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Mistaken for Gay: That was one of the possibilities discussed by the Valley people when they saw the Dayao army — for them, it was unimaginable that such a large group of people would contain no women. Horny Sailors: "The Trouble with the Cotton People" has the teller claiming he had a lot of problems with that at one point during his journey. Relief was problematic, since the Kesh people tend to be careful about the possibility of STD, which are very rare among them, but not in other places. Dirty Old Man: Pandora describes old Kesh men showing off for one another by dancing the Moon (an annual orgy festival).
Blaming the Victim: By the standards of Dayao, any woman without a proper escort is fair game who is asking for it. Blinded by the Sun: The story of Junco, who spent a day staring at the sun trying to learn the secrets of the universe. The doctors only managed to restore his peripheral vision. Always Coming Home was germinated in 1983 when Ursula’s husband Charles took sabbatical from teaching. This enabled the couple to settle for some months at her family ranch “Kishamish”, in the Napa Valley. She had spent the summers of her childhood there, with her brother Karl and parents Alfred Louis and Theodora Kroeber, both anthropologists. As a child, two Native American friends of her father’s, also spent time with the family at “Kishamish”. Exposed to Native American Indian culture from a young age, thanks to her father’s friendship with Juan Dolores, a Papago, and Robert Spott, a Yurok, Ursula was well aware of California’s history and the depth and richness of its autochthonous cultures. Midway through her career, Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley.Defenestrate and Berate: One of the Kesh forms of divorce is a woman taking her husband's things out of the house. Adaptation Expansion: In-Universe. A particular genre in the Valley is a type of play where the author has only written some twenty lines around which any troupe can build a play of their own length and to their own taste.
hrpanjwani on Reading The Wheel of Time: Taim Tells Lies and Rand Shares His Plan in Winter’s Heart (Part 3) 2 hours ago Though Native American literature is an inspiration for Always Coming Home, Le Guin was conscious of the moral implications of using real people’s stories, especially when these have been forcefully written out of Western history. The silence around Native American histories, the inaccessibility of their songs and words, the fact that she was “much better at making things up than at remembering them” influenced the creation and development of Kesh civilization in this fictional ethnography of her native yet future Northern California. The novel’s title reveals how in this simultaneous act of getting close whilst distancing herself, Le Guin was able to metaphorically “come home”.
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Interrupted Intimacy: Stone Telling describes how she traveled to another town in her childhood. Her cousins there tended to have fun at night by interrupting amorous teens. The names in Le Guin's novel are descriptive because they not only name the characters, but they also describe the characters' personalities or circumstances in life. Pandora, for example, is the scientist who puts the entire collection of artifacts from the Kesh society together. However, Pandora was also the name of the first woman, according to Greek legend, who released all the evil in the world. The name, Pandora, also means "gift." Pandora, the editor in Always Coming Home, is keenly aware of the historical significance of her name. The names of both the Kesh and Condor characters are metaphoric as well. Pandora admits near the end of the novel that she has been using the English "meanings" of the Keshian and Condorian names rather than their real spellings Le Guin does this for two reasons: one, she wants her readers to connect with her characters; and two, she wants her characters' names to reflect what her characters do. Le Guin is always circumspect, but the Kesh are grounded in specifics. The Valley of the book is the Napa Valley; the Na River is the Napa River. It is an important wine-growing region, located just north of San Francisco Bay. The story is set far in the future, and readers are given hints of some kind of holocaust that has taken place; areas made unlivable by radioactivity, many genetic defects in humans and animals (born sevai), cities on the coast now underwater. It is likely that with the Greenhouse Effect, or a nuclear explosion, the atmosphere has heated up, melting the polar ice cap and raising the level of the oceans, thus flooding coastal cities, California’s Central Valley, and the low desert area east of the Sierra Nevada. San Francisco Bay has become huge, “the Inland Sea,” and the Coastal Range a long peninsula. These details, though, are not in the book and, in a way, are totally peripheral to the Kesh and their story. The Valley People live in a virtual utopia, holding sacred seasonal ceremonies and exis Space Amish: The Kesh principle of only using technology on a level they can easily maintain on their own is actually quite close to the Amish views.
The Immodest Orgasm: The teller of the Visionary's story talks at one point about her aunt and uncle making a lot of noise in their lovemaking every night. The Loins Sleep Tonight: Stone Telling mentions that when she and her Dayao husband decided to have a child, it took them quite a bit of time due to the latter being both older and weary due to his work.
James Bittner, Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin, University of Michigan Research Press, 1984, 149 pps. Unnamed Performers. “Papago: Girl’s Initiation Ceremony”. Indian Music of the Southwest. Folkways Records, 1957. Raymond Thompson, "Modern Fantasy and Medieval Romance: A Comparative Study," in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, edited by Roger Schlobin, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, pp. 211-25. Always Coming Home is a 1985 Pastoral Science Fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin describing an After the End future.
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