Loungefly Disney Villains Ursula Crystal Ball Mini Backpack

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SF sometimes poses that kind of question. But in the hands of an author like Ursula Le Guin, science fiction ‘isn’t really about the future’, as she put it in The Last Interview. ‘It’s about the present.’ It changes one or two structuring facts about the world as it is and asks: ‘What would humans do if this and this were true?’ The questions Le Guin asked were big, and her answers to them were subtle. Half a century ago she wondered: ‘What if people were gender-neutral most of the time, but changed between male and female at random when they came on heat, so that you could write sentences like “The King was pregnant”?’ (as in her Left Hand of Darkness). Or, ‘what if a capitalist planet had a moon on which there was a society with no laws and no private ownership?’ (as in her Dispossessed). Alongside these large questions her fiction also poses less visible challenges to its readers. Are you so unconsciously racist that you didn’t notice this woman or this wizard was brown-skinned? Didn’t you realise that the person you thought was an alien is actually from Earth? Bowers, Chet A. 2015. An Ecological and Cultural Critique of the Common Core Curriculum. Vol. 471, Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Bommer, Lawrence. 1992. “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” Review of May 14, 2015. Chicago Reader. December 17. http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-search-for-signs-of-intelligent-life-in-the-universe/Content?oid=881080 Richardson, Laurel. 2001. “Getting Personal: Writing-Stories.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 14(1): 33–38. doi: 10.1080/09518390010007647.

Her best books are the first three Earthsea novels, which reached British audiences during the glory days of Puffin in the early 1970s. They had it all. An archipelago of islands in a world where there are dragons and wizards, sea voyages, dark worship of the powers of death. Writing for children pushed Le Guin slightly against her natural inclinations in three respects. It forced her to do plot. It also made her dampen the cultural relativism of her SF: Earthsea does have different peoples with different skin colours and different islands with their own cultures, but in a relatively low-key way. The main thing it did, though, was to enable her to draw on big Arthurian myths (dragons, kings-in-waiting, multiple Merlins), which sent her imagination into overdrive. Writing for children also had less liberating consequences: Earthsea has more conservative intellectual foundations than her writing for adults from the same period. Wizards of Earthsea get their power by speaking the Old Speech, or ‘the language of the making’, by which Earthsea and all in it were summoned into being in the first place. This remains the natural language of dragons, but can be learned by (male) wizards. The language-magic of Earthsea has its roots in the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, which Le Guin described as ‘my father’s favourite book’. She published an English version in 1997: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is an essay by Ursula Le Guin that explores some of these ideas in more detail. It has recently been republished in a bijou volume by Ignota Books. Le Guin posits that ‘the novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story’, even if the hero has frequently taken it over. She critiques the linear ‘Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic’ where fiction is embodied as ‘triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now)’. Næss, Arne. 2005. “Creativity and Gestalt Thinking.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, edited by Harold Glasser and Alan R. Drengson. The Netherlands: Springer. Gough, Noel. 1998. “Reflections and Diffractions: Functions of Fiction in Curriculum Inquiry.” In Curriculum: Toward New Identities, edited by William F. Pinar, 93–127. New York, NY: Garland Publishing Inc.T here​ was a big gap between the first Earthsea trilogy (1968-73) and the final books: Tehanu (1990), Tales from Earthsea (2001) and The Other Wind (2001). During that period Le Guin thought about many things, including sexual politics. The Gandalf model of wizardly power – the idea, dumbly replicated by J.K. Rowling’s Dumbledore, that asexual male mages hold the world in balance – was never compatible with Le Guin’s deep unease about overt expressions of power. That incompatibility made her ask questions about the foundations of Earthsea. The wizards on the island of Roke have become blinkered bachelor dons, who treat all women like faculty wives: they simply refuse to hear them when they say things that are true. Meanwhile the Old Speech, with its direct equation between name, thing and power, begins to fade away. When Le Guin was asked in 2001 if she intended the later books to retract the earlier Earthsea series she gave a characteristically tart response: ‘If the second trilogy invalidated, or retracted, or revoked the first one, I wouldn’t have written it.’

Haraway, Donna J. 2014. “ SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8.

Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, International Library of Sociology. New York, NY: Routledge. That moment came when BOTH Ursula bags were on offer and my mum felt like treating me, I didn’t complain, obviously. Within a couple of days they arrived and it was the definition of pure joy. In person these bags are even better than you could ever imagine. A Carrier Bag Theory of Revolution– another take on this essay in Ploughshares; note how it particularly pays attention to an alternative cyclical view of time

The way we move through the world … tension and drama happen simply by proximity. The way chemistry works, you have oxygen and hydrogen: fine on their own. Put them side by side and all of a sudden: water. I really don’t think there’s any such thing as being too old for Disney. I will constantly be listening to Disney song playlists and watch Disney films constantly. My favourite thing to do is put a Disney film on in the living room and then watch as the rest of my family don’t move until it’s gone off. Last weekend it was Moana, my dad loved it! Being a huge Disney fan means that when I first saw the Danielle Nicole Disney Bag Collection, I immediately wanted it all. I’ve been tame to be honest, a lot tamer than I’d like. I actually just kept admiring from afar, waiting for my moment.Gough, Noel. 2010. “Performing Imaginative Inquiry: Narrative Experiments and Rhizosemiotic Play.” In Imagination in Educational Theory and Practice: A Many-sided Vision, edited by Thomas William Nielsen, Rob Fitzgerald, and Mark Fettes, 42–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Paul, Anne Murphy. 2012. “Your Brain on Fiction.” The New York Times. Accessed March 20, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html. I am definitely going to be buying more Danielle Nicole Disney bags, god bless this woman for making them. Right now I’m about to tweet and ask her to make Maleficent bags because she is my all time favourite Disney Villain.

Within the UK and USA the price you see is the price you pay - you won't be charged any extra fees. I relate this to something Ocean Vuong says in a 2019 podcast, where he is critical of the dominance of conflict-driven plots in the conventions of creative writing: It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. ’ (Haraway 2019:10) It isn’t surprising that Le Guin made Earthsea change. What’s surprising is that it took her so long to do it. She had a PhD in French literature and was married to a historian of France. She must have heard the wave of post-structuralist theory gathering force well before it hit the West Coast in the early 1970s and washed away any residue of the magical belief that things and their signifiers were united by intrinsic bonds. And a complex and multi-faceted feminism was foundational to her writing right from the start. In the later Earthsea books she doesn’t dismantle her earlier world, but allows it to change so that she can explore a heroism (more often displayed by women) of resilience. She also stripped away the Tolkien-style male mage model of children’s fiction, which has such a strong magic of its own it takes time to escape its spell. By going beyond it in the second Earthsea series Le Guin was able to direct a whole array of ‘what if?’ questions against some of the conventions of children’s fantasy. What if you don’t need heroic quests? What if keeping going and tending children through damage and disaster and getting home is the form of heroism that matters most? What if girls can be dragons? These questions led to the creation in the later Earthsea books of two perfectly realised female characters: Tehanu – a girl scorched by fire and maimed by men, whose dry whispering voice makes her Le Guin’s most vivid creation – and her protector Tenar, who takes over from Ged as the central figure of the later books, and who is one of the strongest representations in children’s literature of an ageing woman who doesn’t ‘do’ very much beyond hanging on in there, but who nonetheless becomes the pivot of an entire world.Taguchi, Hillevi Lenz. 2012. “A Diffractive and Deleuzian Approach to Analysing Interview Data.” Feminist Theory 13(3): 265–281. doi: 10.1177/1464700112456001. Reid, William A. 1981. “The Deliberative Approach to the Study of the Curriculum and Its Relation to Critical Pluralism.” In Rethinking Curriculum Studies: A Radical Approach, edited by Martin Lawn and Len Barton. New York, NY: Routledge. The students who signed up were asked to find 3 objects which were somehow related to their research or to the experience of doing their doctorate, put them in a bag and bring them to the online pop-up session. These objects could be linked in practical ways (eg a coffee cup used every day), academically (a favourite book) or for more esoteric reasons related to reflections, memories, dreams, conversations or experiences that were meaningful to them even if tangential to the actual business of writing a doctorate. I wanted to find a way to help doctoral students tap into the creativity and uniqueness they bring to their research and I found a short book by the novelist Ursula Le Guin in which she presents her ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (2019) as a fresh and potentially useful way of thinking about doctoral writing. Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122.