In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books.
Read hardly anything for the week but politics, politics, politics and now I am sick of it. Sick of my laptop and building wifi that seems to have a mind of its own lately too.
I am reading:
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne- “Whether the governor of a besieged fortress should go out and parley” — Read it once...read it twice (it’s real short)...I suppose there’s a moral here somewhere but I like it better when M. talks about himself. And he doesn’t, really, in this essay...moving right along
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace-Last completed the Newton-Leibniz section discovery of the calculus and what that meant to the subject matter. Some interesting notes here on the pedagogy of studying college freshman calculus.
Diaries Volume 1: 1939-1960 by Christopher Isherwood-Finished reading the Introduction
But in one of the midday open threads I did read the link that Ursula Le Guin has stopped writing fiction.
She’ll be 87 this month and doesn’t have the stamina for long trips, nor for much writing. She’s stopped writing fiction completely—a deep personal loss, as there’s nothing she likes better than “making up stories.” It’s a public loss, too. Le Guin is one of America’s most influential living writers, and one of literature’s most subversive and generous imaginations. Since receiving her first rejection letter at the age of 11 (from Astounding Science Fiction magazine), she’s published 10 story collections, six volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, four translations, numerous essays, and 20 novels. Le Guin brought us to wizarding school (in the Earthsea series, published long before Harry Potter), to a dystopian Portland where one man’s dreams change reality (The Lathe of Heaven), to a planet where gender is unfixed and the king is pregnant (The Left Hand of Darkness), to a drought-stricken anarchist planet (The Dispossessed), to a postindustrial Napa Valley (Always Coming Home), and, most recently, to Bronze Age Italy (Lavinia). For Le Guin, “elsewhere” has always been a lens magnifying the vexations of our own time and place, including militarism, sexism, governance, and ecology.
and...she has a new book coming out!
This month, Small Beer Press will release a collection of Le Guin’s reflections on reading and writing—essays, lectures, and book reviews—called Words Are My Matter. The collection articulates Le Guin’s belief in the social and political value of storytelling, as well as her fear that corporatization has made the publishing landscape increasingly inhospitable to risk-takers, to those who insist on other ways. This is a real problem, particularly if we can’t count on fresh water from the well of Le Guin’s imagination. In a year stalked by the long shadows of authoritarianism, ecological collapse, and perpetual war, her writing feels more urgent than ever.