saw someone promote a book with a collage of out of context negative reviews recently, and i thought it'd be fun to do for some of the older lgbt sci-fi books i've read
On one level the book is about the life of a woman who is hardly more than a token in a great epic poem, on another it’s about how history and context shape how we are seen, and the brief moment there is to act between the inescapable past and the unknowable future.
Perhaps to write Lavinia Le Guin had to live long enough to see her own early books read in a different context from the one where they were written, and to think about what that means.
#thinking of how her last four novels between 2004 and 2008 show a progressive blossoming of interest in classical literary traditions#following nearly half a century's worth of a career where she seems to actively avoid the influence of classical or medieval europe#idk. but i think this explains annals of the western shore as much as lavinia.#she gets so interested in what it means to share the same stories across space and time (and class and gender and nationality)#to be united in a community by having the same poetry#and in such an obvious way thinking about classics as a discipline is an incredible way to work through that#and i do think its an interest that must come out of having witnessed her own work unite people in community across time#if you're talking about the way stories and poems bring people together across time...#i read the texts passed on to me by renaissance humanists and 19th century philologists and byzantine monks and late antique scribes...#and they're the same across time and space but they're also not#and to have seen her own work reach people across space and time and be the same but also not... that must have been incredible#so: did living long enough to see her own early books read in a different context and to think about what that means#drive her to think about classical literature as she clearly was for the better part of a decade?
“I want you to do this with me for one month. One month. Write 10 observations a week and by the end of four weeks, you will have an answer. Because when someone writes about the rustic gutter and the water pouring through it onto the muddy grass, the real pours into the room. And it’s thrilling. We’re all enlivened by it. We don’t have to find more than the rustic gutter and the muddy grass and the pouring cold water.”
— Marie Howe, Boston University’s 2016 Theopoetics Conference (via mothersofmyheart)
I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.
Ms. Tippett:
Really?
Ms. Howe:
They really find it hard.
Ms. Tippett:
What do you mean? What is the assignment? 10 observations of their actual world?
Ms. Howe:
Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.
Ms. Tippett:
It does.
Ms. Howe:
It hurts us.
Ms. Tippett:
You naming something.
Ms. Howe:
We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away. And to be with a glass of water or to be with anything — and then they say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that’s whole thing. It’s the point.
Ms. Howe:
It’s the this, right?
Ms. Howe:
Right, the this, whatever. And then they say, “Oh, I saw a lot of people who really want” — and, “No, no, no. No abstractions, no interpretations.” But then this amazing thing happens, Krista. The fourth week or so, they come in and clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff. And it so thrilling. I mean, it is thrilling. Everybody can feel it. Everyone is just like, “Wow.” The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room. And it’s just amazing.
Ms. Tippett:
In some basic level, what they’ve done is just engage with their senses.
Ms. Howe:
Yeah, and have been present out of their minds and just noticing what’s around them, which is — we don’t do. And again, not to compare it to anything. They’re not allowed. And that’s very hard for them. And then on the fifth or sixth week, I say, “OK, use metaphors.” And they don’t want to. They don’t know how. They’re like, “Why would I? Why would I compare that to anything when it’s itself?” Exactly. Good question.
So then you think, why the necessity of a metaphor? Why do you have to use a metaphor now? Not just to do it to avoid it, but to do it to make it more there. And it’s very interesting.
The words and silences we live by. The rituals that sustain us. The poetry of ordinary time.
baratheonpilled
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
origamiaround
