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Reading, writing, and catching a suntan through the window of a coffee shop.
LXIII: Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)
I have another copy of the edition I read somewhere - someone offloading their sf when moving - but I bought this copy in a bookshop in Scarborough with two or three other books, one an van Vogt (The Mind Cage?), the other an R.L. Fanthorpe. My memory says 10p.
Le Guin's critical utopia - although I'm not sure I'll be discussing that aspect - and she still isn't really doing female characters who are wives or daughters (the Hainish envoy being an exception at the end, but at the end). But sex discrimination is discussed. For those who don't know, the story of theoretical mathematician Shevek's exile from the anarchistic Annares to the capitalist Urras, and the course which led him there. Annares is communitarian, although some comrades are clearly more equal than others, and anything without function is clearly taboo. There is presumably no art in this utopia, and no poetics (like Plato's Republic). Taoism clearly stands as more significant than feminism though.
LXIV: Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction (1971)
I thought I'd read these in sixth form, but I see this was bought in Summer 1990 in Nottingham; I think I like it less these days, and Robbins is a writer I fell off after an allergic reaction to Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. I ought to catch up in due course. Here we have hippies setting up an attraction on a Washington state roadside - shades of De Lillo's White Noise but earlier - featuring two snakes and a tsetse fly. Then one of their associates find a Corpse and nothing is going to be the same again. One female character, but central, and a little Earth goddessy. Robbins seems to like describing female juices. The structure and interweaving of threads and payoffs is brilliant.
LXV: Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)
Bought at Hull University's Waterstones in 1991. Many more female characters here, but Sissy Hankshaw, born with incredibly large thumbs, is the most significant. There's also an author's note, apologising for the use of generic male pronouns. The story of Hankshaw, the world's greatest hitchhiker, and an all-female ranch, and the last flock of whooper cranes.
LXVI: Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, Or Lonesome No More! (1976)
Here I salute Phil Revels (and Richard Warren) who turned me onto Robbins and Vonnegut - and for that matter the White Bird of Kinship Trilogy. I must have read a library copy of this, as this is dated Bloomsday 2001, and was picked up at the late, departed Portland Books, in Leamington Spa. Distinctly substandard Vonnegut, after he had declared he was writing no more novels (in Breakfast of Champions?) and with a little racism which was to expand in late novels like Hocus Pocus. A postdisaster Earth narrated by the last president of the USA, from the ruins of the Empire State building. The gimmick is he has given everyone a new middle name, and thus a new set of families - an idea I'm sure he advanced in a nonfiction piece I must have somewhere. Then it stops. Ish.
I've been trying to track this quote down for years - I'd thought it was Doctor Who or Douglas Adams, or both, in fact it was Slapstick
[A safety officer has looked at the mess and chaos in Bernard's lab, and shouted at him.]
"My brother said this to him, tapping his own forehead with his fingertips: 'If you think this laboratory is bad, you should see what it's like in here.'"
LXIII: Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)
I have another copy of the edition I read somewhere - someone offloading their sf when moving - but I bought this copy in a bookshop in Scarborough with two or three other books, one an van Vogt (The Mind Cage?), the other an R.L. Fanthorpe. My memory says 10p.
Le Guin's critical utopia - although I'm not sure I'll be discussing that aspect - and she still isn't really doing female characters who are wives or daughters (the Hainish envoy being an exception at the end, but at the end). But sex discrimination is discussed. For those who don't know, the story of theoretical mathematician Shevek's exile from the anarchistic Annares to the capitalist Urras, and the course which led him there. Annares is communitarian, although some comrades are clearly more equal than others, and anything without function is clearly taboo. There is presumably no art in this utopia, and no poetics (like Plato's Republic). Taoism clearly stands as more significant than feminism though.
LXIV: Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction (1971)
I thought I'd read these in sixth form, but I see this was bought in Summer 1990 in Nottingham; I think I like it less these days, and Robbins is a writer I fell off after an allergic reaction to Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. I ought to catch up in due course. Here we have hippies setting up an attraction on a Washington state roadside - shades of De Lillo's White Noise but earlier - featuring two snakes and a tsetse fly. Then one of their associates find a Corpse and nothing is going to be the same again. One female character, but central, and a little Earth goddessy. Robbins seems to like describing female juices. The structure and interweaving of threads and payoffs is brilliant.
LXV: Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)
Bought at Hull University's Waterstones in 1991. Many more female characters here, but Sissy Hankshaw, born with incredibly large thumbs, is the most significant. There's also an author's note, apologising for the use of generic male pronouns. The story of Hankshaw, the world's greatest hitchhiker, and an all-female ranch, and the last flock of whooper cranes.
LXVI: Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick, Or Lonesome No More! (1976)
Here I salute Phil Revels (and Richard Warren) who turned me onto Robbins and Vonnegut - and for that matter the White Bird of Kinship Trilogy. I must have read a library copy of this, as this is dated Bloomsday 2001, and was picked up at the late, departed Portland Books, in Leamington Spa. Distinctly substandard Vonnegut, after he had declared he was writing no more novels (in Breakfast of Champions?) and with a little racism which was to expand in late novels like Hocus Pocus. A postdisaster Earth narrated by the last president of the USA, from the ruins of the Empire State building. The gimmick is he has given everyone a new middle name, and thus a new set of families - an idea I'm sure he advanced in a nonfiction piece I must have somewhere. Then it stops. Ish.
I've been trying to track this quote down for years - I'd thought it was Doctor Who or Douglas Adams, or both, in fact it was Slapstick
[A safety officer has looked at the mess and chaos in Bernard's lab, and shouted at him.]
"My brother said this to him, tapping his own forehead with his fingertips: 'If you think this laboratory is bad, you should see what it's like in here.'"
