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A review by bluestarfish
Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places by Ursula K. Le Guin
5.0
This is a wonderful collection of essays, transcripts of talks, poems & travelogues, and reviews covering UKLG work in 1976-1988. The first essay, The Space Crone, had me whooping internally and wanting to share it with the train carriage full of of strangers. Is Gender Necessary? Redux, the next essay, is supremely useful to me right now in that it shows that people are allowed to change their minds about what they think! What an amazing gift! The Fisherwoman's Daughter is splendid, but then so is much of what is on offer.
"Offer your experience as your truth" Pauline Oliveros is quoted saying and the evidence would suggest that UKLG has taken this to heart and generously shared with all of us. (Also, when did Doris Lessing write sf??) [2016]
This was a great re-read and I found the great pig quote that I hadn't remembered was (also) from an essay in this collection:
"My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I'm trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks."
The magazine ("Venom") that was created to be an antidote to book reviews that were indistinguishable from back cover blurbs was a brilliant idea. Each anonymous contributor had to write a savage take down of one of their own novels as the "price" of entry (so that people wouldn't know which were suicides and which were murders...) and UKLG's take on "The Beginning Place" was a lot funnier now that I've actually read it.
"Offer your experience as your truth" Pauline Oliveros is quoted saying and the evidence would suggest that UKLG has taken this to heart and generously shared with all of us. (Also, when did Doris Lessing write sf??) [2016]
This was a great re-read and I found the great pig quote that I hadn't remembered was (also) from an essay in this collection:
"My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I'm trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks."
The magazine ("Venom") that was created to be an antidote to book reviews that were indistinguishable from back cover blurbs was a brilliant idea. Each anonymous contributor had to write a savage take down of one of their own novels as the "price" of entry (so that people wouldn't know which were suicides and which were murders...) and UKLG's take on "The Beginning Place" was a lot funnier now that I've actually read it.