"What Happens When a Science Fiction Genius Starts Blogging?"

The New Republic asks (on the occasion of Ursula K. Le Guin's publication of a book collecting selections from her blog):

For Le Guin, imaginative fiction is not “escapist” in the usual, derogatory sense, but in a different, subversive sense: “The direction of escape is toward freedom,” she notes. “So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”

Now, at 87, Le Guin has stopped writing fiction. She continues to blog, and she has found ways to pursue a similar subversive mission in the new medium.

On the blog, Le Guin’s scope is somewhat narrower. A running theme is the life of her cat, Pard. Between each of No Time to Spare’s four topical sections are essays entitled “Annals of Pard.” Devoting such time and interest to the observation of a cat might seem to represent the commonest impulses both of internet culture and old age; but, as always, Le Guin wades into her new genre to deepen and expand it. When Pard brings her a living mouse... and drops it on her bed in the night, her solution is to lock them together in the kitchen until the mouse disappears (whether through elusion or ingestion, she doesn’t know). She reflects on the ethical implications and possible reasons for her resistance to intervention....

“A lot of younger people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely negative, see acceptance of age as negative,” she writes. “Wanting to deal with old people in a positive spirit, they’re led to deny old people their reality. ... ‘You’re only as old as you think you are!’” She scoffs at this attitude and points out its logical and moral problems. Unlike capitalism and patriarchy, the illusion* surrounding old age is that it is an illusion:

Encouragement by denial, however well-meaning, backfires. Fear is seldom wise and never kind. Who is it you’re cheering up, anyhow? Is it really the geezer? To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, you erase my life—me.

Age, she insists, makes one a “diminished thing.” Likewise, a blog does not possess the same artistic or persuasive power as a novel; reading about Le Guin’s cat will not change your life, the way that reading about her strange, freer worlds might. Blog posts are short, topical, and often polemical in a narrow way....

But even in a diminished form of writing,** the spirit of Le Guin’s work remains...

Here's the blog No Time to Spare and here's the book "No Time to Spare." (And here is another collection of blog posts, "The Notebooks," by the Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago. Saramago took up blogging when he was in his 80s, and this inspired Le Guin.)
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* Illusion... not to be confused with elusion.

** A diminished form of writing... That makes me feel a little bad, bad enough to play a diminished 7th chord:

"Whenever one wanted to express pain, excitement, anger, or some other strong feeling – there we find, almost exclusively, the diminished seventh chord. So it is in the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, etc. Even in Wagner’s early works it plays the same role. But soon the role was played out. This uncommon, restless, undependable guest, here today, gone tomorrow, settled down, became a citizen, was retired a philistine. The chord had lost that appeal of novelty, hence, it had lost its sharpness, but also its luster. It had nothing more [to] say to a new era. Thus, it fell from the higher sphere of art music to the lower of music for entertainment. There it remains, as a sentimental expression of sentimental concerns. It became banal and effeminate." — Arnold Schoenberg.