R.I.P. 2018

“ One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time, plenty of time...” Ursula Le Guin 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness

"Whatever may happen in the bad times, the verbal arts, at least, tend to become very important. It’s really important what you say in the bad times.” Ursula Le Guin 2017 Conversations on Writing with David Naimon

The first month of 2018 was not yet over before Ursula Le Guin died.  No Time To Spare, her wonderful selection of online writing, especially for her blog, had been a Christmas hit in December.  I bought it Christmas Eve at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park, California.

This Christmastime I returned to Kepler's and saw a special LeGuin endcap, with that book still featured, as well as collections of short stories, her last volume of poetry, and the collected Earthsea novels, plus a new book, Conversations on Writing, which consists of interviews she gave in 2017.  This book suggests some of the reasons that Le Guin was and will remain a strong influence on other writers, and all kinds of writing.

In terms of her fictions, her particular gift of anthropological science fiction is likely to influence even more visions of the future, as that future is more and more shaped by climate and ecological crisis.  Margaret Atwood notes that all the oppressive aspects of the future she imagines in her novel, The Handmaid's Tale, do happen in parts of the world or did happen in history.  Many of the striking imaginings in Le Guin's novels are derived from Indigenous cultures of the past and present.  Her insistence on cultural attributes that serve the Earth as well as humanity, and preserve a realistic relationship between them, will only grow in importance.

Three very different writers who died in 2018, Philip Roth, Neil Simon and Tom Wolfe, did much to illuminate American life in the 20th century, and in so doing, helped define our view of our own culture.

Roth in his meticulous fictions, in both his grim and hilarious modes, and Simon in his comic plays and screenplays, explored Jewish-American experience, and revealed much about both sides of the hyphen.  They also transcended nationality, imagining their way into other sorts of lives.  Because Neil Simon was so popular, his achievement is perhaps undervalued, particularly his screenplays, including a lesser known gem like Max Dugan Returns. Tom Wolfe on the other hand came from the WASP world, and was equally comfortable writing about the rich and famous, and the oddball outcasts.  He attempted more consciously to define the culture he observed.

Other prominent authors died in 2018, including physicist Stephen Hawking and screenwriter William Goldman, and most recently, Israeli novelist Amos Oz.  But I also recall connections to work by some lesser-known figures: the British philosopher Mary Midgely, who did such crystalline work on evolution, and American philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose books on film I read in the early 70s.

I have a weakness for books on arts and entertainment history, and Gerald Nachman's Raised On Radio was a fairly recent and serendipitous delight.  That's the thing about books--they are the most accessible legacy in the arts, small physical objects that circulate and are otherwise more easily available than films or TV shows, let alone the evanescence of performances.

Other authors who died in 2018 include: Harlan Ellison V.S. Naipaul, Peter Masterson, Paul Henderson, Chin Yang Lee, Michael Freedland, Donald Reed, Dave Anderson, Robert Bausch, Sue Hubbell, Arlo Paasilinna, Raymond Fraser, John Hosttleter, John Taylor Gatto, Angela Bianchini, Louise De Dalvo, Lise Payette, Adam Clymer.

Anne Olivier Bell

Robley Wilson, Roy Wagner, Herbert Meier, Robert Venturi, Alan Abel, Evelyn Anthony, Anita Miller, Andrew Coburn, Ann Moss, Eduard Uspensky, Matthew Aid, John Christgau, Stanley Morgan, Anne Olivier Bell (at age 102), Leo Litvak, Julius Lester, Donald D. Evans, Samuel Schreiner, Jack Ketchum, William Whitehead, Michael Harner, Barbara Wersba, Cynthia Heimel, Kate Wilhelm, Philip Kerr, Anita Shreve, Gena Turgel.

Peter Mayer was an accomplished publisher, the founder of Overlook Press.  Fred Bass ran the Strand Bookstore, the New York Mecca for used books.

Fornes

Neil Simon, Maria Irene Fornes and Ntozake Shange were perhaps the most prominent playwrights lost in 2018, at least from a US perspective.  Others included Alla Sokolova, John Ford Noonan,  Jean-Loup Rivere, Ira Gasman, Steven Jeffreys, Wakako Yamauchi, Hugh Whitemore, Tom Griffin, Tom Murphy and Tony Hogland.

Donald Hall

Donald Hall and Tom Clark are probably the best known poets in the US who died in 2018, at least among those who regularly read poetry, other poets being prominent among them. Though poets arguably still have a high profile in some parts of the world, many would seem to work in relative obscurity.  But they write on anyway, and even if their readers are few, they still can touch individual lives at particular moments, in the unpredictable serendipity of the written word.

What follows is not an exhaustive list of poets who died in 2018.  But it is a long one, and testifies to the endurance of this form in every part of the world. Even if many are not mentioned elsewhere, they are due the honor of being named this once:

Tom Leonard, Julia Vinograd, Janet Paisley, Jerry Gant, Fernando del Paso, E.D. Blodgett, Meena Alexander, Claude Peloquin, David Helwig, Francois Montmaneix, Gyorgy Karoly, Peter Everwine, Priscilla Uppal, Lady Judith Kazantis, Vishnu Khare, Robin Metz.

Jalal Mansur Nurridin

Jalal Mansur Nurridin, Pavel Reznicek, Olav Angelli, Tamaz Chiladze, Matthew Sweeney, Anya Krugovoy Silver, William Corbett, Chemmanan Chacko, Ciril Ziobec, Muntarzir Baba, Jenny Joseph, Darmonto Jatman, Haim Gouri, Val Mulkeens, Luo Fut, Kedarnath Singh, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, David McFadden, Mateja Matevski, Madara Woods.  My apologies for any errors in spelling.

May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

A Larger Reality

Ursula LeGuin made two different but related points, both vital, in accepting an award from National Book Awards.

 The first has to do with the literary legitimacy of science fiction and fantasy writers, and the importance of future visions to the future itself:

 "And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. 

 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." 

 The second point is the restraint on the freedom to write and on true authorship that's been growing a long while and has now reached nearly impossible proportions, not because of some fascist or even national security state, but because of the takeover by the institutionalized greed of market capitalism:

 "Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. 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. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

 Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. 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. Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words." 

 This is almost her complete speech--it's under six minutes in the video above, and the complete transcript is here.