The United States Post Office has just announced the 33rd stamp in its literary arts series – a striking image of novelist and essayist Ursula Le Guin.
Behind the portrait is artwork depicting a scene from The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin’s 1969 novel. It features the Gethenians, a species which is generically asexual, but randomly become male or female during estrus.
Le Guin predicted such a society would avoid any gender-specific roles and invent shared ways to raise children. The radical premise of the novel is captured in its best-known line – the king was pregnant.
Such an idea emphasises the role of chance in our lives. We are born into bodies, families, health, ethnicities and societies we did not choose.
Open mike 17/02/2021 thestandard.org.nz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thestandard.org.nz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Sit List: 5 Berkeley events to broaden your horizons
Learn about birds’ nests; listen to works by women composers; discuss what’s fact vs fiction in the disinformation age; view flower art; and watch online performance.
Listen to some of the greatest women composers of our era at an online concert organized by Ensemble for the Times. Image: E4TT
BIRDS AND NESTS When the trees lose their leaves, we know that winter is here. While it may signal a turn in the weather, it also means that we can better see birds’ nests perched in their bare homes. In this Zoom family event by the UC Botanical Garden, “Birds of the Garden and Their Nests,” garden staff will show you a collection of real nests that they have saved from tree trimmings. You’ll learn about how different birds build their unique nests with specific materials and listen to six bird calls from winged creatures that live in the Garden. After this event, you’ll be inspired to fly around your living room while c
How Yevgeny Zamyatin shaped dystopian fiction While Wells, Huxley and Orwell invented flawed worlds, the Soviet writer was living in one.
Literary Gazette under the title “Certificate concerning social eugenics”, one of them read: Type: Zamiatin. Genus: Evgeny. Class: bourgeois. In the village: a kulak. The product of degeneration. Footnote: an enemy. With its threatening references to degeneration and eugenics, this ditty would not have been out of place in
Der Stürmer, the Nazi tabloid that was being published in Germany at the time. For Zamyatin, one of the best known authors living in the Soviet Union, the attack was the culmination of years of dangerous insecurity. In September 1929 he resigned from the Soviet Union of Writers, and in June 1931 wrote to Stalin asking permission to leave the country. Maxim Gorky interceded on Zamyatin’s behalf, and his request was granted. Accompanied by his wife, Lyudmila, he left Russia in November 1931 and settled in Paris, wh
THE symbolism is certainly pleasing enough. Out goes the Churchill statue from Joe Biden’s White House office. In its place comes a bust of the Mexican labour activist Cesar Chavez. This sits across the room from the head of Rosa Parks, the 60s civil-rights hero who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Also removed, originally hung there by Trump, is a portrait of President Andrew Jackson: a slaver who forcibly (and lethally) replaced Native Americans with white Americans on their own land. Trump preened (and pressed a button on his desk for Diet Coke) in front of flags from the branches of America’s military. Biden will sit, more prosaically, in front of an American flag and another with a Presidential seal (there’s no Coke button).