Love this quote of hers:
Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
“What books didn’t influence me?” she writes. “If only someone would ask that! I’ve been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom. I thought in all fairness I ought to try The Fountainhead. I gave up on page 10.”
Another fun fact, Le Guin finished reading the entire LotR trilogy in 3 days.
Hunter S Thompson was like chaotic good. Certainly not free of some reactionary "all authoritarianism bad" thought, but overall pretty cool. Against the American status quo, pro labor/the IWW, pro drug legalization, anti-search and seizure by the cops, a gun nut (but like in a cool way), outward critic of the government, especially Nixon and Bush/the Iraq war and post-9/11 fanaticism.
He ran for Sheriff of Aspen Colorado and had a pretty fantastic platform built on these six points:
-"Rip up all city streets with jackhammers" and "sod the streets at once ... All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force."
-"Change the name 'Aspen', by public referendum, to 'Fat City'. This would prevent greedheads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name 'Aspen' ... These swine should be fucked, broken, and driven across the land."
-"Drug Sales must be controlled. My first act as Sheriff will be to install, on the courthouse lawn, a bastinado platform and a set of stocks in order to punish dishonest dope dealers in a proper public fashion. Each year these dealers cheat millions of people out of millions of dollars ... it will be the general philosophy of the Sheriff’s office that no drug worth taking should be sold for money."[1]
-"Hunting and fishing should be forbidden to all non-residents, with the exception of those who can obtain the signed endorsement of a resident- who will then be legally responsible for any violation or abuse committed by the non-resident he has 'signed for' ... By this approach-making hundreds or even thousands of individuals personally responsible for protecting the animals, fish and birds who live here-we would create a sort of de facto game preserve, without the harsh restrictions that will necessarily be forced on us if these blood-thirsty geeks keep swarming in here each autumn to shoot everything they see."
-"The Sheriff and his Deputies should never be armed in public. Every urban riot, shoot-out and blood-bath (involving guns) in recent memory has been set off by some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy."
-"It will be the policy of the Sheriff's office savagely to harass all those engaged in any form of land-rape." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Aspen
If you restrict yourself to only consuming media produced by unproblematic people, you'll be hard-pressed to enjoy anything in life.
Living ones? I don't really know off hand, I've heard the guy who wrote The Witcher series is much better than you'd expect of an old Polish man, but I don't know if he's good or just less of a chud than one would expect. Dead authors? Iain M Banks seems to have been a decent person from what I've read, and I've never heard anything bad about Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.
Pretty sure Vonnegut was a legit dude. He had a falling out with his wife, and battled depression, but I am unaware of any allegations against him.
Neil Gaiman also seems ok, decidedly lib.
bell hooks is a certified badass, and I can't imagine she's done anything to be a shit person.
I mean, there are allegations that he's abused women, but thanks to his lawyers they are very difficult to find online. Here's a redacted version of them. As far as I know, he's never responded publicly.
So the linked text reads as if it is about multiple male persons and multiple sources/tidbits. Would be good to know what is meant and were to find unredacted versions. Is everything meant about China?
I don't think the original version is available online anymore, but there are search results that quote this article and relate it to Miéville. He seems to be the person named as "Jekyll" in this text, "whose entire public persona is built on his decency, his fairness, his niceness, his strength, his beauty, his activism, his progressive politics and his integrity".
:a-guy:
real talk I think writing a book filters out 99% of people with a sense of shame
Lovecraft switched over to being a socialist a few years before he died.
Where’d you hear that? That would be nice, although I assume he was still racist :|
Someone here shared a letter once that suggested Lovecraft had recanted a lot of his racist beliefs by the time he died.
Lovecraft was racist because he was sheltered and paranoid and quite literally afraid of people who looked different from him. Later on, he traveled and met a wider variety of people and as far as I am aware he acknowledged how silly his racism was.
I don't know much about his personal life, but Douglas Adams seems like he'd be at least a bit cool
I was going to say “Hemmingway”, but the dude was actually a complete psychopath despite being an anti-fascist.
"Twenty-four years of discipline and labor have created an eternal glory, the name of which is the Red Army. Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid. But we can declare that the Soviet Union will receive the arms, money, and provisions it needs. Anyone who fulminates against Hitler should consider the Red Army a heroic model which must be imitated."
