OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)
By:
May 17, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE DISPOSSESSED | URSULA K. LE GUIN | 1974
According to the Northwest Co-operative Development Center Olympia, Washington, has more cooperatively owned businesses per capita than any other city in the United States, a wellspring which, until recently, included the (sadly closed) New Moon Cooperative Cafe, known for its delicious omelettes and named for the moon colony Anarres, the world imagined by Ursula Le Guin in the novel (for some a sacred text) The Dispossessed.
Raised by anthropologists to understand societies as mutable, changeable, to inhabit Anarres (sounds like anarchist; Le Guin was one, and a Taoist who translated Lǎozǐ’s Tao Te Ching) she invented the Odonians, adherents of the teachings of Odo, a lettrist name that circles itself, a metaphysics of the no one as everyone, at once an imaginary and real number. Odo’s thought is Kropotkin’s, Bakunin’s, and others who theorize life as a poetics of reciprocity and care, rather than an epic of force, of usefulness rather than profiteering, of meeting needs instead of addicting users, of mutual aid instead of rule, of the redistribution of labor rather than wealth, because on Anarres there is no wealth, no capital to accumulate, primitively or otherwise.
Olympia also begins with O, a letter that is a number, and the circle-dancing word cooperative has two of them, a diphthong that glides from one vowel to another, singing around a corner.
Anarres is harsh, bracing, ethical, full of frictions, and unfinished. No Edenic garden, it is dry, thin-soiled, lacking in biodiversity, and the Odonians too have their flaws, despite having overcome so much of the stupidity that states and capitalism inculcate, they fall prey to other pitfalls, for they are human, all too human, thus the ambiguity in the subtitle, as if to say, any utopia worth its salt must contain a grain of it.
OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on RIDDLEY WALKER | Carlo Rotella on THE FACE | Sara Ryan on DREAMSNAKE | Matthew Battles on THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | Ramona Lyons on HIGH-RISE | Adam McGovern on SHADRACH IN THE FURNACE | Deb Chachra on THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY | Tom Nealon on DHALGREN | Michael Grasso on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | Stephanie Burt on BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR | Nikhil Singh on SABRE | Gordon Dahlquist on VALIS | Miranda Mellis on THE DISPOSSESSED | Marc Weidenbaum on SOFTWARE | Peggy Nelson on THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER | Josh Glenn on ENGINE SUMMER | Mimi Lipson on A SCANNER DARKLY | Douglas Wolk on THRILLER | David Hirmes on ARZACH | Anthony Miller on THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER | Annie Nocenti on JIMBO | Seth on MR. MACHINE | Alex Brook Lynn on JUDGE DREDD | Joe Alterio on THE INCAL | Jason Grote on JOSIE AND THE ELEVATOR.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!