But fuck and fucking? I don’t know. Oh, they sound good as curses too. It’s really hard to make the word fuck sound pleasant or kindly. But what is it saying?
I don’t think there are meaningless swearwords; they wouldn’t work if they were meaningless. Does fuck have to do with sex primarily? Or sex as male aggression? Or just aggression?
Until maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago, as far as I know, fucking only meant one kind of sex: what the man does to the woman, with or without consent. Now both men and women use it to mean coitus, and it’s become (as it were) ungendered, so that a woman can talk about fucking her boyfriend. So the strong connotations of penetration and of rape should have fallen away from it. But they haven’t. Not to my ear, anyhow. Fuck is an aggressive word, a domineering word. When the guy in the Porsche shouts Fuck you, asshole! he isn’t inviting you to an evening at his flat. When people say Oh shit, we’re fucked! they don’t mean they’re having a consensual good time. The word has huge overtones of dominance, of abuse, of contempt, of hatred.
So God is dead, at least as a swearword, but hate and feces keep going strong. Le roi est mort, vive le fucking roi.
Readers’ Questions
October 2011
I RECENTLY GOT a letter from a reader who, after saying he liked my books, said he was going to ask what might seem a stupid question—one I need not answer, though he really longed to know the answer to it. It concerned the wizard Ged’s use-name Sparrowhawk. He asked, Is this the New World sparrowhawk, Falco sparverius, or one of the Old World kestrels, also Falco, or their sparrowhawks, which are not Falco but Accipiter?
(Warning: You can get into something of a tangle with these birds. Many people use the words sparrowhawk and kestrel interchangeably, but kestrels, Eurasian or American, are all falcons, while not all sparrowhawks are kestrels, or vice versa. You see what I mean? I am only sorry we lost the beautiful British name windhover. But we have G. M. Hopkins’s poem.)
I immediately answered the letter as best I could. I said it seems to me it can’t be any of the above, because it’s not an Earth bird but an Earthsea bird, and Linnaeus did not go there with his can of names. But the bird I saw in my imagination when I was writing the book was definitely like our splendid little American sparverius, so maybe we could call it Falco parvulus terramarinus. (I didn’t think of parvulus [small] when I wrote the letter, but it should be there. A sparrowhawk is a quite small falcon. Ged was a scrappy boy, but short.)
After I’d answered the letter, I thought about how promptly and with what pleasure I’d done so. And I looked at the never-decreasing stack of letters waiting to be answered and thought how much I wanted to put off answering them, because so many of them would be so difficult, some so impossible . . . Yet I very much wanted to answer them, because they were written by people who liked or at least were responding to my work, had questions about it, and took the trouble to tell me so, and thus deserve the trouble—and sometimes the pleasure—of an answer.
What makes so many letters-to-the-author hard to answer? What have the difficult ones in common? I have been thinking about it for some days. So far, I’ve come up with this:
They ask large, general questions, sometimes stemming from some branch of learning the writers know way, way more about than I do, such as philosophy or metaphysics or information theory.
Or they ask large, general questions about how Taoism or feminism or Jungian psychology or information theory has influenced me—questions answerable in some cases only with a long PhD thesis, in others only with “Not much.”
Or else they ask large, general questions based on large, general misconceptions about how writers work—such as, Where do you get your ideas from? What is the message of your book? Why did you write this book? Why do you write?
This last question (which is in fact highly metaphysical) is often asked by young readers. Some writers, even ones who don’t actually write for a living, answer it “For money,” which certainly stops all further discussion, being the deadest of dead ends. My honest answer for it is “Because I like to,” but that’s seldom what the questioner wants to hear, or what the teacher wants to find in the book review or the term paper. They want something meaningful.
Meaning—this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story . . . ? Tell me what it Means.
But that’s not my job, honey. That’s your job.
I know, at least in part, what my story means to me. It may well mean something quite different to you. And what it meant to me when I wrote it in 1970 may be not at all what it meant to me in 1990 or means to me in 2011. What it meant to anybody in 1995 may be quite different from what it will mean in 2022. What it means in Oregon may be incomprehensible in Istanbul, yet in Istanbul it may have a meaning I could never have intended . . .
Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.
Writing is a risky bidness. No guarantees. You have to take the chance. I’m happy to take it. I love taking it. So my stuff gets misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted—so what? If it’s the real stuff, it will survive almost any abuse other than being ignored, disappeared, not read.
“What it means,” to you, is what it means to you. If you have trouble deciding what, if anything, it means to you, I can see why you might want to ask me, but please don’t. Read reviewers, critics, bloggers, and scholars. They all write about what books mean to them, trying to explain a book, to achieve a valid common understanding of it useful to other readers. That’s their job, and some of them do it wonderfully well.
It’s a job I do as a reviewer, and I enjoy it. But my job as a fiction writer is to write fiction, not to review it. Art isn’t explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains. (Or so it seems to me, which is why I have a problem with the kind of modern museum art that involves reading what the artist says about a work in order to find out why one should look at it or “how to experience” it.)
I see a potter’s job as making a good pot, not as talking about how and where and why she made it and what she thinks it’s for and what other pots influenced it and what the pot means or how you should experience the pot. She can do that if she wants to, of course, but should she be expected to? Why? I don’t expect her to, I don’t even want her to. All I expect of a good potter is to go and make another good pot.
A question such as the one about sparrowhawks—not large, not general, not metaphysical, and not personal—a question of detail, of fact (in the case of fiction, imaginary fact)—a limited, specific question about a particular work—is one most artists are willing to try to answer. And questions about technique, if limited and precise, can be intriguing for the artist to consider (“Why did you use a mercury glaze?” or “Why do you/don’t you write in the present tense?” for instance.)
Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not?
But any question, if it is limited, specific, and precise, can be answered honestly—if only with “I honestly don’t know, I never thought about it, now I have to think about it, thank you for asking!” I am grateful for questions like that. They keep me thinking.
Now, back to Hopkins and “The Windhover”—
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there . . .
Ah, we could explain that, and talk about what it means, and why and how it does what it does, forever. And we will, I hope. But the poet, like the falcon, leaves that to us.
Ki
ds’ Letters
December 2013
PEOPLE SOMETIMES LOOK surprised when I say that I love to get fan letters from children. I’m surprised that they’re surprised.
I get some very lovable letters from kids under ten who write me on their own, mostly with a little parental input. They often describe themselves as “Your Hugest Fan,” which makes me imagine them as towering amiably over the Empire State Building. But most of the letters come from school classes that read the Catwings books. I try to answer these letters at least by thanking every child by name. I can’t usually do much more than that.
Some are problematic: the teacher has told the kids to “write an author,” making the assignment a requirement without regard for the students’ feelings or capabilities—or mine. One desperate ten-year-old forced to write the author told me: “I have read the cover. it is prety good.” What am I to say to him? His teacher put both him and me on the spot and left us there. Not fair.
Frequently teachers tell the students to tell the author what their favorite part of the book is and to ask a question. The favorite part is fine, the kid can always fake it; but asking a question is pointless unless the student really has one. It’s also inconsiderate, raising the impossible expectation that a working author can write back with answers to twenty-five or thirty different questions, even if most of them are variations on two or three standard themes.
When teachers let the kids write whatever they want, if they want to write anything, it works. The questions are real, though some of them would stump the Sphinx. “Why do the catwings have wings?” “Why did you ever write books?” “I want to know how you make some of the words on the cover slanted.” “My cat Boo is nine. I am ten. How old is your cat? Is it fair to catch mice?” And there are interesting criticisms. Kids are forthright, both positively and negatively; their comments tell me what interests and what disturbs them. “Did James ever get better from the Owl?” “I hate Mrs Jane Tabby she made her kitens go away from hom.”
The class mailings I enjoy most are those where the teacher has encouraged the kids to draw their own pictures of scenes in the book, or to write sequels and continuations of the adventures of the Catwings.
“Catwings 5” and “Catwings 6” on ursulakleguin.com, posted quite a while back, are examples of one approach to this: the teacher has guided/collaborated with the students in making up the story, and has chosen the pictures to illustrate it. This is an admirable exercise in teamwork on an artistic project, and the result is charming. Adult control, however, inevitably tames the wild unpredictability of stories and pictures that come straight from each child’s imagination. Such illustrations, stories, and booklets give me almost unalloyed delight.
The occasional alloy is in the now inevitable stories that imitate electronic games, a more alarming instance of adult control. In these, the Catwings go through “a portal” into the middle of an incoherent adventure involving battles and the slaughter of enemies, monsters, etc., by the million. Evidently this is the only story the child knows. It’s scary to see a mind trapped in an endless repetition of violent acts without meaning or resolution, only escalation to keep the stimulus going. So far this kind of thing has come only from boys, which may be, in its way, a hopeful sign. I remember hearing my next older brother in 1937 making up and acting out his own adventure stories in his room—shouts of defiance, muffled thuds, cries of “Get him! Get him!” and machine-gun fire. My brother came through all this mayhem as a quite unviolent adult. But the games of instantly rewarded destruction, in which the characters and action are ready-made “action figures” and the only goal is “winning,” are designed to be addictive, and therefore may be hard to outgrow or replace. Compelled into an endless, meaningless feedback loop, the imagination is starved and sterilized.
As for the joy I get from the stories and booklets, a large part of it is in seeing that so many kids are perfectly willing to write a book (the book may be about fifty words long). They are confident about doing it and about illustrating it. They take obvious pleasure in giving it chapters, and a table of contents, and a cover, and a dedication. And at the end, they all write “The End” with a proud flourish. They should be proud. Their teacher is proud of them. I am proud of them. I hope their family is proud of them. To have written a book is a very cool thing, when you are six or eight or ten years old. It leads to other cool things, such as fearless reading. Why would anybody who’s written a book be afraid of reading one?
As an experienced connoisseur, I can say the best letters and books by kids are entirely handmade. A computer may make writing easier, but that’s not always an advantage: ease induces haste and glibness. From the visual point of view, the printout, with all idiosyncratic characters blanded into a standard font, is drably neat, while the artisanal script is full of vitality. Computer spell-checking takes all the flavor out of the nonprescriptive, creative spelling that can give great delight to a reader. In a printout, nobody tells me what their favrit pert of the book is, or their favroit prt, or faevit palrt, or favf pont. In a printout, nobody asks me Wi did you disid to writ cat wigs? And there are no splendid final salutations, such as “Sensrle,” which had me stumped, until “San serly” and “Sihnserly” gave me the clue. Or “Yours trully,” also spelled “chrule.” Or, frequently, echoing young Jane Austen, “Your freind.” Or the occasional totally mysterious farewells—“mth frum Derik,” “Fsrwey, Anna.”
Frswey, brave teachers, brave children! (And thank you for the quotations!)
mth frum Ursula.
Having My Cake
April 2012
THE INABILITY TO understand proverbs is a symptom of something—is it schizophrenia? Or paranoia? Anyhow, something very bad. When I heard that, many years ago, it worried me. Everything I ever heard about a symptom worries me. Do I have it? Yes! Yes, I do! Oh God!
And I had proof of my paranoia (or schizophrenia). There was a very common proverb that I knew I’d never understood.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
My personal logic said, How can you eat a cake you don’t have?
And since I couldn’t argue with that, I silently stuck to it, which left me in a dilemma: either the saying didn’t make sense (so why did intelligent people say it?) or I was schizophrenic (or paranoid).
Years passed, during which now and then I puzzled over my problem with the proverb. And slowly, slowly it dawned on me that the word have has several meanings or shades of meaning, the principal one being “own” or “possess,” but one of the less common connotations is “hold on to,” “keep.”
You can’t keep your cake and eat it too.
Oh!
I get it!
It’s a good proverb!
And I am not a paranoid schizophrenic!
But it seemed odd that I hadn’t arrived sooner at the “keep” meaning of have. I puzzled over that for a while too, and finally came up with this:
For one thing, it seems to me that the verbs are in the wrong order. You have to have your cake before you eat it, after all. I might have understood the saying if it was “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”
And then, another kind of confusion, having to do with have. In the West Coast dialect of English I grew up with, “I had cake at the party” is how we said, “I ate cake at the party.” So “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” was trying to tell me that I couldn’t eat my cake and eat it too . . .
And hearing it that way as a kid, I thought, Hunh? but didn’t say anything, because there is no way, no possible way, a kid can ask about everything grownups say that the kid thinks Hunh? about. So I just tried to figure it out. And once I got stuck with the illogic of the cake you have being the cake you can’t eat, the possibility never occurred to me that it was all about hoarding vs. gobbling, or the necessity of choice when there is no middle way.
I expect you’ve had quite enough cake by now. I’m sorry.
But see, this is the kind of thing I think about
a lot.
Nouns (cake), verbs (have), words, and the uses and misuses of words, and the meanings of words, and how the words and their meanings change with time and with place, and the derivations of words from older words or other languages—words fascinate me the way box elder beetles fascinate my friend Pard. Pard, at this point, is not allowed outside, so he has to hunt indoors. Indoors we have, at this point, no mice. But we have beetles. Oh yes Lord, we have beetles. And if Pard hears, smells, or sees a beetle, that beetle instantly occupies his universe. He will stop at nothing—he will root in wastebaskets, overturn and destroy small fragile objects, push large heavy dictionaries aside, leap wildly in the air or up the wall, stare unmoving for ten minutes at the unattainable light fixture in which a beetle is visible as a tiny moving silhouette . . . And when he gets the beetle, and he always does, he knows that you can’t have your beetle and eat it too. So he eats it. Instantly.
I know, though I don’t really like knowing it, that not many people share this particular fascination or obsession. With words, I mean, not beetles. Though I want to point out that Charles Darwin was almost as deeply fascinated by beetles as Pard is, though with a somewhat different goal. Darwin even put one in his mouth once, in a doomed attempt to keep it by eating it. It didn’t work.* Anyhow, many people enjoy reading about the meaning and history of picturesque words and phrases, but not many enjoy brooding for years over a shade of significance of the verb to have in a banal saying.
Even among writers, not all seem to share my enjoyment of pursuing a word or a usage through the dictionaries and the wastebaskets. If I start doing it aloud in public, some of them look at me with horror or compassion, or try to go quietly away. For that reason, I’m not even certain that it has anything to do with my being a writer.
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