61 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
  2. Feb 2024
  3. Dec 2023
  4. Nov 2023
    1. He was director of research in the Sociology of Religion at the École pratique des hautes études from 1945 to 1962.[1] He served as the Dean of the Law School at the University of Paris from 1959 to 1962.

      En la Sorbonne, Le Bras fue maestro de Pablo González Casanova.

      Sociología de la religión (ayudó a PGC vincular la emancipación humana desde la religión hasta la ciencia)

      PCG lo menciona en la presentación del libro "Explotación, colonialismo y lucha por la democracia en América Latina", el 9 de noviembre de 2019, en la FCPyS de la UNAM.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goUunGy2cS4

    2. Gabriel Le Bras

      Wikipedia (en)

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Le_Bras

      accessed:: 2023-11-25 11:45

    1. Ausführliche Berichte thematisieren die großen Hindernisse, die in Frankreich für die just transition zu einem nachhaltigen Leben bestehen. Die Klimakrise wird in allen Schichten als Bedrohung wahrgenommen, aber in den ärmeren Gruppen sieht man viel weniger Handlungsmöglichkeiten. https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/fin-du-monde-ou-fin-de-mois-quels-sont-les-freins-a-la-conversion-ecologique-des-classes-populaires-20231118_72LRGBQFONDVFJJY26JU5X2JQY/

      Bericht des Wirtschafts-, Sozial- und Umweltrates: https://www.lecese.fr/sites/default/files/pdf/Avis/2023/2023_24_RAEF.pdf

      Bericht des Wirtschaftsinstituts für das Klima: https://www.i4ce.org/publication/transition-est-elle-accessible-a-tous-les-menages-climat/

  5. Oct 2023
  6. Sep 2023
  7. Jun 2023
    1. Jean Pisani-Ferry, früher eine der wichtigsten Wirtschaftsberater des französischen Präsidenten Macron, hat beziffert, was die Dekarbonisierung Frankreichs entsprechend den Regierungsvorgaben kosten würden Punkt danach sind pro Jahr zusätzliche 66 Milliarden Euro an privaten und öffentlichen Investitionen notwendig. Ob die Regierung, in der die Wirtschafsliberalen inzwischen noch stärker sind, auf die Vorsc.hläge Ferrys eingeht, ist noch unklar. Regierungsvertreter widersprechen vor allem dem Vorschlag einer neuen Vermögenssteuer deutlich. https://www.liberation.fr/politique/financement-de-la-transition-ecologique-lexecutif-fait-la-sourde-oseille-20230604_RA5ABPVWN5C6HEOPPBQF3YF6KA/

  8. May 2023
    1. Combinational creativity: the myth of originality

      Noticing that the title of this isn't original itself (or is it?) There's a similar post entitled "Combinatorial Creativity and the Myth of Originality" by Maria Popova at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/combinatorial-creativity-and-the-myth-of-originality-114843098/

      Perhaps the William Inge quote is incredibly apropos here: https://hypothes.is/a/Fvkz-i8rEe2hJYM4oINfpw

  9. Feb 2023
  10. Dec 2022
  11. Oct 2022
  12. Sep 2022
    1. https://lu.ma/w6c1b9cd

      [[Anne-Laure Le Cunff & Nick Milo - How can we do Combinational Creativity]]

      Details

      Date: [[2022-09-06]]<br /> Time: 9:00 - 10:00 AM<br /> Host: [[Nick Milo]]<br /> Location / Platform: #Zoom<br /> URL: https://lu.ma/w6c1b9cd<br /> Calendar: link <br /> Parent event: [[LYT Conference 2]]<br /> Subject(s): [[combinational creativity]]

      To Do / Follow up

      • [ ] Clean up notes
      • [ ] Post video link when available (@2022-09-11)

      Video

      TK

      Attendees

      Notes

      generational effect

      Silent muses which resulted in drugs, alcohol as chemical muses.

      All creativity is combinational in nature. - A-L L C

      mash-ups are a tacit form of combinatorial creativity

      Methods: - chaining<br /> - clustering (what do things have in common? eg: Cities and living organisms have in common?)<br /> - c...

      Peter Wohlleben is the author of “hidden life of trees”

      CMAPT tools https://cmap.ihmc.us/

      mind mapping

      Metaphor theory is apparently a "thing" follow up on this to see what the work/research looks like

      I put the following into the chat/Q&A:

      The phrase combinatorial creativity seems to stem from this 2014 article: https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/, the ideas go back much further obviously, often with different names across cultures. Matt Ridley describes it as "ideas have sex" https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex; Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts; Niklas Luhmann - linked zettels; Marshall Kirkpatrick - "triangle thinking" - Dan Pink - "symphonic thinking" are some others.

      For those who really want to blow their minds on how not new some of these ideas are, try out Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's book Songlines: The Power and Promise which describes songlines which were indigenous methods for memory (note taking for oral cultures) and created "combinatorial creativity" for peoples in modern day Australia going back 65,000 years.

      Side benefit of this work:

      "You'll be a lot more fun at dinner parties." -Anne-Laure

      Improv's "yes and" concept is a means of forcing creativity.

      Originality is undetected plagiarism - Gish? English writer 9:41 AM quote; source?

      Me: "Play off of [that]" is a command to encourage combintorial creativity. In music one might say "riff off"...

      Chat log

      none available

    2. Anne-Laure Le Cunff & Nick Milo: How can we do Combinational Creativity?

      Interesting to see people talking about these ideas in these spaces. It's too often a missed piece of the puzzle, and is really one of the most valuable parts.

      What was the origin of the phrase "combinatorial creativity"? Was if Farnam Street in 2014 https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/

      Some of Anne-Laure Le Cunff's discussion of this in the past: - Building a Creativity Inbox: Anne-Laure Le Cunff & David Perell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTSAuSUxuj0 (taped: June 23, 2020; released: Jun 25, 2020) where the phrase is uased as well as "idea sex" - Combinational creativity: the myth of originality https://nesslabs.com/combinational-creativity (see https://twitter.com/anthilemoon/status/1275820127058120705)

  13. Aug 2022
    1. Historical Hypermedia: An Alternative History of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and Implications for e-Research. .mp3. Berkeley School of Information Regents’ Lecture. UC Berkeley School of Information, 2010. https://archive.org/details/podcast_uc-berkeley-school-informat_historical-hypermedia-an-alte_1000088371512. archive.org.

      https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2010/historical-hypermedia-alternative-history-semantic-web-and-web-20-and-implications-e.

      https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/audio/2010-10-20-vandenheuvel_0.mp3

      headshot of Charles van den Heuvel

      Interface as Thing - book on Paul Otlet (not released, though he said he was working on it)

      • W. Boyd Rayward 1994 expert on Otlet
      • Otlet on annotation, visualization, of text
      • TBL married internet and hypertext (ideas have sex)
      • V. Bush As We May Think - crosslinks between microfilms, not in a computer context
      • Ted Nelson 1965, hypermedia

      t=540

      • Michael Buckland book about machine developed by Emanuel Goldberg antecedent to memex
      • Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management) by Michael Buckland (Libraries Unlimited, (March 31, 2006)
      • Otlet and Goldsmith were precursors as well

      four figures in his research: - Patrick Gattis - biologist, architect, diagrams of knowledge, metaphorical use of architecture; classification - Paul Otlet, Brussels born - Wilhelm Ostwalt - nobel prize in chemistry - Otto Neurath, philosophher, designer of isotype

      Paul Otlet

      Otlet was interested in both the physical as well as the intangible aspects of the Mundaneum including as an idea, an institution, method, body of work, building, and as a network.<br /> (#t=1020)

      Early iPhone diagram?!?

      (roughly) armchair to do the things in the web of life (Nelson quote) (get full quote and source for use) (circa 19:30)

      compares Otlet to TBL


      Michael Buckland 1991 <s>internet of things</s> coinage - did I hear this correctly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things lists different coinages

      Turns out it was "information as thing"<br /> See: https://hypothes.is/a/kXIjaBaOEe2MEi8Fav6QsA


      sugane brierre and otlet<br /> "everything can be in a document"<br /> importance of evidence


      The idea of evidence implies a passiveness. For evidence to be useful then, one has to actively do something with it, use it for comparison or analysis with other facts, knowledge, or evidence for it to become useful.


      transformation of sound into writing<br /> movement of pieces at will to create a new combination of facts - combinatorial creativity idea here. (circa 27:30 and again at 29:00)<br /> not just efficiency but improvement and purification of humanity

      put things on system cards and put them into new orders<br /> breaking things down into smaller pieces, whether books or index cards....

      Otlet doesn't use the word interfaces, but makes these with language and annotations that existed at the time. (32:00)

      Otlet created diagrams and images to expand his ideas

      Otlet used octagonal index cards to create extra edges to connect them together by topic. This created more complex trees of knowledge beyond the four sides of standard index cards. (diagram referenced, but not contained in the lecture)

      Otlet is interested in the "materialization of knowledge": how to transfer idea into an object. (How does this related to mnemonic devices for daily use? How does it relate to broader material culture?)

      Otlet inspired by work of Herbert Spencer

      space an time are forms of thought, I hold myself that they are forms of things. (get full quote and source) from spencer influence of Plato's forms here?

      Otlet visualization of information (38:20)

      S. R. Ranganathan may have had these ideas about visualization too

      atomization of knowledge; atomist approach 19th century examples:S. R. Ranganathan, Wilson, Otlet, Richardson, (atomic notes are NOT new either...) (39:40)

      Otlet creates interfaces to the world - time with cyclic representation - space - moving cube along time and space axes as well as levels of detail - comparison to Ted Nelson and zoomable screens even though Ted Nelson didn't have screens, but simulated them in paper - globes

      Katie Berner - semantic web; claims that reporting a scholarly result won't be a paper, but a nugget of information that links to other portions of the network of knowledge.<br /> (so not just one's own system, but the global commons system)

      Mention of Open Annotation (Consortium) Collaboration:<br /> - Jane Hunter, University of Australia Brisbane & Queensland<br /> - Tim Cole, University of Urbana Champaign<br /> - Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory annotations of various media<br /> see:<br /> - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311366469_The_Open_Annotation_Collaboration_A_Data_Model_to_Support_Sharing_and_Interoperability_of_Scholarly_Annotations - http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130205/index.html - http://www.openannotation.org/PhaseIII_Team.html

      trust must be put into the system for it to work

      coloration of the provenance of links goes back to Otlet (~52:00)

      Creativity is the friction of the attention space at the moments when the structural blocks are grinding against one another the hardest. —Randall Collins (1998) The sociology of philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (p.76)

  14. Jul 2022
  15. Jun 2022
  16. Apr 2022
    1. published under the title‘An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments’, which firstappeared in Le Monde in 1973, Barthes describes the method thatguides his use of index cards:I’m content to read the text in question, in a ratherfetishistic way: writing down certain passages,moments, even words which have the power tomove me. As I go along, I use my cards to writedown quotations, or ideas which come to me, asthey do so, curiously, already in the rhythm of asentence, so that from that moment on, things arealready taking on an existence as writing. (1991:181)

      In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.


      Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?

  17. Mar 2022
    1. Ce programme nommé « I can word it too », disponible en hébreu et arabe, a été spécialement créé pour cette étude. Il reproduit les activités quotidiennes (jouer à des jeux, prendre les repas, faire sa toilette…) et demande à l’enfant ce à quoi il veut jouer, en lui présentant un choix de jeux sur l’écran

      ==>il s’agirait d’une déclinaison sur écran des outils et méthodes de communication améliorée et alternative (CAA), comme le PECS ou le Makaton. déjà existants, IDEOPICTO ou le langage conceptuel SACCADE

    2. L’imitation et l’influence du jeu interactif sont bien mises en évidence dans une étude de Orit Hetzroni et Juman Tannous, de la Faculté des Sciences de l’éducation de l’Université de Haifa (Israël)

      ==>l’échantillon de l’étude est est extrêmement limité, l’étude n’est pas répliqué et elle ne permet pas de retirer de résultats concluants

  18. Feb 2022
    1. This is a pretty cool looking project for language learning.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Manny Rayner </span> in Manny Rayner’s review of Abécédaire le petit prince | Goodreads (<time class='dt-published'>02/18/2022 11:40:10</time>)</cite></small>

      We have been doing some work recently to make LARA support picture-based texts, and this is our first real example: a multimodal French alphabet book based on Le petit prince. If you're a fan of the book and beginner level in French, you might find it fun! Start Chrome or Firefox and go here.

      There's a set of 26 pages, one for each letter, and each page comes in three versions. In the Semantic version, you can click on the picture and hear the word spoken in French; hovering gives you a translation. In the Phonetic version, you can hover over the word and spell though it one letter group at a time. Clicking on a letter group will play the sound and show you other words where that sound occurs. In the Examples version, you'll see a French sentence from Le petit prince which uses the word, annotated with audio and translations both for the individual words and for the sentence as a whole.

      The screenshot above illustrates. The D word is dessins ("drawings"). This is the Phonetic version: I've just clicked on the letter group in, and it's played the sound /ɛ̃/, the nasalised vowel that this letter group usually represents in French, and shown me that the same sound also occurs in invisible ("invisible") and jardin ("garden"). If you go to the Examples version, you see the sentence Mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau. ("My drawing wasn't supposed to be a hat") from the first chapter of the book.

      Comments will be very welcome! We're thinking of doing more of these and want to know where we can improve things.

    1. Together: responsive, inline “autocomplete” pow­ered by an RNN trained on a cor­pus of old sci-fi stories.

      I can't help but think, what if one used their own collected corpus of ideas based on their ever-growing commonplace book to create a text generator? Then by taking notes, highlighting other work, and doing your own work, you're creating a corpus of material that's imminently interesting to you. This also means that by subsuming text over time in making your own notes, the artificial intelligence will more likely also be using your own prior thought patterns to make something that from an information theoretic standpoint look and sound more like you. It would have your "hand" so to speak.

  19. Jan 2022
    1. https://vimeo.com/232545219

      from: Eyeo Conference 2017

      Description

      Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.

      Notes

      Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.

      Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)

      Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary


      Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4


      Writing using the adjacent possible.


      Corpus building as an art [~37:00]

      Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.

      Open questions

      How might we use information theory to do this more easily?

      What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?

      Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?

      What sources would you use to train your model?

      References:

      • Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
      • Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
      • Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
      • Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production
  20. Jun 2021
    1. I call this "the search for the mot juste," because when I was in the eighth grade Miss Bartholomew told us that Gustave Flau-bert walked around in his garden for days on end searching in his head for le mat juste. Who could forget that? Flau-bert seemed heroic.

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  21. May 2021
    1. The new model is very much influenced by prudent bank regulation and the aim to reduce income smoothing

      Il y a un peu confusion des genres. Certes le nouveau modèle est influencé par les pratiques du secteur bancaire. Le G20 ayant sommé le Board de l'IAS de revoir sa copie suite à la crise financière, c'est un peu logique. Cela dit c'est un grand pas de l'IASB car le normalisateur comptable ne souhaitait pas "sectoriser" la norme comptable. Cependant ce sont les établissements financiers qui utilisent le plus la norme sur les instruments financiers (IFRS9).

  22. Apr 2021
    1. Le Corbusier's ville radieuse is a diagram, which expresses the physical consequences of two very simple basic require­ments: that people should be housed at high overall density, and that they should yet all have equal and maximum access to sunlight and air.3
  23. Jun 2020
    1. vous

      Pourquoi est ce que pour cette question il a fallu calculer a nouveau le rayon de la terre alors qu'elle était déjà donnée dans un document et que nous l'avons calculer dans la question 13 ? Et que les 3 valeurs ( valeur donnée dans le doc et dans les calculs ) ne sont pas les mêmes

  24. Feb 2020
  25. Jun 2019
    1. En réalité, ce que veulent les gens c’est consommer du déplacement : partir loin et vite, et ça ne peut se faire qu’en avion. C’est là où en fait collectivement on peut se demander ce qui nous semble fondamental. Si tu convertis l’interdiction de l’avion en interdiction de se déplacer, ça pose problème aux gens et c’est compréhensible. En plus, dans une société de déclin où on veut éviter les conflits, avoir du brassage culturel c’est super important. Mais continuer à aller loin ne veut pas dire forcément prendre l’avion. Consommer du déplacement ce n’est pas quelque chose de kiffant en soi. Par contre, voyager, oui, c’est intéressant. Mais aujourd’hui on ne voyage jamais : on ne prend pas le temps. Changer ça, ça suppose de repenser notre organisation collective. Quand tu as deux, trois semaines de vacances, tu ne peux que consommer du déplacement. Si on veut voyager sans prendre l’avion, ça veut simplement dire qu’il faut aussi qu’on revoie notre rapport au travail, ou plutôt à l’asservissement par le travail.
  26. Feb 2019
  27. Jan 2019
    1. esearchershave discovered that it takes about 45 minutes to craft a single bead; to make 10,000 suchbeads totals 7,500 hours of work, or three years of labor by skilled craftspeople

      Cf. Le Guin's discussion of gatherers and labor/leisure time

  28. Oct 2018
  29. May 2018
    1. Ce que l'on remarque cependant est que ceux qui sont vraiment habiletés à utiliser l'ordinateur réussissent mieux, même sans correcteur, tout simplement parce qu'ils gagnent presque 40 minutes sur un examen qui en dure 195 parce qu'ils n'ont pas à retranscrire leur brouillon au propre. Personne ne soulève cet avantage indu dont bénéficient actuellement des élèves de certaines écoles où l'on exige l'achat d'un appareil électronique ou bien où l'on fournit ce dernier.

      Test annotation dans Hypothes.is

  30. Nov 2017
    1. the secular spiritual transformation that comes from single-mindedness. When someone’s striving for a cherished goal becomes a life-mission, be it mastering a musical instrument or fine art, or putting heart and soul into building a business, or putting a public policy in place (a new drunk-driving ban or universal health care) they often come to embody their goal. “He is his company.” “She has become her music” (“and she writes the songs”).  Certainly in religion this is what is meant by terming someone holy or a living saint. This is also the secular goal of Confucian practice, to make li (behavioral ritual) yi (character). One accomplishes this transformation by complete and intense concentration of thoughts and behavior, and by “letting go” of one’s self-awareness or ego in the task. The work takes over and one becomes “possessed” by it, either in an uplifting way, or as in the need for exorcism, rehab, or at least “intervention” by friends and family. When morality sets the goal and means here, we term their culmination “moral exemplarism.”
  31. Nov 2016
    1. En el plano internacional, la incertidumbre sería absoluta, lo único que se podría esperar sería que los asesores presidenciales le disuadiesen de tomar decisiones impulsivas, como iniciar una guerra comercial con China o cambiar alianzas estratégicas que desembocasen en un acercamiento a la Rusia de Putin y un alejamiento de sus aliados tradicionales y las políticas de la OTAN.
  32. Jul 2016
    1. Dù không còn ai để tin, vẫn sẽ tin vào AI và tâm lý học Psyc ít nhất là cái mình có thể thử nghiệm hàng ngày! AI trong cuộc sống có lẽ giờ khoa học dữ liệu vẫn là phổ biến nhất nhưng nếu theo khoa học dữ liệu bây giờ, mình sẽ xa rời mục tiêu đầu tiên: xe tự hành. Có nên theo một thứ không biết bao giờ mới có, có thể chả bảo giờ, mà theo một thứ khác có thể làm ngay bây giờ, mà vẫn có liên quan

    2. Dù sao Trí tuệ Nhân tạo vẫn là cái mình có thể tin dù tất cả mọi thứ fall down, tear broken, mình vẫn sẽ theo nó tới cùng. Vì nó là thứ duy nhất dạy mình cách sống sao cho hiệu quả, dễ dẫn tới thành công nhất tâm lý học dạy mình cách sống tốt, có ý nghĩa, hạnh phúc nhất cần kết hợp cả 2 cái này để đạt được cả thành công lẫn hạnh phúc

  33. Aug 2014
    1. INTERVIEWER On the subject of being a woman writer in a man’s world, you’ve mentioned A Room of One’s Own as a touchstone. LE GUIN My mother gave it to me. It is an important book for a mother to give a daughter. She gave me A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas when I was a teenager. So she corrupted me thoroughly, bless her heart. Though you know, in the 1950s, A Room of One’s Own was kind of tough going. Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned that. The women who questioned those rules were too revolutionary for me even to know about them. So I fit myself into the man’s world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a man’s world.
    2. So I put myself through a sort of course, reading that literature, and that led me to utopianism. And that led me, through Kropotkin, into anarchism, pacifist anarchism. And at some point it occurred to me that nobody had written an anarchist utopia. We’d had socialist utopias and dystopias and all the rest, but anarchism—hey, that would be fun. So then I read all the anarchist literature I could get, which was quite a lot, if you went to the right little stores in Portland. INTERVIEWER Where you got your books in a brown paper bag? LE GUIN You had to get to know the owner of the store. And if he trusted you, he’d take you to the back room and show you this wealth of material, some of which was violent anarchism and would have been frowned on by the government. I swam around in that stuff for a couple years before I could approach my lump of concrete again, and I discovered it had fallen apart. I had my character, and he was a physicist, but he wasn’t who I thought he was. So that book started not with an idea but with a whole group of ideas coming together. It was a very demanding book to write, because I had to invent that society pretty much from scratch, with a lot of help from the anarchist writers, particularly Americans like Paul Goodman, who had actually tried to envision what an anarchist society might be like.
    3. INTERVIEWER And featuring male protagonists. LE GUIN Absolutely. Then came literary feminism, which was a tremendous problem and gift to me. I had to . . . handle it. And I wasn’t sure I could, because I’m not much good on theory. Go away, just let me write. But the fact is, I was getting stuck in my writing. I couldn’t keep pretending I was a man. And so feminism came along at just the right moment for me.
    4. LE GUIN The breakthrough was unconscious. It’s a short book, published in 1978, called The Eye of the Heron. It’s about two colonies on another planet—one of them is a bunch of pacifists, Gandhian types. The other one is a criminal colony sent mostly from South America. The two places are side by side. My hero was from the Gandhian society, a nice young man. And then there was a girl, the daughter of the boss of the criminal society. And the nice young hero insisted on getting himself shot, about halfway through the book. And I said, Hey, you can’t do that! You’re my protagonist! My own unconscious mind was forcing me to realize that the weight of the story was in the girl’s consciousness, not the boy’s. INTERVIEWER What led you to set The Left Hand of Darkness in a world where gender is fluid? LE GUIN That was my ignorant approach to feminism. I knew just enough to realize that gender itself was coming into question. We didn’t have the language yet to say that gender is a social construction, which is how we shorthand it now. But gender—what is gender? Does it need to be male, does it need to be female? Gender had been thrown into the arena where science fiction goes in search of interesting subjects to revisit and re-question. I thought, Well, gee, nobody’s done that. Actually, what I didn’t know is that, slightly before me, Theodore Sturgeon had written a book called Venus Plus X. It’s worth checking out, a rare thing, an early male approach to considering gender as—at least partly—socially constructed. Sturgeon was a talented, warm-hearted writer, so it’s also interesting in itself. Stylistically, he was not a great writer, but he was a very good storyteller and a very good mind. But I, of course, went off in a different direction. You could say I was asking myself, What does it mean to be a woman, or a man, male or female? And what if you weren’t?
    5. LE GUIN Updike did a beautiful review of a young-adult novel of mine, The Beginning Place, in The New Yorker. He was always a generous reviewer. And Harold Bloom—he’s put in a really good word for me. It’s funny, The Anxiety of Influence came out at just the time that women were discovering other women writers and saying, Hey, we have influences! We never did before! Here were all the men worrying about the anxiety of being influenced and the women were going, Whoopee!