CZM Book Club: Discussing Two Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Hello ed, Welcome to the Coolson Media book Club, the only book club where actually this week you had to have done the reading for you yourself, because I didn't do it for you.

This is actually the way that every book club works. It is now we're more like a traditional book club.

But I'm your host, Margaret Kiltroy, and as you may have noticed, incapable of synchronizing their chance with me. Are my guests who have not failed at anything else, including Stephen Monicelli, who's occasional host of It could Happen here, and also Hazel Akasha, who helps out with a book club.

How are y all?

I'm doing alright, Margaret, how are you?

There's a cat? I'm happy.

He's a really cute, really sweet recording cat.

Is a good recording cat.

I also have my ursula Lagwin cat mug with me, my commemorative Lagwin mug that I'm going to now sit down on the counter and make too much noise.

Steve, how are you?

I'm doing all right?

The reason I had you on today that you're already aware of.

But I'm going to let the audience.

Know, dear audience, this is not a regular episode of coolsone Media Book Club, because I am not reading you a story. Instead, we are going to talk about stories that you may have already read, or you may go out and read now, in which case it'll be a little confusing. We're going to talk about the work of an author that means a lot to me. We're going to talk about two stories by the perpetual anarchist matriarch herself, who would hate being called a matriarch, Ursula k Legwin.

If you haven't read Those Who Walked Away from omelas and the Day Before the Revolution, or haven't read them recently, you might want to pause here and go take a look. They are very s and they are on the internet for free. Or you can resign yourself to spoilers and forever holds your peace about it. I don't make your choices for you, because, as La Gwynn herself once said, an anarchist is one who choosing accepts the responsibility of choice. You, listener, are accepting the responsibility of your choice to listen without having read the story that that quote comes from. Anyway, what do y'all think of the stories.

I think they are excellent examples of what the short story form can do, and they really get to the heart of I think what Ursula Eloguin was interested in in terms of politics and ideology, and they're just beautifully done. They're fun to read.

Yeah, these are really gorgeous stories. There's some really excellent pros chesses like description really really well effectively in these stories to build out a world that you don't need to know the name of the city that liyah Odo lives in, but you can really feel, you know what it's like to work to liberate a city for your whole life and how that changes how you interact with it as you walk through.

We're going to get more into the themes of it as we start reading Reddit comments from you all, dear listeners from that it could happen here Reddit, and so I'm sure we'll have an awful lot more to say. But yeah, I just I love I feel back. I'm just like I just like LeGuin. Everything is good. These stories are amazing. It's been in particular, The Day Before the Revolution is one of my favorite stories ever written, and it's probably my favorite LeGuin story, and it just gets at so many things so beautifully. It is both an amazing piece just on aging and aging within a movement, but also like one of the more interesting micro analyzes of anarchism that I've ever read, And you know, it means different things to me. I've read it twice. I

read it once a long time ago, and then I've read it just recently, and I love how I get different things out of it at different times, and I know I'm going to get more out of it soon. To recap these two stories for the audience here is just the raw spoilers, so that people have a chance of any idea of what we're talking about. The Ones who walked Away from Omolas aka the story that I always try and call those who walked Away from Omolas, But that's not his title. Its title is The Ones who Walked Away from Omolas is a story about a perfect society, and it is critiquing the very idea of there being a perfect society. And it's like basically being like, all right, imagine a perfect society. Oh, you imagine different

society than I do. Then imagine than the one that you want to imagine. But there's a kid in the Omlas hole that's not what it's called in the story, but that's what history has decided it is called. There's a kid who is being tortured by neglect in just a horrible fashion, just absolute atrocity, and that's what allows the entire society to exist. And then some people are like, I'm willing to accept this, and other people are like fuck all this and they walk away, whether metaphorically or physically.

Is that a decent missing any key points from that one?

Yeah. One of the mean things that Ursula is playing with in the first half the story where she's describing this beautiful, perfect society is like sort of pushing the reader on how much they're willing to accept a utopia. And she says, you know, like do you accept omole? Ask? Do you accept how beautiful it is? Do you accept the children running around? Do you accept the kites in the sky? And specifically that's why she introduces the child and in the hole is to play with like how much utopia readers are willing to believe in, Like there has to always be a catch, and that's you know, one of the interpretations of what it means to walk away from Omolas is to believe that there doesn't have to be a catch that you can just that is,

a perfect utopia could exist out there, and you don't have to hang the joy and the mirth on suffering.

Yeah.

Yeah, And I really loved the way she sort of ends it. It's not just the walking away, but this idea that you know, they're walking away to something that's perhaps even harder to imagine.

Yeah, and it's specifically like, I'm not going to tell you what happens to the people who walk away, you know, even though they are the titular I think that word is pronounced funny characters, those who walk away from Omolas, all right, And so the second story, the Day Before the Revolution is not literally said in the world because Omolas is set in kind of a no place, right, a utopia meaning no place I swear I know things.

But in the.

Introduction to The Day Before the Revolution, at least in the Zene version that we've been linking people to, LeGuin offers a couple paragraphs of introduction and describes the main character, who is one of the primary theorists of anarchism within the revolutionary society that she is in. It's a prequel to the book that Dispossessed, which is the nineteen seventies heterogeneous aetopia. Oh, I can't remember what she called it. Anyway, She's like, it's a utopia. It's not a utopia when she describes anarchism in that book. But you don't have to read The Dispossessed to read and enjoy this story, I would argue, actually, the story is easier to read and easier to enjoy than The Dispossessed, which is one

of my favorite books, but is not as short and delicious as this particular story. Anyway, at the end of the introduction, describes our main character, Leah, do you think how are you all pronouncing this name? Saying Liya Liah, Let's go with Liah is one of those who walked away from Omlas and I love to me.

This is the key of all of.

My understandings of both stories, is that one sentence that she writes.

Because all right, well, okay, I'll get to that.

This story is about lah Odo, who is the Kropacin of their world in some ways, right, but is specifically by this time. The story starts a seventy two year old woman who is very aware of her age, has recently survived a stroke, whose husband and love of her life is dead, and she is watching the revolution begin to unfold, taken on by young people all around her, and she's thinking about her own role within that revolution, what she has left to offer, how she kind of just wants to be herself and go for walks, but instead she's like, well, I guess I accept the responsibility of the choices that I've made, and instead I'm this figure who has to write letters and be a little bit of a figurehead, even though our whole goddamn point

is we don't do that shit. Here I am doing it. And also along the way, a nice, young, sweet thirty year old man comes and focks her and then does her transcription for her and is good shit, I don't know.

Yeah, And that story specifically ends with they know that the revolution is coming. There's like one of the outland provinces is succeeding, and they're planning a big rally, a big general strike for the next day, and she's at the meeting and you know, people are like, can you speak, and she's, you know, again going through this journey, you know, And it's kind of like a main theme of the story is that she is not a very good anarchist.

You know, they all came in a movement, like they are all so free of shame, and they love their long hair. And she's like, I don't. I just kind of missed my husband and I said all of these things, but you guys are the ones who have taken it and run with it. Yeah, And she specifically says like I won't be here tomorrow.

Yeah.

And at the end, she walks up the stairs to her bedroom, which is always the thing that she's dreading throughout the story, and kind of walks into a field of these flowers that she never had the time to learn the name for. And it's really peacefully surrenders to her death. I mean, it's up for interpretation. You might interpret that differently. I interpret it as, you know, surrendering to death, but also surrendering to the new world. And it's also like kind of deeply a story about how the difference between revolutionaries and the people who grew up in the world so that they've created and the things that you know will sort of never be able to be bridged. The new world is birth, but it's not

a world for her. She is at her heart or rebel. She is throughout the story like rebelling against her aging body and you know, telling herself, no, I can't drown and self pity, I can't succumb to my age. She's always been that person and you know, is ushering a lot the revolution, but won't be there tomorrow.

Yeah.

Something I found really charming about her rebellion is that it even extended to her position in the movement and the responsibility of that choice that she made long ago that you know, carried forward and now she's like resisting the image of being this matriarch of the revolution and is exhausted by these young people who want to just come and like look at her, even though she feels like she has nothing more to teach them than what she's already written in her books. So it was like a beautiful character study really that helps bridge the allegorical mode that o'melis is written through.

Yeah. And the reason that I find so interesting the line something like you know Laya is one of the people who has walked away from omil Us, is that a lot of interpretations of Omalus and a lot of critiques of Omalus come down to the idea of like.

Why don't you stay and fight instead? Right?

And I think the fact that Omlas is written, as you said, in allegorical style is such an important part of this because Liya is specifically called someone who walked away from Omolas. Liya has not walked away. And it's really funny because LeGuin is a pacifist anarchist or was or I don't know whatever, death is just going in another direction.

So I'm going to use is as.

A pacifist anarchist, right, And there's sort of an implicit like these characters are like, you know, not necessarily like violent revolutionaries, but she's describing her actions and she mind a like shipyard and she's like kicked police officers, she's like pissing on statues. Like she's not walking away to go set up a society somewhere else. Obviously, lenaras in The Dispossessed, is essentially the anarchists have kind of had to flee and set up their own thing, but there is this like stay and fight, And so I actually think that in the allegorical style of Omlas, to walk away from Omlas is to walk away from the acceptance, is to walk away from the like social piece that is undergirded by all of this horrible shit. And so

I think that actually, in a Laguin style you can stay and fight is walking away from omaalas Okay, And another part I love about the Day before the Revolution is she's like, oh, when I was like twenty two, I came into the cities with my head full of really boring ideas like better wages and vote for women, you know, like, oh, what we cared about was money and power. That's not what matters. Like, I love this idea of anarchism as this transcendent idea that goes sort of not just like capturing these things, but going.

Beyond these things. That's my big takeaway.

And what you can't walk away from because it's too sweet and is probably undergirded by suffering. I mean probably isn't undergird whatever I'm allowed to say legally. There's ads, they're here, here they are, and we're back.

Yeah, And I think this is a good time to maybe start transitioning into some of the reddit discussion. I want to bring in a comment from Reddit user gts eighty fours. The great thing about doing a Reddit thing is I have these wonderful, thoughtful answers from people with names.

Like GTS eighty four.

Yeah, GTS eighty four, Like there's peg leg hippie on my notestock. Y'all are so great. I'm so grateful for all of the wise words that you've shared. Thank you for making this what it is. We're talking about walking away and we're talking about staying and fighting. D e four says one thing I will always find fascinating are the people who think that quote walking away is literally leaving and insist that they would rescue the child and fight.

Yet when you interrogate these people about their own actions when it comes to things like smartphone use or chocolate consumption as to examples of products utterly dependent on child exploitation, their own actions don't line up with their insistencies that they would rescue the child. This is not to judge them for those choices, but to point out that Omolas is less fiction than they supposed and that they have been making a choice to stay for a long time.

Of course, there is a discussion about what quote walking away actually entails and to what extent and might include fighting. Are people who flee the state to live in the woods. Thinking back to cool people, episodes about the Great Dismal Swamp. Those who walked away? Would you include people in prison for fighting back against state oppression, people who lived in the trees to try and stop cop city. Yeah. I think that this again just building on this contradiction around what it means to walk away. What LeGuin is setting up with this metaphor he is walking away fighting or is that a third choice. One of the things that I have enjoyed about this story is that it always seemed to me like the right answer was to stay

and fight. You know, like we're given this assumption that all of the joy and beauty of this world is built on the torture of this child. But it seems to me that people willing to torture a child might not be reliable narrators.

Yeah, that's true.

So, you know, and Legwin is setting you up this dichotomy, this binary choice, and it seems so clearly that the option is to break out of that binary and have a revolution. And I wonder if that is part of what she is doing. Is she is like trying to intentionally get people to flex that muscle and to think about where else they could flex that muscle.

You know, I mean, I think, you know, the pair of the stories answers one of those questions pretty clearly, with the bridge being the Wind's own words and the couple paragraphs you mentioned earlier. You know, I think it's in at least the Wind's mind that someone like Layah is someone who walked away. But also you could view what she's done as fighting, as being imprisoned and resisting the impression that she's faced. So in that sense, I think it takes many forms. But you know, that's why I think of it as an allegory, right, I mean, it's less about the actual act of walking away, it's more about what that represents, because within the boundaries of this allegorical frame, like we have the choice to either

you accept the social peace and all those nice things that rely on that suffering, or to refuse it as the basic assumption that doesn't necessarily mean actually removing yourself from the world, because that's not poss within the context of actually doing anything in the world.

And it's interesting because, like Gwynn has explored a lot the ideas of can you just literally walk away? In other pieces where you have a book. It's been a couple years since I read it. I think it's called The Eye of the Heron, and it's a book about there's some people living on an alien planet and one group of people is being oppressed by the other people, but they don't want to like fight back literally because they're pacifists.

I hope I'm getting this right again. It's been a couple of.

Years and they just literally walk away and they're like, fuck off into the wilderness. In kind of a way that's a little bit reminiscent of like what the not actually oppressed Puritans thought they were doing when they came over to colonize North America. But like, you know, this sort of like walking into Tara Knollys kind of idea is explored in that book, right, but you have other books that you know. The word for world is forest, which is an anti colonial militant struggle allegory about the Vietnam that Star Wars stole the name and or from.

And the entire third book in the original trilogy of Star Wars movies is just a weird let's call it an homage, but it's written by a pacifist, but it is describing using violence to defend your homeland, and so it's interesting to me because also she's also obsessed in her work about the idea of coming home, right, and then we talked about it in the Day Before the Revolution.

You know, the real journey is the return home is something that she's very interested in. And so how does that relate to walking away? Right, if the real journey is to return home? And so I think she's kind of doing both. I think sometimes she means literally like oh no, man, just walk out of there, you know, like hit the bricks cools share Zone style with the skeleton, you know, security Guard.

Does sharre zone, the shar Zone. That's it.

Yeah.

I could also see this in The Late of Heaven, which is not in the Hanish cycle, sort of a one off book. It's about a guy whose dreams come true and has like fucked up psychiatrist, which is a kind of different exploration of the unintended consequences that happen when you try to make the world better.

Yeah, and I mean in The Dispossessed, which is the technical sequel to the Day Before the Revolution, there's the image of the circular wall they have for the landing pad where the ship from the planet comes and lands, and kind of the fundamental question around that wall. Is it to actually keep out this ship, which could land anywhere, or is it really to keep the society that they have on this moon from this symbolic way to get back to Earth or not with Earth, but this earth like planet and the relationship with that earth like planet and the political factions that are there. It's like still and tangled. They're not fully separated. They didn't actually fully walk away from this bigger system that they're operating within.

Oh, that's true, And like one of the whole points, it's been a couple of sears since I read that book, But one of the whole points is we need to coordinate our science across national borders, even though we have like wildly different ideological positions.

Correct.

I want to bring in a Reddit post here as well, from words, words, woods dogs to kind of I don't know, bring us back a little bit into what does it mean to walk away? I think it does a disservice to the story to interpret walking away as one big solitary act. My takeaway is the big question do you try to ignore what you can't Unknow? We can ask ourselves this a million different ways in everyday life. We all know that cell phones are awful for labor exploitation, environmental extraction, enabling a big tech But what do we do when we feel like we need a cell phone?

Do we buy the new one that our provider will give us a good deal or a big payment plan on, or do we spend time looking for a used one that could last us as long as possible. Living our values isn't just something that happens in big, seemingly consequential moments. It happens every single day in all of those little ways.

You can insert that question into everything. What kind of housing we choose, transportation, our food choices, the kind of job we work. Making ethical choices often means taking of hour of poverty, working more and often harder, and being looked at as a weirdo by many around you. To me, that's what walking away is. It's choosing the path that often feels lonely when everyone else around you is literally buying into it all.

There's a lot of truth to what they're saying, you know. The idea of walking away. In my mind, when I consider the pairing of these stories, is it's that it's not just this single monumental act. It's it's like a beginning of a change in the way that you live your life. Life and what happens after that is kind of, you know, up to you and the responsibility of your choice.

And then we see that later, you know, with Layah, and you know, she's grappling with all of her choices and is kind of criticizing herself for being a bad anarchist quote unquote and the imperfectness of her choices, but she's still leaning into the responsibility of those choices, whether they're all perfectly ethical or not, or constrained by other things that are that are larger than her. She's striving to move at least towards something that's better. And so I think, yeah, that you know, it's an individual choice.

I think also it's you know, I think that's why it's depicted as lone people walking away. Sure, you can, you know, learn something in the context of the society you're in, but it is really about the choices that you make as a person. If you, you know, at all believe that individuality or you know, singular consciousness is phenomenon that's not some sort of illusion.

But let's not talk about science, Okay.

So I love this idea because Okay, I love the idea that walking away is a solitary action because only you, as an individual can do that breaking You can break from omelas and walk away, but coming home as a collective action, right, And that's even something that that Lia is almost a little bit struggling with.

I mean, Lia was absolutely.

Part of a coal crew of revolutionaries in her day, but she's like watching the fact that this is like spread, it is such a collective thing now, right, Whereas, like she a lot of her work, you know, the writing of words is more solitary than the average job.

It's not truly solitary. That's nonsense.

And I don't think anyone worth listening to truly believes it's a totally solitary action. But it is a more solitary art than most. And that's what Lia was getting up to, right, was like, oh, alone in a fucking cell, you know. And yeah, I really like this idea that walking away is the individual like, you know, you got to take the pill from the This is a metaphor that no one's done anything bad with. There's this movie that not a lot of people have seen, and that two trans women wrote this an allegory about being trans It was called the network or the something like for the matrix.

Yeah that's it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The weave, the tapestry, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, something one of these things. But yeah, this idea that like in order to break out of this thing that is something you do solitary but then coming back collective action.

I'm into it.

Hazel and I were talking a little bit earlier about the sort of intentionality of writing, where like one of the points of writing in an allegorical style is like, I don't think Legwinn thought.

About like all of this shit before she wrote this.

She wrote a thing and then her words were exposed to millions of people, and you know, and that's one of the beauties of writing.

Yeah, good stories are smarter than their authors. And I think this story is really fuck's smart, and I think that Legwin is really fucking smart, and I think that it takes a smart author to make a really smart, really smart story. But I want to bring in another red comment. This is from Count Pickman, who says, I don't think I'd have the strength, willpower, whateverness that is necessary to make that choice. But I think that part of that is because walking Away in the story is a solitary choice. Those people in the trees and cop city and in prison for fighting the state, they make those choices with other people. Oh my closest friends would walk away from omolass with me. Could I do it? Then?

I think, then what I was incapable of doing alone, I would do in a heartbeat. That makes me wonder why does everyone who walks away and the story do it alone? LeGuin writes, each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Do they have to go alone? Or do they all individually choose to? It makes me sad that they are alone. I have always felt that the only way we can do anything at all, especially when we create new ways to be, is together. I will have to think more about what it means to walk away.

And I want to say I a little bit cheated all of my thoughts that I'm coming up with now I have read the reddit. You all absolutely influenced the shit out of all my thinking around this stuff.

Yeah, you guys fucking killed it.

Yeah, I mean I think you know. I don't mean to be too critical of the commenter who read the story and you gave us their great thoughts, but it's it's not so literal. I think to even be contemplating this is, you know, signifies that you've kind of already made that choice. And it dovetails with what you were saying, Margaret, it's about, you know, quote returning home. Is that collective action because it's not like, you know, the people in the story, it's not like they don't see these people walking away either, And so if you saw your friends doing it, I'm sure you would, you know, also make that choice. But I do think ultimately, yeah, it's just kind of it's a representation of that that rupture that

has to happen internally within one person, and that it's something that you have to choose.

And I think, you know, the decision to leave is one that you could make on your own, but believing doesn't have to be leaving does not necessarily.

Have to be individual.

Yeah, yeah, And I think I don't know, I'm interested in that, in the tension between those things.

All right, I have another Reddit comment I want to read from Available Rise sixt' six point nine. I have heard this story summarized as a torture of a child to maintain happiness for a town before and I know, neglect is a type of torture. I just have always personally found intentional neglect is so much harsher than cruelty of actions or violence. Like when I got told about that case of a girl who is isolated by her parents and grew up unable to speak or become independent.

After her rescue, she got saved. People tried to give her a second lease on life, but it failed because of her neglect. She became a case study and an oddity. It was a psychology class in high school, and it felt like the worst thing ever, maybe because violent action seems quicker and at least ends so you can heal, or if you die, you don't have to feel pain anymore.

The citizens who leave because they can't stand being there choose more neglect. They can't stand the foundation, so instead of taking responsibility or fixing it, they leave. I hate that narrative too. I hate that when your home is broken, you leave it. You don't reclaim it, you don't change it, You just abandon it, neglect it, and neglect your responsibilities to it. I believe we can fix things, or try at least. I am also a small action's ripples kind of person, so a deep cut for me is the line about the child not receiving a kind word. Ever, so many times a kind word has helped me through a bad day. The child also knew kindness once, but they were taken and put there to be neglected. I also know this isn't the point, but was there a

lotterary system for when the neglected child dies? Do they just grab a kid off the street? Is it an honor that here to give your child to everyone else's happiness? And then do you just leave because you feel guilty and pain you neglected your parental responsibilities to your kid. Is there a bunch of shitty parents suffering out in the world for their choices? That would be cool, but they probably live in omelass thinking they're in the right like most shitty parents are in reality. I don't have a lot specifically to say to that one. I just think it's an interesting idea, this idea of like neglecting your responsibility to fix things by just walking away. It's an interesting challenge, and it obviously only works if you

take walking away in one literal way versus this other way. Whatever you know, like like you know, what does it mean? Where you're like all right, fuck it I'm not using a cell phone, or like fuck it, I'm not eating meat, right, And then you're like, oh, but you're not fixing the problems, And then you're like, I don't know.

I just find this an interesting concept.

That's also interesting to me because I often think about the state as a way to avoid responsibility and to avoid engaging with the consequences of our actions. You know, like if some fuc shit's happening and I call the cops, the cops are then going to have to do the violence to mend that instead of me or you know, taking on the de escalation. You know, I'm I'm not explaining this very well right.

Now, but now you're passing the buck onto Yeah. I mean, like I don't do violence. I just call a guy with a gun to come do my violence and put people into cages.

Exactly, or you know, like in a kind of the less fucked up way, like I'm calling a poorly trained social worker to like come and de escalate a situation instead of me taking on the you know, the onus to de escalate that. And I don't know, I feel I think that as like a deep disservice to ourselves to like not build skills and talking to people, and also as a passing the skills and also passing the violence.

Yeah, I mean, I think this, you know, this comment has legitimacy if you know, you don't kind of take away from the story this idea that this thing is unreformable. And I think that's one of the fundamental points of an allegory like this is that she's framing this as a thing that cannot actually be fixed. So any attempt at amelioration of this particular thing isn't really going to do what people want to happen.

Yeah.

Yeah, And you know, I think a lot of people who are frustrated with capitalism or nation states or what have you, you know, they probably think something along similar alliance. And then you know, you get into the whole reformism debate, which I think she's trying to sidestep here.

But you know, we can't side step so the products and services that support this podcast.

Certainly we can't size step our obligation to running their content.

Years as enter back.

And to kind of build on that last comment, Stephen, that's one of the things that's really interesting to me about the allegory is that it means so many things to so many different people, and so we can draw all of these different kinds of conclusions from it. And that's one of the things that's really powerful about fiction is because it means so many different things to different people, you can get a really wide range of experiences from the story. That's like seventeen hundred words, Like, it's really quite short. Most of what we try to run on the show is like between three and five thousand.

Yeah, all right, I'll read one now. So this is from Express Tangerine forty two. They wrote this story reminds me of a dark cartoon where people celebrate turning off a baby killing machine, but they only turned it off and never destroyed it or asked who made it and why. It bothered me that the story is based on the line that everyone is in you unity, much like Justice for All. This is a fantastic story, and I would love to know whether if enough people left, would the greater good no longer be considered worth it, or if it was a cute animal, how that would change that line.

I mean, I think they're just trying to I think this commenter is just trying to get at this idea of like when is enough enough? How many people you know have to leave? And how would it change if it wasn't a child? And I mean, I think, you know, these are all interesting thoughts, and you know, I think we kind of get to that a little bit with the Paired story later on, where it's like it it seemed like it was just a few people, and then it starts to build and build, and suddenly there's this whole movement that spans a nation, and so you know, everybody has their breaking point, and you know, a child being tortured through neglect seemed like a pretty vivid one that you know, would trigger most people, given that not

everybody you know feels the same about animals or something else.

But it triggers most readers.

But it doesn't trigger most people, right people, But like, it doesn't trigger most people to actually walk away?

Are they?

You know?

Like because most people accept this, And that's something that I think most readers understand that most.

People do accept it.

I think that's one of the most brilliant parts about the story is like, oh, you are not even going to believe me about the society until I say there's a kid being tortured, And now you believe me, because we all kind of know that there's darkness in the center that everything is built on, you know, and we all know that, especially in the colonizing nations, the colonial core.

People are fully aware of that now and it's still you know. It changes people's behavior, but it doesn't fundamentally break it. Okay, I want to read a piece that made me think a lot. I don't even know if I have any specific responses to it. Prune Tracy wrote, I work as a music therapist and researcher and aged and disability care and this story really made me think about the assumptions we make about suffering and joy. I find it interesting that the story starts by challenging the reader to subvert the bad habit of thinking only pain is interesting. I think there is a really dark tendency to pedestal pain slash suffering to the point where people can't envision that life could be worth living with pain

slash suffering, rather than accepting that it is part of life that can be beautiful and worthy of joy. Suffering in many stories slash narratives is like a vicarious Catharsis for the audience true crime looking at you, I see this in the way that the reactions to the suffering of the child are described. The people of o Molas are conscious of suffering, but most can't envision that life without the absence of suffering could be worth living for themselves.

This really got me thinking about how people who haven't experienced particular types of suffering can be so spooked by the thought of it that they would sooner choose death than to live with it. This comes up a lot in voluntary assist to dying and disability discourse. I see this a lot working with and caring for people who have demanded It is a fucking brutal disease. But the thing I'm constantly reminded by people with an actual diagnosis is that it is not all doom and gloom. Many people have extraordinary moments of joy, connection, love, and personal growth amongst the challenges, and many of the challenges are related to systemic issues rather than the disease itself. Similarly, the way that the people of Omolas rationalized the cost

benefit analysis of keeping the child and suffering too degraded to know any real joy recalled for me many ablest assumptions about the value of disabled lives and capacity of disabled people to live rich and wonderful lives, assumptions that stem from the inability to imagine disability as anything other than suffering, and the inability to imagine suffering is anything other than that which should be avoided at all costs.

This also made me think about how many people reacted to pandemic lockdowns when they were asked to temporarily give up some freedoms to protect others. People were really quick to minimize the impacts of COVID on disabled people and older people. Their suffering was okay because they already suffered.

I'll never forget how quickly non consensual dnrs were quietly rolled out for disabled group homes in some places. I was also really struck by the passage. But to praise despair is to condemn delight. We can no longer describe happy man, nor any celebration of joy. In my research work, the focus is almost always on how to reduce suffering or deficit. This is what gets grants and funding. Yet the outcomes that people with lived experiences consistently report is that most meaningful to them are joy and fun. For them, the aim is and to eliminate their suffering because it cannot be eliminated, but to live with joy and meaning.

So I really like that the story simultaneously critiques our inability to imagine or value happiness without suffering while critiquing our need to minimize the suffering and others in order to cope with the knowledge that it exists. And I know it's a lot, but one of my main things that I think about this is again, but comparing these two stories is, Oh, my loss is like, I guess we're going to try and do a perfect thing.

So we got to put a kid in a whole.

And the Day before the Revolution is like, nah, people want to do drugs and live in the sewers.

We can't tell them not to.

We're just like maybe you shouldn't, you know, like maybe that's a maybe I shouldn't, but whatever, we're not telling people they can't do that.

And like, I know that's not about disability.

Specifically, although it talks about addiction a little bit, but this like very specific thing in the day before the Revolution, where like, we are not building a society without suffering, We are not building a society without pain. And she's also aging and accepting her own disability as she ages in it, and she's like, I've been stripped down to the foundation, that's all that's left of me. But she's still okay, you know. And she's not okay because like it's great, everything's going to get healed. It's just like okay, because it is what it is.

I think that comment also reminds me or it brings up both feeling of the Mark Fisher quote like it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, and there's so much of that in omol Acid. Also in the Day before the Revolution, but you know, Lugwin is explicitly asking like what are you capable of imagining or are you capable of leaving could be real? And you know, it's we can't imagine the utopia without, you know, without there being the dark side.

And also again the tension with Laya Odo in second one, the Day before the Revolution, of how she is a good revolutionary but she's not a good Odonian.

Yeah, all right, here's one about Day before the Revolution from peg Leg Hippie. They wrote, Odo, the thought leader of the anarchists in this world, seems tired and weary in the day before the Revolution. At one point she thinks, quote, why the hell did she have to be a good Odonian? I think the allegory from before is present year two between Odo and Legwin. And there's an enormous amount of anarchist ideas in The Dispossessed, and it must have been a lot of work for Lagwin to put together such a coherent package, all while placing the events of a novel into that world. The weariness of Odo is a reflection of the weariness of the author. I think the day before the Revolution is l. Gwinn telling her readers

that she isn't Odo, or that even if she is, then why the hell does le Gwin have to be a good anarchist? I mean, you know, great, great comment kind of hits the nail on the head. One of the key themes of the story is, you know, this tension between people who you know, play these significant roles in movements, which every movement has them, and you know, can teach other people based on what they've learned, and the tendency to put these people up on the pedestal and treat them less as people and more as like symbols or figures. And so her resistance to that is really strong in the story, and you mentioned it at the top of the show, like I'm sure Lea Gwynn would similarly bristle at you know, this idea that she's

some sort of matriarchal figure of you know, lefty sci fi, even if she is, you know, a giant. And so I think it's like, you know, an interesting exploration of the reality of, you know, this tension within anybody who is interested in anarchism. It's like, there are these people who kind of are giants in movements, but there's this really strong principle that we shouldn't, you know, exceptionalize them in these ways that we've seen the downsides of that time and time again throughout history, and so yeah, I mean it's it's just a masterfully, you know, well done exploration of that principle through this character study that really humanizes what that tension could look like.

When I was about a wee traveling anarchist who was interested in writing fiction, I interviewed Leaguin about anarchism and fiction, and in it I asked her was like, are you an anarchist? And she was like, oh, I don't. I don't know that I like deserve to be. She was like, I don't know that I do enough of the work, you know. And I was like, well, can we claim you?

And she was like, yeah, I'd be honored. And I'm paraphrasing here, but not by a lot. And I think it's that, like, you know, she's like not an Odonian because she's like still just kind of trying to live.

Her life, you know, and her as Liah is real.

Strong, Like I know that the whole point is that she's not Liyah, but like, there's so many interesting things, Like I think about when Legwyn died, a bunch of anarchist science fiction writers we all like messaged each other and we were like, what the fuck do we do now, you know, and then like the slow consensus we reached was like, oh well, like well we got to do it now. And rereading this story like hit me really hard thinking about that moment where it was like, the shoes are too big to fill with one person. We're just gonna cram a lot of us into there as best as we can, you know.

Anyway, that was myself indulgent response to that.

And when I first read The Day Before the Revolution, before I did that interview with her, and I felt more like the It was just that kind of funny to be like, I've read the story twice, and I read it once as a young man, and now I read it as an old woman, you know, and I get to like be both and I am again I am way closer to thirty than I am to seventy two.

But like, you know, it still was just like really interesting to realize I read it the first time as this just like I was just a frontline anarchist who wrote some scenes, you know, and now a lot more of my work is words, and so it's just fascinating to look at this at two different points of my life.

And like, I think one of the reasons LeGuin is such a masterful writer is that both are presented so well. Like all writers, we have to write the other. And she is not layah right, I'm willing to accept that, you know, but both characters feel very real.

I want to share a comment from Count Pimkin again, the section that talks about how Odo felt anarchism before she learned about it and elaborated on it, how she felt quote at the bottom of something. I grew up in a mostly stable, middle class household in the US. I did not grow up experiencing the bottom of society.

Only by reading the perspectives of those at the bottom and then being a poor adult did I start to understand stupidly. I feel envious of those who grew up with that inherent understanding. I was never rebellious, always a quote good kid, meaning I was obedient out of fear. I've had to build my own capacity to rebel into myself by surrounding myself with friends who can rebel. Part of my inherent nature seems to be that I am someone who wants to follow a good set of rules, where if everyone followed them, everything would turn out okay, lawful, good, I guess, or maybe it's related to my autism. But that desire to run up against the limits of the law and process has unraveled until what I am left

with is mostly kindness and support for those around me, mainly for other queers. I'm thinking of a lot about this, like reflection on what it means to feel anarchism before you learn it. I think I identify a lot with growing up as like the good kid and needing to learn how to rebel. But the quote that you said at the beginning Margaret that an anarchist is one who choosing accepts the responsibility of choice. I think a lot of people kind of instinctually sort of know that, and I think that's like, can be an easy thread to start to pull on. And it's definitely the thread that kind of pulled me into being here.

I mean, I think, you know, what attracted me to the idea earlier on, you know, when I first started reading more factual political philosophy and read things like Legwin, was that, you know, at the core of you know, anarchist ideas. As she says, it's not like the bomb throwing, you know, sort of labeled as terroristic motif. It's about cooperation and choice and responsibility. And I think a lot of people who might consider themselves rule followers are actually people who like cooperation and wish that we lived in a society where more people actually cooperated instead of competed or you know, we're at odds with each other in some way. And so I think that can be a helpful mindset shift for some people, given that you know,

this desire of like, oh, if more people could just follow the right rules, we would all get along. It's more of like if we knew how to cooperate, then things would be better.

Yeah, Margaret, you and I often talk about like blueprint anarchism of like a lot of people think that leftism or anarchism or you know, idealism any kind of way is about like finding the right blueprint for society, finding the right way to structure everything, having everything laid out ahead of time, But that actually anarchism is the process of learning carpentry.

Yeah, it's it's about.

Learning how to how to build the joints and understand what makes a housework. It's what you're saying. It's learning about cooperation and you know, coming to a better understanding of oneself and how to relate to other people. Building skills. You know, we're not all headed to the same place, we're not all building the same blueprint for the same house.

But if we can all start to learn carpentry, if we can practice skills of mutual aid and consensus, decision making.

And conflict resolution, de escalation.

Conflict resolution, capacity to deal with risk, like, that's what gets us there, not having everything figured out out.

Yeah.

I think that the open endedness of anarchism helped Luke. When you think of it as an imaginative possibility, something that isn't set as this like future, perfect ideal state. It's more of like an approach to living and working towards that state where more people are working in cooperation, and that doesn't have this like crystallized you know, perfect design to it. It's something that would probably be in flux.

No, I think we need to just take it all literally. I think that very specifically, we need to all grow our hair long, call ourselves Odonians, and buy a bank and start a commune in a bank. I actually think that the blueprint has been laid out for us. I think that's why the Dispossessed. This is a sarcasm for anyone who's not really good at discerning that, because Lagwin wrote that Dispossessed a discrip of an anarchist society and wrote it in the most anarchistic way.

Leguin's a better anarchist than me.

When I wrote an anarchist society in my book of Country, it goes it's a little bit more like, oh, it's going to kind of kind of work out, And Legwin was like, here's all the fucked up shit with the anarchist society, isn't that stuff messed up, isn't it still better than the alternatives? Which still makes it a hard book to hand the people who are interested in anarchism because you can't really hand them that dispossessed and be like, this is what we're doing, you know, because people will be like, well, one we don't have a moon, and two I don't want to be named by a computer.

And the whole like famine train car sequence in the book that was a bit daring. So yeah, that was, you know, certainly not the utopian depiction that most people are used to.

Yeah, and yet what a way to still do something that works within the idea of writing utopian fiction and just trying to do it as an anarchist would always be impressed by that.

If she samphasizing that it's it's about choice and it's about trade offs and there's no perfect there's no world without you know, some struggle or suffering. Yeah, but perhaps it need not be concentrated into the body of a child.

But hear me out, no, no, I don't get right.

No, don't make that joke. Okay, fine, well do we want to start wrapping up. I'd love to hear what people are reading currently, and if you have a Lagwin book that you'd like to recommend.

I'm finishing this book of short stories that are sci fi. Actually I picked it up on a recent vacation by Ted chang As, the author who wrote the story that inspired Arrival, which, you know, whatever, it's a movie, but it's you know, fun stuff. It's not super really explicitly political, but you know, very philosophical and kind of in the vein of Laguin. It's like sci fi that's actually really just about today. So it's it's been a breezy read.

And then in terms of the Gwin books, Left Handed Darkness, gotta read that. And you've already named a couple of the other favorites of mine.

Margaret's pointing at me, so I'll go. I am a freak and I have been reading this doorstopper nineties epic fantasy called Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. I haven't finished the trilogy, so don't come for me if it gets problematic, but it is extremely fucking good and my stupid nerdy brain loves it. If you like bizarre, feudal fantasy told from the point of view of a teenager, Bastard, son of the King in Waiting, That one might be for you.

But in terms of Legwin, my favorite LeGuin to recommend is the first one that I started with. It's called The Telling. It's one that I would describe is off the beaten path of LeGuin books, but it is the last entry in the Hainish cycle that she wrote before her passing, and it tells the story of a cultural observer who was sent to a planet that in the time that it takes her ship to arrive, they have a cultural revolution, and so the culture that she's come to study is being very brutally repressed. And it's a really beautiful and moving story about the power of folklore as resistance and full culture and you know, as rebellion.

It's got queer protagonists if you're into that. Yeah, really moving piece and really approachable entryway into the Hainoush cycle, which is kind of the series of books that includes Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed and a lot of her other big ones. That would be my Liguin.

Rec I just finished reading a book called Avalon Rise by Madeline Fitch, and Fitch is spelled with two f's, just like a bonus f in there, and it was just a totally polite way to describe some spelling of their surname. I feel really good about myself. It's an amazing book. I writ an advanced reader's copy. I think it's still isn't out yet, but you all should be excited about Avalon Rise by Madeline Fitch. It is a story about anti fascists in a small town in Appalachia who don't want the fascists to start organizing there. But it is written. It's just like a brutally honest It's another like anarchist writing anarchists and being willing to actually write it by being like, hey, you know who's kind

of shitty all the anti fascists.

You know who's even shittier the fascists.

And just really well done. As for a Lagwin book to recommend, I'd say the word for world is forest is maybe my favorite Laguin book.

I say this now.

I had an English teacher when I was in high school who had one Shakespeare play that he never read because he always needed something to look forward to in his life, and so he was never going to read all of Shakespeare, so he'd always have one remaining. I have a lot of Lagwind remaining. But it's why I haven't just eaten them all. But I've read a ton of Lagwin books, but there's a ton more to go.

And it's because I'm facing myself. But the word for world is for us. That's the one I'll go with. You'll read it and you'll never look at ewoks the same again. All right, Well, thank you all the dear listeners for joining us in this experiment, and thanks everyone who commented on Reddit. We did not get to all of your comments. You're probably aware of that if you're one of the people who made a comment.

We ran out of time.

We actually were like, we're going to somehow do all of that, and we did not. But we really appreciate all of you, and thanks so much. Next week we'll probably be back with something that I read to you, because that's usually what happens. But if this experiment seems to be working, then maybe we'll do this again.

Keep the discussion going on Reddit.

Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah, can also keep the discussion going and.

Let us know if you like this or if you hated it, if you were like I actually just want you to read things to me, I don't want to think about stuff.

Yeah, all right, y'all got anything you want to plug?

I'll always be writing stories. You can find all the investcator Dridnalsm. I do my website Stephen Monchelli dot com. And then I've got some more stuff coming out for it could happen here in the coming months. Got to re up of the mini series it did last year, Anti vax America, which will be really uplifting informative stuff that will make you feel good about public health for years to come.

Yay, yeah, yeah, we love to feel good about the sale of public health. My name is Hazel Akasha. You can find the zine that I wrote about self managing and abortion at Tangled Wilderness dot org. And I hope I'll hear behind the scenes, so stay tuned for more mostly specfic, but sometimes we get freaky him.

Margaret I wrote an anarchisyutopia book a while ago called a Country It Goes.

CZM Book Club: Discussing Two Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

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