Oh, gross, gross! If Unfogged is going to be all about the Scientology and Macbook pr0n, I'm just going to have to go back to reading that grim Swedish mystery novel!
And, well, that'll show you!
Becks, if you want to publish your geek porn online, you don't have to make up magzines as a cover. We're here for you.
Let's talk about Becks's new blog's recipe for toor dal and how good it is! Mmmm.
Speaking of bad pr0n, listen to this from 31:50. Clearly this guy's gf should break up with him and fuck w-lfs-n.
The Swedish mystery novel seems to have shovelling snow as a key plot point. So far (200+ pages in), the only erotic action has been a kiss, about which both parties are very conflicted and embarrassed. Everyone seems quietly miserable.
8: JM, which one is it? I've read several Swedish mystery novels!
The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson.
9: Moorder oon zee Ooreeent Ixpress, by Egetha Chreestie-a
The cover had this blurb from the WSJ: this book "resembles the books of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, not to mention those of the modern master Henning Mankell."
I think I may have heard of Per Wahloo, but I would not swear to it. I've never read a blurb on a trade paperback that so instantly made me feel ignorant.
10: I read that! It's about a goldfish!
7: Is it possible to know where 31:30 is without downloading that file, AWB?
"Freeing his hard-on from his plaid boxers..."
Whenever there's a narration of sex with someone in boxers, there's always an act of liberation w/r/t the hard-on in question, especially if the boxers are striped in any way.
You know, I always liked the porn in Bust before I cancelled my subscription. You know, when I want a feminist magazine, I want a feminist magazine. If I want beauty product reviews and fashion spreads, I'll read fucking Cosmo. But hey, that's just me. They do sometimes have great features, but there's a shitload of filler.
One of the best pieces of erotic fiction was the one about the pickpocket who ends up giving the guy a handjob just for the fuck of it. I thought that was rad. Sounds like they've really gone off the rails, though.
Unsurprisingly, I now prefer Bitch magazine.
14: Look about two-thirds of the way through. The call begins "Hi Dan, um, happy new year. This is Paul. My girlfriend, when we have sex, she's a huge grammar nerd..."
Sjowall and Wahloo wrote excellent police procedurals about thirty-forty years ago (?), featuring dour detective Martin Beck (played by Walter Matthau in the Americanized version of "The Laughing Detective"). Then they stopped; I've never bothered to find out why.
What always interested me, besides the "mystery" itself, was the critique of the Swedish (welfare) state and society throughout these books, from a leftist/humanist perspective. If the reader felt, as I tended to at the time, that Swedish-style socialism represented a possible alternative to American-style capitalism, this was a fascinating and disturbing perspective.
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
Husband-and-wife writing team. (Well, wife-and-husband in the above formulation.) Definitely before your time. I think he was a journalist, but anyway, they wrote mystery novels that were amazingly enough translated into English in the 1950s and '60s.
Good thing this came up this week, because before last Sunday's weeding expedition, I had not heard of them.
17 - The pickpocket handjob was pretty good. So was the guitarist who got snowed into the bar. Remember that one? Quality varies widely.
Darn it, pwnd by Dr. N.
I think they stopped writing because he died. He seemed to be kind of old on to his second career even during the time the novels were written. But that's just speculation.
For some reason, I think you'd be really good at writing porn, Becks. We should collaborate and get something published in Bust!
I feel like I've outgrown Bust but it filled a niche when I was right out of college. I doubt I'll renew it this time. Although...yay!...flipping through I see there's an interview with one of the waitresses at the Florida Avenue Grill in DC.
Oh yeah! The guitarist! That was pretty hott.
You know, sometimes I think I should write erotic fiction. If I could just find a way to get paid...
25 crossed with 23, obv.
Hey, maybe we should do an anthology. Women bloggers write erotic fiction?
18: Got it. That's hilarious. "She wants me to yell out something incorrect [in bed] so she can correct it."
"I've never been around anyone who has a grammar fetish."
"You caught her masturbating to a grammar podcast?"
I've been hired to write a porn script, but didn't end up finishing it due to creative differences.
Actually, I don't think I'd be very good at writing porn unless someone else came up with the erotic scenarios. I've done that before, but not for publication.
I have always found the idea of magazines (or maybe just the titles of magazines) like Bust or Bitch slightly strange, and I just realized it's because they so clearly reflect relative positions on (for lack of a better term) power hierarchies. I take both titles (and magazines) to be about female empowerment. I assume similar things are going on with Heeb and similar. But it's basically impossible for me to come up with even the idea of a male-empowering magazine. It's just silly. The closest I could was Dork! or N3RD. There just isn't really a need, and so there isn't a niche, for male-empowerment magazines.
Just thought it was interesting.
Eh, I don't think it's really about "empowerment." I think "Bust is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. Like, "Bust" is a kinda violent word, and punchy, suitable for a magazine name. But it's a magazine for women! So it's about tits! Etc.
Also, their subtitle is "For women with something to get off their chests." So it's another tits metaphor.
As for "Bitch", well that's more of the same, kinda like "I'm a Bitch. So?" But also playing off of the notion of "bitching" (the magazine's subtitle is "feminist response to pop culture). Which is to say, Bitching about it.
Anyway, I don't think either magazine is about female "empowerment." Bust is like a women's magazine without all the "10 things you never knew about sex" and "How to lose 20 lbs. in four days!" and Bitch is kinda like a feminist academic journal, just less academic. And both tend to feature articles about women who do cool shit.
male-empowering magazine
They all would sound like gay porn mags.
Asshole! Cock! Jerkwad! Nutsack!
Butt, for example, which is fucking rad.
There should totally be a hetero-dude empowerment magazine called Douche.
Coincidentally, that is how I fantasize about Ogged. Or w-lfs-n. Sometimes, both.
Anyway, I don't think either magazine is about female "empowerment."
Huh. I guess I took "I'm a Bitch. So?" to be an empowering posture, like attempts to reclaim words, etc., and same with Bust.
Maybe. I guess I have just come to hate the word "empowerment." It sounds so touchy-feely. So I don't want to ascribe it to anything I like.
I guess I have just come to hate the word "empowerment."
Me too, but sometimes it seems like the best choice.
I'm just going to have to go back to reading that grim Swedish mystery novel!
Have you read any of the Per Wahlöö/Maj Sjöwall mystery novels? They come highly endorsed by my folks, and are supposedly quite grim.
Or, equally obviously, Dr. Ngo or Witt's contributions.
Good god. At least I spelled their names correctly … Ms Adams.
don't think I'd be very good at writing porn unless someone else came up with the erotic scenarios.
I was sitting nervously at the bar table, waiting for my imaginary on-line friends. I had agonized over what to wear. I wasn't expecting much, but I didn't want to miss any chances, either, so...(oh god, i've bored myself. let's get this moving). After some time at the table nursing my drink, a squat, balding middle-aged man schlepped up to the table and asked in confident, nasal tones whether I'd like to sex Mutumbo...
Meetup porn would make me too depressed. How awful!
I've read one Henning Mankell, which was all right, but didn't motivate me to seek out more of them.
12: Henning Mankell is a writer of thrillers starring a depressed Swedish police officer (and iirc, his daughter later on), many of which also Examine the Great Issues of contemporary life in Sweden. They're sort of what Ian Rankin's Rebus novels would be if Rebus was Swedish, slightly less drunk, slightly more well adjusted but depressed and Rankin could write better and wasn't so obsessed with 'boomer culture.
Can I just say I never, ever, in my life want to see another pull quote on a thriller comparing it to Rankin?
I mean, in the case of Mankell, it's quite a good fit, but it seems to have become the default choice of editors the world over. Book's a bit gloomy and set somewhere that's a bit grimy? It's like Rankin. I swear, I've seen books claiming to be like Rankin that would only be like Rankin if Rankin were a black lesbian living in Port Au Prince with a deep and abiding love of ska.
Oh, and yeah, Mankell's OK, but not great. The daughter does turn up in some of them, I'm pretty sure.
#34: I had a fantastic idea for a unisex empowerment magazine, but sadly "Cunt: A Magazine For Cunts, And The Cunts Who Love Them" found it more or less impossible to get a distribution deal with any major news retailer, particularly in view of the cover design I had picked.
I'd buy that magazine, D^2. Maybe in Amsterdam, like Butt?
43. ok, how about:
The Day After Election Day, 2008
After 12 hours of burning shit down, I was exhausted. My clothes were in tatters, I was hot and slick all over with sweat, the air heated by the thousand burning buildings, I was hungry and thirsty, but mostly I was just horny. I wandered into a nearby Starbucks. It was ruined, but unburnt. There sat a boy, checkin his emailg on his laptop. His fingers are going to town now, flying across his keyboard with a graceful urgency. His eyes are squinting and his brow is knitted, and he's plugging into his iPod, tell-tale white cord between his bent legs. After I shot and ate him, I decided it was time to take care of my more nagging problem..."
Cunt: A Magazine For Cunts
The Economist exists already, surely?
||
The Carpenters' "Yesterday Once More" was, as of 2005, in China's Top 20 for 32 years.
|>
S/W are interesting: all of their ten books were reissued a couple of years ago in Swedish and I reread them then. They were hard left journalists, who despised their own profession: he died of a heart attack in the early/mid seventies. She is still alive and lives in Malmö. I tried to interview her once but couldn't get the logistics to work, and she wasn't that keen on talking anyway. After he died, she did write a couple more novels with a Norwegian partner but no one seems to have read or bought them, because they were too much like agitprop.
The Beck novels were meant as agitprop too, from the beginning. The idea was to hook the readers on realism, and then introduce them to the true state of capitalism, but of course what actually happened was that the whole thing drifted off into fantasy, and all of the characters started breaking out into little Marxist arias, about "Capitalism with gloves on" and how "in the socialist states, the people trust the police".
Probably a good idea not to interview her, though, since the only question I really wanted to ask was "aren't you ashamed of being so wrong?"
But I will do it for D^2s magazine, if he will print me a business card. "Chief reporter, Cunt."
I am now daydreaming about what it would be like at White House press conferences if my magazine got accredited there.
heh at 54.
re: 53
There's probably a decent book to be had out of the subject of socialist genre fiction [and fictional responses to it]. I'd read it, anyway.
"in the socialist states, the people trust the police"
That's some funny stuff! Maybe the later ones are worth looking into after all.
55: And then there's Speculations About Jakob, by Uwe Johnson. Mystery of sorts set in the GDR, in the same autumn as the Budapest uprising, by an author who left for West Berlin in 1959. So much of it is in what the characters don't say -- or can't because you-know-who is listening -- that it will probably be incomprehensible in another 50 years. But a great book.
Yeah, part of me wonders if there's a mine of really well-written Soviet-era detective fiction out there. Given that a lot of the non-genre fiction of that era is pretty great.
Dsquared, you could take credit in the masthead, as with Macleans or Blackwood's or McSweeneys (though I've pointed out before that this publication makes me wish I could forget how to read)...
Davies' Cunt, the monthly magazine of cunts, cuntery and all things cuntish. If you need a chief sub, I will correct proofs and shout at writers for beer money.
Actually, there's a whole chunk about S/W in my next book. It was only the last two of theirs which went completely off the rails. The last one, in which the Prime Minister is assassinated, makes a fascinating contrast with what happened ten years later when the PM of Sweden really was shot dead in the street.
58. I'd be surprised if there wasn't. Some Soviet SF was surpassingly brilliant.
re: 61
Yeah, that was my thought, too.
OT: Man, I hate participating in depositions by phone. It's not my witness, so I don't have to say anything, but keeping track of what's going on is a brute when I can't see people. (I'm on a break now, not trying to listen and read Unfogged at the same time.) I have this horrible fear of having something relevant to my client happen and just missing it because I'm not in the room.
Man, I hate participating in depositions by phone.
Hard to kick the witness under the table when you're not in the room, eh?
65: Heh. A little discussed problem of being a female attorney (in a world where more than half of your clients are still likely to be men) is that the traditional venue for chewing your witness out for being overly forthcoming is on a mutual bathroom break. Getting that moment of slightly more assured privacy together is tougher when you're not using the same bathroom.
67: A colleague of mine told me about conducting negotiations with Nokia, which he said was terribly disconcerting because they would conduct their confidential side-conversations right there at the negotiating table simply by switching into Finnish, confident in the knowledge that their counterparty would never grasp even a single word of what they said.
The Erast Fandorin books are v successful (though obviously post Soviet) - I'm not sure crime fiction would have done too well in the USSR. Degenerate, you see. Obsessed with anti-social elements.
All the Russians I know are Holmes fans.
re: 69
Yeah, I've read the Fandorin books.
Ah-hah.
http://www.jstor.org/view/00376752/sp050003/05x0403m/0
Someone has written a book on Soviet crime fiction, aka the detektiv.
68: The business version of Navajo code-talkers.
re: 72
Yeah, people get sucked in by that, though. My wife and I once sat in front a Czech girl on the bus, and she was having a highly explicit conversation with someone on the other end. Clearly assuming she was in the clear as no-one would understand.
The temptation to turn to her and say "Have a pleasant afternoon" in Czech as you got off the bus must have been immense.
re: 74
Yeah, very much so.
A friend of mine once did that. He'd been living in Israel for a few years post-university. Working there, and as a result, his Hebrew was really good. He was travelling to work, and as he was waiting to get on (or off) a bus, he overheard some Israeli tourists trying to figure out where to go from a map. Just as the bus was about to leave, he shouts, "3rd on the left, just past the bakers" [or similar] in fluent Hebrew. Leaving them mystified.
Basic Finnish is more widely understood than folk wot of. A lot of British colleges introduce people who are training to be ESL teachers to Finnish, to give them a taste of being on the other end.
73 -- There's also a certain cluelessness at work. I always laugh when I hear someone on the Acela on the phone saying something like: "This is highly confidential. We could be ruined if people found out that X and Y are related . . ." They have to speak up because of the train noise.
OT: Know who's a really sweet and caring guy? DaveC from Obsidian Wings.
I don't read it anymore, but an article in Bust circa 1998 first tipped me off to the existence of blogs (although I don't think they used the term). I was new to the internet at the time. It was at my first office job, and, needless to say, my work productivity has steadily declined since then.
But it's basically impossible for me to come up with even the idea of a male-empowering magazine.
We already have "Guns and Ammo", "Car and Driver", Easy Rider", & "Foreign Affairs", etc. What else do we need?
74/75: I did that once with a bunch of Swedish schoolgirls on a train out of London. Thanked them for the entertainment as I left ...
There are several novels about an Icelandic police detective, set in the not particularly mean streets of Reykjavik, but sadly they are not very good.
Punk-rock credibility: I actually have the first and second issues of Bust, when it was a zine and much more riot grrrl and all stapled together. Double punk-rock credibility: I got issue one by stealing it (er, borrowing and not returning, anyway).
Communist all-rounder Ernest Mandel wrote a very interesting little book, Delightful Murder: The Social History of the Crime Story, which has some good stuff on seventies left-wing European detective novels.
And of course we have all read Darko Suvin on Soviet SF, I assume. If you haven't read Jameson's newish Archeaologies of the Future (from which I am extracting the maximum mileage possible by mentioning it at every opportunity), well, the chapters on Lem and on the guys who wrote Roadside Picnic are very good.
Lem is so peculiar. So dull and yet so compelling. Those Pirx the Pilot stories are like SF stripped of every kind of seductive, libidinal-investment-generating trapping possible.
Cunt: A Magazine for Cunts and the Cunts Who Love Them
An adaptation of the novel? (which semi-ironically is pornography pretending not to be so)
67: The Boss of it All had an element of that which I am sure worked much better for Danish speakers. However, the two languages in question were Danish and Icelandic, I would have assumed that they are close enough that it would not have worked at all. (Undoubtedly there was some verbal humor there that flew right past me.)
the one about the pickpocket who ends up giving the guy a handjob just for the fuck of it
I read that one.
OT: Stewart's interview of Jonah Goldberg last night was pretty hilarious. Just an FYI. He noted before they ran it that the interview lasted about 18 minutes and to edit it down for broadcast they had to chop it up like crazy. Towards the end it essentially turns into a montage of John Stewart wanting to strangle Goldberg and Goldberg looking stupid.
...stripped of every kind of seductive, libidinal-investment-generating trapping possible....
Can't one say the same thing of every cultural artifact sifted through the fine screen of leftism?
re: 87
Nope. In fact a considerable chunk of 20th century lefty-art is mostly all about the fucking.
32:
There's a hugely successful UK lad's mag called Nuts.
(I don't recommend it).
In fact a considerable chunk of 20th century lefty-art is mostly all about the fucking.
You should see Mongolian art!
I did that once with a bunch of Swedish schoolgirls on a train out of London. Thanked them for the entertainment as I left ...
Depending on how you define "once,"....
darn it. "once" s/b "that"
(cant type and talk)
I hate participating in depositions by phone.
I've wondered about this. We do a lot of phone depositions, since the defendants are often in far-flung places around the country and the plaintiffs are often in isolated parts of New Mexico, and it seems like a difficult way to do things.
87: A considerable amount of left-wing science fiction is, in fact, all about...um, er, can't type explicit language on my repositioned work computer with the larger monitor. Well, you get the idea.
What's interesting about Lem is that he's writing about procedure, daily life, tests, bureaucracy--he's not writing SF that allures through use of ray-guns, tentacle porn, revolutionary heroics, strong moral stands, or saving the galaxy. Spare, is Lem.
If you weren't interested in SF or US-Soviet relations, you might not really get a lot out of his work, except maybe that futurological conference one or the one about the imaginary books.
Per Darko Suvin, SF seemed to have a lot more resonance in both pre-revolutionary Russia and in the Soviet Union than in the west, also a lot more cultural legitimacy.
Flippanter, read The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing writes (IMHO) poor science fiction, but her earlier stuff, when she was writing about being a socialist woman in the middle of the last century, is fantastic, and the sex is central, if not pretty.
94. Lem was a towering genius. But we probably only need one of him.
There's a hugely successful UK lad's mag called Nuts.
They were going to call it Bollocks, but the Telegraph threatened an infringement suitt.
And I don't think Lem was in the least bit a lefty. Writers under communism tended not to be.
No, I don't think Lem had a consciously political bone in his body. It would have been interesting to see what he would have written if he'd been, e.g. Mexican
91: I am immune to Swedish scholgirl jokes. I lived with one for a year: she was thirteen, had braces, dark hair, and thick plastic framed spectacles. She was crazy about horses and Dr Hook and the Medicine Show. A lovely person, but not in the least bit erotic.
Returning to the original subject, you could set a porn story in a laundromat, of only for the chance to write "Freeing his plaid boxer shorts from his erection, he popped them neatly into the drum and reached for the soap powder."
73, 75, 80: One of my Russian teachers, M., told our class this anecdote (partly, I think, to admit that his Russian was lame, which we all knew): He was a visiting student in some Moscow suburb back in the Soviet days of strict curfews, and he was hurrying to get home on an unfamiliar train line. So he asks some guy which stop was closest to place X, and the guy says, "Idti ha khui," which means, essentially, "suck my cock." So M. goes over to the transit map and starts looking for the Idti Na Khui station.
When I was an English schoolboy I briefly dated a Swedish schoolgirl. She was tall and tan and young and lovely. And duller than ditchwater. Christ!
98: I'm sure we're operating with different definitions of "left", and because I'm not feeling charitable I will add that I am weary of "left means supporting state socialism and really-existing communism at all costs; no citizen of a Soviet state could have been left wing by any definition; any criticism of state socialism by a citizen of the relevant state is ipso facto right wing." I leave it to you to look up examples of, say, pre-Tiananmen dissidents. Or Lem. You might start with Eden, which is a very strange novel about class exploitation and international intervention. About which, alas, the Wikipedia entry is totally wrong--it's not about the impossibility of communication, since the whole plot winds up with successful communication of a kind.
Writers under communism tended not to be.
East Germany constituted something of an exception to this rule, as the authors and playwrights who settled there tended to do so deliberately as a vote with their feet for socialism (emigration to the West was possible until 1961). In time, many of them lost faith in the SED regime, but remained true to their socialist convictions.
But I'm stepping on Blume's territory here.
As in most of the East Bloc, at least a superficial tinge of leftism was helpful, if not indispensible to be able to make a living in belles lettres at all.
re: 104
Yeah, it's notable that a lot of dissident writers considered themselves of the left.
The unisex empowerment mag is Wanker, obviously.
Frowner: can we just say that he was anti-totalitarian and leave it at that. But I will look for Eden.
SF author Jack Womack gave up writing SF in favour of writing novels set in modern Russia, because it was a far more entertainingly weird dystopia than anything he could invent.
you could set a porn story in a laundromat
We've already covered that.
can we just say that he was anti-totalitarian and leave it at that.
So, "left" is pro-totalitarian?
Frowner, Andrew can speak for himself, but "left means supporting state socialism and really-existing communism at all costs; no citizen of a Soviet state could have been left wing by any definition; any criticism of state socialism by a citizen of the relevant state is ipso facto right wing." is not a calumny that I, as an ex-Trot, can endure. Most of my political heroes were murdered by fucking Stalin.
Which said, I really don't think Lem was consciously a "political" writer. His interests were primarily elsewhere. The Strugatsys, now, they were left wing IMHO (and not especially pro-regime).
108: Eden takes a lot of patience unless you like (wait for it, vicar) hard science fiction. It's very compelling and memorable, though. Certainly about alienness in a really neat way. If you do read it, I would recommend the Jameson chapter about it too, partly for background about Lem and partly to clarify some mechanics.
A big gaggle of Swedish schoolgirls showed up at my birthday party a few years ago and talked the guy I was dating into leaving to have an orgy with them. Fucking Swedish schoolgirls.
re: 112
I think you are misreading Frowner. She's saying that the sentence you quote is not something she agrees with.
Fucking Swedish schoolgirls.
This sentence works much better with an appreciative nod and a wishful smile.
A friend of mine from college once randomly met some Swedish girls in Paris. He said their blowjob technique was different from what he was used to.
He's post-Soviet, but Pelevin writes a style of sci-fi that's a bit like Neal Stephenson, but with more action, humor, and sex, and a more matter-of-fact voice about large issues. The English translation of Generation P is supposed to be terrible. I thought that the English of Werewolf Problem in Central Russia was OK.
re: 118
Yeah, I've liked some of the Pelevin I've read. The Clay Machine Gun, Omon Ra,etc.
re: 119
I'm pretty sure.
She writes "that I am weary of " the sentence you quote.
Looks like a lot of Pelevin's text are available for free on his website. I'll see if my fading Russian is up to the Werewolf one.
112: Wow, I know lots of gratuitous slurs on ex-Trots, but no ex-Trots to use them on..Until now, I suppose, so watch out! (As I understand it, the various Trotskyist organizations in the UK were much better than the ones in the US, though.)
119: Er, vis-a-vis the sentence in question: I meant that I was tired of the idea that there are only two positions: the monolithic left, which supports state socialism unquestioningly in all its nastiest aspects, and the right, which gets to be both "anti-totalitarian" and totally off the hook for the nasty aspects of capitalism. And tired of the idea that "dissident" literature somehow automatically scores points for the right.
Neither Washington nor Moscow, that's what I say.
shorter 123: A pox on both your houses.
124: Sort of. But with more puppets.
By Goldberg's logic, anyone who is against communism must be on the left, rather like anyone he doesn't like is 'fascist', but his logic makes the baby Aristotle cry.
74 - The character of Richard Powers in Powers' Galatea 2.0 does precisely this to some making nasty comments in Dutch while eating lunch at the University of Illinois; he then tells them that most of the people at Illinois speak Dutch. This temptation must be pretty universal.
94 - A friend of mine once described His Master's Voice to me as the only science fiction book which shows any familiarity with the actual lives of scientists, which is a somewhat bleak thought.
Frowner, the two possible political positions are "Fascism" and "Jonah Goldberg."
You should at least try to keep up with contemporary scholarship.
It's adorable when leftists squabble, like watching puppies tussle with kittens.
In contrast, when conservatives squabble, it's awkward and halfhearted, much as I imagine sexual intercourse among conservatives must be, because so much of the energy of conservatism is devoted to camouflaging true desires.
128.2 is problematic, given the number of SF books written by actual scientists.
128: Lem is one of the few SF writers who shows familiarity with actual life generally, I think.
Now in part this is because that's not what the genre is basically for--SF is about collective projects, history, the collective subject (how often can I use the word "collective" in this paragraph?)...so Lem is kind of rearranging the conventions of the genre to do something new, something that only makes sense in the light of the SF that has gone before.
But at the same time, his work is pretty awesome in its dailyness. Floating Worlds, which is so boring that you can scarcely believe it as well as being about giant African nationalists in the shape of cat-like aliens, also does dailyness really well. Which is odd.
I dunno, Flip. I always pictured conservative intercourse to be two people both pretending that they're just fucking to get the other person to leave them alone, ferchrissakes, which would be obnoxious, but potentially hot.
when conservatives squabble, it's awkward and halfhearted
hidden camera footage from the offices of the National Review captures a typical squabble between conservatives
132: If I were to write a fantasy book about philosophers, it sure wouldn't include my daily routine, but would instead include beer, motorcycles, and communing with Being or something.
134: There's always the conservatives who believe sex is holy and pure and transforming. I suspect they're often disappointed.
136: That's a different issue. You can argue that the genre doesn't lend itself to that sort of discussion. You can't successfully argue it's because the authors don't know anything about scientists.
so much of the energy of conservatism is devoted to camouflaging true desires.
You really come right out and say this, huh?
Now, I'd always assumed that conservatism was about the desire for significantly more money, power and security than the majority, and that the basic anti-egalitarianism of conservatism had to be hidden because, well, one has to get the votes to win the elections. (Or at least one did.) But I presume you mean something else?
If you just mean that conservatism is secretly about the desire to prop up the walls of the ego, fend off the strange and scary, etc, then I'm afraid that the left is much the same.
SF is about collective projects, history, the collective subject....
That sounds pretty apt to me.
Frowner, is there an enlightening contrast with the other F in SFF to be drawn? Most of the F that I cast my eyes over at my local Enormobibliothek seems pretty unselfconsciously individualist, if the covers are anything to go by.
re 138; I may have misread 128s intent, though.
East Germany constituted something of an exception to this rule, as the authors and playwrights who settled there tended to do so deliberately as a vote with their feet for socialism (emigration to the West was possible until 1961). In time, many of them lost faith in the SED regime, but remained true to their socialist convictions.
This is certainly the case. Building the "better Germany", etc. The identification with the project of socialism was much greater than in other eastern bloc countries because it was all they had: they couldn't exactly identify with the German state that had existed just previously.
128 says 'shows familiarity', not that this author were the only ones to have it.
140: Different people distinguish between F and SF in different ways...I really urge you to have a look at the Jameson chapter which talks about this, because it's probably the best in the entire book.
Cribbingly, I write: F is classically about the feudal, the aristocratic-and-peasant, the mysterious and unknowable. It is more concerned with the idea that things don't change, history is cyclic, there are eternal characteristics, etc. (And Jameson says all this in more detail and much better.)
But there's so much SF+F right now, or F with SF characteristics, like maybe Nalo Hopkinson for example. I really think this bout of popularization of fantasy (through children's literature and teenage girl kinds of books) and science fiction (through film) is shaking things up a lot. Not unlike all the New Worlds stuff in the sixties.
I have painkillers, expecting typing to be even more erratic because I forget how words work.
I'd always assumed that conservatism was about the desire for significantly more money, power and security than the majority, and that the basic anti-egalitarianism of conservatism had to be hidden because, well, one has to get the votes to win the elections.
There are different kinds of conservatism, of course, but this sounds right enough for the contemporary US. I might say the anti-egalitarianism is not so much hidden as presented in such a way that the group with all the advantages includes the voters who the conservatives are trying to reach.
123. OK, comity. Sorry if I misread you. Dissident writing can be left or right or "fuck you all". As a rule I mistrust dissidents who suddenly feel all comforatble when the regime changes - which is why, for instance, although I don't agree with where he ended up, I deeply respect Rudolf Bahro. 125 is brilliant.
Now, I'd always assumed that conservatism was about the desire for significantly more money, power and security than the majority, and that the basic anti-egalitarianism of conservatism had to be hidden because, well, one has to get the votes to win the elections.
I think anti-egalitarianism is the secondhand clothes of conservatism.
143: yes, that's what I meant in 141. I read 128 differently at first (but disagree, either way)
To continue, F is in some ways more puzzling than SF...it's much messier. Like, when I finally met truly nerdy SF types in college, I was amazed by how they didn't like teh F, and when they explained why it totally didn't tally with what I'd been reading. (That is, the classic critique of F is precisely that it's individualistic in a particularly boring way, apolitical, lends itself to wish-fulfillment, is underpinned by a love of hierarchy, etc.)
But there's so much counter-fantasy, really, that I think one can't even talk about "fantasy" proper being subject to the critique. There's lots of Ursula Le Guin, for example, or (Right-wing represent!) Gene Wolfe, or Lloyd Alexander's Westmark books, or Diana Wynne Jones (the most pro-UN fantasy-writer EVAR!)
I have several friends who do SF studies, and the great advantage there is that they read all those huge sprawling series books and then tell me their interesting analysis, so I don't actually have to bother reading them but can still hold forth on trends in the genre.
re: 148
What does that mean?
But there's so much SF+F right now, or F with SF characteristics, like maybe Nalo Hopkinson for example. I really think this bout of popularization of fantasy (through children's literature and teenage girl kinds of books) and science fiction (through film) is shaking things up a lot. Not unlike all the New Worlds stuff in the sixties.
What the hell, I'm going to go ahead and plug this anthology, if anyone's interested in the blurring of the SF/F lines.
150-the-last-bit: That must be handy. Some of those series would take a serious commitment to get through.
147: I do think there's comity. I hadn't even seen your initial comment about Lem not being political when I wrote mine; I was responding to Nworb. Mostly I just don't like Stalin. (And who does, really? Hands up, Unfogged Stalinatariat!)
98, 99: Lem had a very interesting relationship with Philip K. Dick to say the least. In 1975 Lem's "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" was published in Science Fiction Studies, probably more notable for trashing everyone else than for praising PKD (and it was a key part of his getting expelled fom SFWA in 1976). Presumably Lem did not know that Dick had sent a letter, available at this site, to the FBI in 1974 alerting them to his concerns about Lem (as well as Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner, and Darko Suvin).
What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not ...[my emphasis]
Not fair to pick on PKD when we doing the crazy, but it still was an interesting episode.
Ijon Tichy Lives!
150.3. That is indeed a great advantage.
Seriously, would you group all the writers in 150.2 as "F", rather than "SF"? LeGuin, for example, has a lot of "hard" background in most of her adult books - she just doesn't force feed you with it.
151: Something rude about conservatism and, by extension, conservatives, and what deformities of spirit they may be concealing under their professed reverence for virtue and the best that humanity has made and can make of itself.
See? Brevity is the something of something.
152: Ooh, that does look interesting. The New Weird is a bit of a mixed bag, though, I always think. I don't really like those Vandermeer books as much as everyone else seems to, and I'm not sure why. Maybe a little too much F and not enough SF?
It occurs to me that Mieville's SF qualities are sort of figures for science. Like, he writes a lot about machines and technology but it's not like in most science fiction novels, where the machines themselves need to be written with a certain plausibility. It's like what Delany writes about neologisms--that they exist in SF not so much to be concepts but to give the feeling of being concepts.
Lem is one of the few SF writers who shows familiarity with actual life generally, I think.
Philip K Dick would be another. He, like Lem, comes across as alienated from much of life but he's definitely writing about daily experience.
158.2
Well, and I think he's trying to get some of the feeling of science, the excitement and strangeness and scariness of it -- all that stuff about crisis theory and possibility mining and the absurd punch-card robots -- but he's obviously not at all concerned about the internal plausibility of any of it as actual science. (Punch card robots?)
156: For indubitably adult books, I was thinking of Always Coming Home, which is hard to describe. It's not a utopia, it is only "science" fiction in the sense that it's set in the future, and in feelings and major concerns is more about the spiritual/magical than anything else. But the Earthsea books, lots of her short stories (especially the early ones)...and really, even her later work shares concerns with fantasy. Have you read The Birthday of the World? I haven't been so impressed with many of her recent short stories, but I really like most of those. And the one about the anthropologist's children can certainly be read as a metaphor for F and SF.
It's not that they're completely F as much as they write some F...or wait, yes, I would say Gene Wolfe is all F all the time, even when he's writing about space ships. Like those Whorl books (yawnsville, FWIW)--those are not SF. And Diana Wynne Jones and Lloyd Alexander are indubitably F. I stand by my contention!
160: Then again neither are a lot of SF writers.
160: The political position of science, too. Partly to build a rich and economically complex world but also as part of his General Critique.
hmmm, come to think of it, 162 points to were bright line distinctions are difficult/impossible.
162:
But most SF writers who don't care about scientific accuracy are hoping the reader won't notice or care -- Mieville's in your face about it, his 'science' is self-evidently, gratuitously, self-parodically absurd. That's part of the fun.
He didn't have to make his self-aware robots run on punch cards.
I have to say, I have never been able to get into Le Guin except for The Dispossessed which I absolutely love. Every other time I have started a book by her the language feels so static and stilted that I stop 20 pages into it.
Lem is one of the few SF writers who shows familiarity with actual life generally, I think.
Does this mean the only book of his I've read, The Cyberiad, was unrepresentative? Because that seemed to me more like a collaboration between Italo Calvino and Lewis Carroll than anything else.
It does. I'm very fond of the Cyberiad, but everything else I've read of his is pretty much as Frowner describes it, and (because I'm an incredible lowbrow) is while impressive, kind of a chore.
What about The Compass Rose? Or The Wind's Twelve Quarters? Both were written around the same time as The Dispossessed and one (but I forget which) has a short story about Odo. Also, those two short stories of hers, "The New Atlantis" and the one about the trip to Antarctica, are about as good as any F/SF stories. Plus the really funny and sad one about animal languages, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" or something.
Le Guin is really sentimental and I can see that, and yet there's something in the way she's sentimental that just plugs right in to the sad and mushy part of my brain and many of her stories make me cry.
With all the wordplay and poems and stuff in The Cyberiad I figured most of the idiosyncratic stuff was written by the translator anyway. And since that was the stuff I didn't like, maybe I should read something else by S. Lem.
And stuff like that, you know, that stuff, that's the stuff I mean.
161. The thing about LeGuin is she's all about anthropology. I read Always Coming Home not so much as a futuristic fantasy as an exercise in working through the anthopology of a society in a specified future. Isn't this what a lot of the best SF is about - changing a parameter, in physics, biology, or one of the social sciences, to see what falls out?
Fantasy per se bores me by contrast. Usually it either revisits some ur-narrative in a thin disguise, so you know in advance what's going to fall out, or it changes a parameter and then still has to invoke bloody magic to make its plot work.
People like Wolfe (who I dislike, but that's my problem) seem to straddle the divide, but I'd be inclined to say they were very soft SF, rather than full blown fantasy, on the above basis.
Yeah, there's very little of that exuberant goofiness in what else of his work I've read. (I assume, that while brilliantly translated, it's got to be in the original, though. There wouldn't be anything left of the Cyberiad without the wordplay.)
Lem's collection of reviews of nonexistent books, A Perfect Vacuum, is nice. It avoids his tendency to overwork an idea, and since there's no plot, it's easy to skip the ones that are not in line with one's tastes. Seriously literary people may find it sophomoric, but they're thoughtful and light simultaneously.
I can't manage Pelevin's Russian-- too much slang.
172: And there's so much to dislike in Wolfe, too! I am perpetually on the fence.
How is invoking bloody magic to resolve your plot hugely different from invoking an FTL drive, though? I am remembering some line from a book about someday science being advanced to the point of invisibility, where it is indistinguishable from magic.
Doesn't Ursula Le Guin return to a bunch of exceedingly sappy liberal ur-narratives about The Human Spirit and Tolerance and similar? Her "anthropology" all proves liberal pieties about human nature to be true, and if you transgress against them you will destroy the world. (The thing is, it's easy to make fun of her--she's preachy and ultra-double-plus sincere and very pious about sexuality. But if I could go and live in a utopia, I'd still pick the one in Always Coming Home)
What you find with F that's very SF-y (oh, let's go ahead and call it neo-F) is that it has many of the preoccupations of SF--history, how is history written, how do we know, how do large groups interact, etc. Whereas SF that's very F-y (that Paraspheres stuff, the New Weird) seems to move away from the various scientific certainties and to use "science" more like Mieville uses it, more as an aesthetic or political category.
Jameson tosses off some remark about how with nanotechnology and biotech and all that, the genre future may be with fantasy. He does not elaborate, though.
I find most of the The Star Diaries to be somewhat in the vein of The Cyberiad, not real heavy going. For the others The Futurological Congress and stand out for me as brilliant. You can see where Philip Dick came up with the committee not an individual charge. Maybe some of it is the effect of different translators.
Another OT: Apart from RMMP's 86 being totally correct (the interview's up here, but there apparently won't be an unedited version for a while, supposedly in sympathy with the writer's strike).
Check this news out:
Yale, Harvard's bitterest rival, revealed its plans on January 14th. Students whose families make less than $60,000 a year will pay nothing at all. Families earning up to $200,000 a year will have to pay an average of 10% of their incomes. The university will expand its financial-assistance budget by 43%, to over $80m.
Harvard will have a similar arrangement for families making up to $180,000. That makes the price of going to Harvard or Yale comparable to attending a state-run university for middle- and upper-income students. The universities will also not require any student to take out loans to pay for their tuition, a policy introduced by Princeton in 2001 and by the University of Pennsylvania just after Harvard's announcement.
I know people here have complained about the lack of aid for middle-class kids at the top universities before, and this definitely seems like a move in the right direction. Only a few places will be able to afford it, but the big three Ivies, Stanford and MIT should become a lot more affordable for middle-class kids.
The Futurological Congress and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.
I am remembering some line from a book about someday science being advanced to the point of invisibility, where it is indistinguishable from magic.
I think I'd better read this Jameson book next. My tastes were formed long ago in the glory days of Sladek and Disch and Spinrad and Jerry Cornelius, and I can't really comment on how genres are defined these days.
What about The Compass Rose? Or The Wind's Twelve Quarters?
Yes to TWTQ, no to Compass Rose. I might give it another try, I want to like Le Guin but, as I say, her prose style reminds me of flaws in my own writing. Overly earnest, and way too dry.
I am remembering some line from a book about someday science being advanced to the point of invisibility, where it is indistinguishable from magic.
Clarke's laws. (probably pwned)
I've always appreciated the fact that Clarke is famous outside of SF circles for having invented the concept of a geosynchronous orbit. What a cool thing to have invented. Like the Dyson sphere only practical.
invented the concept of a geosynchronous orbit
I was wrong.
The idea of a geosynchronous satellite for communication purposes was first published in 1928 by Herman Potočnik. The geostationary orbit was first popularised by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in 1945 as a useful orbit for communications satellites. As a result this is sometimes referred to as the Clarke orbit. Similarly, the Clarke Belt is the part of space approximately 35,786 km above mean sea level in the plane of the equator where near-geostationary orbits may be achieved.
Incidentally, is this thread a first for Unfogged in that it started out being about sex and degenerated into a discursive ramble about light reading? The world is turned upside down.
182: we really ought to be able to do better with one titled "Sticky"
Also, Robert Sheckley was very popular in the Ostblock and is neglected here. Many, many short stories, the best are IMO quite good. More humor than is typical in US SF, for one.
is this thread a first for Unfogged in that it started out being about sex and degenerated into a discursive ramble about light reading?
No... No it isn't. Science Fiction is the rarely-played trump card of unfogged conversations. Rarer, but more powerful and all-consuming than food digressions.
*sigh*
Usually the threads that start out about sex degenerate into threads about grammar.
I've only scanned the thread, but I have to say that the trouble with "empowerment" is that the word implicitly dis-empowers anyone not, um, privileged to have encountered the provider of the Empowerment.
Also, nobody talk no smack about typing pr0n. Typinng is hott!
I read Always Coming Home not so much as a futuristic fantasy as an exercise in working through the anthopology of a society in a specified future
That was how it was marketed, wasn't it? I remember the cassette tape of indigenous songs that came with the first edition.
if I could go and live in a utopia, I'd still pick the one in Always Coming Home
Me, I'd probably pick the one from Morris's News From Nowhere.
After posting:
OMG Clarke? Should totally be in a sex thread. Him & his estate in "Ceylon", I tell you...
Also, in 187: "implicitly s/b "explicitly". I can't believe I missed that.
Him & his estate in "Ceylon", I tell you...
Really? I heard those rumors back in the '90s.
Oh, I'm being terribly unfair--"estate in Ceylon" is the whole rumor as far as I know.
I can't speak for my friend's throwaway comment about Lem, but I think it was more that he felt His Master's Voice was an accurate representation of the process of capital-S science -- an interesting event is observed, people get excited about it, many different theories are proposed, and then (spoilers!) it all amounts to nothing and people aren't really sure whether there was any event in the first place -- than anything else in the genre. Obviously someone like Greg Benford, who is a Caltech physicist IIRC, is familiar with what he actually does, but only someone committed to a deeply unreaderly project is going to spend his science fiction novel on depicting a bunch of squabbling middle managers failing to discover something.
Yale sucks.
Maybe, but now it sucks for LESS MONEY!
192: The rumors I've heard about Clarke are from a woman I know who used to live in Sri Lanka, and go past racy into "Damn, I hope that's not true." But to be clear, I have no good reason to think they are true.
195: There's a throwaway line in, I think, The Ghost from the Grand Banks about society having discarded the old prejudice against doctors/mental health professionals having sexual relationships with their patients. It always struck me as kind of an oddly specific thing to mention, but when combined with some of the things I've heard about Clarke that definitely go into "Damn, I hope that's not true" territory... well, it makes me wonder.
195: Same here. Far into "Damn, I hope that's not true," but utterly unsubstantiated.
When you reach a certain age as a male SF writer, you have a license to morph completely into the dirty old man that always lurked in the secret places of your heart, yea, even the very cockles thereof. Note that this doesn't apply to female SF writers; if LeGuin did it it would clearly be way too earnest.
Regarding Lem: I'm now very cross with myself for setting aside Eden months ago, because it looked too much like they were all going to die hopeless & alone. Now I'm curious...
Personally I recommend The Chain of Chance (possibly getting hard to find), in which the scientific method itself is the prime mover of the story's action--although IIRC the novel has in it no technology that wouldn't have been familiar to Lem's contemporary reader.
The Clarke stories got an airing in the British press a few years back, when he was in the honours list. No boys younger than fourteen were mentioned, so far as I can remember. On the other hand, the local paper has on its front page a man weeping because he just got four years for seducing a fourteen year old girl. And he was forty one, which would be about half Clarke's age when the alleged offences took place.
The Chain of Chance is really good. The passage from the Bay of Naples to Rome, with the standing wave of red lights?
I can still remember the first time I read that, and the purely wonderful nature of it. I know it's a bit daft -- it's a bit about a traffic jam on a motorway. Wow, how poetic. But it still made a deep impression on me.
The whole book was like that - really vivid imagery of a not-quite-now.
82: I can't understand thinking Lem is dull, though I think Is ee what you mean with Pirx. Yet Memoirs Found in a Bathtub was one of the funniest books I ever read.
only someone committed to a deeply unreaderly project is going to spend his science fiction novel on depicting a bunch of squabbling middle managers failing to discover something.
Unreaderly? I found HMV practically enthralling.
Also, nobody talk no smack about typing pr0n. Typinng is hott
But this dude is typing on a laptop. Typing pr0n that involved an old-fashioned typewriter, a lipstick-stained cigarette, and, say, garters, would be getting somewhere. In fact, if you had those three items and tossed in a green visor, you wouldn't even need people.
Apparently, there was an investigation of clarke that didn't find anything:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:qBbq7drAtRkJ:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/s/w_asia/74938.stm+The+Sunday+Mirror+arthur+c+clarke&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Here are some of the articles that started the rumors:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_19980201/ai_n14474888
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_19980208/ai_n14474645/pg_1
So what are the relevant laws in Sri Lanka?
Typing pr0n that involved an old-fashioned typewriter, a lipstick-stained cigarette, and, say, garters, would be getting somewhere. In fact, if you had those three items and tossed in a green visor, you wouldn't even need people.
Okay, this I can do. I'll be back in 12 hours with results.
Never fear, Ben, you are over the age of consent to sleep with a 41-y.o. man, even in Sri Lanka.
The artist collects material (all thrown away once the specification was changed to include a typewriter)
But I should have warned people. Sorry.
Not a problem, just figured I'd label it for the unwary.
"I've never been around anyone who has a grammar fetish."
I once went to a fetish party as good grammar.
193: Actually, a lot of Benford's novel Timescape is about scientific research not quite working out, with promising results getting muddied, misinterpreted, and dismissed, the political demands of fundraising conflicting with the underlying imperatives of impending collapse driving the research, and so on.
203: Typewriter porn? David Cronenberg filmed that. The film version of Naked Lunch has some fantastic hot sex with typewriters, among other merits.
Just skimmed the thread, but having known Clarke's Law about science being indistinguishable from magic (and I leave out the qualifiers on purpose) since I was about 10, I was surprised when I read a passage in Tropic of Cancer, I think the section where Miller is teaching in Clichy, that states "Clarke's Law" pretty closely some years before Clarke stated it.
Although I suppose with variant phrasing it isn't that radical or original an idea.
LeGuin's writing is pretty earnest, yes, but I doubt she is personally so. Her brother, whom I know a bit, is a rollicking, irreverant, cynical, sincere-in-unpredictable-ways, dirty old man.
I'm sorry, sorta, to have jacked the thread and ditched it. But I am glad to have the book discussion...
LeGuin's writing is pretty earnest, yes, but I doubt she is personally so.
Actually I was just poking fun at the earlier remark about LeGuin. I don't even find her writing that earnest, really, unless we're talking The Dispossessed.
All right, liberal do-gooders, here's your chance to do some good *and* stick it to the shareholders* of a major corporation.
My employer offers a non-profit fellowship program. Eligible employees can take up to six months off to work for a non-profit, and the company pays them 20% of their salary and continues their benefits. The participants are generally young (24-29 y.o.), overeducated (Ivy League and the like), business savvy, and quantitatively inclined. Politically, they tend to be the vaguely left of center, but not flaming socialists. They are also accustomed to working their asses off night and day.
Anyone know any worthy organizations that could use a highly qualified, motivated employee for a meaningful short-term project? Post a comment expressing interest (and naming the organization, if you care to), and I will send you an e-mail to follow up. I will then post the contact information of in the database that our interested employees can peruse. N.B. I will need personal contacts at these organizations, not just the headquarters address.
*Why, you might ask, would a heartless corporation do something so public-spirited? A lot of our young employees have unfillfilled longings to do something worthwhile with their lives, and this program enables them to go off and get a taste of the poverty and frustration they will encounter in a non-profit career, so that they can tire of it and come back to their highly remunerative jobs with no questions asked.
Why, you might ask, would a heartless corporation do something so public-spirited? A lot of our young employees have unfillfilled longings to do something worthwhile with their lives, and this program enables them to go off and get a taste of the poverty and frustration they will encounter in a non-profit career, so that they can tire of it and come back to their highly remunerative jobs with no questions asked.
How delightfully cynical.
Probably improves retention rates; if my first job had let me do something like that, I would have liked it a lot more.
The reference to Naked Lunch reminded me: I've been meaning to post a link to 'Le Trente-huit Cunegonde' ever since the first Liberal Fascism thread.
I just have to get home first. Don't let me forget.
Probably improves retention rates
Bingo! They start to burn out, thinking "I should really be following my dreams and working for that organization that helps homeless lesbian Bhutanese street children", and this program allows them to give that a try without burning their bridges. In truth, a number of them have thrived in the non-profit world and stuck with it. But the more common case is that they decide that they liked being able to afford good beer and an apartment in a safe neighborhood and they come back to dark side.
they come back to dark side.
Naturally, unfogged stands ready to aid the dark side, as always.
I can't think of non-earnest Le Guin (seriously--the Earthsea books? Not earnest? All those novels about the Hainish? The short story about super-effective solar power? Or the one where the girl's aunt dies? Or Changing Planes?) . Of course, "earnest" isn't as strong a pejorative with me as with many Unfoggers, so I'm perhaps less scrupulous in its use.
But on another note, I'm at my shift at the bookstore, I've just looked at (because in general it's not super reading-intensive) the latest issue of Bust, and read the pron. Lord, it's terrible. It's like anti-pron, in that it makes you never, ever want to leer at strangers again lest you be reminded of it. (Although I say that as a shockingly infrequent leerer.)
I'm not sure why it's bad...probably because it's explicit, but very, very wholesome. Wholesome middle class college chick wholesomely leering at a man who is neither amazingly, overwhelmingly handsome nor unusual-looking, just wholesomely handsome in a low-key way. It's like pron-by-numbers, like an instruction manual for how to have proper, healthy sexual fantasies. Also rather didactic, in that it reminds us that proper healthy middle class women should all be leering at the proper objects of our desire, etc. Technocratic.
231: Left Hand of Darkness? Or maybe Lathe of Heaven, although admittedly my main memories of it are associated with the nice Public TV movie from the 80s.
230: I can't think of non-earnest Le Guin
The Earthsea books had no shortage of message but were not particularly earnest, no. Nor most of the Hainish material if I'm remembering it correctly; there's generally a specific thesis about society and human nature going on, but that's not the same thing. The Dispossessed is earnest by contrast because it's in-your-face about its thesis and more-or-less demands that you agree with it. (It's similar to how Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep partakes of his basic "transcendence through better office furniture" beliefs, but is not earnest in the manner of its much more aggressively -- one might even say tiresomely -- ideological sequel.)
232: I would argue that the Earthsea books are indeed earnest--not directly at the textual level like The Dispossessed...or wait, no, what about those dreadful lectures that Ged gives whats-her-name in The Tombs of Atuan? Where he, for Christ's sake, gives her a pretty dress to show her how wonderful life will be when she just accepts Jesus, er, the views of his society. I actually like The Tombs of Atuan a lot, but it gets really didactic as soon as Ged enters the picture. And all that explaining why the Wicked Magician fears death and why this Does Not Work in the third one! Or the absolute finger-shaking of Changing Planes, where we learn simple environmental lessons and Not To Judge Others Except When They Are Intolerant. Or "The Birthday of the World", which is substantially about how If You Are A Fundamentalist It Will Destroy Your Thinking And Then Your World.
I think one of the reasons I like Ursula Le Guin so much is that I basically think she's right. We would all be better off if we lived on various arid moons under restrictive conditions. I would prefer the cold planet of The Left Hand of Darkness personally, though, to Anarres, which has a hotter climate. Weird how all her stories kind of long for the post-apocalypse.
I really like Ursula Le Guin, and I'm not sure why I have simultaneously such picky critical feelings. Also because she describes worlds where I would like to live, where everyone is slightly priggish, cautious, cerebral, loyal, gentle and not-too-strongly-gendered. Also, she is kind of like L Timmel DuChamp in that her plots are simple-but-dense (like fruitcake!)...thin description, I guess you could say, not thick. Kim Stanley Robinson does thick description, for example.
I've always thought of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas as ultra-earnest, though perhaps that's because I first heard about it via ultra-earnest utilitarians.
235: That is a genuinely misguided story. And yes, it is very earnest. I try not to think of it. It's also horribly, horribly influential on a certain type of young activist. I mean, if you're going to become politically committed by reading Le Guin, what's wrong with The Dispossessed? That's how I did it, and look at me now.
You may have a point about The Tombs of Atuan, which I admit I haven't read in a very long time. Changing Planes -- "absolute finger-shaking"? Really? That's not my recollection at all. "Birthday of the World" is a tragedy of intolerance, but not obviously or solely a Screed About Fundamentalism.
I guess I'm basically defining "earnestness" as unsubtlety. The Left Hand of Darkness has a definite message to convey about technocratic societies, for instance, but it's not a doctrinaire lecture; and similarly with the unmistakably anti-slavery message of Four Ways to Forgiveness. A book doesn't have to be message-free to be un-earnest; it just has to have a complicated and interesting perspective on its message. I tend to disfavour The Dispossessed precisely because it's didactic in a way that makes those kinds of subtleties impossible (and also it's full of the usual selective editing of human nature that always bedevils anarchist utopias).
I love love love The Tombs of Atuan, including its didactic turn at the end, which I always took to be quite precisely "If You Are A Fundamentalist It Will Destroy Your Thinking And Then Your World": this was a rather good lesson for me at one point.
I believe LeGuin comes out and says pretty clearly at some point that she knows that didacticism is her great weakness, and that she struggles against it--not always successfully.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
I read that as "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelets". Why? They're delicious!
Ursula Le Guin made Cory Doctorow cry, so she's cool with me.
I was just rereading Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child, and it occurred to me that it's almost a disquisition on "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"--infinitely worse politics, as Lessing's are always worse, but much more subtle.
In the Le Guin--as I recall--there's this town, and everyone is happy. But when you turn some age, thirteen or fifteen or something, they take you to a guarded place and show you an imprisoned and tormented person and tell you that the price of everyone's happiness is that this person will never know one moment of pleasure or even surcease of pain. And...but you get it now, the ones who walk away are Good.
In the Lessing, two people (who themselves are used as sticks to beat the bad old sixties with) marry and have children and a lovely life, until they have a strange, dangerous, hideous fifth child. After hardships unnumbered, they find an institution which will take the child and--more or less--neglect it and drug it until it dies. They leave the child there, happily. But the mother--who hates and fears the child--none the less goes back and retrieves it and brings it back into the family, in the process destroying the family, exhausting herself and more or less giving up her life to make sure that the scary fifth child doesn't hurt anyone. Now, that's walking away from Omelas, with all its complexities and ambiguities.
I'm admittedly scanning the thread pretty quickly backwards, but earnest as a pejorative when it comes to certain SF writers I find irksome. LeGuin is, after all, a far cry from the sheerly dumb.
Ah, reading a bit more closely:
I guess I'm basically defining "earnestness" as unsubtlety.
Right ... still not seeing why the unsubtle, which I take to be the unironic, that which doesn't hedge, is such a problem.
Oh, but it's clear now that I'd need to reread various LeGuin.
Anyway. "The Word for World is Forest," which I think of as a short story, but is perhaps a novella, is the first LeGuin I read, and it made me cry. Of course I was 14 or so.
237: You and I live in very different worlds, DS. It would never occur to me to describe Le Guin--in any of her books, even my favorites--as subtle. You can always tell who the Good characters are, and who the Bad, and who the Tragically Misguided, and Exactly Where They Go Wrong.
Seriously, how can't you read "Tragic Stories from the Maigrul" (or whatever it's called) and find it poundingly didactic? Also patronizing and culturally weird, I think, since it's so obviously a set of jabs at not just fundamentalism generally but the Darker Other Fundamentalists.
I liked "Old Music and the Slave Women" quite a lot. And I do like "The Birthday of the World"...but the fundies are so Fundie, you know? So sinister and nefarious and secret-keeping. It's kind of the sidelong stuff that I like in that story--the virtual reality part which seems (now that I think about it) kind of an answer to the VR games in Ender's Game, for example. Or the woman who has the high ceilings and paints them blue.
Obviously, we see the same things in Le Guin and weight them differently, and I don't think there's a way to prove who's right. (But it's me! Me!) I don't know, I like her books like I like China Mieville's or like I like Dykes To Watch Out For--they're so familiar that they're part of the landscape and maybe I take their virtues a bit too much for granted. Or perhaps it's that the arguments I have with her books are friendly, in contrast to my persistent quarrel with Gene Wolfe's work.
still not seeing why the unsubtle, which I take to be the unironic, that which doesn't hedge, is such a problem.
Me neither. Also, the charge of "didacticism" has always sounded kind of lazy and kneejerk to me.
I didn't find the Earthsea novels to be unusually preachy. But then, I wouldn't have minded much anyway.
It's not so much the unsubtlety, now that I think about it, as the easiness and clearness of most of the choices--if not to the characters then to the readers. Like, we know in "Solitude" that the mother should let her daughter stay behind. The mother may agonize, but Le Guin has telegraphed to us very clearly what attitude we are to take.
(Er, spoilers for "The Birthday of the World" follow.)
And very often, the good choices are really clear-cut. When people leave the ship in "The Birthday of the World", they are doing something difficult, it's true, but we don't see it as difficult along many vectors. We don't see characters who are friends with the fundies; we don't see people who don't really like most of the leavers...there's just not a lot of complexity in the choice. We do see one guy who stays on the ship and isn't a fundie, but we learn that he has Made A Mistake. If the ship just sailed off and we never knew what happened, that might work a bit better, but knowing that there is Fundypocalypse just makes things seem too pat.
Le Guin hews most often to parable, and that's tough to sustain.
But Always Coming Home is such a success partly because the weird and impatience-generating form (the poetry! the music! the, for heaven's sake, recipes!) rounds it out so well.
In regards to 246: Oh, hey, I'm going by "Fro" now, as sort of an ironic distancing technique to offset my lamentably, dully straight hair.
I've never read any of her books, but I can attest that Le Guin is a lovely, gracious person who tips well.
Excellent point about LeGuin's attachment to bounded spaces--from moons to the scattered islands of Earthsea, she sends us not only far from home, but also to a place from which our (the readers') home is by definition unreachable. Action is localized; when something happens, it happens to everybody. And readers have to set our sympathies with reference only to their perspective.
I think I've tried to ask this before, but I remain curious: is the ansible, as I suspect, the earliest instance in SF of instantaneous communication at interstellar distance using quantum links between particles? Because I don't know shit about particle physics, but that's a pretty cool idea.
Also what's the deal with the eerie similarity (as I see it) between Canopus in Argos & the Hainish universe?
Also it's full of the usual selective editing of human nature that always bedevils anarchist utopias
But the whole book is about how the utopia is also rendered in many ways horrid by even highly improved versions of human nature! (The main character is a saint, but he's the only one.)
It's not so much the unsubtlety, now that I think about it, as the easiness and clearness of most of the choices--if not to the characters then to the readers.
I agree with this assessment. It's a problem. And her universes feel to me very... sparsely populated. Not just locally (obviously she likes to write about situations where people are isolated) but generally. I don't feel like they're teeming with variety and life. But I like a lot of her work. Not the Earthsea books, though.
250: Horrid, sort of. The thing is, people in Le Guin's worlds don't want very much. They're all-even the ones who are comparatively greedy--fairly inward-turning and non-self-seeking. Now, you can see this as a bold statement about how our natures are socially determined and we'd all be better in a better world (which I would like to believe) or you can view it as a flattened and optimistic take on how people are likely to act.
I have no doubt that Le Guin herself is a kind and generous person, and I think she writes many of her characters rather like herself. (She says something like this in one of the stories in Changing Planes).
I guess the criticism of Le Guin that I want to avoid is the "oh, all people everywhere are and always will be ruthless greedy capitalists, and that's why her characters are unrealistic". There's something peculiar with her utopias, but it's not that her characters fail to be middle class Westerners from the present day.
You people made me miss my bus, and the next one doesn't come until 9:36 and it's really, really cold and I have a cold and I want to go home and sleep.
248: aww.
246: Ursula (as I'll confess I think of her) is all about The Tale and how it is passed on. My recollection of "Birthday of the World" is vague (sometimes I read before bedtime), but I suspect that the reason we don't understand Those who didn't leave is that they no longer live in the same world as the teller of the tale.
Her tendency toward parable can be maddening, true, but she writes about How People Choose What to Do & Do It. That's an inherently moral enterprise. It's fine to have a moral. "Telegraphing", though--that's a fair cop.
244: Fro, you're right to assume that eventually you'll get called out about Wolfe...but I must go visit the cat.
(on preview) aww.
243 - You know, I've read a fair amount of stuff about Vietnam, including some very doctrinaire New Left stuff put out byRamparts, and "The Word for World is Forest" may top them all. And I say this as someone who buys wholeheartedly into Rfts' argument in 240, so I'm obviously inclined to read Le Guin as more subtle than some people are.
Frowner, I haven't read that Lessing, but you should read Hilary Mantel's A Change in Climate, which is in many ways a lovely, bleak mediation on the theme that Worse is Better. (It's the story of a husband and wife, former missionaries, and the very bad thing that happened to them in Africa, and the ways in which they do and don't ever recover from it. Also, one of the great failing fictional marriages.)
Thanks for 242, Frowner. I'll have to reread these things -- it's been too long.
246: It's not so much the unsubtlety, now that I think about it, as the easiness and clearness of most of the choices
Yeah, I see this. There's a PKD, Martian Time Slip that engages a theme (among others) similar to the one you mention in 242, and the choices are not clear.
I don't know, I've had this conversation a number of times with people: do you favor fiction that emphasizes how life just, you know, is fraught and full of conundundra, no matter how affecting, indeed deeply felt and consternating; or do you at least not mind seeing some direction [what some would call moralizing parable]? Obviously there's a place for both; I'd become very tired, very quickly, of nothing but the former.
And I say this as someone who buys wholeheartedly into Rfts' argument in 240
RFTS' argument where?
219: Jackmormon: Could this possibly refer to Dr. Clifton B. Kroeber, who taught me (and others) history 40+ years ago??
256 - Sorry, in 250. One of my main takeaways in the book is the small-minded venality on Anarres, both in terms of Shevek being discouraged from doing his research and, in particular, the matter of his apartment, which was really memorable to me for some reason. (I assume it isn't, but I originally read the maneuvering over Shevek's apartment as a nod to Heinlein's "Welcome Home!", a story about two married scientists who decide to move back from their home on the moon to stinky ol' Earth.)
God, I love A Change in Climate.
how life just, you know, is fraught and full of conundundra
A medley of extemporanea?
261: A Princess of Roumania is very good, you know.
A medley of extemporanea?
How did you guess? There are many writers these days, celebrated, who provide nothing but that. It's supposed to be profound.
(Actually, though, you may be indicating something more specific with that -- but I have no idea. We had what counts here as a notable snowstorm today, and I had a mild car accident, and I have to admit I'm tired.)
Ah ha! Unfogged!
Actually, though, you may be indicating something more specific with that
Oh, live is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.
Life. Life is a glorious cycle of song.
261: A Princess of Roumania is very good, you know.
It is! But I thought it bogged down a bit in the middle.
It did...and so do the sequels. But marvelous bizarre. And very good women characters.
Right, I have never heard of Paul Park, but wikipedia says he has a collection called If Lions Could Speak
Oh. That's a Wittgensteinian reference. Not that that means a lot on the face of it, but still.
Thanks!
paul park is fucking awesome! so deeply weird. sugar rain is particularly excellent. my favorite sci-fi book as a kid was lem's invincible. straight-up hard sf with arresting mysterious otherness.
I quite like Philip K Dick, but only his realistic novels like Valis and Through a Scanner Darkly - not that science fiction crap.
257.---No, I was referring to Karl Kr**ber, who still (!) teaches Romanticism and Native American Lit.
Can't you people talk about something interesting, like cooking or philanthropy or something?
A Princess of Roumania is very good, you know.
Not particularly apropos, but a photograph of the present members of the Romanian royal family prompted the following comment a few years ago:
"What use is a princess in modern Europe who isn't beautiful?"
Re: parsimon's question about what's so great about subtlety: I tend to prefer it to straightforward didacticism because as a reader, I tend to bridle at being hit over the head too obviously by the author. This is why I can't read Sheri S. Tepping or Octavia Butler, or many American "hard" SF writers... and why I can read Le Guin.
Re: Anarres and anarchist utopias -- the imperfection of the not-quite-utopia of Anarres is of course the major plot element, but it's still implausibly anodyne.
244: It would never occur to me to describe Le Guin--in any of her books, even my favorites--as subtle.
The reason I would is that Le Guin is often at very great pains to impress upon the reader how everyone in a given situation has reasons for their actions, and how good and evil don't divide up neatly along lines of culture. "Old Music and the Slave Women" is a great example of this; so is "Paradises Lost" -- which it seems to me you're confusing with "The Birthday of the World" -- in which as I remember it a large part of the exposition concerns how and why the new religion grows aboard ship and why the motivations of the believers are comprehensible. (I guess now I have to re-read this story, now.)
Anyway, I'm not saying that she's never didactic, of course she sometimes is. It does happen in Changing Planes sometimes -- okay, a lot of times, perhaps -- since most of these stories are parables of Western societies. (Esp. "Woeful Tales from Mahigul," you're quite right -- in particular the "War for the Alon" and its parallels to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) But if it were the dominant tendency in her writing I'd find her much less interesting as an author.
As you say, we're weighing certain things differently. There's no "right" answer per se, perhaps; but since I find ethical and cultural complexity to be the keys to her best writing, I obviously wouldn't think a sustainable argument can be made that these qualities are absent from her writing.
246: It's not so much the unsubtlety, now that I think about it, as the easiness and clearness of most of the choices--if not to the characters then to the readers.
Again, not necessarily so. I can't identify any "easy and clear" choices for the characters of "Mountain Ways," say, or those of "The Birthday of the World" (the first contact drama which features the breakdown of a clearly Incan-inspired society on contact with a group of astronauts). Estraven's leap of faith in the Ekumen in The Left Hand of Darkness is sympathetic, but not "easy" or "clear."
272: Ah, the other brother! Never knew of him, but it makes sense (in terms of overlapping interests, especially in the American West).