Ursula Le Guin: Classic or Dud? Search and Destroy

The trailer to the long in the works documentary is here:

https://vimeo.com/268831999

Per io9:

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is set to premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest on June 10, followed by a series of US festival visits and eventually a digital release online. Curry also revealed on Kickstarter that the documentary will be broadcast on PBS American Masters sometime in 2019.

Just finished Tehanu. Bleak, but perfect for me, and for right now. It's really quite a feat to go from epic to intimate and have it feel liberating rather than anticlimactic.

Ursula K Le Guin's house is for sale! If we club together we could probably afford it, right?

https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article245407450.html

lets do it

I am good with this approach.

Holy wow that home is glorious.

wish i was always coming home to there.

omg yes please let’s do this

I don't think this will work out the way you hope, Laura.
Oh social media. pic.twitter.com/49m1UWnVzl

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) December 8, 2020

Awesome.

We are delighted to announce that the 33rd stamp in the US Postal Service Literary Arts series honors Ursula. Stamp release will be later this year, date TBD. From then on, all our letters will be three ounces! Thank you @USPS for this distinction. https://t.co/jGboi8i5LU pic.twitter.com/8H3UOGafPv

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) January 15, 2021

Gorgeous

And as I've been muttering elsewhere -- while I'm not positive this is the first US stamp to feature a nonbinary figure, that background scene is obv Left Hand of Darkness and thus features Estraven, so.

Yes, I was just admiring that illustration of Ai and Estraven. Really nice work.

so cool

I’m reading Tombs of Atuan with my son right now and that book is a god damn masterpiece.

You spend almost half the book just living in Arha’s rhythms, feeling the texture of her world and understanding what structures it it: the boundaries of fear and ritual. You have the sensation of a society living on just the husk of an unremembered time. The living drama of humanity has moved on from this place yet we are centred on it. (It’s like the US Senate!) What scriptwriters call “the inciting incident” comes a good third of the book’s length too late, by today’s standards, but what you gain is a recognition of its gravity. Plus it’s goth as shit. It really is astounding. Once the motor of the story picks up its pace all the weight of that long opening gives an inertial force to events that is just awesome. Honestly - the first book - Wizard of Earthsea - is very good, but it follows a fairly traditional structure. And the elements are not very surprising. It’s told masterfully of course, but you know, you’ve got a wizard’s school and some dragons and a hot-headed protagonist. This though - this is really something else. The intensity of it is frankly almost overwhelming.

There’s so much in there about freedom and breaking free of stultifying tradition and whether it’s possible to cast off beliefs you were inculcated with, and how morality intersects with these questions, and how you sometimes need to take the biggest risk you can take, and how an act of kindness - even made without really realising it - can open up your whole heart and change your whole life

booming and otm

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.

Atuan has been my favourite of the Earthsea books for a long time. It was one of the first books I used inter-library loan for as a kid and it was so unlike anything else I'd ever read at that age.
I think it's time for a re-read of the whole series.

I haven’t read Tehanu yet Ned but why do you think it’s more impressive than Tombs of Atuan? Is it possible to explain without giving anything away?

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.

Yeah, as I said upthread, it's amazing that the series' turn from epic to intimate feels so liberating.

I think it's time for a re-read of the whole series.

I did this in 2020 (actually was my first readthrough of books 4-6) and cannot recommend enough.

I'm curious about her translation of the Tao Te Ching as well, but I think I might want something more traditional there.

literally bought this based on yr rec, th

Theres a short story in "Birthday of the world" called "Paradises Lost" that I found really evocative, the concept of multiple generations being in a spaceship heading for a goal (a new planet) and how that parallels with the concept of faith/life after death. Itd make a great TV series.

The UKL TTC is U&K.

Sean Guynes concluded his excellent Le Guin reread with a post on why Tehanu is Le Guin's best book:
https://www.tor.com/2021/02/24/tehanu-le-guins-return-to-earthsea-and-her-best-novel

the 1st time i read it i did it with wrong expectations (and probably at a wrong age).
it'll likely speak more to me now that i'm older, lol.

Psyched

I also found Tombs of Atuan much more immersive and approachable and generally meaningful than Wizard of Earthsea. Ged is very much a figure of legend, running around fighting monsters (even if they're of his own making), and there's something correspondingly chilly and distancing about the narration. With Tombs of Atuan, you're plunged into the emotional world of someone who can't go anywhere or have adventures or even have a name; she's just a kernel of humanity hidden away in the dark, being somehow herself in spite of everything. I guess it's the difference between a traditionally masculine story and a traditionally feminine story, but Le Guin has turned the contrast way, way up.

I'm in the minority, I guess, as I don't think Tehanu works as well as Tombs of Atuan. Tehanu feels to me like Le Guin very consciously trying to write a feminist Earthsea book, in a way that comes across as forced to me.

That post feels very incoherent, sorry. I think I meant "the difference between a traditionally male story and a traditionally female story" - the kind of story imposed from without by traditional gender roles, but exaggerated to the most extreme point, so that the man can literally go anywhere and do anything but has an emotional life/interiority that's almost entirely inaccessible to us, while the woman is literally stuck in a freaking cave and we are immersed so fully in her POV that it's dizzying. Like the difference between, idk, Tom Jones and Persuasion, but side by side in the same series, and the characters are able to sort of step outside of the lines that have been drawn for them and meet and communicate, and somehow both of them seem more human through each other's eyes - idk where I'm going with this but I think it's cool.

Anyway, great posts, Tracer.

See whereas I loved Tehanu because I felt like "oh finally, this stops being about male magic and male energy and turns the dial to matters more rooted and more intimate". It resonated.

I actually didnt like Tombs much because all the scenes down in said tombs felt weird and claustrophobic to me.

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I liked what she was trying to do in Tehanu but I just felt like I could see her trying, and it distracted me. But I do like it, and I get why a lot of people love it.

Had the thought recently that the Jedi are basically orgasm denial wizards which is probably what makes them so fucked up as “good guys”

Theres a short story in "Birthday of the world" called "Paradises Lost" that I found really evocative, the concept of multiple generations being in a spaceship heading for a goal (a new planet) and how that parallels with the concept of faith/life after death. Itd make a great TV series.

I keep thinking of that story these days because of QAnon, the way they watch this religion spring up from absolutely nothing and then take firm enough root to potentially derail everything, and then the oh-so-important vote where sanity just barely prevails, it all feels very familiar.

yes, nice parallel!

Tombs and Tehanu are tied for my favourite, I didn't read the latter till I was much older and found it incredibly powerful, like she was taking the traditional patriarchal structure of the first books and burning it with fire. Wizard/Tombs/Farthest Shore = thesis, Tehanu = antithesis; Tales & The Other Wind = synthesis!

I reread The Farthest Shore recently and liked it much better than I remembered. I had it lumped together in my mind with A Wizard of Earthsea, but it's much darker and more adult - and more personal as well, even though you still don't get much of a sense of who Ged is. This central idea of a world where something has gone deeply, inexplicably wrong everywhere, all the joy and sense of purpose running out of everything, all these people walking around feeling like they've lost something, and they can't even remember what - it all felt, honestly, like a really disturbing reflection of the world as it is now. And I'm not usually a big fan of world-building for its own sake, but the imagery she invents for the land of the dead just feels so right: the wall of stones, the dry river with its dry source, the mountains of pain, all feel like they're part of some vast collective unconscious, like they've always been there.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/21/realists-of-a-larger-reality-wanted-ursula-k-le-guin-prize-for-fiction-to-launch-in-2022