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| Images based on photograph of Le Guin by Benjamin Reed |
Hi Mom,
A great writer has passed on. Maybe she's where you are now, if where you are is a place and not just an idea or an energy or a dimension, which is like a place, but not really., maybe not really.
Ursula K. Le Guin died Monday January 22, 2018.
I was not going to post this content. I had another post planned. Usually, I do not respond this quickly, and I am swamped with work. But thank you Twitter. I spotted messages from Scalzi, and so...
It's a sad day.
An author I support via Patreon, Monica Byrne, renewed my love for Ursula K. Le Guin even more recently in recommending to me her book of short stories (Le Guin's) Compass Rose.
It's a great book, and I am surprised that I didn't know of it until a year or so ago.
For instance, THIS story, so amazing....
http://interconnected.org/home/more/2007/03/acacia-seeds.html
Putting this here so I don't forget about it, even though it came out after I posted this blog:
Scalzi's Tribute
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-leguin-scalzi-20180123-story.html
I will be reading more Le Guin soon, but you know, I had kind of planned to do that anyway... :-)
And so weirdly closer to home, now, than this news would have been since Le Guin is a Portland resident, and, well, here I am so near Portland (and I was just down there Friday).
Hoping that the next world is as wonderful as your imagination, dear Ms. Le Guin. Thank you for all the great and wonderful stories, people, ideas, and worlds.
The next world is probably really cool, but we're all going to miss you here until we join you there.
I could write more, but I hate to say that I have to go back to work...
Oh, but, yeah, so I shared this a couple of hundred posts ago....
http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/06/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-715-ursula.html
I shared this music then, and it seems fitting to share it again.
So, this...
http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2018/01/ursula_le_guin_dies.html
In Ursula Le Guin's worlds, a man can have dreams that reshape reality. A village smith's son can become a great wizard. A girl can rescue her little brother from trolls with nothing more than her toy wooden horse.
In Le Guin's worlds, possibility is everything.
"Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry," the Library Journal once wrote.
Ursula K. Le Guin, a longtime Portland resident who influenced a generation of writers worldwide and whose name became synonymous with superlative speculative fiction, died Monday at her Portland home. She was 88.
A cause of death was not immediately available, but Le Guin had reportedly been ailing for some time. Her son Theo Downes-Le Guin told The New York Times she had been in poor health for several months.
Le Guin's work won numerous prestigious awards, including the Newbery Medal, the top honor for American children's literature; multiple Nebula and Hugo science fiction and fantasy awards; the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction; and, in 2014, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2017, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
more at
http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2018/01/ursula_le_guin_dies.html
AND......
Here's something I had been meaning to post anyway.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/11/06/ursula-k-le-guin-libraries/
Ursula K. Le Guin on the Sacredness of Public Libraries
“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“If librarians were honest,” Joseph Mills wrote in his delightful poem celebrating libraries, “they would say, No one spends time here without being changed…” For Thoreau, books themselves were also changed and fertilized by their cohabitation, “as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in.” “When people don’t have free access to books,” Anne Lamott asserted in contemplating the revolutionary notion of free public libraries, “then communities are like radios without batteries.”
That fertilizing freedom is what Ursula K. Le Guin (b. October 21, 1929) extols in one of the many remarkable pieces in her anthology The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (public library) — the source of Le Guin’s abiding wisdom on gender, what beauty really means, and the magic of real human conversation.
In a 1997 speech celebrating the renovation of Portland’s Multnomah County Library, Le Guin writes:
A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It’s everybody’s place.
After an affectionate time-travel tour of the formative libraries in her life, Le Guin considers the universal gift of the free public library:
Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.[…]Plunging into the ocean of words, roaming in the broad fields of the mind, climbing the mountains of the imagination. Just like the kid in the Carnegie or the student in Widener, that was my freedom, that was my joy. And it still is.That joy must not be sold. It must not be “privatised,” made into another privilege for the privileged. A public library is a public trust.And that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, and that’s everyone, when they need it, and that’s always.
Couple this particular fragment of the wholly magnificent The Wave in the Mind — titled after Virginia Woolf’s famous metaphor for writing and consciousness — with a photographic love letter to public libraries, then revisit Le Guin on where ideas come from and the “secret” to great writing.
Images based on photograph of Le Guin by Benjamin Reed
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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 934 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1801.23 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
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