Sunday, May 10th there was an article in the Los Angeles Times featuring writer Ursula K. Le Guin.
"At 79, she's worked for half a century on the ever-shifting frontier between literary and genre writing, a line she has helped redraw with her elegant prose."
http://www.latimes.com/...
Le Guin's early years help explain her abiding concern: Is there such a thing as a stable human nature? She grew up in Berkeley, the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, a founder of modern anthropology, and Theodora Kroeber, author of "Ishi in Two Worlds," about an American Indian who had outlived his tribe. Her childhood, which included summers at a family ranch in Napa, was full of reading, storytelling and visits from European intellectuals and Native Americans.
Here are some of the quotes from the article.
"I was privileged," she says, "to know the kind of people that most American kids, most bourgeois white kids, don't." She was raised "as irreligious as a jack rabbit."
If someone ever asks if you're religious, tell 'em "irreligious as a jack rabbit."
Eric Rabkin, who teaches at the University of Michigan, sees her work as profoundly shaped by her exposure to alien cultures as well as her father's ambition to find as specifically as he could the time and place from which Western civilization had sprung.
"There's a kind of romance to that view," Rabkin says. "That once upon a time, the worst antagonisms were merely inter-familial -- that basically we're all alike and trustworthy. And I believe she grew up in a family in which that was considered not a fantasy but a scientific fact."
I wonder if the writer of the article knows that our civilization began in Mesopotamia, and everything we equate with high civilization--law, sciences, arts--was all found right there between the Tigris and Euphraties rivers. At one point it separated to branch East and West. The part that went east were the Vedas--the oriental; and to the west went the occidentals.
Do you believe we're basically all alike and trustworthy? I do. We each have a degree of pathology about us, and maybe that's just a symptom of our current circumstance. To be sure there are out and out sociopathic individuals out there, but basically we're all the same: a little clot of desire trying to do the best we can with what we got. What many people hear at Daily Kos don't understand, is that as far as a community, it's a rather small bubble compared to the world at large. It's a big place with millions and millions of people out there.
Le Guin knows her work isn't reaching audiences as it once did. But if there's less breaking ground in her recent writing, she's not striving for that anymore. Her familiar concerns--environmental devastation and energy shortages--don't seem like remnants of the 1970s but have become pertinent all over again.
Right now, energy corporations are hoping their players in the U.S. Congress will give them everything. They won't be able to control solar and wind if America just jumped over to them now. The only way they'll be able to own it all, is if the transition is slow and gradual. Just like the transition of banking practices, just like the transition in the realm of FCC regulations over the last several years. Guess what? Public frequencies have been bought and sold. If we do get a convention, I bet there would be an amendment for that--maybe just to say corporations shall not own public resources. I wonder what Ms. Le Guin would think of all that?
"Writing science fiction and fantasy allow you to back off a little bit," she says, sipping an Oregon beer on her deck, "to try to find the problems that always come back, that we never solve. Like gender relations, war--once there's more than 50 of us living in one place we seem to have war.
"How do we and why do we enslave one another? Slavery is maybe another way of saying class. And of course race, which is involved in the others. I'm just circling around these subjects, which have become somewhat clearer to me as I've gotten older, as being the big problems."
War/Slavery and Race/Class, the two paradigms that expose what? The nature of humanity? Or the nature of human existence? What if the nature of human existence was that we were being abused by something non-human? It could be true, with the way things are today, as a writer, I wonder: Are humans just dogs to a greater species? I wouldn't be surprised. But if it is only us, and it's always only been us, then I guess I just want to know I lived a life with an ample amount of action issued from it.