Sometimes the best way to say something is the way someone more literary than you has said it.  In that vein, here are some relationship quotes of note:

“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”
-Oprah Winfrey

“Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.” -Anthony Robbins

“Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.” -Flavia Weedn

“The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time. And that’s why when one has become a forgiving person, and has managed to let go of the past, what they’ve really done is they’ve shifted their relationship with time.” – Caroline Myss

“Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” – Mark Twain

“Well, it seems to me that the best relationships – the ones that last – are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is… suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with” ~ Gillian Anderson

“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” – Aristotle

“The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller

“Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl – no superior alternative has yet been found.” – Winston Churchill

“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.” – Kahlin Gibran

“To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.” – Eric Fromm

“Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“You can’t stop loving or wanting to love because when its right, it’s the best thing in the world. When you’re in a relationship and it’s good, even if nothing else in your life is right, you feel like your whole world is complete.” ~ Keith Sweat

“Our greatest joy-and our greatest pain comes in our relationships with others.” ~ Stephen R. Covey

“Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made – like bread, remade all the time, made new.” – Ursula LeGuin

“Once the trust goes out of a relationship, it’s really no fun lying to ‘em anymore.” -Norm from Cheers

————————————————————————–

Want to know a proven way to make your relationships work? Visit http://bit.ly/5srkQJ

Ursula LeGuin is best known for her fantasy and science fiction books, from the Earthsea cycle to “The Left Hand of Darkness.”  So when I first picked up “Lavinia,” I thought it would fall into one of her niches.  Turns out I was wrong – and, in the end, pleasantly surprised.

Publisher: Harcourt (original); Mariner Books (re-issue)

Publication Date: 2008 (Harcourt); 2009 (Mariner)

Genre: Historical/mythological fiction

My Rating: 4/5

“Lavinia” is based on Vergil’s epic poem The Aeneid, in which Aeneas and his Trojan army fights to claim the king’s daughter, Lavinia, in order to fulfill a prophecy.  Lavinia does not speak a word in The Aeneid.  This must have prompted a question in Ursula LeGuin’s mind:  What is Lavinia’s story?  And so she gave Lavinia a voice with this story.

Lavinia is the daughter of King Latinus and the princess of Latium, or ancient Italy.  She grows up knowing only peace, freedom, and her mother’s violent, bitter disappointment in losing her sons.  When Lavinia turns seventeen, her first suitors come calling.  Lavinia’s mother wishes her to marry handsome King Turnus of her homeland.  Lavinia, however, is intimidated by the young king and wants justification for her decision not to marry him.  So with her father’s permission, she travels to the sacred groves of Albunea and learns her fate from an oracle (presumably Vergil himself): She must marry a foreigner, which will cause a bloody war, and her husband will not live long.

Soon after this, a fleet of Trojan ships carrying Aeneas sails up the Tiber.  Lavinia is the first to spot them – and at that moment, she chooses to take her destiny into her own hands.  What follows in the wake of her choice is a amalgam of joy and sorrow, love and pain. All the while, readers sense that Lavinia has fully accepted the oracle’s prophecy and has no regrets.

A good writer will always do their research before writing historical fiction.  LeGuin undoubtedly did her homework for “Lavinia,” and it shows.  Readers are immersed in a time before Rome was built, when people wore togas, omens and prophecies were unconditionally abided by, and salt was collected from salt beds at the mouths of rivers.  There are no glaring historical inaccuracies, nothing that immediately makes you want to scratch your head.  The narration fits the time period – it’s simple and to the point, and all of the characters speak in this manner.

As for Lavinia the character, LeGuin portrays her as strong, sensible, and wise beyond her years.  Once her suitors come to her door, she matures very quickly and wishes to speak for herself rather than have others force her to do their bidding.  Lavinia is also pious [this word appears several times in the novel].  She worships her gods (which are eventually adopted as the Roman gods) and adheres to the oracle’s prophecy without question.  While her speech is as understated as LeGuin’s writing style, her monologues to the reader can be quite poetic.  (Which makes sense, since LeGuin also wrote poetry.)  For instance, this is what Lavinia tells the reader after her

I have found my way so far, even though the poet did not tell me the way.  I guessed it right, without mistake, from things he said, the clues he gave me.  I came to the center of the maze following him.  Now I must find my way back out alone.  It will be longer and slower in the living, but not so long, I think, to tell.

I have no complains about this book.  However, my concentration broke a little when I read the war scenes.  Personally I have difficulty reading fighting scenes when they are written in a mechanical way, without much action.  Don’t get me wrong.  LeGuin must have written the war scenes this way so she could quickly transition back to telling Lavinia’s story.  Still, those parts bored me a little, and luckily there are only a few.

All in all, I have to commend LeGuin on another job well done here.  “Lavinia” is a mezmerizing foray into historical fiction from an author who is mythmaker in her own right.  It balances ancient tradition and simplicity with spiritual and romantic elegance without leaning too far in either direction.  I finished this book with the same awe and admiration that I felt after reading her fantasy books.  Fans of LeGuin who may have hesitated to read “Lavinia” should reconsider.  This is a work of passion, and fully deserving of a spot on the shelf next to “A Wizard of Earthsea” and “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

For more information on “Lavinia” and Ursula LeGuin, here are a couple links:

Lavinia on Ursula LeGuin’s website

Ursula LeGuin’s Website

Relationship Quotes: “for Your Enjoyment!”

from [THE GREENLIGHT MINDSET ] Relationship Blog

Sometimes the best way to say something is the way someone more literary than you has said it. In that vein, here are some relationship quotes of note:

“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”
-Oprah Winfrey

“Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.” -Anthony Robbins

“Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.” -Flavia Weedn

“The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time. And that’s why when one has become a forgiving person, and has managed to let go of the past, what they’ve really done is they’ve shifted their relationship with time.” – Caroline Myss

“Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” – Mark Twain

“Well, it seems to me that the best relationships – the ones that last – are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is… suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with” ~ Gillian Anderson

“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” – Aristotle

“The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller

“Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl – no superior alternative has yet been found.” – Winston Churchill

“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.” – Kahlin Gibran

“To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.” – Eric Fromm

“Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“You can’t stop loving or wanting to love because when its right, it’s the best thing in the world. When you’re in a relationship and it’s good, even if nothing else in your life is right, you feel like your whole world is complete.” ~ Keith Sweat

“Our greatest joy-and our greatest pain comes in our relationships with others.” ~ Stephen R. Covey

“Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made – like bread, remade all the time, made new.” – Ursula LeGuin

“Once the trust goes out of a relationship, it’s really no fun lying to ‘em anymore.” -Norm from Cheers

There’s a broad collection of relationship quotes for you.

Click Here-”Regain your LOVER”

The Magic Of Making Up! Click Here!

CA Conrad | The Book of Frank | Chax

Ambar Past with Xalik Guzmán Bakbalom and Xpetra Ernandez | Incantations: Songs, spells and images by Mayan women | Cinco Puntas Press

Ursula LeGuin | A Wizard of Earthsea | Banta | 1981

Peter Trachtenberg | Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning | Little Brown | 2008

Reb Anderson | Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains: Dharma Talks on Zen Meditation | Rodmell | 2005

Carol Samosek | Mediated | na | na

Jennifer Moxley | The Middle Room | subpress | 2007

Can Xue | Old Floating Cloud & Yellow Mud Street: Two Novellas | Northwestern | 1992

Slavoj Zizek | Looking Awry | MIT P | 1992

Franz Kafka | Amerika

Steve Carey | Selected Poems of Steve Carey | Subpress | 2009

Gary Snyder | Mountains and Rivers without End | Counterpoint | 1997

More Eileen Myles here.

“The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao”.

There’s a thing. Many of the world’s readers, on opening the Tao Te Ching and reading the first line, probably sigh deeply; close the book, looking once more at the back cover; then put it straight back on the shelf and meander towards the Terry Pratchett section of the bookshop. It would appear that shifting units may not have been Lao Tse’s primary consideration. Mind you, considering that legend tells us he was pressed into writing his thoughts down as he was fleeing the oppressively claustrophobic nature of civilisation, that might not come as much of a surprise.

At this point, one is tempted to draw a direct link between Lao’s flight from civilisation and the TEFL teacher’s flight from…whatever…but let us leave the dodgy links for another day and thus refrain from adding to the already negative image that the world of EFL has allowed itself to be lumbered with.

OK, well, Muhammed Ali has written the Tao of Boxing, Bruce Lee’s The Tao of Jeet Kune Do is also an established classic, there probably exists a Tao of Business Management and there are undoubtedly heaving bookshelves in some warehouse or the other where Book Liberationists could  save the Taos of Soccer, Tea, Guns, Divorce, Banjos, Tetris and of course Sex from the pungent baths of bleach at the pulping house. “So, what does the world need?” thought I, “The bloody Tao of Teaching EFL.” The answer came to me as I stared glumly at the most recent lottery ticket that lay in front of me, not even one number circled.  Now, there is already a Tao of Teaching, but I couldn’t find a Tao of TeAching – surely Lao Tse was really just the straight guy in a double act, feeding his partner a line? Anyway, thank you Lao. I owe you one.

The project that I have set out before me is to try and interpret the lines of the Tao Te Ching in a way that might be familiar to the befuddled EFL teacher. In so doing I realise that I am exposing myself to ridicule from the hardheads who know all there is to know about teaching and are exceptionally dismissive of the rest of us, but as the Tao Te Ching reminds us, there’s no good that comes without bad. It’s a strange silver lining that has no cloud, so to speak.

For those of you who have no understanding of what the Tao Te Ching is, a brief overview:

It is often described as esoteric (which might explain why some people eagerly –and perhaps furtively-  flick through it and then put it back on the shelf, somewhat disillusioned). It is said to be over 2500 years old, although most copies available through Amazon, Waterstones etc are much younger. It was written, we think, by a man called Lao Tse, although there is also the argument that Lao Tse was actually an amalgam of several people.  Lao’s name is often translated as “Old Master” or “Old Sage” or even “Old Boy” and, somewhat ironically, his masterpiece has become an object of  much academic study  (ironic if you consider the line from one translation, “Give up learning and put an end to all your troubles”).

Basically, the Tao Te Ching (often translated as “The Way and Its Virtue” but also “The Way and the Power of the Way”) is a book of teachings, which are expressed somewhat poetically and leave themselves open to all sorts of interpretations. Hence the Tao of Dog-loving may find itself sat alongside the Tao of Animal Torture. Is this surprising? No, because the Tao speaks to us of universal truths; the rules and laws that shape the universe. These things apply to everyone, no matter how weird the feather that tickles your particular fancy. Why then is there no Tao of TEFL?

There is now.

In helping me write this blog, I have used two translations of the Tao Te Ching: firstly, the version by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. Not only is this a beautiful book to look at, but it is also the first version of the Tao Te Ching that I ever read. Secondly, the Ursula K. Le Guin version, primarily because she is a fellow anarchist and I quite like that. In addition, her book is beautifully presented and I quite like that too.

I propose to look at each section of the Tao Te Ching and attempt to meld them onto the world of EFL. In theory, it should not be a difficult task because these principles underlie the workings of life itself. As long as it’s not harder to read than to write…

Just finished Changing Planes, a recent collection of short stories by Ursula Le Guin.  The narrator tells us of her travels to 15 other planes, part travelogue, part anthropological essay, and part satire.  LeGuin often writes nontraditional stories, and this entire collection seems to defy standard definitions of a story, all of the stories lacking even a protagonist.  The stories typically start with a sweeping history of a world and then climax by zooming in on some small part of it, a specific person or group which is perhaps not what you would expect, or some cranny of the world that’s especially unique or astonishing.  Sometimes these closing revelations have surprising emotional power, especially considering how non-story-like they are. The best example is probably the “Flyers of Gy,” which was originally published in Scifiction and is still available in the online archives. Like Le Guin’s classic “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” it’s a great example of a story that breaks the rules and is still compelling and powerful.

As you can imagine, the stories often read more like world-building notes than they do like stories, but even so Le Guin has such skill that her world-building notes are more intriguing and entertaining than many an action-packed story. I’d recommend this collection if you’re already a fan of Le Guin and just want to soak in more of her fabulousness.  If you’re new to her, it’s not her best work and probably not the best place to start.  Her classic novel The Left Hand of Darkness or story collections like The Birthday of the World would be better introductions.

On a more personal note, at the start of the week I bent over to clean up a broken glass, and a pain shot through my back … a pinched nerve.  As a result, had to work from home most of the week, and typically routine activities such as putting on shoes and socks have been quite an adventure.  Physical therapy is helping, though, and, on the plus side, I’ve been getting a lot of reading done…

I’m following Diana’s lead and using this as an excuse to tell you about books I adore.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White

My Dad read this to me as a bedtime story when I was eight or nine. Having my father read me things was like getting an annotated version – he was able to tell me what the Questing Beast, and Robin Hood, and the Quest for the Grail, and all the other side-stories White integrated into his Arthurian legend were. And why White had done it. Then I re-read it when I was old enough to understand things like politics, and angst, and incest, and realized what a heavy, brilliant book it really is. White’s dry, British sense of humour helps, as well.

The Riddle-Master by Patricia McKillip

Where to start? This woman’s prose is beautiful, her stories have the flavour of grand myths, her characters are real, flawed people, and this trilogy-in-one-book is a grand coming of age story where age is full of strange and incredible powers and responsibilities, and where growing up builds and destroys your life over and over again. Perfect to read as an adolescent, and poignant to read now.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

I had no idea what I was getting into with this book, but it turned into a novel that my friend and I would jointly read hidden under our desk in class. Pullman made the world very real, very sinister, very big and very exciting. As well, I was just the right age to grow up with the protagonists of the trilogy as the books came out, and the big ending blew my mind.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

These rabbits did not fuck around. Do not mess with Hazel. This is an epic, epic novel.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I have never, and I mean never (and I’m a Terry Pratchett fan) laughed so hard at a book. Everything in this novel is brilliant, the narration, the book within a book within a book, the characters, the chopped-out sections, the red herrings, and to top it all of you get an ambiguous ending that reminds you how much you care for these one-line-quipping oafs you’ve spent the whole novel on a grand romp with. I promise, it is even better than the movie (which, by the by, was scripted by Mr. Goldman, and so the dialogue is often verbatim from the novel).

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

I read this in one intense weekend, and have never felt so drained. This novel is a heavily objective investigation of the ultimate tragedy of human development, and the parallel self-destruction we wreak with religion and technology, and the beautiful people who get crushed in between the two every day, right up to the end. It is dry, but that is what makes it so, so, so sad.

Shogun by James Clavell

I will forever blame my Dad for this. I would never have admitted to myself that pulp fiction was fun and worth reading until I whipped through this enormous book in the course of a summer. I could not put it down! Gore! Samurai! Monks! Pirates! Sailors! Ninjas! Geishas! Sex! Torture! And the most incredible mind games! The amount of power-struggling that goes on behind every line of dialogue in this novel is, in itself, a work of art. If you like fun, or things that are badass, or exciting, or dramatic, you’ll like this. That’s just how it is.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

This book represents a turning point for me. When I read it when I was 14, I adored Jane, I adored Mr Rochester, and all I wanted was an epic romance. I recently re-read it, out of curiosity, and found myself hyper-aware of how passive-aggressive and manipulative and self-destructive they both are, and had trouble enjoying it at all. So, yeah, I guess it stuck with me.

Life After God by Douglas Coupland

This had a similar effect on me as Canticle, but with a quieter, smaller, more banal sense of internal apocalypse. A series of short stories and anecdotes, it makes you worry about Coupland, and then, as you get drawn in and admit to all these same feelings in your own mind, about yourself.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

I have never been disappointed by LeGuin’s writing, but this book stands out as an adult appreciation of place, society, culture, gender, power and language, which is why I picked it over any of the Earthsea novels, which do the same thing but sometimes more didactically, what with the younger audience. If anything, I will never think of glaciers the same way.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

I haven’t liked much else Card has done, but this book blew my mind as a kid. The barracks, the gravity-free games, the general feel of it all, still defines science fiction for me. What is technology for, if not stealing our youth and corrupting it?

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

This book introduced me to a kind of fantasy-mythology-based horror I continue to pursue. I don’t remember a whole lot of the plot, but the settings were amazing, and terrifying. In some terrible chase scene the two children had to follow dwarves through flooded mineshafts so narrow they had to squirm along on their stomachs, and eventually on their backs, to be able to keep their mouths above the water level. The enemies were dark, floating, cloaked beings that I was instantly reminded of when I saw the Dementors on screen, and there was a terrifying wolf. Terrifying wolves are key to childhood terror, I think. The wolf-nothing in The Neverending Story also haunted my dreams for years. Anyways, this may or may not be a good book, but damn, did it ever creep me out.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

This made me cry. It is quirky and beautiful and delicate and reserved and quiet and poignant and brief. It contains two stories about loss and departure and relationships and grief, and they do what they do amazingly well. That is, they made me cry.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

This is where that fantasy horror I loved as a child overlapped with serial-killing and zombies and all of the delightful urban legends that haunted me as a teenager. Mingled with the nerdy joy of picking out who’s which mythological figure, I really enjoyed reading this.

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Other people love The Lord of the Rings, but it was too long for my brain to categorize it as a single story. The Hobbit, however, I can remember the plot of probably to the smallest detail from beginning to end, no problem, and the plot was awesome. A journey on horseback and on foot for months through fields, mountains, forests, plains, to a shipping town to battle a dragon? The finest fodder for my imagination at any age.

Ursula LeGuin, a well regarded sci-fi and fantasy author, is releasing a new book in September.  Barnes & Noble sent me an e-mail about the book, because I’ve bought her books before.  But the new LeGuin book isn’t what I was expecting.  It’s called Cat Dreams, and it appears to be a 32-page children’s book about — what else? — sleeping cats.

It’s commendable that Ms. LeGuin is extending her personal brand at the age of 79.  Perhaps the cat thing should’ve been predictable, but it’s a brand extension I didn’t see coming.

Here are some other surprising brand extensions I’ve noticed lately.

Villeroy & Boch, the company we know in the U.S. for fancy china and tableware, also makes toilets under the same brand name.  And urinals.  You see them primarily in Europe — in fact, in almost every rest stop between Paris and Bordeaux.  To clear up any confusion, V&B Omnia is a line of bathroom ceramics.  V&B Olbia is a pretty, white china pattern.

Cheetos Balm is a lip balm that tastes and smells like its extruded-cornmeal cousin.  I think the value proposition is it lets you savor the scent of fake, orange cheese without staining yourself with fake, orange cheese.  Or maybe it’s just to show your friends how “dangerously cheesy” you are.

Obama Fingers are a fried chicken snack that comes with a tub of curry dip.  A German fast food company introduced it in March.  A representative for the company said in a Guardian article that the product “was supposed to be a homage to the American lifestyle and the new U.S. president.”  Nice.

Burger King has stretched its brand in all sorts of crazy directions lately.  The brand extension most widely panned is BK’s line of T-shirts and sleepwear.  If you can get past the off-putting picture of the king, the BK logo does serve a practical purpose.  It’s like a label of origin — not too different from a “Made in China” sticker.  When people see your physique, they’ll know just where you got it.

Matt at Enter the Octopus is spreading the word about an interview conducted by author Jeff VanderMeer.  That lucky dog got to talk with 5 of scifi and fantasy’s top authors – Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock – in a special interview to promote the Shared Worlds summer camp for teen writers, artists, and future game developers.  VanderMeer asked the other authors to talk about the most fantastic real-life city they know, the one that they based some of their fictional cities on.  Check out their answers here.  You get to hear from some awesome writers and help a good cause at the same time.

For years I have watched the cult of Ursula LeGuin spread the word of her greatness as both the epitome of a fantasy writer and a woman writing fantasy. I have heard stories of professors praising LeGuin, while derisively announcing that her work isn’t fantasy or sci-fi because it’s too good. Now that I have finally taken the time to read a book by LeGuin I am comfortable saying that the hype lived up to the experience. LeGuin easily outshines most of her male counterparts with gorgeous prose, imaginative world-building, and an entertaining and meaningful story.

After saving his village from the invading Karg with a mist spell, many believe Ged (also known as Sparrowhawk) has the potential to be the greatest wizard in all of Earthsea. One night, however, in the school for mages in his arrogance he tampers with forbidden magic to raise the dead, which brings back a horrible creature with it, a Shadow. When he leaves the school of mages the Shadow awaits for him, chasing him across the thousands of islands of Earthsea, and hoping to take over his body. Along the way Sparrowhawk will tame a dragon, face an ancient demonic jewel, and visit uncharted parts of the world in his quest to vanquish the Shadow that he gave birth.

Fantasy excels at dealing with abstract themes. In this story we have a coming-of-age tale where Ged must overcome his pride. Ged loves knowledge, but acquiring knowledge too quickly betrays him. His short-lived rivalry with Japser, another wizard at the mage school, proves to be his undoing. The Shadow literally symbolizes his pride, the darker side of power. Only when Ged can come to terms with his own pride, his own failings, his own darker half produced by his great power, can he become a whole person. The purest characters in the novel are the ones who have mastered their pride such as Ged’s original master Ogion (who barely talks to humans anymore, but instead spends most of his time listening to and communing with nature) and his friend, Vetch. Many other examples exist of prideful characters who want to rule the world with their power and look down on others.

The magic system is extremely creative, centering around names. The characters and all the natural objects in the world have “given names” (Sparrowhawk) and their true names, Ged. To have power over an object or natural phenomenon one must uncover its true name. The wizards also can create illusions.

A Wizard of Earthsea is also celebrated for being one of the first fantasies to feature a black main character. This is not your grandfather’s fantasy with its faux medieval European setting. The thousands of islands that make up Earthsea have a Carribean feel to them; nevertheless, they stand on their own not as a bad carbon copy of the real world location, but as a believable fantastical realm with its own rules and logic.

Since Ellie validated my mistaken reading of GIFTS over in that post’s comments thread, I thought I would elaborate. ‘Cause what interested me, when I was reading GIFTS, was how much I thought the foreshadowing worked, which made it doubly jarring that it was… you know, not really foreshadowing at all.

I’ve complained before about books that make you wait while they catch up to where anyone who’s ever heard a story before can see they’re going, and on my reading, LeGuin’s book was doing exactly that; I had very specific opinion about what was going to occur that I thought we’d basically been told, and yet I still felt suspense.

Some of this is because, given my misreading, a lot of lines in the book read as ironic to me that, in retrospect, actually weren’t. And actually, those lines did turn out to be important, but in a much more straightforward way than I imagined: while I assumed that the protagonist was going to do a specific thing, and that dialogue asserting he never would was thus meant as ironic foreshadowing, actually those assurances wound up having a different significance at the book’s end. So, it wasn’t necessarily that LeGuin was less careful than I thought she was being; I just misunderstood how.

But now that I know it wasn’t foreshadowing, I’m curious about some of the choices LeGuin makes early on. After the line that set me off on the wrong track, she turns to a few chapters of backstory. Some of this is establishing the kind of mythic mood of the book, but still, I remember thinking, “If she hadn’t just set up this anticipation, this would be kind of a boring choice.” I attributed my continued interest to wanting to see how she got to where I thought she was going.

It’s a bit like this book about plotting that I remember reading in high school; it urged you, at all costs, to avoid writing lengthy descriptions of sunsets… and then gave a counterexample: a classic Western (sorry, I can’t remember which one) in which our hero is supposed to be murdered at sundown. Suddenly all the details of the fingers of orange curling across the sky are a lot more interesting.

So I read GIFTS in that vein, but I’m interested that it worked for me. The whole structure of the first half of the book is basically a series of things I usually hate — a prologue (it’s not called that, but it functions as one), the backstory — worse, it’s backstory about the character’s parents! So in the book’s first fifty pages, you don’t even get a clear sense of what the protagonist is like. And yet. I kept reading. I liked it. I am befuddled.

This is the sort of anthropological science fiction Le Guin is famous for and this is a particularly good example. Our unknown narrator sits outside the story reporting the evidence to us in a voice that is both scholarly and companionable:

I am not comfortable with the phrase “specific obsession,” but “cultural instinct” is worse.

That “obsession” is to build the Building, a gigantic ever-growing stone structure that is thousands of years old. There are no characters, just the warm, academic voice of the narrator half-explaining, half-tasting the culture. Excellent stuff.

Quality: ****
Shiftiness: ***

Again Sarrantonio uses the introduction as an opportunity to inform us that all he is really interested in is good storytelling and this is a virtue above all others for writers. He tells us nothing of the story itself. I am begining to think I should just skip these.

While I have been known to finish a book and think: “Wow! I wish I could write like that.” I don’t think that there has been one author in particular who inspired me to write. There are authors who I admire greatly for their skill in story-telling (Ursula LeGuin), their gift for character development (Orson Scott Card), the sheer beauty of their prose (Kazuo Ishiguro), or for the ability to craft a genuinely fun read (too many to name), but none of them made me want to become a story-teller as well.

The one person who would receive any credit for my love of writing is not an author at all. In fact, she never once actively encouraged me to write nor did she have any idea that I could. Even more ironic, she has never really understood my fascination with books. While she has been known to read on occasion, she is not what I would call an avid reader by any stretch of the imagination. That person would be my mother.

So how could she be my inspiration to write?

She is incredibly creative. She envisions something and somehow, almost magically, she causes it to happen. On the very rare occasion when life doesn’t go the way she planned, she picks up the pieces and fashions them into something that will work as well if not better. This woman is the epitome of turning lemons into lemonade. Although, I would go one further and say that she takes those lemons and turns them into a sorbet.

When I was a child, we went through one of those rare times when life was not working out the way she had envisioned. Without going into the details, rather than slip into a state of depression or bitterness, she wrapped herself in dreams. She wove stories about how our life was going to get better and surprisingly things did come to pass much as she had described.

While I have yet to perfect her gift for bringing a dream into reality, I did learn how to weave a story. I also learned how to dream and to use my imagination as an escape hatch or form of stress relief when the going gets rough. This gift has taken the form of journaling through good times and bad, being able to enthrall my own children with bedtime stories, and even work out various what-if scenarios for problem solving at work.

You never know what will inspire someone.

Mairead Walpole is the pen name for a somewhat introverted project manager who has 20+ years of business and technical writing under her belt. In her spare time, Mairead reviews books for Crystal Reviews (www.crystalreviews.com) and writes paranormal romance. Her first novel, “A Love Out of Time” is available through Second Wind Publishing (www.secondwindpublishing.com) or Amazon.com.

Lois Lowry paints a deceptively harmonious picture of the future in The Giver.

Imagine a world in which hunger does not exist, war has been abolished, diseases like cancer and AIDS have been cured and poverty is no more.

Sound perfect?

Readers of Lois Lowry’s Newberry Award-winning book, The Giver, may not be convinced after finishing this short but thought provoking work.  While written for a middle school audience, the book addresses adult themes of memory, the tradeoffs of the social contract, truth and indviduals’ desire for authentic feeling and expression.

Twelve-year-old Jonas is the book’s protagonist. 

The book opens toward the end of his and his friends’ designated period of childhood in a place called Elsewhere  Each child is assigned a role that the community’s elders have deemed will suit him or her well and that will also benefit the futuristic society in which they live.

Jonas is chosen to be the receiver of all the community’s memories.  He receives memories from The Giver, who then is unable to retain the memory of the experience he has transferred to Jonas.  Through his sessions with the Giver, Jonas comes to understand experiences like snow and war.   His expanded palate of experiences helps Jonas realize the unfortunate and even unwitting compromises that community members have made: in exchange for their apparent peace and tranquility, they have surrendered the ability to deeper emotions of love and to make independent choices.

Through his position as the receiver, Jonas also can see whatever he wants in the community.  His observation of his father’s euthanizing a baby makes him understand both that he does not really know his parents and, more profoundly, that the society is predicated on lies of purported equality and decent treatment for all.

The realization galvanizes the young man when he realizes that a young baby named Gabe who is placed in his family’s custody may be in jeopardy.  He decides to flee, with the baby in tow. 

The ending is ambiguous.

After consuming all the food they he brought for Gabe and struggling with despair, Jonas gains strength from the memory of sunshine and keeps on going.  He and the baby are on a sled in snow, which was his first memory, and see a town and houses from which music is playing at the bottom of a hill.  They go down toward the houses on the sled.

Facing History and Ourselves, the organization for which my wife works, has published a study guide that takes teacher and students through the book.  One of the guide’s most compelling elements is the Newberry Address Lowry gave.  In it, she talks about the memories that informed The Giver and gives multiple examples of readers’ interpretations of the ending. 

The Giver is in the tradition of dystopian literature like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Kurt Vonnegut’s short story ‘Harrison Bergeron‘ and Ursula LeGuin’s short myth, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.’ 

In each instance, apparent peace is bought at the expense of individual freedom.  Each society is based on some level of suffering and on official powers, despite the community’s pledges of equality.  And each gives the reader pause to think about where we and people in other societies are relative to these questions.

I read about this on Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s “Writer’s Table” – authors pick out books that are supposed to have “shaped their writing”, and they write little reviews in a few words.  I can’t remember why I was looking at Nick Hornby’s Waterstone’s Writer’s Table – although Nick Hornby is absolutely inextricably linked in my mind to the month I spent in London in 2005.  There was a heat stroke in the second week of July, and the dorm where we were staying didn’t have air conditioning of course, and my room was on the third (American fourth) floor, so it was absolutely boiling.  I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on food in air-conditioned restaurants.  Instead of that I wandered around London finding bookstores with squashy armchairs and air conditioning, and I read A Long Way Down and About a Boy and How to be Good.  It was good times apart from how guilty I felt for sitting in Waterstone’s bookshops (and Borders and Blackwell’s and Foyle’s) all over London reading books I had no intention of buying.

In any case, this book looked very appealing.  I don’t know if this is true of everyone, but one of the reasons I carry on loving reading so much is that I love that moment when you are reading a book and you come across a sentence and you think, This person knows me – this person is me.  Admittedly I worry more than most people about being crazy, so maybe I find it disproportionately reassuring to read my own thoughts in somebody else’s book.  The world is a complicated and bewildering place, and it’s hard to decide whether you’re behaving in a way that’s acceptable and normal.  It’s so legitimizing to read that someone else is doing the same thing, because then, if you’re not doing things right, at least you’re not doing them uniquely wrong.

(Oscar Wilde said, Life reflects art.  Not the other way around.)

The Child that Books Built is a memoir about books and reading, and how they shape a child’s life.  The author talks about the books he read as a kid, how he used them as an escape from finding a way to deal with his younger sister’s very serious illness.  He explores all this in the contexts of child development, cognitive psychology, and all that lot, which is really interesting too.  He talks about how he used to read books in bookstores and feel that he had stolen from the bookstores because the book would be in his head when he left; and he also says he can sometimes spend thirty minutes picking a book to read while he cleans his teeth, which is so exactly me too.  (Hooray.)

I would have liked him to talk more about more books I read as a kid, though that’s not of course his problem.  But when he was talking at length about books I read as a kid, it was fascinating.  He talked about the Narnia books and how captivating he found them, and how sensory C.S. Lewis made his world, even though Narnia wasn’t very cohesive (with the witch and the shades of the Arabian Nights and Father Christmas and slavery).  I’d never really thought about it but the descriptions of food in his books were always gorgeous – whenever I drink water that’s really good, clear, nice water (i.e., whenever I drink tap water at home, God bless my home and its clean water), I am always, always thinking about the sea water they drink at the end of Dawn Treader.  Remember that water?

Then it was also interesting when he talked about American literature.  He said he had a hard time placing America, in time as well as space, so that it was never exactly clear to him when the American books were set, how they lined up with English history.  (Oh, he also said that his town celebrated their octocentenary.  I had to go back and read that twice to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.  Octocentenary.  There is nothing in America that is celebrating its octocentenary.)  I was so interested to read about the Little House books from the perspective of a British dude.  He said a thing about how in America, individual freedom is an end in itself, not leading to something else the way (he says) it tends to be in Britain – which I’d never thought of before.  And because I haven’t read those books as an adult, I haven’t really thought about the extent to which the family puts a tremendously high premium on freedom.

Anyway, there was a load of stuff about Ursula LeGuin that sailed right over my head because I never read any of her books until recently and I hated The Wizard of Earthsea; and then some things about science fiction which again were no good to me at all – just have not read very much science fiction.  And I wish he had said more about Diana Wynne Jones.  Everyone should say more about Diana Wynne Jones; I love Diana Wynne Jones.

So thanks, Nick Hornby and Waterstone’s!  I got the book out of the library yesterday, and returned it today, and now I’m pretending it never happened, because really, it’s just getting ridiculous, I must absolutely not get any more books from the library, because I haven’t finished the ones I’ve got, and I want to start reading the books I bought at the book bazaar.  This weekend I’m going to be a reading fiend: I’m going to finish my Murrow biography and read that book about dancing and that book about Wales, at least, and if I have time I shall also read Beyond Black and/or that Barbara Hambly book whose title I can’t remember.

This was the day we packed out. There was a 14-hour drive back to Seattle that needed to start early, so we debated whether or not to go to the panels that morning. Eventually we decided we should, as Jessie said that it was the panel that she most wanted to go to, and I was eager to stay as long as possible.

How Many Roads? (Reading multiple-viewpoint stories): A great panel, led by L. Kimmel Duchamp, with LeGuin, Vylar Kaftan, and others on the panel. Very informative, with lots of good points about both reading and writing multiple viewpoint stories. Best line of the con was Kaftan, discussing the difficulty of describing a first-person viewpoint character: “Nobody looks at themselves in the mirror and thinks about what they look like. But if you do, come up and talk to me afterwards, because I want to put you into a story.”

Driving home: Did I mention that I got a ticket on the way down to CA for going 90 mph in a 65 mph zone? Anyway, as we’re driving home, we pull into a gas station and at the pump next to us is the same cop that pulled me over. He was in his civilian clothes filling up his truck… just where we happened to pull in. He refrained from getting us another ticket, but he did wink at me as I was coming out of the bathroom, which creeped me out.

We got in at about 2am, and promptly collapsed into bed. Everyone agreed that it was a fantastic weekend, though.

(I’ve been incredibly busy for the last several days, so I haven’t had time to blog anything. So this Potlatch follow-up post is late. Sorry!)

Potlatch day two is the main day of programming, and I spent most of the day going to panels and listening to interesting people speak. The main attraction, of course, was Ursula K. LeGuin, who spoke on many panels, and was spoken of on many more. I managed to wrangle a book-signing and a photograph out of her!

The programming for the day can be found on this page. Here’s some brief thoughts on each panel:

Graphic Novels: not something that I’m all that interested in myself, but I was surprised and delighted to see LeGuin leading it. I learned lots about the history and current trends in graphic novels and comics, and saw panels from some very nice webcomics.

The Scalzi Rule: So our little panel attracted the attention of the great John Scalzi himself! I didn’t stay for the whole thing, as I had to go out for lunch, but this was an interesting panel of con etiquette, and what to do about That Guy. You know, the one who wants to soapbox and won’t shut up. I suggested that the Scalzi Rule was appropriate, even necessary for large groups, which garnered lots of disagreement.

Lunch: Delicious sushi with a childhood friend who lives in the Bay Area!

Good Reads: Got only the tail end, because of aforementioned lunch.

Ursula LeGuin’s reading from Always Coming Home: Exceptional. The readings were fine, and the questions were surprisingly insightful and interesting. The last question, about hope, was so inspiring and appropriate to end the reading that I could hardly believe that it wasn’t planned.

Poetry Reading: Entitled Invocation Against Entropy: A Chiastic Farrago of Poetry from John M. Ford and Ursula K. LeGuin. This was the surprise hit of the con, for me. I have little ear for poetry and low expectations from readings. But this was organized into a quasi-dramatic presentation, with gorgeous writing, good readers, and a beautiful chiastic structure.

Auction: Led by Jay Lake and… somebody whose name I really should remember but can’t right now. Entertaining, but I didn’t buy anything.

Scotch tasting: Not an official event, but a Potlatch tradition and a great time nonetheless. This was the best conversation I had the whole con, covering Gene Wolfe, cruelty and beauty, scifi bookstores, and intelligent moles.

I’ll have the brief recap of day three up this evening. Hopefully.

It took me months to finish Ricardo Reis and only a day to finish The Lathe of Heaven. I try to take turns with my books, reading one ’serious’ book and then one ‘fun’ book (ie, something from the genre called ‘literature’ and then something from any other genre out there). I’m on a bit of a sci-fi tear lately, so Lathe was my book of choice.

The Lathe of Heaven is kind of a series of ‘future histories’ by Ursula LeGuin. It is (initially) set in a version of the 1970’s where global warming has run amok, and overpopulation haunts the world. But the best  part has to be that it is all set in Portland! Portland is now a sprawling metropolis of a few million, with the really ‘big’ cities in now-wet Eastern Oregon. The central character is George Orr, a man haunted by the ability to change the world with his dreams. When he dreams certain dreams, the whole world shifts to become like that, and no one but him has a clue otherwise. Unfortunately, he winds up in the clutches of a nefarious psychologist who learns to direct these dreams.  Of course, they never quite turn out the way they’re supposed to. We’re subjected to a series of alternate-histories for the rest of the book, seeing many what-might-have-beens.

The story is a joy to read. Well-written and very interesting, I literally could not put the book down. I’ll say right here that it was a great book and fun read. But let’s get to what I found wrong with it, shall we? Really only a few minor things. LeGuin had a penchant of telling about the world, rather than showing it. That’s understandable once we start switching histories, but it wasn’t really needed for the original one.  Also, the ‘villain’ had a little too much exposition and seemed a bit of a caricature. Most disturbingly, there were aliens in this book. Why? I don’t know. There was no need for them, especially ones that knew about how this whole dream-controlling thing worked. They just popped up, and the book would have been stronger without them. Alas, that’s the curse of scifi.

It was a relief to read a book I enjoyed so much, I was starting to worry that I’d become a TV-zombie. Then I read this book, and saw all these reviews of some of my favorite authors in the New York Times, and I just had a grand weekend. Especially thinking about all these other-Portlands.

Oh, and read the book review about the Wittgensteins. With a title like “suicide squad”, you know it’s going to be good.

I’m in the lobby of the Domain Hotel in Sunnyvale, California, during the lunch break between morning and evening sessions. Yesterday, Larisa and I drove down from Seattle with our friends Jessie and Rob, who form part of my real-life writing group. Actually, Jessie and Rob did most of the driving. I got a ticket for going 90 mph in a 65-mph zone, after which they didn’t let me drive any more.

Potlatch has Books of Honor, rather than guests of honor, and the Books of Honor this year are Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin and Growing Up Weightless by John C. Maxwell. As I mentioned a few days ago, Always Coming Home is one of my favorite novels, and getting to be here to discuss the book and meet LeGuin was one of my major reasons for coming. So far, it’s been completely justified. During last night’s discussion of Always Coming Home we heard some great comments, and I raised a point that elicited response from LeGuin herself. (She wasn’t actually on the panel, by her own wishes, but she spoke from the audience.) Afterwards I was able to talk to her for a few minutes at the con suite, where I did not actually pee my pants and squeal like a fanboy. I said a few things which may even have included complete sentences! And I got a good answer to my question, and learned something I didn’t know.

Most surprising thing about LeGuin: she’s light-hearted and jocular. (And not as old as I thought she was–only turning eighty this year.)

Ursula LeGuin

You’ve heard of Dido and Aeneas (and Purcell, Virgil and all that). Well, a well-known author named Ursula LeGuin decided to pick one of the most obscure but potentially interesting characters of the whole Aeneid and give you Lavinia and Aeneas. The novel is called Lavinia, and I just finished it.

The book came to my attention through my wife. Her book club, having heard that NPR considers the book one of last year’s best, decided to read it. So my wife read it. “You would get more out of this,” she kept saying to me, since there was all this, you know, ancient and Roman stuff in it. I was intrigued.

But when she finished it she and her book club weren’t so convinced. My wife’s verdict: “Sloooow start, but she made the Aeneid accessible to me.”

So I picked it up. And this came to mind:

Always avoid cliché.

So I remember Alfred Hitchcock saying in some interview I once saw. The Hannibal Blog has of late been exploring what makes good storytelling good. But I haven’t said much about the enemies of good stories. I think cliché is the most dangerous of them.

And this is the dilemma of Lavinia: Fantastic conceit for a novel! Really. Exactly the sort of idea that I have time for; indeed not that far away conceptually from the book idea that I myself had. But what a shame about the corny bits.

Here is the genius of the conceit: Aeneas survives the sack of Troy and escapes with his father and son (but not his wife, who perishes in Troy) to wander the Mediterranean. He has a torrid affair with Dido, the wily queen of Carthage, but leaves her and she burns herself (presaging, I might add, what Scipio’s–and Aeneas’–heir will one day do to all of Carthage). Aeneas ends up in Italy, Latium, where his destiny is to found a people, later to become Rome. But it’s not easy. He has to make alliances and fight local wars first. Enter Lavinia. She becomes his second wife (after Creusa in Troy), with whom he will sire the Roman race.

Virgil only mentions her in a line or two. So does Livy. And yet she seems to be so important. A Rutulian king named Turnus had the hots for her and felt upstaged when Aeneas swooped in, and that–ie, she–is what set off the bloody wars. (Shades of Helen?) Oh, and Lavinia is implicitly the mother of the Roman race.

So LeGuin bravely sets out to make Lavinia come alive. And she succeeds in part, but only after page 100 or so. For the first 100 pages LeGuin colors in this woman about whom we know nothing by making her the eternal damsel in distress, slightly hippie, slightly dreamy, chaste but yearning, right out of a B movie. Everything about this Lavinia is a cliché.

Once Aeneas arrives on the scene and we finally have some mythological material to work with (Virgil’s), it gets good. But what gets good is, in effect, the last part of the old Aeneid.

More accessible, yes, as my wife said. In fact, she recommends the book, and so do I, by a hair.

Still, the last word that wants to roll of the tongue of the reviewer is the one that is so devilishly hard for the storyteller to avoid, the one that no storyteller wants to hear said: cliché.

Of late I’ve been rereading Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin, in preparation for Potlatch 18. It’s my second time through the novel, and I have to say that it’s as good upon reread as it was the first time–maybe better.

LeGuin is my favorite author. That’s putting it badly, though, because I don’t just enjoy reading her books: her writing embodies everything that I would want to accomplish as a writer. Ursula LeGuin is who I want to be when I grow up. And Always Coming Home is my favorite of the books of hers that I’ve read (which is most, but not all, of everything she’s ever published). It is the perfect combination of those traits that make her admirable: a piercingly beautiful description of a place that doesn’t exist, painted with such realism that one can hardly believe she didn’t actually go there; a fierce and overwhelming critique of modern civilization, not at its margins but at its core; a story of a place so unlike this world that it seems impossible to achieve, but nonetheless not a utopia or a city of angels, but a place inhabited by people with dirty feet. The first time I read the book it changed the way that I looked at the world. The second time has changed me again.

LeGuin is often polemical but not political, didactic but not condescending–but her politics and her teaching conflict with mine in many places. This makes it a hard book to read. It cuts me to the quick. It bites against things I believe deeply to be true. It speaks honestly, and forces me to be honest. I come away from reading it exhausted, spent and sweaty and in love. Rereading it was exhilarating but tiring, and leaving me with the need to process and consider what I saw. Hopefully, over the next several days I’ll be able to post a few articles discussing this book and my reactions to it. If I’m not too lazy, and if my thoughts settle into a pattern that fits into words.

Steinbeck’s Ghost
Lewis Buzbee

 Young Adult  (Ages 10-14)
Hardcover, 352 pages
Feiwel & Friends
ISBN-13: 978-0312373283
$17.95    Buy the book
 

Somehow the characters of the books that Travis devours in Steinbeck’s Ghost manage to breathe their lives and cares right into his life. As a result of the exchange, readers follow Travis as he becomes increasingly thoughtful, courageous, and mature.

It is this passionate creative relationship with books and reading that renders the magic in this book. More than a mere ghostly mystery, this book and its hero point up the alchemical communication that takes place between a work of fiction and its reader. It is a process that alters both, and which is made new with each successive encounter. In this age of greater appreciation for renewable resources, a book like Steinbeck’s Ghost reminds us that books are infinitely renewable experiences that change as we do.

In Buzbee’s book, hero Travis and his parents have recently moved to a new neighborhood. A whole new life seems to have come in the bargain, in which his formerly relaxed folks now leave early and arrive home late, and Travis is left to make a place for himself in an environment he finds at turns boring and strange.

One day Travis bikes all the way out to the John Steinbeck library (site of former happy times with his parents). There he learns from his friend Miss Babb, the librarian, that city budget cuts now threaten to close the library for good. As he leaves with a fresh stack of books, Travis enters a reverie about how a book can unfold a world, and the fun begins.

Mysterious figures appear — a young writer at a desk in a lighted upper window at night, the eerie Watchers who seem to be calling him somehow, and Gitano, as well as a host of other characters sprung from the pages of Steinbeck’s novels. All have converged, we learn, to impart a message, to tell an untold story. Gradually Travis, the reclusive writer Ernst Oster, and Travis’s newfound best friend, Hil, are all drawn into solving this irresistible mystery.

We admire Travis’s intellectual courage and his philosophic curiosity as his relationship to books and to the world repeatedly interweave, each challenging the validity and solidity of the other until Travis learns to allow the two — the world right under his nose, and the world he finds with his nose in a book — to co-exist.

As for the untold tale and the fate of the library?
Read and find out!

Lovers of books, be warned: this novel will likely draw you irresistibly to the enigmatic works of John Steinbeck (or to return trips, if you’re a veteran) as well as to the more recent yummy goodness of Ursula LeGuin, E.L. Konigsburg, and Laurence Yep.