Review: 'Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations'
This book is a truly inspirational and nifty one in the series of The Last Interview. I knew next to nothing about Ursula Le Guin before reading this book, other than her being a respected sci-fi author.
I didn't know she was funny nor that she was an anarchist.
She maintained that distinction for more than forty years, talking publicly but not privately. It was enough. Some writers need experience to feed the imagination, but Le Guin’s experiences were all in her head. She prided herself in having as few external stimuli as possible. She told an interviewer from Poland in 1988 her ideal schedule:
5:30 a.m.—wake up and lie there and think.
6:15 a.m.—get up and eat breakfast (lots).
7:15 a.m.—get to work writing, writing, writing. Noon—lunch.
1:00-3:00 p.m.—reading, music.
3:00-5:00 p.m.—correspondence, maybe house cleaning.
5:00-8:00 p.m.—make dinner and eat it.
After 8:00 p.m.—I tend to be very stupid and we won’t talk about this.
She was punk. She wrote fantasy and sci-fi before they hit the mainstream and made universes from her head. She was clearly very insightful:
PETER JENSEN: You write science fiction. Do you have any particular vision of the future?
URSULA K. LE GUIN: The thing about science fiction is, it isn’t really about the future. It’s about the present. But the future gives us great freedom of imagination. It’s like a mirror. You can see the back of your own head.
She had integrity and spoke like a true intellectual.
ZELTZER: I notice there’s no anima in your books.
LE GUIN: Of course not—I’m a woman. But the animus writes my books. My animus, what inspires me, is definitely male. People talk about muses—well, my muse ain’t no girl in a filmy dress, that’s for sure. But of course this is all metaphor.
Her words on writing are also very inspirational, direct or not:
MCPHERSON: Once you’re into a major work, like a novel, that has to be written over an extended period of time, how do you maintain the creative flow and deal with the constant interruptions?
LE GUIN: Hemingway, l think it was, had a definite and useful word of advice here. When you stop in the middle of a story or a novel, he said, never stop at a stopping place; go past it a little or stop short of it. Stop even in the middle of a sentence. Tomorrow when you come back to it you can read back the last few paragraphs, or pages, until you come to the “oh yeah, this is what happened next” and you can hook back up into your unconscious flow. That starting and stopping is sometimes a very hairy business.
It’s one reason I adore Tolkien; he always tells you what the weather is, always. And you know pretty well where north is, and what kind of landscape you’re in and so on. I really enjoy that. That’s why I like Hardy. Again, you always know what the weather is.
All interviews are interesting: a couple are plain and not very well researched, but the very last one, conducted over several meetings from 2015 to 2018, by David Streitfeld, is wonderful.
STREITFELD: How does getting old look now?
LE GUIN: It’s not the metaphysical weariness of aging that bothers me. It’s that you get so goddamn physically tired you can’t pull yourself together. If you’ve ever been very ill, it’s like that. You just can’t rise to the occasion. It’s why I don’t do many public appearances anymore. I’m a ham. I love appearing in front of an audience. But I can’t.
STREITFELD: How do you feel about e-books these days? In 2008 you wrote for Harper’s Magazine about the alleged decline of reading. It now seems prophetic about the reliability and durability of physical books: “If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”
LE GUIN: When I started writing about e-books and print books, a lot of people were shouting “The book is dead, the book is dead, it’s all going to be electronic.” I got tired of it. What I was trying to say is that now we have two ways of publishing, and we’re going to use them both. We had one, now we have two. How can that be bad? Creatures live longer if they can do things different ways. I think I’ve been fairly consistent on that. But the tone of my voice might have changed. I was going against a trendy notion. There’s this joke I heard. You know what Gutenberg’s second book was, after the Bible? It was a book about how the book was dead. Personally, though, I hate to read on a screen. I don’t have an e-reader.
STREITFELD: Some writers grumble to me about Amazon, but they’re reluctant to be public about it because they think it will hurt their careers. Others say they do not see an issue here at all.
LE GUIN: Amazon is extremely clever at making people love it, as if it were a nice uncle. I don’t expect to win, but I still need to say what I think. When I am afraid to say what I think is when I will really be defeated. The only way they can defeat me is by silencing me. I might as well go out kicking.
She had no qualms about talking about the works of others:
LE GUIN: What some consider a mystical breakthrough late in Phil’s life looks to me more like a breakdown. Still, this was a remarkable mind. But his works don’t wear as well as I hoped and thought they would.
STREITFELD: Oh no!
LE GUIN: I did an introduction to the Folio Society edition of The Man in the High Castle, and re-reading it I was struck by the clunkiness. Others that I liked a lot I now find hard going. I’m afraid to re-read Galactic Pot-Healer, my secret favorite. Clans of the Alphane Moon, which I was crazy about, now seems cruel. The way he handled women was pretty bad.
She spoke lovingly and straight-forwardly about her husband, Charles.
STREITFELD: I don’t see the books you and Charles were reading last night. Usually they’re on the tables here.
LE GUIN: He’s now reading the Oxford Book of English Verse to me. I’m reading Brontë’s Shirley to him. It’s a good book, much better than I realized. I wasn’t feeling so hot, so we had the reading upstairs, with a little whiskey. I’m still recovering from my birthday. It was very nice. It kind of went on for a week. My daughter came up from Los Angeles, and I got to see her. It’s a serious age, eighty-eight. If you turn the numbers on their side, it’s two infinities on top of each other.
In short, this collection of interviews is enticing, alluring, straighter than an arrow (all due to Le Guin's graces), and makes me want to read Le Guin's work straightaway.
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