Change Begins in Art: Ursula K. Le Guin's Amazing NBA Acceptance Speech
We'd be remiss if we didn't highly recommend the speech from Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards, video of which is now online (see below). Le Guin, who was honored at the ceremony with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, invoked in her acceptance the Amazon/Hachette pricing war (recently given a thorough treatment by Keith Gessen in the current issue of Vanity Fair) by decrying capitalist motives to commodify art and writing.
Even further, she woke up the crowd: "I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality." And as quoted at Bookforum:
“Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
Le Guin has been talking about Amazon's deft use of censorship--its participation in the 'disappearing' of an author--for some time now. A full transcript of her NBA speech is here. And you can watch it all below!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk