Ursula K Le Guin

Very late on the following ship-night, Shevek was in the Davenant's garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A nightblooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves, and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness....

-- From The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

From Publishers Weekly, the news that Ursula K. Le Guin is taking a stand over the recent Google Book Search Settlement (described at Wikipedia).

Bestselling and award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin, whose membership in the Authors Guild dates back to 1972, has resigned from the organization, citing her unhappiness with the role the Guild played in the Google Book settlement. “You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can’t,” Le Guin wrote in her letter of resignation. “There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.”

Continue reading at "Le Guin Resigns from Authors Guild over Google Deal".

And on Le Guin's own site, her full letter of resignation:

So, after being a loyal if invisible member for so long, I am resigning from the Guild. I am, however, retaining membership in the National Writers Union and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, both of which opposed the “Google settlement.” They don’t have your clout, but their judgment, I think, is sounder, and their courage greater.

(Thanks to Alex for the head's up.)

As part of my anniversary-themed 2009 book list, I re-read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (30th - 1979) and Sirens of Titan (50th - 1959) over the last couple of days and was noticing some similar themes and reminiscent imagery between them. Lo and behold, via Wikipedia:

In a 1979 interview released in 2007, Douglas Adams discussed Vonnegut as an influence on The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy[7]:

"Sirens of Titan is just one of those books – you read it through the first time and you think it's very loosely, casually written. You think the fact that everything suddenly makes such good sense at the end is almost accidental. And then you read it a few more times, simultaneously finding out more about writing yourself, and you realize what an absolute tour de force it was, making something as beautifully honed as that appear so casual."

As the saying goes in Sirens,

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

;) But Adams was right -- Vonnegut's book feels casually written, but as you approach the end you get that immediate sense of the masterful construction involved.

Update: Whoa, the accidents continue. I have three books left on the 2009 list, two by Ursula K. Le Guin* and finally From Hell (10th** - 1999), the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell graphic novel about Jack the Ripper. In the Wikipedia article:

From Hell was partly inspired by the title of Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency; to solve a crime holistically, one would need to solve the entire society in which it occurred.

I bet an interesting reading list could be constructed by following a chain of inspiration from author to author or even book to book.

* - The Left Hand of Darkness (40th - 1969) and The Dispossessed (35th - 1974)

** - While the original 10 volumes were published individually 1991-96, the collected edition was released in 1999.

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Milan Kundera
• Ursula K Le Guin
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• James Joyce
• Jack Kerouac
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O'Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

Closing a bunch of tabs. This was a particularly good couple of days for cool things to link to.

Jacket Copy: "Balloon boy story is right out of Edgar Allan Poe"

The Balloon Boy story may have been a hoax, but it if was, the Heene family is in good company. No less than Edgar Allan Poe had an entirely fictional account of a balloon voyage published in 1844 in the Sun newspaper.

A.V. Club Interview: "Alton Brown"

There have been [topics they wanted to do a show on but couldn't] and there are, and most of those have to do with boundaries set by what Food Network wants to show and doesn’t want to show. You know, they’re not gonna let me do a show about rabbit, because they don’t want to think about killing the little bunnies. There probably won’t be a Good Eats episode on, you know, anything glandular.

LA Galaxy Blog: "Landon Donovan Named Honda Player of the Year and Player of the Decade"

In addition to being named the Player of the Year, Donovan was also named the Honda Player of the Decade. This honor comes as little surprise as he had won the Player of the Year award in six (2002, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009) of the last 10 years.

BBC Sport: "Republic face France in play-offs"

The Republic of Ireland will have to beat former World Cup winners France over two legs if they are to make it to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Giovanni Trapattoni's side drew the 1998 champions for the play-offs to be played on 14 and 18 November and will play at home first.

Cyclelicious: "Bikes On Board: Stuttgart cog railroad"

German commuter trains have rush hour restrictions for bikes on board that many Americans who travel by train and bike are familiar with. "Die Zacke" cog railroad between Marienplatz in South Stuttgart to Degerloch, however, features this fantastic platform just for bikes.

BBC News: "At the centre of time"

Without it international travel would be in turmoil and calling friends in faraway places at the right time impossible. Exactly 125 years after the Greenwich Meridian line was drawn, how and why did Britain become the centre of time?

San Bernardino Sun: "Mayor unveils two-story globe design for SBIA"

A spiffy two-story world globe was unveiled Monday at San Bernardino International Airport as a symbol of world travel and sophistication in the city's plans.

The 19-foot objet d'art sits inside a 30-foot-wide fountain in front of the soon-to-be-completed passenger terminal on Leland Norton Way, said Steve Silver of TranSystems, who designed and engineered the globe.

NY Times: "One Reporter’s Lonely Beat, Witnessing Executions "

Of all the consequences of shrinking newsrooms, one of the oddest is this: Fewer journalists are available to watch people die. But Michael Graczyk has witnessed more than 300 deaths, and many of those were people he had come to know.

Jacket Copy: "Happy birthday, Ursula K. Leguin"

Today is Ursula K. Le Guin's 80th birthday. The multiple-award-winning writer is best known for "The Wizard of Earthsea" and is thought of for her science fiction, although she has crossed many boundaries.

[...] "I'm following Tolkien's prescription for fantasy creation. You are making a world out of words, and the only thing that's going to hold it together is its inner consistency.

"Writing science fiction and fantasy allow you to back off a little bit, 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.

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: "Heroes of American Literature #17"

John Steinbeck smoking and reading.

Phew! That's it. And Firefox should be feeling leaner as well. :)

Scott Timberg writes in the Guardian of the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin on modern authors, especially in the way she has help to wean her long-time readers from a "puritanical distrust of imagination." Now there's a pied piper to whom I'd gladly pay attention. :)

"How Ursula K Le Guin led a generation away from realism"

Whatever direct impact Cromwell and the Puritans had on the British Isles, it was, I'll wager, more temporary than their effect on the US. The country Le Guin and I were born into was founded by Puritans, not by tragic Celts or misty Arthurian heroes, and it will take centuries more to get them entirely out of our system. Le Guin addresses this sensibility in her 1974 essay, Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons? As she points out, "in the old, truly Puritan days, the only permitted reading was the Bible," and today, she writes, many Americans, especially men, "have learned to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful".

Time.com has an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin from last week, done by Lev Grossman for the Nerd World blog:

The other day I took a subway to the Upper East Side where I met Ursula K. Le Guin in the lobby of a Courtyard Marriott. We agreed that it was one of the most depressing hotel lobbies we had ever seen, but she was in town to speak at the 92nd St. Y, and her regular hotel was under construction, so there we were.[...]

Le Guin – now in her 70s, with a steel-grey bob that wouldn't look out of place on a Vulcan -- and I chatted for an hour in the hotel bar, while it slowly filled with water from a leak somewhere in the kitchen. That evening the iPhone I recorded the interview on got stolen. (This surpasses the time I deleted an interview with Gerard Butler as my greatest interviewing cock-up ever.) But I had transcribed the first half of the interview, and Le Guin very graciously suggested that we recreate the rest via e-mail.

Continue...