Random music comments
1. Eskimo Joe’s “Black Fingernails, Red Wine” is awesome. It’s incredibly INXS-influenced.
2. Video Hits announced someone had announced their Madonna competition this morning, and I quote: “her and a friend will go to London…”
3. I think I might buy a best of Hoodoo Gurus, if I can find one.
4. I had to explain to some of my kids that the new Chili Peppers video clip was ripping off lots of other bands. Argh.
5. I bought a 3-CD best of the Beach Boys the other day. J was amazed that I knew the words to a large majority of the songs… how had I missed telling him that they were my favourite band for a significant part of my teen years?
6. TZU’s “In front of me” is brilliant, and I just saw the film clip – also brilliant! Very clever hand puppets.
7. I’m not a huge fan of Augie March – I think they’re an Aussie equivalent of whingy Englishman, like Coldplay – but I must say that “One Crowded Hour” is growing on me.
8. I am also thinking about buying the Gnarls Barkley album. Just… cos.
The Left Hand of Darkness
I have, of course, heard about this book by Ursula Le Guin – it’s up there as a seminal work, really, of early scifi especially. I think it counts as spec fic more than scifi per se, but that’s a bit beside the point. I bought it last weekend and read it over the week.
I have a friend who is a big scifi fan who read the Wizard of Earthsea series and was incredibly disappointed – actually, I think he only read the first one and didn’t bother with the others. I may have mentioned this before; to me, Le Guin and some of those other early writers are doing line sketches, whereas a lot of the stuff coming out these days is oil colours – whether they’re consciously thinking about it or not, I think they’re heavily movie-influenced, and writing for a grander and more detailed vision than the earlier writers. Now, I’m perfectly ready to be wrong about that, but it sounds good.
The Left Hand of Darkness is named for a poem of the planet Gethen, where it’s set – light is the left hand of darkness, darkness the right hand of light. Very yin and yang, which is what the whole thing is about, really: the natives of Gethen are ambisexual, that is they are neither man nor woman, or perhaps both, for most of the month, and then come into ‘kemmer’ for a few days – their sex is then decided by the others around them who are also coming into kemmer.
This way of looking at gender was really interesting, but I’ve got to say I wasn’t entirely sure what Le Guin was aiming to do. Her narrator for most of the book was male (from off-world), and he referred to all of the Gethenians as ‘he’. The only times they were described as female were almost derogatory or insulting, which I was really surprised and disappointed by. Now, maybe this is because they were a fairly non-aggressive race, so this was a male reaction to pacificism, but still, it was a bit uncomfortable to read.
Nonetheless, I actually did like the story. It was a poignant story, and she certainly doesn’t spare her characters. It hints at a much grander story – of the Ekumen, the not-governing body bringing 83 worlds together… the Hain, who seeded all of those world with humans… but the story itself, on Gethen, is also very personal and immediate. I think I liked it.
Randomly Yours, Alex 