Quote: Ursula K. Le Guin

The three passages below are from Ursula Le Guin's recent Annals of the Western Shore series. It's not actually one quotation from each book; two are from Voices (book 2), which I have now declared my very favorite of her books that I've read. The third is from the third book, Powers. The whole series, starting with the first book, Gifts, touches on questions of power: what it means, how to recognize it, and how to use (or not use) it. The books all have different main characters, in different places, but those characters are significant in the following books (rather like the Earthsea Cycle), letting it feel more like continuity than a loss of it.

"I'm sorry, now, for that girl of fifteen who wasn't as brave as the child of six, although she longed as much as ever for courage, strength, power against what she feared. Fear breeds silence, and then the silence breeds fear, and I let it rule me. Even there, in that room, the only place in the world where I knew who I was, I wouldn't let myself guess what I might become."

- Voices (Annals of the Western Shore, book 2)

"I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for—so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted and gathered roots and cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives and children were living on in their city left ruined and desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house and honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege and under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it."

- Voices (Annals of the Western Shore, book 2)

"The first true leader I knew was this boy of seventeen, Yaven Altanter Arca, and I have judged others by him. By that standard, leadership means personal magnetism, active intelligence, unquestioning acceptance of responsibility, and something harder to define: a tension between justice and compassion, which is never truly satisfied by one without the other, and so can seldom be wholly satisfied."

- Powers (Annals of the Western Shore, book 3)

Quote: Frances Hodgson Burnett

"And the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles. In the robin's nest there were eggs and the robin's mate sat upon them, keeping them warm with her feathery little breast and careful wings. At first she was very nervous, and the robin himself was indignantly watchful. Even Dickon did not go near the close-grown corner in those days, but waited until by the quiet working of some mysterious spell he seemed to have conveyed to the soul of the little pair that in the garden there was nothing which was not quite like themselves -- nothing which did not understand the wonderfulness of what was happening to them -- the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs. If there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end -- if there had been even one who did not feel it and act accordingly there could have been no happiness even in that golden springtime air. But they all knew it and felt it and the robin and his mate knew they knew it."

- Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

About two weeks ago, Nif and I discovered a pair of cardinals nesting right outside our house! The female cardinal would arrive from elsewhere, hop around the branches, alight on a small clump of brush, and then go absolutely still. It's been very exciting. Sometimes when she takes breaks, the male cardinal comes and sits on a wire or a tree nearby, or hops from branch to branch in the same tree, singing and "cheer"ing. And then in the past two days we've been able to see, when she's off the nest, a little tiny head and mouth waving around!

A note about the quotation: if you're wondering why the robin's mate isn't also a robin...she is. It's just that the male robin has been a particular character in the story thus far, and his mate is a relative newcomer to the scene.

Quote: Trenton Lee Stewart

    The children nodded uneasily. All this talk of danger and emergencies, without explanation, was beginning to wear on them.
    "I'm sorry to put you ill at ease," Mr. Benedict said. "And I haven't much to say to comfort you. I can finally offer some answers to your questions, however. Who wishes to begin? Yes, Constance?"
    To the great exasperation of the others, Constance demanded to know why they couldn't have candy for breakfast.
    Mr. Benedict smiled. "A fine question. The short answer is that there is no candy presently in the house. Beyond that, the explanation involves a consideration of candy's excellent flavor but low nutritional value--that is to say, why it makes a wonderful treat but a poor meal--though I suspect you aren't interested in explanations but simply wished to express your frustration. Is that correct?"
    "Maybe," Constance said with a shrug. But she seemed satisfied.
    "Other questions?" said Mr. Benedict.

- Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society

Speaking of orphans (or virtual orphans) who end up going on dramatic adventures... They get to practice Morse code, too! And through the tests they pass to join the "Society" -- and through working together -- they come to appreciate the many different ways there are to be "gifted".
.-    .-.. ... -    ... ..-.    ..-. ..- -. !

Quote: Lois Lowry

"METICULOUS means extremely precise and careful. Surgeons have to be meticulous. Some people think great cooks are meticulous, but they are wrong. Great cooks read a recipe, maybe, but then they ignore the instructions and add extra garlic if they feel like it. Surgeons can't do that."

- Lois Lowry, The Willoughbys (ARC edition)

Lois Lowry's newest book, The Willoughbys, comes out at the end of March. This excerpt is from the glossary at the back of the advance reading copy. You probably can't tell from this quote that the book is about a lovely "old-fashioned" family where the parents don't particularly like kids, and the kids think they would be better off as orphans. (This potentially disturbing premise is mitigated by the book's general silliness.)

Remember: No adding extra garlic during surgery!

Quote: George Washington

Here is an excerpt of a letter from George Washington to the Jewish community of Newport, RI, in 1790:

"All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens....May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

- George Washington, cited by Susan Jacoby in Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

I was really excited to see this; I think it's an excellent example of the ideals to which our nation should continue to aspire. Our "founding fathers" were full of contradictions (Washington was a slaveowner), but sometimes they did get it right.

Quotes: Jane Austen

I have been reading a lot of Jane Austen in the past few weeks -- some rereads, some new. Here are some excerpts:

"Fanny agreed to it, and had the pleasure of seeing him continue at the window with her, in spite of the expected glee; and of having his eyes soon turned, like hers, towards the scene without, where all that was solemn, and soothing, and lovely, appeared in the brilliancy of an unclouded night, and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods. Fanny spoke her feelings. 'Here's harmony!' said she; 'here's repose! Here's what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry can only attempt to describe! Here's what may tranquillise every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.'"

- Mansfield Park (1814)

"Such an adventure as this, a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. So Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them particularly interesting to each other? How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight? especially with such a groundwork of anticipation as her mind had already made."

- Emma (1816)

"They called each other by their Christian name, were always arm-in-arm when they walked, pinned up each other's train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; and, if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading, with their own contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding: joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?"

- Northanger Abbey (1818)

Quote: Michael Pollan

"For some reason the image that stuck with me from that day was that slender blade of grass in a too big, wind-whipped pasture, burning all those calories just to stand up straight and keep its chloroplasts aimed at the sun. I'd always thought of the trees and grasses as antagonists--another zero-sum deal in which the gain of the one entails the loss of the other. To a point, this is true: More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild."

- Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The Omnivore's Dilemma is an amazing book. I'm two thirds of the way through at this point (Industrial/Corn and Pastoral/Grass, leaving only Personal/The Forest). In this chapter, Pollan has been visiting and working at Polyface farm, an incredibly sustainable "grass" farm where the end products of any one process are used to fuel the next and everything is interconnected. Farmer Joel Salatin has been explaining to him the importance of trees as windbreaks for the grass fields and how much energy is thereby saved for the actual growing of the plants.

A thicker picture book than usual...

Yesterday's American Library Association award announcements at the Philadelphia Convention Center included a bit of a surprise for the Caldecott: The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which is over 500 pages long! It's an excellent book. We're also excited to see that Elijah of Buxton, which is one of my Staff Picks, won a Coretta Scott King Award (having also recently won the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction)!

Further edification: On our Mt Airy and Beyond links page, we have links to the official web pages of a long list of book awards (including ALA), so you can always check there for current recommendations of outstanding books.

Quote: Rachel Naomi Remen

"In turmoil, I walked wearily along the water's edge, comparing myself to others my own age, people of seemingly boundless vitality. I came up wanting. I remember thinking that this disease had robbed me of my youth. I did not yet know what it had given me in exchange.

"In response to these painful thoughts, a wave of intense rage flooded me, the sort of feeling I had experienced many times before. But for some reason, this time I did not drown in it. Instead, I sort of noticed it go by and something inside me said, 'You have no vitality? Here's your vitality.'

"Shocked, I recognized the connection between my anger and my will to live. My anger was my will to live turned inside out. My life force was just as intense, just as powerful as my anger, but for the first time I could experience it as different and feel it directly. In that first moment of surprise, I had a glimpse of something fundamental about who I am; that at the core of things I have an intense love of life, a wish to participate fully in life and to help others to do the same. Somehow this had grown large in me as a result of the very limitations that I had thought were thwarting it. Like the power of a dammed river. I had not known this before. I also knew that in its present form, as rage, this power was trapped. My anger had helped me to survive, to resist my disease, even to fight on, but in the form of anger I could not use my strength to build the kind of life I longed to live. And then I knew that I no longer needed to do it this way. I knew with absolute certainty that my pain was nobody's fault; that the world was not to blame for it. It was a moment of real freedom."

- Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal

Kitchen Table Wisom is a book of very very short essays drawn from Dr. Remen's clinical and personal experiences with chronic and terminal illness. It's the book I lend to friends going through hard times, because over and over it offers hopeful messages and new ways to look at the world.

Quote: Rick Riordan

    I didn't want to admit that I'd seen what the Sirens had promised her. I felt like a trespasser. But I figured I owed it to Annabeth.
    "I saw the way you rebuilt Manhattan," I told her. "And Luke and your parents."
    She blushed. "You saw that?"
    "What Luke told you back on the Princess Andromeda, about starting from scratch ... that really got to you, huh?"
    She pulled her blanket around her. "My fatal flaw. That's what the Sirens showed me. My fatal flaw is hubris."
    I blinked. "That brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches?"
    She rolled her eyes. "No, Seaweed Brain. That's hummus. Hubris is worse."
    "What could be worse than hummus?"

- Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 2)

Quote: Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde has just released a new Thursday Next book! Only in stores a week, and it's already on the Book Sense Bestseller list! I'm very much looking forward to reading it, since it is, after all, First Among Sequels. (Actually, it's fourth.)

Here, meanwhile, is a slice of a Jurisfiction meeting, from The Well of Lost Plots:

    "Good. Item seven. The had had and that that problem. Lady Cavendish, weren't you working on this?"
    Lady Cavendish stood up and gathered her thoughts.
    "Indeed. The use of had had and that that has to be strictly controlled; they can interrupt the ImaginoTransference quite dramatically, causing readers to go back over the sentence in confusion, something we try to avoid."
    "Go on."
    "It's mostly an unlicensed usage problem. At the last count David Copperfield alone had had had had sixty-three times, all but ten unapproved. Pilgrim's Progress may also be a problem owing to its had had / that that ratio."
    "So what's the problem in Progress?"
    "That that had that that ten times but had had had had only thrice. Increased had had usage had had to be overlooked but not if the number exceeds that that that usage."
    "Hmm," said the Bellman. "I thought had had had had TGC's approval for use in Dickens? What's the problem?"
    "Take the first had had and that that in the book by way of example," explained Lady Cavendish. "You would have thought that that first had had had had good occasion to be seen as had, had you not? Had had had approval but had had had not; equally it is true to say that that that that had had approval but that that other that that had not."
    "So the problem with that other that that was that--?"
    "That that other-other that that had had approval."
    "Okay," said the Bellman, whose head was in danger of falling apart like a chocolate orange, "let me get this straight: David Copperfield, unlike Pilgrim's Progress, which had had had, had had had had. Had had had had TGC's approval?"
    There was a very long pause.

--Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots (Thursday Next book 3)

Quote: J.K. Rowling (book 1)

    "A scarlet steam engine was waiting next to a platform packed with people. A sign overhead said Hogwarts Express, eleven o'clock. Harry looked behind him and saw a wrought-iron archway where the barrier had been, with the words Platform Nine and Three-Quarters on it. He had done it.
    "Smoke from the engine drifted over the heads of the chattering crowd, while cats of every color wound here and there between their legs. Owls hooted to one another in a disgruntled sort of way over the babble and the scraping of the heavy trunks."

- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Okay, so what I want to know is, where are all the cats? Toads are out of fashion, owls live in the owlery, but the only cats we ever see, besides here, are Crookshanks and Mrs. Norris. (Well, and Professor McGonagall.) Where are these students keeping their cats of every color? Did they all belong to 7th-years? Did Hagrid make a decree? Alas, I am betting that these burning questions will not be among those finally answered in book 7.

Quote: Ann Rinaldi

    "There are, as far as I can see, two kinds of lies in this world. There's the kind I tell Mama when she asks if I've been to see the hoodoo woman who lives on our plantation. And I say no. Though I have been. And now, like Sis Goose, I have a red flannel bag of my own that holds small animal bones, powdered snakeskin, horsehair, ashes, dried blood, and dirt from the graveyard. All to protect me from any evil I can imagine. And some that I can't.
    "Then there's the kind of lie you live with when you enter into a devil's agreement with yourself never to disclose a certain fact for fear of the results if you do.
    "There are planters in our neck of the woods who believe so much in the lie that the slaves are not free that they will shoot or hang anybody who says otherwise."

- Ann Rinaldi, Come Juneteenth

Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, and marks the day -- two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect -- that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and officially announced that the slaves in Texas were free. Come Juneteenth is the story of a girl in Texas who has to live with the lie she has told her best friend -- legally a slave but raised as her sister -- that the rumors of freedom creeping across the land are not true.

Quote: William Butler Yeats

The following is from The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is in the section entitled The Rose, 1893. I actually know a beautiful musical setting to this poem, composed by a group known as Kiltartan Road.

"I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows shall I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core."

The Teahouse Fire wins Lambda Literary Award!

Ellis Avery's new novel, The Teahouse Fire, won a Lambda Literary Award in the lesbian debut fiction category. Ellis was here earlier this year to do a Japanese tea ceremony and reading from her book. It was a lovely evening in honor of a lovely new book. Congratulations, Ellis!

You can see all of the Lambda Literary Award Winners at www.lambdaliterary.org/awards/current_winners.html

Quotes: Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks

Nif and I are back from Madison! The following quotations are from the writings of the Guests of Honor at this year's WisCon.

From the story "The Hortlak" in Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners (Harcourt, 2005)...

"Batu had spent a lot of time reorganizing the candy aisle according to chewiness and meltiness. The week before, he had arranged it so that if you took the first letter of every candy, reading across from left to right, and then down, it had spelled out the first sentence of To Kill a Mockingbird, and then also a line of Turkish poetry. Something about the moon."

And from Laurie J. Marks' Fire Logic (Tor, 2002)...

"Part 2: Fire Night

Without courage, there would be no will to know.
Without the will to know, there would be no knowledge.
Without knowledge, there would be no language.
Without language, there would be no community.
--MACKAPEE'S Principles of Community

Who is seen to speak to the enemy must be silenced. Who sympathizes with the enemy must lose their heart. Who dreams of peace must dream no more. Those who ravaged the land will be eliminated: without compromise, without mercy.
--MABIN'S Warfare

When I first met my enemy, she was a glyph, and it was I who chose to read her as my friend. When my enemy first met me, I was a glyph, and it was she who chose to read me as her friend. So all people are glyphs, and every understanding comes from choice.
--MEDRIC'S History of My Father's People"

Quote: Susan Palwick

This quote, another paean to spring growth, is from Susan Palwick's The Necessary Beggar, in which an entire family are exiled from their planet and arrive, with no preparation and no papers, in an immigrant refugee camp in Nevada in 2011. This is from one of the epic poems of their homeland.

"And when the shoots came up
She greeted each one by name
For she knew them all already as old friends:
Hello, sweet peas, hello carrots, hello parsnips!
Greetings my wonderful melons! Hail rutabaga!
Welcome if you are the spirits of my ancestors,
Welcome if you are the spirits of strangers,
Welcome if you contain no human spirit at all,
But only the souls of green growing things.
You shall feed my family, you shall feed the world,
Every year you shall die and come to life again
And you will give us life, and we will revere you.
-- from the Epic of Emeliafa"

What if the good guys won?

Grist has a review of Kim Stanley Robinson's Capitol Code trilogy: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting. Dealing with a near-future earth that is fighting global warming, these books present some compelling possibilities. (I was reading the first one just as hurricane Katrina hit!)
Check out the review at
http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2007/04/05/higgins-freese/index.html?source=weekly

2006 Tiptree Award Winners are here!

Here at Big Blue Marble we like feminist science fiction, so we're very excited that the 2006 Tiptree Award Winners are here: Half Life by Shelley Jackson, and The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente. This year's jury also gave special recognition to Julie Philips' biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.

We also have these books from the Tiptree Honor List:
The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner (2006)
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell (2006)
A Brother's Price, by Wen Spencer (2005)

Check out http://www.tiptree.org/ for more Tiptree Winners and more information about the Tiptree Award. You can also find more information about this year's winners at http://www.wiscon.info/downloads/W31eCube9.html.

The Tiptree Awards will be presented on May 27, 2007 at WisCon; Jen and I will be there!

Nif

Quote: Barbara Kingsolver

My second quotation is from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the brand-new book from Barbara Kingsolver and her family. It's an extraordinary book, and I haven't read very far into it yet. My original quote idea was three paragraphs from chapter 1 that begin, "We'd surely do better, if only we knew any better." (Go read them; they're quite thought-provoking!) There's a question in there about what asparagus plants look like in August. I have my neighbor Rhoda to thank for the fact that I actually know the answer to this question!

Anyway, someone convinced me that the three paragraphs would be too long, so I went searching for another quote. This was not hard: practically any paragraph in the four chapters I've read would be an effective pull-quote. I've settled on the following, which takes asparagus (and its unusual growing cycle) and goes deeper:

"From the outlaw harvests of my childhood, I've measured my years by asparagus. I sweated to dig it into countless yards I was destined to leave behind, for no better reason than that I believe in vegetables in general, and this one in particular. Gardeners are widely known and mocked for this sort of fanaticism. But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who's to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?"