You can't make an Omelas

. . . without breaking eggs. The USPS, which contrived to lose the package P sent me in July and offered no effective remedy, has redeemed itself in a tiny way by promising the world a 3oz Ursula Le Guin stamp. It will become available sometime this calendar year and cost 85c. Ya gotta love Le Guin, unless you are The Man or really smug in your cosy status quo. It seems appropriate to post [har har] about her and all her works on the day when US politics turns over a new leaf; and we a briefly hopeful that all will be well. In the fight for the fat demographic [I am talking about the bell curve not the waistband of America] of the middle ground, successful political parties get to look increasingly indistinguishable. Writers like Le Guin can imagine, and present, alternative versions of reality; which may make us think a) how we live with each other is utter crap b) could do better. "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings." is a quote from her acceptance speech for a Literary Award in 2014. In those 5 minutes she ironically and adversely de-constructs the industry which brought her to prominence . . . and the podium from which she delivered her acerbic pfffff collapse of stout party remarks.

Two years ago, I wrote about her being kind and constructive to a much younger writer. And you're never too old to read Earthsea.

If you have 18 minutes, you could, with advantage and probable discomfort, listen to a reading of Those who walk away from Omelas: 

""With the clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city of Omelas, bright towered by the sea . . . 

They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us that the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going . . . those who walk away from Omelas.""

We don't have to accept injustice, inequality and cruelty just because they are hard to discard.

Umbrella

When we was nippers in the 1960s, and living in England, one of the high points of coming to Ireland to visit the rellies was the chance to scoff a Fudge Cream Urney Bar [bottom L] unobtainable in Haslemere or Portsmouth.

• Who said Umbrellas? - you can sing it Les Parapluies De Cherbourg 1964
• U-boats rediscovered in Hamburg and then buried
• St Ursula of Guin on Unheard voices.
• Utrecht - The Miffy Museum [miffyprevvy]
• U2 - Ireland's own
• UB40 - red red wine
• UP - Uttar Pradesh
• UP - Pixar 
• Downhill on casters - skateboarding thrills in N Carolina
• UP United Provinces = Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Provinciën 1581-1795

That would be: Denthe, Friesland, Gelderland, Groningen, Holland, Overijssel, Utrecht, Zeeland. Duh, I can count: that's eight provinces. Yes, yes, but Drenthe was too poor to pay taxes and so was unrepresented in the States General.  No representation without taxation!

Driving Miss Ursula

I occasionally scan 3quarksdaily to see whaaaaat's happenin'? on the liberal arts front. A tuthree days ago I was pointed to a delightful essay in Granta in which Alison Smith gives a very personal tribute to Ursula le Guin. In 1988, when Alison was 18 and Ursula about 40 years older, the famous writer came to visit Rochester NY and the young student was assigned to be her gopher-chauffeur for the week. Alison had been a huge fan of Ursula's books since she was a bookish sub-teen but didn't get gushy and completed her minder's assignment with discretion, honesty and empathy. My reading is that the author found her company far more congenial than that of the English Faculty, who covered their awe of the famous write with a layer of bluff blokey bravado that must have been tedious if not oppressive. By the end of the week young Alison had been transformed by the respect and kindness of the older woman into someone with ambition, confidence and a, probably misplaced, fascination with French culture. She was also determined to be a writer, rather than having pretensions to being an author. To this end she started writing, more and with more regularity [ahem - like myself], until now 30 years later she is scrabbling some sort of a living from her craft. You should read the memoir. If you have a bookish, possibly gay, teenager / twenty-something about your household then you should be sure to make a copy for them. Ursula le Guin died this time last year - I've written my own tributes.

About 15 years ago, The Beloved TB came out . . . and embraced the practice of the Vietnamese peacenik and Dharma teacher, Thích Nhất Hạnh. After being exiled from his native land during the Vietnam War, TNH started a community in the Dordogne Valley in SW France called Village des Pruniers / Plum Village. Round about the time that I went on my transformative pilgrimage to and from Santiago de Compostella, TB went to Plum Village for a week of meditation and silence and underwent her own transformation.
We subsequently fixed up a telephone booth in the yard at home to facilitate our emergency clothing changes before flying off to rescue sheep caught in wire fences. In 2006, we took Dau.I and Dau.II to Plum Village for the Summer Retreat because it was billed as For Workers in the Neurosciences. I've written about how a succession of contingent accidents found me addressing 1,000 participants about Mindfulness in Medicine. I was famous for five-and-a-half minutes [me and Onnie were so taken with the theatre that we ran over by 30 seconds].

In 2011, Plum Village announced that, as their retreats were getting flooded by Irish citizens in need of mindfulness, Mohammad TNH would proceed to the mountain four green fields of Ireland . . . and could somebody local make that happen? That somebody materialised as a small committee of dedicated TNH fans including The Beloved. It was like having to organise part of the World tour of a middle ranking rock band [with fewer drums and guitars, but more bells and saffron. . . and no drugs or alcohol]; because Hissonour announced that his party would include at least 50 monastics from Plum Village. The Itinerary settled down to a) Filling the Dublin Convention Centre with 2,000 bodies for an evening talk; b) Filling the Killarney Convention Centre for a three-day retreat for 800 people; c) Addressing the Norn Iron Assembly at Stormont. A succession of contingent accidents found me as the designated driver of the Popemobile a rented 7-seater people carrier. With my grey hair, dismal-Eeyore demeanour and dressed in my interview-wedding-funeral suit with a sober tie, I looked the part. A peaked cap would have degenerated the costume into parody, so I skipped that.

Very respectful I was too:  not speaking unless addressed, not restlessly searching for soccer commentary on the radio, doing my best to go easy on the gear-changes. There was one dicey moment on the way up to Stormont [R] when I missed a turn in suburban Belfast and did a quick-thinking U-turn neeeeooooww across two lanes of oncoming traffic. The monk sitting in the passenger seat turned a whiter shade of pale but the VIPs in the back seats were in a state of satori - they didn't yelp! anyway. The following day we headed back to Dublin. TNH elected to sit in the front seat to see a bit of the countryside; his team of attendants sat in the back singing Vietnamese pop songs and generally larking about - because the Stormont gig had gone rather well and we were all relaxing. TNH was quietly amused by a sign on the Gormanston toll-booth:

 Arrive Alive 

and when we finally pulled into the place they were staying in Dublin that evening, he put his hand on my arm and said "Arrive Alive" with a little nod of appreciation. Maybe he'd been more alert than I thought when I did the two-wheeled U-ie the day before.

Sunday Sort 03 Jun18

Dau.I walking into the Sunset having righted (a small corner of) the World.

• Clare Daly TD giving credit and taking none ". . . it's a nonsense, lads . . ." for the Referendum
• The 2018 Gloucester Cheese Rolling at Cooper's Hill as ballet. [prev 2015]
• Nice BBC photo-essay with maps of the Faroe Islands [prev]
• Same locale: Islands in the Sky. 
• New Film: The Worlds of Ursula le Guin to be launched next weekend: trailer.
• Feeding the 10,000 at a Sikh temple in Delhi
• The last programming language I a) learned and b) used was Perl (2001-2007). All my friends dumped that as soooo yesterday and embraced Python. I'm glad I didn't learn Python because now Ruby is the language of now.
• Done with the Golden Ratio [prev]? Soooo yesterday. Now it's the Silver Ratio.
• I was on about changing your mind which is A Good Thing. Here's CGP Grey's riff on changing opinion.
• And Thursday's word-a-day Enantiodromia: The tendency of things, beliefs, etc., to change into their opposites . . . see poster at top of post!
• The most peculiar entertainment you'll see this weekend - solid potato salad.
• An explanation of the Celtic Tiger - incl. some errors of fact.
• Push-back on Sanofi being smug about Ambien and its peculiar adverse effects; while equally not condoning Roseanne Barr's racist trash talk.

Obits: Masekela and Le Guin gone

Hugh Masekela a legend in music is dead - yesterday morning, prostate cancer, apparently. No better way to remember him than in his music:

• Township jive
• Khawuzela
• Bring him back home
• No woman no cry
• Sossie

That is all.

For Ursula le Guin, who died on Monday after being poorly for while, I can refer you to three recent Blobs. I came to Earthsea late, regretting I didn't read that stuff much earlier. Le Guin on how to write [regularly and often]. On gender politics. I won't here say "That is all" because I'm just flitting across the surface of le Guin's work and it is not to be treated as background music.

How to write

I was invited to sit in on a lab meeting at The Institute convened so that one of my insanely hard-working colleagues can have a couple of hours quality time with her graduate students and let them give status reports including future plans for, say, the next 90 days.  The first chap up was wrestling with his data and said that, when analysis was over at the end of November, then he would start writing up his thesis.  It was unfortunate timing for him, because I'd just read a wonderful essay by Ursula Le Guin [previously] [previEarthsea] Where do you get your ideas from? The answer trotted out by Harlan Ellison is "his ideas come from a mail-order house in Schenectady".  Le Guin predicatbly says a number of interesting things in 7,500 words.  Early on she asserts: "Well, the secret to writing is writing. Writing is how you be a writer. It’s only a secret to people who really don’t want to hear it."

I (gently) laid into the poor student and said that he, and everyone in the room, had to write a paper or several papers and/or a thesis and if he/we deferred the writing until "the spirit be upon us" or "the moment was right" or "when I've finalised my data-analysis" we all be at nothing. Writing is how you be a writer applies not only to fiction but to science where literary fluency can be a little less obvious than in The Arts Block.  But I had a solution which I borrowed from round-the-world-on-a-bike adventurer Alastair Humphreys. In his DO-lecture: The Importance of Jumping Rivers, Humphreys, ever restless for new challenges, says that he had recently undertaken to do 100 push-ups a day (!).  But he recognised that he was physically incapable of doing this right now, so he started with one push-up a day and built up on that psychological foundation.  This solution to the creative process has a certain resonance with Claude Shannon's analysis of the Creative Process: break-down the problem to more manageable chunks.  We agreed that everyone would aspire to writing 500 words a day, or if not 500, then 300 . . . or 100 [to start]. . . but every day.  It took a bit of time to settle into my rhythm but, as Blob-readers know, I do my 500 words a day every day regularly before breakfast. As well as habit, it must also be partly a process of finding your medium.  I was/am crap at mainstream science because I lacked the discipline to finish projects: get them down on paper so that they pass muster with an editor and 2-3 referees; a process which always included disheartening rewrites and extra analyses and tedious grunt work. The Editor at The Blob accepts everything I submit: that's why the content is so variable in quality and comprehensibility. Long before I blogged, I wrote book reviews.

It may not work.  When Dau.I and Dau.II were 9 and 11, we got nervous about the lack of Education At Home that was going down and I implemented a New Regime.  They would both keep a diary: it could be about anything at all but every day each child would undertake to write at least the same number of words as she had years. Dau.I was biddable about this because she was reading a book a day and had some aspirations, even then, to be a writer. Although that assessment may be coloured by hindsight, because she is definitely now an aspiring writer. Dau.II wouldn't engage, and within a couple of weeks had subverted the system to expose its patronising unreality with sentences like:
* This sentence has nine words and not one more. [Hofstadter previously]
* Counting: one two three four five six seven eight.
* I will write two words less than my sister
Well it wasn't quite like that, she wasn't that precocious, but those sentences do capture the feeling of obeying the letter while undermining the spirit of the exercise.

Elsewhere in her Ideas essay, Le Guin finds resonance, truth and empathy from a statement by Virginia Woolf, that the ideas might come in a blizzard but unless-and-until she could catch the rhythm, nothing was going to get down on paper. Le Guin can't get going until she has given he principal characters names. And indeed, revealing the true name of a magician is a key theme in The Wizard of Earthsea.  The name is a bit like the daemon, although less visibly present, associated with each character in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.  La Woolfe, Le Guin, The Blob are associated in [some] people's minds as a troika of talent.  For me, I restlessly read my corner of the blogosphere, making time to do so, looking for copy. But nothing gets written until I get a Hook: a phrase, a sentence that writes itself in the air . . . then I can start top-and-tailing and filling out that thought until I've got my 500-700 words.

On being a boy

I was reading a piece on the blogosphere a few days ago (I'll never be able to back track a proper citation - sorry) about an ophthalmic surgeon who was examining a child with retinitis pigmentosa.  Suspecting that he might be dealing with Laurence-Moon or Bardet-Biedl syndrome [nobody call it Laurence-Moon-Bardet-Biedl Syndrome LMBBS anymore - so yesterday and clearly contradicted by the genomic data], wrote in his notes " . . . polydactyly might be present".  This elicited a tetchy comment like "Jaysus, how specialised do these consultants get?  Could he not look at the child's hands and count fingers?"  Errm, quite so.

I was reminded of this when I read a recent interview with Ursula le Guin at home in Portland OR.  Last year she won the National Book Award and was presented with her medal by the much younger Neil Gaiman. I covered that in April.  I like the idea that they arranged for Gaiman to make the award. He too started off marginalised as a fantasy writer and that genre is generally not reviewed in the Arts pages of the national broadsheet newspapers because it is not read by the Oxbridge Ivy League of Gentlemen insiders who edit the newspapers of record. Doris Lessing hacked these people off when she started writing science fiction in mid-career.  Le Guin has garnered all sorts of awards - Hugo, Nebula - for fantasy but last year was the first time her talent as a writer (unqualified) was properly recognised.

We can talk about the sniffy and judgmental attitude to what these colossal authors write about.  At her acceptance speech last year Le Guin lashed out a broadside at these hangers-on to the coat-tails of creative genius having the temerity to dictate how, and about what, writers should write. Writing is not about writing a best-seller to make a load of cash for your agent, writing is what writers do because they can do no other. As Neil Gaiman has elsewhere advised, part of becoming a great writer is the process of finding your own authentic voice. As he says, he's the person in the World who writes best in the style of Neil Gaiman.  Unless you have something truly original to say; something that nobody else could articulate in the same way you might as well say nothing and leave the trees standing in their Northern forests.  If that's true for the Arts Block, it is even more true for Science where half the scientific papers ever published are so slight and derivative that nobody, not even their authors, will ever refer to them again. What a waste of trees!

But the invisible background of the success of Lessing and Le Guin is that they have made it despite being women. Lessing famously exposed the sorry pretensions of the publishing world to recognise talent by submitting her next novel Diary of a Good Neighbor under the pseudonym Jane Somers and getting it rejected.  Catherine Nichols, who is a woman and an author, has got some data on the fact that gender matters to these drones who affect to manage what gets published. She sent out identical e-packages [cover-letter, biog, first few pages, telephone and e-contacts] to 100 agents, the gate-keepers of access to publishers.  50 of these packages went out from Catherine Nichols and 50 from George Leyer.  The differential response was wearyingly predictable: 2 bites for Catherine while George got 17.  That, my enumerate friends, is statistically significant. As sassy Caitlin Moran says, that such unconscious bias is unfair, regrettable . . . and STUPID. If your career as an agent or publisher depends on landing the next JK Rowling, you're stacking the odds against having a future at all if you ignore the contribution of half the people on the planet.

I had the honour last week to fly-on-wall a mentor/mentee meeting with a smart young Master of Imm, whom I taught briefly two years ago. He has landed a really nifty project at the interface between immunology and development which I shall write about when it is published in Nature next year.  He has also landed two supervisors, both established women-in-science, so he'll have a rare and interesting experience of the process of learning to science.  In the settle-down chat, one of these women admitted that she had recently had her gender equality cards, quite rightly, marked.  Along with all other Faculty, she had been asked to submit a list of potential key-note speakers for next year's academic seminar series. She thought about this briefly - she's ever busy - and sent in a short list of people in her field she'd like the students to hear.  The list manager came back by return - all the people on her list were men; this was bad for equality and could she think again. She had fished for the most visible in her field and come up blokes.  Whatever the reasons, that's the regrettable reality.

Earthsea? Magic!

It has been a pleasant conceit of The Blob to slag off the cult of Harry Potter, mostly on the grounds that it cannot be that good.  No matter how much you have enjoyed the books; no matter what dreams you have had about quidditch triumphs or pulling a rabbit out of an owl's hat - Potter doesn't deserve its winner-takes-all success. Somebody needs to whisper in your ear that there are other books out there that should be read before you set off on your second Harry Potter.  The great god BBC has recorded two of Ursula le Guin's best books and The Wizard of Earthsea will be available to hear in just under two weeks time on Monday 27th April 2015.  Neil Gaiman has described it as simply the best book about Wizard School.

Meanwhile you can hear Le Guin's [L hand] gender-bender novel The Left Hand of Darkness now.  You can, if you prefer, go off and read the books because they are still in print despite being published decades ago. LeGuin is now 85 and looks it; and is content to look like an old woman, comfortable in her own genuine, crinkly, skin as she explains in a wonderful interview recorded to launch the recordings.  These stories might be fantasy or science fiction but they are also stories for adults which inform us about today's issues perhaps more than they informed people about the times when they were published.  'Darkness' addressed the issue of gender and sexuality and ponders the consequences of there being a spectrum rather everyone fitting into one box or the other.  This is much more widely accepted now and therefore many people are happier in their own unstraight-forward skin.  Consultant endocrinologist Donal O'Shea was on the wireless a week ago suggesting that 1:10,000 or 1:20,000 people might feel that they just aren't whom their external genitalia determined them to be at birth.  That's a tiny minority, far less than the number of people who are blind or Down's syndrome or have cystic fibrosis but it's still half a million people across the planet who need accommodation for their sense of gender.

Another persistent theme in Le Guin's works is the magic power of knowing something's true name and how we must be circumspect in sharing this information with others.  This a common theme in many cultures and would have been absorbed by the child Ursula as she was raised by Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, ground-breaking academic anthropologists from Berkeley California.  From the beginning Ursula was introduced to The Other: whether that was Ishi the last of the Yahi people or the foreign academics who came to visit with the Kroebers. The effect on the young writer was for her to embrace difference as the complement to herself rather than seeking to become more like girls of her age and class in a comfortable bath of sameness.  I first read the Wizard of Earthsea about ten years ago and wondered how I had missed it when I was a teenager and how much of a difference it would have made to my sense of self when that was still plastic.  It's never too late, though.  If you read it now you'll benefit from it, if you have a child to read it with, so much the better.