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Thursday, July 25, 2019

July 10,

July 10:  Bernie's picks
Noctis Oceanus - Ursula K Le Guin (UKLG for the rest)
The Fine Arts - UKLG
The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House - UKLG
The Elders at the Falls - UKLG *
From UKLG’s “rendering” of the Tao Te Ching, Ch. 19

note:     ————-——————————————-
…”Raw silk” and “uncut wood” are images traditionally associated with the characters su (simple, plain) and p’u (natural, honest).

What a summary in 4 lines of the Fine Arts:  Beauty and truth... perceived through
sight, emotion, intellectual or animal-sensual?
Eye and heart, win the prize... vs. blind and misjudged by the mind.


Judging beauty, which is keenest,
Eye or heart or mind or penis?
Lust is blindest, feeling kindest
Sight is strongest, thought goes wrongest.
===================================
Leguin Resources and Bibliography
Her website:  https://www.ursulakleguin.com/home
     One link in it includes some past speeches for a flavor of her wit, down to earth
     practicality and passions:   https://www.ursulakleguin.com/speeches
 
               
-  A Left-Handed Commencement Address, Mills College, 1983 - On being a writer, &    
          therefore a man (text only: http://www.pacifict.com/ron/Mills.html )
 -  Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award Speech, Ursula
        Le Guin December 2014- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk       

        (Her fierce defense of art vs. its commodification)
 -  The Emperor Has No Clothes Award, 2009 - An interesting retelling and consideration
        of the familiar story, shifting into comments on religion, text only at:
           https://ffrf.org/outreach/awards/emperor-has-no-clothes-award/item/11980- ursula-k-le-guin-       
    - Aussiecon 1974 Guest of Honor speech - Australian SF conference airing
          her strong opinions about “genre” writing, its categorization and literary value judgments
Some selected books of poetry, essays, interviews:
- FInding My Elegy, New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010, 2012
So Far So good, Final Poems: 2014-2018, 2018
Conversations on Writing, with David Naimon, 2018
Words are My Matter, Writings about Life and Books, 2000-2016, with A Journal                of a Writer's Week, 2016
the wave of the mind, Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the                 Imagination, 2004
Steering the Craft, A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, 1998, 2015
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, A new
               English Version by UKLG
,1997 [A wonderful “rendering”, elegantly simple,
               with comments, annotations & chapter notes]
-  The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula Le Guin, Vol’s 1 (Where on
               Earth) and 2 (Outer Space, Inner Lands)
, 2012

“NON-LEGUIN-ETRY”  - All these next poems taken from Poetry of Presence, An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Ed. Cole-Day, P. and Wilson, R.R, 2017

Visiting Mountains - Ted Kooser
The plains ignore us,
but these mountains listen,
an audience of thousands
holding its breath
in each rock. Climbing,
we pick our way
over the skulls of small talk.
On the prairies bellows,
the grass leans this way and that
in discussion;
words fly away like corn shucks
over the fields.
Here, lost in a mountain’s
attention, there’s nothing to say.
==================================

A Gift - Denise Levertov
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.
=========================

One Heart - Li-Young Lee
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
========================

a song with no end - Charles Bukowski
when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric”

I know what he
meant
I know what he wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable

we can’t cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as ours.

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