Ursula K. Le Guin on writing and freedom at the National Book Awards
November 21, 2014 5:51 PM   Subscribe

On Wed Nov 19, 2014, in an awards ceremony emceed by Daniel Handler-aka-Lemony Snicket, Ursula K. Le Guin gave "the most ferocious speech ever given at the National Book Awards." Le Guin's acceptance speech for the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters touched on the Amazon vs Hachette throwdown and the practice of art in an age of capitalism. Video. Transcription.
Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings.
posted by spamandkimchi (35 comments total) 67 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

She is my hero.
posted by allthinky at 6:01 PM on November 21, 2014 [15 favorites]


We do live in kind of a weird age when a woman speaking truth with quiet dignity can be described as "ferocious".

I agree that we will need writers like her in the age to come... she has always been brilliant at looking past the dystopia to the wonderful and frightening future beyond. If I can convince my daughters to read one author, it will be her.
posted by selfnoise at 6:03 PM on November 21, 2014 [15 favorites]


We do live in kind of a weird age when a woman speaking truth with quiet dignity can be described as "ferocious".

It's like that Boots Riley mini-kerfuffle a couple months ago: it's the content, not the manner. You say one word against capitalism, all of a sudden even if you're visibly calmer than a Zen monk there's some portion of the audience that can't see you as anything but an "angry ranter." Symptom of the atrophy of public dissent; people ought to see enough real angry ranters that they'd naturally know the difference, but they don't.
posted by RogerB at 6:13 PM on November 21, 2014 [26 favorites]


I loved everything except the shot at Amazon, because so much of what she had to say there could easily be turned on its head against the traditional publishing houses. Amazon created an amazing market for self-publishers with a very low bar and a VERY low financial expectation from them in return (and no money up front or any other scam-like behavior). The company rightfully deserves a lot of criticism for how it treats its employees, but authors? I don't see it.

(Full disclosure: I make a much better living as an indie author, largely through Amazon, than I ever have as a teacher. So either I have firsthand experience or I'm terribly biased. Make your calls as you will.)

But past that? Yeah. Everything she said was wonderful, and I'm glad she said it.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 6:19 PM on November 21, 2014 [9 favorites]


Even Handler had nothing clever to add. “Ursula Le Guin,” he said when he retook the podium. “That’s all I have to say.”

Thank god. I think he said enough that night.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:20 PM on November 21, 2014 [9 favorites]


Books, you know, they’re not just commodities.
would that wanting made it so...

One of the things about Pete Seeger is that he first got an audience through the radio: so was "folk music" an authentic expression of artistic values or a fad of popular mass-entertainment promoted to sell advertising. Seeger never struck me as particularly impressed by the irony of making a career of music facing backward with an audience from the future of popular mass commercialism.

Le Guin seems to have the same naivete about the basis of her career. Books haven't become any more of a commodity, it's just the nature of the market has changed. She was always a creature of that mass-market whether she believes in her own authentic voice or not.
posted by ennui.bz at 6:22 PM on November 21, 2014 [4 favorites]


Interested in a comment from MeFi's Own jscalzi on this. Scalzi has been pretty upfront about writing in X style because that's where the money is.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:23 PM on November 21, 2014


"Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

My introduction to LeGuin was "The Lathe of Heaven" in which (SPOILER) the main character changed the universe he lived in every time he slept and dreamt. I've been insanely jealous of that ability (totally overestimating how much I'd be able to control it) ever since.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:27 PM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]


people ought to see enough real angry ranters that they'd naturally know the difference

Alex Jones still has a show, I think.
posted by weston at 6:29 PM on November 21, 2014


"We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art."
Through all of this, I've tried in vain to understand how a big five US publisher that's a wholly-owned subsidiary of a nine-billion-dollar-a-year-in-revenue multinational should be seen as the counterpoint to the "profiteers" who are crassly interested only in selling commodities like deodorant.

Furthermore, is it the case that when you become a best-selling author you suddenly forget how the mass-market publishing industry actually works? You suddenly think that big publishers are brave advocates for marginalized voices and difficult-to-market books? That they don't deeply research demographics and trends and marketing strategies and go to great efforts to place books on end-caps in stores, like deodorants?

There are small publishers out there who are everything Le Guin is implicitly valorizing about publishing, publishers who are true partners with writers in the production of literature, and who stand as bulwarks against market-researched, highly-marketed, profit-driven production of books as commodities. Hachette isn't among them. Hachette isn't on the side of the angels.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:33 PM on November 21, 2014 [15 favorites]


oneswellfoop: "My introduction to LeGuin was "The Lathe of Heaven" in which (SPOILER) the main character changed the universe he lived in every time he slept and dreamt. I've been insanely jealous of that ability (totally overestimating how much I'd be able to control it) ever since"

It didn't work out so hot for the guy in the book.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:52 PM on November 21, 2014 [4 favorites]


Scalzi has been pretty upfront about writing in X style because that's where the money is.

Here's the blog entry he did on the subject.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:52 PM on November 21, 2014 [4 favorites]


If there's a flaw in LeGuin's POV, it comes from having gotten well-established at a time when there really was only one way to 'make it'. If publishers like Hachette have been 'beddy beddy good to you' for almost 50 years, it's hard to think of them not being 'the good guys'. Remember she resigned from the Authors Guild in protest over its endorsement of Google's book digitization project five years ago. Yeah, maybe a "get off my lawn" attitude, or maybe she looks at the novels she couldn't sell before 1966 and is relieved there wasn't an Amazon self-publishing option then.

Meanwhile, there's an interesting comics/webcomics-oriented thing happening this weekend called "Comfy Con" which is essentially a weekend of video-based 'con panels' on relevant topics, and one of the first ones they did (which you can view anytime) is "Self Publishing vs Publisher", with three comics artists who have done both. Looked at Publishing From Both Sides Now, as it were.

It didn't work out so hot for the guy in the book.
Don't I know it; but I could've made it work, or I believed so for way too long...
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:56 PM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


We do live in kind of a weird age when a woman speaking truth with quiet dignity can be described as "ferocious".

Some years ago now I attended a lecture by her at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Having read (and loved) many of her books, I expected her to be possessed of the kind of quiet-yet-formidable wisdom common to a lot of her fictional characters. Boy was I in for a shock. Make no mistake, Le Guin is full of the proverbial piss and vinegar.
posted by trunk muffins at 7:09 PM on November 21, 2014 [5 favorites]




Thanks for this post - I started to put one together this morning, but I couldn't find a transcript and then work wanted me to work if you can imagine. This one is better.

> She is my hero.

That.
posted by rtha at 7:33 PM on November 21, 2014 [2 favorites]


Author Solutions Steps Up Global Expansion, Penguin Random House Integration
If you're not the product being sold, you are DEFINITELY going to be paying for it.
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:45 PM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


If there's a flaw in LeGuin's POV, it comes from having gotten well-established at a time when there really was only one way to 'make it'. If publishers like Hachette have been 'beddy beddy good to you' for almost 50 years, it's hard to think of them not being 'the good guys'.

I've wondered about that. That system had a lot of flaws but it also supported a lot of writing that doesn't seem to get the same support now, and it's hard to imagine self-publishing of any variety supporting the kind of mid-catalog writers that were a mainstay of publishing a few decades ago. And yet that system has changed, and the bigger publishers' flaws have been exposed sufficiently as well.

Le Guin is an amazing writer; her writing is as formative for me as anything I could possibly name. It's not just the incredible quality of her writing, it's that it has so much substance and thinking behind it. She isn't just extruding book-product like so many authors do.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:12 PM on November 21, 2014 [4 favorites]


Ferocious? No. She is quiet, calm, contemplative. She knows both where she wants to begin and end. This makes it no less terrible for those standing in her way.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:45 PM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


I had read a bit about her Amazon comments, but I didn't expect, halfway through the video, to say aloud to my dog's great surprise, "Day-um girl!"
posted by chatongriffes at 8:45 PM on November 21, 2014 [4 favorites]


I had read a bit about her Amazon comments, but I didn't expect, halfway through the video, to say aloud to my dog's great surprise, "Day-um girl!"

Despite my feelings about the Amazon contents noted above, I really felt like that wasn't remotely the core of her message. Attention to that facet of her speech seems like it's the media jumping on the distractions offered by big name conflicts. The rest of what she said seemed to have far more gravity.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 8:55 PM on November 21, 2014 [1 favorite]




That would be a somewhat fringe reading of Rowling.
posted by Artw at 10:31 PM on November 21, 2014 [5 favorites]


We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings.

Of course, then we could point to alternative, plausibly better models, notably the Roman Republic, that actually existed and operated. We don't have that now.
posted by alasdair at 3:29 AM on November 22, 2014


Potter also belongs to an elite, separate from the ordinary people and applying their powers only for their own kind, and him and chums all go to what is obviously a British public school analogue. In terms of american conservatism their society, including HP, also believe in arming children.
posted by biffa at 6:35 AM on November 22, 2014 [5 favorites]


We've better models now too, like transparency, proportional representation, deliberative democracy or demarchy, progressive taxation, anti-trust regulation, etc., alasdair.

We lack the political will to implement them because our elite face no pressing threat models, like communism, the French revolution, etc. And that's because Keynesianism provides a model where the financial elite pays for armies of upper middle class stooges doing bullshit works, who then frequently support the status quo.

Automation is however making all that bullshit work progressively more senseless and unjustifiable. And fewer stooges means more guillotine builders.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:53 AM on November 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


> Of course, then we could point to alternative, plausibly better models, notably the Roman Republic, that actually existed and operated.

The Roman Republic was horrible, dependent on slavery, the complete submission of women, and constant war. It's no kind of model.

I agree with IF and others that the demonization of Amazon in its struggle with equally predatory and capitalist publishers is bizarre and overwrought.
posted by languagehat at 8:10 AM on November 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


We will need writers who can remember freedom.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
posted by nangar at 2:50 PM on November 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


I love her. There's several good bits of her writing over at Brain Pickings. I think this one is good.
posted by newdaddy at 7:51 PM on November 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Chrysostom:

"Interested in a comment from MeFi's Own jscalzi on this. Scalzi has been pretty upfront about writing in X style because that's where the money is."

Well, if I really wanted to write where the money was, I'd be doing epic fantasy rather than science fiction, since it sells substantially more than SF lit at this point. I write science fiction because I like it, and I write in a commercial fashion because I'd like to make money. But I write commercial science fiction that I would want to read, which means that there is an artistic calculation there as well as a commercial one. I write for money, but I don't write just for money (this is covered more fully in the link jenfullmoon provided upthread).

With regard to Ms. Le Guin's comments: I don't see that anything she's saying is something I would disagree with terribly. Note that she says "Books, you know, they’re not just commodities," which suggests she recognizes that they are commodities, but that she's arguing that their commodity value is not the whole of their worth, and that sacrificing the artistic value for the commodity value is a troubling thing.

Which is her privilege; as an artist she's entitled to think about the art of her craft and to arrogate to it a higher consideration than mere commercial concerns. A publisher, on the other hand, may choose to put commercial considerations above those of art because that's the nature of their role. Which is their privilege. Both publisher and author -- if they wish to sell books -- have to consider art and commerce, in my opinion. They may just vary the percentages.

With that said, while I don't disagree with Ms. Le Guin on any particular point, I don't really get my brain out of joint at writers who go where the money is first and foremost, and worry about the art of writing -- to the extent that they worry about it at all -- a bit further down the chain. There will always be writers who want to be rich and/or famous more than they want to express some sort of truth; there are writers who will put the pressing need to paying the bills over speaking to posterity. In both cases I could judge but it would not profit me much to do so, and besides people who live in glass houses, etc -- the fact I'm unapologetic about the commercial nature of my own writing annoys some people. They will just have to deal.

I'd note that the folks here who seem to be dinging Ms. Le Guin for having a world view shaped entirely by a life comfortably ensconced in the world of traditional publishing should know that (among many other things) she is a founding member of Book View Cafe, an online indie collective publishing experiment, and works with smaller publishers as well; Small Beer Press will be releasing her upcoming collection of short stories. I'd also say that her criticisms of the publishing world are not just limited to Amazon -- she zinged her (New York) publisher for charging libraries more for ebooks than they charge individual consumers, for one example. Her criticisms are fairly catholic, in a small "c" sense of the word.

Finally, as a bit of disclosure, while I have not personally met Ms. Le Guin, I am a fan of her writing and will be writing an introduction to an upcoming reissue of her book Always Coming Home, which is as it happens my favorite book of hers -- and, I would note, easily one of her least overtly commercial. In that particular case, at least, I was delighted that she put the consideration of her art over the consideration of selling millions of copies.
posted by jscalzi at 8:18 PM on November 22, 2014 [13 favorites]


Finally, as a bit of disclosure, while I have not personally met Ms. Le Guin, I am a fan of her writing and will be writing an introduction to an upcoming reissue of her book Always Coming Home, which is as it happens my favorite book of hers -- and, I would note, easily one of her least overtly commercial.

That's my favorite book of hers as well; I'd had the thought of a reread in the back of my mind, so the reissue is well timed. Congratulations for having that opportunity, that is exciting news.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:52 AM on November 23, 2014


Hari Kunzru interviews Le Guin in The Guardian. He also gives short descriptions of some of her most famous works.
posted by Kattullus at 11:58 AM on November 23, 2014 [2 favorites]


My thought was from reading the transcript that the Amazon/Hatchette comments were symptoms of her overall criticism and defense of writing as art:
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:45 PM on November 23, 2014


Ursula K Le Guin has been my personal hero for a long time. I started reading science fiction when I was 10 years old and I have learned more from her books than almost anything else in my life. I wrote her a letter telling her so.

This speech she just gave - and this recent interview - is the only thing I've ever wanted to post on MeFi. Bit of a nervous poster. spamandkimchi beat me to it, but I'm glad it's here.

I don't know what it is with me, but I've just been passionately in love with great science fiction for my whole life. I have been trying to articulate WHY that is for many, many years, and Ursula herself has done a very good job of speaking for me - I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

She really is a realist of a larger reality, and I am so grateful for the books she has written.
posted by Cygnet at 7:15 AM on November 24, 2014 [3 favorites]


There is so much fine observation about humanity in her books. They have taught me to be a better human.

And she is so trustworthy as an author. When you read, you're trusting the storyteller to make immersive visualizations come to life in your mind. You're putting another person in the driver's seat of your consciousness. Ursula K. LeGuin has taken me to some frightening places, some dark and strange places, and also some funny places, but she has always brought me back to a place where I am safe, and better-off for the experience.
posted by spacewaitress at 8:34 PM on November 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


« Older How To Make Streaming Royalties Fair(er)   |   In space, no-one can hear you click every once in... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments