Bianca Leggett /     Thanks Rowena!  Yes I think you've put that brilliantly, the parodax as both sterile and yet teeming with stories isn't so much parodaxical as suggestive that a 'blank generative space' as you say is, like the blank page, where stories happen.  Maybe the affinity of the novel with the airport which Le Guin suggests is a suggestion of a similar 'blank generative' quality in the novel form itself.  This insistence that the airport is banal is common, and yet (in cinematic cliche at least) they are often imagined to be places of high emotion which I suppose is a similar phenomenon: the codified and banal nature of the airport, in fictive terms, seems to invite excess, emotion, disruption  Or sometimes the banality of the airport is itself aestheticized!  Or at least its much more aesthetic when its George Clooney having a banal time in the airport in Up in the Air, but that is neither here not there   Looking forward to reading Le Guin!