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always talking about home
Mar. 2nd, 2009 02:36 pmSo much interesting was said at the Always Coming Home Book of Honor panel at Potlatch that I almost wished I hadn't been moderating it so that I could have afforded to spend some attention on writing it down. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amy_thomson, one of the panelists, recorded it, but many of us spoke without microphones, especially audience members. I haven't heard the recording and haven't heard how it came out.
The panel description writeup framed this as a discussion of the nature of the book and of how it should be read. I began the panel by saying something like this:
But here I can just point you in the direction of the excellent liveblogging ofbadgerbag, who covered several panels (see elsewhere on her LJ). So I can make my further comments in the form of adding useful footnotes and a bit of clarification to what I said on the panel, as reported by her:
( Further comments below the cut )
amy_thomson, one of the panelists, recorded it, but many of us spoke without microphones, especially audience members. I haven't heard the recording and haven't heard how it came out.The panel description writeup framed this as a discussion of the nature of the book and of how it should be read. I began the panel by saying something like this:
If you turn to the title page of Always Coming Home, you see credits reading "Ursula K. Le Guin, author; Todd Barton, composer; Margaret Chodos, artist; George Hersh, geomancer; maps drawn by the author." A little unusual for the title page of a novel, and the cover of the first edition assures us, right below the title, that this is "a novel."General opinion on the panel and among the audience was that a novel can be many kinds of things, and that this thing is one of them. But my point was that the term "novel" raises certain expectations in many people's minds of a certain type of continuous, end-directed narrative. And when confronted by a book which is more of a mosaic, a portrait, they're likely to become bewildered and hostile; thus Norman Spinrad in the review referred to in the panel description.
You turn the pages, and after two different authorial introductions and a poem, you come to the main text. It's pretty straightforward, the autobiography of a woman. It continues on for a while, but on page 41 it stops and says, "The second part of Stone Telling's story begins on page 173." What is this, a choose-your-own-adventure story? Should you turn to page 173 or go on to page 42? If you go on, on pages 46-47 you find this chart which explains a few odd terms like "Third House" and "Blood Lodge" that you might have come across in the story, which is fine. But is this actually a novel as people customarily understand the term?
But here I can just point you in the direction of the excellent liveblogging of
badgerbag, who covered several panels (see elsewhere on her LJ). So I can make my further comments in the form of adding useful footnotes and a bit of clarification to what I said on the panel, as reported by her:( Further comments below the cut )
