Texts.

My Ursula K. Le Guin story

When I was living in Toronto, I was a frequent flyer at the annual International Festival of Authors. Over the years that I attended, I was privileged to see some of the great names of science fiction and fantasy, including Samuel R. Delany, L. Sprague de Camp, William Gibson, and, to my great good fortune, Ursula K. Le Guin. When her appearance at the Festival in October of 2000 was announced, I instantly purchased a ticket, and when the date arrived, hurried down to the venue at Harbourfront Centre so as to obtain a good seat.  Successfully seated in the lower centre of the theatre, I eagerly waited for the evening to begin.

I'm sorry to say that Australian author Robert Drewe, the first of the three authors on the program that evening, didn't impress me - the writing was acceptable, but he was obviously a bit nervous to be reading it to an audience.  Aleksandar Hemon, who read next, delivered a fabulously entertaining anecdote about teaching Canadian Literature in Russia when he was younger - and making it all up. (Because, really, how would anyone in Russia know, before the internet?)

Finally, Ursula K. Le Guin came to the podium.  I was surprised a bit by her stature - she was quite small - and her voice: she had a mild lisp. She announced that she was going to do a reading from Searoads, a collection of short fiction set in a small seaside community in the Pacific Northwest.  The piece she had chosen was called Texts, describing the experience of a woman who reads the words left behind in the foam from ocean waves.

It says a great deal about the experience that I am able to remember what she read.  Normally my personal memory is a thing of impressions and sensations, sensual rather than factual* yet I’m able to evoke a clear memory of Ursula K. Le Guin reading aloud her description of the language of the sea foam:

Do I want to know what the sea writes, she thought, but at the same time she was already reading the foam, which although in vaguely cuneiform blobs was perfectly legible as she walked along beside it. "Yes," it read, "esse hes hetu tokye to' ossusess ekyes.  Seham hute' u."

Utterly without my planning it, my subconscious mind had selected my second-hand copy of Le Guin's award winning The Left Hand of Darkness as reading material for the day. The previous owner had apparently been using it as a study text for a course of some sort (or was an extraordinarily thoughtful reader*) and as such my copy was liberally decorated with marginalia and annotations that illustrated the more significant themes and motifs of the novel.  When it was announced that Ms. Le Guin would be available for autographs after the event, I somewhat nervously decided to get in line with my battered book.

 

When I reached the front of the line, she smiled sweetly at me and asked me in her quiet lisp what I had for her to sign.  I stammered out my little anecdote about the annotated text, and showed her the flyleaf as an example. She smiled at me again and said, "With books like this, I always sign them left handed and mirror reversed."  Switching hands, she rapidly signed the title page as below, which, when you flip it horizontally, is recognizably her name.

As you can see, I still have the book, although it's showing signs of age almost 20 years later  - but then, aren't we all?

And that's my Ursula K. Le Guin story.

- Sid

* Which is why if anyone asks me casually how old my sister Dorothy is, I say "Early sixties" rather than remembering that she was born in 1954.  Which I had to look up.

** This is not as unlikely as it sounds.  I loaned a book to my friend Laurie at some point, and when she apologetically returned it (after belatedly realizing that it was a loan rather than a gift) I was amazed to find that she'd used a yellow highlighter to mark the more significant paragraphs.  I've no idea why - I'm reasonably certain I didn't say that there would be a test.