DannyL

Wild Horses
i dont know if you noticed but i said i agree with your reading and it is 100% correct.
I missed that, sorry. I agree with you re. drawing out symbolic dimensions out of texts, and it's can be deeply fascinating seeing how it plays out in politics via conspiracy can also be quite mindblowing. The qanon stuff I find just wild.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I
that's how it will work Danny, yes. you'll be whipped with stinging nettles in a horrible dungeon by a horrible old dinner lady
I'm imagining grating unlubricated sex that lasts for years with no consumuation with ageing "Blair babes"
 

luka

Well-known member
the Q-Anon stuff, let's assume we don't beleive it (you don't beleive it do you?) ...that disbeleif then gives rise to a whole new set of conspiracies... that it is a psy-op or whatever... 4chan is the testing bed for all kinds of psychologixal experiemtns and mind games
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Magical pratice is a bit like that tbh. You deliberately start looking for meaning and reading significance into events where there maybe is none. I found I took like a duck to water to a new divination system recently because of years of reading the I Ching and using that broad, associative thinking in interpreting it.
 

luka

Well-known member
Magical pratice is a bit like that tbh. You deliberately start looking for meaning and reading significance into events where there maybe is none. I found I took like a duck to water to a new divination system recently because of years of reading the I Ching and using that broad, associative thinking in interpreting it.

you've been training your whole life it! and psychotherapy uses a lot of the same tools. symbol and interpretation. not forcing something too soon. not being reductive.
 

luka

Well-known member
who is q-anon is a fascinating question whether you believe or not and opens up the same vertiginous vortex beneath your feet
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
I can't recall her having any specific power beyond her symbolic role? Remind me if I'm wrong.

Her power is internal I think. Of resilience. The strength to overcome, to find and be herself in a very dark place, and then escape. Symbolized by the fact that she goes on to live under her true name.

The thing the story most powerfully reminds me of is veiling of women in the Islamic world and the separation of menstruating women out from shared social spaces that happens in some societies.

I hadn't noticed Tombs itself as being Islamic. More a pseudo-historical polytheistic warrior empire with priestesses. But certainly there are Islamic elements to the Kargad lands in The Other Wind.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
I remember my experience of reading the book though - again, it was so tonally different from the first one I didn't like it. I then reread it some years later with symbolic googles on and found it totally enthralling.

Ah, that second reading is so typical for Le Guin's work. I've found that many times. Because she never does what you expect – what you want – in sequels. Because she always changes her priorities.

Just in the Earthsea series, I found Tehanu and The Other Wind quite disappointing the first time through. For example, Tehanu first reading: Where's Ged? And why is he so useless? And why does the book end in such a rush? Second reading: Ged's not the main or same character anymore. And it doesn't end in a rush. It ends exactly as it should.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The ending of Tehanu reminds me of the end of The Owl Service, in that the tremendously important and transformative moment happens in a flash, things suddenly aligning and revealing the purpose of the whole structure. Almost the only way to really grasp what has just happened is to go back and read again from the beginning.
 

version

Well-known member
I read a one-star review of The Left Hand of Darkness a while back which accused her of being a misogynist.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Is she the one with the world where people's real names are secret only to be revealed bwteen intimate relations or something
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Something I think about more often than it probably deserves is the character in Halo Jones who erases their personality and becomes socially invisible by repeatedly transitioning (via some transmogrifying machine) from male to female and back again - they can’t decide which they want to be, and they end up being effectively nothing.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
Possibly a TERF offended by all the “ambisexuality”? A woman is a woman, goddamnit!

Calling her a "misogynist" is just ridiculous hyperbole. But the reason is probably because Le Guin uses "he" as a generic neutral pronoun. She later accepted that as valid criticism:

Ursula Le Guin in 1976 said:
I call the Gethenians 'he' because I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for 'he/she'.

Ursula Le Guin in 1988 said:
This utter refusal of 1968 restated in 1976 collapsed, utterly, within a couple of years more. I still dislike invented pronouns, but now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse; and which was an invention of male grammarians, for until the sixteenth century the English generic singular pronoun was they/them/their, as it still is in English and American colloquial speech. It should be restored to the written language and let the pedants and pundits squeak and gibber in the streets.
 
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