Dirt - Space Crone
Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts,
June 18th, 2024
Space Crone
The website as imagination.
Meghna Rao on Ursula K. Le Guin’s pioneering, inventive, rapidly fading early-internet blog. Daisy and Walden share some good links.
Maybe you are like me, and try to understand an author by what they reveal of themselves when they are not writing. I was reading an aging copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven when I found myself wondering what her dreams looked like. I searched for answers elsewhere; in the slant of her signature in a letter to an editor, in a photo of her white-pawed cat drinking from the tap, in her morning routine (write daily until noon and never after 8PM, when she becomes "very stupid").
Eventually, I landed on her website, a buttoned-up, forest green and ash gray place managed by her estate. It looked a little like the curving frontiers of the Pacific Northwest where the late author raised three children with her husband and wrote 22 novels, 12 short story collections, and countless essays. I clicked around its well-managed area. It revealed nothing. Until—tucked away in a corner—I stumbled upon the craggy hills of her old website, opening first to a blurry, slow-loading map pulled from Earthsea, her series of fantasy books released over the span of 30 years.
Inside was an uninhibited, half-alive place, the code struggling to articulate what Le Guin had intended; blog posts with the formatting mangled, partially-bulleted lists of books she’d enjoyed. The website was started in 2006. It had come to resemble what I understood of Le Guin: pioneering, inventive, and rapidly fading.
It had come to resemble what I understood of Le Guin: pioneering, inventive, and rapidly fading.
It was website as imagination, a website was effort. Author ephemera that is integral to understanding Le Guin, tossed to the dustbins of internet history. So let us fish it out.
PLAYBACK
Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.
- Busy Girl by Tove Lo and SG Lewis (Spotify)
- Method Actor by Nilüfer Yanya (Spotify)
- repeat offenders by Joanne Robertson (Spotify)
- NxWorries’ Why Lawd? (Spotify)
- Oh, to be an usher during the newly-announced US theatrical release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (Variety)
- Julio Torres keeps HBO weird with Fantasmas (Rolling Stone)
- Ambition Monster by Jennifer Romolini (New York Times)
MIXTAPE
Good links from the Dirtyverse.
- Eliza McLamb on Charli XCX’s creative process is the only brat thinkpiece I need. (Substack)
- Drew Magary pens an ode to the Metro-North and realizing you’re becoming your parents. (Defector)
- A Q&A with "maritime music expert" Stephen Sanfilippo about #ShantyTok, among other things (Nautilus)
- Hal, it’s about cats. Before there was T.S. Eliot, there was Louis Wain. (Guardian)
- Is AI even scary anymore, or is it just cringe? (Vague Blue)
- W. David Marx’s Manifesto Towards a New Cultural Criticism continues to expand—with diagrams! (Culture: An Owner’s Manual)
- Screw Billie Eilish x Lana Del Rey. Give me Nara Smith in the supermarket talking about what kind of milk she drinks. (Interview)
- The golden age of the celebrity profile goes way beyond "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold," excerpted from Alex Belth’s What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? (Lithub)
- The Nina Protocol mobile app is out now (Resident Advisor)
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