Ursula Le Guin, last night

Well, I'll get the comments started. I voted "Hell, yeah", because I think she's correct. It's also worth noting that she's a hugely successful commercial author, has been for a long time, so it's easy for her to make this comment.

caw

William, thanks for posting her remarks here.

I also voted "Hell, yeah" primarily because of her other statement about the need for writers who can see alternatives and step outside the prevailing views in various ways. The posing of commercial success as an opposite to art is beside that point, from what I can see. Whether there's validity to that opposition or not, her first statement stands, IMO.

I, too, voted "hell, yeah." I don't see a dichotomy in her comments, nor do I see that her commercial success makes it easier so much as it affords her a platform so many of us who think the same way don't have. And, even though no one has said as much, I see no hypocrisy in her statements. Throughout history, writers have been the architects of social change and they have used the avenues open to them in those times to get their thoughts and beliefs out.

Humanity is at crisis point on so many different levels that these new visionaries are needed to awaken us all to new possibilities and alternatives. Writers are observers and world-builders and (often) critical thinkers; they are the ones best placed to get new ideas into the mainstream. Even ideas with which one might disagree will hone one's own critical thinking ability.

So, yeah--hell, yeah.

Kylabelle said:

William, thanks for posting her remarks here.

I also voted "Hell, yeah" primarily because of her other statement about the need for writers who can see alternatives and step outside the prevailing views in various ways.

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I'm all for alternative ways of thinking, but how much is this driven by a hidden agenda? Think Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

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Am I the only one who got both "Hell Yeah!" and a queasy chill from the above?

Hell, yeah. I was very surprised that I've become fascinated by the business end of the industry, but there would be no thrill, for me, if it became the focus over the words and the ideas.

Good points, Ari and Perks. Ari, after I posted I reread her remarks and realized the dichotomy was really in my mind more than in the text. I believe many a commercially successful author, who never really gave a thought, perhaps, to high art, has contributed alternative ideas and expanded cultural perceptions, so, yeah.

Rob, what I find chilling is any attitude that takes an example like Bradley and extrapolates from it the suggestion that therefore alternative visions are dangerous and we'd all be safer in the arms of the familiar good ole conventions our mainstream culture promulgates.

*shudder*

Kylabelle said:

Rob, what I find chilling is any attitude that takes an example like Bradley and extrapolates from it the suggestion that therefore alternative visions are dangerous and we'd all be safer in the arms of the familiar good ole conventions our mainstream culture promulgates.

*shudder*

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I agree, believe it or not. And yet, didn't that discussion also talk about how pervasive the Bradley-apologist crowd was amongst the big writers of the 60's and 70's? That crowd used language similar enough to Le Guin's comments quoted here, that I can't ignore it.

Like I said, my response went both ways. If Ursula Le Guin wasn't part of that apologist crowd, fantastic. If she was...

Draw your own conclusions.

If she was, what?

I really don't see the connection to MZB.

LeGuin is a great writer, but I'm not sure how you divorce art from commerce without going to some sort of patronage system.

I agree with her remarks. I'd be interested in trying to think outside the box, but I'm not sure I'm the guy for the job. I mean, what does that look like and how do you go about doing it?

Her thoughts remind me of a character in James A. Michener's book "The Novel." One of the characters is a literary critic who believes that novels are conversations between authors about higher issues (but I don't think Ms. Le Guin is the egotist that this character was).

Alessandra Kelley said:

Dear god, are you actually comparing Marion Zimmer Bradley's parroting of sixties free love talk in order to justify child rape to Ursula K. LeGuin's lifelong exploration of alternatives to brutal unthinking corporate philosophy?

Is it that they were both female fantasy authors in the 1960s? Because otherwise I cannot fathom how you could possibly have constructed any link between those two.

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I don't really care what gender she is.

I care that what she said struck a similar chord to some of the apologist arguments that were quoted in that thread. Or I think it did.

You don't see that similarity of language. OK.

I voted meh. In truth, I don't give a rat's ass about what Le Guin believes, or thinks we need, or what MZB believed, or thought we needed. Whatever MZB was, she's dead.

Le Guin is still alive, and I find her scary enough.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship .

To put it mildly, this is an incredibly stupid statement. If Le Guin wants one of HER books to say send some message, that's fine. Write, and sell it, just like all the others she's written and sold, in the very system she says is not responsible.

Corporate profit? Oh, hell no, let's have none of that. Frightful thing might mean the business can afford to keep publishing other writers. Publishers are in business to make a profit by providing a product consumers want. It's as simple as this, and to have a successful writer who has made fortune in that system say otherwise is, at best, pure hypocrisy. To say that writing a book just to entertain, and to make a lot of money from it for this reason alone is not responsible, are the words of a moron.

This . . .fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. is just ideological blathering. I remember freedom well, but I'm not silly enough to use a meaningless phrase like "larger reality".


Le Guin needs to get over herself, needs to come into the real world, needs to stop blathering about such things as "obsessive technologies", and needs to write another commercial book worth reading.

Okay, I'm very confused. LeGuin made some comment about "alternatives to how we live now" - and that somehow implied "child molesting" because child molesters might also refer to "alternative lifestyles"? Is that the connection?

RichardGarfinkle said:

And I think she's right over all. I don't think any art benefits from forgetting that one is practicing an art.

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I seriously doubt if anyone has ever created a sing;e piece of great art by trying to create art, or by thinking for a second that one is creating art. I think this is pretentious BS.

The one thing I know for certain is that if you actually have to call something "art", it's a piece of crap. The same is true of the "artist".

Either both stand alone, achieve something others find beautiful and worthwhile, and do so without tags and labels, or both are crap.

Anyone who sits down and thinks, I am an artist, and I am now creating great art, is full of what happens to baloney after it sits in your gut for ten days.

I caught a couple other comments from her speech (haven't found the whole thing, if it's out there somewhere) but I wonder if the comments here were connected to her comments about Amazon/Hatchette. They certainly aren't quite as 'revolutionary' if that was the context, and I would be more enthused about them if so.

James, that's quite a strong sneer there, without a lot of substance I can detect. "LeGuin needs to get over herself". Really.

What an interesting opinion.

I do gather that you disagree with something in her remarks but I'm not quite sure exactly which part -- is it the implied criticism of corporate social attitudes that annoys you? In any case, I find it puzzling just what is so distressing to you, in her words.

I do see a lot of hyperbole in your post, and drawing of conclusions that aren't very well supported in the OP.

No doubt I am missing something crucial here.

ETA: Ah. Your response to Richard begins to shed a little light. You object to the idea that anyone might call herself an artist, since to do so is self-important bullshit and the title of "artist" can only be bestowed by consumers? Am I understanding you yet?

Jamesaritchie said:

I seriously doubt if anyone has ever created a sing;e piece of great art by trying to create art, or by thinking for a second that one is creating art. I think this is pretentious BS.

The one thing I know for certain is that if you actually have to call something "art", it's a piece of crap. The same is true of the "artist".

Either both stand alone, achieve something others find beautiful and worthwhile, and do so without tags and labels, or both are crap.

Anyone who sits down and thinks, I am an artist, and I am now creating great art, is full of what happens to baloney after it sits in your gut for ten days.

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I find this logic nearly as incomprehensible as "MZB == UKLG".

Lots of artists are consciously trying to create art - whether or not it's good (or great) art has nothing to do with what the creator thinks of it. A pretentious artist can be a great artist, and a very humble or purely commercial artist can be a terrible artist.

Also, wanting to create great art and wanting to make money off of it are not mutually exclusive.

Amadan said:

Okay, I'm very confused. LeGuin made some comment about "alternatives to how we live now" - and that somehow implied "child molesting" because child molesters might also refer to "alternative lifestyles"? Is that the connection?

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I think it's more illustrative of my concern to think of it backwards to that. She said that, yeah, but so did some of the apologists for MZB.

Or similar.

Nobody else is seeing it. I can live with that.

I guess I am concerned with the idea of great commercial success =/= art because recently many of the great commercial successes have been by women and books lauded as "artistic" and "literary" seem to be more often written by men. By dividing up books by commercial and literary success and holding up one as better I think really hurts.

However I would appreciate a destruction of the follow-the-leader mentality because it does seem to create boom/bust cycles for writers.

Hapax Legomenon said:

I guess I am concerned with the idea of great commercial success =/= art because recently many of the great commercial successes have been by women and books lauded as "artistic" and "literary" seem to be more often written by men. By dividing up books by commercial and literary success and holding up one as better I think really hurts.

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That sounds like a really dodgy theory, unless you can quantify it somehow.

What I got out of the quote is that art is the antidote to the 24-news channel culture and the misery and paranoia that are the inevitable result of such a steady diet - and that the money the art generates shouldn't be confused with the medicine.

A quick Googling of the subject, and I haven't found anything to suggest that LeGuin was a part of MZB's cabal of apologists in the 60s, 70s and beyond, or even that she was a part of the network of authors who were initially mentored by Bradley or who were first published in one of her Anthologies or her magazine. She is from Berkeley, and so was MZB, and they both wrote/write SFF, so it seems likely they knew one another. But linking the two in searches has come up with no connection, aside from the fact that they are both women who wrote SF and F at a time when relatively few women did.

My personal take on it is that I agree with some of what she said, but yeah, there's nothing wrong with wanting to make a living at what you do either. But the pursuit of commercial success before all else, paired with a culture where there are fewer and fewer publishers and where it is harder and harder to discover new writers, could be an issue.

Having said this, I personally prefer the stuff she wrote before she decided she was going to be a great writer. I really haven't been able to get into anything she's written in recent decades, in fact, except for the sequels to her Earthsea books. But that's my taste. And at the other extreme, I've also lost interest in some writers who haven't changed their style at all over decades. It's a hard line to walk, I suspect.