Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Always Coming Home

I have much less time for personal reading while I am teaching summer intensives -- it took me nine weeks to read Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home. As always, it was a stunning and impressive achievement of a book, but like her other ambivalent utopia (The Dispossessed) this one left me a little cold... The pleasures are intellectual and aesthetic, very real, but I was moved to neither laughter nor tears (as I usually am with her work), tho' the provocations and insights were abundant. I've set out to re-read all her body of work in this year of her departure, but I may not manage the feat after all. I am now beginning the complete Orsinia stories and novel. Introducing my students to Deep Ecology this afternoon, on a comparatively full night's sleep for a change. It's sunny out and I would rather be staring at trees. Last week as I was coming onto campus a student was practicing her violin, and I recognized my favorite melodies from Totoro. Even in the time of Trump, occasionally there is magic.

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