A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be

by Ursula K. Le Guin

20 pages, Unknown Binding

About the author

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.

She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.

Reviews

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essay everyone must read and internalize . The centre of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere!

[matthew harding · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essay gets into your head and maybe even down into your blood. Maybe it's because I assigned it as a companion text to a book my class is reading, which means I spent more time and attention with/on it than something that just struck my fancy, but LeGuin's essay is something to really get lost in and maybe found by? In the essay LeGuin separates out "cold" societies from "hot" societies and even nods at "warm" societies like those mentioned in Robert Nichols book, Daily Lives in Nghsi Altai and Austin Tappan Wright's tome, Islandia. I'm not going to explain these distinctions because explanations are the low road to understanding (actually, they might just be trompe d'oeils). I will say that both of these books contain communities that illustrate kinder, gentler (and more naturally in-tune and intuitive) worlds than the "hot" capitalist society that we live in today (and we are really a mindless lot!) and maybe that's the draw; LeGuin's ability to critique while she imagines alternative ways of living keeps the reader engaged with her thinking. Her ability to use multiple lenses--like the trickster, or the Tao, or the I Ching, or history, anthropology and literary texts--to think deeply about how we got here (and where here actually is) and how we might imagine a different kind of future left me wanting more. Donna Haraway once said that the beauty of good writing (and here I mean writing that makes you think) is that it "fucks with your head." Well, if you are looking for something to upend your worldview, then look no further.
Usà puyew usu wapiw!

[Jeremiah · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is always this essay at the end of the day

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

. . . Ideally, at its loftiest and most pure, the utopia aspires to (if it has never reached) the condition of the idyll as Schiller describes it — that mode of poetry which would lead man, not back to Arcadia, but forward to Elysium, to a state of society in which man would be at peace with himself and the external world.

[Clara Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing and hot. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, circular, cyclical, peaceful, retreating, contracting and cold"

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

organized forgetting = discovery

what is a yin utopia?

missing california