Acclaimed author of such socialist/anarchist-oriented fantasy masterpieces as The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin largely confined herself to poetry, social commentary and yes, blogging, in her later years. As a matter of fact, I was in the middle of a collection of her often hilarious essays when I got the New York Times alert that she had died at her home in Portland, Oregon after several months of ill health.
My favorite essay in the collection ("No Time To Spare") so far is her skewering of an insipid questionnaire she received from Harvard University in 2011, in which aging alumni were asked what they cared about, and what they did in their spare time. And thus the title: when you're in your 80s, your days are rather too limited to worry about filling out stupid surveys which proffer golf, bridge, shopping and racquet sports as the most likely answers to how aging and comfortable Ivy Leaguers spend their free time. Not one of the choices for old-age activities lacked a capitalistic profit motive at its very core.
"An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome," Le Guin quipped. "But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between by upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly an deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time."
"What is Harvard thinking of?" she scoffed. "I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare." (Le Guin was actually a 1951 graduate of Radcliffe, the "sister school" of the then-all male university.)
She was an ardent critic of neoliberal capitalism throughout her life, more than apparent in her body of work. One of the questions on the Harvard survey of octogenarian grads was how they ranked, for "future generations," the importance "of economic stability and growth for the U.S., terrorism, improved healthcare quality and cost, implementation of an effective immigration policy, improved bipartisanship in politics and the export of democracy."
"Since we're supposed to be considering the life of future generations," Le Guin acerbically reacted, after noting that Harvard falsely equated economic stability and growth, "it seems a strange list, limited to quite immediate concerns and filtered through such current right-wing obsessions as 'terrorism. effective immigration policy and the exportation of democracy' (which I assume is a euphemism for our policy of invading countries we don't like and trying to destroy their society, culture and religion.) Nine choices, but nothing about climate destabilization, nothing about international politics, nothing about population growth, nothing about industrial pollution, nothing about the control of government by corporations, nothing about human rights or injustice or poverty."
It's no accident that the death of this groundbreaking, award-winning writer, who John Scalzi calls the "spiritual mother of generations of writers," is barely being noticed on mainstream media. The New York Times obituary is now entirely gone from its initial placement below the digital home page fold. At the top of today's page, in fact, is a big spread about a "radical" new reality TV show called "RePaul's Drag Race" which commercializes the politics of personal identity for a mass audience.
Le Guin would probably have been amused, if not enamored, given that she was the literary ground-breaker of gender-bending narrative, with roots solidly planted in the original socialism-aligned feminist movement.
Here she is accepting the 2014 National Book Awards' lifetime achievement honors in decidedly anti-censorship and anti-capitalism ("a panic of ignorance and greed") language.
14 comments:
Thank you Karen for this tribute.
Fellow Taoist and anti-capitalist, the brilliant and imaginative Ursula Le Guin, will always will be a connection between us and the Great. Gone but not lost.
Namaste
Great send off. Don't skip the video.
She seems pretty sharp for her age. I was turned off by her statements at the beginning. I don't think science fiction and fantasy has been "excluded from literature" and all the awards have gone to realists. I didn't like the idea that realism is somehow not literature of the imagination.
When I play a game (don't know how to lay bridge so its not that) it seems more like opting out of capitalism and the constant need for productivity, same with tennis. Why do you say those activities are capitalistic pursuits?
Kat,
They're leisure class pursuits. They are also group pursuits, so you need nearby people with similar free time and disposable incomes to enjoy these hobbies. I don't know any poor old people who play tennis, or even bridge. For one thing, they increasingly aren't even living into their 80s and if they are, the lack of medical care in their earlier lives ensures that their old ages will not be particularly healthy ones, either cognitively or physically.
One excuse that right-wing politicians use for raising the age for Medicare and Social Security eligibility is that wealthy old people are in such better shape than their forebears. They don't take into account the bodies of bricklayers, nurses, carpenters and others who use their bodies along with their minds to earn a living. Tennis? You gotta be kidding!
Nothing wrong with games, but it is ageist for people/institutions to assume that that's all that retired people are interested in. When they do continue, past retirement age, with their life's work, they're treated with awe. "Pretty sharp for her age" is one such putdown.
The sci fi/fantasy genre has long been denigrated by "serious" critics of literature. Were it not for this fact, I believe that Le Guin would have been a Nobel laureate. I describe this genre as more imaginative than "realistic" literature mainly because of the ability of Le Guin and other fantasy writers to construct whole worlds out of nothing but their own minds.
Umm.. I play on public courts and there are plenty of people that aren't anywhere near rich playing. Now when my friend takes me kayaking, that is another story-- very much an upper middle class pursuit. But either way, I enjoy it.
Why do people put so much stock in awards? It seems like Le Guin had plenty of critical acclaim in her lifetime. For me, Tolstoy or Eliot have plenty of imagination and I suppose I prefer novels without a true heroine. But if you were to look at the winners of National Book Awards-- Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury
It doesn't seem like the essay was so much about rich persons pursuits v. poor persons as much as the idea that "spare time" is to be delineated from productive time or that it is somehow not part of your life's work.
Any activity-- yoga, meditation, studying Bhuddism, can be pursued to capitalistic ends. I would say pursuing an activity simply because you enjoy it and want to pass some time is opting out of capitalism for a short time at least.
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
"In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell
I also don't really believe that anyone constructs whole worlds out of 'nothing but their own minds". I don't believe in the idea of a singular genius. This idea is useful for capitalism though.
Kat,
You're right, the criticism of the capitalistic aspect of many leisure-time pursuits is entirely my own observation. Golf, tennis, etc. are not readily available to poor retirees barely subsisting on a Social Security check. Le Guin, for her part, was obviously financially secure, so her particular beef was with Harvard assuming that its alumni were all selfish old codgers who don't care about social issues. It was the ageist, classist bias of Harvard's questionnaire, the idea that its octogenarian graduates are so wealthy and healthy that all they selfishly care about are their own leisure-time hobbies, that got her goat. I simply added to the critique with my own observation that many hobbies do cost a lot of money, along with Le Guin's, that Ivy League octogenarians are thus pigeonholed into an exclusive class of their very own.
How many people in their 80s play on your public courts? Do they take public transportation, do they arrive in groups on the private assisted living facility bus, or do they still drive their own cars?
As far as books are concerned, I read all "genres" too, and don't value one type over another. I think one reason that sci fi and fantasy are so looked down upon is that the fans are stereotyped much as "Bernie Bros" were stereotyped - as socially awkward, clueless types with an addiction to Star Wars. The genre is often wrongly viewed as being pure escapism.
One author I've gotten into lately is Kim Stanley Robinson, who also writes from an anti-capitalist, ecological, feminist point of view.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/our-greatest-political-novelist
Buddy, can you spare a time?
The clueless can be found at any age. Some lucky few octogenarians have a clearer mind, by far, than so many hip young people. The most noble among those lucky old timers contribute to the world mightily, as long as they have a pulse, by serving as valued teachers and mentors to the young, or they continue to reach out to the world as writers.
True, a clear head in the last stage of life is an unpredictable gift from Fortuna, which seems to me a good reason for not sniping at those lucky old timers when they have the courage to say sharp things about society. Still, as I would never stoop to snipe at a gifted old timer for being more prescient and wiser than people younger than she, so I would not criticize the younger crowd of today for not being smart and wise at any stage of their lives, past, present or future. Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do, obviously.
I suppose we might go round and round for each sport or pastime mentioned by Le Guin, showing how it gets taken over by the greedy. But that might lead us into the waste of time called whataboutery. What first struck me and still abides with me from her acceptance speech was how smart and wise and brave she was. Wouldn't most people who visit this site want more people of talent to speak out like Le Guin, again and again?
As for the tennis racket connection with capitalism (and the elitist crowd), let an outlet of the capitalist press itself tell you more about capitalism's solid connection with tennis.
https://conservativetribune.com/tennis-champ-gives-lesson-in-capitalism-when-asked-if-she-felt-bad-for-winning/
Jay,
The pretty sharp mind comment was ageist I confess. I can't help thinking it because usually in my head it is followed with "that won't be like me".
As for the "conservative tribune" thing it is more about the mindset of the writer than a particular connection tennis has to capitalism. Of course professional sports are capitalistic endeavors-- I'll get that one out of the way-- but, I don't think the writer has a clear grip on socialism if he thinks it has something to do with nobody winning at an inconsequential game. A socialist would probably be more inclined to say everyone who wants to should be free to pursue such an activity (with the removal of barriers imposed by capitalism). Think of baseball in Cuba.
Jay,
What you characterize as "sniping" I would say is simply disagreeing. I realize she is a published author with honors and I am nobody in particular but have I no right to my opinion? I don't need the forgiveness of the Lord.
Karen.
Thanks for the link to that article. I enjoyed it (although I did not mind the ruminations on agriculture in Anna Karenina!). I have lamented from time to time to my husband that I cannot get into any work of fiction that has even the faintest traces of the fantastic. I know that I should branch out. I won't even try to read a work of science fiction. This is a failing on my part. I was not in any way dismissing an entire genre of literature. So, as much as I enjoyed the article I am more likely check out the book by the writer of the article than the one by the subject of the article. One of these days maybe...
Yet musician songwriter Bob Dylan, not Ursula Le Guin, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sign of the times.
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