literature,” performed with a Texas chainsaw.
And not by a literary snob, but by a genre editor, who might be expected to know better.
So, goodbye, Alice. Goodbye, Curdy. Goodbye, Mr Toad. Goodbye, Little Prince. Goodbye, Frodo. Goodbye, Sam. Goodbye, Ged. Goodbye, Will. Goodbye, Wart. Goodbye, Deeba. Goodbye, goodbye... for a while...
You’ll be back. Full of passions and subtleties, doing evil while intending good and vice versa, unpredictable, ambiguous, and breathing metaphor as your native air.
Poor editor, poor bean-counters in Marketing! Never to have crossed the border into the Other Kingdom, never to have seen the fair folk there...
But meanwhile, poor authors of fantasy, told to be imitators of imitators of the secondrate, ordered off to the assembly line at the baloney factory!
And poor kids, who come to that twilight border across which the misty mountains can be seen, only to find a chainlink fence and a NO ENTRY sign, in front of which under a peeling golden plastic arch a nasty little man is selling second-hand hamburgers fried in fusel oil...
— UKL 
4 June 2011
24. To Save Free Enterprise, Books Must Die
Publishers Weakly — May 27, 2011
The publishing house Harpy (formerly Harpy & Roe, then Harpy Collie, then HarpyCollie, now just Harpy again), a wholly owned subsidiary of the international corporation headed by the egregious Rupert Merdle, has announced a new policy designed to make Harpy equally egregious.*
The new policy ensures that e-books bought from Harpy by public libraries will “expire” — disappear — after they have been taken out of the library 26 times. If a library wishes to keep the e-book accessible, it will have to buy it all over again from Harpy.
By allowing their clients to take out hardcopy books an unlimited number of times before they have to be replaced, public libraries have been cheating Mr Merdle out of thousands of dollars a year via Harpy books, thus causing a dangerous drain on the resources of his corporation.
No way to prevent this disturbing library-caused loss to healthy corporate growth has yet been discovered, because a hardcopy book once bought cannot be controlled. It can be bought and sold again and again, or, far more disturbingly, can be given, or loaned, and thus used over and over by different people, in the most blatantly socialistic fashion, without anybody making any profit out of it.
Not so, however, with e-books!
An e-book cannot be worn out, cannot fall to pieces, can go on existing as long as technology supports it and electricity is supplied, and therefore never need be bought but once — a terrifying prospect.
Publishers Macmillion and Slime & Shyster avoid the terror by not allowing any of their e-books in libraries. But they are losing potential profit from sales.
The solution of the problem lay in realising that the existence or nonexistence of their e-books is entirely up to Mr Merdle and his Harpies.
Expiration is the answer. The death of the book. Nothing could be simpler.
The public library buys the e-book, planning to slip it furtively and indefinitely often into the unwashed hands of the kind of people who go to public libraries — but now they can only get away with this 26 times. The twenty-seventh reader who put the book on hold is out of luck. The book expires. Dies. Ceases, as far as the library is concerned, to exist.
If the library wants it, they must buy it again. And again. And again.
And thus capitalism will be safe. . . until the next assault from the anarcho-socialist-librarian underworld. Even now, some egregious libraries are refusing to buy Harpy e-books, thus cheating Mr Merdle out of thousands of dollars a year — a loss unacceptable, as mentioned before, to a corporation whose resources run only to the two-figure billions.
__

	
The word “egregious” is not a slur or insult; it is from Latin ex grege, outside the herd, and merely means “outstanding,” or anyhow it did for about 2500 years. If you want it to mean something else, feel free.

__
Current information on the status of e-books in libraries may be found, among many other sites, at:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/889500-264/harpercollins_overdrive_respond_as_26.html.csp
— UKL 
26 May 2011
23. The Middle of What?
When I was a kid America had three classes. Upper class was yachts, Harvard, Cartier, caviar, crass fat bankers in tailcoats with cigars in newspaper cartoons. Middle class was tree-lined streets in neighborhoods, State U, a class ring, meat and potatoes, Helen Hokinson ladies in New Yorker cartoons. Working class was dust bowl, soup lines, grey faces under cloth caps, cartoons of bums with their toes coming out of their shoes — then overnight it was three shifts at the shipyards and the steel mills, housing shortages, housing developments, public schools full to bursting, and Rosie the Riveter.
And men in uniform. The uniform that cancelled class, or anyhow made it semi-invisible.
Now I’m old, it’s less interesting. America, I’m told, has only one class: the middle.
But doesn’t a middle need the stuff it’s the middle of — the above, the below, the left, the right, the front, the back?
Apparently not. We are, as it were, all middle. There are of course “the wealthy” (never called the rich — rich is a four-letter word) but they occupy a private stratosphere, they are above class, just as they are above paying taxes. “Upper class” is something Americans like to think only the British have. “Lower class” ditto. And the variant forms of lower-classness have vanished too. “Proletariat” was always a commie word. “Working people” sounds so old fashioned. “Labor” — I wonder how many kids, knowing no other connotation for the word, think Labor Day has something to do with having babies? As for “the working class” — haven’t heard of it for years. It probably died (in more ways than one) with the birth of Reaganomics.
I thought maybe my union, the United Auto Workers, could bring itself to talk about the working class, but no. The union magazine, Solidarity, does not use the term working class for its members. An article in the latest issue called “Rebuilding Middle Class is All About Priorities” does mention people who are able or unable to “work,” but uses the word “workers” only once: “the American middle class was built by workers’ struggles.” Evidently now that the middle class has been built, the workers and their struggles are no longer needed.
I used to dislike the phrase working class because it seemed to imply that the other classes all lay about on cushions doing nothing. The middle-class people I knew certainly worked for their living. But at different kinds of work than the working class, less physically consuming, and better paid; so that, however imprecise, the term indicated a real difference. Now even the distinction of blue collar/white collar workers seems to be out. Euphemisms abound. I wonder if terms such as “service industries” obscure discourse more than they clarify it.
Marx thought the workers of the world were going to inherit it, forming a classless society. Our speech now, and our speeches, imply that we live in such a classless society. But where are the workers?
Do we in fact all belong to what Marx called, with loathing and contempt, the bourgeoisie — those supported on the labor of the working people?
To attain a bourgeois standard of living was the so-called American Dream. Have we all achieved it?
Well, if we’re all middle class, I guess so. But I can’t help asking how come so many of us middle-class folks are looking for a job, month after month after month, till they drop us off the rolls so we don’t have to be counted as unemployed any longer? How come a school lunch is the only hot meal, or the only meal, a middle-class kid may get all day (and not on weekends and not all summer)? Why is the nice bourgeois house on the tree-lined street boarded up, lost to mortgage default? Aren’t middle-class young couples supposed to have 2.3 kids and a dog and two jobs and be doing better than daddy did? Don’t middle-class middle-aged people belong on the golf course, not waiting at the unemployment office? And what the hell are all those old bourgeois doing lined up at the Food Bank?
Well, it’s a hard thing to define, the middle class, and who belongs to it.
The only people who clearly can’t belong to the middle class, because they can’t possibly share the American Dream, because they are and can’t ever be Americans, are those illegal people that come across the border and live and work here for forty or fifty years and think their illegal kids ought to be educated by American taxpayers. Well they can just go back where they came from and take their brats and their shovels with them. We’ll dig our own ditches and educate our own kids. Yessirree. Just watch us doing it.
Denial is ingenious. One of its neat tricks is to up a bogey between you and a reality you don’t want to see, so you can fear, and control, the bogey, while it hides the uncontrollable reality.
Fear and hatred of a “communist threat” that never really threatened us led to the use of “socialist” as a bogey-word to blacklist any program for institutionalising social justice. Certain favored institutions and programs that operate essentially socialistically, such as Medicare or the Armed Forces, are exempt from the blacklist — militant patriotism and immediate self-interest do wonders with whitewash. But in most cases, the bogey, the specter of creeping socialism — a term that slithers all the way back past Reagan and Nixon to the so-much-admired Eisenhower — is invoked against any governmental program involving mutual social responsibility, and against any suggestion that the playing field isn’t level.
So, because those foreign unAmerican commie socialists talk about the working class, America can’t have a working class. Or working people. Or, for a very large number of us, work.
But who needs work? We’re all middle class — all living the American Dream.
— UKL 
25 May 2011
22. First Contact
May 2011
I have seen many rattlesnakes, I have eaten fried rattlesnake, but only once have I ever been in contact with a living rattler. Though contact is not the word I really want—it is metaphorical and inexact. We did not touch. Maybe it was communication, though of a very limited kind. As communication between alien species is perhaps doomed to be.
I have told the story often as a comedy, a story in which people behave ridiculously, with a happy ending. Here it is:
We were at the old ranch in the Napa Valley and I was just about to sit down on one of the 1932 iron chaise lounges (carefully, because if you sit too far toward the end, the whole unwieldy thing stands up and throws you off like a bronco) when I heard a noise I recognized. That was the first communication. It was the hissing buzz of the rattlesnake’s rattles. Startled by my movements, it was heading off into the high grass, rattling away. About 15 feet away it looked back, saw me looking at it, and stopped there, its head up and facing me and its gaze fixed on me. As mine was fixed on it.
I hollered for Charles. The rattler paid no attention. I believe they are deaf. I suppose they “hear” their own rattle as vibration in their body, not in the air.
Charles came out and we discussed the situation—not calmly. I said, “If he goes off into the high grass there, we’ll never dare walk out in the pasture the whole time we’re here.”
We thought we had to kill the rattlesnake. That’s what you do, generally, in the country, at a place where little kids come and run around.
Charles went and got the big heavy long-handled hoe my father called the Portugee hoe, with which rattlers had been killed before, by others. Not by us. Charles got close enough to strike.
The rattler and I had never taken our eyes off each other, or moved.
Charles said, “I can’t.”
I said, “I couldn’t either.”
“So what do we do?” we said.
The rattler was probably thinking the same thing.
“Go see if Denys is there?” Charles said.
I said, “I don’t think it’ll move so long as we keep staring at each other, so you go.”
And Charles went up the driveway and down the road a couple hundred yards to our only near neighbors, the Cazets. It took a while. All that while, the snake and I did not move and looked steadily into each other’s eyes. They say a snake’s gaze is hypnotic, but who was hypnotizing whom?
We were like people newly in love who “can’t take their eyes off each other.” This was not love, but it was something equally intense, and even more immediately a matter of life and death.
It is this brief time, five or six minutes I suppose, ten minutes at most, that over the years I have thought of again and again, always with the vividness of the moment and always with a sense of its importance, or import: of there being a great deal to learn from it.
During this time, the rattlesnake and I were alone together. Alone in all the world. We were held together by common fear—bonded. We were held in a spell—entranced.
This time was outside ordinary time, and outside ordinary feelings; it involved danger for both of us; and it involved a bond between creatures who do not and cannot ordinarily relate to each other in any way. Each would naturally try not to relate—to just get away—or to kill in self-defense.
In all these respects, I think it isn’t amiss to think of this time as sacred.
The sacred and the comic are not that far apart, something the Pueblo Indians seem to know better than most of us do.
Charles and Denys came panting down the driveway with the big galvanized garbage can and a piece of semirigid white plastic tubing about 15 feet long. Denys had the tube; he knew what to do because he’d done it before. A distinguished artist/author of children’s books, he was a year-rounder in the valley. And his house was on a pretty little property which, before the house was built, we used to call Rattlesnake Clearing.
The snake continued to look at me only and I at it only, while Denys set the garbage can down on its side with the opening facing the snake, maybe 20 feet from it and very visible to it. Then, coming quietly round behind it at full tube-length, he flicked the end of the tube near its head. That broke the spell. I looked away from the snake at the tube; the snake looked away from me at the tube and then flowed hurriedly away from the thing flicking about in the air behind it and made straight for the welcoming dark cave of the garbage can. It flowed right into it—at which Charles ran to upend the can, and clapped the lid on.
A mighty and wrathful commotion took place inside the can. It shivered and trembled and all but danced. We stood in awe and listened to the rage of a truly angry rattlesnake in an echo chamber. It finally quieted down.
“Now what?”
“Anywhere a good ways away from the house.”
“There’s the millionaire up at the end of the road,” said Denys. “I’ve turned several snakes loose up there.”
A pleasing thought. The millionaire was never there, nobody lived on his lovely hilltop. Excellent rattlesnake territory. The three humans and the garbage can all got in the car and drove up the road, the snake in the can making some vicious criticisms in a low, hissing buzz along the way. At the end of the road we got out and laid the can down, knocked the lid off with the invaluable plastic tube, and watched the split-second disappearance of the snake into a thousand acres of wild oats.
It was our garbage can, the one that still stands up at the top of the driveway where the garbage company can collect on Mondays. I have never looked at that can since, in all these years, without thinking of what it held, once.
A teaching, a blessing, may come in strange ways, ways we do not expect, or control, or welcome, or understand. We are left to think it over.
21. Beige
Beige is the only color I can think of that is used as a fashion sneer. “Everything she wears is beige,” with a falling, faintly snarling tone to the word. Or, more personally, “Oh she’s such a beige person...”
Of course you could say that beige is hardly a color at all. For a moment today I thought it wasn’t even a word.
When I want to write about anything that’s likely to be in the Oxford English Dictionary, I look it up there first. I have the cumbrous 2-vols.-w.-magnifying-glass edition. Cumbrous but invaluable. It tells you where the word came from and who first used it when and all kinds of good nerd stuff like that. So I looked it up – and it wasn’t there.
That had never happened to me before with the OED. It wasn’t there? A word wasn’t in the OED? Beige wasn’t in the dictionary?
Is the world coming to an end, word by word?
After I had sat awhile stunned, magnifying glass useless in my trembling hand, it occurred to me that after all, beige is a French word. The OED doesn’t list words in other languages, it can’t do everything, after all, and maybe beige was still considered foreign and printed in italics in England when the entry was made in the OED, perhaps years before its first edition in 1971 — yes, almost certainly, B being so early in the alphabet. And I’d heard the word in England pronounced very frenchly, behzh, not comfortably diphthonged into bayzh or bayge, as in America. So I put away the magnifying glass and tucked big fat Vol I back in its case and took down the French-English dictionary next to it.
I have to admit it was a relief to find beige right where it ought to be. “Beige, adj. [f. It. bigio] Beige, natural; serge ~, serge of undyed wool; une robe ~, a beige frock.”
Frock? Ah yes. The Concise Oxford French Dictionary is British too... But since its first definition of beige (in French) is beige (in English), the 1952 COFD had got a jump on the 1971 OED.
I liked the second definition, “natural,” and the mention of undyed wool. But before pursuing these I wanted to find out about bigio, so I took down my Hoare’s Italian Dictionary (a classic, and the source of the classic question, What does she need a dictionary for?) and looked it up. Bigio means grey. It is the basis of the name of several Italian birds, dimishing sweetly as they go: A warbler is una bigia, a black-cap is una bigiola, a whitethroat is una bigiarella. Bigiolino (the little grey one) is an edible fungus, and bigiolone (the big grey one) is a fungus which I expect you’d better not try eating because Hoare doesn’t say anything about edible.
The Italian word for grey that I knew was grigio, so I looked it up too and there it was; but no birds or mushrooms. I don’t have a real Italian-Italian dictionary, which might distinguish usages, so it’s just my guess that grigio might be the “colder” kind of grey that shades into blue, and bigio the “warmer” kind shading off towards tan. Chalk pastels come in these two distinct kinds of grey, with a full range from light to dark in each; and you need both, cold for sky, warm for earth.
So, after this little trip to Europe, back to beige in English. My original reason for writing about it was: Why is it looked down upon? Why is it used as a sneer-word?
Its use in English is mostly for clothes and wall paint. And I guess, in clothes and wall paint, it’s hard to make a statement in beige. You need screaming lime, or hot fuchsia, or stark black. Beige avoids making statements. It turns away and murmurs; you can barely hear it. It’s an introverted color. Unadventurous. Uneventful. Dull.
The reason I got thinking about it was that I realised about half my clothes are either beige or very near it, and most of the rest (leaving out an enclave of bluejeans and blue t-shirts) are black, which goes well with beige. I hate the Spring catalogues that come out thirty seconds after Xmas with all the pretty sherbet pastels and the bright redwhiteandblues and the lilac polka dots and there won’t ever be any hope of anything beige until next October and then they’ll probably be off on one of their screaming lime kicks again.
If I had black or brown skin I still wouldn’t go for screaming lime, but I’d be a sucker for crimsons and scarlets and golds. I love the colors and they’d look good on me. If. But they don’t, because my skin is beige. Most of the year it’s a kind of fishy, pallid beige; sometimes in summer by sitting in the sunshine the way the dermatologists say we must never never do, I achieve a warmer tone, a feebly reddish speckled tan, like a farm egg. Never more than that.
So, do I wear beige as camouflage – to make me disappear?
I think it’s the other way round. I think it’s because if I wear scarlet or screaming lime, that’s when I disappear — all you can see is the clothes. Grigio hair, bigio skin, pouf – gone – dimmed to invisibility. Real camouflage. If I wanted to be seen, I’d have to take off all my gorgeous lime and scarlet clothes and appear in my natal, naked beigeness. That would be a statement, I guess.
So what did I want to say about the color? Was I just being defensive about my skin and my clothes? There was something more than that. A positive feeling. A defense of beige itself. A real liking for that range of color – the bigios, the gentle, subtle, lively earth colors. The color of unbleached, undyed wool. The dun of a dun horse. The color (aside from the black and white and pink etc. of their markings and decorations) of the feathers of sparrows and towhees and finches and quail and robins and phoebes .... a sort of default feather color. The tan or dun or light brown of many lovely, common kinds of wood. The color of many rocks — sandstones, volcanic ash, beach sand. The color of very old paper. The soft color of dust.
— UKL 
22 April 2011
PS. After writing all that, I remembered that at the end of my 2-vol OED is a Supplement of newer (or dirtier) words that didn’t get into the first edition. So I looked for beige in the Supplement, and there it was, yessirree, at least two inches of it in agate type. All interesting, including the fact that it was an undyed cloth before it was a color, but not really adding anything to what I wanted to say here, except for defining it as “yellowish grey.”
I’m still thinking about whether I agree with that or not. Yellowish? I’d be inclined to call beige a light brownish grey or greyish brown, or a shade between grey and dun. But perhaps, without the very faint hint of a yellowish tone, it would shade off into greige? Greige is, I believe, a strictly English-language word, made up by textile and fashion people, and a nice one, too: exact, expressive. I’d like to have a greige silk jacket right now. Come on, catalogues, enough with the screaming lime.
The Painful Slow Process of Creating Utopia
Guest post by Mona Elnamoury
From my point of view, it is hard to find the revolution, half revolution or even the counter-revolution in Egypt these days. The brief idealistic utopian moment seems to be fading away in the background. What you actually find is politics in action: all the tactics, maneuvers, secret/public deals, interests talking. Where are the rebels? They are still trying to gather forces every Friday in Tahrir Square asking for the rest of the true Egyptians’ fair demands. But you know what ? As I wrote that phrase “true Egyptians’ fair demands” I wondered a great deal. Who are the true Egyptians and what are their demands? The crystal moment of the liberation night where we all wanted the same thing and looked at the same direction is somehow dimmed. The rebels, my husband, and I together with the educated people want a free Egypt capable of keeping its wonderful history together with a reaching promising future. The religious political movements want more power. However, millions of the hard-working toiling people want economic security and a return to normalcy. Somehow, we want that too together with the lacking general national security. The police is still not in full control again after the famous shameful retreat and setting prisoners free followed by setting the police stations on fire on 28th of January. Thugs are still on the streets committing many kinds of crimes. Serious children kidnappings are taking place. (My heart sinks as I see my children to their school bus everyday!) Traffic offences are being committed all the time. The police does very little about them all. Something went very wrong between the ordinary people and the Egyptian police officer. Their relation is more wrong than the oppressive relation they used to have before: it is suspicious and careless.
Though the violence may no be more serious than it could be on the nights of New York, this chaos in the security situation is all newly and surprisingly becoming real to us. Before, we vaguely knew what danger and from which direction, but now it is very possible that we are shooting in the dark.
The Council of Armed Forces, which is actually ruling the country now, is still acting suspiciously slowly leaving the previous big wigs to sort things out before arresting them under public pressure! The next rebellious move should be against the army from inside the army, I guess.
I feel people are tired. And though we all enjoyed a new democratic trait in the recent referendum over the constitution, oddly enough there seems to be a vague fatigue of the new issues of freedom and responsibility amid this chaos. Even my 8-year-old daughter wants everything to be settled soon as she is afraid she should study all these long messy details in history books in the coming years !
I still count on the Friday demonstrations to bring out the genuine spirit of utopia again. I am still mysteriously optimistic. We had reached the lowest lowest bottom of it before in the final months of Mubarak’s rule. Surely we are rising, no matter how slowly that is happening.
Mona Elnamoury
Mona Elnamoury is Egyptian and is a correspondent of UKL. Her guest blogs begin with an eyewitness account of Liberation Night in Tahrir Square.
11 April 2011
20. Unfacts Concerning the Google (Un)Settlement
Part 2
Continuing, and I hope ending, my discussion of certain often-repeated misunderstandings and misinterpretations of issues related to the Google Book Settlement and copyright:
Unfact: The failure of the Google Settlement spells the end of the “Alexandrian” dream of a great digital library open to all.
Fact: It does nothing of the kind. By denying Google its bid for total control, it may well make that dream more possible.
Discussion: Supporters of the Google digitalization project appear to believe that a private, for-profit corporation is the likeliest agency to establish and maintain a universal, free, public library. This is a leap of faith I cannot make.
Supporters have often spoken as if Google’s archiving project were the only one, on which therefore all hope depends. Surely they are aware of other ongoing digitalization projects that have no corporate strings attached and whose purposes and policies are open to view — such as Project Gutenberg.[i]
Yet, however impressive volunteer projects such as Gutenberg may be, I can’t help thinking that it’s the United States Government that should be founding and operating a digital archive/library, exactly as they founded and maintain the Library of Congress.
The project should be a Digital Library of Congress — using the skills and meeting the standards maintained by our national public library, and funded by Congress for the good of the American people. (If other countries develop such digital libraries, they can all meet on the Internet, in the greatest Alexandrian Library ever.)
Given the know-nothing, starve-the-poor-to-stuff-the rich rant now prevalent in Congress, it’s easy to dismiss such hope as mere wishful blither and say that we should give the job to the people who can do the job... That is, hand it to a hugely successful profit-making corporation dealing in information technology, which has proved its indifference to copyright law and its eagerness to control both the content and the availability of every book ever published in America?
I haven’t an awful lot of faith or hope in Congress, but given the choice, I’ll take Congress over Google, hands down.
(Just as I’ll take Google over Amazon, if it ever comes to that.)
Unfact: “Fair Use” is a clearly defined and clearly understood concept, which Google has observed scrupulously in its digitalization project, by delivering only “snippets” not full texts of copyrighted material.
Fact: It is even harder to determine precisely what Fair Use is than to determine than what “snippets” are.
Some useful definitions of Fair Use:
The primary definition, obviously, is the one supplied by the United States Copyright Office, copied below.[ii]
If you Google “Fair Use Definition,” Barron’s Law Dictionary has a useful discussion, and Wikipedia a long and interesting article.
Discussion: In my last blog, I stated what I recalled as the duration of copyright before the “Mickey Mouse” extensions. My Webmistress and friends at the SFWA emended this before the piece came out. Readers at BVC suggested further useful corrections, which then, in classic Internet fractal mode, led to anti-corrections, leading to hyper-corrections, and a whole wonderful garden of forking arguments, full of thorny niggles, and quibbles in full flower.
I fear what any attempt by me to define “Fair Use” might lead to. A Great Dismal Swamp, with a thousand opinions emerging like velvety green untrustworthy tussocks from the peat-black water... That’s where most discussions of Fair Use I’ve heard end up. I’m not going there.
I will stick to mere personal history, followed by a metaphor.
For decades, I or my agent have invoked Fair Use: either when I want to use a brief quote from a copyrighted book I’m reviewing or discussing or citing — or, conversely, when people ask my permission to use a quotation from my work. If they ask to reprint a whole poem or story, or use an excerpt of over a page or two, or a chapter of a book, then we request full and formal acknowledgment, including citation of the source and copyright information, and if their use of it encroaches on the salability of the original work, we ask a fee. If the quote is of a reasonable size (on the order of a few lines from a poem, a sentence or a paragraph from a story or book), I or my agent thank them and tell them they don’t need formal permission, because such use of a brief quote comes under the Fair Use provision of the rules of copyright; all we ask is that they say who wrote it and where it came from.
I believe that this process is exactly what the Copyright Office’s definition of Fair Use is intended to reinforce and expedite. Like so many not entirely precise definitions, it works fine — perhaps better than super-precise ones. It worked fine for me for forty years and is still working fine.
The problem comes when somebody, for whatever reason, redefines Fair Use to mean you can take pieces of any length out of a copyrighted work and do what you please with them without notifying or obtaining permission from the copyright owner, let alone arranging for appropriate compensation.
This irrational extension of a rational policy begins to reach Moebius-strip circularity when we find a corporation digitalizing an entire copyrighted book without permission and then invoking the doctrine of Fair Use to justify the procedure, since only portions of the book, called “snippets,” have so far been released onto the Internet.
It’s as if pirates captured a galleon as it sailed home from the Indies, then took a couple of sailors and a few pieces of eight from it, put them in a rowboat, and sent them home ahead of the ship.
Seeing it, the ship-owner shouts to the pirates, “Hey! You stole my ship!”
“Whatever do you mean?” say the pirates. “It’s just a little snippet of a rowboat and we didn’t steal it, it’s all yours.”
“But where is my ship?” cries the owner.
“Ship?” say the pirates. “What ship? Oh, that galleon? That’s ours. We digitalized it. See the skull and crossbones?”
[i] Project Gutenberg is a non-profit volunteer project that has for four decades been digitalizing texts that were never copyrighted or are out of copyright. As of December 2009, it was offering 34,000 items and adding fifty new e-books a week — mostly in English, mostly literary. The copyright status of all these titles has been ascertained and recorded. The Project doesn’t claim new copyright on titles in the public domain, as some digitizers do; but, if the Project Gutenberg trademark is used, certain restrictions apply — the text is not to be changed, or used for commercial purposes. (To evade these restrictions, all a user who wants to censor, alter, mash-up, or try to sell the text has to do is omit the header and trademark.) The few copyrighted texts so far included in the Project are distributed with permission of the copyright holder, and are subject to whatever restrictions the copyright holder may specify. PG texts are fully accessible (not the so-called “snippets” offered by Google) and are checked for completeness and accuracy.
The Project was started by Michael Hart in 1971. It is operated through the Internet by volunteers. In 2000 it affiliated with Distributed Proofreaders (DP), greatly increasing the number of volunteers and texts. A non-profit corporation, Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, handles the project’s legal needs and receives tax-deductible donations.
[ii] Definition of Fair Use from the Copyright Office:
“One of the rights accorded to the owner of copyright is the right to reproduce or to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. This right is subject to certain limitations found in sections 107 through 118 of the copyright law (title 17, U. S. Code). One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of “fair use.” The doctrine of fair use has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years and has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.
Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:
1. 1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. 2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. 3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. 4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work
The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.
The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”
Copyright protects the particular way authors have expressed themselves. It does not extend to any ideas, systems, or factual information conveyed in a work.
The safest course is always to get permission from the copyright owner before using copyrighted material. The Copyright Office cannot give this permission.
When it is impracticable to obtain permission, use of copyrighted material should be avoided unless the doctrine of fair use would clearly apply to the situation. The Copyright Office can neither determine if a certain use may be considered fair nor advise on possible copyright violations. If there is any doubt, it is advisable to consult an attorney.
FL-102, Reviewed November 2009.”
— UKL 
5 April 2011
19. Unfacts Concerning the Google (Un)Settlement
In discussions concerning the Google Book Settlement — and now Judge Chin’s ruling against it — I keep running into the same misunderstandings over and over.
Some of these are simply mistaken ideas of what copyright is and does. Most of them naturally arise from the very complicated nature of the issues. All have been perpetuated by inaccurate, confusing, tendentious language.
I’ll cite these “unfacts” as I come upon them and have time to discuss them. I welcome corrections of factual mistakes and will revise to include them. My opinions are just that, my opinions.
1. Unfact: Everybody who opposed the Google Book Settlement hates Google and everything it stands for and wants to destroy the Evil Corporation root and branch and go back to carving runes on rocks.
Fact: Most of us who opposed the Settlement use Google all the time. Whatever misgivings we may have about corporate control of information, Google’s performance in offering access to information without strings attached has so far been admirable and immensely impressive. And most of us strongly favor the idea of a free digital library.
The problem is that Google saw fit to defy copyright law by digitalizing works without permission from the copyright holders.
Discussion: I don’t understand why Google did what they did. If they’d just done it right — followed their own motto “Don’t be evil!”
I know... the Library of Alexandria consisted mostly of stolen books taken by force from the libraries of subject cities. But in this case there was no need for theft. Many authors would gladly give permission for their out-of-print books to be included in a great free digital library (especially if it paid usage royalties, as European public libraries do). The harm came when Google began digitalizing works without permission, and thus attacking both copyright and moral right.
2. Unfact: Copyright is a selfish grab by rich, famous authors so they get to make all the profit out of their books.
Fact: Copyright is a limited and carefully designed law to protect authors from poverty. It allows authors control over the rights in their books, so that they, like any worker, can make what profit they can from their work.
It’s called “copy” right because it involves, literally, the right to make copies of the work.
An author contracting with a publisher sells the publisher a limited piece of her copyright: that is, the right to make copies (i.e., publish the work in a certain form for a certain period of time) in exchange for a share (usually 15% or less) of the publisher’s profits.
Discussion: Copyright has existed only since the 18th century. Till then, writers mostly lived by finding and sucking up to a rich patron. Since then, writers have been able to make an independent living... well, dependent on the whims of publishers — but after all, publishers and writers have pretty much the same stakes in the very chancy game of making books.
Only ignorance or irresponsibility dismiss copyright as “irrelevant to the Digital Age.” It’s needed more than ever, to protect authors from trying to live by selling themselves to corporations or selling their text space to advertisers. Copyright law has to be extended and rewritten to work with the new technologies of publishing. The notion that it’s unnecessary makes it all the harder to get that necessary work done.
A lot of people quote Stu Brand: “Information wants to be free.” I wonder why they hardly ever quote the other half of Stu’s sentence: “It also wants to be paid for.”
Information can be free to the user, the reader, and pay a living wage to the originator, the author: Think of the free Public Library.
This balance can extend to the Internet, if we can rewrite copyright law to cover the new technologies.
Sneers and sloganeering ain’t going to butter the beans. It will take hard and careful work. Can you imagine trying to explain to the current Speaker of the House how it might be done and why it’s important to do it?
3. Unfact: Out-of-print and out-of-copyright are the same thing. “Orphaned” books are out of print and out of copyright.
Fact: A book that is “out of print” is one which no publisher currently claims to have in print and available.
A book that is “out of copyright” is one whose copyright has expired. It is said to be “in common domain.” No one can own the rights — anyone can copy it, reprint it, etc. at will.
Out of print and out of copyright are entirely different things. Most books go out of print within a year or two, but their copyright goes on for decades.
An “orphaned” book means a copyrighted book whose copyright owner — author, or estate, or trust, or representative — can’t be located.
An orphaned book is usually out of print, but it is NOT out of copyright. It’s “orphaned” because the copyright owner can’t be located to send royalties to, or ask for permission to excerpt, copy, reprint, digitalize, etc.
Discussion: “Orphaned” books were always a problem in publishing, but didn’t become a huge problem until the recent grotesque extension of the period of copyright (called the Mickey Mouse Act because a lobby led by Disney Corp. strongarmed it through Congress.)
Copyright used to be 28 years, plus a 28-year extension at request. It is now the lifetime of the author plus 70 years (that could be 120 years!) — an indefensible crippling of the intention of the Copyright Act, which was to give living authors the rights and profits they’d earned, and then let the book go into “public domain” — become free to everybody.
Under Mickey Mouse, a huge number of books are going to end up orphaned — trapped in useless copyright.
It is (God help us!) up to Congress, with the guidance of the Justice Department, to figure out how “orphaned” books should be handled. The best first step would be to knock down the Mickey Mouse Act and return to a rational duration of copyright. If this is unthinkable, perhaps the Copyright Office should be enabled to declare a copyright void if the copyright owner cannot be found — after a bona-fide search plus a period of say two years.
It’s a real problem. But it has nothing to do with Google’s illegally digitalizing books without getting permission from the copyright owners.
The use of “orphaned” as if it meant “uncopyrighted” is an obstinate, unfortunate confusion of terms, clouding the whole debate: and many of those who have used it that way surely know better.
And the sneakiest gambit is that of talking as if only orphaned books are being illegally digitalized. All the time the Settlement has been in the courts, Google has been blithely going ahead digitalizing any book it wanted without obtaining permission, let alone contractual terms. (I can attest to this, since they have thus pirated several of my books, with no attempt whatever to contact the publishers, my agent, or myself — none of whom are exactly hard to locate.)
Such methodical theft looks like more than corporate indifference to the law. It looks like a deliberate effort to destroy copyright. In other words, the corporation would like to do away with the concept of workers getting a fair share of the profit from their work.
That would “be good” for the corporation. Not good for the worker, the writer — or for readers, or for anybody else.
— UKL 
28 March 2011
18. To my Readers in Japan
I wrote my translator-friend Akemi Tanagaki in Tokyo a brief email note. She answered,
“Thank you for your concern.
I’m all right and my family is all right.
Only we feel so sad, helpless and worried.”
And she asked if I would put a brief and simple message on my site for my readers in Japan — “but I know that it is very difficult to find words with which to talk to those suffering very much.”
Yes, dear Akemi, it is difficult, it is impossible. But I am honored by your asking me to try.
To My Japanese Readers:
There is an ocean between us, yet that ocean joins us.
The great tsunami that struck Japan travelled on, growing weaker, until it came to the west coast of America. Here it did little harm. But with that wave came to us the great wave of your grief and suffering.
I hope you know that there are many, many people here who are thinking of you now, and crying for you, and praying that the worst will soon be past.
I admire, more than I can say, the quiet courage the ordinary people of Japan have shown amidst so much loss, suffering, and fear. Your strong and patient faces are beautiful to see. I look at them and cry. I wish you strength and the hope of better days.
With love, 
Ursula 
14 March 2011
17. Would You Please Fucking Stop?
March 2011
I keep reading books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked. The imagination involved is staggering. I mean, literally.
There was one novel I read where the novelist didn’t only make all the fucking characters say fuck and shit all the time but she got into the fucking act herself, for shit sake. So it was full of deeply moving shit like “The sunset was just too fucking beautiful to fucking believe.”
I guess what’s happened is that what used to be a shockword has become a noise that’s supposed to intensify the emotion in what you’re saying. Or maybe it occurs just to bridge the gap between words, so that actual words become the shit that happens in between saying fucking?
Swearwords and shockwords used to mostly come out of religion. Damn, damn it, hell, God, God-damned, God damn it to hell, Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ Almighty, etc. etc. A few of them appeared, rarely, in nineteenth-century novels, usually as —— or more bravely as By G—! or d—n! (Archaic or dialect oaths such as swounds, egad, gorblimey were printed out in full.) With the twentieth century the religious-blasphemy oaths began to creep, and then swarm, into print. Censorship of words perceived as “sexually explicit” was active far longer. Lewis Gannett, the book reviewer for the old NY Tribune, had a top-secret list of words the publisher had had to eliminate from The Grapes of Wrath before they could print it; after dinner one night Lewis read the list out loud to his family and mine with great relish. It couldn’t have shocked me much, because I recall only a boring litany of boring words, mostly spoken by the Joads no doubt, on the general shock level of titty.
I remember my brothers coming home on leave in the Second World War and never once swearing in front of us homebodies: a remarkable achievement. Only later, when I was helping my brother Karl clean out the spring, in which a dead skunk had languished all winter, did I learn my first real cusswords, seven or eight of them in one magnificent, unforgettable lesson. Soldiers and sailors have always cursed—what else can they do? But Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead was forced to use the euphemistic invention fugging, giving Dorothy Parker the chance, which naturally she didn’t miss, of cooing at him, “Oh, are you the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck?”
And then came the sixties, when a whole lot of people started saying shit, even if they hadn’t had lessons from their brother. And before long all the shits and fucks were bounding forth in print. And finally we began to hear them from the lips of the stars of Hollywood. So now the only place to get away from them is movies before 1990 or books before 1970 or way, way out in the wilderness. But make sure there aren’t any hunters out in the wilderness about to come up to your bleeding body and say “Aw, shit, man, I thought you was a fucking moose.”
I remember when swearing, though tame by modern standards, was quite varied and often highly characteristic. There were people who swore as an art form—performing a dazzling juncture of the inordinate and the unexpected. It seems weird to me that only two words are now used as cusswords, and by many people used so constantly that they can’t talk or even write without them.
Of our two swearwords, one has to do with elimination, the other (apparently) with sex. Both are sanctioned domains, areas like religion where there are rigid limits and things may be absolutely off-limits except at certain specific times or places.
So little kids shout caca and doo-doo, and big ones shout shit. Put the feces where they don’t belong!
This principle, getting it out of place, off-limits, the basic principle of swearing, I understand and approve. And though I really would like to stop saying “Oh shit” when annoyed, having got on fine without it till I was 35 or so, I’m not yet having much success in regressing to “Oh hell” or “Damn it.” There is something about the shh beginning, and the explosive t! ending, and that quick little ih sound in between . . .
But fuck and fucking? I don’t know. Oh, they sound good as curses too. It’s really hard to make the word fuck sound pleasant or kindly. But what is it saying?
I don’t think there are meaningless swearwords; they wouldn’t work if they were meaningless. Does fuck have to do with sex primarily? Or sex as male aggression? Or just aggression?
Until maybe 25 or 30 years ago, as far as I know, fucking only meant one kind of sex: what the man does to the woman, with or without consent. Now both men and women use it to mean coitus, and it’s become (as it were) ungendered, so that a woman can talk about fucking her boyfriend. So the strong connotations of penetration and of rape should have fallen away from it. But they haven’t. Not to my ear, anyhow. Fuck is an aggressive word, a domineering word. When the guy in the Porsche shouts “Fuck you, asshole!” he isn’t inviting you to an evening at his flat. When people say “Oh shit, we’re fucked!” they don’t mean they’re having a consensual good time. The word has huge overtones of dominance, of abuse, of contempt, of hatred.
So God is dead, at least as a swearword, but hate and feces keep going strong. Le roi est mort, vive le fucking roi.
The Center of Warmth in Tahrir Square
A Guest Post by Mona Elnamoury
It has been called the Republic of Tahrir Square, a place very much like Annares; everybody cooperates, no leader; everyone is a leader. Art and music and dramas and creativity and dreams are reborn there not for Egypt only but for humanity. It has been the center of warmth to all chilly Egypt during the last month of the Egyptian revolution. But what is the future of the revolution?
Finally it is coming true! 
Tahrir Square, Liberation Night, 11 February 2011
As a middle class Egyptian woman, I cannot say whether the revolution will stumble or fall; succeed or fail. As a university professor, I still find it hard to see exactly what may come next in Egypt’s future. No one can tell. But what I can surely tell is the fact that this revolution will never fail easily. The honest Egyptian people will simply die hard especially after they have tasted the joy of freedom and after they have known about the amount of corruption that has sucked their blood for so long . But let me summarize it in points because it is so complicated.
1. Who started the revolution were the middle class educated youth not the poor toiled people. I have previously wondered why the “Proles” never rebelled (to use Orwellian language). I know now. They are always too tired and too absorbed in the daily struggle for bread and the mere primitive basics of life to revolt. The comfortable youth; who had the luxury to read, discuss, surf the net, know different languages and think were the ones who started the revolution. They started it in the virtual world of the net and amazingly enough they had all the instructions on the net all the time. Then, everyone else followed: Moslem brotherhood, Christians, the workers, middle class families, rich people, university professors, the poor, and even some army officers. They could follow after the original youth broke their fright fear at last.
2. Thirty years of totalitarian ruling is enough to destroy two generations in many subtle ways. The intricate network of corruption that was gradually interwoven in Egypt over the last thirty years is Egypt’s greatest challenge now. It is so tough and widespread that it needs real perseverance and patience to “deconstruct” to use Professor Nasr Abo Zaid’s term: “deconstructing corruption”.
3. The old regime is still very much in power. As I have just mentioned, the network is widespread and the list of the people who need to be expelled out of the country is extremely large. Now I know how genius was the idea of “leaving Omelas” all together. It looks to me like the best answer now to this problem. I am not sure how many Egyptians will be left if — theoretically speaking — the corrupt ones were forced to leave. In fact, I think that somehow we have all been infected by this corruption either by participating or by being silent or finally despairing. So, the old regime is still in power working, hiding facts, manipulating with people’s minds again; trying all the time to figure out new ways to survive.
4. The relationship between the people and the army is ambivalent. There is an unacceptable slowness in carrying out the demands of the young people; namely:
   * Changing all the current temporary government because it is actually the tail of the old government and forming a new cabinet. (They give that one month)
   * Discharging all the local councils and all the governmental universities’ presidents and all the deans.( in 1 month)
   * Setting free all the political prisoners.( in 1 month)
   * Presenting all the ones responsible for the violence and killings of the last events to quick trials.( in 1 month)
   * Deconstructing/reconstructing the Interior Ministry (police) in 1 month
   * Presenting all the corrupt ones to trial and bringing the hundreds of stolen billions back to the country.
   * Having a seriously transparent and democratic presidential elections in 6 months.
These are the basic demands. From the side of the revolution, they seem fair and easy to accomplish. But why they are not? We cannot frankly express our concerns about the army performance not out of fear but out of cautious wisdom. The army might be the last ally to the people and it has always been honorably biased to them. So, should we totally lose it with no serious evidence? Also, we know that it is being cornered. There is the burning Libyan border, the unrest down in the Nile Basin countries, the everlasting threat from Israel in the east, the daily strikes in many places all over the country, unstable economy, and finally the countless corruption cases pouring on their heads every day. The army is faced with terrible inheritance. Can one actually totally dismiss that some of its sectors might have been touched by corruption too?
So, all in all, we are having a state of half a revolution! Again, you can count on the people; the youth who have decided to camp in Tahrir Square since last Friday till the demands are carried out. They have not been nicely treated by the tired army neither are they exactly accepted by many ordinary worried Egyptians who misunderstand their intentions or wish to see normal life back. There is the fear that the homeless hungry people may rebel against the rebels if the economic situation keeps deteriorating (which is one way to explain the term ‘counter-revolution’).
One last feminine thing; it has been extremely difficult to be a mother during that month. You are either the mother of a young man/woman or a child. If you belong to the first category you can either have him/her in Tahrir square in spite of your fears and tears fighting for the freedom of their country and getting the near risk of losing their lives or one of the eyes at least. Or, you may have the kid at home safe and sound in front of TV but despicable and shameful. If the mother of a child, you had to explain what was going on in the best way you could (and sometimes it was just impossible) and at the same time you had to keep the child away from all the tension on TV or outside when the runaway prisoners (freed by the old regime to terrorize the people) and thugs filled the streets. Most important of all, you had to keep the faith and the hope and the smile to give them to everyone. I used to figure myself in the center of the warmth of Tahrir Square when it was cold and grey enough for everyone. Only then, the colors became bright again.
Keep your fingers crossed for Egypt.
— Mona Elnamoury 
2 March 2011
16. Uniforms
February 2011
The United States went to war with Germany and Japan when I was a kid of 11. One of the things I remember is how—overnight, it seemed to me—the streets of Berkeley filled up with uniforms. All during the war, men in civvies were in the minority downtown. But the uniforms didn’t bring uniformity into the city. If anything, they were an improvement on the drab, same-old clothing of the end of the Great Depression.
The army and army air force wore khaki in various shades of brown, greenish, and tan: handsome jackets, creased pants, shined black shoes, all very trim. But never quite a match for the navy uniforms, the gobs in their white tunics and pants and little round white hats in summer, and in winter blue wool tunics with a sailor collar and pants with a 13-button, square flap fly, I kid you not. Cute little round butts looked terrific in that uniform. And the officers in their crisp white or navy blue, gold buttons, gold braid, were a breed apart, sharp as tacks. There were no Marine bases near Berkeley that I know of, anyway we didn’t see Marines around much, but they looked quite grand in the newsreels.
My brother Clif’s ship was commissioned in San Francisco Harbor and we went to the ceremony: a fine show, formal, traditional, embellished by those dandy dress uniforms. The men looked terrific lined up there on the deck, all blue and white and gold in the sun. What boy wouldn’t want to look like that, and be seen looking like that by everybody?
A uniform, ever since the eighteenth century, when they first really started inventing them, has been known as a powerful aid to recruitment.
I can’t say that that was true for the uniforms women got handed in WWII. They imitated the men’s, of course, with skirts instead of pants, but were poorly designed, the taut, snappy look becoming tight and stiff on women; even granted the severe rationing of cloth, the uniforms were unnecessarily skimpy, prim, and awkward. I certainly wouldn’t have joined the WAVES or the WAC for the uniform, only in spite of it. Fortunately for the WAVES, the WAC, and me, I was 15 when the war ended.
During the next several American wars, the whole concept of the uniform evolved away from good fit and good looks toward a kind of aggressively practical informality, or sloppiness, or slobbishness. By now our soldiers are mostly seen in shapeless, muddy-looking spotted pajamas.
This uniform may be useful and comfortable in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Afghanistan. But do men need camouflage when flying from Reno to Cincinnati, or combat boots on Fifth Avenue? I guess soldiers still have dress uniforms—I know the Marines do, they seem to put them on way more often than the other services, maybe because they get so many photo ops in D.C.—but I can’t remember when I last saw an army private on the street looking sharp.
I know that for many boys and men, camo has taken on the glamour that a handsome uniform once had. Grotesque as it appears to me, it looks manly and fine to them. So I guess the uniform still serves as an aid to recruitment, luring the boy who wants to wear it, look like that, be that soldier. And I don’t doubt that young men wear it with pride.
But I wonder very much about the effect of the camo-pajama uniform on most civilians. I find it not only degrading but disturbing that we dress up our soldiers in clothes suitable to jail or the loony bin, setting them apart not by looking good, looking sharp, but by looking like clowns from a broken-down circus.
This whole change in style of uniforms may be part of a change in our style of war, and with it a changed attitude toward service in the military. Possibly it reflects a newly realistic opinion of war, a refusal to glamorize it. If we cease to see war as an inherently noble and ennobling thing, we cease to put the warrior on a pedestal. Handsome uniforms then seem a mere parade, a false front for the senseless brutality of behavior in war. So “fatigues” can be grossly utilitarian, with no thought for the appearance or self-esteem of the wearer. Anyhow, now that most war is waged not between armies but by machines killing civilians, what’s the meaning of a military uniform at all? Didn’t the child dead in the ruins of a bombed village die for her country just as any soldier does?
But I can’t believe the army thinks that way, that it’s making uniforms ugly in order to encourage us to think war is ugly. Perhaps the fatigue uniform reflects an attitude they aren’t conscious of and would never admit, a change less in the nature of war than in our national attitude to it, which is neither glamorizing nor realistic but simply uncaring. We pay very little attention to our wars or to the people fighting them.
Right or wrong, in the 1940s we honored our servicemen. We were in that war with them. Most of them were draftees, some quite unwilling ones, but they were our soldiers and we were proud of them. Right or wrong, since the 1950s and particularly since the 1970s, we began putting whichever war was on at the moment out of sight and out of mind, and with it the men and women fighting it. These days they’re all volunteers. Yet—or therefore?—we disown them. We give them pro forma praise as our brave defenders, send them over to whichever country we’re fighting in now, keep sending them back over, and don’t think about them. They aren’t us. They aren’t people we really want to see. Like the people in jails, the people in loony bins. Like clowns that aren’t funny, from a third-rate circus we wouldn’t think of going to.
 
Now shall we talk about how much we pay, how we are bankrupting our future, to keep that circus going?
No. That’s not something we talk about. Not in Congress. Not in the White House. Not anywhere.
15. Footnote to my Egypt Blog Post
No, Obama didn’t do what W wudda done, and I’m sorry I got all despondent and impatient because he seemed to be so slow, undecided, and halfhearted in doing what he shudda done.
And he is currently doing what he oughta do, it seems, in the Bahrain situation.
Yes, we have no right to run the affairs of other nations. But we do it. We can’t pretend that we don’t carry decisive weight in the affairs of a country like Bahrain. What’s the good of the elephant pretending that it’s not in the room?
What behooves the elephant is to move its feet very, very carefully, use its trunk with delicacy, be patient and restrained as befits its great size and strength, and above all, never go into musth.
— UKL 
21 February 2011
13. The Horsies Upstairs
January 2011
On the eve of Christmas Eve the family was all out in the forest where my daughter and son-in-law and three dogs and three horses and a cat live. Three of them live in the horse barn and the pasture at the top of the hill, five of them in the log-cabin-style house at the bottom of the hill, and one of them in great style in a studio cottage with a heating pad all her own, which in winter she deserts only to hunt mice in the woods. That afternoon it was raining, as it had been all December, so everybody was inside, and the kitchen-living-dining room was pretty full of people, the eldest 83 and the youngest 2.
The two-year-old, Leila, was visiting with her mother and her step-aunt from Toronto. Seven of us had come over for the afternoon, and six were staying there—the hosts upstairs, the Torontans in the study, and one hardy soul out in the trailer. (There is no bed in the studio cottage, and Mimi does not share her heating pad.) The dogs were circulating freely among us and there were many good things to eat, arousing much interest in the dogs. For anybody as young as Leila, it must have seemed pretty crowded and noisy and full of strangers and strangeness, but she took it all in with bright eyes and sweet equanimity.
That morning, when it stopped raining for a while, she had gone up the long, steep driveway with the women to the horse barn and riding ring. They played with pretty Icelandic Perla, and Hank, who stands a stalwart 10 hands high and is convinced of his authority as the only horse (as opposed to mare) on the premises. Leila sat in the saddle in front of Aunty Cawoline on Melody, the kind, wise, old cutting horse, and very much enjoyed her riding lesson. When Mel picked up her pace, Leila bounced up and down, up and down, and softly sang “Twot! Twot! Twot! Twot!” round and round the ring.
So then, that afternoon, indoors, at some point among the various conversations, somebody said it would be dark before you knew it. And somebody else said, “Pretty soon we’d better go up and feed the horses.”
Leila took this in. Her eyes grew a little brighter. She turned to her mother and asked in a small hopeful voice, “Are the horsies upstairs?”
Her mother gently explained that the horsies were not up in the loft but up in the pasture at the top of the hill. Leila nodded, a little disappointed perhaps, but acceptant.
And I carried her question away with me to smile over and to ponder.
It was both charming and logical. In Toronto, in the limited world of a two-year-old, when somebody talked of going “up,” it would almost always mean “upstairs.”
And to Leila the log-walled house, which is very tall though not really very large, must have seemed immense, labyrinthine, unpredictable, with its doors and staircases and basement and loft and porch, everything unexpected, so that you enter the back door at ground level, walk through the house, and go down a long flight of steps to get to ground level . . . Leila had probably been up the loft stairs to the bedroom only once, if at all.
Anything could be up those stairs. Melody, Perla, and Hank could be there. Santa Claus could be there. God could be there.
How does a child arrange a vast world that is always turning out new stuff? She does it the best she can, and doesn’t bother with what she can’t until she has to. That is my Theory of Child Development.
I wrote a short story once, all of which was true, about going to a conference on the Northern California coast among the redwoods and having not the faintest idea I’d ever seen the place, the cabins, the creek, before—until I was told, and realized it was true, that I’d lived there for two intense weeks of two summers—that this very place was Timbertall, the summer camp my friends and I went to when we were 13 and14.
At that age, absolutely all I had noticed enough to remember about the location of Timbertall was that we all got on a bus and rode north for hours and hours talking the whole way, and got off, and were there. Wherever there was. There was where we were. With the creek, and the cabins, the huge stumps, the high dark trees, and us, still talking, and the horses.
Oh, yes, there were horsies up there too. That’s why we were there. That was what mattered, at that age.
I was a kid who, thanks to a wooden jigsaw puzzle of the U.S.A., had the states fairly well located, and had been taught enough geography to acquire some notion of continents and nations. And I knew the redwood country was north of Berkeley, because my parents had driven with me and my brother up that coast when I was nine, and my father was always clear about compass directions.
And that was all I knew at 14 about where Timbertall was, and all I cared to know.
I am appalled by my ignorance. Yet it had its own logic. I didn’t have to drive the bus, after all. I was a kid, carted around by adults the ways kids are. I had an adequate arrangement of the world, a sufficient understanding of my position, for my needs at the time.
No wonder kids always ask, “Are we there yet?” Because they are there. It’s just the harried parents who aren’t, who have to have all this huge distance between things and have to drive and drive and drive to get to there. That makes no sense to a kid. Maybe that’s why they can’t see scenery. Scenery is between where they are.
It takes years to learn to live between, and thus to get the relationships between things arranged, to make sense of them.
It probably takes the weird adult human mind too. I think animals are where they are in the same way a baby is. Oh, they know the way between places, many of them, as no baby does, and far better than we do—horses for sure, if they’ve been over the ground once. Bees, if another bee dances it for them. Terns above the trackless ocean . . . Knowing the way, in that sense, is knowing where you are all the way.
At 14, unless I was in a very familiar place, I had very little idea where I was. More than Leila, but not that much more.
But at 14 I knew the horses were not in the loft bedroom. I knew Santa Claus was not at the North Pole. And I was giving a good deal of thought to where God might be.
 
Children have to believe what they are told. Willingness to believe is as necessary to a child as the suckling instinct is to a baby: a child has so much to learn in order to stay alive and in order to be human.
Specifically human knowledge is imparted largely through language, so first we have to learn language, then listen to what we’re told and believe it. Testing the validity of information should always be permitted and is sometimes necessary but may also be dangerous: the little one had better believe without running any tests that the stove burner could burn even when it isn’t red, that if you eat Gramma’s medicine you will be sick, that running out into the street is not a good idea . . . Anyhow there’s so much to be learned, it can’t all be tested. We really do have to believe what our elders tell us. We can perceive for ourselves, but have very little instinctive knowledge in how to act on our perceptions, and must be shown the basic patterns of how to arrange the world and how to find our way through it.
Therefore the incalculable value of true information, and the unforgivable wrongness of lying to a child. An adult has the option of not believing. A child, particularly your own child, doesn’t.
A scenario: Leila, instead of contentedly accepting the information, begins to wail in disappointment, insisting, “No, the horsies are upstairs! They are upstairs!” A softhearted grownup smiles and coos, “Yes, dear, the horsies are upstairs, all cuddled up in bed.”
This is a lie, though a tiny, silly one. The child has learned nothing, but has been confirmed in an existential misunderstanding which she’ll have to sort out somehow, sometime.
That up means up the stairs, up the hill, and a whole lot of other places too, and that its meaning may depend on where you are at the moment, is important information. A child needs all the help she can get in learning to take that vast variety of meanings into account.
Lying, of course, isn’t the same as pretending. Leila and a grownup might have a fine time imagining the horsies in the bedroom, with Hank hogging all the blankets and Perla kicking him and Mel saying, Where’s the hay? But for this to work as imagination, the child has to know that the horsies are in fact in the horse barn. In this sense, truth to fact, insofar as we know what fact is, must come first. The child has to be able to trust what she’s told. Her belief must be honored by our honesty.
 
I brought in Santa Claus for a reason. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way we handle him. We had Santa Claus in my family (in fact my mother wrote a lovely children’s book about Santa Claus in California letting his reindeer graze on the new winter clover). When I was a kid we read “The Night Before Christmas,” and we set out milk and cookies by the fireplace, and they were gone in the morning, and we all enjoyed it. People love pretense, and love ritual, and need both. Neither of them is counterfactual. Santa Claus is an odd, quirky, generally benign myth—a real myth, deeply involved in the ritual behaviors of the one great holiday we still have left. As such I honor him.
Very early in my life, like most kids, I think, I could distinguish “Pretend” from “Real,” which means I knew myth and fact were different things and had some sense of the no-man’s land that lies between the two. At any age I can recall, if somebody had asked me, “Is Santa Claus real?” I would, I think, have been confused and embarrassed, blushed red in case it was the wrong answer, and said no.
I don’t think I missed anything not thinking Santa Claus was real the way my parents were real. I could listen out for reindeer hooves with the best of them.
Our kids had Santa Claus; we read the poem, and left milk and cookies out for him; and so do their kids. To me, that’s what’s important. That the bonding ritual be honored, the myth reenacted and carried forward in time.
When I was a kid and other kids started telling about “when they found out about Santa Claus,” I kept my mouth shut. Incredulity is unlovable. I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be lovable, but still incredulous when I hear people—adults!—mourning over the awful day they found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
To me what’s awful is not—as it is usually presented—the “loss of belief.” What’s awful is the demand that children believe or pretend to believe a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden short-circuiting of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth, actuality with ritual symbol.
Is what people grieve over the pain not of losing a belief but of realizing that somebody you trusted expected you to believe something they didn’t believe? Or is it that in losing literal belief in our fat little Father Christmas, they also lose love and respect for him and what he stands for? But why?
I could go on from here in several directions, one of them political. As some parents manipulate their children’s beliefs, however well-meaningly, some politicians play more or less knowingly on people’s trust, persuading them to accept a deliberately fostered confusion of actuality with wishful thinking and fact with symbol. Like, say, the Third Reich. Or Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom. Or Mission Accomplished.
But I don’t want to go there. I just want to meditate on the horsies upstairs.
Belief has no value in itself that I can see. Its value increases as it is useful, diminishes as it is replaced by knowledge, and goes negative when it’s noxious. In ordinary life, the need for it diminishes as the quantity and quality of knowledge increases.
There are areas in which we have no knowledge, where we need belief, because it’s all we can act on. In the whole area we call religion or the realm of the spirit, we can act only on belief. There, belief may be called knowledge by the believer: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” That’s fair, so long as it’s fair also to maintain and insist upon the difference, outside religion, between the two things. In the realm of science, the value of belief is nil or negative; only knowledge is valuable. Therefore, I don’t say I believe two plus two is four, or that the earth goes around the sun, but that I know it. Because evolution is an ever-developing theory, I prefer to say I accept it, rather than that I know it to be true. Acceptance in this sense is, I suppose, the secular equivalent of belief. It can certainly provide endless nourishment and delight for mind and soul.
I’m willing to believe people who say they couldn’t live if they lost their religious belief. I hope they’ll believe me when I say that if my intellect goes, if I’m left groping in confusion unable to tell the real from the imagined, if I lose what I know and the capacity to learn, I hope I die.
To see a person who’s lived only two years in this world seeking and finding her way in it, perfectly trusting, having her trust rewarded with truth, and accepting it—that was a lovely thing to see. What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day—from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.
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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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41. Literary Bests
The Award System. A while ago I was invited to choose, from a list of winners of a certain literary prize, “the three best works of American fiction of the last sixty years.” The three works that got the most votes from the invited voters would be announced as the three Best American Novels since 1950.
I’ve judged literary competitions or juried literary prizes pretty often. Every time I did it the responsibility seemed heavier, and so did my conscience. At first, this simple choice from a list seemed like it might be fun to do. But I found I couldn’t do it at all. The list was strong in well-known names and had some fine books on it, but it wasn’t the best sixty American novels since 1950. It was just a list of award winners, some excellent, many mediocre.
I wrote the director of the event explaining my inability to participate, and got back a kind and unreproachful letter. It was both reassuring and troubling to find that he understood my feelings. He asked, off the record, if I ignored the prescribed list of prize winners and picked any three American novels as my choice of the best of the last sixty years, could I do that?
I had to think hard, and I had to say no.
I found that I don’t believe there are three “best” works of American (or any) fiction of the last sixty years. Or ten “best.” Or a hundred. Several hundred? That’s more like it.
There are a whole lot of good writers and good novels. Yes, OK, there’s even more mediocre and bad fiction. So what?
Some good novels are outstandingly good. And I have my favorites, sure. All of us do. That means that they’re my best, or your best, but “the best”?
Maybe within one narrow genre, or a few years, a general agreement on the favorites might show up: but within a few years the results would probably be quite different.
Not long ago, in a vast poll of British novel-readers, The Lord of the Rings came out on top. I was delighted — the vote was such a lovely smack in the eye for trendy snobs and ignorant pedants. But I didn’t believe for a moment that it meant The Lord of the Rings was the best English novel ever written. That would be incredibly naïve.
Yet it is what the award system, the “best” system, asks us to believe.
Voting is the dangerous but essential tool of democracy. In art, voting is dangerous without being essential. Often it’s not even appropriate. In art, even given a carefully selected jury of peers, there’s no way to guarantee that a vote reflects informed, unprejudiced judgment not influenced by fashion, faction, or mere personal quirk. Anybody who’s juried an award, or just argued about a book, knows that.
Novels and stories that a whole lot of readers, plus honest and serious teachers and critics, have continued to hold in esteem for over six decades are surely beginning to deserve the status of “excellent” or even that slippery and over-used adjective “great”. But there are so many different kinds of fiction, so many standards by which to judge a novel, so many ways in which one work may excel another — Whose judgment is so widely and deeply and disinterestedly informed that they can presume to say which handful of them are “the best”?
And when you’ve said it, what have you gained?
And what have you lost?
To say Don Quixote is the best Spanish novel is another way to say it’s the greatest Spanish novel. And when you’ve said it either way, where has it got you? Better to ask, as a good scholar, critic, teacher, asks: why and how is Don Quixote excellent? Why can every Spaniard quote from it? Why is it read and loved after 500 years? Those are real questions, useful questions, that can help lead a reader into and through the book.
Scholars, critics, and teachers who know how to ask and answer these questions are capable of making serious choices, of establishing a canon of literature. The danger they run in doing so is that they and others almost invariably believe their choice to be complete and immutable.
All canons of art are overly restrictive. And all of them are out of date before they are declared.
Used with great caution and suspicion, a literary canon, a list-of-the-best, may have some use in guiding and informing inexperienced readers, but I think probably it’s far more useful as a target of intelligent argument and dissent.
Literary awards are useless for guiding and informing and don’t even make good targets. In declaring a book as “the best,” a literary award serves that book. It does not serve literature. On the contrary, it does literature a considerable disservice.
Awards serve above all to supply commercial booksellers with a readymade commodity and lazy-minded readers, teachers, and librarians with a readymade choice. They needn’t pay attention to the books that didn’t win the prize, they needn’t exercise their own critical faculties, they don’t have to think, they can just order the prize book and believe they’re reading what’s “important.”
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The Idea of The Best. There really may be a best mouse trap or salad spinner, at least till a better one’s invented or the technology is improved. And certain inventions are more important than others. But what would be the sense or use in saying something or other is “the best” technological invention of the last year, or decade, or century? It’s a nice parlor game, but it has almost no intellectual or practical value.
Similarly, in art you might be able to pick one work as the best from a set of similar works of the same general period in the same genre. But, applied to a huge set, such as all the American novels of sixty years — or even one year — “the best” is a meaningless concept. You cannot usefully compare the excellence of oranges, eggplants, knives, hats, French poodles, and dreams.
The idea of “the best” is most comfortable in the sphere of measurable competitive activities — sports. Elsewhere it enforces a competitive attitude that is profoundly out of place.
Once, on a literary jury for a local award, I said I wished we could give the award to the whole excellent shortlist. A couple of the other jurors liked the idea, but one, a librarian, oddly enough, fought it tooth and nail: “Nobody would care if five or six people won,” she said. “Nobody gives a damn unless it’s a horserace. I certainly wouldn’t.”
She got her way, and we chose our one winner. But I left depressed and discouraged. Seabiscuit or Secretariat ran faster than the other horses, they won. A jury didn’t pick them out as “the best.” When you have a jury, it’s not a horserace. It’s a choice. And it may very well be quite arbitrary.
Awards are supposed to spur competitive excellence. But despite the theories of (almost universally male) critics and psychologists, the practice of art is not inherently a competitive activity. It can be made into one, of course. Male or cultural competitiveness often makes it into one. But I do not believe and see no evidence to prove that the passion to do something you have a gift for doing is originally driven by the need to excel or even to show off. Most people who have a gift work extremely hard at it, if they are able to, because the work is intensely, immediately, and reliably rewarding. You have to make a living, but art is very seldom a practical way of doing so. Most artists are in it for the satisfaction of knowing they’re doing, literally, the best thing they can do. In that sense of doing one’s best, and only in that sense, “the best” means something in art. To consider art as a competition to be “the best” is to miss the point.
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The Use of Literary Awards. I’m not saying literary awards should be done away with, or that they have no use at all — only that we shouldn’t take them as meaningful literary judgments.
There have been literary competitions ever since ancient Greece, and though they tend like all competitions to select the predictable, to favor work by men over work by women, and to become ingrown or corrupt, still they serve as spurs to artists who want or need spurring to do their best.
Competitions and awards arouse interest in the audience, even if it’s the kind of interest appropriate to a horse race — witness the hysteria of betting on some of the “big” literary awards — which brings much-needed money to artists and those who support or invest in their work. This is a service principally to the business of art, but also to its vitality in the culture.
And to an author, early in a career, an award can be a true and needed validation — a beautiful reward, like the Boss sings about. The first literary prizes I won, the Nebula and the Hugo, were beautiful rewards to me. They gave me strength by justifying both my trust in my readers and my trust in myself as a writer. They come from the science fiction community: one is awarded by writers, the other by readers. They are of value almost solely within that community. They are ignored or actively despised by those who institute themselves the guardians of capital-L Literature.
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Waste, Injustice, Ungenerosity. When it comes to capital-Literature, the prizes I’ve juried, awarded, or been awarded have left me increasingly uneasy about the arbitrariness and injustice of the choice and the arbitrary need to pick a single winner. Particularly with the “major” national prizes, the pleasure of award and recognition, given or received, is damaged and diminished by knowledge of how the system plays into the prejudice and exclusivism of a literary establishment or coterie, and the advertising machinery of the bookselling business. Praise becomes fame becomes commodification and so on round.
The “majorness” of the “major” awards is itself almost entirely arbitrary and factitious. Why has everybody heard of “the PEN/Faulkner,” while the other PEN awards go unknown and unnoticed? Are the jurors of one PEN prize somehow of ineffably higher calibre than the jurors of the others?
At least we know who they are. The jurors who pick the MacArthur “Genius” Awards are so ineffable, or so anxious about their corruptibility, or so afraid of the vengeance of disappointed non-geniuses, that they accept permanent anonymity. I think this is wrong. In fact I think it’s despicable. Anonymous judgment is a slap in the face of responsibility.
Then there is the waste factor. Of course a good book deserves recognition, but the one-winner-takes-all award ensures that the also-rans — all the good books on the shortlist — are pretty much dumped — forgotten. To name one winner is to create a whole slew of losers. Why? What good is that?
Survival of the fittest, sure, but you can overdo it. Would you shoot every horse in the race but the winner? “Best” book all too often comes to mean “only” book – of the month, the year, the decade…
How mean, how ungenerous we are! I wish that, instead of picking one and dumping all the rest, we celebrated our writers continually and in droves.
I wish we gave literary prizes freely, the way they used to give prizes at the Pet Show at Codornices Park in Berkeley when I was a kid. Every kid in the neighborhood brought their pet, and every pet got a prize, an ad hoc, unique prize: for Soulfulness — for Loud Meowing — for Unusual Spot Placement — for Being the Only Skink…. There was no Best of Breed (in those days there were many mongrels and few breeds), and certainly no Best of Show.
I‘d have some trust and interest in literary prizes like that. For Soulfulness — for Sitting Up and Begging Nicely — for Passion Well Expressed – for Excellent Use of Semi-Colons — for Being the Only Novel About Elderly Female Entomologists in Love….
You think literature would suffer, if prizes were given so freely? You think sharing praise diminishes its worth? You think good books are written in order to win huge advances and one-a-year prizes? Maybe so. I think not. I think the desire to excel in competition, whether for prizes or for money, is likely to produce a mediocre and predictable novel on a trendy topic in a mode recognised as “safe” by the sales department of a large commercial publisher.
I think good novels are written by writers who want to write this novel, their novel, which is like no other. And which is therefore unpredictable, unsafe, and unlikely to win a prize. Given time and chance and a little publicity, of course, it may keep winning readers for years and years to come. But most corporation-owned publishers could care less for the years to come. Bottom line this month is all that matters.
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Book Groups as the Opposite of Awards. I don’t mean Oprah or commercial ventures, I mean the kind of reading group organised by private people among their friends and acquaintances, that have become common in the last twenty years or so. These groups often consist of modest people who don’t trust their own taste and therefore accept too meekly the publicised judgment of PR departments and award-givers. The book club that always picks the newest best seller or Big Prize winner for next month isn’t doing much for literature, although the cookies or the wine and cheese may be terrific.
But a lot of book-club members have been reading all their lives. Reading people tend to be a bit balky, independent, resistant to being told what they ought to read, inclined to go off and discover it for themselves. There are a lot of book groups doing quite serious independent reading and discussion. I wonder if they aren’t doing more to preserve and celebrate literature than all the national awards and lists of Bests.
And how about all the Internet sites and blogs that discuss books read? Some of them are awfully naïve — some of them are awesomely knowledgeable.
There are various ways to sneak around the fences and monuments erected by the Guardians of Literature and the Awarders of Awards in order to get to where we can find out and talk about what’s actually going on in literature. Maybe readers of this blog can suggest some other sneaky routes.
— UKL 
28 December 2011
40. Five Bad Myth
I was impressed by a recent MoveOn.org emailing (November 23, 2011), listing five myths — actually pieces of disinformation — relentlessly propagated by reactionary politicians and news media. There are of course dozens more such myths or lies — President Obama was not born in the United States, etc, etc — but these five are, at the moment, the biggies. To have them all in one place, clearly stated, was useful to my thinking about Republican tactics and the deliberate or unthinking compliance of the media.
These myths have been accepted and repeated by speakers and writers without strong political convictions or who seek to give “balanced coverage” of events, without considering that you cannot balance myths, in the sense of propaganda, deliberate misinformation, with facts.
The murder of six million Jews in Germany did not take place: myth (denial). Six million Jews were murdered in Germany: fact (history). You cannot “balance” or reconcile the myth with the fact and arrive at fact.
You don’t ever get information by repeating disinformation.
Two lies — or five — or a thousand — don’t make a truth.
You can find MoveOn’s myths and debunkings at http://front.moveon.org/top-5-fox-myths-to-debunk-this-thanksgiving/.
And many thanks to MoveOn for all the good work they do!
As I read the list of myths, I began to arrive at my own personal debunks or demystifications, harsher and more radical than theirs.
And here they are:
MYTH #1: The congressional Super Committee failed because both sides refused to compromise.
REALITY: It failed because the Republicans in Congress, following the Party Line, now refuse ANY compromise on ANY issue offered by the Democrats.
Reaganist Republicanism has become a rigid ideology, as Stalinism was.
To be a Republican politician now, you must be, literally, politically correct.
If you don’t correctly parrot the Party Line, you will be exiled to (shudder!) Liberal Siberia.
MYTH #2: Nobody knows what Occupy Wall Street is about.
REALITY: Everybody knows what Occupy Wall Street is about.
But some people are so frightened by the trouble our country is in that they’re in denial about it. The goals of the Occupy Movement make these people morally uncomfortable, threatening their complacency — and so they deny that it has any goals at all.
MYTH #3: Occupiers should stop protesting and just get a job.
REALITY... And the American children who go to bed hungry every night should stop whining and just go buy a supersized burger with fries at MacDonalds, and the homeless should get off the streets and move into a nice house, and the old retired people who are losing medical insurance should ah, umm, well, they should just shut up and get a job. Or die. Or something.
MYTH #4: Occupy Wall Street is intent on provoking violence, especially against banks and the police.
REALITY: A few people have used the Occupy movement as a front for their antisocial behavior, just as a few people have used Republican hatred of Obama as a front for their psychopathy.
The Occupy movement, facing a violent police force in several cities, has so far remained nonviolent. If they can hang on to their nonviolence, they will have made a moral statement comparable to that of Gandhi, or the Freedom Riders, or the young people of Tiananmen Square.
MYTH #5: The biggest crisis facing our country is out-of-control government spending.
REALITY: Our crisis is a loss of active citizenship — a weakening of confidence in democratic ideals and principles. This loss, this weakening, is directly aggravated by Reaganist ideology and propaganda.
Reaganism, seeing extreme inequity as the engine of capitalism, says that the poor should be taxed heavily, the rich more lightly, and the very rich should not have to pay taxes at all. Democracy seeks to share the cost of maintaining government (taxation) equitably, each contributing according to income.
Reaganism says that the government is the enemy. Democracy is the idea that the people are the government.
So, are we our own enemy?
Pogo, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
— UKL 
28 November 2011
39. Ninety-Nine Weeks: A Fairy Tale
Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter who lived with his wife and their daughter and son in a cottage at the edge of a forest. He loved his trade, and worked hard at it. But most of the land belonged to rich ogres, who kept the forests for their own use. Firewood was so expensive that ordinary people had begun to heat their houses with coal. The woodcutter went from door to door offering timber or firewood, but again and again he was turned away. His wife was lame and could not walk far, though she worked hard and well, keeping the kitchen garden and the house. The daughter and son went to the village school. Young Janet looked after the mayor’s wife’s babies every afternoon when school was out, and young Bob earned a penny here and there doing odd jobs. That bit of money the children could bring home was all the family had now, and every penny had to go for rent to their ogre landlord. They had no new clothes or shoes, and ate only from their garden. Their life had grown hard, and winter was coming on.
“Maybe you could get a job at the coal mine, John,” said the woodcutter’s wife.
So he went up the road ten miles to the coal mines and asked for work, but, as he had feared, they told him he was too old to learn that craft, and sent him off.
He trudged homeward, downhearted, though he was by nature a hopeful man. Evening was coming on. Shadows fell across the road. Among the shadows he saw a tall, beautiful woman standing. “Woodcutter,” she said, “be of good cheer! I am your Gift Fairy, and I will give you and your family enough to live on. You will have food, and can buy shoes for your son and daughter!”
“Gracious lady,” said the woodcutter, “you are very kind. What can I do to deserve such a gift?”
“To deserve my gift, woodcutter, you must not work, but every day you must look for work,” said the lady. “You must try four times a day to find a job. No matter if there is no work to be found, you must not stop looking for it. I will be watching you. I will know if you grow discouraged. If you cease to look for work for one month, I will know it, and my gift will cease to appear.”
“Lady,” said the woodcutter, “I’d be glad to have work, but if I ask for a job four times every day in the village, I’ll be going to the same people all the time, because it’s a small village, and they’ll get sick of me.”
“That is not my concern,” said the lady.
“Could you maybe, instead of giving me money, give me some kind of job — any kind?” said the woodcutter, who, as we know, was a hopeful man. “I’m not too old to learn a new craft, and I’ll turn my hand to anything.”
“That is not my department,” said the lady. “The Works Fairies are not functioning at present. All I can offer you is my gift, on the terms I have told you.”
“I accept,” said the woodcutter, with a sigh, “and my family and I are grateful.”
“That is proper,” said the tall woman, and she vanished into the long shadows of the evening.
The woodcutter went home. As he came to his house he happened to put his hand in his pocket, and felt something there, and drew it forth, and lo and behold! it was a silver coin, enough for them to live on for a week. So he went in, and his wife and children gathered round him asking eagerly, “Did you get the job at the mines, Dad?”
“No, they won’t have me,” said he, “but I met a magic lady and she gave me this,” and he tossed the silver coin up spinning in the air. And while they passed it around and admired it and wondered at it, he told them that the magic lady would give them the same every week, so long as he would seek work wherever it could be sought for.
“Now Bob,” he said, “go change this coin at the brewer’s, for he’ll have the change, and bring home a pitcher of beer, for we’ll celebrate tonight. And Janet, you go put four fine chops on our tab at the butcher’s. And dear wife, come give me a good kiss while the kids are out, eh?”
So they made merry that night.
Next day the woodcutter went into the village asking for work at every door, and he did so faithfully, day after day, until the villagers began to say to each other that John Woodcutter was daft, coming back and back when they’d told him and told him they hadn’t a thing for him. And what did he think he’d find, anyway, with the roads already full of men out of work?
The brewer’s wife offered him the job of cleaning out her cow-barn, since she no longer kept a cow, but it was only two or three day’s work, and she wouldn’t give him a silver piece for it, nor half one, so he had to turn her down. After that, when she poured beer for people in the brewery bar she told them that John Woodcutter went around asking for work but when you offered him a job he was too lazy to take it. And some of the people nodded wisely and said, “What do you expect of people who’ll take money for doing nothing?” and others said, “The fairies have no business handing out good money to layabouts and wastrels,” and the mayor said, “Fairy money is foul money. It corrupts those who take it. Mark my words, we’ll soon see John driving a carriage and his wife wearing silken gowns!” Then they all nodded wisely, except one man who had just lost his job of road-paving, and was spending his last coppers on a half-pint of beer to drown his sorrows. That man drank his beer, went out onto the road where John had told them he had met the tall, beautiful lady, and waited for her to appear. And there she was. And she offered her bargain, and he took it.
John kept going about his village, and villages for miles around, seeking and asking for a job. He longed with all his heart to be doing an honest day’s work, but wouldn’t take the part-time jobs he was offered, for they’d bring him in less than the lady’s gift did; so his reputation as a working man was soon lost. His wife Mary’s rheumatism kept growing worse and now was very bad, so he and young Janet kept the house and garden. The boy Bob dropped out of school and got himself prenticed to a carpenter, and they were proud of him, but the fee was a fifth of their silver piece, and Bob as a prentice brought no money in. After a whole year had passed, John was feeling almost as desperate as he had felt coming home from the mine. That evening he went down to the road, and there among the shadows stood the lady, tall and beautiful.
“Lady,” he said, “I look for work, I ask for work, but there’s no work to be had. And people have lost patience with me, bothering them for jobs, but not able to take the little they can offer.”
“You may cease to look,” said she, “whenever you wish.”
“But that would break our bargain.”
“Yes,” said she. “By seeking work, you prove that you are a hopeful man, who believes that good people always have enough money. To cease seeking would prove that you have lost that righteous belief. It would show that you are discouraged. The Gift Fairies cannot see discouraged people. You would become invisible to me. You would become ineligible for my gift.”
“Ah, well,” said John. “We won’t be discouraged, then.”
And month after month, he trudged about, wearing out his shoes, which he couldn’t replace because Mary’s medicines cost a great deal now, and young Bob’s appetite was something ferocious, and young Janet no longer looked after the mayor’s children because the mayor’s wife said her clothes were too shamefully shabby. Mary wept because her pretty daughter didn’t have a decent dress on her back, so John bought cloth from a peddler, and Mary sewed Janet a new dress.
“Tsk, tsk, look at John Woodcutter’s Mary flouncing about in silks and satins, and her dad taking money from those fairies and never doing a lick of work...“
The weeks passed, and every week the day came round when John would feel in his pocket and find the magic piece of silver. Eagerly did he wait for that day, and the money was spent almost before he had it. Then one week the gift-day came, and he felt in his pocket, and nothing was there.
He waited a minute, and felt again. Empty.
He went and weeded the potato patch, and then felt in his pocket, and his other pocket. He went all about the house looking at the ground to see if the silver coin had fallen from his pocket. Nothing.
Evening came, and he went down to the road to that place where the lady stood, tall and beautiful. “Oh, lady,” said John, “your gift didn’t come today. And Mary’s worse, and we really need it.”
The Gift Fairy looked at him silently, as if from a long way off. “John Woodcutter, is it?” she said at last. “I can barely see you. Your ninety-nine weeks are up.”
“What ninety-nine weeks?”
She seemed to look through him as she spoke, and her voice came as if from far away. “You had ninety-nine weeks to look for work. You found nothing. You are now officially discouraged.”
“Oh, but lady, I’m looking for a job every day as hard as ever, even though it’s been close on two years — truly I’m not discouraged — I keep hoping!“
“You are officially discouraged, you have officially ceased to look actively for work, and you are officially invisible to the Gift Fairies.”
“Oh, lady,” cried John in despair, “for how long?”
“Forever,” said the faint, cold voice of the Gift Fairy.
And no matter what John said to her after that, no matter how he pleaded, she did not reply, and gave no sign of hearing or seeing him at all.
Terribly downcast, he set off for home at last. But on the road just as night was falling he met his landlord, the rich ogre who owned most of the property for miles around. “You,” said the ogre, looking down from his tall black horse, “you’re the troublemaker in the cottage by the forest. You haven’t paid your full rent for months. You’re to be out of there at the end of the week.”
“Mr. Ogre,” said John, “if we paid full rent out of what the Gift Fairy gave us, we had nothing left for food and clothing. And now she says she has no more to give us at all.”
“The Gift Fairy, is it!” said the ogre. “Living off the fairies — I should have known it! Do you realize those fairies of yours are trying to raise my taxes — MY taxes — to pay for your roads, and your damned schools that teach you sedition and irreligion, and your police that should have put you long since into one of the jails I have to pay for with MY taxes? Fairies! Everything that’s wrong with this country is the fairies’ fault! Get out of my sight before I give you a whipping!” And the ogre flourished his whip at John, then slashed his horse hard with it, and galloped off into the night.
The rest of that week, John went looking for any work at all, whatever it was and whatever it paid, but another man had always got there before him.
Hearing they could no longer pay for young Bob’s prenticeship, the carpenter sent him home. Bob’s sister Janet had just finished school, and the two young people talked it over and planned what they might do.
On the last evening of the week the brother and sister went down to the road where their father had met the Gift Fairy, and sure enough, she was there among the shadows, tall and beautiful. But she did not look at them.
“Lady,” said young Bob, “I’ve been looking for work and cannot find it, so maybe you’d give me the silver coin, until I do?”
But the lady paid no attention to him at all.
“Lady,” said young Janet, “I’m through school now, and I can teach, or look after babies, or look after sick people, or garden, or cook, or anything at all almost, but my mother needs me, nights, and I can’t find work in the village. So maybe you’d give the silver coin, until I do?”
But the lady paid no attention to her at all.
Bob pleaded, Janet wept, but to no avail. She never looked at them.
A little red fox looked out of a covert by the road and laughed. “She can’t see you, young’uns,” the fox said. “You’re invisible.”
“But I’m hopeful,” Janet said, and Bob said, “But I’m not discouraged!“ And both of them said, “But we’re here — right in front of her!”
“Maybe,” said the fox. “But you didn’t lose your last job.”
Janet and Bob stared at him. “How could we lose a job when we’ve never had one?”
“A good question,” said the fox. “But since you’ve never been employed, you’re officially entering the work force: and so, you’re not eligible for fairy benefits. You’re invisible. It’s wonderful,” said the fox, snapping at a flea on his flank, “how fairies think, and what they can see and can’t see. My opinion is, they’ve been listening far too much to rich ogres. My opinion is, they’d do a better job at being fairies if they listened to the other ninety-nine percent.”
But young Bob and Janet, trying not to weep with disappointment, were already trudging off up the road to help their parents pack up what little they owned and leave their home forever in the morning.
The fox shrugged his narrow shoulders, looking after them through the shadows of the night. “Nobody ever listens to foxes,” he said.
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Some Foxy Figures
Official Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for 2010:
About 14 million people were officially counted as unemployed.
(5.9 million of these people had been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer.)
People without work or without full-time work but NOT counted as unemployed:
8.9 million “involuntary part-time workers” (would work full-time if they could)
6.1 million “wanted work but did not actively seek work”
Of these, 2.5 million had looked for work within the past year; the rest had not, because, according to the BLS, they did not expect to find any (the “discouraged”), or they could not take a job because of a disability, or were in school, or had no way to get to and from work, or had children but no child care.
Also not counted among the unemployed by the BLS are more than 2 million people currently in American prisons.
The total of unemployed not counted as unemployed is at least 17 million; added to the counted figure of 14 million, 31 million people were out of work last year.
The figures have not substantially changed so far this year.
There was a good deal of hoopla recently when the number of oficially unemployed dropped from 14 million to 13.9 million, so that we have “only” 9% official unemployment. This drop is mostly because the “long-term unemployed” simply have been shifted into the “did not seek work” category. Same bods, different pigeonholes.
The true rate of unemployment remains between 16 and 25%.
(It is much the same in European countries that do not fudge the figures as we do.)
The number of unemployed people receiving benefits (less than half) has dropped recently: this is not, as the media say, because we are “recovering from the recession,” but because so many people have been out of work for more than 99 weeks. Their eligibility for benefits has run out.
Even of the 14 million “officially unemployed,” about 30% have been out of work so long they have lost benefit eligibility.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that every dollar spent on unemployment benefits brings the country $1.90 in “economic growth.” A bargain, says the little red fox. (But Fox News would not agree.)
— UKL 
21 November 2011
38. Long-Term Discouragement
Our government decided over fifteen years ago that certain citizens, categorized as “long-term discouraged workers,” do not exist. The category exists, but the citizens don’t. When the Bureau of Labor or other entities give the numbers of the unemployed, these men and woman are excluded: they are not there. They are our government’s version of the Disappeared.
Strangely enough, though out of work, they do not belong to the category of “the unemployed.” The Disappeared (according to an excellent article in DailyFinance*) consist of those who “had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.”
Now how, exactly, does the United States Government know that all these people stopped job-hunting? Gave up for good? Are stretched out in the recliner in front of the TV with a beer, or more likely in front of no TV with no beer and no recliner due to lack of income, and have been lying there for months? Does the Bureau of Labor Statistics knock on their door (assuming they haven’t been foreclosed and evicted and still have a door) and come in, and ask, and observe them for a week or two to see if they are or are not going out looking for a job? Well, no. The statistics on unemployment are gathered rather more indirectly than that.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as “unemployed” only people who have “actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks.” The number of people in the category, “the unemployed,” is based on the number of reports of frequent, continuous job-hunting, which people out of work are required to submit, in order to qualify for unemployment benefits — up until the set date when those benefits cease. After that, the unemployed cease to be even the unemployed. They cease to be counted. They disappear.
And yet the government knows something about them. It knows, for certain, that not one single one of them is looking for work. It knows so because it says so.
It seems odd that people would stop looking for work just the very moment when the dole they were getting by on stops. But remember! They are not the unemployed. They are not even people. They are a category: “the long-term discouraged.” Clearly a negligible category — slobs, louts, layabouts, no entrepreneurial spirit, no good ole American get up and go. They aren’t counted because, frankly, they don’t count.
Currently, around two and a half million American citizens don’t count.
It’s an amazing effective trick, replacing human beings with categories. The statistics present us the highly managed category “the unemployed” as a reality; editorial writers and TV pundits intone it over and over; and it’s only too easy to accept it — until you realise it entails the belief that two and half million unemployed Americans aren’t looking for a job, won’t look for a job, wouldn’t look for one if there were any to look for. Do you believe that?
The trick was perfected in 1994 to pad employment figures. It has worked beautifully ever since.
It allows the government to keep telling us that unemployment is “only” around 9%. The actual figure, once the padding is removed, is certainly over 16% and probably over 22% — very near the worst days of the 1930’s.
It allows the government not to provide job opportunities and works projects. Who needs ’em?
It allows the government to let people starve. Starve? Who? Them? But they don’t exist!
Even if they did exist they’d be so lazy they wouldn’t even vote. Forget ’em.
Some of these non-existent Americans have been visible, recently, joining the tent cities and demos of Occupy America. (But don’t worry, those discontented liberal whine-ins never get anywhere. We’re still testing bombs, we’re still in Viet Nam, racial segregation is still enforced by law, and this recession’s a blip that trickle-down will fix in no time. And it’s morning in America.)
What I don’t know is, how do we refuse to play along any longer — how to demand that the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop padding and give us an honest count? I guess it begins by simply refusing the padded figure every time we hear or see it — correcting it, protesting aloud. Lies grow in the silence of those who hear them.
— UKL
5 November 2011
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Link updated April 2023. “The Jobless Effect: Is the Real Unemployment Rate 16.5%, 22%, or. . .?" by Pallavi Gogoi, DailyFinance, 16 July 2010. Original URL: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/16/what-is-the-real-unemployment-rate/

37. Nôtre-Dame de la Faim
October 2011
I visited a great cathedral this week. It’s situated in a mixed industrial/small business/residential area not far from the Portland Airport, an odd place for a cathedral. But it has a huge congregation and is full of people, not just on Sundays but every day of the week.
And it’s big. Nôtre-Dame de Paris covers about 67,000 square feet. This one is nearly twice as big, 108,000 square feet, two full city blocks (and its overflow, adjunct building across the river covers 94,000 square feet).
Nôtre-Dame, with its towers, is much taller, and is built of stone all carved with saints and gargoyles, and is endearingly ancient and beautiful. This one looks rather unimpressive as you approach it, partly because there are buildings near it and you can’t really get a view of it, and partly because it wasn’t built long ago to celebrate and embody spiritual worship, but recently, in dire need, for a specific material purpose. Still, I wouldn’t discount a very large element of the spirit in the building of it.
From the outside it looks like a particularly huge warehouse, but it hasn’t the strangely menacing, fortresslike look of the great windowless citadels of consumerism, Walmart and the rest. When you get inside, you see the cathedral. The high, airy entrance hall leads you first, on an elegantly stone-tiled floor with little bronze decorations set in here and there, to an area of offices and cubicles. Most churches hide their administrative department, but this one puts it right out front. The walls are blond wood, everything is spacious and handsome. Like the high nave of Nôtre-Dame, the startlingly high ceiling of steel-braced wooden ceiling soars above all the small human activity down on the floor beneath. In the old cathedral that height creates a great, mysterious, upper space of shadows. But the space beneath this vault is luminous.
It wasn’t till I entered the interior, the cathedral proper, that I understood why they’d built the ceiling so high. As there should be, there are great doors to open into the sacred space. And as a sacred space will do, the first sight took my breath away. I stood silent. I remembered what the word awe means.
Much of the interior of the huge building is visible from that doorway, or would be except that the whole floor is covered with immense, towering blocks and piles and stacks of crates, cartons, boxes, and containers, arranged in gigantically severe order, with wide aisles between each tower or bay. Only down the aisles can you see the far walls in the far distance. There are no permanent walls or divisions. The immense, splendidly cantilevered ceiling stretches serenely above it all. The air is cool, fresh, and clean, with the faintest smell of garden stuff, fresh vegetables. Vehicles run quietly up and down the aisles, miniforklifts and the like, looking quite tiny among the high blocks and stacks, constantly busy at moving crates and boxes, bringing in and taking out.
Well, it isn’t a cathedral. That was a metaphor. It’s just a warehouse, after all.
But what kind of warehouse stores nothing to sell? Nothing, not one item in all these (literally) acres of goods, is or ever will be for sale.
Actually, it’s a bank. But not the kind of bank where money is the only thing that happens.
Here is where money doesn’t happen.
This is the Oregon Food Bank. Every box in the great cubical stacks between the aisles, every carton, every can, every bottle, every crate, holds food. Every carton, every can, every pound, every ounce of that food will be given to the people of Oregon who haven’t the money to buy what they need to live on.
It is a cathedral, after all. The cathedral of hunger.
Or should I say the cathedral of generosity? Of compassion, or community, or caritas? It comes to the same thing.
There are people who need help.
There are people who deny it, saying that God helps those who help themselves and the poor and the unemployed are merely shiftless slackers sponging on a nanny government.
There are people who don’t deny poverty, but they don’t want to know about it because it’s all so terrible and what can you do?
And then there are people who help.
This place is the most impressive proof of their existence I ever saw. Their existence, their efficiency, their influence. This place embodies human kindness.
In, of course, the most unspiritual, lowly, humdrum, even gross way. In a thousand cans of green beans, in towers of macaroni boxes, in crates of fresh-picked vegetables, in cold side-chapel refrigerators of meat and cheese . . . In hundreds of cartons with improbable names of obscure beers on them, donated by the brewers because beer cartons are particularly sturdy and useful for packing food . . . In the men and women, employees and trained volunteers, operating the machinery, manning the desks, sorting and packaging the fresh produce, teaching survival skills in the Food Bank classrooms, kitchens, and gardens, driving the trucks that bring food in and the trucks that take food out to where it’s needed.
For these towering walls and blocks and reefs of goods—12,000 to 18,000 pounds of food in each bay of the warehouse—will vanish, melt away like sandcastles, tonight or in a few days, to be replaced instantly by the supply of boxed, canned, glassed, fresh, and frozen food, which in turn will melt away in a day or a week, going where it’s needed.
And that’s everywhere. The Food Bank distributes in every county of the state of Oregon plus one county of Washington State. They don’t have to look far to find people who need help getting enough to eat.
Anywhere kids are, to start with. Many school-age children in our country, towns, and cities don’t get three meals a day, or even two. Many aren’t always sure if they’ll get anything to eat today at all.
How many? About a third of them. One child in three.
Put it this way: If you or I were a statistic-parent with three statistic-kids in school, one of our three children would be hungry. Malnourished. Hungry in the morning, hungry at night. The kind of hungry that makes a child feel cold all the time. Makes a child stupid. Makes a child sick.
Which one of our children . . . which child . . . ?
36. Readers’ Questions
October 2011
I recently got a letter from a reader who, after saying he liked my books, said he was going to ask what might seem a stupid question—one I need not answer, though he really longed to know the answer to it. It concerned the wizard Ged’s use-name Sparrowhawk. He asked, Is this the New World sparrowhawk, Falco sparverius, or one of the Old World kestrels, also Falco, or their sparrowhawks, which are not Falco but Accipiter?
(Warning: You can get into something of a tangle with these birds. Many people use the words sparrowhawk and kestrel interchangeably, but kestrels, Eurasian or American, are all falcons, while not all sparrowhawks are kestrels, or vice versa. You see what I mean? I am only sorry we lost the beautiful British name windhover. But we have G. M. Hopkins’s poem.)
I immediately answered the letter as best I could. I said it seems to me it can’t be any of the above, because it’s not an Earth bird but an Earthsea bird, and Linnaeus did not go there with his can of names. But the bird I saw in my imagination when I was writing the book was definitely like our splendid little American sparverius, so maybe we could call it Falco parvulus terramarinus. (I didn’t think of parvulus [small] when I wrote the letter, but it should be there. A sparrowhawk is a quite small falcon. Ged was a scrappy boy, but short.)
After I’d answered the letter, I thought about how promptly and with what pleasure I’d done so. And I looked at the never-decreasing stack of letters waiting to be answered and thought how much I wanted to put off answering them, because so many of them would be so difficult, some so impossible . . . Yet I very much wanted to answer them, because they were written by people who liked or at least were responding to my work, had questions about it, and took the trouble to tell me so, and thus deserve the trouble—and sometimes the pleasure—of an answer.
What makes so many letters-to-the-author hard to answer? What have the difficult ones in common? I have been thinking about it for some days. So far, I’ve come up with this:
They ask large, general questions, sometimes stemming from some branch of learning the writers know way, way more about than I do, such as philosophy or metaphysics or information theory.
Or they ask large, general questions about how Taoism or feminism or Jungian psychology or information theory has influenced me—questions answerable in some cases only with a long PhD thesis, in others only with “Not much.”
Or else they ask large, general questions based on large, general misconceptions about how writers work—such as, Where do you get your ideas from? What is the message of your book? Why did you write this book? Why do you write?
This last question (which is in fact highly metaphysical) is often asked by young readers. Some writers, even ones who don’t actually write for a living, answer it “for money,” which certainly stops all further discussion, being the deadest of dead ends. My honest answer for it is “because I like to,” but that’s seldom what the questioner wants to hear, or what the teacher wants to find in the book review or the term paper. They want something meaningful.
Meaning—this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story . . . ? Tell me what it Means.
But that’s not my job, honey. That’s your job.
I know, at least in part, what my story means to me. It may well mean something quite different to you. And what it meant to me when I wrote it in 1970 may be not at all what it meant to me in 1990 or means to me in 2011. What it meant to anybody in 1995 may be quite different from what it will mean in 2022. What it means in Oregon may be incomprehensible in Istanbul, yet in Istanbul it may have a meaning I could never have intended . . .
Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.
Writing is a risky bidness. No guarantees. You have to take the chance. I’m happy to take it. I love taking it. So my stuff gets misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted—so what? If it’s the real stuff, it will survive almost any abuse other than being ignored, disappeared, not read.
“What it means,” to you, is what it means to you. If you have trouble deciding what, if anything, it means to you, I can see why you might want to ask me, but please don’t. Read reviewers, critics, bloggers, and scholars. They all write about what books mean to them, trying to explain a book, to achieve a valid common understanding of it useful to other readers. That’s their job, and some of them do it wonderfully well.
It’s a job I do as a reviewer, and I enjoy it. But my job as a fiction writer is to write fiction, not to review it. Art isn’t explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains. (Or so it seems to me, which is why I have a problem with the kind of modern museum art that involves reading what the artist says about a work in order to find out why one should look at it or “how to experience” it.)
I see a potter’s job as making a good pot, not as talking about how and where and why she made it and what she thinks it’s for and what other pots influenced it and what the pot means or how you should experience the pot. She can do that if she wants to, of course, but should she be expected to? Why? I don’t expect her to, I don’t even want her to. All I expect of a good potter is to go and make another good pot.
A question such as the one about sparrowhawks—not large, not general, not metaphysical, and not personal—a question of detail, of fact (in the case of fiction, imaginary fact)—a limited, specific question about a particular work—is one most artists are willing to try to answer. And questions about technique, if limited and precise, can be intriguing for the artist to consider (“Why did you use a mercury glaze?” or “Why do you/don’t you write in the present tense?” for instance.)
Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not?
But any question, if it is limited, specific, and precise, can be answered honestly—if only with “I honestly don’t know, I never thought about it, now I have to think about it, thank you for asking!” I am grateful for questions like that. They keep me thinking.
Now, back to Hopkins and “The Windhover”—
I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom
of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there . . .
Ah, we could explain that, and talk about what it means, and why and how it does what it does, forever. And we will, I hope. But the poet, like the falcon, leaves that to us.
35. More About Steinbeck: Troubled Waters
My friend Roger Dorband told me I had to read Steinbeck’s book about Baja California and the Gulf of Mexico, The Log from The Sea of Cortez.* Of course I went to Powells, and of course Powells, existing under the grace and blessing of heaven, long may it do so! had a paperback copy. Charles and I read it aloud, enjoying it greatly, and I wanted to write about it, because it’s a beautiful book and not very well known. But then, when I read the introduction to the 1995 edition (I generally leave introductions till after I’ve read the book) I almost thought I didn’t want to write about it. What I learned troubled me and greatly complicated my response to the book.
But Steinbeck was a complicated man. No use trying to simplify him. And if, in writing The Log, he dodged certain complications, that’s no reason why I should.
The book chronicles a six-week, 4,000-mile journey in a fishing boat (a Monterey purse-seiner), undertaken in the spring of 1940 as a scientific collecting trip to and in the great arm of the sea between Baja California and the mainland coast of Mexico. It is recounted day by day, as a log. It appears unmistakably, solidly factual: a record of the weather, the places visited, and the inter-tidal creatures seen and collected on the trips ashore. Yet in the telling of this straightforward narrative, something very important is not told. The story is true, but it is not the whole truth, and therefore cannot be nothing but the truth, since a lie by omission is no less a lie for being invisible.
Why did Steinbeck need to lie?
In The Grapes of Wrath, he kept his passionate temperament under a fierce, masterful control. He thereby achieved an honesty that I’m not sure he ever achieved again. In the alternate chapters of that book, many of them praising the splendor of the land – beautiful, passionate descriptive writing, filled with the pain that informs the whole book, the pain of seeing something absolutely good misused, abused, broken – his handling of the material is powerful and flawless. He describes; there is little explaining and almost no preaching at all. That is what I mean by control. He controlled himself, in the interest of seeing clearly and telling what he saw as completely, as honestly as he could.
In his early books, the material sometimes gets out of hand, and truthfulness gets warped by opinion or by over-facile emotion. Tortilla Flat (1935) isn’t the insightful book I expected about Monterey people by a man who had lived with them and knew them, but a rather patronising confection masquerading as machismo and confusing alcoholism with spirituality.
 It was his first success, and a big one. Yet he had the strength to move almost directly away from that kind of success. He wrote In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men, and then his masterpiece. The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939.
Two years after it came the original edition of Sea of Cortez, co-authored with his friend the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. The Log is Steinbeck’s narrative of the voyage, excerpted ten years later from that first, collaborative version.
They were, he tells us, aboard the Western Flyer, one scientist doing research on tidewater fauna, one writer helping the scientist, and four crew, professional fishermen. His portraits of the crewmen are affectionate, humorous, and respectful. Now and then a bit of the Monterey-boys-drink-hard-and-thus-are-wise stuff turns up; but it’s only right and natural that a book about hardworking men in a small ship will include some of the predictable, traditional forms of male bonding. And because all six of them really were working hard, not running away from work in order to booze, Steinbeck can be very funny, without getting coy or boastful, about the amount of beer aboard, and the port visits.
So, four Monterey fishermen plus the two researchers who hired them. It worked out fine. All six of them were nice guys, and they had a hell of a good time, and it’s a hell of a good story.
But — perhaps reading aloud one notices these things more — something about the way it’s told kept making me uncomfortable. Steinbeck uses the first person plural, speaking throughout as “we.” This may reflect the fact that the original version of the book was a collaboration, but it’s confusing, tricky. Sometimes “we” means all six men. Sometimes it means himself and Ed Ricketts (not named in the book, though the crewmen are). Sometimes it’s evidently Steinbeck repeating things he learned from Ricketts. And sometimes it’s definitely Steinbeck going off on philosophical journeys by himself, making large, cloudy preachments or thinking fascinating thoughts. So some of the “we”s seemed truer than others, some had an odd, artificial ring.
Then I read the Introduction and discovered that all the “we”s are false.
The all-male crew of six is a fiction. There were seven people aboard the Western Flyer. One was a woman, Steinbeck’s wife Carol. He took her, or she chose to go, in an attempt to salvage their troubled marriage.
When he wrote the book, he – to use a verb that has never lost for me its terrible resonance from the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile – he disappeared her.
That they divorced soon after is neither a surprise nor a justification.
So in The Log, Steinbeck presents a falsified record as a factual one. Defended as artistic license and by the nobody-knows-what-truth-is argument, such fact-bending and lying by omission is now far more acceptable than it was in 1940, indeed rather fashionable. I doubt it will bother many people as much as it bothers me. I just wish, I bitterly wish, that he’d had the self-respect to know that all he had to do was tell the story straight on, first person, with all the people on board, and Ed Ricketts’ incredibly prescient insights to illuminate it, not as a fairy-tale of six guys on a jolly escape from ordinary life, but as a true story of seven people on an extraordinary voyage through a difficult, beautiful, haunting, and – for two of them, surely — painful reality.
Well, so, you have to forget the disappeared wife. You can’t wonder about her, if you want to read the book. And I still say read it, because though the author evaded instead of controlling his material, so it missed being all it might have been, still, it is a delight. Telling the story day by day, using all his marvelous power of accurate, immediate description, Steinbeck takes us with him on that little shrimp-boat in those strange, mirage-laden, inland waters, so lonesome then and so remote. An unforgettable trip.
And his meditative flights, though a bit pompous sometimes, are often brilliant and lovable. I can only give a taste, such as this from page 178. Their work in the Sea of Cortez was identifying, counting, and collecting the creatures of the tide pools. He’s been talking about the relative importance of common species and unimportance of the rare ones. He’s using ideas he learned from Ed Ricketts, a true pioneer in ecology, whose ideas are part of the foundation of a great deal of our thinking now. But the language and the mystical delight are pure Steinbeck.
[…It] seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. […] It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.
Or, from the last page of the Log proper, as they head north on the grey, fierce ocean, away from the sunlight and shallows of the Gulf:
There was some quality of music here, perhaps not to be communicated, but sounding clear and huge in our minds. The boat plunged and shook herself, and rivers of swirling water ran down into the scuppers. Below in the hold, packed in jars, were thousands of little dead animals [...The] wind blew off the tops of the whitecaps, and the big guy wire, from bow to mast, took up its vibration like the low pipe on a tremendous organ. It sang its deep note into the wind.
— UKL 
8 October 2011

	
Viking published Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, by John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, in 1941. In 1951, Viking published the narative part of the book separately as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck. This is the book I read, republished as a Penguin Classic in 1995, with Steinbeck’s tribute to Ricketts, and a very useful Introduction by Richard Astro.

34. TGAN and TGOW
September 2011
When I was a young novelist, fairly often a reviewer would get fervent and declare that an obscure book such as Call It Sleep, or a hugely successful one such as The Naked and the Dead, was The Great American Novel. By writers the phrase was used half jokingly—What are you writing these days? Oh, you know, The Great American Novel. I don’t think I’ve seen the phrase used at all for a couple of decades at least. Maybe we’ve given up on greatness, or anyhow on American greatness.
I began quite a while ago to resist declarations of literary greatness in the sense of singling out any one book as TGAN, or even making lists of The Great American Books. Partly because the supposed categories of excellence omitting all genre writing, and the awards and reading lists and canons routinely and unquestioningly favoring work by men in the eastern half of the United States, made no sense to me. But mostly because I didn’t and don’t think we have much idea of what’s enduringly excellent until it’s endured. Been around quite a long time. Five or six decades, to start with.
Of course the excellence of immediate, real impact, of an art that embodies the moment, is an excellent kind of excellence. Such a novel speaks to you now, this moment. It tells you what’s going on when you need to know what’s going on. It speaks to your age group or social group that nobody else can speak for, or it embodies whatever the current anguish is, or it shows a light at the end of the tunnel of the moment.
I think all the enduringly excellent books began, in fact, as immediately excellent, whether they were noticed at the time or not. Their special quality is to outlast the moment and carry immediacy, impact, meaning, undiminished or even increasing with time, to ages and people entirely different from those the novelist wrote for.
The Great American Novel . . . Moby Dick? Not greatly noticed when published, but canonized in the twentieth century; no doubt A Great American Novel. And The Great (canonical) American Novelists—Hawthorne, James, Twain, Faulkner, etc. etc. . . . But two books keep getting left off these lists, two novels that to me are genuinely, immediately, and permanently excellent. Call them great if you like the word. Certainly they are American to the bone.
I won’t talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, much as I love and admire it, because I want to talk about the other one.
If somebody came up to me in a dark alley with a sharp knife and said, “Name The Great American Novel or die!” I would gasp forth, squeakily, “The Grapes of Wrath!”
I wouldn’t have, a year ago.
I first read it when I was 15 or 16. It was utterly and totally over the head of the little Berkeley High School girl (maybe “under her radar” is better, but we didn’t know much about radar in 1945 unless we were in the navy). I liked the chapter with the tortoise, early in the book. The end, the scene with Rose of Sharon and the starving man, fascinated and frightened and bewildered me so much that I couldn’t either forget it or think about it.
Everything in the book was out of my experience, I didn’t know these people, they didn’t do things people I knew did. That I had been going to Berkeley High School with the children of the Joads simply did not occur to me. I was socially unaware as only a middle-class white kid in a middle-class white city can be.
I was dimly aware of changes. In the forties, the shipyards and other war employment brought a lot of people into Berkeley from the South and southern Midwest. What I mostly noticed was that, with no discussion or notice taken that I was aware of, the high school lunchroom had become segregated—self-segregated—white kids this side, black kids that side.
So, OK, that’s how it was now. When my brother Karl, three years older than me, was at BHS, the president of the student body had been a black kid—a Berkeley kid. That little, artificial, peaceable kingdom was gone forever. But I could keep living in it. On the white side of the lunchroom.
I lived in it with my best friend, Jean Ainsworth. Jean’s mother, Beth, was John Steinbeck’s sister. A widow with three children, Beth worked for Shell Oil and rented out rooms in their house, higher in the Berkeley Hills than ours, way up Euclid, with a huge view of the bay. The peaceable kingdom.
I got to know Uncle John a little when I was in college in the East and Jean was working in New York City, where he then lived. He was fond of his beautiful red-headed niece, though I don’t know if he quite realized she was his equal in wit and heart.
Once I sat hidden with him and Jean under a huge bush at a huge wedding in Cleveland, Ohio, and drank champagne. Jean or I foraged forth for a new bottle now and then. It was Uncle John’s idea.
At that wedding I had first heard, spoken in all seriousness, a now-classic phrase. People were talking about Jackie Robinson, and a man said, heavily, threateningly, “If this goes on, they’ll be moving in next door.”
It was after that that we hid under the bush with the champagne. “We need to get away from boring people and drink in peace,” Uncle John said.
He did a bit too much of both those things, maybe, in his later life. He loved living high on the hog. He never went back to the austerity of his life when he was working on The Grapes of Wrath, and who can blame him, with fame and money pouring in on him? Maybe some books he might have written didn’t get written and some he wrote could have been better.
I respect him for never jumping through all the hoops at Stanford, even if he kept going back and letting people like Wallace Stegner tell him what The Great American Novel ought to be. He could write rings around any of them, but they may have helped him learn his craft, or at least showed him how to act as if he had the kind of writerly confidence that life on a farm in Salinas didn’t provide. Though it provided a great deal else.
Anyhow, when Jean and I were still in high school, 1945 or thereabouts, I read her famous uncle’s famous novel and was awed, bored, scared, and uncomprehending.
And then 60-some years later I thought, Hey, I really ought to reread some Steinbeck and see how it wears. So I went to Powell’s and got The Grapes of Wrath.
When I got toward the end of the book, I stopped reading it. I couldn’t go on. I remembered just enough of that ending. And this time I was identified with all the people, I was lost in them, I had been living with Tom and Ma and Rose of Sharon day and night, through the great journey and the high hopes and the brief joys and the endless suffering. I loved them and I could not bear to think of what was coming. I didn’t want to go through with it. I shut the book and ran away.
Next day I picked it up and finished it, in tears the whole time.
I don’t cry much anymore when I read, only poetry, that brief rush when the hair stirs, the heart swells, the eyes fill. I can’t remember when a novel broke my heart the way music can do, the way a tragic play does, the way this book did.
I’m not saying that a book that makes you cry is a great book. It would be a wonderful criterion if only it worked, but alas, it admits effective sentimentality, the knee-jerk/heartstring stimulus. For instance, a lot of us cry when reading of the death of an animal in a story—which in itself is interesting and significant, as if we give ourselves permission to weep the lesser tears—but that is something else and less. A book that makes me cry the way music can or tragedy can—deep tears, the tears that come of accepting as my own the grief there is in the world—must have something of greatness about it.
So now, if somebody asked me what book would tell them the most about what is good and what is bad in America, what is the most truly American book, what is the great American novel . . . a year ago I would have said—for all its faults—Huckleberry Finn. But now—for all its faults—I’d say The Grapes of Wrath.
I saw the movie of The Grapes of Wrath, and yes, it’s a good movie, faithful to the elements of the book that it could handle, and yes, Henry Fonda was fine.
But a movie is something you see; a novel is something made out of language. And what’s beautiful and powerful in this novel is its LANGUAGE, the art that not only shows us what the author saw but lets us share, as directly as emotion can be shared, his passionate grief, indignation, and love.
33. Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor
September 2011
Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich.
—Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera, 22 Feb. 2011
It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic pentameter. But they don’t live in a library, and I do live in an economy. Their life can be perfectly poetry-free if they like, but my life is controlled by their stuff whether I like it or not.
So: I want to ask how economists can continue to speak of growth as a positive economic goal.
I understand why we’re in a panic when our business or our whole economy goes into a decline or a recession: because the whole system is based on keeping up with/outgrowing the competition, and if we fail to do that, we face hard times, collapse, crash.
But why do we never question the system itself, so as to find ways to get around it or out of it?
Up to a point, growth is a plausible metaphor. Living things need to grow, first to their optimum size, and then to keep replacing what wears out, annually (as with many plants) or continually (as with mammalian skin). A baby grows to adult size, after which growth goes to maintaining stability, homeostasis, balance. Growth much beyond that leads to obesity. For a baby to grow endlessly bigger would be first monstrous, then fatal.
In taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we’ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.
Maybe there are organisms that have no optimum size, like the enormous fungal network one hears about that underlies the whole Middle West, or is it just Wisconsin? But I wonder if a fungus wandering around thousands of square miles underground is the most promising model for a human economy.
Some economists prefer to use mechanical terms, but I believe machines have an optimum size much as living organisms do. A big machine can do more work than a small one, up to a point, beyond which things like weight and friction begin to ruin its efficiency. The metaphor comes up against the same limit.
Then there’s social Darwinism—bankers red in tooth and claw, surviving fitly, while small vermin live on the blood that trickles down . . . This metaphor, based on a vast misunderstanding of evolutionary process, hits its limit almost at once. In predatory competition, bigness is useful, but there are endless ways to get your dinner besides being bigger than it is. You can be smaller but smarter, smaller but faster, tiny but poisonous, winged . . . you can live inside it while you eat it . . . As for getting a mate, if combat were the only way to score, large size would help, but (despite our battle fixation) most competition doesn’t involve combat. You can win the reproductive race by dancing gracefully, by having a blue-green tail decorated with eyes, by building a lovely bower for your bride, by knowing how to tell a joke . . . As for living space, you can crowd out your neighbors by outgrowing them, but it’s cheaper and just as effective to corner all the water in the vicinity, like a juniper tree, or to be toxic to sea anemones who aren’t closely related to you . . . The competitive techniques of plants and animals are endless in variety and ingenuity. So why are we, clever we, stuck on one and one only?
An organism that settles on a single survival stratagem and ceases to seek and find others—ceases to adapt—is at high risk. And adaptability is our principle and most reliable gift. As a species we are almost endlessly, almost appallingly adaptable. Capitalism thinks it’s adaptable, but if it only has one stratagem, endless growth, the limit of its adaptability is irrevocably set. And we have reached that limit. We are therefore at very high risk.
Capitalist growth, probably for at least a century and certainly from the turn of the millennium on, has been growth in the wrong sense. Not only endless but uncontrolled—random. Growth as in tumor. Growth as in cancer.
Our economy isn’t just in a recession. It is sick. As a result of uncontrolled economic (and population) growth, our ecology is sick, and getting sicker every day. We have disturbed the homeostasis of the earth, the ocean, and the atmosphere—not fatally to life on the planet; the bacteria will survive the corporation. But perhaps fatally to ourselves.
We have been in denial about this for decades. By now the denials are hysterical in every sense of the word—What do you mean, climate instability? What do you mean, overpopulation? What do you mean, reactors are toxic? What do you mean, you can’t live on corn syrup?
We go on mechanically repeating the behaviors that caused the sickness: we bail out the bankers, we resume offshore drilling, we pay polluters to pollute, because without them how is our economy to grow? Yet increasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich, while most people grow poorer. The Economic Policy Institute reports:
From 2000 to 2007 (the last period of economic growth before the current recession) the richest 10% of Americans received 100% (one hundred percent—all) the average growth of income. The other 90% received none.
At this rate, by the time we admit that cancer is not health, that we’re sick, any cure must be so radical as almost certainly to require dictatorial rule, and to destroy more—physically and morally—than it can save.
Nobody in any government seems able even to imagine alternatives, and people who talk about them get little attention. Some of the alternatives that existed in the past had promise; I think socialism did, and still does, but it was run off the rails by ambitious men using it as a means to power, and by the infection of capitalism—the obsession with growing bigger at all cost in order to defeat rivals and dominate the world. The example of the larger socialist states is about as heartening as that of the giant underground fungus.
So what is our new metaphor to be? It might be the difference between life and death to find the right one.
32. Dangerous Writing, Dangerous Cover Copy
“Edgy” has passed its high point as the highest word of praise in the sophistico-critical vocabulary, but I’m sure something similar is replacing it at this very moment — an edgier word to imply dangerous, daring, nerve-wracking, aggressively shocking. Something like “fugu” — that Japanese fish that maybe kills you maybe doesn’t? — “For the fugu experience of your life, read Tad Grimgrocer’s fearless semi-fictional exposé of the kinky underbelly of the tampon industry.”
Meanwhile, we’ll have to coast along with “gut-wrenching.” Cover hype and blurbs continue to assure us regularly that if we read this book our guts will be wrenched. Also our eyeballs are very likely to be seared and our complacent assumptions shaken. That they go on repeating these phrases year after year must mean that it pays off, that readers want to be wrenched, seared, and sneered at.
It seems odd. If my assumptions are complacent, am I likely to go looking for books that discomfort, that disembowel them? Complacency, by definition, refuses to be made uncomfortable. Truly complacent people often do not read at all, because almost all reading is likely to tell you something you didn’t know and thus upset your complacency. There are complacent readers, of course; they read reassuring things that agree with their politics and their religion and bolster their assumptions. Probably the cover says it is “life-affirming.”
However, it seems to me that there’s something very complacent about announcing that your play or your book will shake people’s complacent assumptions.
Who are these complacent people anyhow?
The boojwazzee, I suppose... Artists are suppposed to épater le bourgeois, or we tell ourselves that we do, or we boast about doing so. But we have met the bourgeois and he is us.
In 21st Century America we don’t hear about the working class any more; we are all middle class. (A lot of us don’t have jobs and more of us than ever before go to bed hungry, which didn’t use to characterize the middle class, but never mind that.) There are the filthy rich of course, but they don’t read, they never have, there’s no profit in it. That leaves the middle class to épater itself.
My French dictionary says that épater means to break the foot off a wine glass, or “(slang) to flabbergast.” Can fiction still really flabbergast its readers, shock, shake, amaze, dumbfound, disturb, frighten them? Or can it merely continue meeting the expectations of those whose literary diet consists of revelations of infamy, perverted sexuality, violent injustice, monstrous brutalism, physical deformity, deliberate cruelty, and the mutual infliction of misery on one another by the members of dysfunctional suburban families?
These are revelations?
Is it news to most readers over five that people can be really, really mean to each other?
Or do they just like to read about it?
They do. I do. I sit open-jawed, horrified, enchanted to watch Atreus’s or Hamlet’s dysfunctional families destroy everybody who comes in contact with them in the process of destroying themselves. I am fascinated by Heathcliff’s cruelty and Ahab’s wicked madness and Lennie’s innocent murderousness.
But I don’t think Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Bronte, Melville, or Steinbeck were writing to horrify, to shock or frighten or sicken, to sear eyeballs or to wrench guts. They were aware of audience, oh yes indeed, but their intentions were not violent. They were not in assault mode. A writer whose intention is to frighten and distress the reader has a very aggressive program and a very limited goal. Serious writers want to do something beyond asserting power over their audience, beyond self-satisfaction, beyond personal gain — even though they may want all those things very much.
I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
If this is true, a writer’s relationship with readers has no need to be aggressive, exploitive, coercive, or collusive. To writers whose essential relationship is with their work, the shock, distress, and fear their work may cause their readers to feel are means to an end, their only way of saying what they have to say. They will use these dangerous means carefully, sparingly, at need. The effect can be immediate, long-lasting, and profound. It can last several thousand years.
Writers whose work is not an end in itself but a means to gain fame, power, money, etc., may find that causing shock, fear, digust, etc. are a direct means to that end and can be hugely effective. They use them as a pusher uses drugs. The effect is immediate, brief, and trivial. It lasts until the next best-seller.
Readers who want no more than to get their jollies from the latest exploitation of the latest shock fad are praised by the blurbs for their courage in daring to read dangerous revelations, but I suspect that they’re just as complacent as the readers of “cozy” fiction — risk-free, knowing exactly to expect.
Good writers ask for our consent, in fact our participation in their work, our collaboration in its recreation on the stage as we watch it or on the page as we read it. I guess the reason they’re “good” writers is that they’re so good at winning consent and participation from us, persuading us to give them our trust, and rewarding it with something we did not expect.
That’s quite different from asking us to sit there guzzling another jolt of starbug caffeine while reading a novel in order to have our panic buttons pushed again.
Trust somebody who’s going to give us something we didn’t expect? But that could be dangerous!
Never fear. You’re safe. Just trust the cover copy folks. They’re all out there, ready to wrench your guts and serve them up in a presentation of fried eyeballs and fugu in complacency sauce. Bon appétit!
— UKL 
12 September 2011
31. Papa H
Note: This is dated June 2013 in No Time to Spare, but is from 2011 in Ursula’s original blog.
I was thinking about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey.
I’m sure this has occurred to others. That’s the thing about Homer. People keep going to him and discovering new things, or old things, or things for the first time, or things all over again, and saying them. This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.
Anyhow, so The Iliad is the War (actually only a piece of it, close to but not including the end), and The Odyssey is the Journey (There and Back Again, as Bilbo put it).
I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War, by not taking sides.
The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek—maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.
Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.
Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.
But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.
Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?
In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.
Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic—which is faking it. He faked it very well.
Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.
After all, “Let the best man win” doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, “This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference—so the best fighter will win it.” If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!
But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.
Might does not make right—right?
Therefore right does not make might. Right?
But we want it to. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”
If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land—wishful thinking country.
Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.
Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter—even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms—kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts—a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.
The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.
And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.
I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial “noble” gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments.
I don’t know any war story comparable to The Iliad except maybe the huge Indian epic the Mahabharata. Its five brother-heroes are certainly heroes, it’s their story—but it’s also the story of their enemies, also heroes, some of whom are really great guys—and it’s all so immense and complicated and full of rights and wrongs and implications and gods who interfere even more directly than the Greek gods do—and then, after all, is the end tragic or is it comic? The whole thing is like a giant cauldron of ever-replenished food you can dive your fork into and come out with whatever you need most to nourish you just then. But next time it may taste quite different.
And the taste of the Mahabharata as a whole is very, very different from that of The Iliad, above all because The Iliad is (unjust divine intervention aside) appallingly realistic and bloodthirstily callous about what goes on in a war. The Mahabharata’s war is all dazzling fantasy, from the superhuman exploits to the superduper weapons. It’s only in their spiritual suffering that the Indian heroes become suddenly, heartbreakingly, heart-changingly real.
 
As for the Journey:
The actual travel parts of The Odyssey are related or ancestral to all our fantasy tales of somebody setting off over sea or land, meeting marvels and horrors and temptations and adventures, possibly growing up along the way, and maybe coming back home at the end.
Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalized such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though these generalities can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important—but we’ve merely recognized it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.
Odysseus’s travels involve such a terrific set of adventures that I tend to forget how much of the book is actually about his wife and son—what goes on at home while he’s traveling, how his son goes looking for him, and all the complications of his homecoming. One of the things I love about The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s understanding of the importance of what goes on back on the farm while the Hero is taking his Thousand Faces all round the world. But till you get back there with Frodo and the others, Tolkien never takes you back home. Homer does. All through the 10-year voyage, the reader is alternately Odysseus trying desperately to get to Penelope and Penelope desperately waiting for Odysseus—both the voyager and the goal—a tremendous piece of narrative time-and-place interweaving.
Homer and Tolkien are both also notably honest about the difficulty of being a far-traveled hero who comes home. Neither Odysseus nor Frodo is able to stay there long. I wish Homer had written something about how it was for King Menelaus when he got home, along with his wife Helen, whom he and the rest of the Greeks had fought for 10 years to win back, while she, safe inside the walls of Troy, was prissing around with pretty Prince Paris (and then when he got bumped she married his brother). Apparently it never occurred to her to send Hubby #1, Menelaus, down there on the beach in the rain, an email, or even a text message. But then, Menelaus’s family, for a generation or two, had been rather impressively unfortunate or, as we would say, dysfunctional.
Perhaps it isn’t only fantasy that you can trace right back to Homer?
30. Riffing Again
Dear Mr Rupert Murdoch,
This is your author who your company Harper publishes under the pen name of Scrad Riske, and who is living in Maine under the name of Trespassers W. because of being persecuted in Oregon for some things I was accused of about some old guy’s wallet and defaulting and child support and stuff.
I wrote you a while back* and told you how that was just lies and the only crime I ever actually committed was writing my book you published, Emily Bronte and the Vampires of Lustbaden. I am now very confused because I have finished the sequel, Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Zombies of Sex-Coburg, only my agent said to change the title to Lord Alfred Tennyson and the Zombies of Sex-Coburg so it would be in the right order and I always do what my agent says, but what confuses me is this. In your contract for my book it said that if “Author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals, or if Author commits a crime or any other act that will tend to bring Author into serious contempt, and such behavior would materially damage the Work’s reputation or sales,“ my contract would be terminated. And so I told you then that I was paying strict attention to public conventions and moral just like you do, and you were my Role Model. And I was looking forward to making lots of money from my new book so I could pay the woman that rewrote it several times and my lawyers. But now you yourself have personally shown conduct that evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals, and are accused of crimes that tend to bring you into serious contempt by absolutely everybody, except The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. So it is hard to know what to think. I have stopped watching Fox News because after I watch it I cannot think at all for several hours. Can it be true that what is wrong and bad for Authors to do is OK and fine for rich people to do? I am so confused I wonder maybe should I terminate our contract myself and go back to Blitzen, Oregon, where it seems like crime is sort of simpler and not so many people are quite so contemptible. If you have any advice for me I would like very much to hear it.
Your Troubled Author, 
Trespassers W., a.k.a Scrad Riske 
21 July, 2011
_______________

	
See #12, A Riff on the Harper Contract, 18 Jan. 2011

Dear People at Book View Café and Webmistress Person:
I feared this would happen. Scrad was just so anxious and miserable, I had to let him write you again.
I am his aunt who he sends his mail through because of living in Cogneeto the way he has to.
I can tell you in confidence that Scrad’s real name is Dood Royal Ganglehard, but he likes to be called by his pen name. He isn’t really from Blitzen. He is from Fresno, but he started writing novels when he was sort of hiding out in Burns for a while. He was so happy when the Harper Publisher printed his book!
Now today Scrad read this in the news and just nearly went all to pieces.
“I feel that people I trusted— I don’t know who, on what level — have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay.” 
(RUPERT MURDOCH, denying personal responsibility for the phone hacking scandal that has racked his media empire.)
You see Scrad is very sensitive and so he feels it’s his fault letting poor Mr Murdoch who was his Role Model down like that. By behaving disgracefully. Scrad just doesn’t know how to make it up to poor Mr Murdoch. He’s talking about going to the House of Parliament and trying to apologise to all the lords and things there and tell them not to persecute Mr Murdoch and his boy Jimmy. Scrad knows what it’s like to be persecuted by the police and all them.
He just feels so bad for Mr Murdoch. And also Mr Murdoch says it’s for him to pay but he doesn’t have anything to pay with. He was hoping maybe Mr Murdoch did.
He would be cheered by your sympathy.
Yours Very Truly,
Mrs F. T. Thang (Ganglehard)
29. Without Egg
July 2011
Visiting Vienna in the early 1950s, Charles and I stayed in style for very little expense at the old König von Ungarn Hotel, which had been there since at least the 1820s. We ate breakfast at a café around the corner. Always the same café and the same breakfast: good coffee, fresh fruit, crisp rolls with butter and jam, and a soft-boiled egg. Perfect. Invariable. Every morning.
I don’t know why I got it in my head one morning to vary it, but I did, and when the tall, middle-aged waiter arrived in his impeccable dark coat, I indicated that I wanted the usual breakfast, without the egg.
He appeared not to understand, which, given the quality of my German, was understandable. I repeated something like “Kein Ei,” or “Ohne Ei.”
He responded slowly, in a shaken voice, “Ohne Ei?”
He was disturbed. I was ruthless. Yes, I said, without egg.
He stood for quite a while silent, trying to handle the shock. He visibly forced himself not to appeal, or plead, or show his disapproval. He was a waiter, a disciplined, skillful Viennese waiter, and must obey the most perverse customer. “Without egg, Madame,” he said softly, almost unreproachfully, and went away to fetch my eggless breakfast, which he brought and set before me with silent, funereal dignity.
We still laugh recalling that tiny incident of nearly 60 years ago, but it is also kept alive in my memory by a sense of guilt. For one thing, in 1954, in Vienna, an egg meant something. The city was just coming out of very bad times. It was still occupied, divided among the U.S., the British, and the Russian armies; the cathedral had rearisen and the Opera House was rearising from the rubble of bombing, but damage and destruction was everywhere, and the effect of privation plain to see in the faces and bodies of people on the street. An offer of food in a city that has gone hungry is not a small matter.
Also, I willfully and needlessly disturbed the order of that waiter’s universe. A very small universe, the Viennese café breakfast, but a stable, orderly, perfected one. Better not change something that has achieved excellence. And it was unkind to demand of a person who spent his working life maintaining that excellence to impair it, to do something he so clearly felt was wrong. After all, I could have let him bring the egg and simply not eaten it. He was far too good at his job to have taken notice, except possibly for a mild, commiserative “Madame doesn’t feel hungry this morning?” To have an egg and not to eat it was my privilege. To refuse to let him bring the egg was to interfere with his privilege, which was to bring me a complete and proper Viennese café breakfast. I still want to laugh when I think about it, and I still feel a twinge of guilt.
The guilt has increased since I began, a couple of years ago, to have a soft-boiled egg for breakfast—to have, in fact, a Viennese café breakfast—every morning. Invariably.
I can’t get those lovely, light, crisp European rolls. (Why do the artisanal bread people in this country think crust should be thick and tough? The more leathery, the more artisanal?) But Thomas’s English muffins are very good, so I have them, with tea, fruit, and a three-and-a-half-minute egg eaten, as in Vienna, from the shell.
To soft-boil an egg I put it in a small pot with cold water to cover, set it on high heat till it boils furiously, take it off at once, turn over the egg timer (a three-and-a-half-minute glass), and start the muffins toasting. When the sand is through the glass, the egg comes out of the water and into the egg cup.
As you see, a certain care and ceremony is involved, which is what I wanted to talk about, and also why the egg cup is important.
If you crack a soft-boiled egg and dump it out into a bowl, it tastes the same but isn’t the same. It’s too easy. It’s dull. It might as well have been poached. The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it, the attention it requires, the ceremony.
So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup. But not everybody is familiar with egg cups.
In this country they are usually an hourglass shape, with one lobe or bowl bigger than the other. The small end is just big enough to hold the egg. You could eat it there from its shell, but most Americans take it out, turn the egg cup over, crack the egg, and dump it into the larger bowl, where they smoosh it around and eat it.
British and European egg cups don’t offer that option; they have no big bowl; they are just a small china cup on a short pedestal, like a goblet, in which the egg sits upright. You have no choice but to eat your egg out of its own shell. This is where things get ceremonial and interesting.
So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup—but which end up? Eggs are not perfect ovoids, they have a smaller end and a bigger end. People have opinions about which end should be up, i.e., which end you’re going to actually eat the egg out of. This difference of opinion can become so passionate that a war may be fought about it, as we know from Jonathan Swift. It makes just as much sense as most wars and most differences of opinion.
I am a Big-Ender. My opinion, which I will defend to the death, is that if the big end is up it’s easier to get the spoon into the opening created when you knock off the top of the egg with a single, decisive whack of your knife blade. Or possibly—another weighty decision, another matter of opinion, with advocates and enemies, the Righteous and the Unrighteous—you lift the top of the egg off carefully from the egg-encircling crack you have made by tapping the shell with the knife blade all the way round about a half-inch down from the summit.
Some mornings I whack. Some mornings I tap. I have no opinion on the matter. It depends on my mood.
Some elements of the ceremony offer no choice. The knife has be steel, since the sulfur in eggs blackens silver, and the egg spoon must also be untarnishable—stainless steel, or horn. I’ve never seen a gold egg spoon, but I’m sure it would do. Whatever the material, the spoon has to have a small bowl with a fine edge on it: a thick edge can’t coax all the egg white off the inside of the shell. The handle is short, for good balance and easy handling. An egg spoon is a tiny implement that, like the Viennese breakfast, cannot be improved. Like all good tools, it gives pleasure by its pure aptness. It does one thing only, but does it perfectly, and nothing else can do it. Trying to eat an egg from the shell with a normal spoon is like mending a wristwatch with a hammer.
The sole imperfection of the egg spoon is that it’s so small it gets lost. Horn spoons are larger, but the beautiful horn spoon my daughter gave me finally wore out, its edge becoming coarse and fibrous. Replacement can be a problem; most Americans don’t eat their eggs from the shell, and the implement has become rare and hard to find. When I see one, I acquire it. My current egg spoon is stainless steel; on the handle are the letters KLM. I will not go into how we came to own this spoon.
You see what I mean about difficulty. Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.
If you are in the whacking mood, the first whack of the knife on the shell is decisive. A firm whack on a good shell in the right place decapitates the egg cleanly with one blow—ideal. But some eggshells are feeble and crumbly, and sometimes your aim is tentative or faulty (after all, this is something you have to do before breakfast). If you hit too high, the opening isn’t big enough; too low, you get into yolk, which you don’t want to do yet. So maybe you choose to tap instead of whacking—nowhere near as exciting, but you have more control of the outcome.
So now you have opened your egg. You stick the spoon right down into it, but not too suddenly, or the yolk will well up and dribble wastefully down the outside of the shell. The three-and-a-half-minute egg white is barely firm, while the yolk has thickened just enough to make a beautiful golden sauce for the white. Your job is to mix the two nicely so you get a balance of yolk and white in each small spoonful, while not destroying the delicate little bowl you’re eating from, the eggshell. This takes attention.
The more complete the attention, the more you actually taste the egg.
It may be apparent by now that this whole blog is a subtle blow against double-tasking, and a paean to doing one single thing with, as the Bible puts it, “all thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”
Nor is there any breakfast there. The grave is without egg.
The flavor of a fresh soft-boiled egg is extremely subtle. I like salt and pepper on a fried egg but nothing at all on a boiled egg. It is completely satisfactory in and by itself. If a little butter from the muffin gets into it, that’s fine too.
The soft-boiled egg experience is the same every morning and never the same. It remains endlessly interesting. It is invariably delicious. It delivers a small, solid dose of high-quality protein. Who could ask for more?
Of course, I’m very lucky: I can get toxin-free eggs at our co-op from local farmers who don’t cage their birds in pestholes and don’t feed them on carrion. The eggs are brown, with strong shells and orange yolks, not the weak, pallid things laid by hens kept in filth and torment all their lives. The Oregon Legislature has at last decided to ban poultry batteries, hurray—the ban to take effect in 2024, unhurray. The lobbies who run our lives demand that torture, ordure, and disease continue for 13 more years. I will not live to see the birds go free.
28. It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is
June 2011
The test of fairyland [is that] you cannot imagine two and one not making three but you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail.
The quotation, from G. K. Chesterton, is from an interesting article by Bernard Manzo in the Times Literary Supplement of June 10, 2011 (he didn’t give the source in Chesterton’s writings). It got me to thinking about how imaginative literature, from folktale to fantasy, operates, and to wondering about its relationship to science, though I’ll only get to that at the very end of this piece.
The fantastic tale may suspend the laws of physics—carpets fly; cats fade into invisibility, leaving only a smile—and of probability—the youngest of three brothers always wins the bride; the infant in the box cast upon the waters survives unharmed—but it carries its revolt against reality no further. Mathematical order is unquestioned. Two and one make three, in Koschei’s castle and Alice’s Wonderland (especially in Wonderland). Euclid’s geometry—or possibly Riemann’s—somebody’s geometry, anyhow—governs the layout. Otherwise incoherence would invade and paralyze the narrative.
There lies the main difference between childish imaginings and imaginative literature. The child “telling a story” roams about among the imaginary and the half-understood without knowing the difference, content with the sound of language and the pure play of fantasy with no particular end, and that’s the charm of it. But fantasies, whether folktales or sophisticated literature, are stories in the adult, demanding sense. They can ignore certain laws of physics but not of causality. They start here and go there (or back here), and though the mode of travel may be unusual, and here and there may be wildly exotic and unfamiliar places, yet they must have both a location on the map of that world and a relationship to the map of our world. If not, the hearer or reader of the tale will be set adrift in a sea of inconsequential inconsistencies, or, worse yet, left drowning in the shallow puddle of the author’s wishful thinking.
It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn’t say, “Anything goes”—that’s irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty-seven, or whuddevva, and the story doesn’t “add up,” as we say. Fantasy doesn’t say, “Nothing is”—that’s nihilism. And it doesn’t say, “It ought to be this way”—that’s utopianism, a different enterprise. Fantasy isn’t meliorative. The happy ending, however enjoyable to the reader, applies to the characters only; this is fiction, not prediction and not prescription.
It doesn’t have to be the way it is is a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to “being real.” Yet it is a subversive statement.
Subversion doesn’t suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that things are as they have to be. Fantasy not only asks “What if things didn’t go on just as they do?” but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.
So here imagination and fundamentalism come into conflict.
A fully created imaginary world is a mental construct similar in many respects to a religious or other cosmology. This similarity, if noticed, can be deeply disturbing to the orthodox mind.
When a fundamental belief is threatened the response is likely to be angry or dismissive—either “Abomination!” or “Nonsense!” Fantasy gets the abomination treatment from religious fundamentalists, whose rigid reality-constructs shudder at contact with question, and the nonsense treatment from pragmatic fundamentalists, who want to restrict reality to the immediately perceptible and the immediately profitable. All fundamentalisms set strict limits to the uses of imagination, outside which the fundamentalist’s imagination itself runs riot, fancying dreadful deserts where God and Reason and the capitalist way of life are lost, forests of the night where tigers hang from trees by the tail, lighting the way to madness with their bright burning.
Those who dismiss fantasy less fiercely, from a less absolutist stance, usually call it dreaming, or escapism.
Dream and fantastic literature are related only on a very deep, usually inaccessible level of the mind. Dream is free of intellectual control; its narratives are irrational and unstable, and its aesthetic value is mostly accidental. Fantastic literature, like all the verbal arts, must satisfy the intellectual as well as the aesthetic faculty. Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.
As for the charge of escapism, what does “escape” mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?
 
“Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?” To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.
I know that to philosophers what I’m saying is childishly naive, but my mind cannot or will not follow philosophical argument, so I must remain naive. To an ordinary mind not trained in philosophy, the question—do things have to be the way they are/the way they are here and now/the way I’ve been told they are?—may be an important one. To open a door that has been kept closed is an important act.
Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is—more than any other kind of writing— subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.
Yet as Chesterton pointed out, fantasy stops short of nihilist violence, of destroying all the laws and burning all the boats. (Like Tolkien, Chesterton was an imaginative writer and a practicing Catholic, and thus perhaps particularly aware of tensions and boundaries.) Two and one make three. Two of the brothers fail the quest, the third carries it through. Action is met with reaction. Fate, Luck, Necessity are as inexorable in Middle-earth as in Colonus or South Dakota. The fantasy tale begins here and ends there (or back here), where the subtle and ineluctable obligations and responsibilities of narrative art have taken it. Down on the bedrock, things are as they have to be. It’s only everywhere above the bedrock that nothing has to be the way it is.
There really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related? We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, “It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.”
27. Exercises
The man in Georgia who posted a lot of blogs pretending to be a Syrian lesbian involved in the anti-government protests in Syria and the congressman in New York who posted a lot of pictures of his crotch to women around the country ought to get together. The Georgian has explained his impersonation blogs as being “a writing exercise.” What he can do now is dress up as a Syrian woman, with veiled face of course, and go oooh! ooooh! at the congressman’s crotch. Then he can write a blog about it as a writing exercise. The congressman can parade his crotch, both veiled and unveiled, to the admiring Georgian. Then he can lie and say he didn’t. Then he can explain to his wife and constituents that he did it as a prevarication exercise.
Then perhaps they can both go somewhere a long, long way away, where I will never have to hear or read about them again.
I am trying to think where. Maybe Las Vegas. Maybe they could be a night-club act in Las Vegas. With Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin will lecture on the History of the Colonial Period and flash her glasses and shout Gotcha! while explaining how she gets healthy exercise while controlling predators by shooting wolves from a helicopter. Meanwhile the veiled Georgian blogger will perform the hootchy-kootchy and the unveiled New York congressman will perform the crotchy-crotchy.
They can call it the Cirque Sans Honte. The news media will eat it up.
— UKL 
24 June 2011
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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 


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41. Literary Bests
The Award System. A while ago I was invited to choose, from a list of winners of a certain literary prize, “the three best works of American fiction of the last sixty years.” The three works that got the most votes from the invited voters would be announced as the three Best American Novels since 1950.


I’ve judged literary competitions or juried literary prizes pretty often. Every time I did it the responsibility seemed heavier, and so did my conscience. At first, this simple choice from a list seemed like it might be fun to do. But I found I couldn’t do it at all. The list was strong in well-known names and had some fine books on it, but it wasn’t the best sixty American novels since 1950. It was just a list of award winners, some excellent, many mediocre.


I wrote the director of the event explaining my inability to participate, and got back a kind and unreproachful letter. It was both reassuring and troubling to find that he understood my feelings. He asked, off the record, if I ignored the prescribed list of prize winners and picked any three American novels as my choice of the best of the last sixty years, could I do that?


I had to think hard, and I had to say no.


I found that I don’t believe there are three “best” works of American (or any) fiction of the last sixty years. Or ten “best.” Or a hundred. Several hundred? That’s more like it.


There are a whole lot of good writers and good novels. Yes, OK, there’s even more mediocre and bad fiction. So what?


Some good novels are outstandingly good. And I have my favorites, sure. All of us do. That means that they’re my best, or your best, but “the best”?


Maybe within one narrow genre, or a few years, a general agreement on the favorites might show up: but within a few years the results would probably be quite different.


Not long ago, in a vast poll of British novel-readers, The Lord of the Rings came out on top. I was delighted — the vote was such a lovely smack in the eye for trendy snobs and ignorant pedants. But I didn’t believe for a moment that it meant The Lord of the Rings was the best English novel ever written. That would be incredibly naïve.


Yet it is what the award system, the “best” system, asks us to believe.


Voting is the dangerous but essential tool of democracy. In art, voting is dangerous without being essential. Often it’s not even appropriate. In art, even given a carefully selected jury of peers, there’s no way to guarantee that a vote reflects informed, unprejudiced judgment not influenced by fashion, faction, or mere personal quirk. Anybody who’s juried an award, or just argued about a book, knows that.


Novels and stories that a whole lot of readers, plus honest and serious teachers and critics, have continued to hold in esteem for over six decades are surely beginning to deserve the status of “excellent” or even that slippery and over-used adjective “great”. But there are so many different kinds of fiction, so many standards by which to judge a novel, so many ways in which one work may excel another — Whose judgment is so widely and deeply and disinterestedly informed that they can presume to say which handful of them are “the best”?


And when you’ve said it, what have you gained?


And what have you lost?


To say Don Quixote is the best Spanish novel is another way to say it’s the greatest Spanish novel. And when you’ve said it either way, where has it got you? Better to ask, as a good scholar, critic, teacher, asks: why and how is Don Quixote excellent? Why can every Spaniard quote from it? Why is it read and loved after 500 years? Those are real questions, useful questions, that can help lead a reader into and through the book.


Scholars, critics, and teachers who know how to ask and answer these questions are capable of making serious choices, of establishing a canon of literature. The danger they run in doing so is that they and others almost invariably believe their choice to be complete and immutable.


All canons of art are overly restrictive. And all of them are out of date before they are declared.


Used with great caution and suspicion, a literary canon, a list-of-the-best, may have some use in guiding and informing inexperienced readers, but I think probably it’s far more useful as a target of intelligent argument and dissent.


Literary awards are useless for guiding and informing and don’t even make good targets. In declaring a book as “the best,” a literary award serves that book. It does not serve literature. On the contrary, it does literature a considerable disservice.


Awards serve above all to supply commercial booksellers with a readymade commodity and lazy-minded readers, teachers, and librarians with a readymade choice. They needn’t pay attention to the books that didn’t win the prize, they needn’t exercise their own critical faculties, they don’t have to think, they can just order the prize book and believe they’re reading what’s “important.”


The Idea of The Best. There really may be a best mouse trap or salad spinner, at least till a better one’s invented or the technology is improved. And certain inventions are more important than others. But what would be the sense or use in saying something or other is “the best” technological invention of the last year, or decade, or century? It’s a nice parlor game, but it has almost no intellectual or practical value.


Similarly, in art you might be able to pick one work as the best from a set of similar works of the same general period in the same genre. But, applied to a huge set, such as all the American novels of sixty years — or even one year — “the best” is a meaningless concept. You cannot usefully compare the excellence of oranges, eggplants, knives, hats, French poodles, and dreams.


The idea of “the best” is most comfortable in the sphere of measurable competitive activities — sports. Elsewhere it enforces a competitive attitude that is profoundly out of place.


Once, on a literary jury for a local award, I said I wished we could give the award to the whole excellent shortlist. A couple of the other jurors liked the idea, but one, a librarian, oddly enough, fought it tooth and nail: “Nobody would care if five or six people won,” she said. “Nobody gives a damn unless it’s a horserace. I certainly wouldn’t.”


She got her way, and we chose our one winner. But I left depressed and discouraged. Seabiscuit or Secretariat ran faster than the other horses, they won. A jury didn’t pick them out as “the best.” When you have a jury, it’s not a horserace. It’s a choice. And it may very well be quite arbitrary.


Awards are supposed to spur competitive excellence. But despite the theories of (almost universally male) critics and psychologists, the practice of art is not inherently a competitive activity. It can be made into one, of course. Male or cultural competitiveness often makes it into one. But I do not believe and see no evidence to prove that the passion to do something you have a gift for doing is originally driven by the need to excel or even to show off. Most people who have a gift work extremely hard at it, if they are able to, because the work is intensely, immediately, and reliably rewarding. You have to make a living, but art is very seldom a practical way of doing so. Most artists are in it for the satisfaction of knowing they’re doing, literally, the best thing they can do. In that sense of doing one’s best, and only in that sense, “the best” means something in art. To consider art as a competition to be “the best” is to miss the point.


The Use of Literary Awards. I’m not saying literary awards should be done away with, or that they have no use at all — only that we shouldn’t take them as meaningful literary judgments.


There have been literary competitions ever since ancient Greece, and though they tend like all competitions to select the predictable, to favor work by men over work by women, and to become ingrown or corrupt, still they serve as spurs to artists who want or need spurring to do their best.


Competitions and awards arouse interest in the audience, even if it’s the kind of interest appropriate to a horse race — witness the hysteria of betting on some of the “big” literary awards — which brings much-needed money to artists and those who support or invest in their work. This is a service principally to the business of art, but also to its vitality in the culture.


And to an author, early in a career, an award can be a true and needed validation — a beautiful reward, like the Boss sings about. The first literary prizes I won, the Nebula and the Hugo, were beautiful rewards to me. They gave me strength by justifying both my trust in my readers and my trust in myself as a writer. They come from the science fiction community: one is awarded by writers, the other by readers. They are of value almost solely within that community. They are ignored or actively despised by those who institute themselves the guardians of capital-L Literature.


Waste, Injustice, Ungenerosity. When it comes to capital-Literature, the prizes I’ve juried, awarded, or been awarded have left me increasingly uneasy about the arbitrariness and injustice of the choice and the arbitrary need to pick a single winner. Particularly with the “major” national prizes, the pleasure of award and recognition, given or received, is damaged and diminished by knowledge of how the system plays into the prejudice and exclusivism of a literary establishment or coterie, and the advertising machinery of the bookselling business. Praise becomes fame becomes commodification and so on round.


The “majorness” of the “major” awards is itself almost entirely arbitrary and factitious. Why has everybody heard of “the PEN/Faulkner,” while the other PEN awards go unknown and unnoticed? Are the jurors of one PEN prize somehow of ineffably higher calibre than the jurors of the others?


At least we know who they are. The jurors who pick the MacArthur “Genius” Awards are so ineffable, or so anxious about their corruptibility, or so afraid of the vengeance of disappointed non-geniuses, that they accept permanent anonymity. I think this is wrong. In fact I think it’s despicable. Anonymous judgment is a slap in the face of responsibility.


Then there is the waste factor. Of course a good book deserves recognition, but the one-winner-takes-all award ensures that the also-rans — all the good books on the shortlist — are pretty much dumped — forgotten. To name one winner is to create a whole slew of losers. Why? What good is that?


Survival of the fittest, sure, but you can overdo it. Would you shoot every horse in the race but the winner? “Best” book all too often comes to mean “only” book – of the month, the year, the decade…


How mean, how ungenerous we are! I wish that, instead of picking one and dumping all the rest, we celebrated our writers continually and in droves.


I wish we gave literary prizes freely, the way they used to give prizes at the Pet Show at Codornices Park in Berkeley when I was a kid. Every kid in the neighborhood brought their pet, and every pet got a prize, an ad hoc, unique prize: for Soulfulness — for Loud Meowing — for Unusual Spot Placement — for Being the Only Skink…. There was no Best of Breed (in those days there were many mongrels and few breeds), and certainly no Best of Show.


I‘d have some trust and interest in literary prizes like that. For Soulfulness — for Sitting Up and Begging Nicely — for Passion Well Expressed – for Excellent Use of Semi-Colons — for Being the Only Novel About Elderly Female Entomologists in Love….


You think literature would suffer, if prizes were given so freely? You think sharing praise diminishes its worth? You think good books are written in order to win huge advances and one-a-year prizes? Maybe so. I think not. I think the desire to excel in competition, whether for prizes or for money, is likely to produce a mediocre and predictable novel on a trendy topic in a mode recognised as “safe” by the sales department of a large commercial publisher.


I think good novels are written by writers who want to write this novel, their novel, which is like no other. And which is therefore unpredictable, unsafe, and unlikely to win a prize. Given time and chance and a little publicity, of course, it may keep winning readers for years and years to come. But most corporation-owned publishers could care less for the years to come. Bottom line this month is all that matters.


Book Groups as the Opposite of Awards. I don’t mean Oprah or commercial ventures, I mean the kind of reading group organised by private people among their friends and acquaintances, that have become common in the last twenty years or so. These groups often consist of modest people who don’t trust their own taste and therefore accept too meekly the publicised judgment of PR departments and award-givers. The book club that always picks the newest best seller or Big Prize winner for next month isn’t doing much for literature, although the cookies or the wine and cheese may be terrific.


But a lot of book-club members have been reading all their lives. Reading people tend to be a bit balky, independent, resistant to being told what they ought to read, inclined to go off and discover it for themselves. There are a lot of book groups doing quite serious independent reading and discussion. I wonder if they aren’t doing more to preserve and celebrate literature than all the national awards and lists of Bests.


And how about all the Internet sites and blogs that discuss books read? Some of them are awfully naïve — some of them are awesomely knowledgeable.


There are various ways to sneak around the fences and monuments erected by the Guardians of Literature and the Awarders of Awards in order to get to where we can find out and talk about what’s actually going on in literature. Maybe readers of this blog can suggest some other sneaky routes.


— UKL 
28 December 2011


40. Five Bad Myth
I was impressed by a recent MoveOn.org emailing (November 23, 2011), listing five myths — actually pieces of disinformation — relentlessly propagated by reactionary politicians and news media. There are of course dozens more such myths or lies — President Obama was not born in the United States, etc, etc — but these five are, at the moment, the biggies. To have them all in one place, clearly stated, was useful to my thinking about Republican tactics and the deliberate or unthinking compliance of the media.


These myths have been accepted and repeated by speakers and writers without strong political convictions or who seek to give “balanced coverage” of events, without considering that you cannot balance myths, in the sense of propaganda, deliberate misinformation, with facts.


The murder of six million Jews in Germany did not take place: myth (denial). Six million Jews were murdered in Germany: fact (history). You cannot “balance” or reconcile the myth with the fact and arrive at fact.


You don’t ever get information by repeating disinformation.


Two lies — or five — or a thousand — don’t make a truth.


You can find MoveOn’s myths and debunkings at http://front.moveon.org/top-5-fox-myths-to-debunk-this-thanksgiving/.


And many thanks to MoveOn for all the good work they do!


As I read the list of myths, I began to arrive at my own personal debunks or demystifications, harsher and more radical than theirs.


And here they are:
MYTH #1: The congressional Super Committee failed because both sides refused to compromise.


REALITY: It failed because the Republicans in Congress, following the Party Line, now refuse ANY compromise on ANY issue offered by the Democrats.


Reaganist Republicanism has become a rigid ideology, as Stalinism was.


To be a Republican politician now, you must be, literally, politically correct.


If you don’t correctly parrot the Party Line, you will be exiled to (shudder!) Liberal Siberia.


MYTH #2: Nobody knows what Occupy Wall Street is about.


REALITY: Everybody knows what Occupy Wall Street is about.


But some people are so frightened by the trouble our country is in that they’re in denial about it. The goals of the Occupy Movement make these people morally uncomfortable, threatening their complacency — and so they deny that it has any goals at all.


MYTH #3: Occupiers should stop protesting and just get a job.


REALITY... And the American children who go to bed hungry every night should stop whining and just go buy a supersized burger with fries at MacDonalds, and the homeless should get off the streets and move into a nice house, and the old retired people who are losing medical insurance should ah, umm, well, they should just shut up and get a job. Or die. Or something.


MYTH #4: Occupy Wall Street is intent on provoking violence, especially against banks and the police.


REALITY: A few people have used the Occupy movement as a front for their antisocial behavior, just as a few people have used Republican hatred of Obama as a front for their psychopathy.


The Occupy movement, facing a violent police force in several cities, has so far remained nonviolent. If they can hang on to their nonviolence, they will have made a moral statement comparable to that of Gandhi, or the Freedom Riders, or the young people of Tiananmen Square.


MYTH #5: The biggest crisis facing our country is out-of-control government spending.


REALITY: Our crisis is a loss of active citizenship — a weakening of confidence in democratic ideals and principles. This loss, this weakening, is directly aggravated by Reaganist ideology and propaganda.


Reaganism, seeing extreme inequity as the engine of capitalism, says that the poor should be taxed heavily, the rich more lightly, and the very rich should not have to pay taxes at all. Democracy seeks to share the cost of maintaining government (taxation) equitably, each contributing according to income.


Reaganism says that the government is the enemy. Democracy is the idea that the people are the government.


So, are we our own enemy?


Pogo, thou shouldst be living at this hour.


— UKL 
28 November 2011


39. Ninety-Nine Weeks: A Fairy Tale
Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter who lived with his wife and their daughter and son in a cottage at the edge of a forest. He loved his trade, and worked hard at it. But most of the land belonged to rich ogres, who kept the forests for their own use. Firewood was so expensive that ordinary people had begun to heat their houses with coal. The woodcutter went from door to door offering timber or firewood, but again and again he was turned away. His wife was lame and could not walk far, though she worked hard and well, keeping the kitchen garden and the house. The daughter and son went to the village school. Young Janet looked after the mayor’s wife’s babies every afternoon when school was out, and young Bob earned a penny here and there doing odd jobs. That bit of money the children could bring home was all the family had now, and every penny had to go for rent to their ogre landlord. They had no new clothes or shoes, and ate only from their garden. Their life had grown hard, and winter was coming on.


“Maybe you could get a job at the coal mine, John,” said the woodcutter’s wife.


So he went up the road ten miles to the coal mines and asked for work, but, as he had feared, they told him he was too old to learn that craft, and sent him off.


He trudged homeward, downhearted, though he was by nature a hopeful man. Evening was coming on. Shadows fell across the road. Among the shadows he saw a tall, beautiful woman standing. “Woodcutter,” she said, “be of good cheer! I am your Gift Fairy, and I will give you and your family enough to live on. You will have food, and can buy shoes for your son and daughter!”


“Gracious lady,” said the woodcutter, “you are very kind. What can I do to deserve such a gift?”


“To deserve my gift, woodcutter, you must not work, but every day you must look for work,” said the lady. “You must try four times a day to find a job. No matter if there is no work to be found, you must not stop looking for it. I will be watching you. I will know if you grow discouraged. If you cease to look for work for one month, I will know it, and my gift will cease to appear.”


“Lady,” said the woodcutter, “I’d be glad to have work, but if I ask for a job four times every day in the village, I’ll be going to the same people all the time, because it’s a small village, and they’ll get sick of me.”


“That is not my concern,” said the lady.


“Could you maybe, instead of giving me money, give me some kind of job — any kind?” said the woodcutter, who, as we know, was a hopeful man. “I’m not too old to learn a new craft, and I’ll turn my hand to anything.”


“That is not my department,” said the lady. “The Works Fairies are not functioning at present. All I can offer you is my gift, on the terms I have told you.”


“I accept,” said the woodcutter, with a sigh, “and my family and I are grateful.”


“That is proper,” said the tall woman, and she vanished into the long shadows of the evening.


The woodcutter went home. As he came to his house he happened to put his hand in his pocket, and felt something there, and drew it forth, and lo and behold! it was a silver coin, enough for them to live on for a week. So he went in, and his wife and children gathered round him asking eagerly, “Did you get the job at the mines, Dad?”


“No, they won’t have me,” said he, “but I met a magic lady and she gave me this,” and he tossed the silver coin up spinning in the air. And while they passed it around and admired it and wondered at it, he told them that the magic lady would give them the same every week, so long as he would seek work wherever it could be sought for.


“Now Bob,” he said, “go change this coin at the brewer’s, for he’ll have the change, and bring home a pitcher of beer, for we’ll celebrate tonight. And Janet, you go put four fine chops on our tab at the butcher’s. And dear wife, come give me a good kiss while the kids are out, eh?”


So they made merry that night.


Next day the woodcutter went into the village asking for work at every door, and he did so faithfully, day after day, until the villagers began to say to each other that John Woodcutter was daft, coming back and back when they’d told him and told him they hadn’t a thing for him. And what did he think he’d find, anyway, with the roads already full of men out of work?


The brewer’s wife offered him the job of cleaning out her cow-barn, since she no longer kept a cow, but it was only two or three day’s work, and she wouldn’t give him a silver piece for it, nor half one, so he had to turn her down. After that, when she poured beer for people in the brewery bar she told them that John Woodcutter went around asking for work but when you offered him a job he was too lazy to take it. And some of the people nodded wisely and said, “What do you expect of people who’ll take money for doing nothing?” and others said, “The fairies have no business handing out good money to layabouts and wastrels,” and the mayor said, “Fairy money is foul money. It corrupts those who take it. Mark my words, we’ll soon see John driving a carriage and his wife wearing silken gowns!” Then they all nodded wisely, except one man who had just lost his job of road-paving, and was spending his last coppers on a half-pint of beer to drown his sorrows. That man drank his beer, went out onto the road where John had told them he had met the tall, beautiful lady, and waited for her to appear. And there she was. And she offered her bargain, and he took it.


John kept going about his village, and villages for miles around, seeking and asking for a job. He longed with all his heart to be doing an honest day’s work, but wouldn’t take the part-time jobs he was offered, for they’d bring him in less than the lady’s gift did; so his reputation as a working man was soon lost. His wife Mary’s rheumatism kept growing worse and now was very bad, so he and young Janet kept the house and garden. The boy Bob dropped out of school and got himself prenticed to a carpenter, and they were proud of him, but the fee was a fifth of their silver piece, and Bob as a prentice brought no money in. After a whole year had passed, John was feeling almost as desperate as he had felt coming home from the mine. That evening he went down to the road, and there among the shadows stood the lady, tall and beautiful.


“Lady,” he said, “I look for work, I ask for work, but there’s no work to be had. And people have lost patience with me, bothering them for jobs, but not able to take the little they can offer.”


“You may cease to look,” said she, “whenever you wish.”


“But that would break our bargain.”


“Yes,” said she. “By seeking work, you prove that you are a hopeful man, who believes that good people always have enough money. To cease seeking would prove that you have lost that righteous belief. It would show that you are discouraged. The Gift Fairies cannot see discouraged people. You would become invisible to me. You would become ineligible for my gift.”


“Ah, well,” said John. “We won’t be discouraged, then.”


And month after month, he trudged about, wearing out his shoes, which he couldn’t replace because Mary’s medicines cost a great deal now, and young Bob’s appetite was something ferocious, and young Janet no longer looked after the mayor’s children because the mayor’s wife said her clothes were too shamefully shabby. Mary wept because her pretty daughter didn’t have a decent dress on her back, so John bought cloth from a peddler, and Mary sewed Janet a new dress.


“Tsk, tsk, look at John Woodcutter’s Mary flouncing about in silks and satins, and her dad taking money from those fairies and never doing a lick of work...“


The weeks passed, and every week the day came round when John would feel in his pocket and find the magic piece of silver. Eagerly did he wait for that day, and the money was spent almost before he had it. Then one week the gift-day came, and he felt in his pocket, and nothing was there.


He waited a minute, and felt again. Empty.


He went and weeded the potato patch, and then felt in his pocket, and his other pocket. He went all about the house looking at the ground to see if the silver coin had fallen from his pocket. Nothing.


Evening came, and he went down to the road to that place where the lady stood, tall and beautiful. “Oh, lady,” said John, “your gift didn’t come today. And Mary’s worse, and we really need it.”


The Gift Fairy looked at him silently, as if from a long way off. “John Woodcutter, is it?” she said at last. “I can barely see you. Your ninety-nine weeks are up.”


“What ninety-nine weeks?”


She seemed to look through him as she spoke, and her voice came as if from far away. “You had ninety-nine weeks to look for work. You found nothing. You are now officially discouraged.”


“Oh, but lady, I’m looking for a job every day as hard as ever, even though it’s been close on two years — truly I’m not discouraged — I keep hoping!“


“You are officially discouraged, you have officially ceased to look actively for work, and you are officially invisible to the Gift Fairies.”


“Oh, lady,” cried John in despair, “for how long?”


“Forever,” said the faint, cold voice of the Gift Fairy.


And no matter what John said to her after that, no matter how he pleaded, she did not reply, and gave no sign of hearing or seeing him at all.


Terribly downcast, he set off for home at last. But on the road just as night was falling he met his landlord, the rich ogre who owned most of the property for miles around. “You,” said the ogre, looking down from his tall black horse, “you’re the troublemaker in the cottage by the forest. You haven’t paid your full rent for months. You’re to be out of there at the end of the week.”


“Mr. Ogre,” said John, “if we paid full rent out of what the Gift Fairy gave us, we had nothing left for food and clothing. And now she says she has no more to give us at all.”


“The Gift Fairy, is it!” said the ogre. “Living off the fairies — I should have known it! Do you realize those fairies of yours are trying to raise my taxes — MY taxes — to pay for your roads, and your damned schools that teach you sedition and irreligion, and your police that should have put you long since into one of the jails I have to pay for with MY taxes? Fairies! Everything that’s wrong with this country is the fairies’ fault! Get out of my sight before I give you a whipping!” And the ogre flourished his whip at John, then slashed his horse hard with it, and galloped off into the night.


The rest of that week, John went looking for any work at all, whatever it was and whatever it paid, but another man had always got there before him.


Hearing they could no longer pay for young Bob’s prenticeship, the carpenter sent him home. Bob’s sister Janet had just finished school, and the two young people talked it over and planned what they might do.


On the last evening of the week the brother and sister went down to the road where their father had met the Gift Fairy, and sure enough, she was there among the shadows, tall and beautiful. But she did not look at them.


“Lady,” said young Bob, “I’ve been looking for work and cannot find it, so maybe you’d give me the silver coin, until I do?”


But the lady paid no attention to him at all.


“Lady,” said young Janet, “I’m through school now, and I can teach, or look after babies, or look after sick people, or garden, or cook, or anything at all almost, but my mother needs me, nights, and I can’t find work in the village. So maybe you’d give the silver coin, until I do?”


But the lady paid no attention to her at all.


Bob pleaded, Janet wept, but to no avail. She never looked at them.


A little red fox looked out of a covert by the road and laughed. “She can’t see you, young’uns,” the fox said. “You’re invisible.”


“But I’m hopeful,” Janet said, and Bob said, “But I’m not discouraged!“ And both of them said, “But we’re here — right in front of her!”


“Maybe,” said the fox. “But you didn’t lose your last job.”


Janet and Bob stared at him. “How could we lose a job when we’ve never had one?”


“A good question,” said the fox. “But since you’ve never been employed, you’re officially entering the work force: and so, you’re not eligible for fairy benefits. You’re invisible. It’s wonderful,” said the fox, snapping at a flea on his flank, “how fairies think, and what they can see and can’t see. My opinion is, they’ve been listening far too much to rich ogres. My opinion is, they’d do a better job at being fairies if they listened to the other ninety-nine percent.”


But young Bob and Janet, trying not to weep with disappointment, were already trudging off up the road to help their parents pack up what little they owned and leave their home forever in the morning.


The fox shrugged his narrow shoulders, looking after them through the shadows of the night. “Nobody ever listens to foxes,” he said.


Some Foxy Figures
Official Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for 2010:


About 14 million people were officially counted as unemployed.


(5.9 million of these people had been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer.)


People without work or without full-time work but NOT counted as unemployed:


8.9 million “involuntary part-time workers” (would work full-time if they could)


6.1 million “wanted work but did not actively seek work”


Of these, 2.5 million had looked for work within the past year; the rest had not, because, according to the BLS, they did not expect to find any (the “discouraged”), or they could not take a job because of a disability, or were in school, or had no way to get to and from work, or had children but no child care.


Also not counted among the unemployed by the BLS are more than 2 million people currently in American prisons.


The total of unemployed not counted as unemployed is at least 17 million; added to the counted figure of 14 million, 31 million people were out of work last year.


The figures have not substantially changed so far this year.


There was a good deal of hoopla recently when the number of oficially unemployed dropped from 14 million to 13.9 million, so that we have “only” 9% official unemployment. This drop is mostly because the “long-term unemployed” simply have been shifted into the “did not seek work” category. Same bods, different pigeonholes.


The true rate of unemployment remains between 16 and 25%.


(It is much the same in European countries that do not fudge the figures as we do.)


The number of unemployed people receiving benefits (less than half) has dropped recently: this is not, as the media say, because we are “recovering from the recession,” but because so many people have been out of work for more than 99 weeks. Their eligibility for benefits has run out.


Even of the 14 million “officially unemployed,” about 30% have been out of work so long they have lost benefit eligibility.


The Congressional Budget Office estimates that every dollar spent on unemployment benefits brings the country $1.90 in “economic growth.” A bargain, says the little red fox. (But Fox News would not agree.)


— UKL 
21 November 2011


38. Long-Term Discouragement
Our government decided over fifteen years ago that certain citizens, categorized as “long-term discouraged workers,” do not exist. The category exists, but the citizens don’t. When the Bureau of Labor or other entities give the numbers of the unemployed, these men and woman are excluded: they are not there. They are our government’s version of the Disappeared.


Strangely enough, though out of work, they do not belong to the category of “the unemployed.” The Disappeared (according to an excellent article in DailyFinance*) consist of those who “had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.”


Now how, exactly, does the United States Government know that all these people stopped job-hunting? Gave up for good? Are stretched out in the recliner in front of the TV with a beer, or more likely in front of no TV with no beer and no recliner due to lack of income, and have been lying there for months? Does the Bureau of Labor Statistics knock on their door (assuming they haven’t been foreclosed and evicted and still have a door) and come in, and ask, and observe them for a week or two to see if they are or are not going out looking for a job? Well, no. The statistics on unemployment are gathered rather more indirectly than that.


The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as “unemployed” only people who have “actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks.” The number of people in the category, “the unemployed,” is based on the number of reports of frequent, continuous job-hunting, which people out of work are required to submit, in order to qualify for unemployment benefits — up until the set date when those benefits cease. After that, the unemployed cease to be even the unemployed. They cease to be counted. They disappear.


And yet the government knows something about them. It knows, for certain, that not one single one of them is looking for work. It knows so because it says so.


It seems odd that people would stop looking for work just the very moment when the dole they were getting by on stops. But remember! They are not the unemployed. They are not even people. They are a category: “the long-term discouraged.” Clearly a negligible category — slobs, louts, layabouts, no entrepreneurial spirit, no good ole American get up and go. They aren’t counted because, frankly, they don’t count.


Currently, around two and a half million American citizens don’t count.


It’s an amazing effective trick, replacing human beings with categories. The statistics present us the highly managed category “the unemployed” as a reality; editorial writers and TV pundits intone it over and over; and it’s only too easy to accept it — until you realise it entails the belief that two and half million unemployed Americans aren’t looking for a job, won’t look for a job, wouldn’t look for one if there were any to look for. Do you believe that?


The trick was perfected in 1994 to pad employment figures. It has worked beautifully ever since.


It allows the government to keep telling us that unemployment is “only” around 9%. The actual figure, once the padding is removed, is certainly over 16% and probably over 22% — very near the worst days of the 1930’s.


It allows the government not to provide job opportunities and works projects. Who needs ’em?


It allows the government to let people starve. Starve? Who? Them? But they don’t exist!


Even if they did exist they’d be so lazy they wouldn’t even vote. Forget ’em.


Some of these non-existent Americans have been visible, recently, joining the tent cities and demos of Occupy America. (But don’t worry, those discontented liberal whine-ins never get anywhere. We’re still testing bombs, we’re still in Viet Nam, racial segregation is still enforced by law, and this recession’s a blip that trickle-down will fix in no time. And it’s morning in America.)


What I don’t know is, how do we refuse to play along any longer — how to demand that the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop padding and give us an honest count? I guess it begins by simply refusing the padded figure every time we hear or see it — correcting it, protesting aloud. Lies grow in the silence of those who hear them.


— UKL
5 November 2011



	
Link updated April 2023. “The Jobless Effect: Is the Real Unemployment Rate 16.5%, 22%, or. . .?" by Pallavi Gogoi, DailyFinance, 16 July 2010. Original URL: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/16/what-is-the-real-unemployment-rate/



37. Nôtre-Dame de la Faim
October 2011


I visited a great cathedral this week. It’s situated in a mixed industrial/small business/residential area not far from the Portland Airport, an odd place for a cathedral. But it has a huge congregation and is full of people, not just on Sundays but every day of the week.


And it’s big. Nôtre-Dame de Paris covers about 67,000 square feet. This one is nearly twice as big, 108,000 square feet, two full city blocks (and its overflow, adjunct building across the river covers 94,000 square feet).


Nôtre-Dame, with its towers, is much taller, and is built of stone all carved with saints and gargoyles, and is endearingly ancient and beautiful. This one looks rather unimpressive as you approach it, partly because there are buildings near it and you can’t really get a view of it, and partly because it wasn’t built long ago to celebrate and embody spiritual worship, but recently, in dire need, for a specific material purpose. Still, I wouldn’t discount a very large element of the spirit in the building of it.


From the outside it looks like a particularly huge warehouse, but it hasn’t the strangely menacing, fortresslike look of the great windowless citadels of consumerism, Walmart and the rest. When you get inside, you see the cathedral. The high, airy entrance hall leads you first, on an elegantly stone-tiled floor with little bronze decorations set in here and there, to an area of offices and cubicles. Most churches hide their administrative department, but this one puts it right out front. The walls are blond wood, everything is spacious and handsome. Like the high nave of Nôtre-Dame, the startlingly high ceiling of steel-braced wooden ceiling soars above all the small human activity down on the floor beneath. In the old cathedral that height creates a great, mysterious, upper space of shadows. But the space beneath this vault is luminous.


It wasn’t till I entered the interior, the cathedral proper, that I understood why they’d built the ceiling so high. As there should be, there are great doors to open into the sacred space. And as a sacred space will do, the first sight took my breath away. I stood silent. I remembered what the word awe means.


Much of the interior of the huge building is visible from that doorway, or would be except that the whole floor is covered with immense, towering blocks and piles and stacks of crates, cartons, boxes, and containers, arranged in gigantically severe order, with wide aisles between each tower or bay. Only down the aisles can you see the far walls in the far distance. There are no permanent walls or divisions. The immense, splendidly cantilevered ceiling stretches serenely above it all. The air is cool, fresh, and clean, with the faintest smell of garden stuff, fresh vegetables. Vehicles run quietly up and down the aisles, miniforklifts and the like, looking quite tiny among the high blocks and stacks, constantly busy at moving crates and boxes, bringing in and taking out.


Well, it isn’t a cathedral. That was a metaphor. It’s just a warehouse, after all.


But what kind of warehouse stores nothing to sell? Nothing, not one item in all these (literally) acres of goods, is or ever will be for sale.


Actually, it’s a bank. But not the kind of bank where money is the only thing that happens.


Here is where money doesn’t happen.


This is the Oregon Food Bank. Every box in the great cubical stacks between the aisles, every carton, every can, every bottle, every crate, holds food. Every carton, every can, every pound, every ounce of that food will be given to the people of Oregon who haven’t the money to buy what they need to live on.


It is a cathedral, after all. The cathedral of hunger.


Or should I say the cathedral of generosity? Of compassion, or community, or caritas? It comes to the same thing.


There are people who need help.


There are people who deny it, saying that God helps those who help themselves and the poor and the unemployed are merely shiftless slackers sponging on a nanny government.


There are people who don’t deny poverty, but they don’t want to know about it because it’s all so terrible and what can you do?


And then there are people who help.


This place is the most impressive proof of their existence I ever saw. Their existence, their efficiency, their influence. This place embodies human kindness.


In, of course, the most unspiritual, lowly, humdrum, even gross way. In a thousand cans of green beans, in towers of macaroni boxes, in crates of fresh-picked vegetables, in cold side-chapel refrigerators of meat and cheese . . . In hundreds of cartons with improbable names of obscure beers on them, donated by the brewers because beer cartons are particularly sturdy and useful for packing food . . . In the men and women, employees and trained volunteers, operating the machinery, manning the desks, sorting and packaging the fresh produce, teaching survival skills in the Food Bank classrooms, kitchens, and gardens, driving the trucks that bring food in and the trucks that take food out to where it’s needed.


For these towering walls and blocks and reefs of goods—12,000 to 18,000 pounds of food in each bay of the warehouse—will vanish, melt away like sandcastles, tonight or in a few days, to be replaced instantly by the supply of boxed, canned, glassed, fresh, and frozen food, which in turn will melt away in a day or a week, going where it’s needed.


And that’s everywhere. The Food Bank distributes in every county of the state of Oregon plus one county of Washington State. They don’t have to look far to find people who need help getting enough to eat.


Anywhere kids are, to start with. Many school-age children in our country, towns, and cities don’t get three meals a day, or even two. Many aren’t always sure if they’ll get anything to eat today at all.


How many? About a third of them. One child in three.


Put it this way: If you or I were a statistic-parent with three statistic-kids in school, one of our three children would be hungry. Malnourished. Hungry in the morning, hungry at night. The kind of hungry that makes a child feel cold all the time. Makes a child stupid. Makes a child sick.


Which one of our children . . . which child . . . ?


36. Readers’ Questions
October 2011


I recently got a letter from a reader who, after saying he liked my books, said he was going to ask what might seem a stupid question—one I need not answer, though he really longed to know the answer to it. It concerned the wizard Ged’s use-name Sparrowhawk. He asked, Is this the New World sparrowhawk, Falco sparverius, or one of the Old World kestrels, also Falco, or their sparrowhawks, which are not Falco but Accipiter?


(Warning: You can get into something of a tangle with these birds. Many people use the words sparrowhawk and kestrel interchangeably, but kestrels, Eurasian or American, are all falcons, while not all sparrowhawks are kestrels, or vice versa. You see what I mean? I am only sorry we lost the beautiful British name windhover. But we have G. M. Hopkins’s poem.)


I immediately answered the letter as best I could. I said it seems to me it can’t be any of the above, because it’s not an Earth bird but an Earthsea bird, and Linnaeus did not go there with his can of names. But the bird I saw in my imagination when I was writing the book was definitely like our splendid little American sparverius, so maybe we could call it Falco parvulus terramarinus. (I didn’t think of parvulus [small] when I wrote the letter, but it should be there. A sparrowhawk is a quite small falcon. Ged was a scrappy boy, but short.)


After I’d answered the letter, I thought about how promptly and with what pleasure I’d done so. And I looked at the never-decreasing stack of letters waiting to be answered and thought how much I wanted to put off answering them, because so many of them would be so difficult, some so impossible . . . Yet I very much wanted to answer them, because they were written by people who liked or at least were responding to my work, had questions about it, and took the trouble to tell me so, and thus deserve the trouble—and sometimes the pleasure—of an answer.


What makes so many letters-to-the-author hard to answer? What have the difficult ones in common? I have been thinking about it for some days. So far, I’ve come up with this:


They ask large, general questions, sometimes stemming from some branch of learning the writers know way, way more about than I do, such as philosophy or metaphysics or information theory.


Or they ask large, general questions about how Taoism or feminism or Jungian psychology or information theory has influenced me—questions answerable in some cases only with a long PhD thesis, in others only with “Not much.”


Or else they ask large, general questions based on large, general misconceptions about how writers work—such as, Where do you get your ideas from? What is the message of your book? Why did you write this book? Why do you write?


This last question (which is in fact highly metaphysical) is often asked by young readers. Some writers, even ones who don’t actually write for a living, answer it “for money,” which certainly stops all further discussion, being the deadest of dead ends. My honest answer for it is “because I like to,” but that’s seldom what the questioner wants to hear, or what the teacher wants to find in the book review or the term paper. They want something meaningful.


Meaning—this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story . . . ? Tell me what it Means.


But that’s not my job, honey. That’s your job.


I know, at least in part, what my story means to me. It may well mean something quite different to you. And what it meant to me when I wrote it in 1970 may be not at all what it meant to me in 1990 or means to me in 2011. What it meant to anybody in 1995 may be quite different from what it will mean in 2022. What it means in Oregon may be incomprehensible in Istanbul, yet in Istanbul it may have a meaning I could never have intended . . .


Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.


Writing is a risky bidness. No guarantees. You have to take the chance. I’m happy to take it. I love taking it. So my stuff gets misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted—so what? If it’s the real stuff, it will survive almost any abuse other than being ignored, disappeared, not read.


“What it means,” to you, is what it means to you. If you have trouble deciding what, if anything, it means to you, I can see why you might want to ask me, but please don’t. Read reviewers, critics, bloggers, and scholars. They all write about what books mean to them, trying to explain a book, to achieve a valid common understanding of it useful to other readers. That’s their job, and some of them do it wonderfully well.


It’s a job I do as a reviewer, and I enjoy it. But my job as a fiction writer is to write fiction, not to review it. Art isn’t explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains. (Or so it seems to me, which is why I have a problem with the kind of modern museum art that involves reading what the artist says about a work in order to find out why one should look at it or “how to experience” it.)


I see a potter’s job as making a good pot, not as talking about how and where and why she made it and what she thinks it’s for and what other pots influenced it and what the pot means or how you should experience the pot. She can do that if she wants to, of course, but should she be expected to? Why? I don’t expect her to, I don’t even want her to. All I expect of a good potter is to go and make another good pot.


A question such as the one about sparrowhawks—not large, not general, not metaphysical, and not personal—a question of detail, of fact (in the case of fiction, imaginary fact)—a limited, specific question about a particular work—is one most artists are willing to try to answer. And questions about technique, if limited and precise, can be intriguing for the artist to consider (“Why did you use a mercury glaze?” or “Why do you/don’t you write in the present tense?” for instance.)


Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not?


But any question, if it is limited, specific, and precise, can be answered honestly—if only with “I honestly don’t know, I never thought about it, now I have to think about it, thank you for asking!” I am grateful for questions like that. They keep me thinking.


Now, back to Hopkins and “The Windhover”—


I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom


of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding


Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding


High there . . .


Ah, we could explain that, and talk about what it means, and why and how it does what it does, forever. And we will, I hope. But the poet, like the falcon, leaves that to us.


35. More About Steinbeck: Troubled Waters
My friend Roger Dorband told me I had to read Steinbeck’s book about Baja California and the Gulf of Mexico, The Log from The Sea of Cortez.* Of course I went to Powells, and of course Powells, existing under the grace and blessing of heaven, long may it do so! had a paperback copy. Charles and I read it aloud, enjoying it greatly, and I wanted to write about it, because it’s a beautiful book and not very well known. But then, when I read the introduction to the 1995 edition (I generally leave introductions till after I’ve read the book) I almost thought I didn’t want to write about it. What I learned troubled me and greatly complicated my response to the book.


But Steinbeck was a complicated man. No use trying to simplify him. And if, in writing The Log, he dodged certain complications, that’s no reason why I should.


The book chronicles a six-week, 4,000-mile journey in a fishing boat (a Monterey purse-seiner), undertaken in the spring of 1940 as a scientific collecting trip to and in the great arm of the sea between Baja California and the mainland coast of Mexico. It is recounted day by day, as a log. It appears unmistakably, solidly factual: a record of the weather, the places visited, and the inter-tidal creatures seen and collected on the trips ashore. Yet in the telling of this straightforward narrative, something very important is not told. The story is true, but it is not the whole truth, and therefore cannot be nothing but the truth, since a lie by omission is no less a lie for being invisible.


Why did Steinbeck need to lie?


In The Grapes of Wrath, he kept his passionate temperament under a fierce, masterful control. He thereby achieved an honesty that I’m not sure he ever achieved again. In the alternate chapters of that book, many of them praising the splendor of the land – beautiful, passionate descriptive writing, filled with the pain that informs the whole book, the pain of seeing something absolutely good misused, abused, broken – his handling of the material is powerful and flawless. He describes; there is little explaining and almost no preaching at all. That is what I mean by control. He controlled himself, in the interest of seeing clearly and telling what he saw as completely, as honestly as he could.


In his early books, the material sometimes gets out of hand, and truthfulness gets warped by opinion or by over-facile emotion. Tortilla Flat (1935) isn’t the insightful book I expected about Monterey people by a man who had lived with them and knew them, but a rather patronising confection masquerading as machismo and confusing alcoholism with spirituality.


 It was his first success, and a big one. Yet he had the strength to move almost directly away from that kind of success. He wrote In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men, and then his masterpiece. The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939.


Two years after it came the original edition of Sea of Cortez, co-authored with his friend the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. The Log is Steinbeck’s narrative of the voyage, excerpted ten years later from that first, collaborative version.


They were, he tells us, aboard the Western Flyer, one scientist doing research on tidewater fauna, one writer helping the scientist, and four crew, professional fishermen. His portraits of the crewmen are affectionate, humorous, and respectful. Now and then a bit of the Monterey-boys-drink-hard-and-thus-are-wise stuff turns up; but it’s only right and natural that a book about hardworking men in a small ship will include some of the predictable, traditional forms of male bonding. And because all six of them really were working hard, not running away from work in order to booze, Steinbeck can be very funny, without getting coy or boastful, about the amount of beer aboard, and the port visits.


So, four Monterey fishermen plus the two researchers who hired them. It worked out fine. All six of them were nice guys, and they had a hell of a good time, and it’s a hell of a good story.


But — perhaps reading aloud one notices these things more — something about the way it’s told kept making me uncomfortable. Steinbeck uses the first person plural, speaking throughout as “we.” This may reflect the fact that the original version of the book was a collaboration, but it’s confusing, tricky. Sometimes “we” means all six men. Sometimes it means himself and Ed Ricketts (not named in the book, though the crewmen are). Sometimes it’s evidently Steinbeck repeating things he learned from Ricketts. And sometimes it’s definitely Steinbeck going off on philosophical journeys by himself, making large, cloudy preachments or thinking fascinating thoughts. So some of the “we”s seemed truer than others, some had an odd, artificial ring.


Then I read the Introduction and discovered that all the “we”s are false.


The all-male crew of six is a fiction. There were seven people aboard the Western Flyer. One was a woman, Steinbeck’s wife Carol. He took her, or she chose to go, in an attempt to salvage their troubled marriage.


When he wrote the book, he – to use a verb that has never lost for me its terrible resonance from the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile – he disappeared her.


That they divorced soon after is neither a surprise nor a justification.


So in The Log, Steinbeck presents a falsified record as a factual one. Defended as artistic license and by the nobody-knows-what-truth-is argument, such fact-bending and lying by omission is now far more acceptable than it was in 1940, indeed rather fashionable. I doubt it will bother many people as much as it bothers me. I just wish, I bitterly wish, that he’d had the self-respect to know that all he had to do was tell the story straight on, first person, with all the people on board, and Ed Ricketts’ incredibly prescient insights to illuminate it, not as a fairy-tale of six guys on a jolly escape from ordinary life, but as a true story of seven people on an extraordinary voyage through a difficult, beautiful, haunting, and – for two of them, surely — painful reality.


Well, so, you have to forget the disappeared wife. You can’t wonder about her, if you want to read the book. And I still say read it, because though the author evaded instead of controlling his material, so it missed being all it might have been, still, it is a delight. Telling the story day by day, using all his marvelous power of accurate, immediate description, Steinbeck takes us with him on that little shrimp-boat in those strange, mirage-laden, inland waters, so lonesome then and so remote. An unforgettable trip.


And his meditative flights, though a bit pompous sometimes, are often brilliant and lovable. I can only give a taste, such as this from page 178. Their work in the Sea of Cortez was identifying, counting, and collecting the creatures of the tide pools. He’s been talking about the relative importance of common species and unimportance of the rare ones. He’s using ideas he learned from Ed Ricketts, a true pioneer in ecology, whose ideas are part of the foundation of a great deal of our thinking now. But the language and the mystical delight are pure Steinbeck.


[…It] seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. […] It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.


Or, from the last page of the Log proper, as they head north on the grey, fierce ocean, away from the sunlight and shallows of the Gulf:


There was some quality of music here, perhaps not to be communicated, but sounding clear and huge in our minds. The boat plunged and shook herself, and rivers of swirling water ran down into the scuppers. Below in the hold, packed in jars, were thousands of little dead animals [...The] wind blew off the tops of the whitecaps, and the big guy wire, from bow to mast, took up its vibration like the low pipe on a tremendous organ. It sang its deep note into the wind.


— UKL 
8 October 2011



	
Viking published Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, by John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, in 1941. In 1951, Viking published the narative part of the book separately as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck. This is the book I read, republished as a Penguin Classic in 1995, with Steinbeck’s tribute to Ricketts, and a very useful Introduction by Richard Astro.



34. TGAN and TGOW
September 2011


When I was a young novelist, fairly often a reviewer would get fervent and declare that an obscure book such as Call It Sleep, or a hugely successful one such as The Naked and the Dead, was The Great American Novel. By writers the phrase was used half jokingly—What are you writing these days? Oh, you know, The Great American Novel. I don’t think I’ve seen the phrase used at all for a couple of decades at least. Maybe we’ve given up on greatness, or anyhow on American greatness.


I began quite a while ago to resist declarations of literary greatness in the sense of singling out any one book as TGAN, or even making lists of The Great American Books. Partly because the supposed categories of excellence omitting all genre writing, and the awards and reading lists and canons routinely and unquestioningly favoring work by men in the eastern half of the United States, made no sense to me. But mostly because I didn’t and don’t think we have much idea of what’s enduringly excellent until it’s endured. Been around quite a long time. Five or six decades, to start with.


Of course the excellence of immediate, real impact, of an art that embodies the moment, is an excellent kind of excellence. Such a novel speaks to you now, this moment. It tells you what’s going on when you need to know what’s going on. It speaks to your age group or social group that nobody else can speak for, or it embodies whatever the current anguish is, or it shows a light at the end of the tunnel of the moment.


I think all the enduringly excellent books began, in fact, as immediately excellent, whether they were noticed at the time or not. Their special quality is to outlast the moment and carry immediacy, impact, meaning, undiminished or even increasing with time, to ages and people entirely different from those the novelist wrote for.


The Great American Novel . . . Moby Dick? Not greatly noticed when published, but canonized in the twentieth century; no doubt A Great American Novel. And The Great (canonical) American Novelists—Hawthorne, James, Twain, Faulkner, etc. etc. . . . But two books keep getting left off these lists, two novels that to me are genuinely, immediately, and permanently excellent. Call them great if you like the word. Certainly they are American to the bone.


I won’t talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, much as I love and admire it, because I want to talk about the other one.


If somebody came up to me in a dark alley with a sharp knife and said, “Name The Great American Novel or die!” I would gasp forth, squeakily, “The Grapes of Wrath!”


I wouldn’t have, a year ago.


I first read it when I was 15 or 16. It was utterly and totally over the head of the little Berkeley High School girl (maybe “under her radar” is better, but we didn’t know much about radar in 1945 unless we were in the navy). I liked the chapter with the tortoise, early in the book. The end, the scene with Rose of Sharon and the starving man, fascinated and frightened and bewildered me so much that I couldn’t either forget it or think about it.


Everything in the book was out of my experience, I didn’t know these people, they didn’t do things people I knew did. That I had been going to Berkeley High School with the children of the Joads simply did not occur to me. I was socially unaware as only a middle-class white kid in a middle-class white city can be.


I was dimly aware of changes. In the forties, the shipyards and other war employment brought a lot of people into Berkeley from the South and southern Midwest. What I mostly noticed was that, with no discussion or notice taken that I was aware of, the high school lunchroom had become segregated—self-segregated—white kids this side, black kids that side.


So, OK, that’s how it was now. When my brother Karl, three years older than me, was at BHS, the president of the student body had been a black kid—a Berkeley kid. That little, artificial, peaceable kingdom was gone forever. But I could keep living in it. On the white side of the lunchroom.


I lived in it with my best friend, Jean Ainsworth. Jean’s mother, Beth, was John Steinbeck’s sister. A widow with three children, Beth worked for Shell Oil and rented out rooms in their house, higher in the Berkeley Hills than ours, way up Euclid, with a huge view of the bay. The peaceable kingdom.


I got to know Uncle John a little when I was in college in the East and Jean was working in New York City, where he then lived. He was fond of his beautiful red-headed niece, though I don’t know if he quite realized she was his equal in wit and heart.


Once I sat hidden with him and Jean under a huge bush at a huge wedding in Cleveland, Ohio, and drank champagne. Jean or I foraged forth for a new bottle now and then. It was Uncle John’s idea.


At that wedding I had first heard, spoken in all seriousness, a now-classic phrase. People were talking about Jackie Robinson, and a man said, heavily, threateningly, “If this goes on, they’ll be moving in next door.”


It was after that that we hid under the bush with the champagne. “We need to get away from boring people and drink in peace,” Uncle John said.


He did a bit too much of both those things, maybe, in his later life. He loved living high on the hog. He never went back to the austerity of his life when he was working on The Grapes of Wrath, and who can blame him, with fame and money pouring in on him? Maybe some books he might have written didn’t get written and some he wrote could have been better.


I respect him for never jumping through all the hoops at Stanford, even if he kept going back and letting people like Wallace Stegner tell him what The Great American Novel ought to be. He could write rings around any of them, but they may have helped him learn his craft, or at least showed him how to act as if he had the kind of writerly confidence that life on a farm in Salinas didn’t provide. Though it provided a great deal else.


Anyhow, when Jean and I were still in high school, 1945 or thereabouts, I read her famous uncle’s famous novel and was awed, bored, scared, and uncomprehending.


And then 60-some years later I thought, Hey, I really ought to reread some Steinbeck and see how it wears. So I went to Powell’s and got The Grapes of Wrath.


When I got toward the end of the book, I stopped reading it. I couldn’t go on. I remembered just enough of that ending. And this time I was identified with all the people, I was lost in them, I had been living with Tom and Ma and Rose of Sharon day and night, through the great journey and the high hopes and the brief joys and the endless suffering. I loved them and I could not bear to think of what was coming. I didn’t want to go through with it. I shut the book and ran away.


Next day I picked it up and finished it, in tears the whole time.


I don’t cry much anymore when I read, only poetry, that brief rush when the hair stirs, the heart swells, the eyes fill. I can’t remember when a novel broke my heart the way music can do, the way a tragic play does, the way this book did.


I’m not saying that a book that makes you cry is a great book. It would be a wonderful criterion if only it worked, but alas, it admits effective sentimentality, the knee-jerk/heartstring stimulus. For instance, a lot of us cry when reading of the death of an animal in a story—which in itself is interesting and significant, as if we give ourselves permission to weep the lesser tears—but that is something else and less. A book that makes me cry the way music can or tragedy can—deep tears, the tears that come of accepting as my own the grief there is in the world—must have something of greatness about it.


So now, if somebody asked me what book would tell them the most about what is good and what is bad in America, what is the most truly American book, what is the great American novel . . . a year ago I would have said—for all its faults—Huckleberry Finn. But now—for all its faults—I’d say The Grapes of Wrath.


I saw the movie of The Grapes of Wrath, and yes, it’s a good movie, faithful to the elements of the book that it could handle, and yes, Henry Fonda was fine.


But a movie is something you see; a novel is something made out of language. And what’s beautiful and powerful in this novel is its LANGUAGE, the art that not only shows us what the author saw but lets us share, as directly as emotion can be shared, his passionate grief, indignation, and love.


33. Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor
September 2011


Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich.


—Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera, 22 Feb. 2011


It’s as silly for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic pentameter. But they don’t live in a library, and I do live in an economy. Their life can be perfectly poetry-free if they like, but my life is controlled by their stuff whether I like it or not.


So: I want to ask how economists can continue to speak of growth as a positive economic goal.


I understand why we’re in a panic when our business or our whole economy goes into a decline or a recession: because the whole system is based on keeping up with/outgrowing the competition, and if we fail to do that, we face hard times, collapse, crash.


But why do we never question the system itself, so as to find ways to get around it or out of it?


Up to a point, growth is a plausible metaphor. Living things need to grow, first to their optimum size, and then to keep replacing what wears out, annually (as with many plants) or continually (as with mammalian skin). A baby grows to adult size, after which growth goes to maintaining stability, homeostasis, balance. Growth much beyond that leads to obesity. For a baby to grow endlessly bigger would be first monstrous, then fatal.


In taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we’ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.


Maybe there are organisms that have no optimum size, like the enormous fungal network one hears about that underlies the whole Middle West, or is it just Wisconsin? But I wonder if a fungus wandering around thousands of square miles underground is the most promising model for a human economy.


Some economists prefer to use mechanical terms, but I believe machines have an optimum size much as living organisms do. A big machine can do more work than a small one, up to a point, beyond which things like weight and friction begin to ruin its efficiency. The metaphor comes up against the same limit.


Then there’s social Darwinism—bankers red in tooth and claw, surviving fitly, while small vermin live on the blood that trickles down . . . This metaphor, based on a vast misunderstanding of evolutionary process, hits its limit almost at once. In predatory competition, bigness is useful, but there are endless ways to get your dinner besides being bigger than it is. You can be smaller but smarter, smaller but faster, tiny but poisonous, winged . . . you can live inside it while you eat it . . . As for getting a mate, if combat were the only way to score, large size would help, but (despite our battle fixation) most competition doesn’t involve combat. You can win the reproductive race by dancing gracefully, by having a blue-green tail decorated with eyes, by building a lovely bower for your bride, by knowing how to tell a joke . . . As for living space, you can crowd out your neighbors by outgrowing them, but it’s cheaper and just as effective to corner all the water in the vicinity, like a juniper tree, or to be toxic to sea anemones who aren’t closely related to you . . . The competitive techniques of plants and animals are endless in variety and ingenuity. So why are we, clever we, stuck on one and one only?


An organism that settles on a single survival stratagem and ceases to seek and find others—ceases to adapt—is at high risk. And adaptability is our principle and most reliable gift. As a species we are almost endlessly, almost appallingly adaptable. Capitalism thinks it’s adaptable, but if it only has one stratagem, endless growth, the limit of its adaptability is irrevocably set. And we have reached that limit. We are therefore at very high risk.


Capitalist growth, probably for at least a century and certainly from the turn of the millennium on, has been growth in the wrong sense. Not only endless but uncontrolled—random. Growth as in tumor. Growth as in cancer.


Our economy isn’t just in a recession. It is sick. As a result of uncontrolled economic (and population) growth, our ecology is sick, and getting sicker every day. We have disturbed the homeostasis of the earth, the ocean, and the atmosphere—not fatally to life on the planet; the bacteria will survive the corporation. But perhaps fatally to ourselves.


We have been in denial about this for decades. By now the denials are hysterical in every sense of the word—What do you mean, climate instability? What do you mean, overpopulation? What do you mean, reactors are toxic? What do you mean, you can’t live on corn syrup?


We go on mechanically repeating the behaviors that caused the sickness: we bail out the bankers, we resume offshore drilling, we pay polluters to pollute, because without them how is our economy to grow? Yet increasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich, while most people grow poorer. The Economic Policy Institute reports:


From 2000 to 2007 (the last period of economic growth before the current recession) the richest 10% of Americans received 100% (one hundred percent—all) the average growth of income. The other 90% received none.


At this rate, by the time we admit that cancer is not health, that we’re sick, any cure must be so radical as almost certainly to require dictatorial rule, and to destroy more—physically and morally—than it can save.


Nobody in any government seems able even to imagine alternatives, and people who talk about them get little attention. Some of the alternatives that existed in the past had promise; I think socialism did, and still does, but it was run off the rails by ambitious men using it as a means to power, and by the infection of capitalism—the obsession with growing bigger at all cost in order to defeat rivals and dominate the world. The example of the larger socialist states is about as heartening as that of the giant underground fungus.


So what is our new metaphor to be? It might be the difference between life and death to find the right one.


32. Dangerous Writing, Dangerous Cover Copy
“Edgy” has passed its high point as the highest word of praise in the sophistico-critical vocabulary, but I’m sure something similar is replacing it at this very moment — an edgier word to imply dangerous, daring, nerve-wracking, aggressively shocking. Something like “fugu” — that Japanese fish that maybe kills you maybe doesn’t? — “For the fugu experience of your life, read Tad Grimgrocer’s fearless semi-fictional exposé of the kinky underbelly of the tampon industry.”


Meanwhile, we’ll have to coast along with “gut-wrenching.” Cover hype and blurbs continue to assure us regularly that if we read this book our guts will be wrenched. Also our eyeballs are very likely to be seared and our complacent assumptions shaken. That they go on repeating these phrases year after year must mean that it pays off, that readers want to be wrenched, seared, and sneered at.


It seems odd. If my assumptions are complacent, am I likely to go looking for books that discomfort, that disembowel them? Complacency, by definition, refuses to be made uncomfortable. Truly complacent people often do not read at all, because almost all reading is likely to tell you something you didn’t know and thus upset your complacency. There are complacent readers, of course; they read reassuring things that agree with their politics and their religion and bolster their assumptions. Probably the cover says it is “life-affirming.”


However, it seems to me that there’s something very complacent about announcing that your play or your book will shake people’s complacent assumptions.


Who are these complacent people anyhow?


The boojwazzee, I suppose... Artists are suppposed to épater le bourgeois, or we tell ourselves that we do, or we boast about doing so. But we have met the bourgeois and he is us.


In 21st Century America we don’t hear about the working class any more; we are all middle class. (A lot of us don’t have jobs and more of us than ever before go to bed hungry, which didn’t use to characterize the middle class, but never mind that.) There are the filthy rich of course, but they don’t read, they never have, there’s no profit in it. That leaves the middle class to épater itself.


My French dictionary says that épater means to break the foot off a wine glass, or “(slang) to flabbergast.” Can fiction still really flabbergast its readers, shock, shake, amaze, dumbfound, disturb, frighten them? Or can it merely continue meeting the expectations of those whose literary diet consists of revelations of infamy, perverted sexuality, violent injustice, monstrous brutalism, physical deformity, deliberate cruelty, and the mutual infliction of misery on one another by the members of dysfunctional suburban families?


These are revelations?


Is it news to most readers over five that people can be really, really mean to each other?


Or do they just like to read about it?


They do. I do. I sit open-jawed, horrified, enchanted to watch Atreus’s or Hamlet’s dysfunctional families destroy everybody who comes in contact with them in the process of destroying themselves. I am fascinated by Heathcliff’s cruelty and Ahab’s wicked madness and Lennie’s innocent murderousness.


But I don’t think Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Bronte, Melville, or Steinbeck were writing to horrify, to shock or frighten or sicken, to sear eyeballs or to wrench guts. They were aware of audience, oh yes indeed, but their intentions were not violent. They were not in assault mode. A writer whose intention is to frighten and distress the reader has a very aggressive program and a very limited goal. Serious writers want to do something beyond asserting power over their audience, beyond self-satisfaction, beyond personal gain — even though they may want all those things very much.


I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.


If this is true, a writer’s relationship with readers has no need to be aggressive, exploitive, coercive, or collusive. To writers whose essential relationship is with their work, the shock, distress, and fear their work may cause their readers to feel are means to an end, their only way of saying what they have to say. They will use these dangerous means carefully, sparingly, at need. The effect can be immediate, long-lasting, and profound. It can last several thousand years.


Writers whose work is not an end in itself but a means to gain fame, power, money, etc., may find that causing shock, fear, digust, etc. are a direct means to that end and can be hugely effective. They use them as a pusher uses drugs. The effect is immediate, brief, and trivial. It lasts until the next best-seller.


Readers who want no more than to get their jollies from the latest exploitation of the latest shock fad are praised by the blurbs for their courage in daring to read dangerous revelations, but I suspect that they’re just as complacent as the readers of “cozy” fiction — risk-free, knowing exactly to expect.


Good writers ask for our consent, in fact our participation in their work, our collaboration in its recreation on the stage as we watch it or on the page as we read it. I guess the reason they’re “good” writers is that they’re so good at winning consent and participation from us, persuading us to give them our trust, and rewarding it with something we did not expect.


That’s quite different from asking us to sit there guzzling another jolt of starbug caffeine while reading a novel in order to have our panic buttons pushed again.


Trust somebody who’s going to give us something we didn’t expect? But that could be dangerous!


Never fear. You’re safe. Just trust the cover copy folks. They’re all out there, ready to wrench your guts and serve them up in a presentation of fried eyeballs and fugu in complacency sauce. Bon appétit!


— UKL 
12 September 2011


31. Papa H
Note: This is dated June 2013 in No Time to Spare, but is from 2011 in Ursula’s original blog.


I was thinking about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey.


I’m sure this has occurred to others. That’s the thing about Homer. People keep going to him and discovering new things, or old things, or things for the first time, or things all over again, and saying them. This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.


Anyhow, so The Iliad is the War (actually only a piece of it, close to but not including the end), and The Odyssey is the Journey (There and Back Again, as Bilbo put it).


I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War, by not taking sides.


The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek—maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.


Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.


Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.


But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.


Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?


In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.


Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic—which is faking it. He faked it very well.


Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.


After all, “Let the best man win” doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, “This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference—so the best fighter will win it.” If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!


But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.


Might does not make right—right?


Therefore right does not make might. Right?


But we want it to. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”


If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land—wishful thinking country.


Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.


Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter—even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms—kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts—a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.


The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.


And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.


I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial “noble” gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments.


I don’t know any war story comparable to The Iliad except maybe the huge Indian epic the Mahabharata. Its five brother-heroes are certainly heroes, it’s their story—but it’s also the story of their enemies, also heroes, some of whom are really great guys—and it’s all so immense and complicated and full of rights and wrongs and implications and gods who interfere even more directly than the Greek gods do—and then, after all, is the end tragic or is it comic? The whole thing is like a giant cauldron of ever-replenished food you can dive your fork into and come out with whatever you need most to nourish you just then. But next time it may taste quite different.


And the taste of the Mahabharata as a whole is very, very different from that of The Iliad, above all because The Iliad is (unjust divine intervention aside) appallingly realistic and bloodthirstily callous about what goes on in a war. The Mahabharata’s war is all dazzling fantasy, from the superhuman exploits to the superduper weapons. It’s only in their spiritual suffering that the Indian heroes become suddenly, heartbreakingly, heart-changingly real.


 


As for the Journey:


The actual travel parts of The Odyssey are related or ancestral to all our fantasy tales of somebody setting off over sea or land, meeting marvels and horrors and temptations and adventures, possibly growing up along the way, and maybe coming back home at the end.


Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalized such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though these generalities can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important—but we’ve merely recognized it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.


Odysseus’s travels involve such a terrific set of adventures that I tend to forget how much of the book is actually about his wife and son—what goes on at home while he’s traveling, how his son goes looking for him, and all the complications of his homecoming. One of the things I love about The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s understanding of the importance of what goes on back on the farm while the Hero is taking his Thousand Faces all round the world. But till you get back there with Frodo and the others, Tolkien never takes you back home. Homer does. All through the 10-year voyage, the reader is alternately Odysseus trying desperately to get to Penelope and Penelope desperately waiting for Odysseus—both the voyager and the goal—a tremendous piece of narrative time-and-place interweaving.


Homer and Tolkien are both also notably honest about the difficulty of being a far-traveled hero who comes home. Neither Odysseus nor Frodo is able to stay there long. I wish Homer had written something about how it was for King Menelaus when he got home, along with his wife Helen, whom he and the rest of the Greeks had fought for 10 years to win back, while she, safe inside the walls of Troy, was prissing around with pretty Prince Paris (and then when he got bumped she married his brother). Apparently it never occurred to her to send Hubby #1, Menelaus, down there on the beach in the rain, an email, or even a text message. But then, Menelaus’s family, for a generation or two, had been rather impressively unfortunate or, as we would say, dysfunctional.


Perhaps it isn’t only fantasy that you can trace right back to Homer?


30. Riffing Again
Dear Mr Rupert Murdoch,


This is your author who your company Harper publishes under the pen name of Scrad Riske, and who is living in Maine under the name of Trespassers W. because of being persecuted in Oregon for some things I was accused of about some old guy’s wallet and defaulting and child support and stuff.


I wrote you a while back* and told you how that was just lies and the only crime I ever actually committed was writing my book you published, Emily Bronte and the Vampires of Lustbaden. I am now very confused because I have finished the sequel, Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Zombies of Sex-Coburg, only my agent said to change the title to Lord Alfred Tennyson and the Zombies of Sex-Coburg so it would be in the right order and I always do what my agent says, but what confuses me is this. In your contract for my book it said that if “Author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals, or if Author commits a crime or any other act that will tend to bring Author into serious contempt, and such behavior would materially damage the Work’s reputation or sales,“ my contract would be terminated. And so I told you then that I was paying strict attention to public conventions and moral just like you do, and you were my Role Model. And I was looking forward to making lots of money from my new book so I could pay the woman that rewrote it several times and my lawyers. But now you yourself have personally shown conduct that evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals, and are accused of crimes that tend to bring you into serious contempt by absolutely everybody, except The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. So it is hard to know what to think. I have stopped watching Fox News because after I watch it I cannot think at all for several hours. Can it be true that what is wrong and bad for Authors to do is OK and fine for rich people to do? I am so confused I wonder maybe should I terminate our contract myself and go back to Blitzen, Oregon, where it seems like crime is sort of simpler and not so many people are quite so contemptible. If you have any advice for me I would like very much to hear it.


Your Troubled Author, 
Trespassers W., a.k.a Scrad Riske 
21 July, 2011


_______________



	
See #12, A Riff on the Harper Contract, 18 Jan. 2011



Dear People at Book View Café and Webmistress Person:


I feared this would happen. Scrad was just so anxious and miserable, I had to let him write you again.


I am his aunt who he sends his mail through because of living in Cogneeto the way he has to.


I can tell you in confidence that Scrad’s real name is Dood Royal Ganglehard, but he likes to be called by his pen name. He isn’t really from Blitzen. He is from Fresno, but he started writing novels when he was sort of hiding out in Burns for a while. He was so happy when the Harper Publisher printed his book!


Now today Scrad read this in the news and just nearly went all to pieces.


“I feel that people I trusted— I don’t know who, on what level — have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay.” 
(RUPERT MURDOCH, denying personal responsibility for the phone hacking scandal that has racked his media empire.)


You see Scrad is very sensitive and so he feels it’s his fault letting poor Mr Murdoch who was his Role Model down like that. By behaving disgracefully. Scrad just doesn’t know how to make it up to poor Mr Murdoch. He’s talking about going to the House of Parliament and trying to apologise to all the lords and things there and tell them not to persecute Mr Murdoch and his boy Jimmy. Scrad knows what it’s like to be persecuted by the police and all them.


He just feels so bad for Mr Murdoch. And also Mr Murdoch says it’s for him to pay but he doesn’t have anything to pay with. He was hoping maybe Mr Murdoch did.


He would be cheered by your sympathy.


Yours Very Truly,


Mrs F. T. Thang (Ganglehard)


29. Without Egg
July 2011


Visiting Vienna in the early 1950s, Charles and I stayed in style for very little expense at the old König von Ungarn Hotel, which had been there since at least the 1820s. We ate breakfast at a café around the corner. Always the same café and the same breakfast: good coffee, fresh fruit, crisp rolls with butter and jam, and a soft-boiled egg. Perfect. Invariable. Every morning.


I don’t know why I got it in my head one morning to vary it, but I did, and when the tall, middle-aged waiter arrived in his impeccable dark coat, I indicated that I wanted the usual breakfast, without the egg.


He appeared not to understand, which, given the quality of my German, was understandable. I repeated something like “Kein Ei,” or “Ohne Ei.”


He responded slowly, in a shaken voice, “Ohne Ei?”


He was disturbed. I was ruthless. Yes, I said, without egg.


He stood for quite a while silent, trying to handle the shock. He visibly forced himself not to appeal, or plead, or show his disapproval. He was a waiter, a disciplined, skillful Viennese waiter, and must obey the most perverse customer. “Without egg, Madame,” he said softly, almost unreproachfully, and went away to fetch my eggless breakfast, which he brought and set before me with silent, funereal dignity.


We still laugh recalling that tiny incident of nearly 60 years ago, but it is also kept alive in my memory by a sense of guilt. For one thing, in 1954, in Vienna, an egg meant something. The city was just coming out of very bad times. It was still occupied, divided among the U.S., the British, and the Russian armies; the cathedral had rearisen and the Opera House was rearising from the rubble of bombing, but damage and destruction was everywhere, and the effect of privation plain to see in the faces and bodies of people on the street. An offer of food in a city that has gone hungry is not a small matter.


Also, I willfully and needlessly disturbed the order of that waiter’s universe. A very small universe, the Viennese café breakfast, but a stable, orderly, perfected one. Better not change something that has achieved excellence. And it was unkind to demand of a person who spent his working life maintaining that excellence to impair it, to do something he so clearly felt was wrong. After all, I could have let him bring the egg and simply not eaten it. He was far too good at his job to have taken notice, except possibly for a mild, commiserative “Madame doesn’t feel hungry this morning?” To have an egg and not to eat it was my privilege. To refuse to let him bring the egg was to interfere with his privilege, which was to bring me a complete and proper Viennese café breakfast. I still want to laugh when I think about it, and I still feel a twinge of guilt.


The guilt has increased since I began, a couple of years ago, to have a soft-boiled egg for breakfast—to have, in fact, a Viennese café breakfast—every morning. Invariably.


I can’t get those lovely, light, crisp European rolls. (Why do the artisanal bread people in this country think crust should be thick and tough? The more leathery, the more artisanal?) But Thomas’s English muffins are very good, so I have them, with tea, fruit, and a three-and-a-half-minute egg eaten, as in Vienna, from the shell.


To soft-boil an egg I put it in a small pot with cold water to cover, set it on high heat till it boils furiously, take it off at once, turn over the egg timer (a three-and-a-half-minute glass), and start the muffins toasting. When the sand is through the glass, the egg comes out of the water and into the egg cup.


As you see, a certain care and ceremony is involved, which is what I wanted to talk about, and also why the egg cup is important.


If you crack a soft-boiled egg and dump it out into a bowl, it tastes the same but isn’t the same. It’s too easy. It’s dull. It might as well have been poached. The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it, the attention it requires, the ceremony.


So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup. But not everybody is familiar with egg cups.


In this country they are usually an hourglass shape, with one lobe or bowl bigger than the other. The small end is just big enough to hold the egg. You could eat it there from its shell, but most Americans take it out, turn the egg cup over, crack the egg, and dump it into the larger bowl, where they smoosh it around and eat it.


British and European egg cups don’t offer that option; they have no big bowl; they are just a small china cup on a short pedestal, like a goblet, in which the egg sits upright. You have no choice but to eat your egg out of its own shell. This is where things get ceremonial and interesting.


So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup—but which end up? Eggs are not perfect ovoids, they have a smaller end and a bigger end. People have opinions about which end should be up, i.e., which end you’re going to actually eat the egg out of. This difference of opinion can become so passionate that a war may be fought about it, as we know from Jonathan Swift. It makes just as much sense as most wars and most differences of opinion.


I am a Big-Ender. My opinion, which I will defend to the death, is that if the big end is up it’s easier to get the spoon into the opening created when you knock off the top of the egg with a single, decisive whack of your knife blade. Or possibly—another weighty decision, another matter of opinion, with advocates and enemies, the Righteous and the Unrighteous—you lift the top of the egg off carefully from the egg-encircling crack you have made by tapping the shell with the knife blade all the way round about a half-inch down from the summit.


Some mornings I whack. Some mornings I tap. I have no opinion on the matter. It depends on my mood.


Some elements of the ceremony offer no choice. The knife has be steel, since the sulfur in eggs blackens silver, and the egg spoon must also be untarnishable—stainless steel, or horn. I’ve never seen a gold egg spoon, but I’m sure it would do. Whatever the material, the spoon has to have a small bowl with a fine edge on it: a thick edge can’t coax all the egg white off the inside of the shell. The handle is short, for good balance and easy handling. An egg spoon is a tiny implement that, like the Viennese breakfast, cannot be improved. Like all good tools, it gives pleasure by its pure aptness. It does one thing only, but does it perfectly, and nothing else can do it. Trying to eat an egg from the shell with a normal spoon is like mending a wristwatch with a hammer.


The sole imperfection of the egg spoon is that it’s so small it gets lost. Horn spoons are larger, but the beautiful horn spoon my daughter gave me finally wore out, its edge becoming coarse and fibrous. Replacement can be a problem; most Americans don’t eat their eggs from the shell, and the implement has become rare and hard to find. When I see one, I acquire it. My current egg spoon is stainless steel; on the handle are the letters KLM. I will not go into how we came to own this spoon.


You see what I mean about difficulty. Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.


If you are in the whacking mood, the first whack of the knife on the shell is decisive. A firm whack on a good shell in the right place decapitates the egg cleanly with one blow—ideal. But some eggshells are feeble and crumbly, and sometimes your aim is tentative or faulty (after all, this is something you have to do before breakfast). If you hit too high, the opening isn’t big enough; too low, you get into yolk, which you don’t want to do yet. So maybe you choose to tap instead of whacking—nowhere near as exciting, but you have more control of the outcome.


So now you have opened your egg. You stick the spoon right down into it, but not too suddenly, or the yolk will well up and dribble wastefully down the outside of the shell. The three-and-a-half-minute egg white is barely firm, while the yolk has thickened just enough to make a beautiful golden sauce for the white. Your job is to mix the two nicely so you get a balance of yolk and white in each small spoonful, while not destroying the delicate little bowl you’re eating from, the eggshell. This takes attention.


The more complete the attention, the more you actually taste the egg.


It may be apparent by now that this whole blog is a subtle blow against double-tasking, and a paean to doing one single thing with, as the Bible puts it, “all thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”


Nor is there any breakfast there. The grave is without egg.


The flavor of a fresh soft-boiled egg is extremely subtle. I like salt and pepper on a fried egg but nothing at all on a boiled egg. It is completely satisfactory in and by itself. If a little butter from the muffin gets into it, that’s fine too.


The soft-boiled egg experience is the same every morning and never the same. It remains endlessly interesting. It is invariably delicious. It delivers a small, solid dose of high-quality protein. Who could ask for more?


Of course, I’m very lucky: I can get toxin-free eggs at our co-op from local farmers who don’t cage their birds in pestholes and don’t feed them on carrion. The eggs are brown, with strong shells and orange yolks, not the weak, pallid things laid by hens kept in filth and torment all their lives. The Oregon Legislature has at last decided to ban poultry batteries, hurray—the ban to take effect in 2024, unhurray. The lobbies who run our lives demand that torture, ordure, and disease continue for 13 more years. I will not live to see the birds go free.


28. It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is
June 2011


The test of fairyland [is that] you cannot imagine two and one not making three but you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail.


The quotation, from G. K. Chesterton, is from an interesting article by Bernard Manzo in the Times Literary Supplement of June 10, 2011 (he didn’t give the source in Chesterton’s writings). It got me to thinking about how imaginative literature, from folktale to fantasy, operates, and to wondering about its relationship to science, though I’ll only get to that at the very end of this piece.


The fantastic tale may suspend the laws of physics—carpets fly; cats fade into invisibility, leaving only a smile—and of probability—the youngest of three brothers always wins the bride; the infant in the box cast upon the waters survives unharmed—but it carries its revolt against reality no further. Mathematical order is unquestioned. Two and one make three, in Koschei’s castle and Alice’s Wonderland (especially in Wonderland). Euclid’s geometry—or possibly Riemann’s—somebody’s geometry, anyhow—governs the layout. Otherwise incoherence would invade and paralyze the narrative.


There lies the main difference between childish imaginings and imaginative literature. The child “telling a story” roams about among the imaginary and the half-understood without knowing the difference, content with the sound of language and the pure play of fantasy with no particular end, and that’s the charm of it. But fantasies, whether folktales or sophisticated literature, are stories in the adult, demanding sense. They can ignore certain laws of physics but not of causality. They start here and go there (or back here), and though the mode of travel may be unusual, and here and there may be wildly exotic and unfamiliar places, yet they must have both a location on the map of that world and a relationship to the map of our world. If not, the hearer or reader of the tale will be set adrift in a sea of inconsequential inconsistencies, or, worse yet, left drowning in the shallow puddle of the author’s wishful thinking.


It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn’t say, “Anything goes”—that’s irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty-seven, or whuddevva, and the story doesn’t “add up,” as we say. Fantasy doesn’t say, “Nothing is”—that’s nihilism. And it doesn’t say, “It ought to be this way”—that’s utopianism, a different enterprise. Fantasy isn’t meliorative. The happy ending, however enjoyable to the reader, applies to the characters only; this is fiction, not prediction and not prescription.


It doesn’t have to be the way it is is a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to “being real.” Yet it is a subversive statement.


Subversion doesn’t suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that things are as they have to be. Fantasy not only asks “What if things didn’t go on just as they do?” but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.


So here imagination and fundamentalism come into conflict.


A fully created imaginary world is a mental construct similar in many respects to a religious or other cosmology. This similarity, if noticed, can be deeply disturbing to the orthodox mind.


When a fundamental belief is threatened the response is likely to be angry or dismissive—either “Abomination!” or “Nonsense!” Fantasy gets the abomination treatment from religious fundamentalists, whose rigid reality-constructs shudder at contact with question, and the nonsense treatment from pragmatic fundamentalists, who want to restrict reality to the immediately perceptible and the immediately profitable. All fundamentalisms set strict limits to the uses of imagination, outside which the fundamentalist’s imagination itself runs riot, fancying dreadful deserts where God and Reason and the capitalist way of life are lost, forests of the night where tigers hang from trees by the tail, lighting the way to madness with their bright burning.


Those who dismiss fantasy less fiercely, from a less absolutist stance, usually call it dreaming, or escapism.


Dream and fantastic literature are related only on a very deep, usually inaccessible level of the mind. Dream is free of intellectual control; its narratives are irrational and unstable, and its aesthetic value is mostly accidental. Fantastic literature, like all the verbal arts, must satisfy the intellectual as well as the aesthetic faculty. Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.


As for the charge of escapism, what does “escape” mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?


 


“Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?” To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.


I know that to philosophers what I’m saying is childishly naive, but my mind cannot or will not follow philosophical argument, so I must remain naive. To an ordinary mind not trained in philosophy, the question—do things have to be the way they are/the way they are here and now/the way I’ve been told they are?—may be an important one. To open a door that has been kept closed is an important act.


Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is—more than any other kind of writing— subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.


Yet as Chesterton pointed out, fantasy stops short of nihilist violence, of destroying all the laws and burning all the boats. (Like Tolkien, Chesterton was an imaginative writer and a practicing Catholic, and thus perhaps particularly aware of tensions and boundaries.) Two and one make three. Two of the brothers fail the quest, the third carries it through. Action is met with reaction. Fate, Luck, Necessity are as inexorable in Middle-earth as in Colonus or South Dakota. The fantasy tale begins here and ends there (or back here), where the subtle and ineluctable obligations and responsibilities of narrative art have taken it. Down on the bedrock, things are as they have to be. It’s only everywhere above the bedrock that nothing has to be the way it is.


There really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related? We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, “It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.”


27. Exercises
The man in Georgia who posted a lot of blogs pretending to be a Syrian lesbian involved in the anti-government protests in Syria and the congressman in New York who posted a lot of pictures of his crotch to women around the country ought to get together. The Georgian has explained his impersonation blogs as being “a writing exercise.” What he can do now is dress up as a Syrian woman, with veiled face of course, and go oooh! ooooh! at the congressman’s crotch. Then he can write a blog about it as a writing exercise. The congressman can parade his crotch, both veiled and unveiled, to the admiring Georgian. Then he can lie and say he didn’t. Then he can explain to his wife and constituents that he did it as a prevarication exercise.


Then perhaps they can both go somewhere a long, long way away, where I will never have to hear or read about them again.


I am trying to think where. Maybe Las Vegas. Maybe they could be a night-club act in Las Vegas. With Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin will lecture on the History of the Colonial Period and flash her glasses and shout Gotcha! while explaining how she gets healthy exercise while controlling predators by shooting wolves from a helicopter. Meanwhile the veiled Georgian blogger will perform the hootchy-kootchy and the unveiled New York congressman will perform the crotchy-crotchy.


They can call it the Cirque Sans Honte. The news media will eat it up.


— UKL 
24 June 2011                
                
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 


You can browse the archive by year here.


56. Libraries and Ebooks
It can be just as fast and easy to order an ebook from the library as to buy it online, and it costs nothing. Why would anyone buy an ebook from the publisher if the library has it for free?


So why would a publisher sell ebooks to libraries?


This is a legitimate, big problem, which affects authors just as much and as directly as it does libraries and publishers. It has no quick fix. To solve it will take a complete and painful rethinking and re-organisation of the whole publishing industry.


But many corporate publishers, without seeking a long-term strategy, consulting no interest or value but their own, have reacted with mere panic greed.


Some, exhibiting all the foresight, generosity, and public spirit of a Florida alligator, outright refuse to sell their ebooks to libraries. Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan are among them.


This policy can be summed up as: Libraries can go to hell.


Other publishers, perhaps hoping to keep some appearance of a certain degree of goodwill towards men, limit themselves to making it hard for the library to stock ebooks and inconvenient for you to get them from the library. They call it “inserting friction.” A kind of anti-Vaseline.


Currently various publishers are employing various forms of “friction:”


“Embargo” (some publishers call it “Windowing”): the publisher refuses libraries access to recently published ebooks, especially best sellers. The library must wait as long as 18 months to get the book.


Snatch-back: Instead of selling an ebook to the library, the publisher rents it for a certain length of time or a certain number of uses — after which the ebook vanishes, pouf! The library must pay for it all over again. 


Harper Collins sells an ebook to a library for 26 individual uses, then the book vanishes and the library is forced to purchase another.


Selective price-gouging: The publisher charges libraries more than other customers for best-sellers. 


Random House announced in March that it was increasing the cost of ebooks to libraries, in some cases tripling it.


Pay-on-Demand: Require the library to pay the publisher a sum each time the ebook is ordered. 


This is an ironic reversal of the system obtaining in Europe whereby the author is paid a small sum every time the book is taken out of a library. European libraries can do this because their evil nanny governments support them with money. No American public library could afford this kind of pay-on-demand either to the author or the publisher.


And the absurdest piece of meanness yet:


Make the Old Lady Hobble Downtown: Every library that can afford to gives patrons access to music, audio books, databases, etc. via their home computer, but some publishers want libraries to allow access to ebooks only to patrons who actually, physically, come to the library. You have to be there in person and hold out your hand, see, so the librarian can put those valuable electrons in it.


But, but, but — libraries have always offered their books for free. So, how come print publishers didn’t refuse to sell books to libraries? Why didn’t they didn’t “insert friction”?


Well, partly because many publishers had a sense of responsibility, or at least a degree of shame. But also because they were aware that library circulation is more likely to increase book sales than to cut into them.


Every time a library buys a book, the publisher is more likely to sell that author’s books. Library Journal conducted a survey in 2011 about the buying habits of library users; more than half reported that they’d bought books by an author whose book they’d read in the library. As Library Journal says, “The public library is an active partner with the publishing industry in building the book market, not to mention the burgeoning e-book market.” And, talking to the Christian Science Monitor, Molly Raphael, president of the American Library Association, reported “Some libraries have a ‘buy it now’ button for people who don’t want to wait [for an e-book from a library, or don’t want it to suddenly disappear from their reader]. We’re doing a lot, frankly, to drive people to buy.”


But damn the facts, full speed ahead! The part of the publishing industry controlled by corporations for immediate profit is determined to see public libraries as competitors — even if they lose profits by doing so.


For a long time most Americans agreed on the importance of the free public library to the well-being of the community and the country. A publisher then would hesitate to be seen deliberately making things hard for libraries. But reactionary ideology has weakened the idea of community; muddy thinking has convinced people that information on the Internet is free; and libraries are being conveniently misrepresented as mere outmoded warehouses for print books. Readers may assume that libraries don’t and won’t buy and circulate ebooks.


In fact, despite the expense of constantly changing technologies, the non-support of voters bleating anti-tax mantras, and the aggressive tactics of corporate publishers, the great public libraries have kept abreast with the electronic age, and they very much want to buy and circulate free ebooks.


Since corporations don’t consider human rights or needs, only corporate profits, they feel free to use tactics that infringe, ignore, or flout the rights of readers. They are in fact practicing commercial censorship. They are keeping books from us.


If the part libraries play in distributing ebooks gets “frictioned” into insignificance, it will be easier for the corporations to take further control of what ebooks you personally can obtain, how long a book will stay on your reader before you have to pay for it again, and whatever else they want to control. If they see profit in doing any of this, they’ll do it. If small publishers try to sell the books they don’t sell, the big corporations will eliminate the small publishers.


At this point, the U.S. Government shows very little promise of exerting any kind of intelligent control over predatory publishing corporations, and the Department of Justice even seems to be colluding with them.


Libraries are essential because they keep permanent collections — even of unpopular books, even of impermanent, seemingly valueless items — a samizdat from 1940, a newspaper from 1933. Ebooks, including self-published ebooks, would become part of permanent library collections, which could then join the worldwide network of electronic libraries.


The existence or disappearance of a library’s permanent collection isn’t a sexy issue. But it’s absolutely basic to access to information and to the continuity of human knowledge.


If ebooks largely replace printed books, and the public libraries are decimated or eliminated as a permanent resource open to everybody, we may be able to access books only through the corporations. It will not be easy to get a book the corporations have decided is unprofitable, outdated, unnecessary, or unpleasing; it may be very difficult to find out whether a text has been cut or tampered with; there may be no way to know that a book ever existed…. The importance of free, independent electronic libraries, such as Project Gutenberg, is inestimable.


We’d be wise to keep our information base as broad as possible, by supporting the existing public libraries in their heroic and amazingly successful effort to carry on their job in the electronic age.


The goal of the public library has been to give anyone who needs or wants it permanent, unlimited, free access to books. All books.


The goal of the public library in the electronic age is what it always was: to give permanent, unlimited, free access to books — print books, ebooks, all books — to everyone.


Is that worth supporting, or what?


— UKL 
27 August 2012


__________


Many thanks to Vailey Oehlke, Director of the Multnomah County Library, for fact-checking, facts, and references.


A useful link: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publishing-and-marketing/article/49316-survey-says-library-users-are-your-best-customers.html


55. The Opening Night
9.40, Friday night, July 27, 2012. Cheap, hokey, trivial, cynical, pompous, patronising, pretentious, button-pushing, celebrity-worshiping, predictable beyond belief, degrading of every poet, musician, or artist associated with it, what a great show the Olympics opening night in London is! It’s still going on. Hours yet to go. I gave up at 9.15. I don’t know why I lasted past the shot of the corgis looking up adorably from the palace steps at the helicopter that was fakely bearing the fake Queen away so that she could fakely parachute down into the stadium, ooooh, wowwwwww, wheeee, and then (really) sit there glowering straight ahead and looking as if she had just drunk a quart of vinegar.


“Look, she’s smiling,” my husband said hopefully, when they sang God Bless the Queen, but I couldn’t see it. She just looked as if maybe her Tums were giving her a bit of relief for a moment, but she was still sour, bored, ungracious, and not about to hide it. Oh England, my England.


I guess I kept hoping there might be one more really amazing moment like the moment of the five rings descending: that was true real stage-magic as well as huge Super Special FX. But no. Just more hokum and more schmalz. And I began to think I might totally lose it if the chirpy announcers mentioned Danny Boyle one more time. Every two or three minutes we had to be told that he was responsible for this wonderful, dazzling extravaganza of British schlock. Maybe he wrote it all those mentions into his contract? For quite a while I thought they were saying Danny Boy, as in the song Oh Danny Boy, and wondered why. Perhaps I was confused because I think they did sing a bit of Oh Danny Boy at the very beginning. Maybe Danny Boyle put it in as a cute little subtle compliment to himself. I’m not sure though whether I did hear Oh Danny Boy at all, because there were so many little bits of songs. But of course they ended, inevitably, with the song “Jerusalem,” the words of which were written by William Blake, who in his direst visions of what might happen to his country never envisioned anything so monstrously silly as this.


I suppose eventually the poor athlete will come panting into the stadium with the Flame, and we’ll have some more whooptido and hokum. Maybe the Queen will be shot up to a hovering helicopter on a rocket in a fountain of fireworks, glowering all the way, and then we’ll get to see the corgis looking up adorably from the palace steps to greet her.


I leave it to the corgis. I’ve had enough. I’m going to go to bed and think about Thomas Hardy’s poem, “The Darkling Thrush.” The English do that kind of thing really, really well.


— UKL 
28 July 2012


P.S. Saturday morning. It seems there was a huge unplanned, unsponsored, spontaneous celebration going on in Trafalgar Square at the same time — Londoners and people from all over the world who’ve come for the Olympics all gathering to wait for the clock to tell them the opening moment of the Games, singing, shouting, waving flags, climbing up on the big bronze lions, and having a ball. Reading about that, I finally felt the authentic Olympic thrill.


54. Le Guin’s Hypothesis
I keep telling myself that I’m done writing about Literature vs Genre, that that vampire is buried at the crossroads with a stake in its heart and garlic in its coffin. And then it pops up again, undead. Its latest revival is a cheery one in an entertaining article, “Easy Writers,” in the May 28 New Yorker by Arthur Krystal, who discusses the literature/genre divide and while seeming to make light of it does a pretty thorough job of perpetuating it.


He uses Chesterton’s phrase, “good bad books,” for genre novels, and calls reading them a “guilty pleasure” — a phrase that succeeds in being simultaneously self-deprecating, self-congratulatory, and collusive. When I speak of my guilty pleasure, I confess that I know I sin, but I know you sin too, nudge nudge, aren’t we sinners cute?


Mr Krystal gives a good brief discussion of 18th-century disapproval of all novel-reading as guilty pleasure, and is amusingly acute about the dire modernist invention of the “serious” or literary novel, which tossed out all other novels as genre — trivial.


But his only quoted example of the literary novel is Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. Now, I love that interminable four-decker and think it one of the great novels about war. But it was never well known in America, and I wonder how many people have even heard of it by now. If it exemplifies the literary novel, the literary novel is: obscure, unpopular, syntactically complex, ninety years old, and British.


So, then. Is literature the serious stuff you have to read in college, and after that you read for pleasure, which is guilty?


Mr Krystal doesn’t say this directly. But he says nothing about the non-guilty pleasure that both literary and genre novels can afford. And what he says about genre fiction all fits into the familiar modernist mishmash of Puritanism and reverse snobbery.


I don’t want to join the group still huddled together in a corner of a twentieth-century lunchroom smirking over a copy of Amazing Wonder Tales because it’s “bad,” and flipping off the stuffy teacher who wants us to read A Tale of Two Cities because it’s “good.” I don’t want to be there any more.


“Skilled genre writers,” Mr Krystal says, “know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It’s plot we want and plenty of it.”


Who “we,” white man?


Plot is not the reason I turn to novels and is often the least interesting element to me in them. Story is what matters. Plot complicated and extends story; plot is indeed pure artifice. But Mr Krystal seems to say that only genre writers are aware that a certain level of artificiality must prevail in fiction. Does he mean that literary writers don’t use artifice? That they don’t know, just as as surely as genre writers, the absolute, imperative, marvelous artificiality of their art? That Virginia Woolf, so often demonstrably plotless, was artless?


And I question the idea that we “turn to” genre fiction as addicts turn to their needle or their bottle. Genre as Fixfic.


Anybody who reads a lot is, if you like, an addict. The people who put their initials on the fly-leaf of a library copy of a mystery so that they won’t keep checking the same book out over and over are story addicts. So is the ten-year-old with his nose in The Hobbit, oblivious to dinnertime or cataclysm. So is the old woman rereading War and Peace for the eighth time. So is the scholar who studies the Odyssey for forty years. The very quality of story is to hold, to fascinate. Ask the Wedding Guest to stop listening once the Ancient Mariner gets going. He can’t. He’s hooked. Sometimes you get hooked on mere plot, sometimes on mere familiarity and predictability, sometimes you get hooked on great stuff.


The trouble with the Litfic vs Genre idea is that what looks like a reasonable distinction of varieties of fiction always hides a value judgment: Lit superior, Genre inferior. Sticking in a middle category of Good Bad Books is no help. You might just as well make another one, Bad Good Books, which everybody could fill at their whim — mine would contain a whole lot of Booker Prize winners and, yes, definitely, The Death of Virgil — but it’s just a parlor game.


Some things have to happen before there can be more intelligent discussion of what literature is. And some of them are in fact happening, at last. It’s good to see that Mr Krystal can laugh at Edmund Wilson, if only at a safe distance. English departments have largely given up trying to defend their ivied or ivory towers by shooting down every space ship that approaches. Critics are ever more clearly aware that a lot of literature is happening outside the sacred groves of modernist realism. But still the opposition of literature and genre is maintained; and as long as it is, false categorical value judgment will cling to it, with the false dichotomy of virtuous pleasure and guilty pleasure.


To get out of this boring bind, I propose an hypothesis:


Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.


The value judgment concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.


Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure.


Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc.... and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.


Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.


Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.


This makes the Puritan snobbery of “higher” and “lower” pleasures irrelevant, and very hard to defend.


Of course every reader will prefer certain genres and be bored or repelled by others. But anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the “inferior” genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.


If we thought of all fictional genres as literature, we’d be done with the time-wasting, ill-natured diatribes and sneers against popular novelists who don’t write by the rules of realism, the banning of imaginative writing from MFA writing courses, the failure of so many English teachers to teach what people actually read, and the endless, silly apologising for actually reading it.


If critics and teachers gave up insisting that one kind of literature is the only one worth reading, it would free up a lot of time for them to think about the different things novels do and how they do it, and above all, to consider why certain individual books in every genre are, have been for centuries, and will continue to be more worth reading than most of the others.


Because there is the real mystery. Why is one book entertaining, another disappointing, another a revelation and a lasting joy? What is quality? What makes a good book good and a bad book bad?


Not its subject. Not its genre. What, then? That’s what good book-talk has always been about.


We won’t be allowed to knock down the Litfic/Fixfic walls, though, as long as the publishers and booksellers think their business depends on them — capitalizing on the guilty pleasure principle.


But then, how long will the publishers and booksellers last against the massive aggression of the enormous corporations that are now taking over every form of publication in absolute indifference to its content and quality so long as they can sell it as a commodity?


— UKL 
18 June 2012


53. A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy
June 2012


It is time for humanity to ascend from our primitive condition as omnivores, carnivores, vegetarians, and vegans. We must take the inevitable next step to Oganism—the Way of the Aerovore—leading away from obesity, allergy, and cruelty toward blameless purity. Our motto must be All we need is O.


Many people troubled by the suffering of animals—animals who would scarcely exist outside zoos if we did not breed them for their meat, milk, and eggs—remain strangely indifferent to the endless, enormous ordeal of the vegetables we keep in captivity or capture wild. Consider, for one moment, what plants undergo at our hands. We breed them with ruthless selectivity, harass, torment, and poison them, crowd them into vast monocultures, caring for their well-being only as it affects our desires, raising many merely for their byproducts such as seed, flower, or fruit. And we slaughter them without a thought of their suffering when “harvested,” uprooted, torn living from their earth or branch, slashed, chopped, mown, ripped to pieces—or when “cooked,” dropped to die in boiling water or oil or an oven—or, worst of all, eaten raw, stuffed into a human mouth and masticated by human teeth and swallowed, often while alive.


Do you think a bean is dead because you bought it at the store in a plastic bag? That a carrot is dead because it’s been in the refrigerator for a while? Have you ever planted a few of those beans in damp earth and waited a week or two, put the carrot top in a saucer of fresh water and waited a week or two?


The life in a plant may be less visible but far more intense and durable than the life in an animal. If you put an oyster in a saucer of fresh water and keep it for a week, the result will be quite different.


Why then, if it is immoral to subject an oyster to the degradation of becoming food, is it blameless, even virtuous, to do the same thing to a carrot or a piece of tofu?


“Because the carrot doesn’t suffer,” says the vegan. “Soybeans have no nervous system. They don’t feel pain. Plants have no feelings.”


That is exactly what many people said about animals for millennia, and what many still say about fish. As science has brought us—some of us—back to an awareness of our animality, we have been forced to acknowledge that all higher animals suffer pain and fear at least as intensely as we do. But just as we once misused science to support the claim that animals are mindless machines, so now we misuse science to support the claim of knowing that nonanimal living things—plants—have no feelings.


We know nothing of the sort.


Science has only just begun to investigate plant sensitivity and plant communication. The results are still meager, but positive, fascinating, and strange. The mechanisms and processes, being so very different from the senses and nervous systems of animals, are barely understood,. But so far what science has to say on the subject fails to justify the convenient belief that plants are insensate. We don’t know what the carrot feels.


In fact, we don’t know what the oyster feels. We can’t ask the cow’s opinion on being milked, although we can hypothesize that if her udder was full she might feel relief. The assumptions we make about all other living creatures are mostly self-serving. And perhaps the most deeply entrenched of them is that plants are insensate, irrational, and dumb: thus “inferior to” animals, “here for our use.” This snap judgment allows even the most tenderhearted of us to disrespect plants, to kill vegetables without mercy, to congratulate ourselves on the purity of our conscience while in the very act of callously devouring a young kale stalk or a tender, delicate, curling, living, infant pea tendril.


I believe the only way to avoid such cruel hypocrisy and achieve true clarity of conscience is by becoming an Ogan.


It is a pity that the Ogan movement by its nature and principles is fated to be, in each individual case, rather short-lived. But surely the first martyrs of the cause will inspire multitudes to follow them in forswearing the grossly unnatural practice of supporting life by eating other living beings or their byproducts. Ogans, ingesting only the unsullied purity of the O in the atmosphere and in H₂O, will live in true amity with all animals and all vegetables, and will proudly preach their creed for as long as they possibly can. It could be for several weeks, sometimes.


52. Some Recent Fantasies
Reading/Seeing (iii)
When somebody asks me, “Who are your favorite sf and fantasy authors?” I duck and mumble. Any answer I can make will be incomplete, invidious, and insignificant. If it’s guidance they want, I’m no expert. I never was a true fan, reading only one genre. To me that would be like living in an immense forest and refusing to see any kind of tree but one — oaks, say. Oaks are great. But then you come to a grove of 300-foot, 1200-year-old redwoods, and you see nothing?


And usually I’m years out of date. At the moment, though, I happen to have been reading a fair amount of recent or forthcoming fantasy; and I feel that I’ve come into a promising young part of the forest. Mixed new growth, quite vigorous. Good to see growing.


There’s a problem, though. People who insist that fantasy is for children still insist on trying to cram all the young trees — oaks, redwoods, mallorns — into bonsai pots.


Since publishers are feeling terribly unsafe these days, and since YA is a big, solid market, and fantasy is a big, solid part of it, publishers feel safe publishing fantasy as YA. And so writers of fantasy may find they’re expected to have kid protagonists and discouraged from writing about adults. Harry whatshisname and the teenie werewolves and the young gladiators have locked the fantasy/YA combo tight, at least for now. Retro macho “epics” of war-and-violence with nominally adult protagonists may escape the YA label, as they reach teen-agers through tie-ins, games, movies.


It’s all marketing, of course, where it isn’t spinach.


Children have no corner on imagination, nor can you limit fantasy to the experience of adolescents. Kids are perfectly capable of reading about adults, and will do so, if the adults do anything interesting — as they do in science fiction, for instance. (Most kids find novels about adults in dysfunctional families with dreary sex lives in the suburbs uninteresting, and by God, they’re right; but that’s another topic.) Also, adults will of course read about kids, if the kids are doing anything interesting — You there, Huck? — The whole idea of YA as a literature apart is shortsighted and arbitrary. But it’s marketing, so it’s a sacred cow. Milk it, and question not.


Jo Walton wriggles almost wholly free of the grip of the sacred cow. I’m sorry, but those words just came to me, and I could not resist them — sometimes one gets these wonderful gifts of metaphor. — So, anyhow, in Among Others, Jo Walton writes in the voice of a 14-year-old girl; but that girl as an adult, doubling the author, is also implicitly present. This unsimplification, this grounding in lived time, enriches the book and frees it from any ‘age-group,’ as well as keeping it clear of the only-kids-understand-anything sentimentality of a Salinger.


Mo is a diary-writing bookworm. Her daily criticism of the authors she’s reading is spot-on 14-year-old-girl-in-1979, funny, acute, and impassioned. (I’m glad she liked early Le Guin. I believe she knew about the movie of Lathe of Heaven a year or so before it existed, but hey, this is a fantasy, innit?) Mo has suffered a lot of major damage by age 14, so her reading could be seen as ‘compensatory,’ or ‘escapist,’ but that would be a mistake. She was a reader before she was damaged. Books continue to offer her not an escape, but a reality. A good many of us know, often quite early in our life and throughout it, that as far as we’re able to, we’re going to live a good part of that life in books, maybe the best part, certainly a vital part. And here’s one of us, a shameless reader, a shameless science-fiction reader, rejoicing with all her heart in the wealth of her existence. An almost too gorgeous boyfriend appears, but, rightly, he isn’t really as convincing or interesting either to Mo or to us as what she’s reading.


Magic in Walton’s novel functions magically, yet can always be seen and explained as nothing unusual. Fairy? what fairy? that was a rabbit. The spell didn’t change reality, reality’s always just been the way the spell made it be.... This is a large, interesting idea, well worked out. Walton’s trying hard to do what I call moving the boundary: to redraw the border of Elfland, to alter, or make more permeable, the wall beween the possible and the impossible. I think she almost succeeds. I don’t think anyone can, in fact, succeed. But it’s a gallant and fascinating enterprise.


If the sf readers who dismiss fictional magic as soft-brained wish-fulfilment will look at what Walton’s doing at that boundary line, they’ll see a harder, more honest intelligence at work than in the kind of “hard” sf that uses the terminology of scientific theory or speculation magically.


In a dry, quiet way, the book is very funny. Mo’s three aunts, who are witches, are witches because they are respectable in a way only the English could imagine and perfect. If I ever again meet a thoroughly nice, refined lady of that sort, I’ll know why she makes me so miserable. She can’t help it. She’s a Britwitch.


Goblin Secrets, by William Alexander, which came out this spring is aimed at somewhat younger readers than Among Others, or at anybody who likes adventures following fast one upon another. Set in a conventionally self-contained imaginary place (a splendidly imagined city, not cyberpunk but an interesting variation) and with a fairly conventional orphan child-hero, it doesn’t push out toward any boundaries; but it is outstanding, in this increasingly crowded and imitative field, for the unlabored imaginative authority and completeness of its setting, and for the fine, vivid English it’s written in. It’s an endearing book. And there’s something else to it that I can’t put words to: a haunting quality, a sense of depth, of unspoken further implication, in the adventures and the characters, which is its real magic. I wish I could have read it when I was eleven.


Kij Johnson was a member of workshops I directed, or herded, whatever it is the ‘teacher’ does at a writing workshop — once at Clarion in Seattle and once at The Flight of the Mind on a bend of the McKenzie River. I called her Foxwoman, after the story she was then writing.


The story is in her new book, At the Mouth of the River of Bees. It’s just as good as I thought it was going to be, if not better. My memory in general is very poor, but it holds on firmly to certain intense physical experiences, real or imagined, so that I can always in my mind walk down a certain dusty driveway in California, or stand before the gates of Moria seeking how to open them. Ever since that workshop, I’ve always been able to revisit the fox’s earth under the house/the beautiful house under the house. It was amazing to be able to ‘really’ go back to it in “Fox Magic.”


One or two weak stories might have been left out, but the variety is tremendous, exhilarating. The book definitely won’t do that short-story-collection thing to you where all the stories run together into a sort of depressing porridge in your mind. “26 Monkeys” is as different from “Chenting” as “Names for Water” is from “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” and each one is differently excellent. Along with “Fox Magic,” my favorite may be that last one. It’s about an engineer. I like engineer stories, ever since I read “The Bridge-Builders” and others in Kipling’s The Day’s Work when I was ten. I like stories that take you quietly into a place and let you do difficult and interesting work with some of the people there. By the end of the story you know those people, and love them, and wish you could go on and build the next bridge with them.


— UKL 
21 May 2012


PS. And between when I wrote this and when we posted it, both Among Others and The Man Who Bridged the Mist won the Nebula Award. Hey, Foxwoman! Way To Go!


51. The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum
May 2012


(Reading, Seeing ii)
The narrative gift, is that what to call it? The storyteller’s knack, as developed in writing.


Storytelling is clearly a gift, a talent, a specific ability. Some people just don’t have it—they rush or drone, jumble the order of events, skip essentials, dwell on inessentials, and then muff the climax. Don’t we all have a relative who we pray won’t launch into a joke or a bit of family history because the history will bore us and the joke will bomb? But we may also have a relative who can take the stupidest, nothingest little event and make it into what copywriters call a gut-wrenchingly brilliant thriller and a laugh riot. Or, as Cousin Verne says, that Cousin Myra, she sure knows how to tell a story.


When Cousin Myra goes literary, you have a force to contend with.


But how important is that knack to writing fiction? How much of it, or what kind of it, is essential to excellence? And what is the connection of the narrative gift with literary quality?


 


I’m talking about story, not about plot. E. M. Forster had a low opinion of story. He said story is “The queen died and then the king died,” while plot is “The queen died and then the king died of grief.” To him, story is just “this happened and then this happened and then this happened,” a succession without connection; plot introduces connection or causality, therefore shape and form. Plot makes sense of story. I honor E. M. Forster, but I don’t believe this. Children often tell “this happened and then this happened,” and so do people naively recounting their dream or a movie, but in literature, story in Forster’s sense doesn’t exist. Not even the silliest “action” potboiler is a mere succession of unconnected events.


I have a high opinion of story. I see it as the essential trajectory of narrative: a coherent, onward movement, taking the reader from Here to There. Plot, to me, is variation or complication of the movement of story.


Story goes. Plot elaborates the going.


Plot hesitates, pauses, doubles back (Proust), forecasts, leaps, doubling or tripling simultaneous trajectories (Dickens), diagrams a geometry onto the story line (Hardy), makes the story Ariadne’s string leading through a labyrinth (mysteries), turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time (the novel in general) . . .


There are supposed to be only so many plots (three, five, ten) in all fiction. I don’t believe that either. Plot is manifold, inexhaustibly ingenious, endless in connections and causalities and complications. But through all the twists and turns and red herrings and illusions of plot, the trajectory of story is there, going forward. If it isn’t going forward, the fiction founders.


I suppose plot without story is possible—perhaps one of those incredibly complex cerebral spy thrillers where you need a GPS to get through the book at all. And story without plot occurs occasionally in literary fiction (Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” perhaps)—oftener in literary nonfiction. A biography, for instance, can’t really have a plot, unless the subject obligingly provided one by living it. But the great biographers make you feel that the story of the life they’ve told has an aesthetic completeness equal to that of plotted fiction. Lesser biographers and memoirists often invent a plot to foist onto their factual story—they don’t trust it to work by itself, so they make it untrustworthy.


I believe a good story, plotted or plotless, rightly told, is satisfying as such and in itself. But here, with “rightly told,” is my conundrum or mystery. Inept writing lames or cripples good narrative only if it’s truly inept. An irresistibly readable story can be told in the most conventional, banal prose, if the writer has the gift.


 


I read a book last winter that does an absolutely smashing job of storytelling, a compulsive page-turner from page 1 on. The writing is competent at best, rising above banality only in some dialogue (the author’s ear for the local working-class dialect is pitch-perfect). Several characters are vividly or sympathetically portrayed, but they’re all stereotypes. The plot has big holes in it, though only one of them really damages credibility. The story line: an ambitious white girl in her early twenties persuades a group of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, to tell her their experiences with their white employers past and present, so that she can make a book of their stories and share them with the world by selling it to Harper and Row, and go to New York and be rich and famous. They do, and she does. And except for a couple of uppity mean white women getting some egg on their face, nobody suffers for it.


All Archimedes wanted was a solid place to put the lever he was going to move the world with. Same with a story trajectory. You can’t throw a shot put far if you’re standing on a shaky two-inch-wide plank over a deep, dark river. You need a solid footing.


Or do you?


All this author had to stand on is a hokey, sentimental notion, and from it she threw this perfect pitch!


Seldom, if ever, have I seen the power of pure story over mind, emotion, and artistic integrity so clearly shown.


And I had to think about it, because a few months earlier I’d read a book that brilliantly demonstrates a narrative gift in the service of clear thought, honest feeling, and passionate integrity. It tells an extremely complicated story extending over many decades and involving many people, from geneticists cloning cells in cloistered laboratories to families in the shack-houses of black farming communities. The story explains scientific concepts and arguments with great clarity while never for a moment losing its onward impetus. It handles the human beings it involves with human compassion and a steady, luminous ethical focus. The prose is of unobtrusive excellence. And if you can stop reading it, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. I couldn’t stop even when I got to the notes—even when I got to the index. More! Go on! Oh please tell me more!


I see a huge difference in literary quality between these two hugely readable books, which certainly has to do with specific qualities of character—among them patience, honesty, risk-taking.


Kathryn Stockett, the white woman who wrote The Help, tells of a white girl persuading black women to tell her intimate details of the injustices and hardships of their lives as servants—a highly implausible undertaking in Mississippi in ’64. When the white employers begin to suspect this tattling, only an equally implausible plot trick lets the black maids keep their jobs. Their sole motivation is knowing their stories will be printed; the mortal risk they would have run in bearing such witness, at that place in that year, is not seriously imagined, but merely exploited to create suspense. White Girl’s motivation is a kind of high-minded ambition. Her risks all become rewards—she loses malevolent friends and a bigoted boyfriend and leaves Mississippi behind for a brilliant big-city career. The author’s sympathy for the black women and knowledge of their everyday existence is evident, but for me, it was made questionable by her assumption of a right to speak for people without earning that right, and killed dead by the wish-fulfilling improbability of her story.


Rebecca Skloot, the white woman who wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, spent years researching a vastly complex web of scientific research, thefts, discoveries, mistakes, deceits, cover-ups, exploitations, and reparations, while at the same time trying, with incredible patience and good will, to gain the trust of the people most directly affected by the one human life with which all that research and profit-making began—the family of Henrietta Lacks. These were people who had good reason to feel that they would be endangered or betrayed if they trusted any white person. It took her literally years to win their confidence. Evidently she showed them that she deserved it by her patient willingness to listen and learn, her rigorous honesty, and her compassionate awareness of who and what was and is truly at risk.


 


“Of course her story is superior,” says Mr. Gradgrind. “It’s nonfiction—it’s true. Fiction is mere hokum.”


But oh, Mr. Gradgrind, so much nonfiction is awful hokum! How bad and mean my mommy was to me before I found happiness in buying a wonderful old castle in Nodonde and fixing it up as an exclusive gourmet b&b while bringing modern educational opportunities to the village children . . .


And contrarily, we can learn so much truth by reading novels, such as the novel in which you appear, Mr Gradgrind.


No, that’s not where the problem lies. The problem—my problem—is with the gift of story.


If one of the two books I’ve been talking about is slightly soiled fluff while the other is solid gold, how come I couldn’t stop reading either of them?


50. Chosen by a Cat
April 2012


Annals of Pard II
In the four months since I wrote about his arrival, Little Pard has grown up. He is now Not Large But Quite Solid Pard. He’s what they call a cobby cat, not a leggy one. When he sits upright, the view from the rear is pleasingly and symmetrically globular, a shining black sphere, plus head and tail. But he isn’t fat. Though not for want of trying. He still loves kibbles, oh kibbles, oh lovely kibbles! Crunch, crunch, crunch to the last crumb, then look up with instant, infinite pathos—I starve, I perish, I have not eaten for weeks . . . He would love to be Pardo el Lardo. We are heartless. One half cup of food a day, the vet said, and we have obeyed her. One quarter cup of kibbles at seven, another at five. And, well, yes, there is a sixth of a can of catfood with warm water on it for lunch, to make sure he gets plenty of water. But he often leaves that till five when the kibbles arrive, the One True Food. And then he cleans both bowls and goes into the living room and maybe flies around a little bit, but mostly just sits and digests in bliss.


He is a vivid little creature. Youth is so dramatic! His tuxedo is utterly black and utterly white. He is utterly sweet and utterly nutty. Wild as a bronco, inert as a sloth. One moment he’s airborne, the next fast asleep. He is unpredictable, yet keeps strict routines—every morning he rushes over to greet Charles coming downstairs, falls over on the hall rug, and waves his paws in a posture of adoration. He still won’t sit on a lap, though. I don’t know if he ever will. He just doesn’t accept the lap hypothesis.


Getting waked up by 20 minutes of strong, steady purring is very nice, plus the nose that investigates the neck, the paw that pats the hair . . . the increasing intensity of purr, the commencement of pouncing . . . By then it’s quite easy to get up. Then he rushes into the bathroom ahead of me and flies around, mostly about waist level, getting into things; and he plays with the water I run for him in the bathtub and then leaps out to make wet flower paw prints here and there, or if I dribble him water in the washbasin he closes the stopper, thus creating a water hole where savage panthers may crouch in wait for dik-diks and gazelles, or possibly beetles. Then we go downstairs—one flying, the other not.


Closing the drain is typical. He’s clever at opening cabinets too, because he likes getting into things, anything that can be got into—cabinets, drawers, boxes, bags, sacks, a quilt in progress, a sleeve. He is ingenious, adventurous, and determined. We call him the good cat with bad paws. The paws get him into trouble and cause loud shouting and scoldings and seizures and removals, which the good cat endures with patient good humor—“What are they carrying on about? I didn’t knock that over. A paw did.”


There used to be a lot of small delicate things on shelves around the house. There aren’t now.


Charles bought him a little red harness. He is incredibly patient about having it put on—we thought it would be Charles the Bloody-Handed for weeks, but no. He even purrs, somewhat plaintively, during the harnessing. Then the bungee leash is attached, and they go out and down the back steps into the garden for Pard’s Walk. It went quite well twice, then a man running by outside the fence slapping his feet down galumph galumph scared Pard, and he wanted to go back inside at once, and is only beginning to get unscared of all the weirdnesses out there.


I think when it stops raining and we can sit outdoors with him it will be OK. He needs open space to fly around in, that’s for sure. But then of course we fear he may get too bold in his enthusiasm and ignorance and wander into the wild backyards and thickets down the hill or chase a bird out into the street, and so get lost or meet the Enemy. The Enemy comes in so many forms to cats. They are small animals, predators yet very vulnerable, and Pard has neither street smarts nor wilderness wisdom. But he’s bright. He deserves what freedom we can give him. Once it stops raining.


Meanwhile, he usually spends a good part of the day with me in my study, sleeping on the printer, about a foot from my right elbow. He fixated on me to start with and still tends to follow me up and down stairs and keep nearby, though he’s gaining more independence, which is good—if I wanted to be the center of the universe, I’d have a dog. My guess is that for the first year of his life, in a small and crowded household, he was never alone; so he needs time to get used to solitude, as well as to silence, boredom, never getting pursued or squashed by a passionate baby, etc.


Not wanting to be the center of the universe doesn’t mean I don’t love having a cat nearby. It seems we got his name right: he’s a pardner, a true companion. I really like it when he sleeps at the top of my head on the pillow like a sort of fur nightcap. The only trouble with his sleeping on the printer is that it’s six inches from my Time Machine, which when it’s saving stuff makes a weird, tiny, humming-clicking noise exactly like beetles. Pard knows that there are beetles in that box. Nothing I can say will change his mind. There are beetles in that box, and one day he will get his paw into it and get the beetles out and eat them.


49. Reading, Seeing (i)
I don’t promise to keep this up regularly, but wanted to give it a try — talking a bit about some books I read and shows I see. Few of the books and none of the shows will be very new, and some may be very old.


Reading.
I’ve got a few more chapters of Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) to read. I’m reading it slowly, and admiring it deeply.


Krugman persuasively shows that America from the Roosevelt administration through the Nixon years was a nation of remarkable economic equality, social enlightenment, and genuine two-party government, (which we all took for granted as the way America is), and that the Republican goal, from Reagan on, has been to reinstate extreme economic inequality, halt or undo social improvement, and refuse political compromise and co-operation, thus derailing the democratic process.


Krugman writes with grace and clarity, and is probably the only economist I’ve ever been able to understand.


Two quotations:


Franklin Delano Roosevelt, campaigning in 1936:


We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.... We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.... [These forces] are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.


So the “old enemies” are with us again, but what Democrat now faces them with Roosevelt’s defiance? Only the Occupy movement has that courage.


And Dwight David Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1952:


Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L.Hunt..., a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.


What’s terrifying about this is how Eisenhower’s party in just a few decades has proved him wrong, wrong in everything he says except, possibly, the last word.


Reading.
I wanted a novel to read at night in bed (when too dim-brained to follow an argument I still can follow a story) — so I went to my To Read shelf.


It’s low on novels just now. I tried the one Tove Jansson I hadn’t yet read, Fair Play. I wanted to like it but found it predictable, and written with a kind of smugness or self-admiration that put me off, so I gave up. This doesn’t weaken my admiration for the madly original Moomintroll books, or her beautiful novel True Deceiver .


So I started the one Kent Haruf I haven’t yet read, Where You Once Belonged. Am about halfway through now. Haruf is terrific. Very quietly great. (The critical/prize-awarding people have, predictably, paid him little attention — an ABA runner-up for Plainsong, which should have walked off with the Pulitzer.) The two early books are so solid and beautiful, and Plainsong fully comparable to the best of Willa Cather (to whom I’m sure he’s tired of being compared, but if you write about the Western Middle West, you can’t get away from Willa.) Here are his four books:


The Tie that Binds, 1984


Where You Once Belonged, 1990


Plainsong, 1999


Eventide, 2004


It’s time for another, please, Mr Haruf?


(Half)Seen
We finally had to get onto Netflix when our lovely video store down the street got killed by Netflix. I hate this. I HATE it. I HATE being controlled by corporations. I HATE CORPORATIONS.


O.K.


So, last night we had Syriana. We gave up halfway through.


Probably we were just too tired and stupid for a fast-paced complex thriller. I found the cutting self-conscious to the point of self-parody — scene after scene a few seconds long, then cut — cut — cut again — Makes for fast pace, sure, but it’s too much like two hours of Tourette syndrome. And it intellectualizes the story. Shock without affect. Time only to figure out what’s happening where — never why, hardly even who. Allatime you’re figuring out. Well, I don’t watch movies to figure out. I don’t enjoy it. So, Syriana goes back.


Read
Finished Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal. It was written just before the housing market crash and the rise of Obama to the Presidency. Reactionary “movement Republicanism” has gone fast and far since then, belying much of Krugman’s hopes expressed in the last section. It is, however, a very good, very useful book, an aid to clear thinking.


A final quote from it (guess who said this, and when):


The strange alchemy of time has converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party in the country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best and building solidly and safely on these foundations. The Republicans, by contrast, are behaving like the radical party — the party of the reckless and embittered, bent on dismantling institutions which have been built solidly into our social fabric.


The first election I could vote in was 1952. I don’t forgive Eisenhower for defeating my candidate. Though Ike was a moderate with no ideological program, yet I think with his election our long trip to the wilderness of reactionary thinking began. Adlai Stevenson, who knew what true conservatism is, lost. And now we live with the regressive fantasies of “the party of the reckless and embittered.”


— UKL
16 April 2012


48. Having my Cake
April 2012


The inability to understand proverbs is a symptom of something—is it schizophrenia? Or paranoia? Anyhow, something very bad. When I heard that, many years ago, it worried me. Everything I ever heard about a symptom worries me. Do I have it? Yes! Yes, I do! Oh, God!


And I had proof of my paranoia (or schizophrenia). There was a very common proverb that I knew I’d never understood.


You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
My personal logic said, How can you eat a cake you don’t have?


And since I couldn’t argue with that, I silently stuck to it, which left me in a dilemma: either the saying didn’t make sense (so why did intelligent people say it?) or I was schizophrenic (or paranoid).


Years passed, during which now and then I puzzled over my problem with the proverb. And slowly, slowly it dawned on me that the word have has several meanings or shades of meaning, the principal one being “own” or “possess,” but one of the less common connotations is “hold on to,” “keep.”


You can’t keep your cake and eat it too.
Oh!


I get it!


It’s a good proverb!


And I am not a paranoid schizophrenic!


But it seemed odd that I hadn’t arrived sooner at the “keep” meaning of have. I puzzled over that for a while too, and finally came up with this:


For one thing, it seems to me that the verbs are in the wrong order. You have to have your cake before you eat it, after all. I might have understood the saying if it was “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”


And then, another kind of confusion, having to do with have. In the West Coast dialect of English I grew up with, “I had cake at the party” is how we said, “I ate cake at the party.” So “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” was trying to tell me that I couldn’t eat my cake and eat it too . . .


And hearing it that way as a kid, I thought, “Hunh?” but didn’t say anything, because there is no way, no possible way, a kid can ask about everything grownups say that the kid thinks “Hunh?” about. So I just tried to figure it out. And once I got stuck with the illogic of the cake you have being the cake you can’t eat, the possibility never occurred to me that it was all about hoarding vs. gobbling, or the necessity of choice when there is no middle way.


I expect you’ve had quite enough cake by now. I’m sorry.


But see, this is the kind of thing I think about a lot.


Nouns (cake), verbs (have), words, and the uses and misuses of words, and the meanings of words, and how the words and their meanings change with time and with place, and the derivations of words from older words or other languages—words fascinate me the way box elder beetles fascinate my friend Pard. Pard, at this point, is not allowed outside, so he has to hunt indoors. Indoors we have, at this point, no mice. But we have beetles. Oh yes Lord, we have beetles. And if Pard hears, smells, or sees a beetle, that beetle instantly occupies his universe. He will stop at nothing—he will root in wastebaskets, overturn and destroy small fragile objects, push large heavy dictionaries aside, leap wildly in the air or up the wall, stare unmoving for ten minutes at the unattainable light fixture in which a beetle is visible as a tiny moving silhouette . . . And when he gets the beetle, and he always does, he knows that you can’t have your beetle and eat it too. So he eats it. Instantly.


I know, though I don’t really like knowing it, that not many people share this particular fascination or obsession. With words, I mean, not beetles. Though I want to point out that Charles Darwin was almost as deeply fascinated by beetles as Pard is, though with a somewhat different goal. Darwin even put one in his mouth once, in a doomed attempt to keep it by eating it. It didn’t work.* Anyhow, many people enjoy reading about the meaning and history of picturesque words and phrases, but not many enjoy brooding for years over a shade of significance of the verb to have in a banal saying.


Even among writers, not all seem to share my enjoyment of pursuing a word or a usage through the dictionaries and the wastebaskets. If I start doing it aloud in public, some of them look at me with horror or compassion, or try to go quietly away. For that reason, I’m not even certain that it has anything to do with my being a writer.


But I think it does. Not with being a writer per se, but with my being a writer, my way of being a writer. When asked to talk about what I do, I’ve often compared writing with handicrafts—weaving, pot-making, woodworking. I see my fascination with the word as very like, say, the fascination with wood common to carvers, carpenters, cabinetmakers—people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what’s been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.


Yet when I compare my craft with theirs, I feel slightly presumptuous. Woodworkers, potters, weavers engage with real materials, and the beauty of their work is profoundly and splendidly bodily. Writing is so immaterial, so mental an activity! In its origin, it’s merely artful speech, and the spoken word is no more than breath. To write or otherwise record the word is to embody it, make it durable; and calligraphy and typesetting are material crafts that achieve great beauty. I appreciate them. But in fact they have little more to do with what I do than weaving or pot-making or woodworking does. It’s grand to see one’s poem beautifully printed, but the important thing to the poet, or anyhow to this poet, is merely to see it printed, however, wherever—so that readers can read it. So it can go from mind to mind.


I work in my mind. What I do is done in my mind. And what my hands do with it in writing it down is not the same as what the hands of the weaver do with the yarn, or the potter’s hands with the clay, or the cabinetmaker’s with the wood. If what I do, what I make, is beautiful, it isn’t a physical beauty. It’s imaginary, it takes place in the mind—my mind, and my reader’s.


You could say that I hear voices and believe the voices are real (which would mean I was schizophrenic, but the proverb test proves I’m not—I do, I do understand it, Doctor!). And that then by writing what I hear, I induce or compel readers to believe the voices are real too . . . That doesn’t describe it well, though. It doesn’t feel that way. I don’t really know what it is I’ve done all my life, this wordworking.


But I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them.


I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.


And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are built and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework.


Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.



	
From Darwin’s Autobiography: “I will give proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”



47. Primitive Copy-rites of Ancient Peoples
Vonda recently said something about hectograph and asked if I remembered it. I wrote back to her:


Oh do I remember hectograph. We had one when I was 12 or so. My brother Karl used it most; I think he put out literature on it when he was campaigning for office at Berkeley High. Karl had political ambitions. When he was nine he campaigned for City Manager of Berkeley. All he had to print up his literature on then was one of those letterpress sets where the letters are pink rubber, and you put them into little wooden slots with tweezers, and press it all on an inkpad, and then onto the paper, and it comes out rather pale and crooked, but PRINTED. His campaign slogan was The Man Who Can Do It. Good slogan, huh? He got three write-in votes. I was proud and impressed.


Anyhow, a hectograph is essentially a tray of very stiff jello and a kind of special ink that the message is written or typed in. The process is messy and slow, the ink has the gift of ubiquity, the jello has to be cleaned and recleaned and rerecleaned. The copies come out rather pallid and blurry, in a distinctive shade of purple.


Purple text in wonky typewriter front reading: This is what hectograph looked like.
It came in a neat little kit that all fit in a box not much bigger than the jello tray, which was probably 9×12. Easy to move, and to hide. Samizdat was often hectographed. There were jokes in Russia about all the people in Siberia with purple fingers. (My friend Jean worked in Saigon before the war, and there were jokes there, too, about people with purple fingers; but theirs were due to gentian violet which was a topical cure for a local sexually transmitted fungal itch.)


Talking about the hectograph reminded me of later efforts at home reproduction (of text). Some time in the seventies or eighties our friend Helen, who was working as a Kelly Girl (temp secretary) told us about home copiers, which were new, and knowing that I had a lot of copying, said we ought to get one, and told us which kind: a heat copier, I don’t remember the brand. It required a special sensitive paper. If you didn’t let it cook long enough, the copy was too anemic to read, and if you cooked it too long the paper turned a dark toasty brown, thus entirely concealing the text. But with a little care it worked, and it didn’t cost too much or take up much room, and I used it a lot, copying letters mostly, and music for my recorder.


What we didn’t know then was that the life of the copy was pretty short, I suppose because the paper remains somewhat light-sensitive. By now, the letters I filed are semi-legible. My lovely Scots and Welsh folksongs and the paper they’re on are gradually becoming exactly the same delicate brown color.


They look as if they’d been written in lemon juice, or milk, and let dry, and then held over a flame: Secret Writing. Did you do Secret Writing? It worked, but it wasn’t exactly easy to read, and the paper did tend to either toast slowly or burst into flame, thus destroying the Secret Message, possibly before you’d read it. But at least that kept the Secret.


—UKL
2 April 2012


46. The Death of the Book
People love to talk about the death of whatever — the book, or history, or Nature, or God, or authentic Cajun cuisine. Eschatologically-minded people do, anyhow.


After I wrote that, I felt pleased with myself, but uneasy. I went and looked up eschatological. I knew it didn’t mean what scatological means, even though they sound exactly alike except eschatological has one more syllable, but I thought it had to do only with death. I didn’t realise it concerns not one thing but The Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. If it included scatology too, it would be practically the whole ball of wax.


Anyhow, the eschatologists’ judgment is that the book is going to die and go to heaven or hell, leaving us to the mercy of Hollywood and our computer screens.


There certainly is something sick about the book industry, but it seems closely related to the sickness affecting every industry that, under pressure from a corporate owner, dumps product standards and long-range planning in favor of ‘predictable’ sales and short-term profits.


As for books themselves, the changes in book technology are cataclysmic. Yet it seems to me that rather than dying, “the book” is growing — taking on a second form and shape, the ebook.


This is a vast, unplanned change that’s as confusing, uncomfortable, and destructive as most unplanned changes. Certainly it’s putting huge strain on all the familiar channels of book publication and acquisition, from the publishers, distributors, book stores, and libraries, to the reader who’s afraid that the latest best seller, or perhaps all literature, will suddenly pass him by if he doesn’t rush out and buy an electronic device to read it on.


But that’s it, isn’t it? — that’s what books are about — reading?


Is reading obsolete, is the reader dead?


Dear reader: How are you doing? I am fairly obsolete, but by no means, at the moment, dead.


Dear reader: Are you reading at this moment? I am, because I’m writing this, and it’s very hard to write without reading, as you know if you ever tried it in the dark.


Dear reader: What are you reading on? I’m writing and reading on my computer, as I imagine you are. (At least, I hope you’re reading what I’m writing, and aren’t writing “What Tosh!” in the margin. Though I’ve always wanted to write “What Tosh!” in a margin ever since I read it years ago in the margin of a library book. It was such a good description of the book.)


Reading is undeniably one of the things people do on the computer. And also, on the various electronic devices that are capable of and may be looked upon as “for” telephoning, taking photographs, playing music and games, etc, people may spend a good while texting sweetiepie, or looking up recipes for authentic Cajun gumbo, or checking out the stock report — all of which involve reading. People use computers to play games or wander through picture galleries or watch movies, and to do computations and make spreadsheets and pie charts, and a few lucky ones get to draw pictures or compose music, and so on, but mostly, am I wrong? isn’t an awful lot of what people do with computers either word-processing (writing) or processing words (reading)?


How much of anything can you do in the e-world without reading? The use of any computer above the toddler-entertainment level is dependent on at least some literacy in the user. Operations can be learned mechanically, but still, the main element of a keyboard is letters, and icons take you only so far. Texting may have replaced all other forms of verbality for some people, but texting is just a primitive form of writing: you can’t do it unless you no u frm i, lol.


It looks to me as if people are in fact reading and writing more than they ever did. People who used to work and talk together now work each alone in a cubicle, writing and reading all day long on screen. Communication that used to be oral, face to face or on the telephone, is now written, emailed, and read.


None of that has much to do with book-reading, true; yet it’s hard for me to see how the death of the book is to result from the overwhelming prevalence of a technology that makes reading a more invaluable skill than it ever was.


Ah, say the eschatologists, but it’s competition from the wondrous, endless everything-else-you-can-do-on-your-iPad — competition is murdering the book!


Could be. Or it might just make readers more discriminating. A recent article in the NY Times (“Finding Your Book Interrupted... By the Tablet You Read It On” by Julie Bosman and Matt Richtel, March 4, 2012) quoted a woman in Los Angeles: “With so many distractions, my taste in books has really leveled up.... Recently, I gravitate to books that make me forget I have a world of entertainment at my fingertips. If the book’s not good enough to do that, I guess my time is better spent.” Her sentence ends oddly, but I think it means that she prefers reading an entertaining book to activating the world of entertainment with her fingertips. Why does she not consider books part of this world of entertainment? Maybe because the book, even when activated by her fingertips, entertains her without the moving, flickering, twitching, jumping, glittering, shouting, thumping, bellowing, screaming, blood-spattering, ear-splitting, etc, that we’ve been led to identify as entertainment. In any case, her point is clear: if a book’s not as entertaining — on some level, not necessarily the same level — as the jumping, thumping, bleeding, etc, then why read it? Either activate the etc, or find a better book. As she puts it, level up.


When we hear about the death of the book, it might be a good idea to ask what “the book” is. Are we talking about people ceasing to read books, or about what they read the books on — paper or a screen?


Reading on a screen is certainly different from reading a page. I don’t think we yet understand what the differences are. They may be considerable, but I doubt that they’re so great as to justify giving the two kinds of reading different names, or saying that an ebook isn’t a book at all.


If “the book” means only the book as physical object, its death, to some devotees of the Internet, may be a matter for rejoicing — hurray! we’re rid of another nasty heavy bodily Thing with a copyright on it! — But mostly it’s the occasion of lament and mourning. People to whom the pysicality of the book printed on paper is important, sometimes more important than the contents — those who value them for their binding, paper, and typography, buy fine editions, make collections — and the many who simply take pleasure in holding and handling the book they’re reading, are naturally distressed by the idea that the book on paper will be totally replaced by the immaterial text in a machine.


I can only suggest, don’t agonize — organize! No matter how the corporations bluster and bully and bury us in advertising, the consumer always has the option of resistance. We don’t get steamrollered by a new technology unless we lie down in front of the the steamroller.


The steamroller is certainly on the move. Some kinds of printed book are already being replaced by e-books. The mass market paperback edition is threatened by the low-cost e-book edition. Good news for those who like to read on a screen, bad news for those who don’t, or like to buy from Abebooks and A-libris or to pounce on 75-cent beat-up secondhand mysteries. But if the lovers of the material book are serious about valuing good binding and paper and design as essential to their reading pleasure, they will provide a visible, steady market for well-made hard-cover and paperback editions: which the book industry, if it has the sense of a sowbug, will meet. The question is whether the book industry does have the sense of a sowbug. Some of its behavior lately leads one to doubt. But let us hope. And there’s always the “small publisher,” the corporation-free independent, many of which are as canny as can be.


Other outcries about the death of the book have more to do with the direct competition with reading offered on the Internet. The book is being murdered by the etc at our fingertips.


Here “the book” usually refers to literature. At the moment, I think the DIY manual, or the cookbook, the guide to this or that, are the kinds of book most often replaced by information on a screen. The Encyclopedia Britannica just died, a victim, as it were, of Google. I don’t think I’ll bury our Eleventh Edition just yet, though; the information in it, being a product of its time (a hundred years ago), can be valuably different from that furnished by the search engine, which is also a product of its time. The annual encyclopedias of films/directors/actors were killed a few years ago by information sites on the Net — very good sites, though not as much fun to get lost in as the book was. We keep our 2003 edition because being ourselves ancient, we use it more efficiently than we do any site, and it’s still useful and entertaining even if dead — more than you can say of the corpse of almost anything but a book.


I’m not sure why anyone, no matter how much they like to think about the End Times, believes that the Iliad or Jane Eyre or the Bhagavad Gita is dead or about to die. They have far more competition than they used to, yes; people may see the movie and think they know what the book is; they can be displaced by the etc; but nothing can replace them. So long as people are taught to read (which may or may not happen in our underfunded schools), and particularly if they’re taught what there is to read, and how to read it intelligently (extensions of the basic skill now often omitted in our underfunded schools), some of them will prefer reading to activating the etc. They will read books (on paper or on a screen) as literature.


And they will try to ensure that the books continue to exist, because continuity is an essential aspect of literature and knowledge. Books occupy time in a different way than most art and entertainment. In longevity perhaps only sculpture in stone outdoes them.


And here the issue of electronic and print on paper has to re-enter the discussion. On the permanence of what is in books, much of the lasting transmission of human culture still relies. It’s possible that highest and most urgent value of the printed book may be its mere, solid, stolid permanence.


I’ll be talking now not about “the book” in America in 2012 so much as about how things are all over the world in the many places where electricity may be available only to the rich, or intermittent, or non-existent; and how things may be in fifty years or five centuries, if we continue to degrade and destroy our habitat at the present rate.


The ease of reproducing an ebook and sending it all over the place can certainly secure its permanence, so long as the machine to read it on can be made and turned on. I think it’s well to remember, though, that electric power is not to be counted on in quite the same way sunlight is.


Easy and infinite copiability also involves a certain risk. The text of the book on paper can’t be altered without separately and individually altering every copy in existence, and alteration leaves unmistakable traces. With e-texts that have been altered, deliberately or by corruption (pirated texts are often incredibly corrupt), if the author is dead, establishing an original, authentic, correct text may be impossible. And the more piracies, abridgments, mash-ups, etc are tolerated, the less people will understand that textual integrity matters.


People to whom texts matter, such as readers of poetry or scientific monographs, know that the integrity of the text is essential. Our non-literate ancestors knew it. The three-year-old being read to demands it. You must recite the words of the poem exactly as you learned them or it will lose its power. — Daddy! You read it wrong! It says “did not” not “didn’t!”


The physical book may last for centuries; even a cheap paperback on pulp paper takes decades to degrade into unreadability. Continuous changes of technology, upgrades, corporate takeovers, leave behind them a debris of texts unreadable on any available machine. And an e-text has to be periodically recopied to keep it from degrading. People who archive them are reluctant to say how often, because it varies a great deal; but as anyone with email files over a few years old knows, the progress into entropy can be rapid. A university librarian told me that, as things are now, they expect to recopy every electronic text the library owns, every eight to ten years, indefinitely.


If we decided to replace the content of our libraries entirely with electronic archives, at this stage of the technology, a worst-case scenario would have informational and literary texts being altered without our consent or knowledge, reproduced or destroyed without our permission, rendered unreadable by the technology that printed them, and, unless regularly recopied and redistributed, fated within a few years or decades to turn inexorably into garble or simply blink out of existence.


But that’s assuming the technology won’t improve and stabilize. In any case, why should we go into either/or mode? It’s seldom necessary and often destructive (look at Congress.)


Maybe the e-reader and the electricity to run it will become available to everyone forever. That would be grand. But as things are or are likely to be, having books available in two different forms can only be a good thing, now and in the long run.


I do believe that, despite the temptations at our fingertips, there’s an obstinate, durable minority of people who, having learned to read, will go on reading books, however and wherever they can find them, on pages or screens. And because people who read books mostly want to share them, and feel however obscurely that sharing them is important, they’ll see to it that, however and wherever, the books are there for the next generation(s).


Human generations, that is — not technological generations. At the moment, the computer generation has shortened to about the life span of the gerbil, and might yet rival the fruitfly.


The life span of a book is more like that of the horse, or the human being, sometimes the oak, even the redwood. Which is why it seems a good idea, rather than mourning their death, to rejoice that books now have two ways of staying alive, getting passed on, enduring, instead of only one.


—UKL 
25 March 2012


45. Google Goggles
One weird thing about being very old is never being sure whether it’s you or the other people who are weird. It’s pretty safe to assume that it’s you.


After all, people who walked along shouting at people who weren’t there used to be considered weird. But a few decades ago we dumped them all on the streets and thus made them average, though for a while you could consider them somewhat weird. By now, when somebody goes charging past on the sidewalk in Santa Cruz bellowing continuously at the top of his voice at a broker in Wichita, and you find that weird, you’re the weird one.


Where’s “here?” Where’s “there?” We and the people we talk to or “relate with” are increasingly neither here nor there.


Thus the great weird forward march of progress is soon to bring us “Heads Up Display Glasses” — Google Goggles. These devices will look like shades, but inside the lens on a tiny screen an inch from the goggle-wearer’s eye they will display indispensable information: where you the goggle-wearer are, maps of how to get there from here or here from there, where your friends are, how to contact them, your latitude, your altitude, your attitude — everything in the world, except the world.


Obviously, this technology can offer people whose sight is impaired an immense boon. Why don’t I trust us to limit it to that, maybe not even to use it for that?


The human desire to occasionally, temporarily, replace the actual world with some kind of improvement on it was nourished in its long infancy by the arts, and in its brief teens by movies and TV. Then ever-improving electronic technologies moved in and began to feed, maintain, and incite its appetite, which by now is insatiable. If we can shout on a phone or fill our ears with music instead of listening to the sounds or silence around us, we will. If we can text our Facebook Friends instead of seeing the faces around us, we will. If instead of looking around to find out where we are we can listen to a machine tell us where it thinks we are, we will; and if we can walk into a brick wall while the machine tells us it’s recalculating, we probably will.


The Google Goggles promise only GPS-type information, but what sort of pitiful Luddite is going to be content with that? Like us, our devices must multitask. They must do everything everything else does, only faster. If, instead of seeing where we’re going, we can read the latest Dow Jones figures an inch away with one eye and watch a ball game an inch away with the other eye, we will. The GPS can be programmed to warn us about the brick wall, or the kid on the tricycle, after all. They’re very reliable. Look how well they worked at CERN, proving that things can too go faster than light, nyah nyah for that old Luddite Einstein.


The crude, primitive glasses of the olden days improved vision. Google Goggles will replace vision. Who’ll want to see anything but the endless information, entertainment, and communication all there right before their eyes? Maybe some kind of nature nuts.


After all, if for some reason we want to see what the world looks like while we’re looking at something more interesting, we can be taking pictures with the hidden camera inside our goggles. We can photograph the people who stagger past us, tilting their heads strangely as they scroll and click, until they get hit by a taxi driver whose cloud was not managing the guidance system in full synchrony with realtime. Then we can put the pictures on our smart phone, or even on one of the little screens an inch away inside our goggles so we can look at them while the other screen tells us our longitude and the latest 5/4 Supreme Court decision (declaring that Super-PACs and fetuses are human and women are not).


It’s reassuring to think that wearing Google Goggles won’t interfere with walking or running or biking or driving, or anyhow hardly any more than cell phones and texting do. After the streets and highways have been more or less rendered impassable by carnage for a year or two, a few state legislatures will pass a bill to make it an offense to wear the goggles when driving in a nursery school zone or piloting a jet plane. Anything beyond that would infringe on our self-evident Constitutional right to access information, interface with our loved ones, and play games about killing people at all times in all places simultaneously.


To be sure, the article about the goggles in Slatest* says that “the technology isn’t meant to be used all the time.” Ha, ha! Not used all the time? That’s pretty weird!


— UKL 
5 March 2012



	
Link updated April 2023. "Google Expected to Unveil Smart-Phone Glasses This Year" by Ankita Rao, The Slatest, 22 February 2012. Original URL: http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/02/22/google_s_smart_phone_glasses_to_launch_this_year.html



44. People I don’t want to hear any more about
The family of eight who generate three–quarters of a cupful of trash to put in the garbage every week, use no plastic of any description for any purpose, grow all their own food in a 2-square-foot worm garden, shoot anyone suspected of bringing sugar onto their property, and have trained their cat and two dogs to live on rutabaga and chopped kale.


The man of 92 who runs 36 miles a day to train for the 29 marathons which he flies all over the country every year to run in, along with the woman of 105 who does 500 push-ups before breakfast. After breakfast (a cup of black coffee and a square of sugarless 180% Nigerian chocolate) she works out until noon with her personal trainer, skips lunch, and powerwalks till dinner (Vegan, with one half glass of red wine). She then meditates for five hours, sleeps for four, and gets up at 4.30 sharp to begin her push-ups.


The artist who was paid 55 million dollars for an installation consisting of a dead cat on a sawhorse. While the concept is of course entirely the artist’s, the sawhorse and cat were provided and arranged by his two assistants, who are paid $20 an hour. The sculpture is particularly noted for its kinetic and interactive elements. These consist of the decay of the cat from day to day and the resulting changes in the appearance of the corpse; the relative position of corpse and sawhorse; and the variations in quality and intensity of odor. Titled “Intimations of Tit-Fingering in the Mind of a Genius – IV” the piece, on display at the Tate Modern, has been universally admired by art critics as a stunningly authentic statement of what it states. The assistants replace the dead cat every six to eight weeks, depending on its kinetic interactivity.


The world-famous chef of Introuvable, a two-table restaurant in a remote French village, Cul d’Airain, where a ten-course dinner costs upward of 22,000 euros. The food consists of tiny fragments of unidentifiable substances sliced tissue-paper thin and arranged in complex aesthetic patterns on gold leaf by the chef’s assistants, who pay him 4,000 euros an hour for the privilege of executing his culinary presentations.


The Presidential candidate with a gold-plated dog carrier strapped to the roof of his Mercedes with a diamond-studded bunjee cord, who frequently has sex with corporations because, to him, corporations are people. He feels the pain of the American middle class. He does not feel the pain of the American poor, because the poor are fine, because they have a safety net under them, which he has promised his friends the corporations to remove, once he’s elected by a 5 to 4 vote of the Supreme Court (i.e., the five-ninths of the judges who are wholly owned subsidiaries of various corporations plus the Vatican).


Celebrities. Such as Chelsi and Battersi, the Soho twins, who appeared for 48 seconds on reality TV in 2009, and are now suing each other for identity theft. 


Or Dingi Remora, whose mother says she’s “doing just a wonderful, hard, brave, heartwarming job of soul redemption” working out her twelfth sentence for shoplifting while stoned out of her head by going once a week to be photographed by the press in the entrance of the Beverly Hills Childrens Hospital while stoned out of her head. 


Or Brandi Weinwein and Brusk Sullen, who married in January, divorced in late January, had whirlwind affairs with American Idol idol Pupi Moab and rap star Bad Bad BAD Dog, announced they were madly in love again with each other last Saturday, and would have been remarried this Sunday if Brandi hadn’t been arrested for driving naked at 188 mph on Mulholland and Brusk hadn’t shot his cocaine dealer dead at a party in Redondo Beach.


— UKL
20 February 2012


43. Fear and Loathing in e-Land
Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “loathing” it?


The little Time article itself is fairly accurate about what I’ve said about e-reading, but the title of the series, “Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books,” reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it.


With us or against us! Cyberfreak or Luddite!


Five-year-olds who don’t enjoy green peas and aren’t interested in eating them are likely to announce (unless they’ve acquired some manners) that they HATE peas — Ugh! Yecchh! Bleaghh! The way people talk, you’d think that faced with e-technology we’re all five-year-olds. Either I just loooove my Kindle to death, or Ugh! Yecchh! Bleaghh!


Why is it that, when I accused Google of unethical behavior in digitalizing copyrighted books without permission, I was (and still am) repeatedly described as hating Google and an enemy of the Internet?


When I accuse our government of unethical behavior in keeping men against whom no charge has been preferred and who are given no chance to prove their innocence in a terrible prison in Guantánamo, there are indeed some Americans who would describe me as hating our government and being an enemy of the United States. But there are more who are capable of making the enormously important distinction between enmity towards an institution, and disapproval of some of its policies or acts.


These are the ones who actually believe in freedom of speech.


Evidently some people believe they’re defending the freedom of the Internet by opposing any criticism of anything done on the Internet (or anything Google does). They’re thinking the way the extreme right thinks: There are two sides. We are on the Good side. Our people are Good. Everything they do is Good. To criticize them is Evil! There must be no free speech about free speech! It’s dangerous!


In its defensiveness and immaturity, this is five-year-old thinking: If Daddy doesn’t like something I like to do, it means he doesn’t love me. If Mommy says I’m doing something wrong or stupid, it means she thinks I’m bad and stupid and she loathes and hates me and so I loathe and hate her too and I will now fall down screaming in the supermarket aisle and let the world know how mean she is.


Why are people so defensive about electronic technology? Do they really think the Luddite hordes are coming after them with burning torches? Why is mere discrimination taken as negative criticism? Love me, love my iPad? Oh, come on. Grow up!


— UKL
6 February 2012


42. Choosing a Cat
January 2012


Annals of Pard I
I have never chosen a cat before. I have been chosen by the cat, or by people who offered us a cat. Or a kitten was weeping up in a tree on Euclid Avenue and needed to be rescued and grew up into a 14-pound gray tiger tom who populated our neighborhood in Berkeley for blocks around with gray tiger kittens. Or pretty golden Mrs. Tabby, probably after an affair with her handsome golden brother, presented us with several golden kittens, and we kept Laurel and Hardy. Or when Willie died, we asked Dr. Morgan to let us know if anybody left a kitten at the veterinary door the way people do, and she said it wasn’t likely because it was long past kitten season, but next morning there was a six-month-old in a tuxedo on her doorstep, and she called us up, and so Zorro came home with us for 13 years.


After Zorro died last spring, there had to be the emptiness.


Finally it began to be time that the house had a soul again (some Frenchman said that the cat is the soul of the house, and we agree). But no cat had chosen us or been offered to us or appeared weeping in a tree. So I asked my daughter if she’d come to the Humane Society with me and help me choose a cat.


A middle-aged, sedate, homebody cat, suitable for owners in their eighties. Male, for no reason but that the cats I have loved most dearly were males. Black, I hoped, as I like black cats and had read that they are the least popular choice for adoption.


But I wasn’t particular about details. I was nervous about going. I dreaded it, in fact.


How can you choose a cat? And what about the ones I couldn’t choose?


 


The Humane Society’s Portland office is an amazing place. It is immense, and I saw only the lobby and the cat wing—rooms and rooms and rooms of cats. There’s always somebody, staff and volunteers, at hand if you want them. Everything is organized with such simple efficiency that it all seems easy-going and friendly—low-stress. When you are one of the huge number of people coming daily to bring in or adopt animals, when you see the endless incoming and outgoing of animals and glimpse the tremendous, endless work involved in receiving and treating and keeping them, the achievement of that easygoing atmosphere seems almost incredible and totally admirable.


The human/animal interface is a very troubled one these days, and in one sense the Humane Society shows that trouble at its most acute. Yet in everything I saw there, I also saw the best of what human beings can do when they put their heart and mind to it.


Well, so, we found our way into the cat wing and looked about a bit, and it turned out that at the moment there were very few middle-aged cats for adoption. The ones that were there mostly came from one place, which I’d read about recently in the newspaper: a woman with 90 cats who was sure she loved them all and was looking after them and they were all fine and . . . you know the story, a sad one. The Humane Society had taken about 60 of them. The nice aide whom we began to follow around told us that they weren’t in as bad shape as most animals in those situations, and were fairly well socialized, but they weren’t in very good shape either, and would need special care for quite a while to come. That sounded a bit beyond me.


Aside from them, most of the cats there were kittens. Kittening was very late this year, she said. Just like tomatoing, I thought.


In one room of six or eight kittens, Caroline noticed an agitated nylon play-tube which seemed to contain at least two active animals, one black and one white. Eventually one small cat emerged, very black-and-white and pleased with himself. Our guide told us he was older than most of them—a year old. So we asked to see him. We went to the interview room and she came in with the little fellow in the tuxedo.


He seemed very small for a year old: seven pounds, she said. His tail stood straight up in the air, and he purred most amazingly, and talked a good deal in a rather high voice, and often fell over in a playful/appeasement position. He was clearly, and naturally, anxious. He clung a little to the aide, till she left us alone with him. He wasn’t really shy, didn’t mind being picked up and handled and petted, though he wouldn’t settle on a lap. His eyes were bright, his coat sleek and soft, the black tail stood straight up, and the black spot on his left hind leg was terminally cute.


The aide came back, and I said, “OK.”


She and my daughter were both a little surprised. Maybe I was too.


“You don’t want to look at any others?” she asked.


No, I didn’t. Send him back, look at other cats, make a choice of one, maybe not him? I couldn’t. Fate or the Lord of the Animals or whatever had presented me with a cat, again. OK.


 


His previous owner had conscientiously filled out the Humane Society questionnaire. Her answers were useful and heartbreaking. Reading between some of the lines, I learned that he lived his first year with his mother and one sibling in a household where there were children under three, children from three to nine, and children from nine through fourteen, but no men.


The reason why all three cats were given up for adoption was stark: “Could not afford to keep.”


He had been only four days at the Humane Society. They had neutered him right away and he was recovering fast; he was in excellent health, had been well fed, well treated, a sociable, friendly, playful, cheerful little pet. I do not like to think of the tears in that family.


 


He has been with us a month today. As his first owner warned, he is somewhat shy of men. But not very. And not afraid of children, though sensibly watchful. We lived 13 years with shy, wary Zorro, who feared many things—including my daughter Caroline, because once she stayed in our house with two big, unruly dogs, and for 10 years he never forgave her. But this fellow is not timid. In fact, he is perhaps too fearless. He grew up as an inside-outside cat. Here, he won’t go outside till the weather gets warm. But then he must. I can only hope he knows what to be afraid of out there.


Like many young cats, he goes wild as a buck once or twice a day, flying about the room about three feet off the ground, knocking things off and over, getting into all kinds of trouble. Shouts of disapproval are ineffective, little swats on the butt are slightly effective, and he understands, and remembers, what No! and a preventing hand in front of his nose means. But I found to my distress that sometimes a threateningly raised hand will cause him to cringe and crouch like a beaten dog. I don’t know what that comes from, but I can’t stand it. So shout and swat and No! is all I can do.


Vonda sent me a whole bucket full of Super Balls, wonderful for solo soccer games and working off excess energy. He’s good at all varieties of String Game. When he wins at String-on-a-Stick, he walks off with the string and the stick and likes to carry the whole thing downstairs, clatter rattle bump. He is quite good at Paws Beneath the Door, but hasn’t yet got the point of Paws Between the Banisters—because there were no banisters in the house he grew up in. That was clear the first few days, when he tried to navigate our stairs, a landform entirely new to him. The learning process was extremely funny, and dangerous to us ancients, who are unsteady enough on stairs without a confused cat suddenly appearing belly up on the next stair down or darting madly crossways right in front of your foot. But he mastered all that, and now races up and down far ahead of us, barely touching the stairs at all, as to the manor born.


They warned us at the Humane Society that there was a feline cold going around, probably from the rescued cats, and he probably had it; there’s nothing they can do about it, any more than a kindergarten can. So he brought it home, and was a very snuffly little body for two weeks. Not a totally bad start, since he wanted to cuddle and sleep a lot, and we could get to know one another quietly. I didn’t worry much about him, because he had no fever and never for a moment lost his appetite. He had to snort to breathe while he ate, but he ate, and ate . . . Kibbles. Oh! Kibbles! Oh, joy! Oh gourmet delight, oh tuna and sushi and chicken liver and caviar all in one! I guess kibbles is all he ever had to eat. So Kibbles is Food. And he loves Food. He just loves it. He certainly won’t bother us with his finicky, demanding tastes. But it may take strong willpower (ours) to prevent globularity in this cat. We will try.


He is pretty, but his only unusual beauty is his eyes, and you have to look closely to realize it. Right around the large dark pupil they are green, and around that, reddish yellow. I had seen that magical change in a semiprecious stone: he has eyes of chrysoberyl. Wikipedia tells us that chrysoberyl or alexandrite is a trichroic gem. It shows emerald green, red, or orange-yellow depending on the angle of the light.


While he had the cold and we were lying around together I tried out names. Alexander was too imperial, Chrysoberyl far too majestic. Pico was one that seemed to fit him, or Paco. But the one he kept looking around at when I said it was Pard. It started out as Gattopardo (the Leopard, Lampedusa’s Prince Fabrizio). That was too long for anybody his size, and got cut down to Pardo, and then turned into Pard, as in pardner.


Hey, Little Pard. I hope you choose to stay around a while.


Ursula K. Le Guin
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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 


You can browse the archive by year here.


71. Pard Pix
Annals of Pard VII
Annals VII-1.jpeg
The Placing of the Paws is Particularly Pleasing


Annals VII-2.jpeg
Pigeons Passing?


Annals VII-3.jpeg
Pretty Pard Posing with Posies


Annals VII-4.jpg
Pink-Petal Peonies, Pink-nose Pard


70. What Is Black and White and Orange All Over?
Annals of Pard VI
I was defrosting the freezer, and Pard of course came down with me to survey and re-investigate the basement, which is big and has much to investigate, what with the Pre-Cambrian furnace, and dark corners and odd angles and crowded shelves and storage boxes and picnic baskets and 10-quart boilers and so on, and many spiders, and many spiderwebs. He often comes up from the basement with gluey cobwebs delicately festooning his whiskers and his ears. This time he conducted a prolonged expedition, and when he finally came back upstairs his white muzzle was spotted all over with a shocking color. I thought he’d shoved his face into something sharp and hurt himself. I panicked and got hold of him, and we investigated, and Charles laughed. “It isn’t blood,” he said.


Pard had indeed stuck his head into something or other. Whatever it was, it wasn’t sharp, but it was very rusty.


I tried to wash his face for him with a dishcloth, and he thought I had gone mad. He was civil, but not cooperative, verging on indignant. I wash my own face, thank you! All I succeeded in doing before he got away was spreading the bright reddish spots into a general orange smear all over his jowls and chin. Now he looked like the wrong end of one of those primates with luridly colorful bits of their anatomy. What made it funny of course was that he didn’t know it, and maybe couldn’t know it — do cats even see red-orange? — and if he had known it, wouldn’t care.


He does look at himself in the mirror. I don’t believe any cats have passed an awareness-of-self-image test, as some apes have — for instance, seeing in the mirror a bit of tape stuck to their face, and lifting a hand directly to it to pick it off. But when Pard catches me looking at him in the mirror he often turns his head from that reflected exchange to meet my actual gaze, which impresses me: surely it signifies an understanding of what the mirror image is? Often he sits on the counter in the bathroom beside a mirror that gives him a full-length self-view, and seems to be studying it with calm approbation.


I doubt that merely finding his face had turned orange would change that.


The rust wore off gradually. He is a cleanly fellow and I’m sure washed his face as often as usual, but no oftener. After a day or two there was still a strong yellow tinge around the region of the whisker-roots. Cat’s whiskers are technically called vibrissae, a pretty Latin word hinting at the vibrancy and vibration and bristling of those amazing clusters of sensitivity, that spring like a fountain out of a cat’s muzzle and above its eyes and tell it so much about its world . . . though evidently they don’t always tell the cat not to stick its face into that particular interesting hole, from which it will emerge bright orange.


— UKL 
24 June 2013


69. The Diminished Thing
May 2013


Not wanting to know much about getting old (I don’t mean older, I mean old: late seventies, eighties, beyond) is probably a human survival characteristic. What’s the use of knowing anything about it ahead of time? You’ll find out enough when you get there.


One of the things people often find when they get there is that younger people don’t want to hear about it. So honest conversation concerning geezerhood takes place mostly among geezers.


And when younger people tell old people what old age is, the geezers may not agree but seldom argue.


I want to argue, just a little.


Robert Frost’s ovenbird asked the operative question: “What to make of a diminished thing?”


Americans believe strongly in positive thinking. Positive thinking is great. It works best when based on a realistic assessment and acceptance of the actual situation. Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great.


Everybody who gets old has to assess their ever-changing but seldom improving situation and make of it what they can. I think most old people accept the fact that they’re old—I’ve never heard anybody over 80 say “I’m not old.” And they make the best of it. As the saying goes, consider the alternative!


A lot of younger people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely negative, see acceptance of age as negative. Wanting to deal with old people in a positive spirit, they’re led to deny old people their reality.


With all good intentions, people say to me, “Oh, you’re not old!”


And the pope isn’t Catholic.


“You’re only as old as you think you are!”


Now, you don’t honestly think having lived 83 years is a matter of opinion.


“My uncle’s 90 and he walks eight miles a day.”


Lucky Unk. I hope he never meets that old bully Arthur Ritis or his mean wife Sciatica.


“My grandmother lives all by herself and she’s still driving her car at 99!”


Well, hey for Granny, she’s got good genes. She’s a great example—but not one most people are able to imitate.


Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation.


Would you say to a person paralyzed from the waist down, “Oh, you aren’t a cripple! You’re only as paralyzed as you think you are! My cousin broke her back once but she got right over it and now she’s in training for the marathon!”


 


Encouragement by denial, however well-meaning, backfires. Fear is seldom wise and never kind. Who is it you’re cheering up, anyhow? Is it really the geezer?


To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, you erase my life—me.


Of course that’s what a lot of really young people inevitably do. Kids who haven’t lived with geezers don’t know what they are. So it is that old men come to learn the invisibility women learned 20 or 30 years earlier. The kids on the street don’t see you. If they have to see you, it’s often with the indifference, distrust, or animosity animals feel for animals of a different species.


Animals have instinctive codes of etiquette for avoiding or defusing this mindless fear and hostility. Dogs ceremonially smell each others’ anuses, cats ceremonially yowl on the territorial borderline. Human societies provide us with various more elaborate devices. One of the most effective is respect. You don’t like the stranger, but your carefully respectful behavior to him elicits the same from him, thus avoiding the sterile expense of time and blood on aggression and defense.


In less change-oriented societies than ours, a great part of the culture’s useful information, including the rules of behavior, is taught by the elders to the young. One of those rules is, unsurprisingly, a tradition of respect for age.


In our increasingly unstable, future-oriented, technology-driven society, the young are often the ones who show the way, who teach their elders what to do. So who respects whom for what? The geezers are damned if they’re going to kowtow to the twerps—and vice versa.


When there’s no social pressure behind it, respectful behavior becomes a decision, an individual choice. Americans, even when they pay pious lip service to Judeo-Christian rules of moral behavior, tend to regard moral behavior as a personal decision, above rules, and often above laws.


This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused with personal opinion. A decision worthy the name is based on observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment. Opinion—that darling of the press, the politician, and the poll—may be based on no information at all. At worst, unchecked by either judgment or moral tradition, personal opinion may reflect nothing but ignorance, jealousy, and fear.


So, if “I decide “—if my opinion is—that living a long time just means getting ugly, weak, useless, and in the way, I waste no respect on old people, just as if my opinion is that all young people are scary, insolent, unreliable, and unteachable, I waste no respect on them.


Respect has often been overenforced and almost universally misplaced (the poor must respect the rich, all women must respect all men, etc.). But when applied in moderation and with judgment, the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by repressing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where appreciation and affection can grow.


Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.


People whose society doesn’t teach them respect for childhood are lucky if they learn to understand, or value, or even like their own children. Children who aren’t taught respect for old age are likely to fear it, and to discover understanding and affection for old people only by luck, by chance.


I think the tradition of respecting age in itself has some justification. Just coping with daily life, doing stuff that was always so easy you didn’t notice it, gets harder in old age, till it may take real courage to do it at all. Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.


 


So much for respect. Back to the diminished thing.


Childhood is when you keep gaining, old age is when you keep losing. The Golden Years the PR people keep gloating at us about are golden because that’s the color of the light at sunset.


Of course diminishment isn’t all there is to aging. Far from it. Life out of the rat race, but still in the comfort zone, can give the chance to be in the moment, and bring real peace of mind.


If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding. It’s had more time to gather knowledge and more practice in comparison and judgment. No matter if the knowledge is intellectual or practical or emotional, if it concerns alpine ecosystems or the Buddha nature or how to reassure a frightened child: when you meet an old person with that kind of knowledge, if you have the sense of a bean sprout you know you’re in a rare and irreproducible presence.


Same goes for old people who keep their skill at any craft or art they’ve worked at for all those years. Practice does make perfect. They know how, they know it all, and beauty flows effortlessly from what they do.


But all such existential enlargements brought by living long are under threat from the lessening of strength and stamina. However well compensated for by intelligent coping mechanisms, small or large breakdowns in one bit of the body or another begin to restrict activity, while the memory is dealing with overload and slippage. Existence in old age is progressively diminished by each of these losses and restrictions. It’s no use saying it isn’t so, because it is so.


It’s no use making a fuss about it, or being afraid of it, either, because nobody can change it.


Yes, I know, we are, at the moment, in America, living longer. Ninety is the new70, etc. That’s generally taken to be a good thing.


How good? In what respects?


I recommend studying the ovenbird’s question long and seriously.


There are many answers to it. A lot can be made of a diminished thing, if you work at it. A lot of people (young and old) are working at it.


All I’m asking people who aren’t yet really old is to think about the ovenbird’s question too—and try not to diminish old age itself. Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.


 


Please understand, I’m speaking for myself, for my own crabby old age. I may get told off for it by hordes of enraged octogenarians who like being told they’re “spry” and “feisty.” I don’t begrudge the fairy tale to those who want to believe it—and if I live longer than I think I want to, maybe I’ll even come to want to hear it: You’re not old! Nobody’s old. We’re all living happily ever after.


68. Why Your Library May Not Have the E-Book You Want
While most small presses sell all their books freely and happily to libraries, the “Big Five” publishers continue to be terrified by the idea of letting public libraries have their e-books, and to punish libraries for even trying to get their e-books to customers.


The corporations’ confused and panic-driven search for an “acceptable business model” for the library e-book has led to some truly grotesque solutions:


HarperCollins rents a library the license to an e-book for 26 uses, after which the license expires and the book goes poof.


Hachette sells e-books to libraries at three times the print price for the first year — and one and a half times print price thereafter.


Macmillan sells only its Minotaur crime and mystery e-books to libraries, asking $25 apiece — again about three times as much as anybody else has to pay.


Random House has raised prices for some of its e-books by 300 percent.


Simon and Schuster, which previously refused to sell e-books to libraries at all, is now trying out a pilot program: A library will be able to buy license for any e-book in the S&S catalogue for one year, and each book can be lent any number of times — “so long as it is being used by one borrower at a time.”


Perhaps we should be glad that this experiment is being carried out only in parts of New York City.


People in New York City are tough. They will not mind being followed home from the library by a person in a purple cloak and grey tights, known as S&SMan, who will move into their apartment and stay there as long as the book checked out, watching closely to be sure that nobody else in the family reads it or is even looking over the borrower’s shoulder….


And here are some truly remarkable figures:


In October, 2012, a certain best-selling book sold in print for $15.51.


If you bought the e-book on Amazon, the price was $9.99.


If your public library bought the e-book, they paid $84.00 for it.


So, dear reader, if your library doesn’t have the e-book you’d like to read, please don’t complain to your librarian. Complain to your publisher. Tell him to wake up and get real.


67. La Guantanamera
After the Boston Marathon bombing people kept talking about Americans standing together, standing tall. I didn’t understand.


Americans grieving together, bowing down in sorrow together — I could understand that. We needed to mourn together for a celebration of joyful bodily health and strength that ended in horror, mutilation, and death. But standing together? Against what?


There is no enemy. This isn’t a replay of 9/11, an attack that did indeed draw us to stand together, briefly, before we cowered down in the quickly-built bunkers of terror-of-terrorism.


This is much more like a replay of the ever more frequent shooting sprees in colleges, malls, schools by sick men with powerful weapons out to hurt and kill at random. They always have their reasons — wretchedness and hatred disguised as personal, religious, or political reasoning, the circular, self-centered, meaningless “reasons” of insanity.


A nation can stand together against a conspiracy of intelligent fanatics like Al-Qaeda, but against a pair of wretched psychopaths? Us, against two sick kids? The United States, against them?


I know a lot of people can only stand together if they have an enemy to stand against — if they are at war. At the moment, a lot of such people here want that enemy to be Islam. As they have counterparts in Islam who are ready to oblige them, they may well get their wish.


It is not my wish. I have a question, instead. My question is: What do we stand together for?


And here I come up against something that really scares me.


How can I stand with my fellow Americans, “stand tall” as we are exhorted to do, what is the America I am standing up for — when I see our government abandon the principles of its Constitution, the moral consensus of mankind, and our national self-respect, by encouraging and prolonging deliberately cruel treatment of prisoners who have not stood trial and are not allowed to stand trial or seek release?


The Congress and the President are directly, immediately, daily responsible for an ongoing outrage of decency, a travesty of justice, the prison at Guantánamo. The responsibility and the shame for dodging it weigh most heavily on President Obama. He promised to deal with it, and has not done so.


On the contrary, he has embraced the Bush policy of “indefinite detention” of “suspects” — the emprisonment of arbitrarily designated “enemies of the government” without trial. War is always the excuse for this policy, as in the mass internment of our Japanese citizens in the 1940’s. Its use is very dangerous to the health of a democracy, and its prolongation could be fatal.


So I am not standing tall as an American, these days. I am sitting alone with my head bowed down, fighting an awful sadness.


I keep listening to an old song. I don’t know if it helps the sadness or makes it worse. Lots of American kids learned it at summer camp, a song as peaceable as “Kumbayya,” a familiar, yearning tune. But the irony of it now...And the sweetness of the words, their generous spirit, make that irony even harder to bear.


Yo soy un hombre sincero 
de donde crecen las palmas 
y ante de morirme quiero 
echar mis versos del alma


Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera


Con los pobres de la tierra 
quiero yo mi suerte echar…


I am an honest man 
from where the palm trees grow 
and before I die I want 
to share my soul’s poetry


Girl of Guantánamo, country girl of Guantánamo


With the poor of the earth 
I want to share my fate.... 
~


The words of La Guantanamera are by the great Cuban poet José Martí; José Fernandez Diaz put them to the tune. You can hear old, old Pete Seeger singing it, here; or young Joan Baez; or dozens of other voices, Cuban, American....


Sung by Pete Seeger:


www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EJ1kZ0yBzg


Sung by Joan Baez:


www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRTC3cfWfGk


Other relevant links:


Is Force-Feeding Torture?, by Joe Nocera. The New York Times, 31 May 2013


Send Judges to Guantánamo, Then Shut It , by Bruce Ackerman and Eugene R. Fidell, The New York Times, 3 May 2013


The Detainees’ Dilemma, by Joe Nocera


President Obama’s Press Conference: “I’m going to go back at this...”


66. The Rehearsal
April 2013


Sitting in on a rehearsal is a strange experience for the author of the book the play is based on. Words you heard in your mind’s ear 40 years ago in a small attic room in the silence of the night are suddenly said aloud by living voices in a bright-lit, chaotic studio. People you thought you’d made up, invented, imagined, are there, not imaginary at all—solid, living, breathing. And they speak to each other. Not to you. Not anymore.


What exists now is the reality those people build up between them, the stage-reality that is as ungraspable and fleeting as all experience, but more charged than most experience with intense presence, with passion . . . until suddenly it’s over. The scene changes. The play ends.


Or in a rehearsal, the director says, “That was great. Let’s just take it again from where Genly comes in.”


And they do: the reality that vanished appears again, they build it up between them, the doubts, the trust, the misunderstanding, the passion, the pain . . .


Actors are magicians.


All stage people are magicians, the whole crew, on stage and behind it, working the lights and painting the set and all the rest. They collaborate methodically (ritual must be methodical, because it must be complete) in working magic. And they can do it with remarkably unlikely stuff. No cloaks, no magic wands or eyes of newt or bubbling alembics.


Essentially they do it by limiting space, and moving and speaking within that space to establish and maintain a Secondary Creation.


Watching a rehearsal makes that especially clear. At this point, some weeks before first night, the actors wear jeans and T-shirts. Their ritual space is marked out with strips and bits of tape on the floor. No set; their only props are a couple of ratty benches and plastic bowls. Harsh lights glare steadily down on them. Five feet away from them, people are moving around quietly, eating salad out of a plastic tub, checking a computer screen, scribbling notes. But there, in that limited space, the magic is being worked. It takes place. There another world comes into being. Its name is Winter, or Gethen.


And look! The king is pregnant.


65. Accidental Discovery
The argument for real books against virtual books is often based on the thingness of the real book — the beauty of the binding, the pleasure of handsome design and typesetting, the sensuality of turning a paper page, the pride of ownership. I sympathize with that, but I’m a reader, not a collector — I love my books (and I have lots of them) for what’s in them. Except for a few dear, battered kid’s books that both my mother and I read as children, the physical individuality of a book is pretty secondary to me.


And so, given this priority of the contents, I’ve defended the e-book and e-reading devices as an extension of, not an attack on, The Book — as augmentation, not loss or destruction.


But this piece is about one way e-books do involve a real limitation, a loss. If this appears somewhat inconsistent, consider: what is life without incompatible realities?


It all began (like many novels) with a letter. I hide from fan email and the social media because email for business and with close friends is all or more than I can handle. Sometimes my PO mail is more than I can handle, too, though I always hope to respond. Anyhow, the letter Orion Elenzil wrote me was handwritten on paper, and it was a very nice letter of appreciation. But there was a PS or afterthought that I was particularly struck with. Orion says it’s OK to quote him:


…About traditional paper books compared to E-books… There’s an aspect to traditional books which is lost in even the best electronic reader, which is Accidental Discovery: i’m reading this or that, and leave it laying about the house, and you visit and see it, or you’re perusing my book-shelves to see what i’m up to, and find something which interests you. I’m a technologist, and i worry that this casual, accidental, and as you mention, social means of discovering by talking about books is threatened by devices which need to be explicitly searched in order to find out what they hold.


I answered him right away (by email — he did say he’s a technologist!) I said:


Your ‘minor point’ about books on paper as opposed to ebooks, the quality of Accidental Discovery, seems to me actually a pretty major issue. What it made me think of first was library card catalogues…. The electronic library catalogue has all kinds of uses and virtues, but (at least as far as I can manage to use it) it absolutely lacks Accidental Discovery. Maybe it has a little Planned Discovery, via subject search, but it just can’t provide what the card catalogue did by way of serendipitous blundering into related or totally unrelated books and authors via the drawer of cards you happened to be looking at.


Then of course the library shelf multiplies Accidental Discovery enormously.... My “research method” was to go to the largest library accessible to me, get into the stack where some books about whatever it was were, and blunder around in those shelves pulling off books until I found the ones I needed. I mean, how much can you know from the title? One book on Ancient Roman Sewers will be useless and the one next to it will be a revelation. But riffling through to establish such judgments seems immensely easier to do with an actual bound book than with the page-by-page limitation of a reading device. (Not sure of that, since I still don’t own one, though I’ve played with them — maybe I just don’t know how to e-riffle.)


To this Orion answered,


I think you’ve hit a nail on the head with the process of browsing the stacks of a library, or of a bookstore. I often head into a bookstore without a specific author or type of book in mind, and just walk around looking at titles and covers, or trying out a couple pages in the middle until something catches my eye. or not.


(Of course, of course! — and this activity, browsing, is so important, and so impossible anywhere but in an actual, physical bookstore — the bookstores we’ve lost, because we’ve let ourselves be lured into the pathless jungles of the Amazone…. )


I hold some hope that this organic and somewhat undirected discovery of books may eventually find an analogue in the digital age. I never would have predicted the amazing ways of sharing online we currently have, so I can’t profess to imagine what the e-reader may become in another ten or twenty years. But I absolutely agree with you that the current modes lack the accidental discovery which artifact books have so wonderfully. Altho I confess I’m also criticizing e-readers without having used them.


(Me too — have played with several kinds of e-reader, but haven’t yet felt a need to own one.


(Orion goes on: )


Another minor aspect I enjoy of traditional books which is currently meaningless with their digital offspring is that each book is its own artifact, complete with a small history and story. Many book-lovers would condemn me, but I’m an inveterate marker-of-pages and notes-in-the-margin maker. And it may be a small hubris, but in books I feel a particular connection with, I generally add my own name beneath the author’s on the title page — not as a mark of ownership, but of history. And now that I say it out loud, I realize that perhaps that agrees with your notion that “Reading is a collaboration”.


In any event, I’m positive that reading will remain healthy, and I’m hopeful that e-reading may discover ways to provide these things we enjoy in traditional reading.


I hadn’t even thought about writing-in-books. It’s a subject naturally loathesome to the librarian. And to the kind of collector who encases an unread book in plastic to preserve its virginity. But Orion is right, it’s important.


Underlining whole passages as I used to do, or even worse covering them with neon hiliter, is a lazy student habit that severely defaces a book. But the pencilled exclamation point or question mark, and the “Bullshit!” or “Wow!” or more subtle or cryptic comments in the margin, are only mildly intrusive, and can be enjoyable, adding a lively sense of connection to an earlier reader. A previous owner’s name on the flyleaf or title page gives this same sense of continuity. An old book bought secondhand may have the names of several people who owned the book, and sometimes dates – 1895, 1922, 1944…. This always touches me. I like to add my name and the year, respectfully, to the list.


My beloved friend Roussel Sargent recently gave me a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses printed in 1596 and rebound in vellum in 1604 — a very small, very thick volume, pocket-size, the letterpress still black and clear, imprinted on linen paper that weighs nothing and has worn like iron. For all my lack of the collector’s instinct, I handle that little book with reverence. It is the oldest book I have ever touched, by far. And touch does mean a good deal. So does time.


I know what the contents are, but reading Ovid in this edition would be even slower work for me than reading Latin always is. When I look into it, I’m far more likely to try to puzzle out the writing-in-the-book than the printed text. The margins are full of comments and the close-printed lines are interlineated with translations (mostly into German, or with another Latin word) in various colors of ink, some very faded, and many different handwritings, all tiny and mostly illegible to me. This book has been a scholar’s treasure and perhaps a schoolboy’s torment, it’s been bought and sold and given, lost and found, it’s been jammed into the pockets of greatcoats, thumped about in rucksacks, pored over in student lodgings, it has gathered dust in attics, crossed many waters, and changed hands a hundred times; it contains four hundred years of obscure human histories right along with the two-thousand-year-old words of the poet. Would I prefer it virginal, encased in plastic? Are you crazy?


But the question I can’t answer has to do with content. It’s this: To what extent is the Metamorphoses in e-book form the same book as the one I’ve been describing?


I don’t know.


But thinking about it has made it clearer to me that what there is to a physical book beside its text may be quite important. And it appears that these aspects, these qualities, these intellectual and social accidents, are at present inaccessible to electronic technology: irreproducible.


I hope my generous correspondent Orion is right that we may figure out how to restore human connectivity to the e-book, so that it does not, like so much of what we do on our electronic devices, isolate us more and more deeply, even as we are busier and busier communicating.


— UKL
25 March 2013


64. The Trouble
January 2013


Annals of Pard V
I’ve never had a cat before who directly challenged me. I don’t look for much obedience from a cat; the relationship isn’t based on rank or a dominance hierarchy as with dogs, and cats have no guilt and very little shame. I expect a cat to steal food left out on the counter knowing perfectly well that he’ll be swatted if caught. Greed, and possibly the joy of theft, overrides the slight fear. Stupid human me to leave food out on the counter. I expect a cat who has been scolded or swatted for getting up on the dining table to get up on the dining table and leave little footprints all over it, because he sees no reason to refrain from doing so when I’m not in the room. When found later, the evidence of the little footprints will have passed the statute of limitations. To make any sense to a cat, retaliation for wrongdoing must be immediate. The cat knows that as well as I do, which is why I expect him to do wrong while I’m not in the room, and don’t expect him to do wrong while I am.


To do wrong under my very eyes strains our relationship. It demands scolding, swatting, shouting, flight, pursuit, commotion. It is a challenge, a deliberate invitation to trouble. And this is where Pard is different from the many and various cats who have companioned me. They were all like me—they wanted to avoid trouble.


Pard wants to make it.


He isn’t a troublesome cat. His hygiene is impeccable. He is gentle. He never steals food. (To be sure, this is only because he doesn’t recognize anything but kibbled catfood as food. I can leave the pork cutlets on the counter while he’s waiting hungrily for his quarter cup of dinner kibbles, and he won’t even get up to sniff them. I could put a piece of bacon on top of his kibbles and he would eat them and leave it. I could lay a filet of sole down on him and he would shake it off with contempt and go away.)


He challenges me by doing what he’s forbidden to do. And I guess there really aren’t a lot of things he’s forbidden, besides jumping up on the mantel and knocking off the kachinas.


He isn’t allowed to get on the dining table, but there’s nothing to do there but leave footprints. The mantel, which is a really big jump even for Pard, is the only unprotected display place left in the house for small ornamental things; all the others have found safe havens unreachable even by airborne cats. So jumping up onto the mantel has become his goal, his challenge.


But only if I am in the room.


He’ll spend all day in the living room and never look at the fireplace until I come in. A while after we’ve both been there, Pard begins to glance at the mantelpiece. His eyes get rounder and blacker. He wanders carelessly about on a chair arm (allowed) or side table (allowed) near the fireplace. He stands up on his hind legs to sniff a lampshade or the top of the fire screen very thoroughly with enormous interest, always a little closer to the mantelpiece. Till, usually when I’m not looking but not quite not looking, he’s airborne, and up on the mantel knocking something off. Then scolding, shouting, flight, pursuit, etc.—Trouble! Mission accomplished.


Recently there is an added element: the squirt bottle. As soon as he looks at the mantel I pick up the squirt bottle. The first couple of times, when he made ready to jump onto the mantel and I squirted him, he was totally taken aback. He didn’t even associate the squirt with the bottle. He does now. But it merely adds a new flavor, a new spice, to the Trouble. It doesn’t keep him off the mantel.


I gave in a couple of days ago and moved all the little kachinas to a haven, leaving only the two big ones and some outstanding rocks. But this morning, while I was doing downward dog with my back turned, Pard jumped up onto the mantel and knocked off the lump of Tibetan turquoise, taking a chip out of it when it hit the hearth.


The ensuing Trouble was pretty intense, although I never could get anywhere near close enough to swat him. He knew I was mad. He has been terribly polite ever since, and inclined to fall over and wave his paws in an innocently endearing manner. He’ll go on that way till we’re all in the living room this evening and the need for Trouble arises in him again.


This little cat so deeply shaped by human expectation, the tamest cat I ever had, has a flame of absolute, willful wildness.


I’m sure some of it’s the boredom factor—a young cat with old people, an indoors cat . . . But Pard doesn’t have to be an indoor cat. He chooses to.


The cat flap is opened for him all through daylight, at his request or at our suggestion. Sometimes he goes out onto the deck, looks down into the garden, birdwatches for a few minutes, and comes back. Or he may go out and turn right around and come back. Or he may say, Oh, no, thanks, it’s very large out there, and quite cold this time of year, so I think I’ll stand here halfway out the cat flap for a while and then back back in. What he doesn’t do is stay out. When the weather warms up and we’re outside too, he will, but not enthusiastically. He’ll go out and go down and eat some of the kind of grass that makes him throw up and come back indoors and throw it up on the rug. That isn’t Trouble-making, it’s just Cat-being.


There is no moral to this story, and no conclusion. Wish me luck with the squirt bottle.


63. Kidnapped
You know those poor orphans starving in the snow on your doorstep that Google wants to put to work for Corpocracy Inc? Well, the Brits are after them too. Parliament is considering an “enterprise regulatory reform” bill containing extremely permissive provisions concerning “orphan works.”


What is an “orphan work’? The definition is pretty clear: a copyrighted work (most often a book, story, or photograph) for which the “parent” — the author or copyright holder — cannot be located.


Finding a copyright is easy: the Copyright Office has it on file. Finding copyright holders (heirs who don’t know they’re heirs, etc.) can take time. It’s not always quick and easy to identify an orphan as such.


And here’s where the definition is vulnerable to deliberate manipulation and obfuscation. (I like that word, obfuscation — “making dark.”)


The operative term is cannot be located— which does not mean “hasn’t been found,” or “nobody bothered to look for.”


Increasingly often books are called “orphans” just because nobody is bothering to locate the copyright holder, or even make a copyright search. If stringent requirements for identification aren’t upheld, anyone who wants to exploit the rights to an older work can, after the most cursory search for the copyright holder or no search at all, just declare the book, the story, the photograph “orphaned.”


And if this practice isn’t questioned, they can go ahead without concern for copyright, reproducing and exploiting the so-called “orphan.”


It’s not an orphan at all. It’s been kidnapped.


By now kidnapped works probably far outnumber genuinely orphaned ones. The Google Book Settlement allowed Google to declare books orphaned with little or no pretense of search and then reproduce them busily, steadily, and no doubt profitably. The Internet makes it incredibly easy to do so. The U.S. Copyright Office has generally failed or refused to interfere, leaving the entire onus of proof that the work is protected by copyright to the individual author.


Now the Brits are trying to legalize this injustice — a dangerous precedent for decisions yet to be made in the U.S. And worse yet, if Parliament passes the bill, many American works published on both sides of the Atlantic will be misidentified as “orphaned,” scanned and put online by British libraries and others without the permission of the digital rights holder.


Once that happens, you might as well kiss your copyright goodbye. Your book has not only been kidnapped, but handed over to the pirates. As Parliament lurches along hand in hand with Blind Pugh and Long John Silver, somebody else will be burying your treasure. Arr, arr. Isn’t that funny?


At this point, most of the organized opposition in the U.K. is coming from photographers, photo licensing agencies, distributors of news photographs. This also happened in the U.S. in 2008, when photographers got together and stopped “orphan works” legislation in Congress.


It’s hard to understand why writers, who are just as directly affected, are hard to stir up on this issue. Maybe we’ve had copyright so long that we thought it was genetic, or something?


What’s happening is that the Corpocracy — first Disney, then Google, to be followed by Amazon and the rest — has been working for over ten years now to dismantle copyright in practice and destroy it in principle — and to get government sanction for doing so.


Copyright Office seems to be paralyzed; the Department of Justice is looking away; the present Congress is hardly likely to protect art or artists against corporate greed. It’s up to us, the artists, the photographers, the writers, to defend our rights.


At this point, I don’t know any organization working to co-ordinate us into an effective movement except the National Writers Union. However you feel about unions in general, if you’re a writer of any kind, you might look into this one. It’s small, it’s active, and it’s on our side. Nobody much else is.


— UKL 
21 January 2013


Here are some useful links*:


Two British resistance websites —
Photographers: http://www.stop43.org.uk/
Authors: Authors Rights
Encouraging information here:
British Journal of Photography
In the U.S., the National Writers Union statement opposing the British legislation is at:
Support for the Creative Economy [PDF]


And here is the NWU’s warning about what the British bill can do to American properties. It ain’t pretty.


Violate the obligations of the U.K., pursuant to the Berne Convention, with respect to the rights of authors of works first published in the U.S. and elsewhere outside the U.K.;


Misidentify many works first published in the U.S. and other countries — particularly works simultaneously published in multiple countries, U.K. editions of works previously published in different editions in the U.S., and works first published online on servers in the U.S. — as having been first published in the U.K. and as being  “orphan works”;


Authorize reproduction and use of U.S. and other foreign works without the permission of the author (or other holder of the particular rights being exploited) in ways that interfere with the  “normal commercial exploitation” of rights to those works; and


Impose burdensome “opt out” and/or  “claim” requirements, constituting “formalities” prohibited by the Berne Convention, on foreign authors who do not want our work included or authorized for reproduction or use through “orphan works” or ECL schemes. (The costs which would be imposed by these proposals on authors, whether in the UK or abroad, of searching lists of works to which some of the rights had provisionally been identified as “orphaned”, are entirely omitted from the Impact Assessment prepared by the IPO, even though these costs would manifestly be the largest category of costs imposed by the “orphan works” scheme.)



	
Links updated April 2023. 



62. A Much-Needed Literary Award
January 2013


I first learned about the Sartre Prize from “NB,” the reliably enjoyable last page of the London Times Literary Supplement, signed by J.C. The fame of the award, named for the writer who refused the Nobel in 1964, is or anyhow should be growing fast. As J.C. wrote in the November 23, 2012, issue, “So great is the status of the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal that writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre.” He adds with modest pride, “The Sartre Prize itself has never been refused.”


Newly shortlisted for the Sartre Prize is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turned down a 50,000-euro poetry award offered by the Hungarian division of PEN. The award is funded in part by the repressive Hungarian government. Ferlinghetti politely suggested that they use the prize money to set up a fund for “the publication of Hungarian authors whose writings support total freedom of speech.”


I couldn’t help thinking how cool it would have been if Mo Yan had used some of his Nobel Prize money to set up a fund for the publication of Chinese authors whose writings support total freedom of speech. But this seems unlikely.


Sartre’s reason for refusal was consistent with his refusal to join the Legion of Honor and other such organizations and characteristic of the gnarly and countersuggestible existentialist. He said, “It isn’t the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to let himself be turned into an institution.” He was, of course, already an “institution,” but he valued his personal autonomy. (How he reconciled that value with Maoism is not clear to me.) He didn’t let institutions own him, but he did join uprisings, and was arrested for civil disobedience in the street demos supporting the strikes of May 1968. President de Gaulle quickly pardoned him, with the magnificently Gallic observation that “you don’t arrest Voltaire.”


I wish the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal could have been called the Boris Pasternak Prize for one of my true heroes. But it wouldn’t be appropriate, since Pasternak didn’t exactly choose to refuse his 1958 Nobel. He had to. If he’d tried to go accept it, the Soviet government would have promptly, enthusiastically arrested him and sent him to eternal silence in a gulag in Siberia.


I refused a prize once. My reasons were mingier than Sartre’s, though not entirely unrelated. It was in the coldest, insanest days of the Cold War, when even the little planet Esseff was politically divided against itself. My novelette “The Diary of the Rose” was awarded the Nebula Prize by the Science Fiction Writers of America. At about the same time, the same organization deprived the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem of his honorary membership. There was a sizable contingent of Cold Warrior members who felt that a man who lived behind the iron curtain and was rude about American science fiction must be a Commie rat who had no business in the SFWA. They invoked a technicality to deprive him of his membership and insisted on applying it. Lem was a difficult, arrogant, sometimes insufferable man, but a courageous one and a first-rate author, writing with more independence of mind than would seem possible in Poland under the Soviet regime. I was very angry at the injustice of the crass and petty insult offered him by the SFWA. I dropped my membership and, feeling it would be shameless to accept an award for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance, took my entry out of Nebula competition shortly before the winners were to be announced. The SFWA called me to plead with me not to withdraw it, since it had, in fact, won. I couldn’t do that. So—with the perfect irony that awaits anybody who strikes a noble pose on high moral ground—my award went to the runner-up: Isaac Asimov, the old chieftain of the Cold Warriors.


What relates my small refusal to Sartre’s big one is the sense that to accept an award from an institution is to be co-opted by, embodied as, the institution. Sartre refused this on general principle, while I acted in specific protest. But I do have sympathy for his distrust of allowing himself to be identified as something other than himself. He felt that the huge label “Success” that the Nobel sticks on an author’s forehead would, as it were, hide his face. His becoming a “Nobelist” would adulterate his authority as Sartre.


Which is, of course, precisely what the commercial machinery of bestsellerdom and prizedom wants: the name as product. The guaranteed imprint of salable Success. Nobel Prize Winner So-and-so. Best-Selling Author Thus-and-such. Thirty Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List Whozit. Jane D. Wonthepulitzer . . . John Q. MacArthurgenius . . .


It isn’t what the people who established the awards want them to do or to mean, but it’s how they’re used. As a way to honor a writer, an award has genuine value, but the use of prizes as a marketing ploy by corporate capitalism, and sometimes as a political gimmick by the awarders, has compromised their value. And the more prestigious and valued the prize, the more compromised it is.


Still, I’m glad that José Saramago, a much tougher Marxist nut than Sartre, saw fit not to refuse the Nobel Prize. He knew nothing, not even Success, could compromise him, and no institution could turn him into itself. His face was his own face to the end. And despite the committee’s many bizarre selections and omissions, the Nobel Prize for Literature retains considerable value, precisely because it is identified with such writers as Pasternak, or Szymborska, or Saramago. It bears at least a glimmer reflected from their faces.


All the same, I think the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal should be recognized as a valuable and timely award, and what’s more, one pretty safe to remain untainted by exploitation. I wish somebody really contemptible would award me a prize so I could be in the running for a Sartre.


61. An Attempt to Think as a Free Thinker
With thousands of devout Muslims protesting the enforced Muslimization of their government in Egypt, and since thousands of sincere Christians refused Tea Party pressure to Christianize our government, I need to think about whether I am actually opposed to organised religion, as I’ve always thought I was, or only to the church meddling with the state — to religion claiming control over practical decisions and intellectual realms that, since the Enlightenment, have been taken out of its control.


Voltaire’s untranslatable and invaluable slogan, écrasez l’infâme! — stamp out the abomination! — didn’t refer to religion, as militant atheists would like it to. It referred to policies and activities of the Catholic Church. His passionate hatred of the Church’s interference with free thought didn’t keep him from being a deist, or from accepting the last rites of the church he was born in. L’infâme is not religion but the misuse of religion, religion made into control, degraded from power-to into power-over. L’infâme is the meddling priest and priesthood, the church that declares itself a holy supergovernment above political government, claiming mindless obedience from the individual consciences which are the essential element of a state evolving towards democracy and freedom.


The United States Constitution does not mention God. The only blessings it invokes are those of Liberty. This nation was not conceived “under God.” The men who wrote the Constitution generally acknowledged the value of religion in its own sphere as a powerful force in maintaining community and a guide to spiritual practice, sometimes to moral choice, but firmly maintained the distinction between the religious and the political domains and asserted its necessity in the First Amendment.


Efforts to blur that clarity by permitting or demanding intrusion of prayer and invocation of God into the doings of the government have grown a great deal in the last sixty years. The drive to make America a Christian state have been strengthened by right-wing identification with fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, seeing religion not as a freely chosen community of thought and practice but as unquestioning compliance with priestly teaching and command, sets up religion as the opponent of any community or government except that of its priesthood and the politicians who serve them.


There is no way such an all-or-nothing hierocratic rule can work with democracy. This is the tragedy of Israel, and may yet be that of Egypt.


A church that controls the army and police is enormously powerful. But any fundamentalist priesthood can bully and frighten even the reasonable majority of church members into accepting fanatical extremism, traditionally by keeping half the congregation, women, ignorant and disempowered; by threatening and carrying out punishment for disobedience and heresy; and by activating and harping on sectarian prejudices and hatred.


Unfortunately — and this is what is troubling my conscience now — they can also rely on the prejudices of members of different sects or other religions, and of the non-religious, to supply the scorn and contempt that binds any group into a community full of hatred and self-righteousness, ready to turn self-defense into blind aggression.


An ingroup depends on outsiders to maintain it. There’s no Us without Them, whether we declare them, or they declare us, to be the outsiders.


Israelis who support Netanyahu, the extreme wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the reactionary-religious American movement currently represented by the Tea Party, all act on the self-generated conviction that theirs is the only valid religion and that it must guide political action. But their fanaticism is also a product of liberal prejudice, which too often lumps all Jews together, or all Muslims together, or all Christians together. To identify the many peaceable believers with the few dangerous fanatics is to think as a militant — Us eternally against Them — and so deny any compromise, any hope of peaceful coexistence, let alone democratic collaboration.


It behooves free thinkers to refuse to let the aggressive misuse of religion prejudice our minds against any and all religion. The best answer to the people who want to force us into divisive sectarianism may still be the steadfast silence of the Constitution.


— UKL
17 December 2012


For an editorial detailing the increasing religiosity of American political discourse, see “The God Glut,” by Frank Bruni, at the New York Times.


In this piece, Bruni doesn’t mention that practising Catholics form a majority of the Supreme Court, at least two of whom (Scalia and Thomas) are members of the highly secretive, extremely reactionary Catholic society Opus Dei (Sotomayor couldn’t be if she wanted to, since Opus Dei, “the work of God,” excludes women). To what extent are such justices influenced by the dogmatic policies of the Vatican? Should justices be expected to state the issues on which they consider their church a higher moral authority than the law and to recuse themselves from judging such issues? Is anyone asking that question? Religious bias in any judge in any court should be the subject of attention and protest. Voltaire, we need you. We need you in the media. Now.


— UKL
17 December 2012


60. Pard and the Poets
Annals of Pard IV
Six poets came to my house yesterday afternoon for the monthly meeting of our poetry group. There should have been eight of us in all, but alas Jeannette couldn’t come. She definitely should have been there, because her Ruby Roo is a very bad young cat, like Pard. All the poets own cats, or dogs, or horses, or kids, or grandkids, and they’re all experienced in youth and badness; but Ruby Roo takes the cake. So, anyhow, they all dumped their coats (it was rainy) on the windowseat, and we sat in a circle of chairs around the fireplace and had some tea, and then started to read and discuss our poems. (The assignment had been to write a somonka, which is two tankas, in two voices, a call and a response.) Pard had greeted everybody as they came in, a bit shyly but with some excitement and a strong desire to sniff their shoes thoroughly. By now, he was circling around the edges of the group, occasionally darting through it with his tail up in the air and recurved over his back. (Barbara observed “That cat has a handle.”) Once he climbed the back of my chair and patted my head a little, but mostly he did not demand attention. We were deep in a discussion of where the somonka under scrutiny didn’t quite work and how to fix it, when Molly said in a smothered voice “Excuse me but —” pointing to the heap of coats over on the windowseat. It was heaving strangely. It writhed. A coat sleeve began to twitch as if an unseen arm were entering it. Pard, who likes very much to get into things — boxes, cupboards, bags, garments — was trying coats on. As he got farther in, the sleeve humped up and wriggled wildly. Finally, deep inside the cuff, appeared a pink nose and one slightly desperate green-yellow eye. It was too tight for him to get on out of in that direction or to turn around and get back out of in the other. Caroline finally took pity on him and helped him extract himself — the rest of us were incapable of movement, collapsed in our chairs, paralysed with laughter. It was pretty loud. Pard departed at once from the scene of this uncouth simian behavior. He went upstairs to the attic and sat on Charles’s lap. Quiet, dignified male bonding. Then he helped Charles with his jigsaw puzzle, something he is fonder of doing than Charles is of his doing it. The poets, downstairs, recovered slowly, and went back to their somonkas.


— UKL
3 December 2012


59. Catching up with Pard
Annals of Pard III
Not that I ever will... But it’s getting on to a year since we went to the Humane Society and came home with seven pounds of cat. My two blogs about Pard made him some friends on the Net. For them, here is an early anniversary report.


His tuxedo is still impeccable, and his tail continues straight up in the air. But he is now The Ten-Pound Pard, though still on the half-cup a day total recommended by the vet. Friskies or Meow Mix in the morning, Trader Joe’s Chicken Kibbles in the evening. Pard’s idea of a varied, gourmet diet.


But alas, T–Joe changed brands. The new bag of chicken kibbles has lovely pictures of fruits and vegetables on the bag, and much talk about healthy diet, but the contents defy even the Greed of Pard. After gamely chewing at the hard little greeny-brown pellets, he gets discouraged and gives up, something I never thought I’d see him do. Cats are not vegans. They are predators, carnivores, needing about as much vegetable food as they’d get from what’s in a mouse’s stomach. Any effort to persuade a cat that kale and apples are food disrespects the nature of the animal in favor of human moral sensibilities, theories, or fads. Of course all commercial catfood is aimed at the buyer, not the consumer — Meow Mix is all cute little different colored fish, as if a cat gave a hoot in hell about the shapes and colors — but Pard and I both think Trader Joe has gone too far. Fruit catfood? Come on, T-Joe. Get real.


He still gets a little catfood soup daily to increase his water intake. And when his breakfast has vanished and he goes Please, sir, I want some more, he gets his Foody Ball. This is a cute trick: plastic, about 2" diameter, with a hole in which to insert a few kibbles or cat treats, and a kind of screw inside to impede their movement. You put the ball on the floor and the cat bats it around, and every now and then a Foody Fish falls out of the hole, just often enough to keep him interested. At least it keeps Pard interested. My daughter Elisabeth’s cats sit quietly gazing at her, waiting for her to shake the Foody Ball till a Foody Fish falls out of it. She is aware that this defeats the purpose of the Foody Ball, but she hasn’t been able to convince her cats of that. They just gaze at her, and wait. They know.


What matters to cats: 1. Food. 2. Sleep. — Pard sleeps on the bed at night, all night, usually forming a central nucleus or core around which I conform myself as required, it being a known fact that a cat sleeping on a bed causes a wrinkle in gravity that increases the weight of the cat by a factor of ten or more. Often he bounces and pounces for a while, but soon he curls up and sleeps. If disturbed, he purrs a little, recurls, and sleeps. He still sometimes gets up on my pillow, forming a sort of warm nightcap with paws, and sleeps. A paw may come to rest softly on my ear in a comfortable, companionable way. And he continues his custom of starting a good, loud purr just about the time I’m beginning to wake up. A very good way to begin a day.


In the daytime, he sleeps anywhere, so long as it’s near one of us. If I’m working at my computer, he’s often on top of the printer, about 18" to my right. This is very nice until he wakes up and is bored. There are certain areas on and above my desk where paws are strictly, permanently forbidden to go. The owner of the paws knows this perfectly well, but is never, ever going to leave authority unquestioned.


He is still the good cat with the bad paws.


The one time I ever left my computer open and unattended for five minutes, the paws deftly removed the Left-Bracket and Return keys. They can open almost every cabinet we have, and some heavy drawers. Pard feels strongly that what can opened should be opened and what can be gotten into should be gotten into. He practices at it every day. He’s quite reckless about it, and may yet get into real trouble, leaping and diving blindly into every opening in the world. The washing machine was not one of his successful ventures.


The paws are also terrific at bug-catching and cat-toy games, and carry him in mad lightspeed scurries up and down stairs and all over the house at all levels. When he is not asleep, he is utterly awake, and usually in motion. He is the most fully three-dimensional cat I have ever had. Well, no; Lorenzo Bean used to appear thirty feet up in the redwood, swaying sweetly on a tiny branch, while Pard had some difficulty in his single venture up the apple tree. But can he leap! His vertical dimension includes all surfaces of furniture and all tops of things, no matter how high the thing is or what else is on the top of it. We still have hardly a week without a shriek Get OFF THAT! PARD! — followed by a crash, and the scurry of departing paws.


He is an indoor cat by choice. When the weather got good last summer and we began living in the garden and on the second-story decks, we soon let Pard out of his little red halter, free to wander — because he didn’t wander. His garden exploration, even with Charles nearby, was rarely farther than ten feet from the bottom of the back stairs. He would go down, eat some particularly savage, saw-edged decorative grass from a clump of it near the stairs, sit a while looking warily at everything, then go back indoors and throw up the grass on the Afghan rug, where all our cats have always thrown up. He might come back out and birdwatch from the deck for a while, making that little k-k-k-k noise (which scientific observers tell us is not an expression of frustration, but a sound that interests birds). But he was always clearly relieved to go back inside when we did. Now it’s too cold to sit out, he seems perfectly content to be in. He watches a lot of Cat TV through various windows.


I can only think that since his first year of life was spent in a small house crowded with children, our big house with two ancients quietly doddering around in it appears quite enough world to him. And it’s good not to have to worry about the dangers cats face on a street like ours. Yet it’s kind of sad. With those paws, those alert, attentive eyes, that lightning response-time, he’d be a great hunter, if he hunted. But, though no vegan, he is a strict kibbler. And there are no wild kibbles in the garden.


He did bring in a bird once. He left it in the telephone hall, where all our cats always leave their birds. When I had almost stepped on it and shrieked and got over that, I studied the poor tiny body. It was not a new bird. It was distinctly a used bird. It had probably brained itself on a window, or one of the neighbor cats left it in our garden. Pard found it and did the right thing: bring it in and go away, leaving it for the Bandar-Log to dispose of. I did the right thing too.


He still doesn’t believe in laps or being held; only on the bed will he snuggle up close. He doesn’t head-butt our legs, and though he likes to be petted and jowl-scritched, his only affectionate advance is a curiously touching, questioning gaze at close quarters, maybe the slightest nose-kiss. Yet he’s close by us almost constantly. And he’s totally good about having his claws cut: he sits in the crook of Charles’s arm, endures the operation with one or two quiet moans, snarfs his cat-treat rewards, and trots off cheerfully, tail up, looking for something to get his paws into.


I said “believe in laps” facetiously. Actually, I think one of the great things about animals is that they don’t believe in anything. They don’t have to. They know. People like to say that their pet “thinks he’s people,” or “dogs believe their master is God,” and so on, but that’s just talk. An animal knows what it knows, and does not know what it does not know. Between their knowledge and their ignorance there is no vague area for the vast and trackless human jungle of theories, notions, imagination, and beliefs. Your dog knows who he is and who you are and what you are to him. He may well know it better than you do, because his knowledge is unclouded by ideas. And, if also unwarped by fear or bad training, animal knowledge is factual, solid. It doesn’t go as far as imagination goes, it only goes as far as the truth. You can be perfectly sure that your cat is never going to write a treatise on phlogiston, become a Nazi, or start a holy war.


Knowledge, of course, may be sent astray by incomplete or specious evidence. Last spring, Pard knew there were beetles in my Time Machine, because he could hear them. But he kept watching, patiently, with a mind not controlled by the wilfulness of theory or belief. And over time, as no beetles ever emerged from the Time Machine, and there was never a scent or sign of beetlitude except the occasional faint buzzing, he grew skeptical, as you might say; or better, he learned the truth – acquired the knowledge that there are no beetles in the Time Machine. And he stopped trying to get it open.


Then the other day he was suddenly back at it, poking and prying so earnestly that I got curious. I lifted the small, heavy, closely sealed machine up a little bit. A box-elder beetle ran out from underneath it. The paw flashed, the beetle was gone. (There are wild kibbles!)


Since then Pard has paid no more attention to the Time Machine.


Compared to the vast phantasmagoria of imagination and belief, the world of known facts, actuality, reality, may seem small and dull. But it is restful. It offers peace of mind. We can’t live there, but we can visit; and the animals, letting us visit it with them, let us see that it is, in fact, infinite, infinitely rich.


When one of us is about to go away, Pard knows it. He does not know for how long. He does know a suitcase means Longer, and seeing one, grows disturbed and agitated and flies about, causing disturbance and agitation. When Charles is gone, he knows it, accepts the fact, never goes up to Charles’s study. When we come back he knows the instant of it and is there at the front door: the small white-and-black face, the bright gold-and-green eyes. A cheerful scurrying about, a tail straight up in the air. A joyful welcome. Hello, little Pard!


— UKL 
12 November 2012


58. Lying it all away
October 2012


I’m fascinated by this historical snippet from the New York Times’s “On This Day” feature:


On October 5, 1947, in the first televised White House address, President Truman asked Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe.


The first televised White House address—that’s interesting. Imagine a world in which a president speaks to the people on the radio, or can speak only to a physically present audience, like Lincoln at Gettysburg. How quaint, how primitive, how different from us, were those simple folk of olden days!


But that’s not what fascinates me in this item. What I’m working hard to imagine or remember is a country whose president asked his people not to eat beef on Tuesdays or chicken on Thursdays because there were people starving in Europe. The Second World War had left the European economy as well as its cities pretty much in ruins, and this president thought Americans would a) see the connection between meat and grain, and b) be willing to forgo a luxury element of their diet in order to give away a more essential food to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of whom we’d been killing, and some of whom had been killing us, two years earlier.


At the time, the request was laughed or sneered at by some and ignored by most. But still: can you imagine any president, now, asking the American people to deprive themselves of meat once or twice a week in order to stockpile grain to ship to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of them no doubt terrorists?


Or asking us to refrain from meat now and then to provide more grain to programs and food banks for the 20,000,000 Americans living in “extreme poverty” (which means malnutrition and hunger) right now?


Or, actually, asking us to do without anything for any reason?


Something has changed.


Since our betrayed public schools can no longer teach much history or reading, people may find everyone and everything before about 25 years ago unimaginably remote and incomprehensibly different from themselves. They defend their discomfort by dismissing people before their time as simple, quaint, naive, etc. I know Americans 65 years ago were nothing of the sort. Still, that speech of Harry Truman’s tells me something has indeed changed.


Being very old, I remember a little about the Depression, and a lot about the Second World War and its aftermath, and some things about Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” and so on. This experience doesn’t allow me ever take prosperity for all as a fact—only an ideal. But the success of the New Deal and the socioeconomic network set in place after 1945 allowed a lot of people to assume almost unthinkingly that the American Dream had come to pass and would go on forever. Only now is a whole generation maturing that didn’t grow up in the alluring stability of steady inflation, but has seen growth capitalism return to its origins, providing security for none but the strongest profiteers. In this respect, the experience of my grandchildren is and will be very different from that of their parents, or mine. I wish I could live to see what they’re going to do about it.


But this still doesn’t quite take me to whatever it is about that request of old Harry’s that intrigues me so, and that, when I think about it, makes me feel as if the America I’m living in is somebody else’s country.


An education that gave me a sense of the continuity of human life and thought keeps me from dividing time into Now (Us—the last few years) and Then (Them—history). A glimmer of the anthropological outlook keeps me from believing that life was ever simple for anybody, anywhere, at any time. All old people are nostalgic for certain things they knew that are gone, but I live in the past very little. So why am I feeling like an exile?


I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising. That hard-minded man Saul Bellow wrote that democracy is propaganda. It gets harder to deny that when, for instance, during a campaign, not only aspirants to the presidency but the president himself hides or misrepresents known facts, lies deliberately and repeatedly. And only the opposition objects.


Sure, politicians always lied, but Adolf Hitler was the first one who made it into a policy. American politicians didn’t use to lie as if they knew that nobody cared whether they lied or not, though Nixon and Reagan began testing those waters of moral indifference. Now we’re deep in them. What was appalling to me about Obama’s false figures and false promises in the first debate was that they were unnecessary. If he’d told the truth, he would have supported his candidacy better, as well as putting Romney’s faked figures and evasive vagueness to shame. He would have given us a moral choice instead of a fudge-throwing match.


Can America go on living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country? I don’t know.


I guess it’s become improbable even to me that a president should ever have asked Americans not to eat chicken on Thursday. Maybe it is quaint, after all. “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Yeah, uh-huh. Oh boy! That one did some fancy lying too. Still, he talked to us as adults, citizens capable of asking difficult questions and deciding what to do about them—not as mere consumers capable of hearing only what we want to hear, incapable of judgment, indifferent to fact.


What if some president asked those of us who can afford to eat chicken not to eat chicken on Thursdays so the government could distribute more food to those 20,000,000 hungry members of our community? Come off it. Goody-goody stuff. Anyhow, no president could get that past the corporations of which Congress is an almost wholly owned subsidiary.


What if some president asked us (one did, once) to accept a 55 mph speed limit in order to save fuel, roads, and lives? Chorus of derisive laughter.


When did it become impossible for our government to ask its citizens to refrain from short-term gratification in order to serve a greater good? Was it around the time we first began hearing about how no red-blooded freedom-loving American should have to pay taxes?


I was certainly never in love with the mere idea of “doing without,” as Puritans are. But I admit I’m depressed by the idea that we can’t even be asked to consider doing without in order to give or leave enough for people who need it or will need it, including, possibly, ourselves. Is the red-blooded freedom-loving American so infantile that he has to be promised whatever he wants right now this moment? Or, to put it less fancifully, if citizens can’t be asked to refrain from steak on Tuesdays, how can industries and corporations be asked to refrain from the vast and immediate profits they make from destabilizing the climate and destroying the environment?


It appears that we’ve given up on the long-range view. That we’ve decided not to think about consequences—about cause and effect. Maybe that’s why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.


If and when we finish degrading the environment till we run out of meat and the rest of the luxury foods, we’ll learn to do without them. People do. The president won’t even need to ask. But if and when we run out of things that are not a luxury, like water, will we be able to use less, to do without, to ration, to share?


I wish we were getting a little practice in such things. I wish our president would respect us enough to give us a chance to practice at least thinking about them.


I wish the ideals of respecting truth and sharing the goods hadn’t become so foreign to my country that my country begins to seem foreign to me.


57. Where Have All the Liars Gone?
What’s happened to the word “lying,” anyhow? Nobody tells a lie any more.


“Deciding to ignore the facts,” “not fact-checking,” “stretching the truth,” “not telling the entire truth,” — in covering speeches by Romney, Ryan, and all the leading Republican spokesmen, the media have a hundred ways of saying that they lied without saying so.


Even Politifact, when proving an outright, deliberate falsification, doesn’t use the word “lie.” They call it “Pants on Fire.” Isn’t that cute, now.


Today, the day after the Republican convention, was the first time I’ve seen an editorial or op-ed piece use the word “lie.” Kind of a landmark? In describing Paul Ryan’s speech, Paul Krugman in fact used the phrase “the big lie,” with umistakable reference to Adolf Hitler’s favorite stratagem.


Calling lies by name won’t affect the Republicans. Some of them are so far out of touch with reality that they wouldn’t know a fact if it bit them, and the rest have desperately adopted disinformation and falsification as their road to election. The Republican politician and voter must “believe in belief” and then turn his mind off. The big lie is their policy, and it has become compulsory. It won’t change now.


But I wonder if calling lies lies might get through to Obama and his advisors and spokespeople? Stupidly, instead of revealing falsehood by steadfastly speaking truth, they’ve been imitating the enemy. Increasingly often their statements “ignore the facts,” “stretch the truth,” and all the rest of the euphemisms. Every time the Democrats lie, they lose that much advantage over their shape-shifting, blame-dodging opponents.


By ceasing to weasel, waffle, shove things under the carpet, exaggerate successes, and evade problems, Obama could show his genuine personal strength. If, without lecturing and shaking his finger at us, he would tell us only the truth as he knows it, we-the-people might rise to that challenge as we rose to the challenge he offered in his first campaign — with enthusiasm, with hope.


“Speak truth to power” is a popular slogan these days. In a democracy, what about the responsibility of power to speak truth?


— UKL 
3 September 2012


Ursula K. Le Guin
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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 


You can browse the archive by year here.


86. The Internet as Heaven
Time and space are the basic parameters of being in the world. Plants and animals fill their time and their space without question: the tree or the cow occupies its place in the world and its life-span completely and comfortably, seeking only to continue in them. Human beings as babies and children do much the same.


But the developing human brain loses or abandons this seamless occupancy of the world. People begin to question the size and shape of the space they occupy and the length of time they occupy it. They become restless and uncomfortable, they feel incomplete. Dissatisfied with the parameters of their being, they seek to change or escape them. This dissatisfaction has been called divine discontent. In Buddhism recognition of it is dukkha, the First Noble Truth.


Travel was for a long time one way to augment our limited experience of space. Unfortunately it augmented the experience of time only through discomfort. (Are we there yet?) But high-speed travel, eagerly pursued as a goal for the last couple of centuries and made more comfortable, shrinks time-between-places. At 50 miles an hour or so, motion begins to erase the experience of space, to diminish the awareness of traversal. Awareness of location begins to be limited to the vehicle, with little perception of the world outside it. At supersonic speeds the body has no experience at all of the distance traversed, only of the relatively brief time spent traversing it. At the speed of light the body would probably have no experience at all of either space or time.


However, since travel as we know it involves actually transporting the body, it provides no real escape from space and time. The body, however fast and far it goes, has to end up somewhere sometime.


Human beings discovered long ago that escape from limitations of time and space is possible through altering perception — by imagination, dream, stargazing, getting drunk, getting high, intellectual concentration, contemplation, art, mystical practice. Again, the escapade doesn’t last, since when it ends you’re right back in your own body, but it is a well-tested and popular tactic.


Symbolic language provides one of these means of altering perception. Writing and reading can occupy the mind with a symbolic experience completely excluding local awareness. Of course, eventually the book ends and you’re back where you started from. Although “you” may not be entirely the same person that started out to read the book.


The absorption of consciousness by symbol is heightened tremendously on the Internet. Virtual communication (all of which involves and much of which consists of reading or writing) is a mental or symbolic act that involves the body only in mental attention and some minimal physical motions. By almost disembodying consciousness, it erases awareness of location and lapse of time. On the Internet, corporeal consciousness is replaced with a tremendously versatile, almost purely mental existence consisting of immediate symbolic communication with other people, individually or in great although not clearly realized numbers, and access to symbolic reproductions of reality in the form of information, literature, images, music, games, catalogues of consumer items, etc. This wealth of symbolic reproduction is so extendable and can lead to so many connected and related reproductions that people can wander in it endlessly. Absorbed in virtual communication on the Internet, they successfully escape from consciousness of actuality, including mortality. Symbolic communications, active and passive, fill awareness to the point that the communicator is not aware of time, space, and the body that exists in such a limited region of them.


The Internet’s supply of channels of communication and of symbolic reproductions is already inexhaustible and still increasing.


To be free of the body, tied to no place in time and no time in place, yet having effortless, limitless access to everyone one knows, to all knowledge, and to immediate or securely promised satisfaction of desires would appear to be the condition of a blessed immortality.


What could possibly be wrong with it?


— UKL 
2 June 2014


85. Pard and the Time Machine
May 2014


People who think of me as a sci-fi writer will not be surprised to hear that there is a Time Machine in my study. So far it hasn’t transported me among the Eloi and the Morlocks or back among the dinosaurs. Fine with me. I’ll take the time I got, thanks. All my Time Machine does is save stuff from my computer and provide interest and occupation to my cat.


In Pard’s first year with us he spent a lot of time on beetles, because we had a lot of them. The box elder beetle is now endemic in Portland, having shifted its allegiance from box elders, which we don’t have, to big-leaf maples, which we have lots of. And so we have beetles, who live under the siding boards of the house and breed, and swarm, and creep and seep impossibly through nonexistent crevices of the window frames into the house, where they mass on sunlit windows and blunder about infuriatingly, getting under pillows and papers and feet, and into everything, including cups of tea and Charles’s ears. Mostly they crawl, but they fly when alarmed. They are rather pretty little beetles, and harmless, but intolerable, because (like us) there are too many of them for their own good.


Pard used to see them as animated kibbles and enjoyed the chase, the pounce, the crunch. But evidently they weren’t as tasty as Meow Mix or dental Greenies, and anyhow, enough beetles is enough. He now ignores them as steadfastly as we do, or try to.


But back then, when the Time Machine made its little clicky-whirry-insectlike internal noises, he was sure that it contained or concealed beetles, and spent a good deal of time trying to get inside it. It is 7.5 inches square and 1.5 inches high, white plastic, fortunately very tough white plastic, well and tightly sealed all round, and quite heavy for its size. All his efforts barely scratched the surface. As it continued to resist him, and his interest in beetles cooled, he stopped trying to open the Time Machine. He discovered that it offered other possibilities.


Its normal temperature is high, quite warm to the hand (and I think it gets hotter when performing its secret and mysterious connective operations in putative virtuality or the clouds of Unknowing or wherever it is it saves stuff).


My study, being half windows, is drafty and sometimes pretty cold in winter. As he came out of airborne youth and began to spend more time lying around near me in the study, Pard, being a cat, found the Warm Place.


He’s there right now, although today, the last of April, my thermometer says it’s 77 degrees and rising. He is sound asleep. About one fifth of him is right on top of the Time Machine. The rest of him, paws and so on, spills over to the desk top, partly onto a lovely soft alpaca Moebius scarf a kind reader sent me with a prescient note that said, “If you don’t need this I hope your cat will like it,” and partly on a little wool fetish-bear mat from the Southwest that a friend gave me. I never had a chance at the scarf. I opened the package at my desk. Pard came over and appropriated the scarf without a word. He dragged it a few inches away from me, lay down on it, and began to knead it, looking dreamy and purring softly, till he went to sleep. It was his scarf. The mat arrived later, and was adopted as promptly: he sat on it. The cat sat on the mat. His mat. No argument. So the mat and scarf lie on the desk right by the warm Time Machine, and the cat distributes himself daily among the three of them, and purrs, and sleeps.


The other use he may have found for the Time Machine is purely, to me, speculative. It involves dematerialization.


Pard doesn’t go outside often or stay long unless one of us is with him. He can’t sleep outside, can barely lie down and half relax; he remains stimulated, watchful, jumpy. He has Indoors and those who share it with him pretty well under his paw, but he knows that Outdoors is way beyond his knowledge or control. He’s not at home there. Wise little cat. So when now and then he vanishes, I don’t much worry about his having somehow got out the back door and then found his cat flap locked; he’s somewhere about the house.


But sometimes the disappearance goes on, and there is no Pard anywhere, outside or in. He is not in the basement, or the dark attic, or in a closet or a cupboard, or under a bedspread. He is not. He has dematerialized.


I get anxious and call his food call, ticky-ticky-ticky! and rattle the can of Greenies in an alluring fashion that would ordinarily bring him straight up or down the stairs without touching paw to stair.


Silence. Absence. No cat.


I tell myself to stop fretting, and Charles tells me to stop fretting, and I attempt or pretend to stop fretting, and go on with whatever I’m doing, fretting.


The sense of mystery is constant and oppressive.


And then, there he is. He has rematerialized before my eyes. There he is, with his tail curved over his back, and a bland, friendly expression suggesting permanent readiness for food.


Pard, where were you?


Silence. Affable presence. Mystery.


I think he uses the Time Machine. I think it takes him elsewhere. Not cyberspace, that’s no place for cats. Maybe he uses it to open temporal interstices, like the impossible window-frame nonspaces by which box elder beetles enter the house. By such secret ways, known to Bastet and Li Shou, lit by the stars of Leo, he visits that mysterious realm, that greater outdoors, where he is safe and perfectly at home.


84. The Circling Stars, the Sea Surrounding: Philip Glass and John Luther Adams
April 2014


Every year one of the Portland Opera Company’s productions is sung by the singers in the company’s outstanding training program. In 2012 it was Philip Glass’s short opera Galileo Galilei. There is a splendor to young voices different from the patina of the experienced singer; and these performances always have an extra charge of tension and excitement.


The bold, beautiful, intricately simple set, all circles and arcs and moving lights on different planes, was, I believe, from the Chicago premiere in 2002; the conductor was Anne Manson.


The first scene shows us Galileo old, blind, and alone. From there the story follows a reverse spiral through time, revolving back lightly and ceaselessly through his trial, his triumphs, his discoveries, to the last scene, where a little boy named Galileo sits hearing an opera about Orion and the dawn and the circling planets written by his father, Vincenzo Galilei. It is all borne along and buoyed up by the ceaselessly repetitive and ever-changing music, always spiraling, never resting, and yet moving with the slow majesty of the great orbits, without reference to any beginning or ending, in a vast, joyous continuity. It moves, it moves, it moves . . . E pur si muove!


I was rapt from the first moments, and by the last scene I could scarcely see the stage for tears of delight.


We went back the next night and had the same radiant experience. There’s now a recording of the Portland Opera performance (Orange Mountain Music, OMM 10091). I have listened to this with deep pleasure and will listen to it again. But I am still certain that the true power of opera, and certainly this opera, is in the actual production, the immediate, live presence of the singers and the interaction of their voices and the music with the sets, lighting, action, movements, costumes, and audience to create a global, irreproducible experience. This is how all the great opera composers have understood their undertaking. Recording, film, all our wonderful instruments of virtuality, catch only the shadow, recall only a memory of that lived experience, that moment of real time.


An opera is a preposterous proposition. It’s almost incredible that any production of any opera ever comes off. To a lot of people, of course, it doesn’t—Tolstoy was one. Philip Glass’s music is also somewhat preposterous. To a lot of people it isn’t music at all. Some of his pieces sound mechanical, even perfunctory to me; but having been deeply moved years ago by the film Koyaanisqatsi, and by his Gandhi opera Satyagraha on stage in Seattle, I’m always ready to hear what Glass is up to now. For Galileo he had a brilliant librettist, Mary Zimmerman, and rose to the challenge. The words and action of the piece are luminously intelligent: they go to the heart of what Galileo’s life and thought mean to us in terms of knowledge, courage, and integrity both scientific and religious, yet they linger also on the humanity of the man who rejoiced in his daughter, rejoiced in thought and argument, rejoiced in his work and his great discoveries, and for his public reward got shame, silence, and exile. It is a grand story, and a dark one: quite right for opera.


I found Galileo completely beautiful. I think it as beautiful in its way as Gluck’s Orfeo is in its. Neither is so dramatically and emotionally huge as much nineteenth-century opera, but both are complete, whole, every element in them entering into a ravishing totality. Galileo has an intellectual grandeur rare in opera, but even that is in the service of making pleasure, true pleasure—the pleasure given by something noble, thoughtful, deeply moving, and delightful.


And this was my first twenty-first-century opera. What a marvelous start!


 


Just two years later, this March, the Seattle Symphony brought a concert to Portland that included a piece, Become Ocean, they commissioned (and bravo for doing so!) from the composer John Luther Adams.


There are too many composers named John Adams. The one from San Francisco is better known at present, but I’ve found his music increasingly disappointing ever since the curiously brainless and vapid opera Nixon in China. Living in Alaska, John Luther Adams is still marginal not only to mainland America but to mainstream fame. But I believe that will change as his music is heard.


For Become Ocean, the orchestra is divided on stage into three groups with differing instrumentations. All three play continuously, each following its own pattern of tempo, volume, and tonality. Now one group and now another dominates, the ebb and flow of each interpenetrating with the others like currents in the sea. Sometimes they all are on the ebb; again their crescendos overlap until a vast, deep tsunami of music swells over the hearers, overwhelming . . . and then subsides again. The harmonies are complex, there are no tunes as such, but there is no moment in the work that is anything less than beautiful. The hearer can surrender to the surrounding sound as a ship surrenders itself to the waves, as the great kelp forests surrender to the movement of the currents and the tides, as the sea itself surrenders to the gravity of the moon. When the deep music ebbed away at last, I felt that I’d come as near as ever I will to indeed becoming ocean.


We stood up to applaud, but not many people did. Portland audiences tend to leap to their feet automatically for a soloist, but rise more selectively for mere orchestra. I think the response was to some extent puzzled, maybe bored. Become Ocean is 45 minutes long. A man near us was growling about it never ending, while I was wishing it never had.


Edgard Varèse’s Déserts came next in the program, a piece that skillfully and faithfully obeys the modernist mandates of discord. Maybe we have at last worked through the period when serious music had to seek antiharmony and strive to shock the ear. Neither Glass nor Adams appears to be following a program dictated by theory; like Gluck or Beethoven, they’re innovative because they have something new to say and know how to say it. They are obedient only to their own certainties.


I came away from both these concerts marveling that while our republic tears itself apart and our species frantically hurries to destroy its own household, yet we go on building with vibrations in the air, in the spirit—making this music, this intangible, beautiful, generous thing.


83. Cats, Claws, Panic
Annals of Pard X
Do cats bite their nails? I mean, do cats other than Pard bite their nails?


After breakfast, Pard washes his face. Sometimes the soft swipe across the jowl with the spit-dampened front paw turns into something else: he holds that paw pad-first to to his mouth, gets a claw between his teeth, and tugs it. He tugs repeatedly, and hard enough to make a not wholly agreeable tooth-on-claw noise.


In the afternoon, when he is doing All-over Spitbath and Yoga Grooming, he lies comfortably on the lower end of his backbone, seizes one hind leg with one front paw, gets a hind claw between his teeth, and tugs it at the same way. He must be using his felines (surely they aren’t called canines in a cat?) because his other teeth don’t look capable of a grip like that.


I never had a cat before that did this. Sometimes I think he’s cleaning his claws, as we clean our fingernails. Sometimes I think he’s getting off the little shells that claws discard as they grow out. Sometimes I wonder if he’s so bored he bites his nails.


Does anybody know?


Do cats have panic attacks?


One night last month Pard stayed up in the uninhabited part of the attic all night long. In the morning he didn’t come and walk around on me and purr till I got up. He didn’t come and walk all over everything in the bathroom purring with his tail in the air while I got dressed. He didn’t gallop down the stairs ahead of me and stand around purring extremely loudly with the tip of his tail between his ears while I put his kibbles in his bowl.


He didn’t come down at all till I called him with his food call, prrrt-ticky-ticky! and rattled the kibble-can. And I had to come clear upstairs with it. Then he ventured down the attic stairs — stair by stair, paw by paw — eyes like searchlights, ears back, mouth tense, tail low: textbook illustration of Very Anxious Cat. It took him forever to get all the way down to the kitchen, and then he was too anxious to eat — the first time ever that he didn’t clean his bowl industriously and immediately. He’d nibble, and then freak out again and crouch, or run back upstairs. He never did finish that breakfast.


He was that way all day. He wanted to be with me, but was not sociable and couldn’t relax. He led me once up to the attic, and we walked all around in it. I wondered if maybe something like a raccoon or big rat had got in there and given him a scare. But there was no sign of that, and no particular place that spooked him, there or elsewhere. He was just totally, globally spooked. It was very spooky.


It really is not the kind of attic that has ghosts.


I did think of Strange Animal Behavior Before Earthquakes that I used to read about in newspaper supplements in 1938.


The only thing besides earthquakes I could think of that seemed a possible cause for such a panic was my overnight bag, which I’d set out the day before. He’d sniffed it then, with no alarm whatever, and got into it, because it is his privilege and duty to enter all enterable spaces and explore them. He has explored that bag twenty times. He got out again, and thereafter ignored the bag. I wasn’t going to travel till the next day, and anyhow wasn’t in the state I’m sometimes in before a trip; though he’s definitely sensitive to stress and high tension, I don’t think he was picking up my travel nerves. Anyhow, his way of acting out my tensions is to do The Forbidden Things — leap up to the mantelpiece, attack the embroidery on the Morris chair, disintegrate the sofa leg, etc. — and then go hide in plain sight in my armchair, exactly like a wicked three-year-old.


He remained unhappy all day, licking his lips often, tail held low, unable to settle down and sleep — barely distracted from his anxiety for a moment by crunchy Greenies, usually the delight of life.


I wasn’t happy about leaving him, wondering if some physical ailment was making him act this way, though he didn’t move or act as if in pain. He hid out somewhere again all night, but he did come in and walk around on me at six-thirty. He was still tail-down and purrless, but behaving more normally. So I went on my trip.


When I called home, Charles reported that Pard was doing better. Next day when I got home he was pretty well back to normal and the day after that he was fine.


He’s not what I’d call a spooky cat. He’s shy with people, mostly because he sees so few. Sudden noises can scare him (though sometimes he obviously just wants an excuse to race upstairs with a lot of hysterical scrabbling and a huge black bottlebrush tail. After which he saunters back down. Noise? What noise?) And he still generally prefers looking out the window to going out the door. When he does go out onto our second-story verandah, he’d rather one of us was with him; he’s tense and cautious, tail down, the whole time he’s out. Often he doesn’t even go all the way down the stairs to the garden. But mostly, usually, basically, he is a cheerful little body, tail high, purring me awake in the morning, devouring his breakfast and dinner, racing joyously after Greenies, in full control of his household and its routine.


What was that awful night and day of fear? Do cats have panic attacks out of the blue? Does anybody know?


If you know about Nail Biting Cats or Cat Panics, you can tell me by clicking on the Book View Café link to this blog. I will read all reports with interest and gratitude. (You might want to take a look at BVC’s bookstore while you’re there, they publish good stuff.)


— Ursula K. Le Guin 
24 March 2014


82. Belief in Belief
February 2014


You can buy rocks in which are carved words intended to be inspiring—LOVE, HOPE, DREAM, etc. Some have the word BELIEVE. They puzzle me. Is belief a virtue? Is it desirable in itself? Does it not matter what you believe so long as you believe something? If I believed that horses turned into artichokes on Tuesdays, would that be better than doubting it?


 


Charles Blow had a fine editorial in the New York Times on January 3, 2014, “Indoctrinating Religious Warriors,” indicting the radical Republicans’ use of religion to confuse opinion on matters of fact and their success in doing so. He used a Pew report from December 30, 2013, to provide this disheartening statistic:


Last year . . . the percentage of Democrats who believed in evolution inched up to 67 percent, the percentage of Republicans believing so plummeted to 43 percent. Now, more Republicans believe that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” than believe in evolution.


Now, greatly as I respect Charles Blow’s keen intelligence and reliable compassion, his choice of words here worries me. Four times in this paragraph he uses the verb believe in a way that implies that the credibility of a scientific theory and the credibility of a religious scripture are comparable.


I don’t think they are. And I want to write about it because I agree with him that issues of factual plausibility and spiritual belief or faith are being—cynically or innocently—confused, and need to be disentangled.


I wasn’t able to find the exact wording of the questions asked in the Pew survey.


Their report uses the word think more often than believe—people “think” that human and other beings have evolved over time, or “reject the idea.”


This language reassures me somewhat. For if a poll-taker asked me, “Do you believe in evolution?” my answer would have to be “No.”


I ought to refuse to answer at all, of course, because a meaningless question has only meaningless answers. Asking me if I believe in evolution, in change, makes about as much sense as asking if I believe in Tuesdays, or artichokes. The word evolution means change, something turning into something else. It happens all the time.


The problem here is our use of the word evolution to signify the theory of evolution. This shorthand causes a mental short circuit: it sets up a false parallel between a hypothesis (concerning observed fact) and a revelation (from God, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible)—which is then reinforced by our loose use of the word believe.


I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.


The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief.


Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope.


I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from profoundly different ways of looking at the same world—different ways of coming at reality: the material and the spiritual. They can and often do coexist in perfect harmony.


Extreme literalism in reading religious texts makes any kind of thinking hard. Still, even if one believes that God created the universe in six days a few thousand years ago, one can take that as a spiritual truth unaffected by the material evidence that the universe is billions of years old. And vice versa: as Galileo knew, though the Inquisitors didn’t, whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes round the earth doesn’t affect one way or the other the belief that God is the spiritual center of all.


The idea that only belief sees the world as wonderful and the “cold hard facts” of science take all the color and wonder out of it, the idea that scientific understanding automatically threatens and weakens religious or spiritual insight, is just hokum.


Some of the hokum arises from professional jealousy, rivalry, and fear—priest and scientist competing for power and control of human minds. Atheist rant and fundamentalist rant ring alike: passionate, partial, false. My impression is that most working scientists, whether they practice a religion or not, accept the coexistence of religion, its primacy in its own sphere, and go on with what they’re doing. But some scientists hate religion, fear it, and rail against it. And some priests and preachers, wanting their sphere of influence to include everything and everyone, claim the absolute primacy of Biblical revelation over material fact.


Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you can’t believe in evolution, and vice versa.


But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you can’t believe in artichokes.


 


Maybe the problem is that believers can’t believe that science doesn’t involve belief. And so, confusing knowledge with hypothesis, they fatally misunderstand what scientific knowledge is and isn’t.


A scientific hypothesis is a tentative assertion of knowledge based on the observation of reality and the collection of factual evidence supporting it. Assertions without factual content (beliefs) are simply irrelevant to it. But it’s always subject to refutation. The only way to refute it is to come up with observed facts that disprove it.


So far, evidence fully supports the hypothesis that Creation has been changing since its origin, that on earth living creatures, adapting to change, have evolved through eons from single-cell organisms through a vast profusion of species, and that they’re still adapting and evolving right now (as can be seen in the evolution of finch species in the Galápagos, or moth coloration, or barred/spotted owl interbreeding, or a hundred other examples).


Yet to the strict scientific mind, the theory of evolution is not absolute knowledge. Exhaustively tested and supported by evidence as it is, it’s a theory: further observation can always alter, improve, refine, or enlarge it. It’s not dogma, it’s not an article of faith, but a tool. Scientists use it, act on it, even defend it as if they believed in it, but they’re not doing so because they take it on faith. They accept it and use it and defend it against irrelevant attack because it has so far withstood massive attempts at disproof, and because it works. It does a necessary job. It explains things that needed explaining. It leads the mind on into new realms of factual discovery and theoretical imagination.


Darwin’s theory vastly enlarges our perception of reality—our always tentative knowledge. As far as we have tested it and can test it, and always subject to modification as we learn more, we can accept it as true knowledge—a great, rich, beautiful insight. Not a revealed truth, but an earned one.


In the realm of the spirit, it appears that we can’t earn knowledge. We can only accept it as a gift: the gift of belief. Belief is a great word, and a believed truth too can be great and beautiful. It matters very greatly what one believes in.


I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we’d avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.


81. The Tango
Annals of Pard IX
Cats are pure predators: they hunt live prey. Carrion and other stuff dogs like is of no interest to them. They abhor sweets, and despise most vegetables, though many make an exception for asparagus, or corn, and my big Leonard liked a taste of salad greens and had a passion for raw spinach. We’re told that feral cats get the greens they need from what the prey they eat ate.


Pard is about as unferal as a cat can be. He stays indoors by choice and can’t be persuaded to vary his austere, self-chosen diet of dry kibbles and tap water. But we live in an old house with a lot of holes in it. The outdoors gets in. Live prey occurs fairly often. . . And he’s a very good predator, at least up to a point. He’ll spend whole days or nights in the attic, listening, expecting. He knocks over the trash basket under the kitchen sink every morning to examine it for live content. He knows where the mice were and will be. He knows where the mouse is, and waits for it. And he gets it.


It’s at this point that his predatory purity gets muddled and his skill as a hunter ends. As well as I can figure it out, his Food Perception Zone is so extremely limited that the mouse doesn’t enter into it at all. To him the mouse is a toy, a really good toy — the best imaginable — a toy that will play with him. Oh joy! And he brings it to me.


At this point most people say instructively, “He’s teaching you to hunt.” The idea is that mama cats bring live mice to their kittens and release them in order to teach the kittens hunting skills. This may well be so, but I have trouble extrapolating it to a young neutered male. Pard knows the difference between a woman and a kitten. And anyhow I don’t think he wants to teach me hunting skills. I bring him toys and play with some of them with him. He connects toy-playing with me, so he brings his grand new toy to me to play with.


His first couple of catches were dispatched pretty quickly, I think by accident, through clumsiness. He hadn’t yet learned how not to damage the toy. Alas, he has perfected this skill.


The worst time was a month or so ago when he brought a rather large, extremely vigorous mouse to my room at about two a.m. and released it on my bed. I woke up in time to fling it wildly off in a spontaneous convulsion, which sent it running about on the floor again so Pard could chase it again. Clearly I was behaving just as I should, keeping the toy in motion — so when he found it he brought it right back onto the bed. This time I was wide awake, and made noise and light as well as wild physical upheavals. Pard was delighted.


The mouse remained in good running order for a long time. There was no way I could catch it, but there were dozens of ways Pard could, and did — and then let it go again. It went on and on. It was awful. Even when they both got out into the hall, I couldn’t shut them out of the room, because the room door is about half an inch off the floor and the mouse would have got into the room leaving the cat outside hurling himself against the door. I fled to another room with a mouseproof door and shut it and hid.


That may have impaired Pard’s motivation, because the mouse got away, and he didn’t catch it for two days, though he was on the hunt most of the time. I lay each night in dread of the midnight mouse.


He caught it, and another since then, both in the trash can under the sink (which has steep sides a mouse can’t climb, so it’s like shooting fish in a barrel). He brings his mouse to my room in the dead of night, carrying it carefully, as a mother cat carries a kitten, and with the same alert, head-up, trotting gait. He puts it gently down on the floor — he hasn’t put one in bed with me again, for which I am grateful. The chase then circles round under furniture, into the doorless closet, behind the drum, through the vacuum-cleaner-parts boxes, etc. Rattle rattle, pause — BANG! — long tense pause — skitter, skitter, rustle, thump — long, long pause . . . Rattle . . . rattle. . . Then at last, blessedly, silence. The final silence. Exhaustion or an over-hasty pounce has released the mouse at last.


Pard carries it up and leaves it on the floor of Charles’s study in the attic. That done, he has absolutely no further interest in it. Why Charles gets the body, only Pard knows. We’d like to see it as a thoughtful attention, but it seems rather more like the child who generously gives his friend the toy he broke — “Here! This is a present! For you!”


Knowing that there is no way he can learn Compassion any more than he can learn Cruelty, the skill I wish I could teach Pard is Quick Murder. But whatever it is — the predatory instinct inseparably interacting with the play instinct, I suppose — all he wants of a mouse is for it to go on. And the mouse resourcefully, silently, gallantly dances out its role in the fatal tango.


— UKL 
6 January 2014


80. Kids' Letters
December 2013


People sometimes look surprised when I say that I love to get fan letters from children. I’m surprised that they’re surprised.


I get some very lovable letters from kids under 10 who write me on their own, mostly with a little parental input. They often describe themselves as “Your Hugest Fan,” which makes me imagine them as towering amiably over the Empire State Building. But most of the letters come from school classes that read the Catwings books. I try to answer these letters at least by thanking every child by name. I can’t usually do much more than that.


Some are problematic: the teacher has told the kids to “write an author,” making the assignment a requirement without regard for the students’ feelings or capabilities—or mine. One desperate 10-year-old forced to write the author told me, “I have read the cover. it is prety good.” What am I to say to him? His teacher put both him and me on the spot and left us there. Not fair.


Frequently teachers tell the students to tell the author what their favorite part of the book is and to ask a question. The favorite part is fine, the kid can always fake it; but asking a question is pointless unless the student really has one. It’s also inconsiderate, raising the impossible expectation that a working author can write back with answers to 25 or 30 different questions, even if most of them are variations on two or three standard themes.


When teachers let the kids write whatever they want, if they want to write anything, it works. The questions are real, though some of them would stump the Sphinx. “Why do the catwings have wings?” “Why did you ever write books?” “I want to know how you make some of the words on the cover slanted.” “My cat Boo is nine. I am ten. How old is your cat? Is it fair to catch mice?” And there are interesting criticisms. Kids are forthright, both positively and negatively; their comments tell me what interests and what disturbs them. “Did James ever get better from the Owl?” “I hate Mrs Jane Tabby she made her kitens go away from hom.”


The class mailings I enjoy most are those where the teacher has encouraged the kids to draw their own pictures of scenes in the book, or to write sequels and continuations of the adventures of the Catwings.


“Catwings 5” and “Catwings 6” on this website, posted quite a while back, are examples of one approach to this: the teacher has guided/collaborated with the students in making up the story, and has chosen the pictures to illustrate it. This is an admirable exercise in teamwork on an artistic project, and the result is charming. Adult control, however, inevitably tames the wild unpredictability of stories and pictures that come straight from each child’s imagination. Such illustrations, stories, and booklets give me almost unalloyed delight.


The occasional alloy is in the now inevitable stories that imitate electronic games, a more alarming instance of adult control. In these, the Catwings go through “a portal” into the middle of an incoherent adventure involving battles and the slaughter of enemies, monsters, etc. by the million. Evidently this is the only story the child knows. It’s scary to see a mind trapped in an endless repetition of violent acts without meaning or resolution, only escalation to keep the stimulus going. So far this kind of thing has come only from boys, which may be, in its way, a hopeful sign. I remember hearing my next older brother in 1937 making up and acting out his own adventure stories in his room—shouts of defiance, muffled thuds, cries of “Get him! Get him!” and machine-gun fire. My brother came through all this mayhem as a quite unviolent adult. But the games of instantly rewarded destruction, in which the characters and action are ready-made “action figures” and the only goal is “winning,” are designed to be addictive, and therefore may be hard to outgrow or replace. Compelled into an endless, meaningless feedback loop, the imagination is starved and sterilized.


As for the joy I get from the stories and booklets, a large part of it is in seeing that so many kids are perfectly willing to write a book (the book may be about 50 words long). They are confident about doing it and about illustrating it. They take obvious pleasure in giving it chapters, and a Table of Contents, and a cover, and a dedication. And at the end, they all write “The End” with a proud flourish. They should be proud. Their teacher is proud of them. I am proud of them. I hope their family is proud of them. To have written a book is a very cool thing, when you are six or eight or ten years old. It leads to other cool things, such as fearless reading. Why would anybody who’s written a book be afraid of reading one?


As an experienced connoisseur, I can say the best letters and books by kids are entirely handmade. A computer may make writing easier, but that’s not always an advantage: ease induces haste and glibness. From the visual point of view, the printout, with all idiosyncratic characters blanded into a standard font, is drably neat, while the artisanal script is full of vitality. Computer spell-checking takes all the flavor out of the nonprescriptive, creative spelling that can give great delight to a reader. In a printout, nobody tells me what their favrit pert of the book is, or their favroit prt, or faevit palrt, or favf pont. In a printout, nobody asks me, Wi did you disid to writ cat wigs? And there are no splendid final salutations, such as “Sensrle,” which had me stumped, until “San serly” and “Sihnserly”gave me the clue. Or “Yours trully,” also spelled “chrule.” Or, frequently, echoing young Jane Austen, “Your freind.” Or the occasional totally mysterious farewells—“mth frum Derik,” “Fsrwey, Anna.”


Frswey, brave teachers, brave children! (And thank you for the quotations!)
mth frum Ursula.


79. TGAN
November 2013


A question from New Bookends, “Where is the great American novel by a woman?” got an interesting answer from the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid.[1]


[. . .] bear with me as I advocate the death of the Great American Novel.


The problem is in the phrase itself. “Great” and “Novel” are fine enough. But “the” is needlessly exclusionary, and “American” is unfortunately parochial. The whole, capitalized, seems to speak to a deep and abiding insecurity, perhaps a colonial legacy. How odd it would be to call Homer’s “Iliad” or Rumi’s “Masnavi” “the Great Eastern Mediterranean Poem.”


I like this very much.


But there’s something coy and coercive about the question itself that made me want to charge into the bullring, head down and horns forward.[2] I’d answer it with a question: Where is the great American novel by anybody? And I’d answer that: Who cares?


I think this is pretty much what Mr. Hamid says more politely, when he says that art


is bigger than notions of black or white, male or female, American or non. Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them. It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves.


Three cheers and Amen to that.


But I want to add this note: To me, the keystone of the phrase “the great American novel” is not the word American but the word great.


Greatness, in the sense of outstanding or unique accomplishment, is a cryptogendered word. In ordinary usage and common understanding, “a great American” means a great American man, “a great writer” means a great male writer. To regender the word, it must modify a feminine noun (“a great American woman,” “a great woman writer”). To degender it, it must be used in a locution such as “great Americans/writers, both men and women . . .” Greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.


The writer who sets out to write the great American novel must see himself as a free citizen of that province, competing on equal ground with other writers, living and dead, for a glittering prize, a unique honor. His career is a contest, a battle, with victory over other men as its goal. (He is unlikely to think much about women as competitors.) Only in this view of the writer as a fully privileged male, a warrior, literature as a tournament, greatness as the defeat of others, can the idea of “the” great American novel exist.


That’s a good deal to swallow, these days, for most writers over 14. I’ll bet the whole notion of “the great American novel” is nothing like as common and meaningful an idea among authors as it is among readers, fans, PR people, reviewers, those who don’t read but know authors by name as celebrities, and people who need something to blog about.


 


Now this may get me told off by women who value competitiveness and feel the problem with women is that they think they shouldn’t or can’t compete, but I’ll say it all the same. It makes perfect sense to me that I’ve never heard a woman writer say she intended, or wanted, to write the great American novel.


Tell you true, I’ve never heard a woman writer say the phrase “the great American novel” without a sort of snort.


Whatever the virtues of competitiveness, women are still deeply trained by society to be cautious about laying claim to greatness greater than the greatness of men. As you know, Jim, a woman who competes successfully with men in a field men consider theirs by right risks being punished for it. Literature is a field a great many men consider theirs by right. Virginia Woolf committed successful competition in that field. She barely escaped the first and most effective punishment—omission from the literary canon after her death. Yet 80 or 90 years later charges of snobbery and invalidism are still used to discredit and diminish her. Marcel Proust’s limitations and his neuroticism were at least as notable as hers. But that Proust needed not only a room of his own but a cork-lined one is taken as proof he was a genius. That Woolf heard the birds singing in Greek shows only that she was a sick woman.


So as long as men need to “be reflected at twice their natural size,” a woman writer knows that open competition with them is dangerous. Even if she wants to write the, or a, great American novel, she’s unlikely to announce (as male writers do from time to time) that she plans to or has written it. And if she feels she deserves a Pulitzer or Booker or Nobel, or anyhow wouldn’t mind having one, she knows most literary awards are weighted so heavily in favor of men that the social efforts involved in most major awards, the networking and careful self-presentation, are a great expense for an unlikely return.


But risk avoidance isn’t all there is to it. Because competition for primacy, for literary supremacy, doesn’t seem as glamorously possible for women as it does for men, the whole idea of singular greatness—of there being one great anything—may not have the hold on a woman’s imagination that it has on a man’s. The knights in the lists have to believe the prize can be won and is worth winning. Those relegated to the preliminary jousts and the sidelines can see more clearly how arbitrary the judgment of championship is, and can question the value of the glittering prize.


Who wants “The” Great American Novel, anyhow? PR people. People who believe that bestsellers are better than other books because they sell better than other books and that the prizewinning book is the best book because it won the prize. Tired teachers, timid teachers, lazy students who’d like one text to read instead of the many, many great and greatly complex books that make up literature.


Art is not a horserace. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.






[1] Quotations pulled from Mohsin Hamid’s “Bookends” column, printed in the New York Times Book Review on October 15, 2013.


[2] In the 1920s, on a great Peruvian hacienda with a private bullring, my parents watched matadors-in-training fight cows. The full ritual was performed, except that injury to the animal was avoided, and it did not end in a kill. It was the best training, my parents were told: after las vacas bravas, bulls were easy. An angry bull goes for the red flag; an angry cow goes for the matador.


78. Blurbery
After the sixteenth request last month to blurb a book, I lost count. They kept coming; there must have been about thirty in the month of October. Five of them came in the form of the novel itself arriving unsolicited in my postbox with a cover letter from the author or editor. The others are letters, mail or email, describing the book and requesting me to read and blurb it. They all express admiration of my work, and most seem to be familiar with it, though some sound as if their familiarity was limited to my name.


Is something wrong here?


Am I not doing my duty by my fellow writers? Should I have read a novel every day last month and blurbed each one as the shatteringly brilliant gut-wrenchingly thrilling replacement for Game of Thrones/Girl with the Whatsit Tattoo/War and Peace?


If I did, what good would it do?


#


As you know, Jim, commercial publishing is collapsing into the production of bestsellers by the publishing subsidiaries of international corporations, who focus their PR on books expected to sell big & quick. And as newspapers and other traditional carriers of book reviews also collapse, reviewing dwindles into Kirkus, bestseller lists, informed or uninformed blogs, and amateur online ‘interactivity’ such as meaningless ‘likes’ or the ‘reviews’ at amazon dot com, much of which is mere self-promotion.


But what can authors do, if their publishers won’t do PR for them — or won’t even publish them, so they have to self-publish — what can they do but self-promote?


The how-to-sell-yourself guidebooks tell you all about the wondrous results of shamelessness. Uh-huh. Boasting works, for a while. Then it hits resistance. Self-praise is always rightly suspect. A crowd of people all shouting I Am The Greatest! at each other? Useless, boring. . . . Hence the frantic search for the blurb.


A blurb-seeker of even middling intelligence won’t approach bestseller celebrities, knowing the request will be simply dumped or brushed off by a staff-person employed to dump or brush off. But many writers consider giving a fellow writer a blurb as part of their job if they can do it honestly; and a moderately successful author, having no dump-and-brush-off staff, may be approachable.


So the self-published author hopefully makes a list of useful established authors and writes them blurb-me letters. And even the author who has found a publisher may discover that the days when the editor wrote the blurb-me letters are gone: the publisher now expects, demands, that the author write them. It’s all part of the prevailing idea that authors should sell themselves while publishers do more important things.


The trouble is, these days, that any moderately successful author who ever blurbed a book is at this very moment being approached by other authors and probably some editors — and not two or three of them a month, the way it was ten years ago, but many, many, and from all sides — like a lone impala on whom are converging a pack of wild dogs, a horde of hyenas, a pride of lions, three leopards, two aardwolves, and a leopard in a pear tree.


This is not a workable PR system. This is no way to publicise or sell books.


While standards of publication, reviewing, and advertising on the Internet remain incoherent, and while corporate publishers refuse to spend money to publish or publicise anything but the safest bets, we’re supposed to pretend that authorial self-promotion and the relentless inter-exploitation of writers for blurbs can maintain the whole business of literature?


Well, it can’t.


Meanwhile, this impala wishes say to every author and editor and aardvark who has sent her a book to blurb or a please-blurb letter this month — and all those who will send her their book or their please-blurb letter in coming months — Thank you! I am honored by your confidence in me and very sorry I cannot reply in any way but I have urgent business about thirty miles away across the Veldt right now, goodbye!


— UKL 
4 November 2013


77. Pard, Autumn 2013
Annals of Pard VIII
Annals VIII-1.jpeg
Pard Regards the Jungle Out the Window


Annals VIII-2.jpeg
Pard Surveys the World from Above


Annals VIII-3.jpg
Pard Prefers his Water Fresh


Annals VIII-4.jpg
Help, police, 911! There is a mad cat in the bathtub!


— UKL 
21 October 2013


76. Steens Mountain Region, August 2013
76-Steens-1.jpeg
This is what a lot of it looks like. It is the northernmost part of the Basin and Range country, high desert, altitude over 4000', annual rainfall under 12" except for Steens Mountain, nearly 10,000 feet, which gets up to 40" as rain and snow.


76-Steens-2.jpg
Rainwater and snowmelt comes roaring down the NW side of the mountain as the Donner and Blitzen River and many smaller creeks, spreads out in lakes and marshes in the valley, and stays there. This is Knox Pond. There are a good many ducks and wading birds moseying around in it.


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The P-Ranch barn near Frenchglen. Peter French ran a cattle empire for absentee bosses over the whole area before it began to be homesteaded. His great barns are admirable structures.


76-Steens-4.jpg
Inside the P-Ranch barn — long unused, of course.


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Red Crater, in the Diamond Lava Beds, a state park, site of many recent small but fierce volcanic eruptions. This was one of them.


76-Steens-6.jpg
I am standing on the edge of Red Crater, shooting across one corner of it to the high point. The person on the skyline gives some sense of the scale.


76-Steens-7.jpg
Malheur Maar, the end of the road in the Diamond Lava Beds. The tiny lake inside the crater always has a pair of ducks living on it. A memorably strange and silent place.


76-Steens-8.jpg
I photograph this old ranch outbuilding every year. It’s a little more decrepit every time, but not much more.


76-Steens-9.jpg
Taken from the front steps of the ranch house where I sit every morning to watch the sun come up. That butte with its rimrock edge is one wall of the narrow valley. This picture was taken at evening, with the sinking sun throwing the shadow of the similar butte behind the house onto this one.


76-Steens-10.jpg
Work on the ranch.


— UKL 
21 October 2013


75. Doggerel for a Cat
His paws are white, his ears are black.
When he isn’t around I feel the lack.
His purr is loud, his fur is soft.
He always carries his tail aloft.
His gait is easy, his gaze intense.
He wears a tuxedo to all events.
His toes are prickly, his nose is pink.
I like to watch him sit and think.
His breed is Alley, his name is Pard.
Life without him would be hard.


74. Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert
August 2013


The house where we stay is on a small cattle ranch, in the valley of a creek that comes energetically down off a mountain, cutting a winding oasis of willows and grass between very steep ridges topped with basalt walls like battlements—rimrock. Across the creek is the ranchhouse under a huge old weeping willow. The eastern ridge rises immediately behind it; immediately behind our house, the western ridge. Level, grassy pastures fill the narrow land between; the steep slopes are sagebrush, rabbitbrush, bare dirt, rock. Far up the long valley, most of the ranch stock are still in summer pasture. It’s very quiet around the house. The nearest town is three miles to the north. Its population this year is five.


On the First Day
Five swallows sit the near wire.


A fiercely agitated flicker lights on the other wire, then follows its own crackling cry.


Rain hangs in the overcast, heavy above the ridge.


A hen has laid an egg: outbursts of proud contentment. Two roosters crow, competing.


The peacocks make their gallant, melancholy, meowing trumpet call.


Soon the sun will break above the rimrock of the ridge, an hour after rising.


Flights of blackbirds pass in the cool, shadowed air between the eastern and the western rimrock, dozens at a flight, each flight a sound of many wings, an airy throbbing rush and thrill. The creaking whicker of wind in feather, now and then. Now and then a chirp.


In silence far above them swallows follow the hunt, the least and sweetest predators.


A contrail feathers out white over the eastern ridge.


As my eyes begin to have to look away from the slow intolerable brightening I close them and inside the lids see the long curve of the ridge dark red, the darkest red: above it a band of green, the purest green. Each time I look and close my eyes again, the band of green grows wider, burning clear, unmitigated fire of emerald. Then at its center appears a circle of pale, unearthly blue.


I open my eyes and see the source, the sun, one glance, and look down blinded, humble, to the earth, the dull black lava pavement of the path.


The warmth of the sun is on my face as soon as its light is.


 


After the tremendous thunderstorm of afternoon, tall shivering towers of rain that swept across the pastures, wind that writhed the great old willow like seaweed in the waves, after all that was over and the quiet dusk was filling up the air between the ridges, the horses got to frisking. The little roan and the three bays nipped and kicked, ran and reared, chest to chest; even Daryll, old paint swayback boss, got into it with the colts a bit. They teased, they galloped across the pastures, hooves drummed that wild music on the ground. They quieted down, drifting off north along the creek. Old paint’s white flank glimmered like fireflies in the willowy dark.


In the night, awake, I thought of them standing in the wet grass, among the willows, in the night.


I stood on the doorstep in the deep night. Cloud-veils crossed the blazing pavement of the firmament and passed. Above the eastern ridge a shining blur, the Pleiades.


On the Second Night
On the second night all creatures woke, and the sleepless cricket was silent suddenly. The thunder spoke from ridge to ridge, from canyon to canyon, far, then nearer. Darkness split wide open to reveal what it hides. Only for a moment can the eyes of the creatures see the world in that awful light.


On the Third Day
In the afternoon the ravens of the western ridge flew with their children across the air between the ridges, calling in their language full of r’s. The youngest talked a lot, the elders answered briefly. Then all at once there seemed to be five ravens? six?—no: these were vultures, materializing from the sky, eleven, twelve, nine, seven . . . soaring, vanishing, appearing, circling, playing with heights and distances and one another in their marvelous, calm, and never broken silence.


After a while they all drifted off back south toward the mountain, quiet lords of the warm towers of the air.


Walking up the road from Diamond after dinner, we heard way off across the fields the shrill, uncanny chorus, a coyote family. A nighthawk’s twang. Metal rattled loud where a hoof touched it in the effortless leap: the doe flitted off into twilight like a rolling-falling wave. Then, from the old, tall poplars hoarding darkness, voices spoke softly with complete authority. Under cloud, the red sun shone out, sank, was gone. The owls said nothing more. The old trees released their darkess finally.


On the Morning of the Fourth Day
Sunlight fills the open valley half a mile away, but here between the rimrocked ridges I sit in windy shadow; half an hour yet to wait on the lava doorstep, while the rain from yesterday’s thunder-shower drips from gutterless eaves onto my head and book, for the brightness over the dark bulk of the ridge to gather and center into the sun itself.


The big black cattle munch industrious on rain-gift grass just outside the wooden fence around the house. A peacock pulls his poor, slattern tail along through molting August, pride reduced to sapphire head and rajah’s crest and the brassy, meowing, melancholy jungle cry.


The banty rooster shrills: It-is-a-clarion-call! It-is-a-clarion-call! The big rooster exerts the unjustified superiority of a deeper voice. The hens pay no attention, scattering out, scudding along like sailboats over the grass. Now they begin to chatter, to gather back to the henyard: Gretchen has come out to scatter feed.


The contrail shines where it has each morning, drifting now steadily north and east to where the sun will rise. It slowly passes, iridescent, behind the ridge that darkens as the brightness grows.


It is risen. It is risen in beauty.


The reliable miracle, a couple of minutes later and a little farther south each day.


The lesser miracle, the brief transubstantiation of black lava into glimmering red-violet and blue-green light in my observing and delighted eyes, has occurred, is over. The rough black rock keeps its secret.


The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability. He is drawn to my orange tea mug.


The big black heavy cattle munch and breathe and gaze, each with its following of small black birds. All living things work hard to make their living.


I sit on the rough black steps and try to tell the secret that they keep. But I cannot.


They keep it.


In Molt


The peacock walks away
in pace of ceremony: step, and pause:
step, and pause:
a king to coronation, or beheading.
The single remnant of his glory
stripped bare, bone white,
trails behind him in the dirt.


 


On the Fifth Afternoon
Hundreds of blackbirds gathered in the pastures south of the house, vanishing completely in the tall grass, then rising out of it in ripples and billows, or streaming and streaming up into a single tree up under the ridge till its lower branches were blacker with birds than green with leaves, then flowing down away from it into the reeds and out across the air in a single, flickering, particulate wave. What is entity?


73. Walking through the Bottomland
This has been a prime week for unzipping political penises and seeing what they look like in public. In Paris Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been charged with “aggravated pimping,” which is legal French for encouraging, abetting, and exploiting prostitution. In New York Anthony Weiner has been busy sexting again, what a surprise! What a thrill! And — descending from these international heights of public lechery — here in Portland our county chairman and one of his subordinates left an email record of erotico-nepotism that has thoroughly screwed both her career and his.


Strauss-Kahn — I hope the arrogant old man feels his humiliation and understands the reason for it, though I doubt he can. Weiner appears to be far too deeply stupid to know what shame is. As for Jeff Cogen here in Portland, I feel a desolate disappointment, which is what drives me to write this piece.


The most promising local politician we had throws away his personal reputation and his sound career — for what? It doesn’t appear to have been love, but mere self-indulgence encouraged by ambition and a naïve sense of entitlement.


You have to ask, does any degree of power translate in a man’s mind into sexual license? Does giving people responsibility invite them to act irresponsibly?


His playmate, equally promising in her field, apparently felt as entitled to transgression; the tango was definitely a twosome. Women given power don’t often interpret it directly as privilege to fuck where they want — the power is usually less, and they’re likely to pay more, and more immediately, for the privilege. But women do of course use sex as rungs on the ladder of ambition.


Ms Manhas lost her job as soon as the story came out. Mr Cogen, though asked to resign by his fellow commissioners, has not done so. He says he wants to be judged by the law, not by public outcry. As the outcry has been relentlessly amplified by the local newspaper, he has a kind of point there. Portland has just survived a mayor who started out his term by having an affair with an underage intern, lying about it, and getting away with it. At least the county chairman and the health department manager are both adults, and so far, more or less, unperjured.


Maybe he can survive the scandal. Maybe we can have another tainted mayor. And then she, like his honor, will be just a casualty of his career.


But — but — what were they thinking? Did they imagine that emails and textings are secret? That privacy exists?


I guess they’ve been living where Anthony Weiner lives.


I wish the countries where we all live didn’t overlap so largely with that bottomland of imaginary entitlement and sordid, selfish folly.


“Sing me a melody, sing me the blues....”


— UKL 
29 July 2013


72. The Cat Letters
(obediently transcribed by Elisabeth and Ursula Le Guin)


Although incomplete, these letters are of great interest in revealing much concerning the Five Deliberations.


Though practiced openly and constantly by most cats, the actual nature of the Deliberations has remained obscure to most humans. Frederika’s revelation of them by name and her description of the practice to her correspondent Zorro is an epoch in our understanding of feline thought, and should clarify many mysteries of feline behavior.


At the time these letters were written, Zorro was about twelve, and had been in control of two humans in Portland, Oregon, for many years. Orphaned and abandoned as a kitten, he had had little or no teaching from elders of his kind, and had worked out a code of behavior of his own which was not always entirely satisfactory to himself or others. His epistolary friendship with Frederika was a great boon to him.


The growing bond between him and Opal was less intellectual, but of considerable interest also, particularly as regards their discussions of humping and biting.


Frederika, in middle age, was in full control of a single human, in West Hollywood, California. A somewhat troubling element had recently been introduced into her life in the person of Opal, a completely uneducated young cat, whose presence certainly caused Federika to call upon the spirit and practice of the Deliberations more actively than ever. But it is clear that Frederika was an adept, a true sage, ready to teach any who called upon her for teaching — as Zorro did, though Opal unfortunately did not.


There are no pictures currently available of the three correspondents. Zorro always wore tuxedo. Frederika still dresses in subtle and becoming grey; Opal favors a mixture of rather gaudy colors including orange, white, and black.


The opening letters of the correspondence have been lost. It ended, sadly, with Zorro’s death in 2011, only a few weeks after his last letter to Opal.


First Series — December 2010
Zorro to Opal and Frederika
Dear Opal and Frederika,


I wanted to tell you about the mouse I caught. I have let my humans catch the other mice, under the sink in the kitchen, because the mice have an escape hole there, but the humans have this box trap, and all I have to do is stand at the cabinet door and lash my tail and make my eyes into searchlights until they realise that there is a mouse in there and set the trap for it.


The mouse in the attic study was however more accessible to me and after long strategic planning I caught it by knocking over a wastebasket and a few other things in a prolonged, noise-producing, highly satisfying Chase Scene. I then brought it down to the front bedroom, where, naturally, I released it so it could play with me educationally. It played with me a little bit but then cheated and got down into the furnace grate and disappeared, which is unfair. They watched with great interest, I will say that for them, but I doubt they learned much. How can I teach them how to catch mice without traps if the mouse does not cooperate?


I ate the first mouse I ever caught and part of the second one but then decided that they are far more interesting and valuable educationally.


Wishing you asparagus, calves’ liver, and sufficient ham,


Your Friend at a Distance,


Z


__________


Frederika to Zorro
Dear Zorro,


Here in our big pink building we do not have mice. I have searched quite extensively. This is unfortunate, and I suspect foul play on the part of the humans. Opal clearly does not know what a mouse is; she is very young and ignorant; how is she to learn the basics???


There have however been birds on occasion. I remember with fondness the last, a young crow that I dismembered at leisure in the living room. The human living with me at that time was thoughtful enough to let me take all afternoon at it.* It is a pity Opal was not there at that time, it would have been a fine anatomy lesson.


However there have not been birds of late and so I have entered upon the practice of the Five Deliberations. I was in the preliminary phases when Opal arrived, apparently to stay. This was fortuitous, since her youthful abysmal ignorance and silliness have provided me with much opportunity to intensify my practice of the Second Deliberation.**


I have few complaints. For some reason Opal’s food tastes consistently better than my own, but this situation is easily remedied. Less easy to remedy is the Usual Human’s consistent unwillingness to arise for the 4 AM Snack required by all true Practicants; but I have found a particular spot to scratch on the headboard of the bed which usually effects a response.


When this is inefficacious, I have been known to lick the tip of her nose. There is, of course, no personal affection implied, consistent with the Foundational Deliberation.***


On this windy night I send you all due Crunchy Treats, and a dollop of half-and-half,


Frederika



	
(note from Human: this was my last tenant but one, Marianna, who wrote me about it while I was in Spain. She is an ardent vegan. She left the scene in dismay, and made her boyfriend clean it up.)




	
* Ignoring




	
** Reserve



__________


Opal to Zorro:
Grrrrrr, grrrrrr


—Opal


__________


Zorro to Frederika:
Dear Frederika,


I am deep in admiration concerning the crow. I had quite given up on birds since they have these stupid front leg sort of things (even worse than the humans’ “arms”) which they use to go up off into the air with. It is abnormal and unjust.


My mouse used the Furnace Vent Routes and is now on the ground floor, behind the stove. I spent most of the day crouching and lashing my tail at his exit route. I am glad that the humans have set their little trap there so that I can go up to the blue chair and go to sleeep, I have certainly earned it.


I should like to know more of the Deliberations.


I have certain Practices. One of them I think resembles your Headboard Scratching, but it is a little more direct; it consists of Head Scratching. When the Female Human is facing the wrong way in bed (lying on her left side) she needs to be rearranged, so I come and scratch the top of her head (quite gently, barely any claw extrusion at all) until she turns over and faces the correct direction (lying on her right side) so that I can lie down beside her pillow with my butt in her face and go to sleep.


Head Scratching is quite effective. Has never failed yet. You might try it.


Z.


__________


Zorro to Opal:
Dear Opal,


Hssssssssssssssss hsss.


Your Distant Friend,


Zorro


__________


Frederika to Zorro:
Dear Zorro,


Herewith the Five as I have been taught them. I hope that you find them useful.


1. Reserve (The Foundational Deliberation) A host of divergent translations reflect regional and philosophical variations: The Cat that Walks by Himself (Great Britain and former colonies); Self-Sufficiency (North America); Cat Tvam Asi (East Asia); and (among Japanese temple cats) Mu.


2. Ignoring.


3. The Warmth Asana (sometimes expressed as an equation, x = 1/b2, where x is the ambient temperature and b2 the amount of fur exposed to air). The physical calibrations required to maintain equilibrium can be enormously delicate in a mild climate such as that of my home.


4. Placement (Feng Shui). Finding the right place in which to practice, relative to current conditions (topography, temperature, astrological factors, misguided attempts at reading by humans).


5. Sameness. That things should be always the same goes without saying; maintaining Sameness in a world prone to lamentable irregularities that are out of our control (I need only mention the terrible Cat Carrier) is said to be the highest discipline of them all. In a certain sense the first four Deliberations can be considered preliminary to the Fifth.


I wish a satisfying outcome to your labors with the mouse.


— Frederika


__________


Opal to Zorro:
I like playing with human underwear, do you?


— Opal


__________


Zorro to Frederika:
Dear Frederika,


I deeply admire your formulation of the Five Deliberations. It is clear that you have acquired true wisdom. As it is said, Adversity is the Mother of Felinity. I wish you, if Perfect Sameness is unattainable, at least a monotonous Regularity perturbed only by the slightest variations, such as the occasional crow.


The mouse has not evidenced itself recently, so I have retired to the attic furnace grate, which is covered by a carpet which spreads the heat out nicely, thus facilitating the Third Deliberation, and is also near the blue chair where the human sits making those misguided attempts to read from which, by judicious exercise of the Fourth Deliberation, I can often save him.


Your Friend, remotely,


Zorro


__________


Zorro to Opal:
Dear Opal:


No. I like humping fleece things while going oww, wowww, do you?


Z.


__________


Opal to Zorro:
Dear Uncle Zorro,


Right now I am alone in my Private Place because I got mad at Auntie Fredi and said bad things.


She made me mad because she wanted to go on the human’s lap but so did I. This was Not Fair. And then she went up on a piece of furniture that was higher than me and looked down on me all superior the way she does. Her and her Deliberations, phhht. So I went in the middle of the floor and looked away from everybody and made my eyes all greeny and lashed my tail and said grrrr, grrrr, ooowwwwooo.


And then when the human put me in the Private Place I bit her. I am sorry for that part, but sometimes bites come out and have to be bitten.


But now I am feeling better and softer and when the human comes to the door she will bring me a treat because she always does.


What is humping?


—Opal


__________


Frederika to Zorro:
I forgot to mention a refinement to the Fourth Deliberation with which you are doubtless familiar; it concerns computers and tails. With practice, and constant delicate flicking adjustments, it is possible to cover a surprising number of the keys that the human wants to tap upon. This can often result in being invited, even if somewhat ungently, onto the Lap. That is where I currently reside.


—Fredi


P.S. Of course I do not look down on anyone even when I am superior to them. I am Ignoring; but the ignorant do not recognize this.


__________


Zorro to Opal:
Dear Young Opal,


You must not say phhht to your Aunt Fredi. Saying phhht is excessively kittenish and you are not a kitten any more. Consider, for example, that you have a Private Place, in which you may withdraw, or be withdrawn, to practice both the Foundational and the Great Fifth Deliberations at leisure. Kittens have no Private Places except momentarily inside cartons, drawers, cupboards, etc. and then another kitten or two or six always crowds in, rendering Reserve impossible and destroying all hope of Sameness. You are a fortunate young Cat and should behave as such.


I entirely understand and approve of your philosophy of bites. If I had not lost my lower fangs (when a foolish and trusting youth, I was attacked by a viciously unstable small end-table), my own practice of the custom would be even more effective than it is. I favor the wrist, which bleeds most satisfactorily, do you?


As for humping, I feel perhaps you should consult your Aunt on this subject. It concerns gender, about which I find my ideas not as clear as I should like them to be. I know that gender is what divides us into Toms and Queens, but having begun life ( I am quite certain) as a Tom kitten, I do not seem to be a Tom cat, yet am quite certain that I am not an old Queen. Perhaps fleece blankets and shirts do not have the peculiar fascination for you that they have for me, so I shall say no more about humping at this time.


I wish you excellent, crunchy, utterly undeserved treats.


Uncle Zorro


__________


Zorro to Frederika:
Dear Fredi,


Ah what poetry is in your saying: “I am Ignoring, but the ignorant do not recognise this.” I deeply sympathise with your being required to live with a young and ignorant companion. When I had a companion we were both young and ignorant. I bit him all the time. He never bit back, which was annoying, though I now understand it as showing that he was more advanced in the Foundational Deliberation than I. The good die young. Perhaps to you, an advanced Practicant, biting is on the same low order as saying phhht? I hope not, as I still truly enjoy a good lightning bite every now and then. I was glad to find, however, while I was carrying my mouse around, that my control was as good as ever; the mouse was entirely undamaged. And how did the humans receive this careful, thoughtful presentation, when it got up and ran off? With shrieks and lamentation! I shall never understand them.


May the food of Opal taste ever better to the Aunt of Opal.


And if, as I think may be, you are about to go into the House of Exile, may your time in the Horrible Carrier be brief, and may your mastery of all Five Deliberations make your time there pass like the dream of a winter's night.


Remotely,


Zorro


The Second Series of Letters, Jan-Feb 2011
Fredi to Zorro:
Dear Zorro,


There are things I do not understand.


My human is sitting (of which I approve). She has been sitting most of the day (better still). She is working with her tablet that vibrates and emits light and occasionally noises—I know you must know whereof I speak, these tablets seem to accompany most humans—and of course I help her. I keep her lap suitably warm, and when her tension level or my desire to snack rises beyond a certain level, I invoke Sameness distract her and reestablish balance. I am used to her sometimes irritable responses to this and I do not mind them because they always eventually result in my getting what I want.


All of this is well known. The part I do not understand is her consistent failure to understand and appreciate my artistic applications of the Fourth Deliberation tail techniques. Over time I have practiced the artistic tail placements designed to enhance the beauty and usefulness of any work surface, duly adapted to the tablet: Tip Rests on Delete Key; Delicately Brushing Trackpad; and so on.


Today, to honor her for spending such an unusually long time so nicely seated, I invoked the rare and exquisite Full Length Cross Keyboard Adornment. She was utterly unappreciative. Indeed I found myself summarily upon the floor, as if I were a mere kitten. I was quite offended...I wondered whether you had had any similar rebuffs and how you dealt with them.


Fredi


PS now however I am doing it again and she is letting me, by typing gently around and beneath my tail...perhaps progress can be made after all. Persistence and steadfastness are key.


__________


Zorro to Fredi, February 2011:
Dear Fredi,


Some time ago you wrote me a letter, which I apologise for not replying to sooner, concerning your human's odd behaviour in relation to your refined application of Fourth Deliberation Tail Technique.


I should shrug (if I had shoulders to shrug with) and dismiss this as typical human lack of appreciation of many applications of the Fourth Deliberation — such as their objection to one's gracefully sudden Placement between their face and a book or newspaper, their resistance to proper Bed Feng Shui arrangements, etc. — if it did not concern the tail.


I have a great interest in tail management. My tail is one of my best attributes. I carry it rather low, lion style. It is not full and fluffy, of course; I pride myself on my shorthair ancestry. It is very long, very black, very flexible, and I employ it with immense variety and eloquence.


My female has, I am happy to say, a quite admirable admiration of my tail, and distinctly appreciates its rhetorical and ornamental flourishes, as well as some of its subtler Placements, such as the slow draw across the cheek when napping, and the evanescent wrap about the leg when requesting treats.


Obviously, your tail, like mine, is faultless. Therefore I wonder if the problem is with the tablet, rather than with the tail?


The tablet is, I have come to believe, a very evil creature. It is not alive, but it definitely has powers — not crude ones, such as the horrible Vacuum Monster, which destroys one's self-possession by mere roaring and bellowing as it runs about — but subtle powers, to which the humans become deeply in thrall. It absorbs their energies in a strange way, leading them to ignore even Us.


I have found the wisest course to be total avoidance of the tablet. I do not set paw upon it even when it is shut up like a box. I do not attempt to sit upon the female when the tablet is casting its spell of vibrations, lights, and clicking noises on her. If I want something while she is under the tablet spell, I walk around and around her chair, using the delicate and charming evanescent tail wraps I mentioned above, leaning warmly against her legs, purring ostentatiously, looking up sweetly, etc.


If this does not work, and such is the malign power of the tablet, it often doesn't, then I unsheath. I begin to scratch alternately at her pants leg (very lightly) and on the wall next to her (rather loudly). I believe you use this latter technique on the headboard of her bed when she is violating Bed Feng Shui? It is quite effective, is it not? After a while she always hisses and gets up and goes downstairs to serve me my Soupy Supper so that I can ignore it for several hours before I eat it in the middle of the night.


You might try this form of Placement in order to obtain your wishes. But I am so sorry your female does not properly appreciate your tail. It is very sad.


Remotely Yours,


Zorro


__________


Zorro to Opal:
Dear Young Opal,


I don't know why it is, but you bring out something feral in me and so I have been wanting to ask you if you get violent impulses that overwhelm you so that you just go and do them?


The female human was petting my wonderfully thick, dense, silky, warm fur and I was purring away in full observation of the Third and Fifth Deliberations, when like lightning the desire to bite came upon me, and like lightning I bit.


I have only two fangs ever since the table attacked me, but they are extremely effective fangs. It was a forearm slash. She hissed furiously and swatted my elegant, slender backside quite hard. It was almost a cat reflex — but she can't unsheath, so it did no harm. I hissed back at her, leapt off the bed, and departed with dignity, while she was still hissing and bleeding. I felt good about the whole thing. Do you ever do anything like this?


I scarcely want to ask Fredi. I am sure she always observes the Deliberations, and I have a feeling that this behavior is, somehow, not quite in accord with any of them.


Blackly, Your


Uncle Zorro


 Ursula K. Le Guin 

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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
You can browse the archive by year here.
100. “A Book that Changed My Life”
 post 100.png 

There’s a magazine aimed at the people who used to be called old before that became the unspeakable and unprintable “o” word now replaced by blandnesses such as elderly, senior, feisty, and spry. This magazine approached me, I expect because I am a writer who is very [unspeakable and unprintable], to see if I’d write a short piece for them. I sent them the 200 words they asked for, but they never answered, and I realised I was glad they hadn’t, because my 200 words were no good.
The problem was their topic: “A book that changed my life.”
A book? One book?
When I was very little, books were read to me; then I started reading them; a while after that I started writing them. By now I’ve been reading and writing books for about eighty years, and every single one of them changed my life.
Well, I admit some of them didn’t change it very much. But you never can be sure what you take away with you from a book. Almost anything you read is likely to have the power to change, or to shape, your life.
Since almost any book can inform or misinform, enlighten or confuse, shrink or enlarge expectations, and directly or indirectly subvert conventional teachings or beliefs, The Powers that Be, political and religious, are always trying to control books by censorship, forbidding literacy to women, etc. Their distrust is justified. Nobody can guess how a person’s life or a people’s fate may be changed by one book, or one poem, or even a single sentence.
So in that sense, the magazine’s topic was a sound one. But for me, it was this can of worms the size of Arkansas. How the hell was I going to pick one book out of eighty years of reading books? One, out of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books that changed my life, every one of them in a different way?
So I wrote them 200 words of bleh, which went nowhere, thank goodness, and I forgot about it.
Then the Strand Bookstore in NYC asked me to do their monthly “author’s bookshelf.” The authors gets to pick 50 books, and they do their best to have copies of them all, set out on a sale table in their store.
Well, now that is a really nice idea. I thought I could do that.
Fifty isn’t very many books, by my lights, but at least it’s 49 more than one. And the only qualification was liking them, and I like a lot of books a whole lot. I got to fifty in about ten minutes. Actually, a lot more than fifty, because I cheated — with some authors, such as Virginia Woolf, I just said “anything she wrote” — simplifying life both for myself and for the Strand.
I tried to name books purely because I like (love) them. I consciously tried to avoid thinking about it, thinking that I should mention something because it had such an influence on me . . . No. People are always asking me What Books Influenced You? — a question I hate, because it’s the same problem as A Book That Changed Your Life.
What books didn’t influence me?
If only someone would ask that! I’ve been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom. I thought in all fairness I ought to try The Fountainhead. I gave up on page 10.
But that title reminds me of The Fountain, by Charles Morgan, a book that did have real influence on me when I was 22. Though I don’t now really know why, so it’s not among my fifty at the Strand. But it’s on my own shelf, for the piety or tenderness we have for something we loved long ago. So is D.H. Lawrence. So are many others I didn’t list.
By a semi-conscious decision, I left out almost all the kids’ books I have reread all my life. And most books not in English.
For some reason I had listed almost no fantasy and sf, when I realised I had my fifty, and more than fifty, and must stop. If I went on I would try to make the list complete, and there is no way it can, or should, be complete. There will always be one more book I forgot to mention. And there will be the book that I haven’t yet read but will read tomorrow and love. So I just stopped.
Here’s my original list. They’re not in any meaningful order. I’ve added a few books that I couldn’t bear to think weren’t included. But then again, I stopped. The beginning of wisdom is in knowing when to stop. Or maybe sometimes it’s in just stopping.
List of books sent to Strand Bookstore:
Virginia Woolf: whatever you have — novels, letters, the diary.
Jane Austen: all the novels
José Saramago: The Cave, Blindness, Seeing, The Stone Raft, The Elephant’s Journey, All the Names
Charles Dickens: Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Poetry (collections or selections): Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Yeats, Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Emily Bronte
Lucretius: The Nature of Things
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
Charles McNichols: Crazy Weather
Thomas Berger: Little Big Man
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Rudyard Kipling: Kim, Just So Stories (with Kipling’s illustrations), The Jungle Books (with his father’s illustrations), The Day’s Work
Lyov Tolstoy: War and Peace (in any of the older translations, not Pevear), Anna Karenina
Molly Gloss: The Jump-Off Creek, The Hearts of Horses, Falling From Horses
Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi
Added:
Poetry: A.E.Housman: Poems (how could I have not mentioned Housman!?)
J.R.R.Tolkien, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (ditto)
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees
Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia
Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog
— UKL 
15 June 2015
99. Up the Amazon with the BS Machine,
or
Why I keep Asking You Not to Buy Books from Amazon
Amazon and I are not at war. There are vast areas in which my peaceful indifference to what Amazon is and does can only be surpassed by Amazon’s presumably equally placid indifference to what I say and do. If you like to buy household goods or whatever through Amazon, that’s totally fine with me. If you think Amazon is a great place to self-publish your book, I may have a question or two in mind, but still, it’s fine with me, and none of my business anyhow. My only quarrel with Amazon is when it comes to how they market books and how they use their success in marketing to control not only bookselling, but book publication: what we write and what we read.
Best Seller lists have been around for quite a while. Best Seller lists are generated by obscure processes, which I consider (perhaps wrongly) to consist largely of smoke, mirrors, hokum, and the profit motive. How truly the lists of Best Sellers reflect popularity is questionable. Their questionability and their manipulability was well demonstrated during the presidential campaign of 2012, when a Republican candidate bought all the available copies of his own book in order to put it onto the New York Times Top Ten Best Seller List, where, of course, it duly appeared.
If you want to sell cheap and fast, as Amazon does, you have to sell big. Books written to be best sellers can be written fast, sold cheap, dumped fast: the perfect commodity for growth capitalism.
The readability of many best sellers is much like the edibility of junk food. Agribusiness and the food packagers sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we come to think that’s what food is. Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is.
I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese. Fortunately, I also know that many human beings have an innate resistance to baloney and a taste for quality rooted deeper than even marketing can reach.
If it can find its audience by luck, good reviews, or word of mouth, a very good book may become a genuine Best Seller. Witness Rebecca Skloot’s Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which for quite a while seemed to have immortal life among the Times Top Ten. And a few books work their way more slowly onto BS lists by genuine, lasting excellence — witness The Lord of the Rings, or Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories. Not products of the BS Machine, such books sell because people actually like them. Once they get into the BS Machine, they are of course treated as products of the BS Machine, that is, as commodities to exploit.
Making a movie of a novel is a both a powerful means of getting it into the BS Machine and a side-effect of being there. Like so many side-effects, it may outdo its cause. To many people the movie is the real thing, the book can be left unread. If the book has value as a book, however, and is kept in print, I have noticed with pleasure that in time the movie tends to become the shadow, while the book regains its substance, its reality, and continues to be read.
But you can’t buy and read a book that hasn’t been kept in print.
Consistent in its denial of human reality, growth capitalism thinks only in the present tense, ignores the past, and limits its future to the current quarter. To the BS machine, the only value of a book is its current salability. Growth of capital depends on rapid turnover, so the BS machine not only isn’t geared to allow for durability, but actually discourages it. Fading BSs must be replaced constantly by fresh ones in order to keep corporate profits up.
This fits well with a good deal of reader desire and expectation, since to many readers much of the value of a BS is that it’s new: everybody’s reading and talking about it.
Once it’s less read and talked about the BS is no longer a BS. Now it’s just a book. The machine has finished with it, and it can depend now only on its own intrinsic merit. If it has merit, reader loyalty and word of mouth can keep it selling enough to make it worth keeping in print for years, decades, even centuries.
The steady annual income of such books is what publishers relied on, till about twenty years ago, on to support the risk of publishing new books by untried authors, or good books by authors who generally sold pretty well but not very well.
That idea of publishing is almost gone, replaced by the Amazon model: easy salability, heavy marketing, super-competitive pricing, then trash and replace.
Any publisher willing to print a book that isn’t easy to market, or to keep books that sell modestly but steadily in print, is bucking this trend. Most of them are small houses. The few big publishers that now continue functioning at all under the deliberately destructive pressure of Amazon marketing strategies are increasingly controlled by that pressure, both in what they publish and how long they keep it in print. This pressure forbids them to value quality as well as salability, or to plan in terms of long-term sales.
And the independent booksellers that were and are the natural habitat of the non-best-selling book have been driven out of business — first by the chains that operated as part of the BS Machine, and now, decisively, by Amazon.
As a book dealer and publisher, Amazon wants no competitors, admits no responsibilities, and takes no risks.
Its ideal book is a safe commodity, a commercial product written to the specifications of the current market, that will hit the BS list, get to the top, and vanish. Sell it fast, sell it cheap, dump it, sell the next thing. No book has value in itself, only as it makes profit. Quick obsolescence, disposability — the creation of trash — is an essential element of the BS machine. Amazon exploits the cycle of instant satisfaction/endless dissatisfaction. Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
— UKL 
1 June 2015
98. Puzzle Personal Assistant
Annals of Pard XV
 Annals XV.jpg 

Pard Gives Charles Invaluable Assistance in the Jigsaw Department.
Photo by Moe Bowstern
—UKL 
11 May 2015
97. Utopiyin, Utopiyang
April 2015
These are some thoughts about utopia and dystopia.
The old, crude Good Places were compensatory visions of controlling what you couldn’t control and having what you didn’t have here and now—an orderly, peaceful heaven; a paradise of hours; pie in the sky. The way to them was clear, but drastic. You died.
Thomas More’s secular and intellectual construct Utopia was still an expression of desire for something lacking here and now—rational human control of human life—but his Good Place was explicitly No Place. Only in the head. A blueprint without a building site.
Ever since, utopia has been located not in the afterlife but just off the map, across the ocean, over the mountains, in the future, on another planet, a livable yet unattainable elsewhere.
Every utopia since Utopia has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgment, both a good place and a bad one. Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.
In the yang-yin symbol each half contains within it a portion of the other, signifying their complete interdependence and continual intermutability. The figure is static, but each half contains the seed of transformation. The symbol represents not a stasis but a process.
It may be useful to think of utopia in terms of this long-lived Chinese symbol, particularly if one is willing to forgo the usual masculinist assumption that yang is superior to yin, and instead consider the interdependence and intermutability of the two as the essential feature of the symbol.
Yang is male, bright, dry, hard, active, penetrating. Yin is female, dark, wet, easy, receptive, containing. Yang is control, Yin acceptance. They are great and equal powers; neither can exist alone, and each is always in process of becoming the other.
 
Both utopia and dystopia are often an enclave of maximum control surrounded by a wilderness—as in Butler’s Erewhon, E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Good citizens of utopia consider the wilderness dangerous, hostile, unlivable; to an adventurous or rebellious dystopian it represents change and freedom. In this I see examples of the intermutability of the yang and yin: the dark mysterious wilderness surrounding a bright, safe place, the Bad Places—which then become the Good Place, the bright, open future surrounding a dark, closed prison . . . Or vice versa.
In the last half century this pattern has been repeated perhaps to exhaustion, variations on the theme becoming more and more predictable, or merely arbitrary.
Notable exceptions to the pattern are Huxley’s Brave New World, a eudystopia in which the wilderness has been reduced to an enclave so completely dominated by the intensely controlled yang world-state that any hope of its offering freedom or change is illusory; and Orwell’s 1984, a pure dystopia in which the yin element has been totally eliminated by the yang, appearing only in the receptive obedience of the controlled masses and as manipulated delusions of wilderness and freedom.
Yang, the dominator, always seeks to deny its dependence on yin. Huxley and Orwell uncompromisingly present the outcome of successful denial. Through psychological and political control, these dystopias have achieved a nondynamic stasis that allows no change. The balance is immovable: one side up, the other down. Everything is yang forever.
Where is the yin dystopia? Is it perhaps in post-holocaust stories and horror fiction with its shambling herds of zombies, the increasingly popular visions of social breakdown, total loss of control—chaos and old night?
Yang perceives yin only as negative, inferior, bad, and yang has always been given the last word. But there is no last word.
At present we seem only to write dystopias. Perhaps in order to be able to write a utopia we need to think yinly. I tried to write one in Always Coming Home. Did I succeed?
Is a yin utopia a contradiction in terms, since all the familiar utopias rely on control to make them work, and yin does not control? Yet it is a great power. How does it work?
I can only guess. My guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth.
96. Addendum to “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”
From: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/08/kazuo-ishiguro-rebuffs-genre-snobbery
At a Guardian event held at the Royal Institution in London on Sunday, Ishiguro said that veteran author Ursula K. Le Guin was “a little bit hasty in nominating me as the latest enemy for her own agenda,” after she had written a blog post accusing him of “despising” the fantasy genre.
“I think she wants me to be the new Margaret Atwood,” he said, referring to the criticism the Canadian author and poet has received from Le Guin for distinguishing her writing as “speculative fiction” and for saying science fiction was about “talking squids in outer space”.
“If there is some sort of battle line being drawn for and against ogres and pixies appearing in books, I am on the side of ogres and pixies,” he said. “I had no idea this was going to be such an issue. Everything I read about [The Buried Giant], it’s all ‘Oh, he’s got a dragon in his book’ or ‘I so liked his previous books but I don’t know if I’ll like this one’.
“[Le Guin]’s entitled to like my book or not like my book, but as far as I am concerned, she’s got the wrong person. I am on the side of the pixies and the dragons.”
I am delighted to let Mr Ishiguro make his own case, and to say I am sorry for anything that was hurtful in my evidently over-hasty response to his question “Will they think this is fantasy?”
I still don’t quite understand why he asked it, but I only questioned it because it appeared to me to be drawing the kind of “battle line” that he deplores.
Indeed I wish I hadn’t flown off the handle at what I took for a sneer at the literature of fantasy, offending him so that I suppose he and I will never be able to discuss such issues as his remarks make me long to ask him about. For instance: If I said I was “on the side of” dragons, but not really “on the side of” pixies, would that interest him at all? Would he be interested in talking about the various definitions of the word “fantasy” as inclusive of most imaginative literature (as I use the word), or as limited to a modern commercial development in fiction and the media (as I think he was using the word)?
I certainly had no intention of nominating Mr Ishiguro as “the latest enemy for my own agenda,” and regret very much that my clumsiness led him to take my words so much amiss. I have no agenda that I’m conscious of, and I certainly don’t want to nominate any enemies (and least of all Margaret Atwood, whom I have long been honored to consider a wonderfully unpredictable, admirable friend). My enemies must nominate themselves; I have no interest at all in making, finding, or knowing them.
Many sites on the Internet were quick to pick up my blog post, describing it as an “attack”, a “slam”, etc. They were hot on the scent for blood, hoping for a feud. I wonder how many will pick up this one?
— UKL 
10 March 2015
95. “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”
Kazuo Ishiguro talked to interviewer Alexandra Alter (NYT 20 Feb 15) about his forthcoming novel The Buried Giant, which takes place in a non-historic just-post-Arthurian England. Everybody there has lost most of their longterm memory, due to the influence of the breath of a dragon named Querig.
Ogres and other monsters roam the land, but Querig just sleeps and exhales forgetfulness, until a pair of elderly Britons with the singularly unBriton names of Beatrice and Axl arrive with the knight Gawain and a poisoned goat to watch a Saxon named Wistan kill Gawain and then slice the head off the sleeping dragon. Beatrice and Axl wander on in search of their son, who they now remember may be dead, until Beatrice falls asleep in the boat of a mysterious boatman who rows her off to a mysterious island while Axl wanders back inland.
A wild country inhabited by monsters, an old couple who must leave their home without knowing exactly why, a sense that important things have been, perhaps must be, forgotten . . . Such images and moods could well embody a story about the approach of old age to death, and indeed I think that is at least in part the subject of the book. But so generic a landscape and such vague, elusive perceptions must be brought to life by the language of the telling. The whole thing is made out of words, after all. The imaginary must be imagined, accurately and with scrupulous consistency. A fantastic setting requires vivid and specific description; while characters may lose touch with their reality, the storyteller can’t. A toneless, inexact language is incapable of creating landscape, meaningful relationship, or credible event. And the vitality of characters in a semi-historical, semi-fanciful setting depends on lively, plausible representation of what they do and how they speak. The impairment of the characters’ memory in this book may justify the aimlessness of their behavior and the flat, dull quality of the dialogue, but then how is it that Axl never, ever, not once, forgets to address his wife as “princess”? I came to wish very much that he would.
Mr Ishiguro said to the interviewer, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”
Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?
It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.
To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
‘Surface elements,’ by which I take it he means ogres, dragons, Arthurian knights, mysterious boatmen, etc., which occur in certain works of great literary merit such as Beowulf, the Morte d’Arthur, and The Lord of the Rings, are also much imitated in contemporary commercial hackwork. Their presence or absence is not what constitutes a fantasy. Literary fantasy is the result of a vivid, powerful, coherent imagination drawing plausible impossibilities together into a vivid, powerful and coherent story, such as those mentioned, or The Odyssey, or Alice in Wonderland.
Familiar folktale and legendary ‘surface elements’ in Mr Ishiguro’s novel are too obvious to blink away, but since he is a very famous novelist, I am sure reviewers who share his prejudice will never suggest that he has polluted his authorial gravitas with the childish whims of fantasy.
Respect for his readers should assure him that, whatever the book is, they will honestly try to follow him and understand what he was trying to do.
I respect what I think he was trying to do, but for me it didn’t work. It couldn’t work. No writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre — far less its profound capacities — for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it. I found reading the book painful. It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, “Are they going say I’m a tight-rope walker?”
— UKL 
2 March 2015
94. The Saga of the Mice, Continued
January 2015
Annals of Pard XIV
We were reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring aloud before dinner last night when Pard came trotting through the living room in an uncharacteristically feral way: body low to the ground, tail down, head poised, eyes all black pupil. And sure enough, a small mouse in his mouth. He put it down, let it go, recaught it, and trotted on back to the kitchen, the tiny black tail hanging out of his mouth. We went on grimly with Penelope. After a while Pard came back, mouseless, and looking clueless. He wandered off, and we decided, or hoped, he’d lost the mouse.
Just as we were about to do the dishes he reappeared with it. It was now distinctly less active, but still alive. Pard was confused, troubled, and purposeless, as he always is when he has caught a mouse: totally possessed by the instinctive command to hunt, to catch, to bring the catch to the family as trophy or toy or food, but lacking any instinct or instruction as to how to follow through to the kill.
A cat with a mouse—the cliché example of cruelty. I want to say clearly that I do not believe any animal is capable of being cruel. Cruelty implies consciousness of another’s pain and the intent to cause it. Cruelty is a human specialty, which human beings continue to practice, and perfect, and institutionalize, though we seldom boast about it. We prefer to disown it, calling it “inhumanity,” ascribing it to animals. We don’t want to admit the innocence of the animals, which reveals our guilt.
It’s possible that I could have caught the mouse and taken it outside to spare it some suffering. (Charles couldn’t, because after an operation a little while ago he’s forbidden to stoop down.) I didn’t even try. To do it, I’d have to be highly motivated, and I’m not. I feel neither guilty nor ashamed of that, only unhappy about the whole situation.
I’ve never been able to come between a cat and its prey. When I was twelve or so our tomcat caught a sparrow on the lawn. Two of my brothers and my father were there. All three shouted at the cat, tried to get the bird away from it, and succeeded, in a cloud of feathers and confusion. I recall clearly, because I was clearly aware of my own feelings at the time, my refusal to join the shouting and scolding and scrambling. I disapproved. I thought the matter was between the bird and the cat and we had no business interfering with it. This may appear very cold-blooded, and perhaps it is. There are certain other matters of life and death toward which I have a similarly instant, absolute, imperative response—it is right to do this, or it is wrong to do this—which is not affected by personal preference or tenderness, has nothing to do with the reasonings of conscience, and cannot be justified by the arguments of ordinary morality. But neither can it be shaken by them.
Our feeble solution to Pard and the mouse’s problem was to shut them into the kitchen, leaving them to work it out in their own way. (And the dishes to be done in the morning.) What the mouse needed was to find the hole he’d come in by. Pard’s box is in the kitchen porch and his water bowl on the kitchen floor, so Pard had all he needed. Plus his problem.
And minus us. He is a very human-dependent cat. He’s almost always unobtrusively nearby. Fits of flying about at eye level, wreaking sudden havoc on bedspreads, galloping madly up flights of stairs, and bouncing backward stiff-legged and humpbacked with enormous tail and glaring eyes down the hall ahead of you for no reason occur now and then, but mostly he’s just quietly somewhere near one or the other of us. Keeping an eye on us, or sleeping. (Right now he’s conked out on his beloved Moebius scarf right next to the Time Machine, about 18 inches from my right elbow.) Nights he almost always spends on my bed around the vicinity of my knees.
So I knew I’d miss him last night and he’d miss me. And we did. I got up to pee at around 2 a.m. and could just hear him weeping softly down in the kitchen. All the way home from the Humane Society in the carrier, he meowed and yowled lustily, but since then he’s never raised his voice. Even when shut by mistake in the basement, he just stands at the door and cries, softly, Meew? till somebody happens to hear him.
I steeled my heart, went back to bed, and felt bad till 3:30.
In the morning getting dressed I heard Meew? again, so I dressed fast, hurried down, and opened the kitchen door. There was Pard, still puzzled, still anxious, but tail in the air to greet me and breakfast.
There was no mouse.
These chapters of the saga almost always end now in mystery. An unhappy mystery.
A result, maybe, of the only partly worked-out relationship between two immensely different ways of being, the human and the feline. Wild cat and wild mouse have a clear, highly developed, well-understood connection—predator and prey. But Pard’s and his ancestors’ relationship with human beings has interfered with his instincts, confusing that fierce clarity, half taming it, leaving him and his prey in an unsatisfactory, unhappy place.
People and dogs have been shaping each other’s character and behavior for 30,000 years. People and cats have been working at transforming each other for only a tenth that long. We’re still in the early stages. Maybe that’s why it’s so interesting.
 
Oh, but I forgot the weird part! After I’d hurried downstairs this morning, as I got to the kitchen door, I saw a triangle of white on the floor under it, a piece of paper. A message had been shoved under the door.
I stood and stared at it.
Was it going to say “Please let me out” in Cat?
I picked it up and saw a friend’s telephone number scribbled in pencil. The scrap of paper had fallen off the telephone table in the kitchen hall. Pard was still saying Meew? very politely behind the door. So I opened it. And we had our reunion.
93. Pard’s Christmas, 2014
Annals of Pard XIII
 Annals XIII-1.jpeg 

What’s Under the Tree?
 Annals XIII-2.png 

Helping Charles Unwrap. (Click for video.)
 Annals XIII-3.png 

It’s Been so Exciting, I’m Tired and Going to Take a Bath. (Click for video.)
Pard’s New Year Greeting:
So here’s a paw, my trusty friend, 
And gie’s a paw o’ thine! 
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet 
For auld lang syne.
— UKL 
5 January 2015
 Annals XIII-4.jpg 

92. Knowing a Book by its Cover
This is the front cover of a new translation of one of my books. I want to report as truthfully as I can my first response to it:
I looked, I liked, and (since I couldn’t read the title) I wondered: Which book is it? What language? I must have forgotten that I had something coming out in Africa? or maybe India?
I looked inside, and saw it was Four Ways to Forgiveness, published in Finland.
The publisher is Vaskikirjat. I’d like to credit the translator and the cover artist, but since Finnish is a language of which I don’t know and can’t even guess at a single word, I don’t know who is which: (Käännös) Jyrki Iivonen, (Kansi) Jani Laatikainen, or (Taitto) Erkka Leppänen. In any case, my thanks to all.
Now I wish I knew if you, Reader, were as surprised as I was to find this is the cover of a book printed in Finland. And if you, like me, are a little horrified by your own surprise — but not surprised at it.
Finland is a nation of about 5 million people. As well as I can figure from the statistics, about 99% of this population is white.
The US is a nation of about 316 million people, of whom around 77% are or consider themselves white.
I believe everybody in Four Ways to Forgiveness is some shade of brown except for those described as black, and the slave population of Yeowe, contemptuously called “dusties,” who are a sort of pale greige. In most of my books, a minority of the characters, or none, are specified as white, while major characters or whole populations are described as dark-skinned.
With very rare exceptions, the cover art of my books in both America and England has utterly ignored specific descriptions in the text and portrayed the characters as white. Often strikingly white — pallid North European types — Finnish, maybe . . .
Many readers believe that writers get to choose the covers of their books. In traditional publishing, it’s a lucky author who even gets a look at the cover before the book comes out. Some of us who have gained a little clout get a clause in the contract that gives us cover approval, but our approval is ”not to be unreasonably withheld.”
Guess who gets to define “unreasonable”?
I’ve fought the blonde bimbos and the hairy-chested, blue-eyed Aryan heroes tooth and nail for forty years. Over and over I have been utterly defeated. Publisher’s cover departments are patronizing and impenetrable. We know what sells, they say. Covers with people of color on them don’t sell.
Cover departments are always absolutely certain that they know what sells. Blind certainty is a hard thing to overcome, particularly when it’s silently supported by a comfortably unquestioning acceptance of racial prejudice.
And so in a way it’s self-fulfilling, for if no one in America ever sees a book with a person of color on the cover, a book with a person of color on it may look quite strange, unfriendly, to something like 77% of possible American readers . . .Oh it’s something about Them, it isn’t about Us, I only want to read about Us.
Dear Finnish publisher and artist, I praise your spirit and thank you for giving my book this joyous and appropriate presentation.
May the publishers presenting my books in my own country look at it and take thought, and take courage from it too. It’s true, what this painting shows: if we bring the good spirit to the dance, we can dance together. There might even be a Forgiveness Day.
—UKL 
8 December 2014
91. The Inner Child and the Nude Politician
October 2014
Last summer a company that makes literary T-shirts asked me for permission to use a quote:
“The creative adult is the child who survived.”
I looked at the sentence and thought, Did I write that sentence? I think I wrote something like it. But I hope not that sentence. Creative is not a word I use much since it was taken over by corporationthink. And isn’t any adult a child who survived?
So I Googled the sentence. I got lots of hits, and boy were some of them weird. In many of them the sentence is ascribed to me, but no reference to a source is ever given.
The weirdest one is at a site called quotes-clothing.com:
MY DEAR,
The creative adult is the child who survived.
The creative adult is the child who survived after the world tried killing them, making them “grown up.” The creative adult is the child who survived the blandness of schooling, the unhelpful words of bad teachers, and the nay-saying ways of the world.
The creative adult is in essence simply that, a child.
Falsely yours,
URSULA LEGUIN
The oddest part of this little orgy of self-pity is “Falsely yours,” which I take to be a coy semiconfession of forgery by whoever actually wrote the rant.
I’ve looked through my own essays for the sentence that could have been used or misused for the quote, because I still have a feeling there is one. So far I haven’t found it. I asked my friends in an sf chat group if it rang any bell with them—some of them being scholars, with a keen nose for provenience—but none of them could help. If anybody reading this has a theory about the origin of the pseudo-quote, or better yet a Eureka! with volume and page citation, would you please post it as a response at BVC? Because it’s been bothering me ever since June.[1]
The sentence itself, its use and popularity, bothers me even more. Indifference to what words actually say; willingness to accept a vapid truism as a useful, even revelatory concept; carelessness about where a supposed quotation comes from—that’s all part of what I like least about the Internet. A “blah blah blah, who cares, information is what I want it to be” attitude—a lazy-mindedness that degrades both language and thought.
But deeper than that lies my aversion to what the sentence says to me: that only the child is alive and creative—so that to grow up is to die.
To respect and cherish the freshness of perception and the vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood is one thing. But to say that we experience true being only in childhood and that creativity is an infantile function—that’s something else.
I keep meeting this devaluation of growing up in fiction, and also in the cult of the Inner Child.
 
There’s no end of books for children whose hero is a rebellious misfit—the boy or girl (usually described as plain, and almost predictably red-haired) who gets into trouble by questioning or resisting or ignoring The Rules. Every young reader identifies with this kid, and rightly. In some respects, to some extent, children are victims of society: they have little or no power; they aren’t given the chance to show what’s in them.
And they know it. They love reading about taking power, getting back at bullies, showing their stuff, getting justice. They want to do so so that they can grow up, claim independence in order to take responsibility.
But there’s a literature written for both kids and adults in which human society is reduced to the opposition Kids Good/Creative, Adults Bad/Dead Inside. Here the child heroes are not only rebellious but are in all ways superior to their hidebound, coercive society and the stupid, insensitive, mean-minded adults that surround them. These heroes may find friendship with other children, and understanding from a wise, grandparently type of another skin color or from people marginal to or outside their society. But they have nothing to learn from adults of their own people, and those elders have nothing to teach them. Such a child is always right, and wiser than the adults who repress and misunderstand him. Yet the super-perceptive, wise child is helpless to escape. He is a victim. Holden Caulfield is a model of this child. Peter Pan is his direct ancestor.
Tom Sawyer has something in common with this kid, and so does Huck Finn, but Tom and Huck are not sentimentalized or morally oversimplified, nor do they consent to be victims. They are described with, and have, a powerful sense of ironic humor, which affects the crucial issue of self-pity. The coddled Tom loves to see himself as cruelly oppressed by meaningless laws and obligations, but Huck, a real victim of personal and social abuse, has no self-pity at all. Both of them, however, fully intend to grow up, to take charge of their own lives. And they will—Tom no doubt as a successful pillar of his society, Huck a freer man, out there in the Territories.
It seems to me the Super-Perceptive Child Victim of Self-Pity has something in common with the Inner Child: they’re lazy. It’s so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one.
 
The idea that we all contain an Inner Child who has been suppressed by our society, the belief that we should cultivate this Inner Child as our true self and that we can depend upon it to release our creativity, seems an overreductive statement of an insight expressed by many wise and thoughtful people—among them Jesus: “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Some mystics and many great artists, aware of drawing on their childhood as a deep source of inspiration, have spoken of the need to maintain an unbroken inner connection between the child and the adult in one’s own inward life.
But to reduce this to the idea that we can open a mental door from which our imprisoned Inner Child will pop out and teach us how to sing, dance, paint, think, pray, cook, love, etc. . . . ?
A very wonderful statement of the necessity, and the difficulty, of maintaining a connection to one’s own child-self is Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” The poem offers a profoundly felt, profoundly thoughtful, radical argument:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting . . .
Instead of seeing birth as an awakening from blank nonbeing and fetal incompletion into the child’s fullness of being, and seeing maturity as a narrowing, impoverishing journey toward blank death, the ode proposes that a soul enters life forgetting its eternal being, can remember it throughout life only in intimations and moments of revelation, and will recall and rejoin it fully only in death.
Nature, says Wordsworth, offers us endless reminders of the eternal, and we are most open to them in our childhood. Though we lose that openness in adult life, when “custom” lies upon us “with a weight/heavy as frost, and deep almost as life,” still we can keep faith with
Those shadowy recollections,
        Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
        Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake
        To perish never.
I cherish this testimony particularly because it need not be seen as rising from the belief system of any religion. Believer and freethinker can share this vision of human existence passing from light through darkness into light, from mystery to endless mystery.
In this sense, the innocence, the unjudging, unqualified openness to experience of the young child, can be seen as a spiritual quality attainable or reattainable by the adult. And I think this is what the idea of the Inner Child originally, or optimally, is all about.
But Wordsworth makes no sentimental plea to us to nourish the child we were by denying the value of maturity or by trying to be a child again. However conscious we are of the freedom and awareness and joyfulness we lose as we age, we live a full human life not by stopping at any stage but by becoming all that is in us to become.
        Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death;
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
(If, like me, you look at that word soothing in surprise, wondering how thoughts of human suffering can be soothing, perhaps you will feel as I do that such wonder is a key—a sign that the poet’s direct language contains immensely more than its apparent clarity reveals at first, that nothing he says in this poem is simple, and that though it’s easily understood, any understanding of it may lead on, if followed, to further understanding.)
The cult of the Inner Child tends to oversimplify what Wordsworth leaves complex, close off what he leaves open, and make oppositions where there are none. The child is good—therefore the adult is bad. Being a kid is great—so growing up is the pits.
Sure enough, growing up isn’t easy. As soon as they can toddle, babies are bound to toddle into trouble. Wordsworth had no illusions about that: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/upon the growing Boy . . .” The transition to adulthood, adolescence, is difficult and dangerous, recognized as such by many cultures—all too often in punitive ways such as cruel male initiation rites, or the brutal eradication of adolescence in girls by marrying them off as soon as they menstruate.
I see children as unfinished beings who have been given a very large job to do. Their job is to become complete, to fulfill their potential: to grow up. Most of them want to do this job and try their level best to do it. All of them need adult help in doing it. This help is called “teaching.”
Teaching can of course go wrong, be restrictive, not educative, be stultifying, cruel. Everything we do can be done wrong. But to dismiss teaching as a mere repression of childish spontaneity is a monstrous injustice to every patient parent and teacher in the world since the Old Stone Age, and denies both children’s right to grow up and their elders’ responsibility to help them do so.
Children are by nature, by necessity, irresponsible, and irresponsibility in them, as in puppies or kittens, is part of their charm. Carried into adulthood it becomes a dire practical and ethical failing. Uncontrolled spontaneity wastes itself. Ignorance isn’t wisdom. Innocence is wisdom only of the spirit. We can and do all learn from children, all through our life; but “become as little children” is a spiritual counsel, not an intellectual, practical, or ethical one.
In order to see that our emperors have no clothes on, do we really have to wait for a child to say so? Or even worse, wait for somebody’s Inner Brat to pipe up? If so, we’re in for a lot of nude politicians.
[1] Welcome responses to this blog post on Book View Café soon gave me both the sentence I wrote and a possible source of the misquotation. In the 1974 essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” (reprinted in the collection The Language of the Night), I wrote: “I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.” Nothing about “creativity” whatever. I was just hitting at the notion that maturity is mere loss or betrayal of childhood. The misquote may have first appeared on the Internet in 1999, in a huge and generally useful collection of quotations compiled by Professor Julian F. Fleron. When I wrote him, he was distressed to learn that it was a misquote, and most amiably removed it at once. But a false attribution on the Internet is like box elder beetles—the miserable little things just keep breeding and tweeting and crawling out of the woodwork. I checked just now (July 2016): Goodreads and AIGA continue to attribute the “creative adult” misquote to me. It has also taken on an independent existence, and is even referred by one source as “the well-known saying.” Oh well!
90. Catching Up, Ha Ha
October 2014
It’s been two months since I blogged. Considering that I am on the eve of my 85th birthday and that anyone over 75 who isn’t continuously and conspicuously active is liable to be considered dead, I thought I should make some signs of life. Wave from the grave, as it were. Hello, out there! How are things in the Land of Youth? Here in the Land of Age they are rather weird.
The weirdness includes being called a liar by Hugh Woolly, the famous self-publisher of How, because I was rude to amazondotcom, the famous philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting publishers, encouraging writers, and greasing the skids of the American Dream. Various other weirdnesses have arisen in my life as a writer, some quite enjoyable. But the important and dominant weirdness of life this autumn consists of not having a car—a condition that to a lot of people is the American Nightmare.
We do have our nice Subaru, but we can’t drive it. I never could. I learned to drive in 1947 but didn’t get a license, for which I and all who know me are grateful. I’m one of those pedestrians who start to cross the street, scuttle back to the curb for no reason, then suddenly leap out in front of your car just as you get into the intersection. I am the cause of several near accidents and a great deal of terrible swearing. It’s awful to think what I might have done armed with an automobile. In any case, I don’t drive. And since August, sciatic pain from stenosis keeps Charles from driving, and from walking much at all. I can walk (I have the same thing he has, fortunately much less severely), but after a few blocks I go lame on the left hind. We’re 10 steep blocks from our co-op market. So we’ve lost the liberty our legs or the car gave us to pop out and get what we needed when we needed it.
It’s a wonderful freedom, much missed. I’ve had to go back to the routine of my childhood, when we did the shopping once a week. No running down to see what looks fresh and good for dinner or to pick up a quart of milk—everything has to be planned ahead and written down. If you don’t get the cat litter on Tuesday, well, you don’t have any cat litter till next Tuesday, and the cat may have some questions for you.
There’s no hardship about shopping this way; in fact I look forward to it, since my friend Moe takes me, and is a really good, intense shopper who notices bargains and things. But still it’s tiresome always having to think about it instead of just doing it.
Just do it!—the motto for those who run 20 miles every morning in swoosh-covered shoes, the mantra of undelayed gratification. Yeah, well. Charles and I do better with Sí, se puede. Or, with Gallic philosophy, On y arrive.
As for doctors’ appointments, one of the finest paradoxes of senility is that the oftener you have to go to the doctor, the harder it is to get there. And haircuts! Now I know how the world looks to those little dogs with the bangs all over their eyes. It looks hairy.
All in all, the main effect of being inordinately old and carless is that there’s even less time to do things other than what has to be done than there was before. Keeping up with answering letters, and writing blog posts, and getting the books in the basement organized, and a whole slew of things like that all get put on the back burner—which may or may not be functioning, as we have had the stove since 1960.
But you know, they don’t make stoves like that anymore.
89b. About Anger
October 2014
ii. Private Anger
I’ve been talking about what might be called public anger, political anger. But I went on thinking about the subject as a personal experience: getting mad. Being angry. And I find the subject very troubling, because though I want to see myself as a woman of strong feeling but peaceable instincts, I have to realize how often anger fuels my acts and thoughts, how very often I indulge in anger.
I know that anger can’t be suppressed indefinitely without crippling or corroding the soul. But I don’t know how useful anger is in the long run. Is private anger to be encouraged?
Considered a virtue, given free expression at all times, as we wanted women’s anger against injustice to be, what would it do?
Certainly an outburst of anger can cleanse the soul and clear the air. But anger nursed and nourished begins to act like anger suppressed: it begins to poison the air with vengefulness, spitefulness, distrust, breeding grudge and resentment, brooding endlessly over the causes of the grudge, the righteousness of the resentment. A brief, open expression of anger in the right moment, aimed at its true target, is effective—anger is a good weapon. But a weapon is appropriate to, justified only by, a situation of danger. Nothing justifies cowing the family every night with rage at the dinner table, or using a tantrum to settle the argument about what TV channel to watch, or expressing frustration by tailgating and then passing on the right at 80 mph yelling FUCK YOU!
Perhaps the problem is this: when threatened, we pull out our weapon, anger. Then the threat passes or evaporates. But the weapon is still in our hand. And weapons are seductive, even addictive; they promise to give us strength, security, dominance . . .
 
Looking for positive sources or aspects of my own anger, I recognized one: self-respect. When slighted or patronized, I flare up in fury and attack, right then, right there. I have no guilt about that.
But then so often it turns out to have been a misunderstanding—the disrespect was not intended, or was mere clumsiness perceived as a slight. And even if it was intended, so what?
As my great-aunt Betsy said of a woman who snubbed her, “I pity her poor taste.”
Mostly my anger is connected less with self-respect than with negatives: jealousy, hatred, fear.
Fear, in a person of my temperament, is endemic and inevitable, and I can’t do much about it except recognize it for what it is and try not to let it rule me entirely. If I’m in an angry mood and aware of it, I can ask myself, So what is it you’re afraid of? That gives me a place to look at my anger from. Sometimes it helps get me into clearer air.
Jealousy sticks its nasty yellow-green snout mostly into my life as a writer. I’m jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I’m contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them—if I don’t like their writing. I’d like to kick Ernest Hemingway for faking and posturing when he had the talent to succeed without faking. I snarl at what I see as the unending overestimation of James Joyce. The enshrinement of Philip Roth infuriates me. But all this jealous anger happens only if I don’t like what they write. If I like a writer’s writing, praise of that writer makes me happy. I can read endless appreciations of Virginia Woolf. A good article about José Saramago makes my day. So evidently the cause of my anger isn’t so much jealousy or envy as, once again, fear. Fear that if Hemingway, Joyce, and Roth really are The Greatest, there’s no way I can ever be very good or very highly considered as a writer—because there’s no way I am ever going to write anything like what they write or please the readers and critics they please.
The circular silliness of this is self-evident; but my insecurity is incurable. Fortunately, it operates only when I read about writers I dislike, never when I’m actually writing. When I’m at work on a story, nothing could be farther from my mind than anybody else’s stories, or status, or success.
Anger’s connection with hatred is surely very complicated, and I don’t understand it at all, but again fear seems to be involved. If you aren’t afraid of someone or something threatening or unpleasant, you can as a rule despise it, ignore it, or even forget it. If you fear it, you have to hate it. I guess hatred uses anger as fuel. I don’t know. I don’t really like going to this place.
What I am coming away from it with, though, seems to be a pervasive idea that anger is connected with fear.
My fears come down to fear of not being safe (as if anyone is ever safe) and of not being in control (as if I ever was in control). Does the fear of being unsafe and not in control express itself as anger, or does it use anger as a kind of denial of the fear?
One view of clinical depression explains it as sourced in suppressed anger. Anger turned, perhaps, against the self, because fear—fear of being harmed, and fear of doing harm—prevents the anger from turning against the people or circumstances causing it.
If so, no wonder a lot of people are depressed, and no wonder so many of them are women. They are living with an unexploded bomb.
So how do you defuse the bomb, or when and how can you explode it safely, even usefully?
A psychologist once informed my mother that a child should not be punished in anger. To be useful, he said, punishment must be administered calmly, with a clear and rational explanation to the child of the cause of punishment. Never strike a child in anger, he said.
“It sounded so right,” my mother said to me. “But then I thought—was he telling me to hit a kid when I’m not angry?”
This was shortly after my daughter Caroline, a sweet-natured, affectionate two-year-old, came up to me while the family was sitting around on the terrace outside my parents’ house; she smiled up at me rather uncertainly and bit me hard on the leg.
My left arm swung out in full backhand and knocked her away like a fly. She was unhurt, but enormously surprised.
There were then, of course, many tears, many hugs, many consolations. There were no apologies on either side. I got guilty about hitting her only later. “That was terrible,” I said to my mother. “I didn’t think! I just whacked her!”
My mother then told me about what the psychologist had told her. And she said, “When your brother Clifton was two, he bit me. And he kept doing it. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I shouldn’t punish him. Finally I just blew up, I slapped him. He was so surprised, like Caroline. I don’t think he even cried. And he stopped biting.”
If there is a moral to this tale, I don’t know what it is.
 
I see in the lives of people I know how crippling a deep and deeply suppressed anger is. It comes from pain, and it causes pain.
Maybe the prolonged “festival of cruelty” going on in our literature and movies is an attempt to get rid of repressed anger by expressing it, acting it out symbolically. Kick everybody’s ass all the time! Torture the torturer! Describe every agony! Blow up everything over and over!
Does this orgy of simulated or “virtual” violence relieve anger, or increase the leaden inward load of fear and pain that causes it? For me, the latter; it makes me sick and scares me. Anger that targets everything and everybody indiscriminately is the futile, infantile, psychotic rage of the man with an automatic rifle shooting preschoolers. I can’t see it as a way of life, even pretended life.
You hear the anger in my tone? Anger indulged rouses anger.
Yet anger suppressed breeds anger.
What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?
89a. About Anger
October 2014
i. Saeva indignatio
In the consciousness-raising days of the second wave of feminism, we made a big deal out of anger, the anger of women. We praised it and cultivated it as a virtue. We learned to boast of being angry, to swagger our rage, to play the Fury.
We were right to do so. We were telling women who believed they should patiently endure insults, injuries, and abuse that they had every reason to be angry. We were rousing people to feel and see injustice, the methodical mistreatment to which women were subjected, the almost universal disrespect of the human rights of women, and to resent and refuse it for themselves and for others. Indignation, forcibly expressed, is an appropriate response to injustice. Indignation draws strength from outrage, and outrage draws strength from rage. There is a time for anger, and that was such a time.
Anger is a useful, perhaps indispensable tool in motivating resistance to injustice. But I think it is a weapon—a tool useful only in combat and self-defense.
People to whom male dominance is important or essential fear women’s resistance, therefore women’s anger—they know a weapon when they see one. The backlash from them was immediate and predictable. Those who see human rights as consisting of men’s rights labeled every woman who spoke up for justice as a man-hating, bra-burning, intolerant shrew. With much of the media supporting their view, they successfully degraded the meaning of the words feminism and feminist, identifying them with intolerance to the point of making them almost useless, even now.
The far right likes to see everything in terms of warfare. If you look at the feminism of 1960–1990 that way, you might say it worked out rather like the Second World War: the people who lost it gained a good deal, in the end. These days, overt male dominance is less taken for granted; the gender gap in take-home pay is somewhat narrower; there are more women in certain kinds of high positions, particularly in higher education; within certain limits and in certain circumstances, girls can act uppity and women can assume equality with men without risk. As the old ad with the cocky bimbo smoking a cigarette said, You’ve come a long way, baby.
Oh gee, thanks, boss. Thanks for the lung cancer too.
Perhaps—to follow the nursery metaphor instead of the battlefield one—if feminism was the baby, she’s now grown past the stage where her only way to get attention to her needs and wrongs was anger, tantrums, acting out, kicking ass. In the cause of gender rights, mere anger now seldom proves a useful tool. Indignation is still the right response to indignity, to disrespect, but in the present moral climate it seems to be most effective expressed through steady, resolute, morally committed behavior and action.
This is clearly visible in the issue of abortion rights, where the steadfast nonviolence of rights defenders faces the rants, threats, and violence of rights opponents. The opponents would welcome nothing so much as violence in return. If NARAL vented rage as Tea Party spokesmen do, if the clinics brandished guns to defend themselves from the armed demonstrators, the opponents of abortion rights on the Supreme Court would hardly have to bother dismantling Roe vs. Wade by degrees, as they’re doing. The cause would be already lost.
As it is, it may suffer a defeat, but if we who support it hold firm it will never be lost.
Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.
If women who value freedom are dragged back into open conflict with oppression, forced to defend ourselves against the reimposition of unjust laws, we will have to call on anger as a weapon again: but we’re not at that point yet, and I hope nothing we do now brings us closer to it.
Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous. Nursed for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process. The racism, misogyny, and counterrationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.
88. An Unfinished Education
Annals of Pard XII
July 2014
Last Thursday night, Pard woke me up about 3 a.m. by bringing his real, live mouse toy onto the bed so I could play with it too.
This was the third time he’s done it, always about 3 in the morning. For the third time (having had some practice) I flung both cat and mouse off the bed with a giant convulsion of bedclothes. Both cat and mouse went right on running briskly about the room, scrabble scrabble silence scutter scamper silence scrabble . . . This time I didn’t stick it out at all. I fled down the hall to another bedroom and shut the door.
In the morning Pard was walking up and down the hall all bright and innocent and wondering why I was in that bedroom.
No sign of mouse.
Last time there never was any sign of what became of mouse. I assumed it escaped, that time and this time.
But Friday night Pard woke me about 3 a.m. by rummaging persistently at the base of the standing lamp in my bedroom, making annoying noises, and worrying me that he’d knock the lamp over, even though the base is a big, heavy brass disk. No way to go back to sleep with that going on. I picked him up and shut him out of the room.
There’s no use trying to shut out both Pard and a mouse, because the door is so high off the floor that the mouse can run back in, leaving Pard out, and then Pard will rattle the door and cry.
But this time when I shut him out, Pard just went down the hall to sleep in the other bedroom. This told me, indirectly, something about the mouse.
Pard is an excellent hunter, but as I said in an earlier blog, he doesn’t know that he should kill the prey, nor, evidently, does he know how to. His instincts and skills are impeccably feline, but his education was incomplete.
Saturday morning, once I was up, dressed, and more or less competent, I lifted the heavy lamp base and looked under it. Sure enough, the poor little dead mouse was there. In its last refuge. Injury, terror, exhaustion. All can be mortal.
I wrote a poem for the mouse. I am not sure it’s finished yet, I keep moving lines and changing bits of it, but here it is in its current form.
Words for the Dead
Mouse my cat killed
gray scrap in a dustpan
carried to the trash
To your soul I say:
With none to hide from
run now, dance
inside the walls
of the great house
And to your body:
Inside the body
of the great earth
in unbounded being
be still
87. The Myth of the Veneer
“The secret world of the Mafia is a concave mirror that reflects and magnifies our world. If looked at properly, it can illuminate aspects of society that are normally out of focus and taken for granted. When we peel away the veneer of law and moral convention, we enter a world where social relations are in their raw state, the use of violence is pervasive, information uncertain and betrayal a common currency, and where the natural bonds of family love are defiled. By looking at the Mafia microcosm, we can understand better who we are.”
This paragraph, from the Times Literary Supplement of September 18, 2009, opened a review by Federico Varese of The First Family, by Mike Dash, a book about the Mafia. I found it such an exemplary mishmash of half-baked statements and half-thought-out notions that I kept it around until I could take it on, mixed metaphor by mixed metaphor, cliché by cliché. I think it was worth doing, because the basic fallacy it expresses is repeated so tirelessly and accepted so widely as the tough-minded, ugly truth. I’m calling it after its favorite metaphor: The Myth of the Veneer.
So, to begin with: What aspects of society are normally out of focus? What aspects of society are normally in focus? When, to whom? Whose eyes are supposed to be looking, focused or unfocused?
How does peeling away a veneer allow us to enter a world?
If you peel away a veneer, you reveal a solid substance of a different nature from the veneer. If law and moral convention are a veneer, the implication is that they are a thin, artificial disguise or prettification of something substantial but less pretty.
What is this substance?
Are we to assume the substance revealed is that of social relations in their raw state?
Does a raw state postulate some “natural” or prehistoric phase of human existence, a pre-social state in which there was no social code, and each individual invented behavior and relationship from scratch?
Social animals such as man all live within a system of rules of behavior and relationship, some innate and some learned, which limit violence within the group, facilitate communication, and make repeated betrayal of trust unprofitable. Almost all human beings, even infants, are continuously engaged in intensely complex mutual human relationships taking place within a society and culture consisting of rules, laws, traditions, institutions, etc. that specify and regulate the nature and manner of those relationships.
There is no evidence that human beings ever lived in asocial anarchy, and much evidence that, like other social animals, they have always lived within a social system. The rules differ greatly, but there are never no rules.
In other words, law and moral convention — social control of behavior and relationship — is not an artificial, enforced constraint, but a substantial element of our existence as members of our species. Non-violent, informative, trustworthy behavior is fully as natural to us as violence, lying, and betrayal.
This confusion about what “natural” means is exposed in the surprising statement that the natural bonds of family are defiled in the world revealed by the Mafia-mirror — a world previously posited as the “raw,” natural one that was concealed by “unnatural” social hypocrisy.
Why would we understand better who we are by looking in the Mafia-mirror? Its selective reflection and magnification appear to “illuminate” only degradation of the substantial and defilement of the natural. We certainly will come to understand better who the Mafiosi are by studying their world. But wouldn’t we better understand who we are by looking at the place of such an institution as the Mafia within the rich, complex world of (more or less) functional human relationships, law, and moral convention in which most of us who read books and blogs are fortunate enough to live?
But Mr Varese, dismissing all that as mere veneer, privileges criminality as reality.
Rip off the disguise and we are all revealed — traitorous, savage, ruthless brutes. It’s a fantasy cherished by many. Particularly, perhaps, by quite honest, decent, literary men.
— UKL 
7 July 2014


 Ursula K. Le Guin 

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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
You can browse the archive by year here.
115. My Life So Far, by Pard (Part ii)
The Annals of Pard XX
 Annals XX-1.jpeg 

I cried very loudly in the roaring moving room-thing on the way here, because I thought the awfulness and strangeness was all happening over again forever. I still always think that when they put me in the box that smells of fear and the roaring moving room-thing. But except for that I have hardly cried at all since coming here.
The aunty human went away and left me with the old queen and an old tom. I was distrustful of him at first, but my fears were groundless. When he sits down he has an excellent thing, a lap. Other humans have them, but his is mine. It is full of quietness and fondness. The old queen sometimes pats hers and says prrt? and I know perfectly well what she means; but I only use one lap, his. What I like to use about her is the place behind her knees on the bed, and the top of her head, which having a kind of fur reminds me a little of my Mother, so sometimes I get on the pillow with it and knead it. This works best when she is asleep.
The kibbles here are of different species and varying quality. They are let loose from their boxes and bags into my bowl twice a day at the appointed time. Most of them are good, but the small dark kind taste rather nasty and I don’t hunt them down till I really need them. Recently a large new breed appeared that taste excellent, almost as good as greenies.
No other kibble is as good as a greeny. And greenies often fly – the old tom and queen see to it that they do – and I chase them across the floor, and pursue them under things, and knock them right out of the air. Hunting is very exciting and satisfactory, especially when the prey moves.
When I first came here I was barely out of kittenhood and constantly in search of excitement. Here and there, though never in my bowl, I found what I thought was a lively kind of kibble, running around, hiding under things, even flying sometimes. I hunted them for quite a while and caught a great many, but they never did taste very good. I gave up hunting them at last, admitting that beetles are an inferior form of kibble. Still, it was fun to hunt them.
It is not fun to hunt mice. It is exciting in an intense, terrible way. If there is a mouse, I cannot think of anything else. I cannot sleep. I cannot eat kibbles. I can only smell and hear and think of mouse. I don’t understand this, and it makes me unhappy. But when the mouse comes out of hiding I have to hunt it and catch it. I always catch it. And then what? It isn’t a kibble, it isn’t to eat. It’s much bigger, and furry, who wants to eat a huge fur-coated kibble? It is a wonderful toy while it plays, but after a while it begins to run down and stops moving. So I bring it to the old queen, who is good with toys and makes them move. But if it is a mouse, she leaps up and does shouting and hurls the mouse off the bed, and there is great unpleasantness.
All the same, much as I dislike unpleasantness, I cannot leave the mouse. Usually it begins moving again, and sometimes even gets away and escapes into the outside, but not often. When it runs down altogether it is taken away. Then I can sleep and be happy.
 Annals XX-2.jpg 

The outside is somewhat like mice: it is too exciting. It makes anxiety. I want to go there and then when I am there I want to come inside again. I am used to walls. Walls are good, they limit things. There is no limit to the outside. It is crowded with endless things and beings, pathways and pathlessnesses, movements, sounds, tiny noises in the earth and behind every leaf, huge bangs and clamor from where the roaring things rush by and the terrible dogs pull their humans along by straps and nothing makes sense. But then, it is all exciting. There are the green leaves to eat, and then come in and throw them up on the rug. There are the beings that fly, not only little ones like beetles but ones the size of mice and even bigger. When I see them I say something to them I never say to anybody else, a kind of little clicking. I know they are to hunt. How could I catch a flying kibble bigger than a mouse, and what would I do with it if I caught it? But still when I see one, even through the window, I crouch to spring and whisper k-k-k-k-k-k-k to lure it closer.
It is very puzzling, the outside, and very dangerous. I know that, and mostly I stay in sight of the old queen or tom, and always I know the quickest path straight back to the door, my door, into my walls, into my place.
But there are the smells outside, the endless, rich, piercing, mysterious smells, and I want to go back out, and smell each leaf and stick and track for a long time, and walk on the strange paths of dirt and grass, in the danger.
Yet while I am there I want to be back inside with the old slow tom and queen, where things happen slowly and when they should happen and the kibbles are in the bowl morning and evening, where I can lie in the sun and look through the window at the outside without being in its danger, or curl up on the tom’s lap or the queen’s head and hear the purring and be happy.
There is so much mystery always that adding all the outside to it is too much for me.
Inside, I am troubled only when the old tom and queen go away for a long time, which they don’t do often any more, but when they do some of the strangeness gets into the house, the kibbles become irregular, and I am not at peace.
 Annals XX-3.jpeg 

And my peace is disturbed when the young queens come to make the noise machine go on the floors. The anxiety of the horrible roaring noise drives me to do foolish things like trying to hide behind the thing the old queen always sits in front of staring at instead of paying attention to me. I am not supposed to go behind it, and unpleasantness occurs when I insist on doing so. Perhaps the unpleasantness of the noise machines drives me to make more unpleasantness. I don’t know. Sometimes I decide to go behind the thing simply because as I lie on the desk beside her in peaceful companionship, I get bored with her staring at it and ignoring me, and know I can change that by going where I am not to go.
Recently when I did that and wouldn’t stop doing it we both got so upset that the old queen did shouting, swatted me, and pulled my tail, and I actually glared and cursed her.
Soon after, she apologised and made amends. I did not. Cats have no amends to make. But we were both relieved that the unpleasantness was ended.
Since then, when I start to go around behind the thing she stares at, instead of attempting to exert domination and causing anxiety to us both she begins to scratch my jowls and chin most irresistibly. So I stop where I am and do not resist the irresistibility, and as she finds this irresistible too, there is pleasantness and good feeling. I just started around behind a minute ago, but settled down for a thorough jowl-rub on both sides while warmth and good feelings were exchanged.
She’s staring at the thing again now, only glancing at me now and then to pet my head and neck, but I can hear the old tom down in the kitchen and know that the kibbles of the evening will soon be in the bowl. I can wait. I have things running quite satisfactorily in this place, my place.
— Pard 
9 May 2016
114. My Life So Far, by Pard (Part i)
The Annals of Pard XIX
 Annals XIX-1.jpg 

In the first place there were Mother and Sister and me with a mother and an aunty human who had a lot of kittens. Some tom humans came around now and then and either paid no attention to anybody but the queens, or were dangerous to kittens, pretty much like real toms. Mother and Sister and I kept out of their way and had no worries except sometimes the younger kitten humans, who will pull your tail as soon as their eyes are open. And some of the bigger ones played too rough, or tried to hug. Hugging, even when well meant, is horrible.
Life was often quite exciting in the first place, and we were happy together. I am hardly ever sad, but sometimes when I am going to sleep I hear purring around me that is not mine, and it seems that Mother and Sister and I are all curled up like one warm cat. And then I am happier than usual.
The kibbles there were all of one species, but there were plenty of them, except when there weren’t any of them. When the bowl had been empty for a while and then the kibbles were turned loose in it, Sister and I did a lot of growling and shoving to see who could get more first, but it wasn’t serious, it just made hunting and killing the kibbles more exciting.
The humans ate the weird things humans eat. Mother ate some of them too, but when she tried to hunt any of them the mother and aunty and the bigger kittens got all upset and did shouting and swatting and made unpleasantness. I dislike unpleasantness, so I never even tried. Why hunt weird things when you have kibbles? Besides, the humans don’t eat our kibbles, so we don’t eat theirs. Fair is fair. Except for exceptions.
So that was all good, but then came the awfulness. It was confusing and terrible and everything changed all at once, so that I want not to remember it, and have succeeded pretty well. There was the box that smelled of fear, and the roaring moving room-thing, and all the strangenesses, and really I don’t want to think about it or that Mother and Sister and I have not seen each other again.
In the strange place, all the humans were toms and queens and strangers, and there were far too many cats, all strangers. Sometimes I cried and sometimes I got my tail up for a while. None of the humans ever shouted or swatted, and some of them petted. But I mostly remember being in the little room with strange cats in it and with walls I could see through into a lot of other little rooms with see-through walls and cats in them. Cats, and toys, and litter boxes, and climbing places, and hiding boxes.
 Annals XIX-2.jpeg 

One of the strangenesses was that I lost my balls there. I had two of them. They were near my tail, not very big, but I liked them. After I woke up in the strange place and they put me in the little room and I was washing, I noticed they were gone. I looked all around for them but they weren’t in the little room. I was too sore and sleepy to worry much about them.
 Annals XIX-3.jpeg 

I hid in one of the hiding boxes box most of the time at first, but then I felt better and got bored and came out and investigated the toys. They were good. There was one I could get clear into and crawl through excitingly. The other cats were all right, but strangers. There were always kibbles in the bowl when I felt like hunting, but I didn’t very much. And always water, too, in bowls. In the first place, I had often had to climb up to the water hole and brace myself on the slippery white sides to keep from falling in while I drank, which was exciting, but not very. Here in the second place I never do it any more. There is a water bowl, but I don’t often drink from it these days, because the waterfall happens when I stand on the edge of the sink and request it. Water that doesn’t move isn’t half as good as a waterfall.
There was so much strangeness in the strange place that when I met the old queen and the younger aunty humans they were just parts of it. But they distinctly had good intentions, and good manners, too, admiring me, holding out their knuckles to me like noses, and making no effort to hug. So I purred loudly and kept my tail so straight up that the end of it fell over onto my back, which pleased them, and there was mutual pleasantness. And so I left there and came here with them.
— Pard 
2 May 2016
113. Reality Goes Over the Top
Frank Bruni’s article for the New York Times about Stanford University’s decision to accept no students at all for next year’s freshman class was such a keen, accurate picture of the current process of application and admission to prestigious colleges that a great many people took it to be a true one.
This got me thinking about the fragility of satire. When reality overdoes itself, when it gets surreal, what’s left for the satirist?
I tried to think of a headline about Donald Trump that would be unbelievable.
Trump Apologizes For Everything He Ever Said. 
Trump Declares Himself Next Dalai Lama. 
Trump Relieves Himself on Fox TV Newscaster on Fox TV. 
Trump Dumps Wife, Woos Mrs. Cruz.
These are implausible, but are they unbelievable? The last two aren’t even very implausible.
Is anything about the current behavior of the Republican Party satirisable, or has it entered the Trump Zone – you can’t make it weirder than it is?
The behavior of obstinately stupid people is merely boring, but most of us find pigheadedness funny now and then. Pure, silly craziness (Chaplin delicately eating his shoelaces, John Cleese walking) can be very funny. Stupid craziness (the Three Stooges) can be kind of funny. Some people, especially children, laugh at crazy behavior even when it does harm to others. But craziness persisted in to the point of self-destruction isn’t funny and offers very little ground for making fun of it, and the Republican Party is certainly busy destroying itself and as much of the Republic as possible with it.
There is the weird Republican verbal code — “conservative” for reactionary, “center” for far right, the various ways of not saying “black,” the “Welfare Queen,” the “Illegal Voter,” — endless misnomers, lies, and fantasms. The media have so generally accepted this misuse of language as valid that most of the words it degrades have become almost meaningless. Small room for irony there.
And no snarky little kid in the crowd can possibly deny the existence of the emperor’s new clothes as the Congressmen and the Militiamen strut past, shameless in their paunchy nakedness, safely wrapped in the sacred colors of the United and the Confederate States of America.
All the same, we shouldn’t give up. There were satirists behind the Iron Curtain who could be quite painfully entertaining about life under Stalin. I remember in the dark days of a long-ago war the relief of laughing at Spike Jones, “Und ve Heil! (fart) Heil! (fart) right in der Fuehrer’s face!” I admire any contemporary satirist who‘s been able to out-bizarre the bizarre political statements and behaviors encouraged by the Grand Old Party. There are still people among us who know what to do with a candidate who doesn’t know the difference between a presidential election and a farce: you laugh him all the way to defeat.
But that leaves Cruz. What’s scary about Cruz is that there’s nothing funny about him. Can we find anything in him to laugh at? Can anybody even smile at him? If Trump is the essentially harmless nut who thinks he’s Napoleon, Cruz seems to me more like the classic psychopath, the guy “who was kind of a loner but always just seemed like everybody else,” till he got the guns, or the power, and began acting out his unspeakable fantasies.
— UKL 
11 April 2016
Der Fuehrer’s Face by Spike Jones — YouTube
112. Pard Pix
The Annals of Pard XVIII
 Portrait of Pard as Nominee to the Supreme Catcourt 

Portrait of Pard as Nominee to the Supreme Catcourt
 Is that person with the Horrible Sucking Machine coming into this room? 

Is that person with the Horrible Sucking Machine coming into this room?
 Perhaps I can frighten her off by looking extremely evil. 

Perhaps I can frighten her off by looking extremely evil.
 Aha, I think she has been terrified. 

Aha, I think she has been terrified.
 Proof that house cleaners and dragons—I mean CATS—get along 

Proof that house cleaners and dragons—I mean CATS—get along
111. The Game of Fibble
 FIBBLE-IMG_1510-240w.jpg 

The first Game of Fibble of which actual record exists was played in Portland, Oregon, in December of 2015. A well-attested rumor has it that the Game of Fibble was played in Cannon Beach, Oregon, a few years earlier, and this may well have been the first Game of Fibble played anywhere.
We know, however, that great scientific breakthroughs and intellectual discoveries are often made almost simultaneously by different geniuses in different places. And it is possible that many geniuses in the past have invented Fibble without publicizing their discovery — possibly without even knowing it.
It is a game of unique potential, with all but unlimited opportunities for silliness.
I present the rules of Fibble, as invented and developed by E. and C. Le Guin and L. Howell, and named by U. Le Guin.
The Rules of Fibble
Revised 26 February 2016

	
Two to four players, the more the merrier.
	
The only words allowed are words that (so far as anybody there knows) do not exist.
	
If another player recognizes that a word you made is a real English word, you have to take it apart and make one that isn’t.
	
After you have placed this word on the board, you must pronounce and define it to the other players.
	
English is the default language. Non-existent English words must be pronounceable in English.
	
You may also make a word in dialect or another language — Wessex, Cajun, Old Norse, Inuit, Klingon, Finnish, etc — so long as the word doesn’t really exist in that dialect or language. You must say what language it is in, and be able to pronounce it (more or less) and define it. If any of the other players knows the language and recognizes the word as existing in that language, you have to take it apart and make another word.
	
Words can be proper names, book titles, characters in books, slang, dirty, etc., so long as they are not real names, titles, characters, slang, dirty words, etc.
	
If you use all seven letters in one word you may be applauded. The pink and red squares don’t count extra, because no score is kept.
	
If the players want to, they may play collaboratively. Collaboration is often fruitful in regard to word definitions: other players discuss and refine the meaning and application of an invented word.

The Object of the Game
The Object of the Game is to use up all the letters. Since you can always make up a word or suffix that fits in somewhere, it is probably impossible not to achieve this goal.
—UKL
Definitions of a few of these words:
ESWOX: a kind of footgear worn by the ZOMOI, a warlike people of the Albanian hinterland.
TORG: a piece of leg armor worn with eswox.
PURPODED: past tense of the verb purpode, to intend to do something which blows up in your face.
FLOTT: a wet fart.
LORPINE, adj.: lying around on your face not doing anything
The KOUDHIAD: the great epic of the grasslands, recounting the deeds of the hero Koudh.
NAGNEET, beloved of the hero Koudh, a beautiful maiden but ill-natured.
ANAGNEET, sister of Nagneet, less beautiful but much nicer.
I am sorry that the meanings of VINGULB and GNOOT have been forgotten, but perhaps our readers can supply them.
110. Thirty-Five Days
In answer to a letter about the continuing occupation of the Malheur Refuge headquarters, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley wrote me,
“Despite [the recent arrest of several militants], the armed takeover of the wildlife refuge is still ongoing, and it remains extremely taxing and damaging to the local community and to Harney County. Local leaders deserve tremendous credit for their ongoing management of this situation. The sheriff, county commissioner, and others in the community have worked hard to prevent these extremists from spreading their divisive ideology, to coordinate with federal and state officials, and to remind everyone that the community does best when we pursue collaborative solutions rather than conflict.”
What needs to be said, well said!
But it lacks a sense of urgency. Things are bad in Harney County and getting worse. Deeper damage is done every day the occupation continues to be tolerated.
Patience in a situation like this is all-important — the vigilant patience the lawmen showed in waiting for the Bundy brothers to leave the protection afforded them on the Refuge and in Burns. But patience must not become paralysis.
Is the extreme patience being shown to continued open defiance of the law partly a function of the remoteness of the place where it’s happening?
If a federal property in New Jersey was occupied by armed outsiders calling themselves “militiamen,” justifying their occupation by a radical theocratic re-interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and calling for mass resistance to law enforcement, would four of them be allowed to continue the occupation indefinitely?
If important ongoing scientific studies and reclamation programs under federal auspices in a suburb of Chicago or Washington were being paralyzed and trashed by four hooligans carrying guns, how long would they be allowed to continue the irreparable destruction?
As Senator Merkley says, the local people and their officials have shown their determination to resist all provocation to violence and allow all voices to speak, while steadfastly refusing to permit any further attacks on their property and freedom.
The outsiders cut fences, a despicable act in cattle country; the ranchers mended them. The citizens of Harney County aren’t fence cutters, they’re fence menders. They just want to get back to work. They deserve the chance.
How much patience can the rest of us demand of them? How long are four scofflaws wrapped in American flags to hold several thousand American citizens hostage? Another week? another month? How long, O FBI?
109. High Noon in Harney County: Twenty Days
The FBI and other Federal agents have been in Burns, Oregon, for twenty days now, watching a crime being committed by armed lawbreakers. Today they invited Ammon Bundy, the chief lawbreaker, to a polite conversation with one of their agents, after which he was politely sent back to continue committing the crime.
They talk to him. To us they say nothing.
Twenty days of an armed, illegal, openly destructive take-over of a national property, the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and its headquarters: nothing done, nothing said.
Twenty days of holding the communities of Burns, Crane, Diamond, Frenchglen and all the isolated ranches of the area under siege and continuous threat: nothing done, nothing said.
Twenty days of domestic terrorism, financially disastrous to a struggling local economy and causing disastrous division within the local community: nothing done, nothing said.
The wish to avoid a bloody fiasco like Waco is clear, and wise.
But there are many options open to the government short of rushing in with massive weaponry to “take them out.” Why not arrest so-called “militiamen” who leave the Refuge to harass high-school students or buy snacks at the Safeway in Burns? What about a visit to freeloader Cliven Bundy, father of two of the men infesting the Refuge, who defied the Feds a few years ago and now sits at home in Nevada enjoying the million or so dollars he owes me and all other American citizens in unpaid fees for grazing his cattle on our public lands?
The longer the list of such unpunished crimes grows, the longer the federal agents tolerate armed defiance of the rule of law, the harder it is not to see their inaction and silence as impotence and cowardice.
The people of Harney County prefer their independence to outside interference, and would like to handle this situation by themselves. But the longer the siege is allowed to continue, the more impossible that becomes, and the greater is the Federal government’s responsibility for the rapidly increasing economic and moral damage.
As for us across the country, who watch this apparent comedy — a couple of hundred bigoted loons paralyzing the Government of the United States — and begin to see how much long-term tragedy must result, what do we do?
I can only suggest that we let the people of Harney County know that we support them, that we admire their restraint and decency under great stress, and applaud their sheriff and their town meetings for the steady, courageous effort to let everybody have a voice.
One good thing about this very bad situation — it allows us to see a small, remote community of our hard-working, law-abiding fellow citizens remind the rest of us how to be a democracy.
—UKL 
22 January 2016
108. Some Books I Read in 2015
Elena Ferrante’s Naples Quartet.
 I’ve read only the first two books. Found the first absorbing, fascinating, and a terrific study of urban class and gender structure – the social anthropology novel at its best. The second somewhat more predictable but still satisfying, especially the last half. But at the very end of it, the Worthless Prick suddenly pops up again. Oh, no! Is all the interest, all the promise of the protagonists – of the novel itself – to be thrown away on the women-adoring-a-jerk story, the love-as-addiction story? Again? I’ve gone on that nowhere trip with a novel way too often. I’m not signing on for this one. Maybe I’ll come back to the third and fourth volumes after a while. Maybe not.
Meanwhile I keep wondering why the mysteriously elusive Elena Ferrante is so mysteriously elusive. Because being mysteriously elusive is great PR, well, sure. But there’s another possibility. The psychological study of two minds, a relationship between two girls growing into women, while brilliant, is entirely in terms originated by and therefore acceptable to men (the central focus of a woman’s life is a man; women can’t and don’t trust other women). The intense competitiveness of the two girls is perfectly plausible, but as the main element of a friendship between women it ceased to convince me; mere rivalry seldom plays the part in women’s lives that it does in many men’s. And then, Lina is such a classic male-dream-woman, the eternal Carmen, magnetically sexy, fiery, holding herself apart from other women but eagerly abasing herself to the male animal…. Women of course write about such women, and often, but seldom at this level of sophistication.
Anyhow, for what it‘s worth, I’m laying no bets on the gender of the coy author.
Jane Smiley’s Trilogy of Novels, The Last Hundred Years
 A year per chapter, for a century, starting in 1920 on an Iowa farm. I started the first volume, Some Luck, directly after reading Ferrante. The culture shock was awful – an old cart horse after a Maserati. Plod, plod, plod, a chapter a year.... Queer insights into the mind of a baby. Discussions of the problems of running a farm. Prose of the “transparent” kind that it’s easier and trendier to dismiss than to write. All very ordinary. Yet the wit flashes; the humor is as dry and subversive as that of a Native American. By about 1932, I’d plodded on into pure enjoyment, and a growing admiration sometimes bordering on awe.
Smiley’s courage is as great as her ambition. She flouts the mandarin demands of post-modernity and cares nothing for the limitations and snobberies of literary sophistication. She doesn’t need another Pulitzer, after all. She has a story to tell, and tells it the way it has to be told. It’s Realism, and all it implies – “ordinary” people and occupations and preoccupations – but it’s something else, too, undefinable implications that reach beyond the evidence of realism and beyond the past and present into pure imagination. The scope of the three volumes, as they follow the fortunes of the children on and off the farm, from coast to coast and on into the twenty-first century, is enormous, but the emotional intensities and depths of the story are entirely, often heart-breakingly, personal.
I have never read a book like this.
Yet I long to make comparisons. Jane Austen, for fair-minded, acute, and funny representation of the minds and manners of a certain period in a certain country. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for the handling of those two subjects, and for understanding family relationships. Mark Twain and H.L. Davis, for genial acceptance of the endless variety of weirdness of character that flourishes in all Western America. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, for an ultimately tragic vision of a country determined to destroy its very earth and all the life and hope that can be born of it.
I’ve written sarcastically about the search for “The Great American Novel.” As far as I’m concerned, the search is over. This one will do just fine.
Homer, The Iliad
 I read a review in the TLS, with some quotations, of this translation by Peter Green, and immediately ordered a copy.
Green doesn’t try to reproduce the Homeric hexameter in English (impossible for several reasons) but approximates it with a line of 12 to 17 syllables, 5 or 6 of them stressed. To my ear this works very well as narrative poetry, with excellent flexibility, an unforced music, and a long, rolling beat that carries the story relentlessly forward. It begs to be read and heard aloud.
He’s trying to give us the meaning through the sound, writing for the ear as the way to the mind. The result is uneven, but for me it carries far more power, authority, and beauty than any of the current standard translations (Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles). I feel that I’m hearing Homer, at last, for the first time.
At least half of the Iliad is simply boring to me – the endless battle scenes, the killer boys with their killer toys. Bang bang you’re dead. Homer’s skill is peerless at giving us at least an illusion of variety while telling the same damn thing over and over and over; but it’s no use. I‘m up there on the walls of Troy with the Trojan women, praying to the gods to let the men finish the slaughter, be done, get over it, STOP IT! And all go home/come home safe and sound! Knowing all along that poor crazy Cassandra is right, and they never will.
I’m also unable to like or admire the hero of the epic, Achilles. I’ve tried and tried, but can’t see much but a spoilt, sullen, adolescent bully. I’m sorry for the kid, because there are clear signs that he could grow out of it, grow up into a man, and he won’t get time to. But that lack of time, after all, was his own choice.
My hero is the big loser, the husband and father, the grown-up. Hector is a mensch.
I always detested Helen, but either she comes out quite differently in this translation or my viewpoint has changed with age. Of course she’s as trustworthy as a rattlesnake; but she’s not a babe, not an airhead. She’s a woman getting passed around by men and making the best of it. She knows how fragile her glamor is. And so what she really thinks, and really wants, and really is, nobody is ever going to know. Not even Homer.
Peter Green teaches in the United States; his Iliad is published by the University of California Press. (If you’re interested, please order it from U.C. or an independent bookseller, not from amazon dot com.) I just hope he is working very hard and fast on translating the Odyssey so that I can live to read it.
107. Pard’s Christmas 2015
Annals of Pard XVII
 The Fur Beneath the Fir 

The Fur Beneath the Fir
 Through the Looking-Glass 

Through the Looking-Glass
 At the Water Hole 

At the Water Hole
 Pard expresses his disdain for a dog calendar 

Pard expresses his disdain for a dog calendar
 Pard helps wrap prezzies 

Pard helps wrap prezzies
 Pard helps unwrap prezzies 

Pard helps unwrap prezzies
 Excitement Makes the Eyes Shine 

Excitement Makes the Eyes Shine
Christmas Eve at the Farm
— UKL
3 January 2016
106. A Child Who Survived
The vapid statement “the creative adult is the child who survived” is currently being attributed to me by something called Aiga —
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/design-quote-creative-adult-is-child-who-survived-ursula-le-guin/
which is “supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.” I wasn’t able to communicate with Aiga to ask them to take my name off their design.
It probably wouldn’t do much good anyhow. A false attribution on the Internet is like box elder beetles, the miserable little things just keep breeding and tweeting and crawling out of the woodwork.
I posted on my blog and at Book View Café on this persistent misattribution last year. Early and very welcome responses to it by Meelis and Jonathan on BVC gave me both the sentence I wrote, and a possible source of the misquotation.
Meelis pointed out this sentence in the 1974 essay “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” (reprinted in the collection The Language of the Night):
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
Nothing about “creativity” whatever. I just said a grown-up is somebody who lived through childhood — a child who survived. A truism, of course, but in 1974 I had reasons for stating it. The disavowal of childishness that is part of assuming adulthood, particularly male adulthood, can become a denial of the value of any connection to oneself as a child or to children in general. It was acceptable, forty years ago, for people to boast of disliking children. It was all but automatic for critics to deny adult value to fantasy literature simply by saying it was ‘for children.’ And some feminists of the Seventies, wanting to free women from sole responsibility for children, denied any natural connection to them at all. This was the mindset I was addressing. I was just trying to keep the child-adult connection open, and free of contempt.
Jonathan discovered that the earliest appearance on the Internet of the misquote was in 1999, from a huge collection of quotations compiled by Professor Julian F. Fleron:
http://www.westfield.ma.edu/math/faculty/fleron/quotes/
The professor gave no source for the sentence; I have no idea why he attributed it to me.
It is high time that this sentence, “The creative adult is the child who has survived,” be attributed to its originator, Prof. Julian F. Fleron.
If he did not originate it, and wishes to be freed from the onus of supposedly having done so, that’s up to him or to those who wish to preserve his good name. I just wish, oh how I wish! that he hadn’t stuck me with the damn thing.
— UKL 
28 December 2015
105. Ruby and Me
These pictures are of Ruby and me at the thirty-fifth Wild Arts Festival, an annual craft fair and book sale for the Portland Audubon Society.
 UandRubyOne_5973_edited_upres.jpg 

I attend to sign books for the very lively benefit. (People bought 58 copies of my new poetry book, Late in the Day!) Ruby attends for the edification and delight of those who behold her.
 UandRubyTwo5975_edited_upres.jpg 

Ruby turned up at the front door of a farmhouse, a young Turkey Vulture someone had tamed and then lost or abandoned. The farm family wisely brought her to the Audubon Society. She never learned the skills she needs to survive in the wild and is not accepted by her own people, so she must live with us, which she does with great dignity. I admire Ruby very much, and like to think that I look a little like her, or would if I had a majestic black-and-silvery feather cloak and an ivory nose. We both always attend the Wild Arts Fair.
In the first picture, I am trying unsuccessfully to imitate Ruby’s splendid profile. In the second one, she’s turned away because the camera flash displeased her. I wasn’t really that close to her. You don’t invade the personal space of somebody with a six-foot wingspread.
Ruby’s companion from the Audubon Society asked us what we thought she weighed. One guessed forty pounds, and one said, “If she was a Thanksgiving turkey I’d say about 18 pounds.” In fact she weighs more like 4 pounds. She is all feather and hollow bone. The Queen of Air and Darkness.
— UKL 
7 December 2015
Photography by Alyson Berman 
Photo-editing by Zach Kobrinsky
104. A Trip South
Back in the days, I did considerable traveling around the country to talk or teach or read from a new book. Only once did I get hooked into a regular book tour, the if it’s Tuesday this must be Connecticut thing. After a couple of weeks of that, and after sitting in a plane on the runway at the Denver airport watching them de-ice the plane for the third time before we took off into a white-out blizzard, as we climbed (just barely) over the Rockies, I was able only to resolve never to do a book tour again.
The worst thing about it was that I’d realised I was obsessing about whether and when I could have a drink before I went on stage. I’ve “used alcohol,” as the medical questionnaires weirdly phrase it, ever since I was in college, but I’d never before (or since) felt that alcohol was beginning to use me. Nicotine had had me cornered for years, and I didn’t want another addiction. It scared me. When I got home I was so strung out that Charles looked me over and said, “I’m going to take you over to the beach for three days by yourself,” and he did.
He put me in a nice little run-down motel, kitchenette and geraniums, two blocks from the ocean. I didn’t speak to anybody but the grocery store clerk for three days. I spent them walking or sitting on the beach. In the evening I’d wander back to my room and sit down with a shot of bourbon to call Charles before I made dinner. Dr Le Guin’s Pacific Therapy worked. It wasn’t too long after that that we bought a house, a few blocks from that motel, so we could both do beach retreats, jointly or in solitude — with a kitchen that had more than two saucepans, one lid, no teapot, and those damn serrated motel knives that won’t cut butter.
For a long time plane travel was no problem for me physically, and although I always hated airports, I did enjoy flying. It can be amazingly beautiful, and sometimes a real high. I got more than one story idea at 30,000 feet. (One was the germ of Changing Planes.) But as deregulation progressed, and security became a big deal, and the airlines took to processing passengers as insentient objects, airports became suburbs of hell. And the bag of peanuts on the plane deteriorated into five intensely saline plaster pretzels and a granite corn nut, and then into nothing at all. And I was getting lame, and old, and then really old, and the prospect of getting through airports and plane changes and delays made me more and more anxious, until I saw I couldn’t do it alone. So now I fly only very seldom, and as a sheep, guided by an endlessly resourceful and kindly shepherd, my son.
Thus I arrived, bleating softly, in Los Angeles airport last Saturday night.
I feel like writing a blog about the trip, because I never have done that, and because I have a fairly strong feeling that I may not fly anywhere to do a gig again. No, I am not saying never. I learned long ago never to say never, or anyhow hardly ever. And I hardly ever say last, ever since I published The Last Book of Earthsea and then discovered it was the fourth book of six. Never and last are closing words. Having spent a good deal of my life trying to open closed doors and windows, I have no intention of going around slamming them shut now, just because I’m 86.
As I see it, getting old gives me the opportunity to go through another door, into another place.
Old age is quite a different place from what people who don’t live there think it is or say it is or want it to be. Here, what you want doesn’t count as much as it used to. Energy, stamina, memory, any of them may suddenly fail and let you down — not because you let it happen, but because you can’t prevent it. Where there’s a will, here, there isn’t always a way. Doors do shut; windows close. No hype, no vanity or pretense, no resolution can keep them open. In fact, I wonder if a continuous strenuous effort to keep them open may prevent the compensatory thinning of the fabric of the everyday, the weakening of all walls and barriers, that increasingly admits shadows, gleams, intimations, glimpses of a larger habitation, a vaster landscape even than that of the world seen from 30,000 feet.
So anyhow, I made one strenuous effort. I flew to L.A. to do a gig — I’m sorry, an Event — at the Center for the Art of Performance series in Royce Hall on the UCLA campus on Sunday afternoon. I took it on partly because it paid very well and thus provided me a (completely unnecessary) excuse to go on to Santa Ana to see my daughter in the house she bought there two years ago. I very much wanted to see her in it, so that I could imagine her where she is whenever I think of her. It is hard to have children where you can’t imagine them.
Also, the person who was to talk with me on stage was Meryl Friedman, who now teaches at UCLA, but who, years ago, in her wild youth, produced the first stage play of my Left Hand of Darkness. I always regretted that I wasn’t able to go to Chicago to see it. Reviews of the play and reports by people who saw it were very impressive. When I had the pleasure of being in on the production of Left Hand here in Portland two years ago by Hand2Mouth and Portland Playhouse Theaters, I knew better than ever what I’d missed in Chicago. Stage magic is just about the purest magic I know. So I wanted, at least, and at long last, to meet Meryl. It was a happy meeting.
 Meryl Friedman & UKL in green room 

Meryl Friedman & UKL in green room
 Me and Meryl on stage 

Me and Meryl on stage
 The Diva, at her first ever back stage dressing room with her name on the door 

The Diva, at her first ever back stage dressing room with her name on the door
Afterwards, Theo and I met Charles Solomon and Scott Johnston at a fish house for dinner. I don’t remember how Chas (as I will call him to distinguish Charleses) and I became email-pen-pals — was it something to do with Miyazaki? or with cats? We share cat stories shamelessly. I tell him about Pard, he tells me about Nova, Matter, and Typo. Typo makes himself into a black fur scarf around Chas’s neck and goes to sleep there. I wish he could have worn Typo to the restaurant. Over the past few years, Chas has given me a master class in the criticism and appreciation of animated film, and patiently endures my ignorant grumblings about why does everybody have to look like inflated plastic toys, etc. As a critic, he can be a master grumbler himself, but he grumbles from knowledge. Meanwhile, Scott does the real thing, practices the art. I don’t know how often a top artist and a top critic can make a happy marriage, but it’s a great thing when it happens. The picture, taken by Scott, is me and Charles — both obviously full of fish and purring.
 UKL & Charles Solomon 

UKL & Charles Solomon
Next morning we rather gratefully left the hotel. It was perfectly OK, but why do hotels think you want to enter a cavernously dark lobby with a gas fire burning in a glass hearth on a brilliant day in Southern California, or eat breakfast in windowless gloom to the unmeaning thump and whimper of muzak, while palm trees clash and glitter outside in the sunlight? I’m just glad the muzak wasn’t yet playing “White Christmas” and “Let it Snow.” Anyhow, we got out into the bright air under a radiant blue sky and drove on The 405 (every highway in L.A. must have its article) down into Orange County.
Santa Ana isn’t a mess of cognitive dissonances plunked down in a desert, like Riverside. It’s a solid old town with a history. Like Sacramento, Monterey, Petaluma, it’s been there for a while, with good reasons to be there — a county seat with federal offices, for years the market center of a great orchard and farming area, a long-established settlement of Americans originally from the south, chiefly Mexico.
Elisabeth’s house is in a largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood built mostly just after the second world war. The push now is to upscale and gentrify, that is, to push out the people who’ve lived and worked and paid taxes there for sixty years or more, bulldoze the one-story houses, scrape away the lots full of tricycles and persimmon trees and old California sycamores, and erect the sterile megamansions of Money with their locked doors and unopenable windows. Can we do nothing to prevent these hordes of the filthy rich from overrunning our country and dispossessing our people, to stem this ever-growing White Plague of freeloaders who let us pay their taxes while they send our jobs to China and our kids to Afghanistan? — Oh, it’s so easy to rant with so many examples of ranting to be heard, and so easy to turn bigotry upon itself! Anyhow, I hope the City of Santa Ana comes to its senses and saves its pleasant neighborhoods.
We met the other inhabitants of the house. Here they are: Terri; Chimul in his cat-bed; Opal (with whom I bonded when she was still a kitten); and on my lap, in his new holiday sweater, Ugo, a long-term visitor.
 Terri, Chimul, Opal, UKL, Ugo 

Terri, Chimul, Opal, UKL, Ugo
Terri calls Chimul the Punk, and there is some truth in it, but he’s very pretty. Both cats outweigh little Ugo, but they all get on; and Ugo is a dear, and a brave watchdog. After we had enjoyed touring the house we went round the garden, where we deeply admired the clothesline and the compost pit, and deeply envied the lemon and orange and persimmon trees.
 Agave or Century Plant, used as Clothesline 

Agave or Century Plant, used as Clothesline
 Meyer Lemon, just getting its growth 

Meyer Lemon, just getting its growth
 104-9.jpeg 

Persimmons
Elisabeth made us a grand lunch of fish and vegetables which we ate outside in the sunshine at the table beside the pretty solar, a shady-sunny patio enclosed with lattice and half-roofed, with a most inviting hammock.
 At table 

At table
 Hammock, with Occupant 

Hammock, with Occupant
It was quite windy, with the palms sounding like sea-waves, and not very warm, except in the sun — a north-wind day. I didn’t grow up in Southern California, never even saw it till I was over thirty, but California is itself and nowhere else from top to bottom, from Sierra to sea. When I’m there, almost anywhere there, deep in me a contented voice says: Yes. Right. Some people have an Inner Child. I have an Inner Californian.
We drove downtown to see the Centro Cultural de México, the community center that first drew my daughter to Santa Ana in pursuit of the son jarocho music of Vera Cruz, and which has become an important element of her life. But all too soon it was time to leave for the airport.
John Wayne Airport. I didn’t say I like everything about California, you know.
After we got there we discovered that the two-hour six-o’clock flight to Portland was two hours late. Altogether we spent three hours in John Wayne Airport. Not too bad. Theo belongs to airline clubs where you can sit peacefully and have a drink, and the restaurant was really OK. But it was getting pretty close to closing time. John Wayne Airport shuts right down at ten p.m., because the people in the megamansions in the luxury burbs and Huntington Beach object to having plebeian airplanes fly over them when they want to sleep. Honestly. This is true. And not only that: all day long, so as not to disturb the filthy rich, the planes have to gain altitude fast by taking off very steeply.
By then I was quite willing to take off very steeply.
We flew against headwinds all the way north, missed our landing the first try, circled back, and bumped down in blinding rain and gusty wind about midnight. Dear, wet Portland, hello! I am happy to be home.
— UKL 
23 November 2015
103. Concerning a Wilderness
 post 103-1.png 

I spoke briefly last week at a celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Steens Mountain Wilderness, October 2, 2015, in Portland, held by the Oregon Natural Desert Association.
 post 103-2.jpg 

Getting an area designated Wilderness is no easy matter, even when, or especially if, it’s so far away from urban areas that most people never heard of it. A Wilderness designation offers protection from ruinous land use, reckless development, and recreational over-exploitation. Beautiful, remote, unique, and fragile, the Steens high desert region is one of the jewels in Oregon’s crown. We can hope that Crater Lake (a National Park since 1902, but not yet a Wilderness) and the amazing Owyhee Canyonlands will soon join it.
Here’s how Matt Kertman, the Outreach Director, describes ONDA:
Nearly half of Oregon is high desert, characterized by rolling uplands, jagged mountains and canyons, rushing rivers and rich wildlife. The Oregon Natural Desert Association is the only nonprofit organization that works exclusively to protect, defend and restore this high desert. ONDA has worked in stunning, ecologically significant areas in the Central Oregon Backcountry, John Day River Basin, Greater Hart-Sheldon Region and the Owyhee Canyonlands for almost 30 years. Learn more at ONDA.org.
 post 103-3.jpg 

Photo: Win Goodbody | www.wingoodbody.photography
I’ve been a member for a long time and thoroughly admire the work ONDA does and how they do it. They’re based in Bend, and many of their members are Eastern Oregonians. At the meeting, I tried to express my appreciation of the way they handle relations with the people who live in the remoter desert areas. Efforts to conserve and protect wilderness often meet local pressures and resistances rising from ignorance or from greedy dreams of easy money from development. Education and awareness can change the balance there. But the education and the awareness have to go both ways.
Nobody likes being told how to live where they live by somebody who doesn’t live there. Much of the population of Eastern Oregon consists of people who don’t want anybody telling them anything at all. Part of their ethos could be reduced to something like: You need help, we’ll give it, generously and with good will. And we’ll keep our cows off your grass, and you keep yours off ours.
Cattle ranching is still one of the ways to make a living in the Steens area. I’m not going to recite the many ways in which this always was a poor way to use this land and is now rapidly becoming an impossible one both economically and ecologically. That’s not in question.
The problem is that there are families who’ve been ranching there for four or five generations. (My great-grandfather tried it on the Steens, around 1870, but gave it up.) These people and their animals are just as much a part of “the scenery” as the buttes and the marshes, the egrets and the eagles. Grazing practices that have impoverished the land can be and are being reduced and improved, and many of the ranchers are as aware of the need for this as any ecologist.
On the ranch I know best, the cattle are entirely grass fed, freely grazing in uncrowded grasslands by a river. They’re handled when handling is necessary by a few people on horseback or little ORVs – no hazing by helicopter, etc. Old cows and ailing calves are walked in to pastures near the ranch house to be cared for. When the time comes to move or sell off animals for beef, they aren’t crammed into trucks but led out onto the road by a cowboy or two to go along at their own gait. Drivers in cars on that road go at that gait for a while too, in the dust, among the big half-curious eyes of the cattle and the soft, random mooing.
I’m not describing this sentimentally, nor to defend raising cattle for beef, but to try to counter the impression that all beef is a product of enormous corporations that keep the animals in cruel, filthy, shameful misery. There are cattle outfits where the relationship of people and animals is more like the relationship of gardener and garden: knowledgeable, intimate, hands-on, and tending towards mutual benefit.
The reason I brought up the ranches and the ranchers at the ONDA meeting, and here, is this: I went out to the Steens country because I’d fallen in love with it, the desert, the scenery. It took me years to realise how much I was learning by living on a ranch for a few days a year, watching domestic animals as well as wild ones, and talking with the people. Slowly I began to see the scenery as what it is to them: their world, by birth or choice; their life, often their parents’ and their children’s life. They know it deeply, they curse it from the bottom of their hearts for its implacable obstinacy, they love it and give their lives to it.
It’s only too easy to antagonize “the locals” by appearing to dismiss their hard-earned local knowledge or giving the impression that the aesthetic emotions or escapist yearnings of hikers, campers, birders, tourists are more valuable than the ranchers’ relationship to the land and the living they and their animals earn from it.
Such antagonisms can be modified by patient listening on both sides, genuine conversation, working towards a mutual good. Sounds easy. It’s complicated. Nothing in conservation work is ever uncomplicated! But I’m proud of ONDA for working on that conversation, being neighborly, trying to include the human landscape in the natural one as truly part of what is to be honored, protected, and saved.
At the meeting I read some poems from Out Here, the book Roger Dorband and I did about that country. I’ll end with one from its history. In the 1890’s the P Ranch covered a great part of what we now call Harney County and the Steens. Frenchglen (population ~12) is named for the man who ran it, who built barns the way the Middle Ages built cathedrals.
The Cattle King
He turned his back in scorn, did Peter French,
unarmed, and the homesteader shot him dead,
on the land he’d got by hook or crook, P Ranch —
the cattle kingdom he was ruling, still
convinced he’d break the desert to his will,
control it all; and yet his partners profited,
ate up the cash and cheated Peter French.
Controlling, cheating, ruling, we’ve done ill
and ill and ill again to this great spread
we got by hook or crook, this empire-ranch,
this Harney County. Maybe we’ll learn until
we learn to use it well. Of him let it be said:
his lifeblood’s in this land where he lies dead.
— UKL 
12 October 2015
102. A Personal Take on Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee’s “new” book starts out wonderfully. Its young author had a sure touch and a light hand. It is entertaining, vivid, funny, dry. It begins to come apart a bit, but gains in intensity, about halfway through, when it hits its real subject: A person imbued with the highest ethical standards is faced by a radical immorality in her society, in which her family and friends are complicit.
Reviews that describe the Attticus of Watchman as having become a racist, or being revealed as a racist, by clinging to the idealized Atticus of Mockingbird may miss the point of Watchman. Atticus hasn’t changed. We saw him through his young daughter’s eyes as faultless. Now, seen by his grown daughter, we can see him as imperfect: a good man who, being fully committed to living, working, and having friends in an unjust society, makes the compromises and performs the hypocrisies required of its members. He’s a lawyer — not a judge — with a lawyer’s complex relationship to justice.
Watchman isn’t free of childishness — its author was still pretty young — but its goals are adult ones: to show how hard it may be for a daughter to see her father as a fellow human being, and how hard it is to rebel completely against the injustice of your own people. Merely to be less racist than most of the people around you can be quite an accomplishment. I think that by seeing Atticus as first saint, then demon, we refuse to let him be a man, and also refuse to hear what the author was trying to tell us about being a Southerner.
So, the daughter returning home on a visit finds her father, her model of clear thinking and courageous honesty, is siding with the bigots; her boyfriend, her model of brotherly kindness, is siding with the bigots. What’s she to do?
The answer from outside is quick and easy: of course she rebels. She rises in wrath, denounces, disowns, and departs.
That’s what Scout (now Jean Louise, 26, on a two-weeks visit home from New York) almost does. It’s what I would have imagined her doing, and believed it absolutely necessary for her to do, before I married into a white Southern family and lived with them some years.
If you love and respect people who live in and obey the rules of such a society, and I loved my father and mother in law, and they deserved all my love and respect — if they love and respect you, as they did me — if you have family feeling or rational sense of decency, you do not and cannot arise in a halo of self-righteousness at every instance of race prejudice, denounce, disown, and depart. Depart where? You live there. These are your people. You are a member of this kind, upright, affectionate family. You live in this society with its tremendous, ingrained prejudices — racial, religious, and other.
You find how to evade showing approval of injustice, and how to avoid practising it, as well as you can. You meet the endless overt bigotry with silent non-acceptance, perhaps with a brief word or two reminding the bigot that not everyone shares, or admires, his opinons. Now and then, when Cousin Roy gets to ranting on about the niggers, and you’re about to leave the room because you’re feeling sick, your mother-in-law says very quietly, I don’t like such talk, Roy. And Roy shuts up.
Oh, it’s all so much more complicated than it looks like from outside, to people who don’t have to consider how love and loyalty constrain you, to people from Outside the South, where of course no such injustice is ever practiced, no such bigotry exists.
It may seem implausible that a person can, like Jean Louise, grow up without race prejudice in a society so profoundly racist as the small-town White South. It is in fact a miracle, but not an uncommon one. I can attest that my husband and two of his cousins, raised entirely in that society, grew up entirely without race prejudice. But unlike Jean Louise they were intensely aware of their anomaly, the complex discomfort of their position. They were all among the first in their families to go to college; they all sought and found a non-racially prejudiced community of people within Southern society, or else left the South altogether. What is implausible to me is not that Jean Louise is, as she says, “colorblind,” but that she’s somehow managed to blind herself all her life to her difference from her people.
The time is early in the Civil Rights movement; customary behaviors are becoming the object of discussion, deep-rooted injustices are being challenged. On her visit home, Jean Louise realises that her boyfriend and father are active in anti-NAACP organisations. She feels utterly betrayed. Her naivety may be incredible, but her denunciations are fine, her diatribes fierce. They soon get the wind taken out of them, however, by unshaken arguments from the boyfriend, an erratic uncle, and (most importantly) the beloved father, who, with a mixture of Christian meekness and lawyerly aplomb, permits her to say unforgivable things to him, while gently setting her straight about practical realities, the impossibility of immediate change, the importance of avoiding violence — all the persuasive and predictable justifications for moving very, very, very slowly towards righting the wrong.
Jean Louise has arisen and denounced, unsuccessfully. Does she depart?
We’re never told what she’s been doing in New York City. She never thinks about the place, any person there, or her work, whatever it is. A small town in Alabama is the entire cosmos of the novel. I think it must have been the cosmos of the author’s life. Jean Louise is going to go back North, but we don’t know whether to stay there or not. My guess is that what she was doing in New York was being a writer; and she’ll make a go of it, and come back South to stay. Not a very hard guess to make.
It appears that the New York editor who handled the book was uninterested in the human and moral situation the author was attempting to describe, or in helping her work through the over-simplifications and ineptitudes of that part of the book. Instead, she apparently persuaded Lee to enlarge on the very charming, nostalgic early parts of the book, when Jean Louise was Scout. Lee was encouraged to go back to childhood, and so to evade the problems of the book she wanted to write by writing, instead, a lovable fairytale.
I like to think of the book it might have been, had the editor had the vision to see what this incredibly daring first-novelist was trying to do and encouraged and aided her to do it more convincingly. But no doubt the editor was, commercially speaking, altogether right. That book would have found some admirers, but never would it have become a best-seller and a “classic.” It wouldn’t have pandered to self-reassuring images of White generosity risking all to save a grateful Black man.
Before Watchman was published, I was skeptical and unhappy — all the publicity made it sound like nothing but a clever lawyer and a greedy publisher in cahoots to exploit an old woman. Now, having read the book, I glimpse a different tragedy. Lee was a young writer on a roll, with several novels in mind to write after this one. She wrote none of them. Silence, lifelong. I wonder if the reason she never wrote again was because she knew her terrifyingly successful novel was untrue. In obeying the dictates of popular success, letting wishful thinking corrupt honest perception, she lost the self-credibility she, an honest woman, needed in order to write.
So I’m glad, now, that Watchman was published. It hasn’t done any harm to the old woman, and I hope it’s given her pleasure. And it redeems the young woman who wrote this book, who wanted to tell some truths about the Southern society that lies to itself so much. She went up North to tell the story, probably thinking she’d be free to tell it there. But she was coaxed or tempted into telling the simplistic, exculpatory lies about it that the North cherishes so much. The white North, that is. And a good part of the white South too, I guess.
Little white lies . . . North or South, they’re White lies. But not little ones.
Harper Lee was a good writer. She wrote a lovable, greatly beloved book. But this earlier one, for all its faults and omissions, asks some of the hard questions To Kill a Mockingbird evades.
— UKL 
3 August 2015
101. Some People Are Just As Equal As Others
Annals of Pard XVI
 Pard Gives an Eye-Level Visitor a Level Eye 

Pard Gives an Eye-Level Visitor a Level Eye
Pard photo courtesy Euan Monaghan/Structo
This photograph illustrates something I’ve been thinking about cats, dogs, and people. And about Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
We know that dogs, descended from wolves, and having lived domestically with humans for as long as 30,000 years, are for the most part deeply hierarchical, conceiving of society as a pyramid with The Boss (Alpha Male, Master, Mistress, God, King, Leader) on top and other beings arranged in descending order beneath. Obedience to authority and acceptance of one’s place in that social and moral order is right behavior.
I believe that cats, descended from semi-social or asocial wild cats and having lived domestically with humans for probably less than 3,000 years, have no concept whatever of a rightful hierarchy of social or moral authority. It does not occur to a cat that any other being has any right, other than might, to its obedience, which is offered only out of immediate self-interest or personal affection. Cats are intensely opportunistic, practical anarchists.
What we see in this photograph, taken by an amiable human willing to get down on his belly at floor level with the cat, is that the cat accepts this willingness as unworthy of special notice. The cat considers himself on a level with the human, whether the human is towering six feet above him or is flat on the floor with him.
Knowing  that the human is a stranger, although a quiet, well-behaved one, and is ten times larger and stronger than himself, the cat shows no alarm, but some rational distrust. He offers no welcome, slits his eyes, sets his ears at alert, gives nothing away, and simply looks straight at the large intruder upon his territory.
This is the level gaze of one who does not conceive himself as inferior to anybody — who sees himself as the social equal of anyone he meets.
I don’t say the absolute equal. Size matters. Pard grants me a certain authority: there are places I forbid him to go and things I prevent him from doing, and though he tests these sanctions often and sometimes disobeys them, mostly he accepts them. I think he does so because he trusts me, is fond of me, and is very much smaller than me. If he weighed 120 pounds instead of 12, he would be lot likelier to assert his equality with me by disobeying my orders.
Relationships of trust and affection that involve a balance of power are never simple. We work them out as we go along, individually and by species. Generalizations lead to assumptions that are often misleading, sometimes fatally so. After all, an 80-pound dog frightened or goaded into aggression, or who has been trained and encouraged to attack, is as dangerous as any leopard.
That so many of us can’t see the cat’s level gaze as a declaration of equality, but see it as contemptuous, arrogant, even threatening — as declaring superiority — signifies that, like wolves and dogs, we simians are hierarchs. We want power to be assigned to certain individuals once for all, not to pass around among us according to circumstance. We make permanent niches — Higher, Lower — and fill them. Creatures who won’t stay in the niche we put them in frighten or anger us. The gaze of equality from a small, speechless, furry creature is read as the intolerable challenge of an inferior claiming superiority.
I said cats are anarchists, but a society of equals is also, after all, a democracy.
The cat-human connection, historically an almost entirely practical, utilitarian one (with occasional fits of worshiping the cat as a divinity) in our time has come to include powerful bonds of intimate affection, unconditional, as between equals. I like the idea that from these subtle, intense companionships we might have something to learn about the nature of our own politics, our difficulty in achieving, even conceiving, genuine equality.
— UKL 
20 July 2015
 Pard is doing the Legless Cat Asana on top of a four-drawer filing cabinet in the upstairs hall, at just about human eye level, a good place for exchanging greetings with his equals. Photo by Moe Bowstern. 

Pard is doing the Legless Cat Asana on top of a four-drawer filing cabinet in the upstairs hall, at just about human eye level, a good place for exchanging greetings with his equals.
Photo by Moe Bowstern.


Ursula K. Le Guin
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In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog, inspired in part by reading Jose Saramago’s. A subset of these writings were collected in No Time to Spare, released in December 2017 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 


You can browse the archive by year here.


130. Poem Written in 1991
When the Soviet Union Was Disintegrating
by Ursula K. Le Guin
i
The reason why I’m learning Spanish
by reading Neruda one word at a time
looking most of them up in the dictionary
and the reason why I’m reading
Dickinson one poem at a time
and still not understanding
or liking much, and the reason
why I keep thinking about
what might be a story
and the reason why I’m sitting
here writing this, is that I’m trying
to make this thing.
I am shy to name it.
My father didn’t like words like “soul.”
He shaved with Occam’s razor.
Why make up stuff
when there’s enough already?
But I do fiction. I make up.
There is never enough stuff.
So I guess I can call it what I want to.
Anyhow it isn’t made yet.
I am trying one way and another
all words — So it’s made out of words, is it?
No. I think the best ones
must be made out of brave and kind acts,
and belong to people who look after things
with all their heart,
and include the ocean at twilight.
That’s the highest quality
of this thing I am making:
kindness, courage, twilight, and the ocean.
That kind is pure silk.
Mine’s only rayon. Words won’t wash.
It won’t wear long.
But then I haven’t long to wear it.
At my age I should have made it
long ago, it should be me,
clapping and singing at every tatter,
like Willy said. But the “mortal dress,”
man, that’s me. That’s not clothes.
That is me tattered.
That is me mortal.
This thing I am making is my clothing soul.
I’d like it to be immortal armor,
sure, but I haven’t got the makings.
I just have scraps of rayon.
I know I’ll end up naked
in the ground or on the wind.
So, why learn Spanish?
Because of the beauty of the words of poets,
and if I don’t know Spanish
I can’t read them. Because praise
may be the thing I’m making.
And when I’m unmade
I’d like it to be what’s left,
a wisp of cheap cloth,
a color in the earth,
a whisper on the wind.


Una palabra, un aliento.


ii
So now I’ll turn right round
and unburden an embittered mind
that would rejoice to rejoice
in the second Revolution in Russia
but can’t, because it has got old
and wise and mean and womanly
and says: So. The men
having spent seventy years in the name of something
killing men, women, and children,
torturing, running slave camps,
telling lies and making profits,
have now decided
that that something wasn’t the right one,
so they’ll do something else the same way.


Seventy years for nothing.


And the dream that came before the betrayal,
the justice glimpsed before the murders,
the truth that shone before the lies,
all that is thrown away.
It didn’t matter anyway
because all that matters
is who has the sayso.


Once I sang freedom, freedom,
sweet as a mockingbird.
But I have learned Real Politics.
No freedom for our children
in the world of the sayso.
Only the listening.
The silence all around the sayso.
The never stopping listening.
So I will listen
to women and our children
and powerless men,
my people. And I will honor only
my people, the powerless.


–Ursula K. Le Guin
1991


This is Ursula’s final blog post. 
25 September 2017
129. Pard and the Time Machine
The Annals of Pard XXIII
In an earlier blog post (#59, Annals of Pard III) I described my cat’s relationship to the Time Machine that sits on my desk keeping tabs on what goes on in my computer. When both Pard and the Time Machine were younger, it often made faint clickety buzzing noises, which convinced him that it it contained beetles. A reasonable assumption, since our house swarmed with box-elder beetles that year, and they did get into everything. He enjoyed hunting them. But eating them always appeared to be more a duty than a reward. Presently he gave it up. Then he gave up beetle-hunting altogether, as a boring juvenile pastime beneath the dignity of a mature cat.


He no longer tried to pry the sleek plastic box of the Time Machine open with tooth and claw to reveal beetles; but he still worked at it from time to time — evidently because it was shut. Pard has a strong conviction that what is closed ought to be opened. A box, a bag, a cabinet door, a room door, a drawer, a chest, a steamer trunk. The mandate is clear: you get it open, you go through it, or enter into it; and then after a while you come out again, leaving it open behind you.


Enough cats obey this mandate that I think there must be some survival value in it, perhaps that of knowing the local shelters and hiding places that you can get into at need. People think of cats as predators, but of course for any larger predator they are easy prey. Just ask the neighborhood owl or coyote.


Pard’s desire to insert himself entirely into small enclosed spaces doesn’t approach the genius for it of the great Maru, star of Youtube; but it is fascinating to watch him patiently prying at a latch, or working to coax a heavy pull-drawer open, or pushing open any door left ajar with one gracefully lifted paw and then sauntering through it, as if cats and doors were coeval.


Since I have a cat and a Time Machine, people naturally ask if the cat uses the Time Machine. He does; but not to transport him to a different part of the continuum. Cats can do that by themselves. Anybody who lives with a cat knows that at one time the cat is here; at another time, he is not. The transition from there to not there is imperceptible. (This transition may in fact have been what Schroedinger was trying to investigate in his famous thought experiment involving a cat and a box; but if so, the gun was a fundamental mistake.) Feline transilience does not require machinery. Possibly it involves paws, doors, and small places, but we can’t be sure. All we know is, we call kitty, kitty, and there is no cat; we do not call kitty, kitty, and there is.


Having no use for the Time Machine for transportation, and having given up on it as a beetle container and as an openable box, Pard discovered its true function. My study, a small corner room with a wall and a half of windows, gets as cold in winter as it gets hot in summer. Pard likes to be on the desk not far from me, like the Time Machine. Its sleek white plastic box is reliably warm, day and night. Cats approve of reliable warmth. Though very small as Time Machines go (nothing compared to H.G.Wells’s), its surface can support an average-sized cat, or at least some of the cat, with some bits lopping over. The hum it still sometimes emits is less chitinous than it used to be, more like a purr.


It’s warm, and it purrs? What more can you ask?


Here is Pard using the Time Machine for its true purpose.


Photograph by T.A. Downes-Le Guin
Photograph by T.A. Downes-Le Guin


128. Pard: An Interrupted Nap
Linda Long, photographer. 
Marilyn Reaves, distracter. 
U.K. Le Guin, skritcher


nap-1.jpeg
nap-.jpg
nap-3.jpeg
nap-4.jpg
— UKL 
24 July 2017


127. The Jaguar
the ghost of a jaguar walks through the fence 
the jaguar is our freedom


a friend gave me a precious thing
a little fragment of the Berlin wall


but this wall they are building
straight across my heartland


with our flag draped across it
is the coffin of my country


hands reach through the gaps
to clasp, until the gaps are sealed


and even music
cannot get through


but only the ghosts
of all we have betrayed


this is the wall of lamentation
the grave of the jaguar


— UKL 
17 July 2017




___________________






A Border Fence Blurred Through Art
by Erica Berenstein and Fernanda Santos
The New York Times
126. Cause to Celebrate
Photo of a barren hillside with text overlaid reading: Welcome to Oregon: Home of the Clearcut / Find out more at: www.ClearCutOregon.com
July 5, 2017. Tonight, after the ironic fireworks of a peculiarly anxious Independence Day, I want to celebrate two good things that have happened in my state.


First: Last week the Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed a ruling that bars the Port of Portland, manager of the Portland Airport, from banning an ad from Oregon Wild in partnership with ACLU of Oregon. The poster, a photograph of a totally barren mountain wasteland of rocks and gravel, says “Welcome to Oregon, Home of the Clearcut.” The state has long been under the thumb of the timber industry, and its feeble laws protecting public health and the environment must be strengthened. (You can find out more at ClearCutOregon.com.)


And: Today the state legislature voted for the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which codifies the legal right to abortion and protects and increases health care including contraception, abortion, and postpartum care to all Oregonians regardless of income, gender, or citizenship status. NARAL Pro-choice Oregon announced this under the banner, “Abortion is Healthcare.”


These local actions won’t get attention the way weird presidential twitterings do. But they make me feel my Republic can and will survive the mindless destructivism of misled Republicans and the frightened apathy of an opposition without leadership. Two cheers for Oregon!


— UKL 
5 July 2017


125. A Work in Progress: Earthsea Sketches by Charles Vess
Here are a few more of Charles Vess’ preliminary sketches for the illustrations for the one-volume Earthsea next year, along with excerpts from our correspondence about the pictures and their subjects.


As you see, the dragons of Earthsea are now very splendid creatures. The people, the islands, the towns, the houses and ships and forests and goats of Earthsea are all coming to visible life. The pages of the book will be thronged and vivid with them.


These are first-draft, rough-draft sketches in pencil, alterable in every detail. Charles will not finish them in ink until we have got every roofbeam and wine glass right. But I love the freedom of the pencil sketches, the energetic lines and vigorous composition that give the sense of motion in open space.


Collaboration between two arts is an exciting business!


I. Inside An Imaginary House
(March 17, 2017)
Charles wrote:


. . . I also discovered that the Mage’s home in Re Albi had a wooden floor. Good to know, perhaps?


Ursula answered:


The wooden floor also came as a surprise to me when young Ogion insisted on laying it for Dulse (and I hope there is nothing in the earlier books that contradicts it).


How do you see the roof of the house? The Overfell is a windy place much exposed to weather, and I think I vaguely imagined slate or tile rather than thatch; but all I am sure of is that it’s not ceiled, inside the house one sees the beams and rafters.


Charles wrote:


I’d been doodling a floor plan (which I don’t know if I’ll ever use . . .) and had a stone floor in mind. But wooden planks makes much more sense.


Roof: It would certainly be shingled with either wood or slate because in that high place thatch would just blow away in the wind.


Also, I discovered after carefully reading through the first 4 books that the one, small window is facing west and in the alcove. Good to know.


Ursula answered:


I will doodle the floor plan in my head and try to scan and send it. I realized that the way I describe the interior of the house in A Wizard is a bit different from the way I later worked it out, and I want to see if I can make it consistent.


That’s what I thought about thatch.


The conformation of Gont Mountain/Island certainly suggests volcanic; therefore probably not much slate around. But lots of forest. Therefore wood shingles?


Old Mage’s House floor plan, by UKL


I sent Charles this floor plan of the house, with the following note:


Old Mage’s House floor plan, by UKL
Old Mage’s House floor plan, by UKL


Ursula wrote:


Very scrawly, sorry.


Proportions not to be taken as accurate! I was just trying to work out roughly where things are in relation to each other.


The alcove is more or less opposite the fireplace, and only large enough for a pallet bed (young Ged’s, later Therru’s)


I think the other bed (Ogion’s, later Tenar’s, then Ged and Tenar’s) is described in Wizard as being “at the back” of the house, but by now I know it’s in the back room but more in the middle of the house. Its head is against the room-divider, which is all that is left of what was the inner dividing wall between the hearthplace and the barn or byre part of the house.


Dulse’s teacher Ard (Bones of the Earth) exiled all animals from the house, built a goat house as a lean-to against the East wall, and took out much of the original divider wall (which was 4 or 5 feet high — did not reach to roof).


So the house is spoken of in Wizard as “one large room,” but it is semi-divided, with the old byre serving as bedroom-workshop-storage closets or shelves. The back door, a sliding door as in a barn, is now unused except in emergency.


I think when Ogion reintroduced goats, he moved the goat house farther from the house and took down the lean-to, so I did not draw it.


The goat house, chicken house, cow-barn (I am sure Tenar had a cow) etc. can be anywhere you please in relation to the house.


I hope this is helpful. If you see anything missing or anomalous please let me know.


March 20, 2017


Ursula continued:


I take back what I said about Tenar keeping a cow. If she did it would be mentioned in the books. She made goat cheese, but bought her cow’s milk and butter from a farm just outside Re Albi.


(It was just because I have always wanted to keep a cow, a Jersey.)


II. Outside An Imaginary House
(April 11, 2017)
Ged and Tenar in Front of Old Mage’s House
Ged and Tenar in Front of Old Mage’s House


Charles wrote:


Now, don’t panic, I haven’t sketched out any of the other planned drawings for this book yet. I just thought that I’d do the last one first so that it wouldn’t be quite so sad when I got to it. That is, sad for me, not Ged & Tenar who are well content to spend their remaining lives peaceably & together but conceptually, I’ll be almost done with this lovely project.


Anyway . . .


Here are Ged and Tenar sitting in front of their home, glasses of wine in hand, attended by a goat (or goats ?) with the sunset bathing them in its color (I wish that this was to be in color but alas, it is not . . .). I wanted to run this by you in this very rough stage just to make sure that I have all the elements orientated in the correct manner, ie: what’s facing west is supposed to be there.


Ursula answered:


This is lovely. Mood perfect. Compass orientation correct. Old Mage’s House perhaps a little more imposing than I had imagined it: perhaps the stones would be less perfectly faced? the general impression a little messier & humbler? — but all in all, I am simply glad to see it realized.


I had no idea there was a tree at the NW corner! What kind of tree is it?


I can’t make out the wine glasses. I was just worried that they might be stemmed. They wouldn’t be. In fact, would they be glass? I guess so. Everybody who can put their wine in a glass does so, don’t they.


Excellent goat.


A couple of hens maybe? I do think hens are good company


Charles wrote:


The tree would be a Peach Tree, growing there in the protective corner of the house wall.


They would be holding simple crockery to drink their wine out of wouldn’t they?


Certainly, I’ll put some hens pecking about their feet. That will be fun.


And, I’ll make the house a bit more humble.


Ged and Tenar in Front of Old Mage’s House
Ged and Tenar in Front of Old Mage’s House


(April 12, 2017)
Charles wrote:


Here’s that drawing put onto paper a bit more carefully.


Also, its summer? I say that because Ged has just been watering the cabbages. So are there then peaches on the Peach Tree?


If so I must laden those branches . . .


Ursula answered:


Aww!


A few peaches, not ripe yet . . . ?


The house is perfect.


I don’t know if expressions come into it at this stage? Tenar looks a bit timid or downcast to me — it’s partly her posture, which suggests to me that she is looking to him for reassurance (but not vice versa). Tenar is a strong woman with a courageous, independent, and (by now) essentially serene spirit. I just don’t want to see her looking the least bit weak!


The chickens are a joy.


Buc-buc-buc!


III. A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds
(April 24, 2017)
Charles and I both detest discrepancies or contradictions between text and illustration and strive very hard for consistency. Nobody might ever have noticed the problem we discuss here. But I feel like confessing it, because in this case, deciding that consistency would be foolish, we called on magic to bail us out.


Charles wrote:


I have a question. When I was rereading this section with Alder walking up from the Gont Port I came to a short sentence that gave me pause, especially after having drawn the house at Re Albi twice and worked out its floor plan with you. Right on page #5 you describe the small house as “wooden”. Yikes! I don’t remember it ever being described that way before. Is it? Maybe I’m just catching that aspect now. Please let me know, because if it is I’ll need to redraw those other two images.


Ursula answered:


Arghh! Gont Mountain is all forested, plenty of timber, & so I saw the house as wood.


But I was so convinced by the house you drew that I never gave it a thought.


Now I wish I could go back and take the word “wooden” out of the text!


I hate to think of you having to take that handsome stone cottage down and rebuild it all with a pencil.


We could just ignore the discrepancy for once?


After all a wizard’s house might be capable of unexpected transformations….


The floor plan is unchanged.


Charles wrote:


Double bubble, toil and trouble. By the magic that is invested in these fingers and this pencil I transform thee, wood into stone.


Thank you!


IV. Transformation
(April 2017, 2017)
Vess-Transformation-Earthsea6p154_500w-1.jpg
This sketch is still just roughed out in many respects, but I wanted to post it here so you can see how our dragons have developed, and also see Charles drawing a physical transformation as it happens, which is not really possible.


Such transformations are so easy faked visually on film that we may cease to realise how truly strange it would be to see a dragon descend and become a woman in flesh and blood. The unmoving picture, defying possibility, saves that radical strangeness from the banality of the filmic anything-is-possible.


And look at the movement in the unmoving pencil lines — the dragon towering like a great hawk among the castle towers, the girl startled and amused to find herself again diminished — grounded — standing on only two feet…


— UKL 
1 May 2017


124. Refusing to be Bullied
The manic speed and vindictiveness of the Republican attack on American core values and institutions make it all too easy for us, the majority opposition, to feel defeated — hopeless. This article is a good antidote.


It’s appropriate that the city of Santa Ana, with its long, deep Mexican-American heritage, its fourth and fifth-generation Mexican-American families, and its sympathetic State government, achieved this genuine victory over prejudice, this refusal of obedience to a hateful, cruel federal policy.


But don’t think it was easy, even there, to do so. Becoming a Sanctuary City isn’t just a matter of words, it takes real commitment, long and steady resolve, and determined hope, to resist and keep resisting the politicians and interests that seek power by supporting those shameful policies, and the misguided citizens who imagine they will gain profit or status from them.


I wish with all my heart that my city, Portland, Oregon, would follow the lead of Santa Ana — stand by its hard-working Mexican-American population, and let all its citizens share the honor of refusing to be bullied into bowing to the orders of a bigoted administration.


¡Nadie es ilegal!


— UKL 
6 March 2017


P.S. I was unfair in this final paragraph. Portland did declare itself a sanctuary city a while back, as our new mayor, Ted Wheeler, reminded us in an editorial in The Oregonian, Jan. 29, 2017


I took this declaration as well-intentioned but little else. To be more than a feel-good announcement, it must be implemented with effective instructions to the police, effective provisions for actual sanctuary for people whose documentation is in question, and so forth — a very big commitment, that will inevitably rouse loud and angry opposition. But I was wrong to assume that my city had not made that commitment, and truly hope that it will make and keep it.


— UKL 
March 8, 2017


123. Constructing the Golem
The legend of the golem varies according to the teller, but I will follow the version that tells how in a time of persecution a rabbi made a mighty giant out of mud, a golem, and wrote a sacred word on its forehead — “Truth” — that gave it life. With its frightening size and enormous strength, the golem was to defend and safeguard the Jews. But the golem was not rational, not controllable. It was a danger in itself. So the rabbi removed a single letter from the word on its forehead, which then read “Death,” and the life went out of the giant, leaving only mud.


Sometimes it seems lately that most of the emails I get from my friends are about Donald Trump. Some are laments, confessions of despair; many are witty parodies of him, funny imitations of him, scathing cartoons about him. He is the subject, the object, of all of them.


He is also the subject of most lead stories in most newspapers, which is expectable for a new president, and of endless editorials. I gather that he fills the political news on TV even more thoroughly and is exhaustively, continually discussed, attacked, defended, parodied, etc. on the social media, not to mention his own nightly fits of twittering. I don’t know this firsthand because I rarely watch or listen to any media news any more, don’t follow or read social media at all (though occasionally have posted something from my website), and don’t have a smart phone. If this makes you feel that I am disqualified to comment on modern life and politics, I can’t argue.


As a science fiction writer, I will, however, say that sometimes the view of Earth from another planet can give insights otherwise unattainable.


Looking at the New World from the ancient one I inhabit, I am appalled at the constant, obsessive attention paid to Trump.


He appears to be exactly what he wants to be: addictive.


He is a true, great master of the great game of this age, the Celebrity Game. Attention is what he lives on. Celebrity without substance. His “reality” is “virtual” — i.e. non-existent — but he used this almost-reality to disguise a successful bid for real power. Every witty parody, hateful gibe, clever takeoff, etc., merely plays his game, and therefore plays into his hands.


Reagan was the master of TV, but this guy has a nation full of people with their eyes and ears already glued 18 hours a day to screens and speakers, already habituated to a stream of disparate, disconnected “information” (news/entertainment/commercials mashup) which cannot be fact-checked, cannot be organized into understanding, because it’s so huge, so incessant, and goes by so fast. Exactly the way Trump thinks and talks.


It’s how he won the campaign: keeping in the limelight, flummoxing his Republican rivals, outshouting poor, rational Clinton, silencing thought with a flood of incessant, bullying, meaningless words.


It’s no use wishing the media would stop hanging on him and the press would stop reporting every tweet, but it may be worth saying that they’d do less of it if we stopped watching and listening to him — if we weren’t so literally fascinated by him.


He’s the snake and we’re the chickens.


When he does something weird (which he does constantly in order to keep media attention on him), look not at him but at the people whom his irresponsible acts or words affect — the Republicans who try to collaborate with him (like collaborating with a loose cannon), the Democrats and Government employees he bullies, the statesmen from friendly countries he offends, the ordinary people he uses, insults, and hurts. Look away from him, and at the people who are working desperately to save what they can save of our Republic and our hope of avoiding nuclear catastrophe. Look away from him, and at reality, and things begin to get back into proportion.


I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way.


He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud.


— UKL 
21 February 2017


122. The Wall by Anita Endrezze
My friend Deborah Miranda sent me this poem by her friend Anita Endrezze, which says a lot of the things that have been struggling in me to get said lately, and makes me cry, and rejoices my heart. I asked Anita if I could post the poem here, and asked her to write a little about herself and about it. Here it is.


— UKL 
3 February 2017


Anita Endrezze.png
Anita Endrezze is from Native American (Yaqui) and European heritage. She has ten published books plus is included in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. 


Her most recent book is A Thousand Branches (Red Bird Press), which is a book of poems and art. Her book of short stories, Butterfly Moon, is available from University of Arizona Press. She was given the Governor’s Writers award for Washington State and has received other awards as well. She has a M.A from Eastern Washington University. Her art has been in international exhibitions. One of her projects was a collaborative altered book which is now at the Smithsonian. Her next exhibit is in Seattle in February. It’s a collaborative work about Don Quixote and migration. 


She has Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis and is mainly housebound.


More info can be found at her website:  Anitaendrezze.weebly.com


About the poem:
I asked myself, what should the Wall be made of? Since I'm a poet, I work with imagery and symbols. The Wall itself is a symbol. But I’m a visual artist also so I like to see. A wall of taco trucks, a wall of solar panels. The humorous, the utilitarian, the inventive. And layers of messages. What could be freer than sunshine and renewable energy as opposed to millions of dollars to build a wall? Or tacos, a blend of cultures, to nourish people. I took some images from social networking posts, like the solar panel and Lego ideas in order to connect with the current situation. I also wove my own creative ideas into the poem. The poem seems to resonate with many people because of those techniques.


The Wall
by Anita Endrezze (Yaqui)
Build a wall of saguaros,
butterflies, and bones
of those who perished
in the desert. A wall of worn shoes,
dry water bottles, poinsettias.
Construct it of gilded or crazy house
mirrors so some can see their true faces.
Build a wall of revolving doors
or revolutionary abuelas.
Make it as high as the sun, strong as tequila.
Boulders of sugar skulls. Adobe or ghosts.
A Lego wall or bubble wrap. A wall of hands
holding hands, hair braided from one woman
to another, one country to another.
A wall made of Berlin. A wall made for tunneling.
A beautiful wall of taco trucks.
A wall of silent stars and migratory songs.
This wall of solar panels and holy light,
panels of compressed cheetos,
topped not by barbed wire but sprouting
avocado seeds, those Aztec testicles.
A wall to keep Us in and Them out.It will have faces and heartbeats.
Dreams will be terrorists. The Wall will divide
towns, homes, mountains,
the sky that airplanes fly through
with their potential illegals.
Our wallets will be on life support
to pay for it. Let it be built
of guacamole so we can have a bigly block party.
Mortar it with xocoatl, chocolate. Build it from coyote howls
and wild horses drumming across the plains of Texas,
from the memories
of hummingbird warriors and healers.
Stack it thick as blood, which has mingled
for centuries, la vida. Dig the foundation deep.
Create a 2,000 mile altar, lit with votive candles
for those who have crossed over
defending freedom under spangled stars
and drape it with rebozos,and sweet grass.
Make it from two way windows:
the wind will interrogate us,
the rivers will judge us, for they know how to separate
and divide to become whole.
Pink Floyd will inaugurate it.
Ex-Presidente Fox will give it the middle finger salute.
Wiley Coyote will run headlong into it,
and survive long after history forgets us.
Bees will find sand-scoured holes and fill it
with honey. Heroin will cover it in blood.
But it will be a beautiful wall. A huge wall.
Remember to put a rose-strewn doorway in Nogales
where my grandmother crossed over,
pistols on her hips. Make it a gallery of graffiti art,
a refuge for tumbleweeds,
a border of stories we already know by heart.  


Copyright © 2017 by Anita Endrezze


121. Pard Gets a New Catnip Mouse
The Annals of Pard XXI
With thanks to Nora Eskes 
photographer and mouse donor


Annals XXI-1.jpg
Annals XXI-2.jpeg
Annals XXI-3.jpg
120. A thanksgiving
A thanksgiving
Those who stood at Standing Rock 
show us how the rocks stand 
so that only earth itself can move them, 
so that they move with earth, 
dancing earth’s dance with sky 
so their shadows tell the years.


They show us that to stand in place, 
standing in your rightful place, 
is to go the right way, 
going the way the earth goes.


Those who stood at Standing Rock 
have shown us the way and blessed it. 
A dark way we have to go 
yet it is blessed in its beginning. 
May it end rightly, 
so that we stand with them there, 
so that we dance with them there 
where they stood for us at Standing Rock.


—Ursula K. Le Guin 
4-5 December 2016


119. The Election, Lao Tzu, a Cup of Water
Americans have voted for a politics of fear, anger, and hatred, and those of us who oppose this politics are now trying to figure out how we can oppose it usefully. I want to defend my country, my republic. In the atmosphere of fear, anger, and hatred, opposition too easily becomes division, fixed enmity. I’m looking for a place to stand, or a way to go, where the behavior of those I oppose will not control my behavior.


Americans are given to naming enemies and declaring righteous war against them. Indians are the enemy, socialism is the enemy, cancer is the enemy, Jews are the enemy, Muslims are the enemy, sugar is the enemy. We don’t support education, we declare a war on illiteracy. We make war on drugs, war on Viet Nam, war on Iraq, war on obesity, war on terror, war on poverty. We see death, the terms on which we have life, as an enemy that must be defeated at all costs.


Defeat for the enemy, victory for us, aggression as the means to that end: this obsessive metaphor is used even by those who know that aggressive war offers no solution, and has no end but desolation.


The election of 2016 was one of the battles of the American Civil War. The Trump voters knew it, if we didn’t, and they won it. Their victory helps me see where my own thinking has been at fault.


I will try never to use the metaphor of war where it doesn’t belong, because I think it has come to shape our thinking and dominate our minds so that we tend to see the destructive force of aggression as the only way to meet any challenge. I want to find a better way.


My song for many years was We Shall Overcome. I will always love that song, what it says and the people who have sung it, with whom I marched singing. But I can’t march now, and I can’t sing it any longer.


My song is Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.


Though we’ve had some great scholars of peace, such as Martin Luther King, studying it is something Americans have done very little of.


The way of the warrior admits no positive alternatives to fighting, only negatives — inertia, passivity, surrender. Talk of “waging peace” is mere glibness, you can’t be aggressively peaceful. Reducing positive action to fighting against or fighting for, we have not looked at the possibility of other forms of action.


Like the people who marched to Selma, the people who are standing their ground at Standing Rock study, learn, and teach us the hard lessons of peace. They are not making war. They are resolutely non-violent. They are seeking a way out of the traps of anger, hatred, enmity. They are actively trying to get free, to be free, and by their freedom, free others as well.


Studying peace means in the first place unlearning the vocabulary of war, and that’s very difficult indeed. Isn’t it right to fight against injustice? Isn’t that what Selma and Standing Rock are — brave battles for justice?


I think not. Brave yes; battles no. Refusing to engage an aggressor on his terms, standing ground, holding firm, is not aggression — though the aggressive opponent will always declare that it is. Refusing to meet violence with violence is a powerful, positive act.


But that is paradoxical. It’s hard to see how not doing something can be more positive than doing something. When all the words we have to use are negative — inaction, nonviolence, refusal, resistance, evasion — it’s hard to see and keep in mind that the outcome of these so-called negatives is positive, while the outcome of the apparently positive act of making war is negative.


We confuse self-defense, the reaction to aggression, with aggression itself. Self-defense is a necessary and morally defensible reaction.


But defending a cause without fighting, without attacking, without aggression, is not a reaction. It is an action. It is an expression of power. It takes control.


Reaction is controlled by the power it reacts against. The people who at present claim to be conservatives aren’t conservatives at all, they are radical reactionaries. The position of the reactionary is not that of the agent, but that of the victim. The reactionary tends always toward paranoia, seeing himself as the obsessive object of vast malevolent forces and entities, fearing enemies everywhere, in anyone he doesn’t understand and can’t control, in every foreigner, in his own government.


Many contemporary Republicans have permanently assumed the position of victim, which is why their party has no positive agenda, and why they whine so much.


The choice to act, rather than react, breaks the paralysis of fear and the vicious circle of aggression, frees us go forward, onward.


We have glamorized the way of the warrior for millennia. We have identified it as the supreme test and example of courage, strength, duty, generosity, and manhood. If I turn from the way of the warrior, where am I to seek those qualities? What way have I to go?


Lao Tzu says: the way of water.


The weakest, most yielding thing in the world, as he calls it, water chooses the lowest path, not the high road. It gives way to anything harder than itself, offers no resistance, flows around obstacles, accepts whatever comes to it, lets itself be used and divided and defiled, yet continues to be itself and to go always in the direction it must go. The tides of the oceans obey the moon while the great currents of the open sea keep on their ways beneath. Water deeply at rest is yet always in motion; the stillest lake is constantly, invisibly transformed into vapor, rising in the air. A river can be dammed and diverted, yet its water is incompressible: it will not go where there is not room for it. A river can be so drained for human uses that it never reaches the sea, yet in all those bypaths and usages its water remains itself and pursues its course, flowing down and on, above ground or underground, breathing itself out into the air in evaporation, rising in mist, fog, cloud, returning to earth as rain, refilling the sea. Water doesn’t have only one way. It has infinite ways, it takes whatever way it can, it is utterly opportunistic, and all life on earth depends on this passive, yielding, uncertain, adaptable, changeable element.


The death way or the life way? The high road of the warrior, or the river road?


I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace.


The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last.


The way of the water admits them all.


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, always seeking the best way, the easiest way, but if not finding any easy way still, always, going on.


The cup of water that gives itself to thirst is a model for me of the compassion that gives itself freely. Water is generous, tolerant, does not hold itself apart, lets itself be used by any need. Water goes, as Lao Tzu says, to the lowest places, vile places, accepts contamination, accepts foulness, and yet comes through again always as itself, pure, cleansed, and cleansing.


Running water and the sea are models for me of patience: their easy, steady obedience to necessity, to the pull of the moon in the sea-tides and the pull of the earth always downward; the immense power of that obedience.


I have no model for peace, only glimpses of it, metaphors for it, similes to what I cannot fully grasp and hold. Among them: a bowl of clear water. A boat drifting on a slow river. A lake among hills. The vast depths of the sea. A drop of water at the tip of a leaf. The sound of rain. The sound of a fountain. The bright dance of the water-spray from a garden hose, the scent of wet earth.


A Meditation
The river that runs in the valley
makes the valley that holds it.


This is the doorway:
the valley of the river.


~


What wears away the hard stone,
the high mountain?
The wind. The dust on the wind.
The rain. The rain on the wind.


What wears the hardness of hate away?
Breath, tears.


~


Courage, compassion, patience
holding to their way:
the path to the doorway.


~~~


Blog post 119, “The Election, Lao Tzu, a Cup of Water,” may be quoted, reprinted, or translated as a whole. Please notify the webmaster of reprintings.


118. Health Update Update
The kindness of these messages is wonderful. I wish I could thank you each. I can only thank you all — with all my heart.


Health update: My daily bouquet of medicines with weird names is definitely doing its job. Am quite recovered from the bad time, and get along fine if I don’t push it. My model of behavior is the Sloth.


Can’t hang from branches yet, but am real good at moving slo o o w w l y . . .


Best wishes to all my well-wishers,


—Ursula 
October 23, 2016 


118 Pard.jpg
117. Health Update
Dear Readers:


I’m sorry about not keeping up my blog posts, but everything got interrupted for me this summer when my congenital heart murmur (leaky valve) finally began to exact its toll. I spent a few days in hospital, have been home now for three weeks. Doing fine but not doing very much — and that looks to be the way it will be for a while.


Pard is a great help in not getting anything done except lying around more or less ornamentally. I am learning this art from a true master.


So I won’t try to keep blogging, though I miss it, and hope maybe I can post something now and then. Even if it’s just silly poems. Like these.


 


Versification


I tried to write a distich
but it turned antagonistic
and tried to rhyme with biscuit
and I don’t know how to fix it.


So I try to write a tercet
such a pretty little verset
but no matter how I nurse it
it’s another quatrain, curse it!


Simile’s Story 


As I was walking by the sea
I met a Phor that said to me,
“O will you be my Simile?”


I said: “Although it pains me sore,
And probably will pain you more,
I’m not, and do not, like you, Phor.”


So I went on by the sea-side
And met a Morphosis, who cried,
“O Simile, come be my bride!”


I sighed: “Whatever change you bring,
I’ll wear your transubstantial ring,
For I love you like anything!” 


So, in alternate woe and bliss,
Sometimes like that, sometimes like this,
I live as Mrs. Morphosis.


Pard’s Apparel 


He wears a striking suit of black:
Long sleeves in front – short pants in back.
White is his tie, and white his shirt,
Immaculate of stain or dirt.
On his white stockings, from the rear,
Two ornamental spots appear, 
Serving to lessen the albedo
Of his unusual tuxedo.


116. The Big Book of Earthsea
Saga has officially announced that they’ll publish all Earthsea in one volume in 2018 — a grand present for a Wizard’s fiftieth birthday.


When Joe Monti first proposed this edition to me, I was happy to think of the six books of Earthsea, Ged and Tenar’s whole story, all truly together at last — but I worried about how much it would weigh.


I read lying down. I know what a Giant Tome can do to your arms and shoulders. Not to mention your solar plexus.


But I’ve been working on my abs and my brachioradiales. I can handle it. Bring it on, Joe!


Seriously, what is most exciting to me about this edition is THE PICTURES. Charles Vess is painting a wraparound cover and a full-color frontispiece for each of the six books (and, says he, “the title page will be in color, if I have anything to say about it.” To which I say Amen!) Then he’ll be drawing some fifty black-and-white vignettes for chapter heads, ten or a dozen full-page illustrations, and a bunch of smaller pictures throughout the book.


This is the first completely illustrated Earthsea ever. And I do mean completely.


OK, I confess — I was worried about that too, at first.


I’ve had some great relationship with illustrators, and some not so great ones. Some professional illustrators, having been or fearing to be bossed and harassed by unreasonable or impossible demands, simply refuse to communicate with the writer. I accept that only if I have the corresponding right to refuse the illustrations.


But with an artist of the standing of Charles Vess, the situation is different. He can legitimately expect autonomy — to find and follow his own vision of the text without seeking any input from the writer.


I expected that he would do that. I was almost incredulous when he didn’t. But incredulity turned to happy relief. Charles is a collaborator.


I love collaboration. As a poet and story-writer I work strictly alone; but to find an artist of a different art — painter, composer, filmmaker, playwright, actor, choreographer — that I can consult with, talk with, and watch as they make what I wrote into something new, yet still itself, something I couldn’t make, couldn’t even imagine — That is a privilege and a joy.


So, this is how it’s been going:


Charles begins the conversation, emailing me occasonally with questions, remarks, while reading the books. I answer as usefully as I can. Also, we chat. I find out that he has sailed all around Scotland. He tells me about Neil Gunn’s novel The Silver Darlings, which I read with vast pleasure. I don’t know what I tell him, but slowly and at easy intervals a friendship is being established.


Suddenly Charles sends me a sketch of a dragon.


116 Earthsea-1.jpeg
An Early Dragon Sketch 
Copyright © 2016 Charles Vess


It is an excellent dragon. But it isn’t an Earthsea dragon.


Why?


Well . . . an Earthsea dragon wouldn’t have this, see? but it would have that . . . And the tail isn’t exactly right, and about those bristly things —


So I send Charles an email full of whines and niggles and what-if-you-trieds-such-and-suches. I realize how inadequate are my attempts to describe in words the fierce and beautiful being I see so clearly.


Brief pause.


The dragon reappears. Now it looks more like an Earthsea dragon.


But still, it wouldn’t have this here, but it would have something there . . . And about its eye . . . And about those bristly things, you know, don’t they make it very male? and dragon gender is really mysterious . . . .


And so on — more nitpicking, more whimpering, more what-ifs and inadequate efforts to describe.


Patient as Job, grimy with graphite, Charles responds with further dragons, ever more graceful and powerful, ever closer to my heart’s desire . . . and his too, I hope.


116 Earthsea-2.jpg
First sketch for Tehanu frontispiece 
Copyright © 2016 Charles Vess


Then all at once he sends a rough sketch for the title page that makes me leap up and shout Oh, LOOK AT THAT!!! even though nobody is there but the cat, who doesn’t.


But then, even in that, I find things to whine about, and ask about, and pester him about.


And so it goes. A fascinating process, but not an easy process for either of us, I think. It can be very exciting; it can be very trying.


Two different, intense temperaments; two independent people with a sense of mastery in their respective crafts; one on the East coast, one on the West, a continent between them; a mature man and an old woman, with the inevitable differences of vision and of expectation that age and gender create . . . . Is it from the differences, maybe even the strains, that a spark is struck?


But the concordances, the understandings, the growing confidence, the trust, are the fuel that keeps the fire burning.


The fire is burning. And I am perfectly certain that this book, whatever it may weigh, is going to be beautiful — a treasure.


—UKL
18 July 2016


116 Earthsea-3.jpg
Earthsea Title Page 
Copyright © 2016 Charles Vess


For more illustrations, please visit the Facebook page of Charles Vess
Update 22 July 2016: Charles Vess Talks Slipping Into Ursula K. Le Guin’s Brain to Draw Earthsea Dragons, at tor.com