Potlatch, Friday night

[badgerbag]

As we drove up to the Domain hotel I saw Matt outside and was *suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that I was about to see all these people I really really like* yay!!! And then it was just like that. I said hi to some people and was hugged a lot, bought two really nice tektites from elisem, talked with iamnotandrei who was wearing the wizard hat, got my tshirt and badge and stuff, resolved to come back to dealers room with money tomorrow. Ran into E. Peel who was one of my profs in grad school and who is mega awesome expert on narrative theory and utopias. I saw so many other people I totally love!!! How did I miss talking to yellowjellybean? whump made us flip a coin for which book of honor should go first. I won the toss and then i faked doing another toss to decide if we should go first or not. Really I had already decided to go first to get it over with and so that I would not be fidgeting in pain for an hour before speaking.

It went okay, I was not at my speaking best, but did a decent job of moderating and balancing everyone's contributions. In a show of hands I estimated 2/3 of the people in the room had read the book! That felt amazing. So many people made wildly intelligent comments! I wish I'd taken notes! I made one (I think interesting) point about baudrillard, the spectacle, and neobaroque style or "difficult writing" as a way of resistance or response to being caught in the spectacle. I loved what Eileen said about the genre conventions of throwing the reader into a sea of neologisms and weird tech you're supposed to just figure out (or accept not knowing for a while until you figure out) or know from genre conventions of what things are supposed to be like with tech and the future or on the moon. She also mentioned Catalyst by Nina Kiriki Hoffman as a good book to compare... She's right! Zond-7 and Laurel talked about surveillance and Doctorow's book Little Brother. iamnotandrei talked about gaming and rpgs and how well they were represented. their importance in the book to the characters' personal development as well as the point I was thinking of about resistance. Zond-7 made a fabulous point about how stories often construct surveillance or the capacity to do it as being bad because of a supervillain spider at the center of the web watching everything for malicious purposes (and how this is a bad strategy for persuading people that privacy is important ) -- Ford avoided doing that and kept it complex. Then we brought up the elephant in the room aka Heinlein. I was happy that our whole panel wasn't about that. I wish I could remember everything everyone said - I do particularly remember the woman from the audience who said the moment where (Cissy Okuda? Ruby Rincon?) reacted with horror and anger in the park at the Slammer kids playing with water, that was the only moment in the book where she felt like she could identify with one of the characters.

The panel on Always Coming Home, I took notes that were nearly a verbatim transcript. Here they are, a bit raw.

ACH panel

David Bratman
Ellen Peel
Molly Gloss
Amy Thomson

David: introductions.

Ellen reference to Prospero, Tristam Shandy, the feeling of embarrassment that she was expecting or waiting for more of Stone Telling's story and then felt guilty for it

*aud laughter*

Carrier Bag theory of fiction referenced by Molly! *knowing mmm-hmms from audience*

Amy: It's a fantasy, anthropological fantasy, the only thing to do is to read it. I love a good gossipy ethnography.

David: Norman Spinrad's review in Asimov's, " a novella surrounded by the equivalent of the Dune Encyclopedia". It's 40K words therefore it's a novel. As defined by Mike Resnick. ((WELL THEN ! LOL!!)) Also this disrespects the rest of the stories, like the stories which were award winning in their own right and some publicshed separately. Someone else said that novels are stoires that are pointed towards their own ending "the purpose of reading the book is to get to the damn ending" ACH is a mosaic, a portrait, that does contain stories. Which have story power.

David - asks panelsists, How you read it. Reading path? Read first bit, then what? should you or should you not turn to page 173.

Molly whatever you feel like doing is what you should do!

Amy: I think i've read this book at least twice, it's been a while since i've revisted it. I'm a better reader of the book now hthen when it first came out mumblety mumblety years ago. You can approach it from either side of the hinge.

David - skipped some, skipped dangerous people which is a chapter in the middle of a novel written by people in the story, has always skipped in it. Then went back and read it later. even continuous narratives can be read that way... On The Dispossesed and narrative structure. reading some books in chronological order the events take place rather than the ordering of the narrative.

Ellen - It would be neat to try many ways to read it. Do it in a group. Break the groups into smaller groups, each one does it a different way. Another group read just the poetry. Another startig with explanation in the back, ideally they'd all be people who hadn't read it before.

(Oh, we're not a teacher or anything...like a mad scientist who need innocent subjects! I hope Ellen actually does this experiment)

David: Is it a utopia?? my friend (dis?)liked it because she had severe allergies and said she would die in this society... This is relevant only if we view it as a blueprint for an ideal society , a prescriptive utopia but it is not. the Kesh are not "perfect little savages" they argue, fight , parody each other, not something that happens in most utopias. I liked visiting, I wouldn't want to live there. If I were there I'd go to (wakwaha) and spend all my time on the computer. I am visiting and learning about it from an ethnographic perspective

Amy "this is not perfect, it' by the author of The One who walked away from omelas, it's not going to be perfect" what I love about it is that it's a landscape book. I had not spent a lot of time in napa valley but I had before it became disneyland winery for adults I'm a landscape oriented person. I really enjoyed that aspect.. I would havespend all my time in Calistoga...

Molly - "There will always be a sickness in man" bit of the book. Not perfect people, we will always be human beings who argue with each othr aand mess thigns up. The demonstrate a society that is admirable but remains human, not perfectable. In many ways a consensual society which automatically means that it's messy, wil make decisions slowly and with great difficulty and will often make the wrong choices. This is only one small place on a planet. most utopias are set on a planet but this is in a valley. They're not typical. we're told in a couple of places this only applies to people who live in the valley. It's implicit that there''s many other people around the worlds.

David - the cotton people... They're not completely insular. But that's not the primary focus of their interest. It's local. I grew up in this valley here. I felt very much at home in the landscape. Theres great description of the landscape whih is meaningful to me, this place is different from that place, and that is ineherent in the people who live there. le guin one of the few sf writers, who show that a planet has more than one government.

Ellen - Being local, its one fo the charms but it's in some ways a weakness, significant to me that Stone Telling is half Kes and half oteher, her father doesn't have a house, she leaves the vaelly because she oesn't feel comfortable there. she feels a certain annoyance with the people who live there, partly adolescent thing but partly her mixed heritage. Of course she's mixed when she gets to her father's too but then she comes home - not home in a simple way either before she leaves or before she comes back. When she comes back not everyone is pleased to see her. localness is porous in not so good ways. The condors inspire some of the Kesh to take on some warrior ways and things get mixed up. That gives some of the energy to the story... people aren't just sitting around being happy all the tiem.

David - strain of militarism in the Kesh even without the influence of the Condor. Old Women Hating,
Third Child story - both about deeply unhappy people. Who can't be brought out fromt he position they're enmeshed in. Intensely interesting.

Molly - preparing for this panel, searched the web for reviews. In many reviews people said people were creating an idealistic native american society. I think they're wrong. These are people who live in houses i
with kitchens and washing machines . They're not meant to be Native Americans. But the dancing, the houses, etc is where the reviewers are getting this notion. Religion is described as a pagan sort of religion. So they think it sort of resembles native american stuff. you could say the same thing about native american stuff .... (???)

Amy - The problem with reviewing books like this is that reviewers are in a hurry . like lays potato chips you can't really eat this book in a hurry.

David - It only resembles native american stuff in the way that Gandalf resembles Merlin. Not a copy! There was one specific comparison in the book about people living lightly on the land as the native americans did. Maybe that's where some reviewers are getting the idea.

(( But this doesn't take place in a vacuum! If you live in this country and this landscape you would have that impression, we can't detatch from history, also the style of storytelling, this is disingenuous also weirdly defensive! the book itself's narrator has doubts about the point of it all! It's not like anyone went Oh Ursula you heinous racist. No giant defensive reaction is necessary, i should hope we can talk about cultural appropriation and complexities of it without this.... BUT NO And why are people so desperate to deny that anything in the book echoes various Native American cultures? It is interesting! ))

Amy - I know Ursula well enough to read things into the book from knowing her and I know she's a Kroeber and yet I don't know how much her father's work influenced her writing of the book, I just assume it.

(No comment from Ursula)

Tom Becker - strong impression of the book's singualarity. There isn't anything else like it. Is there?

Amy - The closest thing to it I know of is the Silmarillion

Aud - what about the lessing canopus books

Cyn - yeah there's some faint similarities.

aud - the book it's most like for me is sarah monette (somthing)

Aud - slaughterhouse 5, catch 22 (out of order)

what??

Aud - create your own adventure, create your own encyclopeida

ctein - faulker's sound and fury not linear. I don't think of Ursula as jerking the reader around so if it was not reasonable to read the book in the order the pages int he book were printed she would have put them in a different order. (aud laughter) Anyway, what about the sound recordings?

Vonda: poems in the web site and link to todd barton's web site. You can hear them online.

Steven S - Reminds me of role playing game supplements! They traditionally include an adventure .

Strata - Tried to read it when I was young and had only read rocannon's world and I wwent "whaaaa??" But now read it b/c it was Book of Honor and liked it. Deliberate attempt to produce an altered state in the reader. Which I would not put past the author at all. If I saw the segments of the book posted as a blog, a group blog, then it would click! Pepys diary on line, suddenly you get it. calvino, umberto eco, the book is a dialogue between author and reader, le guin is putting up a second level of indirection between author and reader. so that the reader goes WHAT this is another person writing.

Aud: If you grind up page 464 and smoke it...

*everyone laughs*

Liz (me) -I'm a translator. I read this sort of book all the time. It's an anthology of translations, not an encyclopedia. Strata is right it is mean to be many different authorial voices.

aud - yes it says that in the beginning, this is a translation from a language not yet invented

cyn - like David I'm from the east bay, this is home, I felt passionately that this is northern california, this is home. my first edition was the mass market paperback with the owl on it. I read the stone telling bits and then the crunchy bits, I adored them. That comment by Spinrad was a compliment. I *love* the Dune Encyclopedia - my true love was all the crunchy bits!

David - my thing was to take these maps, i work for the us geological survey... I got the topographical maps, and I went to the place and paid my respoect to it.

Aud - There are three rules to writing a novel, and no one knows what they are.

Aud - Novel is such a loaded term - I was taught that novels were a certain narrative structure. But, one of the irritating thing to me about the indian appropriation idea that people got wrong was that she wasn't appropriating indian culture she was appropriating anthroplogy. therefore it's entirely appropriate appropriation becuase i'ts what her parents did. you can't appropriate what your parents are.

((Okay, I think this is totally wrong-headed! at least someone said "appropriation" out loud though. ))

Aud: The Pandora character - she has a strong moral focus - very anthropolgical - she has qualms - am I really describing these people?

aud - it's an accident that it's all one volume. It woudl be a suitcase from our travelling anthropologist and you decide what to read next.

Amy - like one of those experimental books where you open it up and there's bits of things and letters and maybe a feather.

Aud - Ecological book, deeply - they have a broken world that we destroyed and they've inherited.

Amy The book is a dialogue with the present day from the future.

Aud - Anthropology itself was being sent up. There were little jokes everywhere. "Is that tape on yet?"

(This is so true!! It was hilarious!)

David - Motel with the mysteries - send up of far future anthropology of now

Neil - you were taking one deliberate particular spin of utopia. I thought it was utopia, the narrator having a direct dialogue not in the sense of the perfect society one size fits all doesnt this is about as good as it gets with real people

Neil - (something long)

David - Different tribes in norther california on the map

Amy - prescriptive vs descriptive utopias

Mike Ward - Is it this or that? it's a veyr small section of the library of congress card catalogue ... Now, the AIs say that they're not doing anything or interfering and they're just providing services. BUT of course they would!

Aud - USA by John Dos Passos.

David - very much a model for John Brunner.

Aud - I love the book, I read it three times. The thing that bothers me a little bit is that the collapse of the Condor empire is a little convenient. But I can't accept that soeone much like htem would be more successful and might have already succeeded so there are not bigger empires

(3 people) Because of the AI !!!

Aud - you started by asking "is it a novel?" Who cares. It's a great book, it made a permanent difference in how I see the world. I liked it because I entered an altered state and it was a vision of the future that included a more reverent view of other forms of life than humanity. Is this a early form of what Ursula later called a story sweep.

David - it may be, we're going to talk on Saturday about graphic novels etc. why it matters? well, it does, people worry about how it's presented. for many people with many books you have to know how you are supposed to approach the book, to get an understanding of it. If you don't know, you will get negative reaction be ause people's expectations are not met.

Ellen - What you say is very true in general and it's especially true because of its material illustrations and i've always thought it's a real ripoff that adult books don't have them, why do you have to give them up when you grow up? cd, music, etc. Institutional material economic questions that come up with any book but especially this one. One other thing about this, I went to a signing many years ago, the author and Todd Barton who did the music, when he tried to copyright the musical score, the library of congress said no you cannot, it's the traditional music of the Kesh! (everyone breaks up laughing)

aud - role of the AIs. problematic in the book, the way the Kesh are indebted to that they follow in the footsteps of an industrial culture. they have trains, washing machine, computer, none of them exist if they weren't coming out of an industrial cultures. The book has very little good to say about the backwards head people who came before. Contraception. They have a reliable means of population control other than starvation.

Ursula - Many native peoples do control their population. Pre-industrial!

Amy - Ursula you also mentions that the people have lower fertility in general.

Richard P. G. - A wikipedia entry, first sentence, a link somwhere , a video, within that they're another link to something else, about 7 links down you click and the whole system crashes, you start again and it's a totally different story.

David - when people complain about hypertext I tell them it's existed as long as there's been footnotes

Ellen - I think it's interesting theres a people who choose to be relatively low tech rather than are forced to be low tech.

Molly - stone telling tells us this is the closest we get to the history of the Kesh - we don't get to the history of the Kesh. how is her story a history of the Kesh? a puzzle to ponder

Amy - The guy who kept going on about the golden mean. she was trying to get chronology from him, such a beautiful misconnection.

David -Their different view of the world.

Amy: Some of you may have noticed the author sitting in the audience. Ursula do you want to say anything or not?

Ursula - No!


*********

Well, just quickly, to accompany my parenthetical interpolations in the transcript above,

Here is a link to my thoughts a few months ago about Always Coming Home and cultural appropriation, with much-better-than-my-thoughts comments underneath. Read through the comments! They're so good!

http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=619

************************************

Then I went to the con suite which was quite crowded. I ate really good cheese, and truffle pate and salmon and lemon cake that was heavenly and had champagne. Rook was doing his firefly LARP downstairs and Zond-7 argued in corners about digital rights with guy in suspenders. I hung out with RPG and Stephanie R talking about computers and books. RPG said something about his control language for phone dialing being Swedish and I thought, there is a brilliant hack, for voice activated stuff, set the command lang to be a language you don't normally speak so that the words "Dial" or numbers are still normally useable instead of functioning to switch modes. He told me he ported Eliza to the PDP and got class credit from noam chomsky. Actually he went "there was a linguistic program that emulated blah blah" and I went "Yes... you mean Eliza?" I told him about the history of the game Galactic Conquest. He told me that at the Computer History Museum you can play space war at the PDP-1 demo (OOOOOOOO) Stephanie and I talked about Louisa May Alcott and the pleasures of re-reading. She knows Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom like the back of her hand, like I do and we had fun talking about it! At some point I began to droop and lay down on a bed for a while. People were having great conversations all around me.

Earlier I was a huge dork by showing Ursula and Vonda the sky map on my G1. you hold it up to the sky and it shows you the names of the stars and planets and things and it knows which way you are pointing (it has gps and a compass) They were underwhelmed, what about actually going out and looking at the sky. But! neato! gadget!!! layer of information! Then later Vonda showed me her pin that has the constituion on it and I whipped out my phone yet again to show her i have We the People app on it which has the constitution and bill of rights and all the amendments! like I said, huge dork moment.

I am going back for the middle of today but have to leave at 4 or so for Zond-7's daughter's birthday and then want to come back Sunday.

Comments

[hhw.livejournal.com]

thanks for posting your notes! I wanted to go to Potlatch this year for ACH specifically but it was not to be.

[rhipowered.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing! Wicked exciting that Vonda was there, I recently read Dreamsnake and just was totally entranced.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

THank you for posting this verbatim! Always Coming Home is one of my top 5 favorite books of ever and always and this was interesting to read.

I am confused by the cultural misappropriation stuff; it sounds like some people just think that because she's white she can't bring this sort of stuff up at ALL, which I think is . . . well, wrongheaded.

Thanks so much, Liz!

Novel length

[(Anonymous)]

Uh...Mike Resnick doesn't define a novel as over 40,000 words. That's the way the
Hugo rules and the Nebula rules define it.

-- Mike Resnick

Re: Novel length

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

8-) David said it, I am merely a conduit with a little snark attached!

Re: Novel length

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Livebloggers are of course merely doing the best they kind, typing as fast as their little fingers can move. What I said precisely, as best as I can recall, was:

"It's actually over 40,000 words long, which makes it technically a novel.* And in a world with people like Mike Resnick in it, who think that never the twain shall meet**, that makes a difference!"

*By the Hugo and Nebula rules, which I did not add, trying to speak briefly and thinking most of the audience would know that.

**i.e., that a story of 40,001 words - a novel by Hugo definition - is a completely and utterly different animal from a story of 39,999 words - a novella by Hugo definition. The backstory to this is that the Hugo rule definitions of story lengths actually include a grey area around the edges; a story in that grey area can be placed in either category. When the Hugo Administrators (of whom I was one) applied that rule in 1994, Mike Resnick was outraged, and claimed to see no difference between putting, say, a 39,000 word story in Novel (well within the grey area as the rules then stood) and putting a 2,400 word story in Novel.

Great blogging, Liz. More comments later.

Re: Novel length

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I put my full comments on my own LJ here. (http://calimac.livejournal.com/358430.html)

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for writing this up. It broke my heart not to be able to attend Potlatch once I found out LeGuin would be there -- she's my favorite author of all time. And ACH is so special to me.

I really appreciate being able to read such a detailed account of this discussion!

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

No problem, it seems to be what I do automagically in any situation! There will be an even better thing though because Amy Thomson did a sound recording and there will be mp3s of it if you want to hear it. And there is a person named Arwen making a documentary on Le Guin - she was filming her reading!

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

How cool! Thanks for letting me know.

[eriktrips.livejournal.com]

wow. not to rain on the parade--a very interesting parade that has me thinking I should read this book--but I'm getting weird uncomfortable sensations about the things being said about Native Americans: they don't live in houses with kitchens and washing machines? and if they lived lightly on the land they don't anymore? I'm just getting whiffs of romantic historical misconceptions here. why couldn't Native Americans show up in the book as part of the society that is however modern it is?

but I wasn't in the room so I can't direct these questions to the appropriate parties.

Thanks

[(Anonymous)]

Liz, thanks so much for your unbelievably detailed notes. Conferences are usually so ephemeral. Ellen