Eugene Fischer

Tag: Ursula Le Guin

2016 Tiptree Symposium celebrating Ursula K. Le Guin

In December I traveled to Eugene, Oregon to attend the 2016 Tiptree Symposium, a two-day academic conference on the work of Ursula K. Le Guin. I got to see some old friends, made some new ones, briefly met Le Guin herself, and heard many thoughtful panels and lectures. If that sounds like something you’re sad to have missed, you’re in luck: the University of Oregon has put videos of the presentations online.

I’m planning to rewatch several of these, starting with the incredible panel Alexis Lothian put together on “Speculative Gender and The Left Hand of Darkness,” featuring Aren Aizura, micha cárdenas, and Tuesday Smillie presenting three trans perspectives on the novel. I took five pages of notes on this panel alone, and came away feeling I hadn’t been able to jot down everything I wanted to think more about.

Since the video index page I linked above truncates the titles, here’s a full listing of the videos:

December 1, Sally Miller Gearhart Lesbian Lecture, Dr. Alexis Lothian, “Queer Longings in Straight Futures: Notes Toward a Prehistory for Lesbian Speculation”

December 2, Welcome and Panel 1: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Field of Feminist Science Fiction

December 2, Panel 2: UO Prof. Edmond Chang’s Feminist SF students on The Word for World is Forest

December 2, Keynote and Q & A: Karen Joy Fowler, “Ursula Le Guin and the Larger Reality”

December 3, Panel 3: “Speculative Gender and The Left Hand of Darkness”

December 3, Panel 4: “Le Guin’s Fiction as Inspiration for Activism”

December 3, Panel 5: Kelly Sue DeConnick and Ben Saunders: “New Directions in Feminist Science Fiction: A Conversation with Kelly Sue DeConnick”

December 3, Keynote: Brian Attebery, “The James Tiptree Jr. Book Club: A Mitochondrial Theory of Literature” (The text of this one was also published on Tor.com)

An Overdue Return to Tabclosing

My tabs have gotten so extensive that I’ve outsourced the problem and started banishing them to my Pocket queue rather than keep them in the browser. Time to start recording this stuff again. There will be much more of this to come.

  • “Zac Efron and Michelle Rodriguez, Romantic Human Couple” – To start off with something amusing, a brief photoessay from Mallory Ortberg at The Toast. Includes rumination on the placement of the human carapace and the line, “I can love you better from up here, alone.”
  • “40 plus 5” (NSFW) – Following up with something raw and occasionally harrowing, a long photoessay from Ruth Fowler about the birth of her son Nye. She had a complicated home birth, and her photographer husband Jared Iorio captured the whole thing though his lens. The photos are graphic and powerful, and Ruth writes about the experience of giving birth with taught, unsentimental description, which I found incredibly affecting. I’ve also been reading the other essays on Fowler’s site.
  • “On Turning 30” – Molly Crabapple writing in Vice about age and gendered expectations. She and I are the same age. Our experience getting here has been different in important ways.
  • “When Hitting ‘Find My iPhone’ Takes You to a Thief’s Doorstep” – Article in the New York Times that was sent to me by many people. They sent it to me because they know I did this. When my iPad was stolen, I tracked the thief’s location and used some social engineering to spook his roommates into revealing him, then sent the police to his door. I got the iPad back, and the thief was arrested. At no time did I ever consider bringing a weapon with me.
  • “The Myth of the Veneer” – Ursula Le Guin, at the Book View Cafe, writes about the myth that civilized, prosocial behavior is a superficial mask for an anarchic human nature.
  • “The Teaching Class” – Rachel Reiderer writing for Guernica Magazine about the corporatization of higher education and the current state of the things where the janitors make more than the professors. Basically, a long essay about why I’m bailing out of the sad, sucker’s game that is modern humanities academia.
  • And finally, an excellent video about patterns of discourse on the internet: “This Is Phil Fish”

The Duty of the Righteous Man

A personal journal entry from several months ago begins with a quotation by Primo Levi, which I encountered in an essay by Ursula LeGuin.  “It is the duty of the righteous man to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.”

I wrote several paragraphs of not-very-focused rumination about this idea when I first encountered it, and I have thought back to it many times since.  And now I find myself thinking of it once again as I read the thoughts of one of my Clarion teachers, Mary Anne Mohanraj, talking about issues of race and its treatment in SF/F on John Scalzi’s blog. (“Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up To Speed” Part 1, Part 2)  A fair amount of this discussion concerns genre fiction and the genre fiction community, but there is much here that is a reflection of our culture as a whole.  Specifically, it was through the early rounds of this discussion (which has kind of unfortunately come to be known as RaceFail ’09) that I encountered Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which helped focus for me some of the fuzzy edges of the concept of undeserved privilege and made me realize that while my thinking about privilege in terms of class was fairly developed, it was still very rudimentary on issues of race.

I’m still getting my thoughts in order on the subject of subverting undeserved privilege, and how doing so interfaces or fails to interface with rational self-interest.  It’s a sort of idealism vs. pragmatism in the face of preexisting conditions argument, and I am struggling to find my own clarity of thought about it.  But the RaceFail ’09 discussion has helped me learn to recognize kinds of privilege that were previously invisible to me, and even bereft of conclusions the improved perception is valuable.