11 ms·

Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

186 points by benbreen 12y ago

aerovistae 12y ago
Reminds me of Roald Dahl's short story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator." I cannot recommend it enough. Amazing story about a future in which an engineer creates a machine that writes stories quick and cheap, thousands and thousands of them in no time at all. http://bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_great_automatic_grammatizator_and_ot_-_roald_dahl.pdf http://bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_gre...
InAnEmergency 12y ago
Her comments seem somewhat related to her book "The Dispossessed" which contrasts a capitalist world with a plausible anarchist/communist world.
- slowmovintarget 12y ago
  While she may speak with the authority of having written "The Dispossessed" (which is wonderfully good), her words seem to mostly be about Amazon. In that regard I think her comments miss the mark ("corporate fatwa" being the biggest silliness).
  - the_af 12y ago
    In what way do they miss the mark? I have immense respect for both Ursula K. Le Guin's work and her ideology. Her comments seem pretty sensible to me.
    - slowmovintarget 12y ago
      I cannot speak to her ideology, as I've only read her novels and admired her amazing craftsmanship and care. For example, in "The Dispossessed" she crafts a point of rational observation of both extremes of capitalism and communism. I've not had the opportunity to read of or hear her own personal views. I think her remarks aimed at Amazon miss the mark. She said: "...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." Amazon was not "punishing disobedience", rather they are attempting to negotiate more favorable terms for literally all involved parties. (Amazon's historical data shows a lower price for e-books increases overall sales generating a higher profit for Amazon, for the publisher, and for the author.) To me, attempting to show an equivalence between Amazon's contractual negotiation with Hachette and religious pronouncements from Muslim clerics sounds a false note in an otherwise important statement.
  - rquantz 12y ago
    I think you're wrong about them being mostly about amazon. She's talking about capitalism. Amazon is only a symptom.
bhrgunatha 12y ago
> Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I never really studied history in any depth. Do you think this is just hyperbole? By which I mean is she simply overstating or exaggerating the role of art in historic events? Am I taking it too literally - that art is the first step towards cultural upheaval? Can anyone give some examples of art effecting some kind of huge social change?
- benbreen 12y ago
  It's easy to point to examples when we construe art (as she does here) as including all forms of creative writing or storytelling. Just one example is work by many literary scholars on the 18th century novel as helping create a new sense of interiority and private life (i.e., reading a novel alone replaced gathering around a fire to hear a story). Or, going back much further, Alexander the Great's obsession with the Iliad would surely count as significant for world history.
- foobarian 12y ago
  Perhaps the real root cause of upheaval such as pervasive discontent correlates with occurrences of revolutionary art. Perhaps the art then acts as an amplifier or accelerator of the discontent, creating a feedback loop. Clearly it helps when the "art" is easily distributed and widely understood (printing press, literacy).
- avalaunch 12y ago
  "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Supposedly Abraham Lincoln said this to Harriet Beecher Stowe in reference to her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited for changing the North's attitude towards slavery.
  - bhrgunatha 12y ago
    That's a really great example, thanks!
- Tenhundfeld 12y ago
  The "art of words" has certainly effected huge social change. This is self-evident if you include political commentary and philosophy (Common Sense, Wealth of Nations, Federalist Papers, Communist Manifesto, etc.). If you restrict it to fiction, a common example is 1906 novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. If you're talking about art like paintings, plays, music, etc., I don't have any examples off the top of my head. However, I think it's a truism that art is often the first/only safe place to criticize the powerful. I don't know if that's really art effecting change as much as art giving a voice to underlying forces for change.
jseliger 12y ago
I heard her make remarks in a similar vein at the Washington State Book Awards in 2006: http://jakeseliger.com/2006/10/28/le-guin-at-the-seattle-public-library http://jakeseliger.com/2006/10/28/le-guin-at-the-seattle-pub... . Incidentally, though, I think this no longer true: "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship." It's now easier than ever for writers to answer to no one but readers; the Internet in general and Amazon in particular are tremendous open platforms that let writers decide what to publish without the need for a conventional publisher. See further http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopoly http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopo... .
- Booktrope 12y ago
  The problem with Le Guin's position is that it's so Manichean, a world composed of good guys and bad guys with no ambiguities. To her, it's either sell books like deodorant or some ideal system where it's quality, not marketability, that makes books sell. This sounds good, but it's tripe. As you say, the Internet in general and Amazon in particular have opened up publishing -- Amazon getting huge credit because it not only allows freer publishing, but has set up a system that allows many thousands of new authors to actually connect with readers. Yet, Amazon is also a business focused on selling products at high volume with tight margins. These two goals aren't opposed, they're different aspects of a complex business. Amazon can be both a great contributor and profit-motivated, it's not that hard to see how. Who defines quality, anyway? The tastemakers, like newspaper reviewers, who nobody much pays attention to anymore? Or Le Guin -- she seems to think she knows what's good. I imagine, what if John Kennedy O'Toole had the opportunity to self-publish A Confederacy of Dunces, instead of facing despair when all the traditional publishers turned him down. What if he'd been able to sell his work like toothpaste on Amazon, even if the tastemakers thought it wasn't worth publishing. To Le Guin, this would somehow violate the ideals the publishing world ought to aspire to. To me, I wish the opportunities offered by Amazon had been around back then.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
plover 12y ago
Video is up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk
- carlob 12y ago
  This should be further up. I personally found myself skimming through the written version while her delivery left me glued to the screen and quite moved.
clebio 12y ago
> We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
- vixen99 12y ago
  What a bizarre connection! Disputing the divine right of kings had to be a private act or you faced the consequences; you and I, the consumers, ultimately decide the fate of the millions of businesses that constitute the system we call capitalism within a free market.
  - davedx 12y ago
    She is talking about moving to a new system outside of capitalism, not causing a dip in profits for one particular company.
    - logicchains 12y ago
      "Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely. Moving to a system "outside of capitalism" involves preventing this, and necessarily involves large scale violence both to take the accumulated capital of savers and to persecute anyone who still seeks to engage in the free exchange of goods. See for example the merchants in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia who were hung or shot for being capitalist traitors, and the landowners who were exiled or killed. It was literally illegal to own a shop, or to grow or make something and exchange it for something else.
      - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
        Luckily there's never been any large scale violence within or around capitalism. Everyone's freedoms - especially the freedom to get paid a fair rate for hard work - are quite safe.
        logicchains 12y ago
        If you add up Mao's and Stalin's bodycounts, that's 50-100 million people, so yes, compared to that we are quite safe. I don't know of any capitalist nation that's inflicted anything in that order of magnitude of deaths on its own citizens, and what deaths there are are usually caused by noncapitalist entities like the state police and army. Noncapitalist because they're not funded voluntarily; I suspect if the military was something we had to pay for as individuals like bread, computers, cars, etc. then it'd be a hellova lot smaller. Similarly I can't imagine many people would pay gangs of private detectives to go around locating and imprisoning drug users.
sxcurry 12y ago
Sorry, I admire her writing, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Books are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Amazon and Audible. New technologies, and they are helping more people to read more books than ever before.
- rquantz 12y ago
  This is a typical view around here. Obviously to Le Guin they are more than that. But what would one of the great writers of our time, approaching the end of her life, know about that?
  - jasonisalive 12y ago
    She's very good, but great? I don't know about that. I've really enjoyed many of her books, but at heart they seem to me to be the books of an author who isn't particularly conscious of her privilege level in the world. Furthermore she never really seemed to move beyond a very American-centric strain of 60s radical politics in her thinking and aesthetics. If you're a certain type of American, I'm sure you could be convinced that she's a truly rich and resounding thinker. People on the other side of that fence would probably wish she was interested in speaking to the whole human audience.
    - jkaunisv1 12y ago
      That's surprising because in every one of her stories I've read, there is a stark awareness of racial, social and class differences. She is one of the most aware authors I can think of. She writes about differences between men and women, the rich and the poor, capitalists and socialists, leaders and servants, personal family events and large-scale world events. I am not American and your comment comes across as very pigeonholing. What other part of the human audience do you wish she'd speak to?
- kitsune_ 12y ago
  This is ironic because you could apply the same statement to issues like open-source software, walled gardens and net neutrality. To the regular joe, the issues we talk about as developers on here hardly matter, yet as a people actually writing the software, we tend to be of the opinion that we know better. I.e. re a typical speech by rms: "Sorry, I admire his coding, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Programs are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Apple's or Google's app stores. New technologies, and they are helping more people to consume software than ever before."
WalterBright 12y ago
The notion that the publishing industry was ever able to reliably discern quality is scuttled not only by "Moby Dick", but by a long list of other failures: http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/ http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rej...
- afterburner 12y ago
  That's a list of "Best-sellers initially rejected", though. Not quite the same as quality initially unrecognized. Some of them could still be books of low quality, that happen to be popular.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    Nobody has found a reliable metric to determine the quality of art, not even close, other than what others are freely willing to pay for it.
    - logicchains 12y ago
      You might be surprised how many people there are who would consider the quality of art to be inversely proportional to what others are freely willing to pay for it. Particularly those in the business of making art that few are interested in paying for.
      - WalterBright 12y ago
        Not at all. I've also run into people who put on stage productions who are disappointed if people actually go to see them, feeling that means they "sold out". While they're entitled to their opinions, I suspect that this is just a rationalization for being terrible artists :-) It's like people who take pride in not knowing anything about technology.
    - afterburner 12y ago
      "not even close" Really? Because while Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are far from perfect, they are quite useful in pointing out movies that have more rather than less quality.
davedx 12y ago
I love Ursula Le Guin's books. My favourite quote by her (if not in general) in this one: “If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.”
CaptainSwing 12y ago
Thanks for a great post! I'm a big fan of Le Guins fiction, as well as her commentary and critique of literature as commodity. Another great (anti-capitalist) novelist who I admire, China Mieville, touched on some similar topics in his keynote speech at the Edimnburgh International Book Festival a few years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-the-future-of-the-novel http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-... "But who decides who qualifies as a writer? Does it take one sonnet? Of what quality? Ten novels? 50,000 readers? Ten, but the right readers? God knows we shouldn't trust the state to make that kind of decision. So we should democratise that boisterous debate, as widely and vigorously as possible. It needn't be the mere caprice of taste. Which changes. And people are perfectly capable of judging as relevant and important literature for which they don't personally care. Mistakes will be made, sure, but will they really be worse than the philistine thuggery of the market? "We couldn't bypass the state with this plan, though. So for the sake of literature, apart from any- and everything else, we'll have to take control of it, invert its priorities, democratise its structures, replace it with a system worth having. "So an unresentful sense of writers as people among people, and a fidelity to literature, require political and economic transformation. For futures for novels – and everything else. In the context of which futures, who knows what politics, what styles and which contents, what relationships to what reconceived communities, which struggles to express what inexpressibles, what stories and anti-stories we will all strive and honourably fail to write, and maybe even one day succeed? "

186 points by benbreen 12y ago

Reminds me of Roald Dahl's short story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator." I cannot recommend it enough. Amazing story about a future in which an engineer creates a machine that writes stories quick and cheap, thousands and thousands of them in no time at all. http://bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_great_automatic_grammatizator_and_ot_-_roald_dahl.pdf http://bookophile.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/8/6408830/the_gre...

InAnEmergency 12y ago

Her comments seem somewhat related to her book "The Dispossessed" which contrasts a capitalist world with a plausible anarchist/communist world.

slowmovintarget 12y ago
While she may speak with the authority of having written "The Dispossessed" (which is wonderfully good), her words seem to mostly be about Amazon. In that regard I think her comments miss the mark ("corporate fatwa" being the biggest silliness).
- the_af 12y ago
  In what way do they miss the mark? I have immense respect for both Ursula K. Le Guin's work and her ideology. Her comments seem pretty sensible to me.
  - slowmovintarget 12y ago
    I cannot speak to her ideology, as I've only read her novels and admired her amazing craftsmanship and care. For example, in "The Dispossessed" she crafts a point of rational observation of both extremes of capitalism and communism. I've not had the opportunity to read of or hear her own personal views. I think her remarks aimed at Amazon miss the mark. She said: "...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." Amazon was not "punishing disobedience", rather they are attempting to negotiate more favorable terms for literally all involved parties. (Amazon's historical data shows a lower price for e-books increases overall sales generating a higher profit for Amazon, for the publisher, and for the author.) To me, attempting to show an equivalence between Amazon's contractual negotiation with Hachette and religious pronouncements from Muslim clerics sounds a false note in an otherwise important statement.
- rquantz 12y ago
  I think you're wrong about them being mostly about amazon. She's talking about capitalism. Amazon is only a symptom.

bhrgunatha 12y ago

> Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I never really studied history in any depth. Do you think this is just hyperbole? By which I mean is she simply overstating or exaggerating the role of art in historic events? Am I taking it too literally - that art is the first step towards cultural upheaval? Can anyone give some examples of art effecting some kind of huge social change?

benbreen 12y ago
It's easy to point to examples when we construe art (as she does here) as including all forms of creative writing or storytelling. Just one example is work by many literary scholars on the 18th century novel as helping create a new sense of interiority and private life (i.e., reading a novel alone replaced gathering around a fire to hear a story). Or, going back much further, Alexander the Great's obsession with the Iliad would surely count as significant for world history.
foobarian 12y ago
Perhaps the real root cause of upheaval such as pervasive discontent correlates with occurrences of revolutionary art. Perhaps the art then acts as an amplifier or accelerator of the discontent, creating a feedback loop. Clearly it helps when the "art" is easily distributed and widely understood (printing press, literacy).
avalaunch 12y ago
"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Supposedly Abraham Lincoln said this to Harriet Beecher Stowe in reference to her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited for changing the North's attitude towards slavery.
- bhrgunatha 12y ago
  That's a really great example, thanks!
Tenhundfeld 12y ago
The "art of words" has certainly effected huge social change. This is self-evident if you include political commentary and philosophy (Common Sense, Wealth of Nations, Federalist Papers, Communist Manifesto, etc.). If you restrict it to fiction, a common example is 1906 novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. If you're talking about art like paintings, plays, music, etc., I don't have any examples off the top of my head. However, I think it's a truism that art is often the first/only safe place to criticize the powerful. I don't know if that's really art effecting change as much as art giving a voice to underlying forces for change.

jseliger 12y ago

I heard her make remarks in a similar vein at the Washington State Book Awards in 2006: http://jakeseliger.com/2006/10/28/le-guin-at-the-seattle-public-library http://jakeseliger.com/2006/10/28/le-guin-at-the-seattle-pub... . Incidentally, though, I think this no longer true: "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship." It's now easier than ever for writers to answer to no one but readers; the Internet in general and Amazon in particular are tremendous open platforms that let writers decide what to publish without the need for a conventional publisher. See further http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopoly http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopo... .

Booktrope 12y ago
The problem with Le Guin's position is that it's so Manichean, a world composed of good guys and bad guys with no ambiguities. To her, it's either sell books like deodorant or some ideal system where it's quality, not marketability, that makes books sell. This sounds good, but it's tripe. As you say, the Internet in general and Amazon in particular have opened up publishing -- Amazon getting huge credit because it not only allows freer publishing, but has set up a system that allows many thousands of new authors to actually connect with readers. Yet, Amazon is also a business focused on selling products at high volume with tight margins. These two goals aren't opposed, they're different aspects of a complex business. Amazon can be both a great contributor and profit-motivated, it's not that hard to see how. Who defines quality, anyway? The tastemakers, like newspaper reviewers, who nobody much pays attention to anymore? Or Le Guin -- she seems to think she knows what's good. I imagine, what if John Kennedy O'Toole had the opportunity to self-publish A Confederacy of Dunces, instead of facing despair when all the traditional publishers turned him down. What if he'd been able to sell his work like toothpaste on Amazon, even if the tastemakers thought it wasn't worth publishing. To Le Guin, this would somehow violate the ideals the publishing world ought to aspire to. To me, I wish the opportunities offered by Amazon had been around back then.
- WalterBright 12y ago

plover 12y ago

Video is up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk

carlob 12y ago
This should be further up. I personally found myself skimming through the written version while her delivery left me glued to the screen and quite moved.

clebio 12y ago

> We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

vixen99 12y ago
What a bizarre connection! Disputing the divine right of kings had to be a private act or you faced the consequences; you and I, the consumers, ultimately decide the fate of the millions of businesses that constitute the system we call capitalism within a free market.
- davedx 12y ago
  She is talking about moving to a new system outside of capitalism, not causing a dip in profits for one particular company.
  - logicchains 12y ago
    "Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely. Moving to a system "outside of capitalism" involves preventing this, and necessarily involves large scale violence both to take the accumulated capital of savers and to persecute anyone who still seeks to engage in the free exchange of goods. See for example the merchants in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia who were hung or shot for being capitalist traitors, and the landowners who were exiled or killed. It was literally illegal to own a shop, or to grow or make something and exchange it for something else.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      Luckily there's never been any large scale violence within or around capitalism. Everyone's freedoms - especially the freedom to get paid a fair rate for hard work - are quite safe.
      - logicchains 12y ago
        If you add up Mao's and Stalin's bodycounts, that's 50-100 million people, so yes, compared to that we are quite safe. I don't know of any capitalist nation that's inflicted anything in that order of magnitude of deaths on its own citizens, and what deaths there are are usually caused by noncapitalist entities like the state police and army. Noncapitalist because they're not funded voluntarily; I suspect if the military was something we had to pay for as individuals like bread, computers, cars, etc. then it'd be a hellova lot smaller. Similarly I can't imagine many people would pay gangs of private detectives to go around locating and imprisoning drug users.

sxcurry 12y ago

Sorry, I admire her writing, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Books are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Amazon and Audible. New technologies, and they are helping more people to read more books than ever before.

rquantz 12y ago
This is a typical view around here. Obviously to Le Guin they are more than that. But what would one of the great writers of our time, approaching the end of her life, know about that?
- jasonisalive 12y ago
  She's very good, but great? I don't know about that. I've really enjoyed many of her books, but at heart they seem to me to be the books of an author who isn't particularly conscious of her privilege level in the world. Furthermore she never really seemed to move beyond a very American-centric strain of 60s radical politics in her thinking and aesthetics. If you're a certain type of American, I'm sure you could be convinced that she's a truly rich and resounding thinker. People on the other side of that fence would probably wish she was interested in speaking to the whole human audience.
  - jkaunisv1 12y ago
    That's surprising because in every one of her stories I've read, there is a stark awareness of racial, social and class differences. She is one of the most aware authors I can think of. She writes about differences between men and women, the rich and the poor, capitalists and socialists, leaders and servants, personal family events and large-scale world events. I am not American and your comment comes across as very pigeonholing. What other part of the human audience do you wish she'd speak to?
kitsune_ 12y ago
This is ironic because you could apply the same statement to issues like open-source software, walled gardens and net neutrality. To the regular joe, the issues we talk about as developers on here hardly matter, yet as a people actually writing the software, we tend to be of the opinion that we know better. I.e. re a typical speech by rms: "Sorry, I admire his coding, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Programs are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Apple's or Google's app stores. New technologies, and they are helping more people to consume software than ever before."

WalterBright 12y ago

The notion that the publishing industry was ever able to reliably discern quality is scuttled not only by "Moby Dick", but by a long list of other failures: http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/ http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rej...

afterburner 12y ago
That's a list of "Best-sellers initially rejected", though. Not quite the same as quality initially unrecognized. Some of them could still be books of low quality, that happen to be popular.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  Nobody has found a reliable metric to determine the quality of art, not even close, other than what others are freely willing to pay for it.
  - logicchains 12y ago
    You might be surprised how many people there are who would consider the quality of art to be inversely proportional to what others are freely willing to pay for it. Particularly those in the business of making art that few are interested in paying for.
    - WalterBright 12y ago
      Not at all. I've also run into people who put on stage productions who are disappointed if people actually go to see them, feeling that means they "sold out". While they're entitled to their opinions, I suspect that this is just a rationalization for being terrible artists :-) It's like people who take pride in not knowing anything about technology.
  - afterburner 12y ago
    "not even close" Really? Because while Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are far from perfect, they are quite useful in pointing out movies that have more rather than less quality.

davedx 12y ago

I love Ursula Le Guin's books. My favourite quote by her (if not in general) in this one: “If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.”

CaptainSwing 12y ago

Thanks for a great post! I'm a big fan of Le Guins fiction, as well as her commentary and critique of literature as commodity. Another great (anti-capitalist) novelist who I admire, China Mieville, touched on some similar topics in his keynote speech at the Edimnburgh International Book Festival a few years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-the-future-of-the-novel http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-... "But who decides who qualifies as a writer? Does it take one sonnet? Of what quality? Ten novels? 50,000 readers? Ten, but the right readers? God knows we shouldn't trust the state to make that kind of decision. So we should democratise that boisterous debate, as widely and vigorously as possible. It needn't be the mere caprice of taste. Which changes. And people are perfectly capable of judging as relevant and important literature for which they don't personally care. Mistakes will be made, sure, but will they really be worse than the philistine thuggery of the market? "We couldn't bypass the state with this plan, though. So for the sake of literature, apart from any- and everything else, we'll have to take control of it, invert its priorities, democratise its structures, replace it with a system worth having. "So an unresentful sense of writers as people among people, and a fidelity to literature, require political and economic transformation. For futures for novels – and everything else. In the context of which futures, who knows what politics, what styles and which contents, what relationships to what reconceived communities, which struggles to express what inexpressibles, what stories and anti-stories we will all strive and honourably fail to write, and maybe even one day succeed? "