{"id":6853,"date":"2018-09-06T11:07:13","date_gmt":"2018-09-06T18:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=6853"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:43:06","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:43:06","slug":"le-guin-no-time-to-spare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2018\/09\/06\/le-guin-no-time-to-spare\/","title":{"rendered":"Le Guin, NO TIME TO SPARE"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/LeGuinNoTime.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/LeGuinNoTime-300x230.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"230\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-6857\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/LeGuinNoTime-300x230.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/LeGuinNoTime.jpg 498w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>Ursula K. Le Guin, NO TIME TO SPARE: Thinking About What Matters (2017)<\/p>\n<p>This book is a collection of the best blog posts Le Guin did on her site at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ursulakleguin.com\/\">http:\/\/www.ursulakleguin.com\/<\/a>, from 2010 until her death in early 2018. It was published in December 2017, and won the Hugo Award in August 2018 as Best Related Work (i.e., a nonfiction book about science fiction or fantasy) of 2017. One has to acknowledge that the award was something of a sympathy vote, for while it&#8217;s a charming book with many wise thoughts, very little of it is about science fiction or fantasy specifically. The title echoes her reflection on her age, and about a questionnaire that asked what she did in her \u2018spare time\u2019. As a full-time writer, she\u2019s constantly busy with \u201cdaydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking\u2026 None of this is spare time. I can\u2019t spare it\u2026 I\u2019m going to be eight-one next week. I have no time to spare.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Still, Le Guin is one of science fiction\u2019s greatest writers, and she applied her talent not just to science fiction and fantasy, and it\u2019s well worth spending time sampling her wisdom in this book.<\/p>\n<p>The introduction is by Karen Joy Fowler \u2013 note p xiv \u2013 xv, \u201cIn another essay, in another book, Le Guin has said that so-called realism centers the human. Only the literature of the fantastic deals with the nonhuman as of equal interest and important. In this and so many other ways, fantasy is the more subversive, the more comprehensive, the more intriguing literature.\u201d [[ I\u2019ll have to track down that essay. I agree with this to a point \u2013 but think it is science fiction that deals with the nonhuman as of equal interest, and fantasy that more often indulges in human interests and priorities in an indulgent way. ]]<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>She notes that she was inspired to start a blog by reading the blogs of Jose Saramago.<\/li>\n<li>P3, dealing with a Harvard survey asking what she does in her \u2018spare time\u2019. Writing is what she does; she doesn\u2019t have spare time. She skips some questions with inadequate choices for answers.<\/li>\n<li>P8, about old age, rejecting that saying about \u2018you\u2019re only as old as you feel\u2019, and being frank about the challenges of getting older<\/li>\n<li>P12, more about getting old, and respect, and the young<\/li>\n<li>P18, about he she doesn\u2019t drive and neither she nor husband can walk down 10 steep blocks to the market any more; they have to plan weekly shopping<\/li>\n<li>P23, Choosing a Cat, at the Humane Society in Portland, picking one out, taking him home, naming him Pard<\/li>\n<li>P29, Chosen by a Cat, after four months, how Pard eats, tears around the house, getting into things, eating beetles<\/li>\n<li>P35, about cursing in fiction, so unimaginative with only two words these days<\/li>\n<li>P39, readers\u2019 questions, she likes only specific ones, like about sparrowhawks; what stories mean is up to the reader<\/li>\n<li>P44, kids\u2019 letters, mostly about Catwings, and with charming misspellings<\/li>\n<li>P48, about how she never got the proverb about having one\u2019s cake and eating it too; perhaps a confusion over the meaning of \u2018have\u2019 which can mean eat. Words matter.<\/li>\n<li>P53, about Iliad and Odyssey, the ur-stories about story and the journey<\/li>\n<li>P59, about the Sartre Prize for nonacceptance of an award; how she\u2019d won the Nebula for \u201cThe Diary of the Rose\u201d but refused it over the SFWA\/Lem kerfuffle. [[ This is news: it\u2019s long been known that she withdrew that story from the final ballot, but not that she did so despite the fact that it had actually won; by withdrawing it, she let Asimov win for \u201cThe Bicentennial Man\u201d ]]<\/li>\n<li>P63, About the great American novel, and how such a notion is parochial and unnecessary; but how her own favorite is <em>The Grapes of Wrath<\/em>, how the ending made such an impact on her when she read it young<\/li>\n<li>P69, what a great novel by a woman? Again, doesn\u2019t take idea seriously.<\/li>\n<li>P74, The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum, discusses two books, <em>The Help<\/em>, a page-turner but troublesome in many ways, and <em>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Sacks<\/em>, much better. Yet both compulsively readable.<\/li>\n<li>\u201cIt Doesn\u2019t Have to Be the Way It Is\u201d p80: about imaginative literature, and how it\u2019s different than childish imaginings; it\u2019s not \u2018anything goes\u2019 and it\u2019s not \u2018it ought to be this way\u2019; it\u2019s \u2018it doesn\u2019t have to be the way it is.\u2019 P83t:\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cAs 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 \u201cescapism\u201d an accusation of?\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>And this on the relation of fantasy and science, p84.3:\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cThere really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it\u2019s 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. \u201c<\/li>\n<li>(Well\u2014it\u2019s easy to see the distinction; science is about what\u2019s real, in a practical way; fantasy is almost by definition about what isn\u2019t real. But that\u2019s not her issue here.)<\/li>\n<li>But the passage goes on: \u201cOf 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\u2019t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, \u2018It doesn\u2019t have to be the way we thought it was.\u2019 \u201c<\/li>\n<li>(This is more to the point. The hostility to fantasy, therefore, might come from those, the religious, who are certain in their opinions about the world and resent having them challenged; thus the religious reaction against the Harry Potter books, which supposedly encouraged belief in magic and witchcraft.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>P85, Utopiyin, Utopiyang. About dystopias, and the relationship between male and female, yang and yin. Ends with thoughts about the idea of growth as the continuing good, p87b:\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>More about Pard: how the cat likes to make some kinds of trouble; how it disappears at times.<\/li>\n<li>P101, about the importance of solidarity, and how male group solidarity shapes the world, perhaps, and how it\u2019s much different than the kind of \u2018sisterhood\u2019 that characterized early feminism.<\/li>\n<li>P107, how the sharp uniforms of earlier eras have given way to the baggy camos of the modern one.<\/li>\n<li>P111, written in 2011 (during the last recession): More about the notion that growth is a positive economic goal. It\u2019s plausible, as in a person\u2019s growth; but the person stops growing at some point.\n<ul>\n<li>3: \u201cIn taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we\u2019ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>6: \u201cCapitalist 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\u2014random. Growth as in tumor. Growth as in cancer.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>(Long my thought. We may have avoided the pitfalls of the \u2018population bomb\u2019 forecast in the 1960s, but, mathematically, the race can\u2019t continue to grow *forever*, or we\u2019ll overload the planet.)<\/li>\n<li>114e: \u201cSo what is our new metaphor to be? It might be the difference between life and death to find the right one.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>P115, how politicians lie, but how \u201csomething has changed,\u201d how Americans sacrificed during World War II and no one can imagine them doing it today; how life was never \u2018simple\u2019 for people in earlier times; how we seem to have given up on the long-term view.<\/li>\n<li>P120, about the cult of the \u2018inner child\u2019 who possesses some essential innocence lost in adulthood; and about a quote attributed to Le Guin that she didn\u2019t remember. Quotes from Wordsworth, about how life is a \u201csleep and a forgetting\u201d between two poles of eternal being that a soul enters life from.<\/li>\n<li>P128, \u201cModest Proposal\u201d (i.e. a mock serious piece, after Swift) about how even eating vegetables is taking their lives.<\/li>\n<li>P130, asking why is \u2018belief\u2019 in itself desirable? And why asking about \u2018belief\u2019 in evolution, say, is the wrong question. One doesn\u2019t \u2018believe\u2019 evolution; one accepts it. P133t:\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cThe 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\u2014not to belief or disbelief.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>P136: About anger, including private anger, including anger at writers she doesn\u2019t respect be so respected by others: Hemingway, Joyce, Roth; because if they are the greatest, \u201cthere\u2019s no way I can ever be very good or very highly considered as a writer\u2026\u201d\n<ul>\n<li>(Of course the solution here is that writers are valued for different reasons, and by different people; there is no singular canon that everyone agrees upon. And surely Le Guin know this; she\u2019s just venting.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>More about Pard: bringing mice into the house. The cat knows how to capture, but doesn\u2019t have the instinct to kill.<\/li>\n<li>P159: Appreciations of works by Philip Glass, the short opera Galileo Galilei, and John Luther Adams, Become Ocean. (Of the Glass, there are brief excerpts on YouTube.)<\/li>\n<li>P166, about her assistant Delores, who handled her mail, until she died; how other writers deal with such assistants.<\/li>\n<li>P173, about breakfasts in Vienna, with or without eggs, and what it meant when she declined the egg; and about eating soft-boiled eggs, and egg cups.<\/li>\n<li>P179, about a \u2018cathedral\u2019 in Portland that is actually a huge warehouse food bank.<\/li>\n<li>P184: about their Christmas tree. How cutting down the live tree is a kind of \u201critual sacrifice\u201d\u2026<\/li>\n<li>P188, about how children learn new ideas, about how a small lie about \u201chorsies\u201d being upstairs can be taken literally; about Santa Claus, about pretend vs real, about how \u2018loss of belief\u2019 involves how children believe in falsehoods, and how \u201cBelief has no value in itself that I can see.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>P197, Staying at a ranch in Napa and capturing a rattlesnake.<\/li>\n<li>P201, About staying in Bend, Oregon, a town with new developments and curved streets that are easily confusing; and about a lynx that had been kept as a pet, declawed, and then abandoned, now at the High Desert Museum.<\/li>\n<li>P210, finally, \u201cNotes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert\u201d \u2013 poetic descriptions of wildlife, sunrises, landscapes, over several days.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ursula K. Le Guin, NO TIME TO SPARE: Thinking About What Matters (2017) This book is a collection of the best blog posts Le Guin did on her site at http:\/\/www.ursulakleguin.com\/, from 2010 until her death in early 2018. It &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2018\/09\/06\/le-guin-no-time-to-spare\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6853"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6874,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6853\/revisions\/6874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}