As I mentioned in my earlier post, LHoD left me with several thoughts/musings. The one that really stuck with me was how she treated gender.
"My landlady, a voluble man..." (pg. 38) starts chapter 4 of LHoD. Even before we've gotten that far, Le Guin has used an overabundance of man pronouns, despite her narrator's hesitance to do so. As a reader, I then become prone to thinking about all of the characters I meet as males, not the strange combination of hermaphrodite and androgen that the citizens of Gethen are. (Note: apparently, in one of Le Guin's short stories about the Gethenians, she changed all of the pronouns to "she." I think it would be really interesting to read that story and see how my reactions are different.) Whenever Le Guin brings out the "feminine" side of her characters, I find myself questioning about whether or not what they just did was enough to classify them as female, instead of male.
I guess what I'm really objecting to is Genly's classification of "male" actions and "female" actions. Betrayal is not a female-exclusive thing, in my mind, and neither is non-violence. Hm.
It would be very interesting to ask Le Guin what exactly she was trying to get across with the gender-ambiguity of LHoD. Are the views that Genly express ones that Le Guin hold herself, or just something she was just using? She doesn't explore gender differences very deeply, given the fact that the entire book is about a population where gender doesn't truly exist.
Now, that's an interesting idea. In Gethenian culture, does gender not exist, or are both genders represented in everyone? My personal opinions tend more towards the latter.
All in all, I loved Genly's reaction when his compatriots finally arrive on Gethen. Just another example of Le Guin's writing prowess. And I really want to read the short stories she's written about other Gethenians. My favourite parts of the book were the little snippets told from other people's point of view or taken from mythology.
-J
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Birds Of A Feather...
Nat and I went semi-exploring today, during our random free time between classes (i.e., I needed to go to the real post office and she wanted to look for her doctor's office). So we're driving around what seems to be part suburbs/part middle of nowhere, looking for her doctor's. We turn into a relatively residential neighbourhood and all of a sudden see this...
In case you can't tell, those are WILD TURKEYS. In someone's front yard. OH MAN.
I'd heard that people in New England have wild turkeys wandering around, but that was my friend from Maine who told me, not suburban Massachusetts!
AND THEN...
We're pulling into the parking lot back at school and we see a bird dive down right in front of us. There's a hawk (or possibly falcon, I can't tell the difference) that lives on campus and it POUNCED ON A CHIPMUNK RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. We turned around and then it flew off, eating the dead chipmunk it had just caught.
I am suitably impressed by Massachusetts now. We get cool stuff in California, but nothing like this!
-J
In case you can't tell, those are WILD TURKEYS. In someone's front yard. OH MAN. I'd heard that people in New England have wild turkeys wandering around, but that was my friend from Maine who told me, not suburban Massachusetts!
AND THEN...
We're pulling into the parking lot back at school and we see a bird dive down right in front of us. There's a hawk (or possibly falcon, I can't tell the difference) that lives on campus and it POUNCED ON A CHIPMUNK RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. We turned around and then it flew off, eating the dead chipmunk it had just caught.
I am suitably impressed by Massachusetts now. We get cool stuff in California, but nothing like this!
-J
Monday, October 20, 2008
Cold Weather Thoughts From A California Girl
I highly enjoy this "actual seasons" thing.
The leaves do dance prettily on the ground, just like the poets say.
Trenchcoats FTW.
-J
The leaves do dance prettily on the ground, just like the poets say.
Trenchcoats FTW.
-J
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Les Petites Histories
I've been surrounded by short stories recently. Fortunately for me, that is not a problem.
The first in my slew of short stories is Neil Gaiman's collect, Fragile Things. Gaiman is one of my favourite authors, who has posted several of his short stories online (I highly recommend 'A Study in Emerald'). My copy of his work is actually a book on CD, read aloud by Neil himself. *sighs* It is absolutely beautiful. I am normally not a huge audio book fan (being easily distracted visually and therefore prone to not completely listening to what is playing), but for Neil, I will make an exception. I heard him read 'Other People' aloud when he had a book signing near my house a few years back, and I was completely blown away. The way he reads, the inflections that he knows to add, make the stories live and wrap themselves around you. Gaiman already has a very distictive writing style (though he is one of the most versitile writers I know), and his rendition of his works make it all the better. The one problem with completely immerging myself in Neil Gaiman? I start writing my manuscript and he comes out of my pen, not me. Oops.
The second in my short story adventure is Sword and Sorceress, Vol. XIII, an anthology edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. S&S anthologies have reached up into the 20s and are a collection of fantasy short stories collected and edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley (continued after her death by Diana L. Paxson and Elisabeth Walters) that all feature strong female characters in roles generally not assigned to women. The stories can be hit or miss (for the tradition epic-adventure-fantasy-story can really bore me after a few paragraphs, and those will occur), and MZB and I differ in our opinion on what makes a good story, but I still really like them. Because the first book was published in 1984, and have been published almost yearly since them, many of them are only available in used book stores. Now, I'm trying to collect them all, and I currently have 11 of the 22 (*celebration for having reached the half-way point*), only just purchasing #11 (er, technically Vol. 13, since I'm not collecting them in order) yesterday. It probably would be possible to find them online, but I enjoy searching used book stores and finding them there (and hey, it's got me half way through, so I think I'm doing pretty well). Despite the stories being published by different authors, they all are rather similar (in fact, MZB will remark on how each year her anthology will have an unofficial theme to it), exhibiting a common writing style generally found only in fantasy.
The final short story is my own. I have an idea in my head about what I want my story to look like, and how my characters (well, at least the main character, Violet) will act. I have to be careful, though, about when I write. If I write too soon after reading any short story, that author's writing style will bleed through my own writing, leading it off in a different direction from the one I originally intended. I've had to scrap entire paragraphs because I will look at them and go, "Nope, that's not me. Can't have someone else writing my story." However, reading these other short stories gives me inspiration. When I write short stories, I make them short. That is, we're talking several pages, max. Not 15 pages minimum, like this one needs to be. Reading Gaiman's and other author's longer short stories, though, where they still pull off a story in a reasonable length of time without making it seem to be only a snippet of a novel, has really encouraged me and made me feel as if I will be able to make my own work. : D
Now, back to the books for me.
-J
The first in my slew of short stories is Neil Gaiman's collect, Fragile Things. Gaiman is one of my favourite authors, who has posted several of his short stories online (I highly recommend 'A Study in Emerald'). My copy of his work is actually a book on CD, read aloud by Neil himself. *sighs* It is absolutely beautiful. I am normally not a huge audio book fan (being easily distracted visually and therefore prone to not completely listening to what is playing), but for Neil, I will make an exception. I heard him read 'Other People' aloud when he had a book signing near my house a few years back, and I was completely blown away. The way he reads, the inflections that he knows to add, make the stories live and wrap themselves around you. Gaiman already has a very distictive writing style (though he is one of the most versitile writers I know), and his rendition of his works make it all the better. The one problem with completely immerging myself in Neil Gaiman? I start writing my manuscript and he comes out of my pen, not me. Oops.
The second in my short story adventure is Sword and Sorceress, Vol. XIII, an anthology edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. S&S anthologies have reached up into the 20s and are a collection of fantasy short stories collected and edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley (continued after her death by Diana L. Paxson and Elisabeth Walters) that all feature strong female characters in roles generally not assigned to women. The stories can be hit or miss (for the tradition epic-adventure-fantasy-story can really bore me after a few paragraphs, and those will occur), and MZB and I differ in our opinion on what makes a good story, but I still really like them. Because the first book was published in 1984, and have been published almost yearly since them, many of them are only available in used book stores. Now, I'm trying to collect them all, and I currently have 11 of the 22 (*celebration for having reached the half-way point*), only just purchasing #11 (er, technically Vol. 13, since I'm not collecting them in order) yesterday. It probably would be possible to find them online, but I enjoy searching used book stores and finding them there (and hey, it's got me half way through, so I think I'm doing pretty well). Despite the stories being published by different authors, they all are rather similar (in fact, MZB will remark on how each year her anthology will have an unofficial theme to it), exhibiting a common writing style generally found only in fantasy.
The final short story is my own. I have an idea in my head about what I want my story to look like, and how my characters (well, at least the main character, Violet) will act. I have to be careful, though, about when I write. If I write too soon after reading any short story, that author's writing style will bleed through my own writing, leading it off in a different direction from the one I originally intended. I've had to scrap entire paragraphs because I will look at them and go, "Nope, that's not me. Can't have someone else writing my story." However, reading these other short stories gives me inspiration. When I write short stories, I make them short. That is, we're talking several pages, max. Not 15 pages minimum, like this one needs to be. Reading Gaiman's and other author's longer short stories, though, where they still pull off a story in a reasonable length of time without making it seem to be only a snippet of a novel, has really encouraged me and made me feel as if I will be able to make my own work. : D
Now, back to the books for me.
-J
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