eruthros

So this afternoon I was sitting on a bus, heading off campus, and I saw this guy get on wearing a plastic lei with a condom taped to it and a little tag on the back. "Huh," I thought, "I wonder what that's all about. Some event, maybe?" but I couldn't see the tag.

Then, later, he sat down in front of me, and it turns out the tag said "You have just been safely lei'd by the Condom Co-op."

Also, I was putting books away a while ago and glanced at my copy of A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin. One blurb, from the London Sunday Times, contained this fabulous phrase:

Among the looms of fantasy fiction, Ursula Le Guin weaves on where J.R.R. Tolkien cast off. It's a large claim; heresy perhaps to legions of Hobbit fanciers.

So, of course, y'all know the first thing I thought of when I read that. Because "pervy hobbit fanciers" is just such a great phrase.

I don't know, though, that I would say that Le Guin and Tolkien have anything in common beyond writing in nominally fantasy worlds on occasion. Le Guin rocks my world with her speculative fiction, and while I really like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, they're not exactly what I would call speculative.

I think Ursula K. Le Guin writes beautifully, and does her "thought-experiments" with all the ability of someone who really thinks about people, and what makes people (she is, after all, the daughter of one of the foremost anthropologists of the early 20th century). Her words:

I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies. ... The truth is a matter of the imagination.

Clearly, the intent, execution, and style is entirely different.