Skip to content

Tag: margaret atwood

Published April 27, 2017

The Prophet of Dystopia

art direction by Christopher Moisan; illustration by Patrik Svensson

I am terribly late to this, but Rachel Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch, profiled Margaret Atwood for The New Yorker earlier this month. Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale has just been released as a TV series starring Elizabeth Moss:  

Despite the novel’s current air of timeliness, the contours of the dystopian future that Atwood imagined in the eighties do not map closely onto the present moment—although recent news images of asylum seekers fleeing across the U.S. border into Canada have a chilling resonance with the opening moments of the television series, which shows Moss, not yet enlisted as a Handmaid, attempting to escape from the U.S. to its northern neighbor, where democracy prevails. Still, the U.S. in 2017 does not show immediate signs of becoming Gilead, Atwood’s imagined theocratic American republic. President Trump is not an adherent of traditional family values; he is a serial divorcer. He is not known to be a man of religious faith; his Sundays are spent on the golf course.

What does feel familiar in “The Handmaid’s Tale” is the blunt misogyny of the society that Atwood portrays, and which Trump’s vocal repudiation of “political correctness” has loosed into common parlance today. Trump’s vilification of Hillary Clinton, Atwood believes, is more explicable when seen through the lens of the Puritan witch-hunts. “You can find Web sites that say Hillary was actually a Satanist with demonic powers,” she said. “It is so seventeenth-century that you can hardly believe it. It’s right out of the subconscious—just lying there, waiting to be applied to people.” The legacy of witch-hunting, and the sense of shame that it engendered, Atwood suggests, is an enduring American blight. “Only one of the judges ever apologized for the witch trials, and only one of the accusers ever apologized,” she said. Whenever tyranny is exercised, Atwood warns, it is wise to ask, “Cui bono?” Who profits by it? Even when those who survived the accusations levelled against them were later exonerated, only meagre reparations were made. “One of the keys to America is that your neighbor may be a Communist, a serial killer, or in league with satanic forces,” Atwood said. “You really don’t trust your fellow-citizens very much.”

 

Comments closed
Published May 10, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Arresting Charm — Writer and artist Howard Chaykin on the late Carmine Infantino who died April 4th:

My best friend Michael Abramowitz was a huge fan of Carmine’s, and I held and hold his tenure on The Flash from 1956 to 1965 in great affection. Infantino’s Flash was infused with a sleek modernism absent from other work of the period, a look and sensibility utterly different from that of his peers. His work was profoundly two dimensional, apparently uninterested in deep space. He frequently used the lower panel border as his horizon, with figures standing on that line, creating an effect somewhat like a stage apron, with flat shapes serving to represent middle and deep distance. It sounds odd, and it was, but it had an arresting charm. Infantino’s work, viewed today, is far more sophisticated, but also more emotionally detached, than that of his colleagues.

You can see more Carmine Infantino covers at The Golden Age blog.

Accidental Publishing — A feature on Seattle’ comics publisher Fantagraphics in Publishers Weekly:

The Fantagraphics publishing program began “almost by accident” in 1981, according to Groth, and over the last three decades has grown to feature some of the most critically acclaimed comics artists in the U.S. and from around the world. The Fantagraphics list includes the work of the Hernandez brothers (Love and Rockets), Daniel Clowes (Eightball, Ghost World), Chris Ware (The ACME Novelty Library), and Jim Woodring (Frank, Weathercraft) and has grown to include multi-volume archival reprint projects such as R. Crumb’s The Complete Crumb Comics and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. By championing the comics medium and the creators it has published, Fantagraphics has been instrumental in raising the profile of graphic fiction as an art form that transcends the superheroes and monsters that established the medium so many decades ago.

The Only Kind of Geography — Writer Alan Moore on psychogeography and, in particular, his work with Eddie Campbell on From Hell (via LinkMachineGo):

My approach, in keeping with Theophile Gautier’s elegant definition of Decadent literature as being capable of plundering from the most ancient past or the most recent ‘technical vocabularies’ (which is also a good working definition of postmodernism), would be to see the current model of psychogeography as evolving from and thus essentially containing earlier versions of the practice, making these original techniques available to modern artists as important tools within their repertoire. For example, one need not subscribe to any nebulous New Age conceptions with regard to ‘ley lines’ to appreciate that Brecon visionary Alfred Watkins’s idea of linking geographic points into a web of sightlines could have modern application if regarded as a linkage of ideas, as in both Iain Sinclair’s work and in my own From Hell.

Psychic Garburator — Margaret Atwood on dreams at the NYRB Blog:

Most dreams of writers aren’t about dead people or writing, and—like everyone else’s dreams—they aren’t very memorable. They just seem to be the products of a psychic garburator chewing through the potato peels and coffee grounds of the day and burping them up to you as mush. If you keep a dream journal, your mind will obligingly supply you with more dreams and shapelier ones, but you don’t always want that, nor can you necessarily make any sense of what you may have so vividly dreamt. Why, for instance, did I dream I had surged up through the lawn of Toronto’s Victoria College and clomped into the library, decomposing and covered with mud? The librarian didn’t notice a thing, which, in the dream, I found surprising. Was this an anxiety dream? If so, which anxiety?

See also: Leon Neyfakh on Margaret Atwood at Technology at The New Republic.

And finally…

An interview with Patti Smith at LA Weekly:

I’m much too self-centeredly ambitious to simply be content with the transfer of success from one realm to another. I would rather write or record something great and have it overlooked than do mediocre work and have it be popular. My goals are really work-oriented. I don’t stay in one discipline because it’s more lucrative than another. In fact, the most successful thing I ever did was Just Kids, for which I had absolutely no expectations. I just wanted to do a beautiful little book that would give Robert [Mapplethorpe] to the people. And then it became a global success. It’s so funny, because Robert always cared about me becoming successful, while I never did. It’s almost like he was suddenly saying, “Dammit, Patti, you’re gonna be successful, even if I have to make it happen!” I always laugh when I think that my greatest success came through Robert.

Comments closed
Published October 19, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Buzzwords of the Incurious — Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, delivers a searing review of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis.  A must-read:

The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.

Swimming Out of Guilt — David Ulin talks to Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus at the LA Times:

“I didn’t predict this for myself,” Spiegelman admits, firing up another cigarette. “I thought ‘Maus’ was going to take two years and I’d move on with my life. But it’s an ongoing wrestling match. Basically ‘Breakdowns’ ” — the 2008 collection that recontextualized his early work, including the first three-page “Maus” strip, from 1972 — “and ‘MetaMaus’ are the great retrospections, the period of my life I’m still swimming out of. Then I get to find out if there’s any other stuff in my pockets to make bets with.”

The World We Live In — Author William Gibson interviewed at the A.V. Club:

I don’t actually think of science fiction as primarily a predictive form. That’s its cultural reputation and that’s what lots of people believe it is, but my approach has always been that it’s invariably about the day it was written in. Regardless of what the author tells us, it can’t really be anything else. There’s no way it can be about the future, except it pretends to be the future. It’s like reading 1984. What it’s actually about is 1948, the year it was written. You see Orwell responding to various aspects of the world he lived in, which was changing, since the world always is.

See also: Margaret Atwood talks about speculative fiction and her new collection of essays Other Worlds with CBC Radio (audio) and The Globe and Mail.

And finally…

Trash — Nathan Heller on film critic Pauline Kael, a new collection of her work, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, and Brian Kellow’s new biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark:

Kael realized that the pictures had a chance to succeed where classic books, painting, and art music had been shunted from the mainstream; she thought a tolerance for “trash” was key to maintaining this openness and innovation. Still, she was no fugitive from the old arts. Kael once said that she’d rather live in a world without movies than in a world without books, and she resented the decline of public literary dialogue. She saw the movies as American art’s second chance.

Also at The New Yorker, Richard Brody looks back Kael’s book 5001 Nights at the Movies.

 

Comments closed
Published August 3, 2011

Whither the Library?

Going to the library is one of my earliest memories. I don’t remember much about the books, but I remember the building — its steps and its smell — and I remember the funny pinkish orange library tickets for children. I think I could take out three books at once.

I also remember that the library was not that close to where we first lived. We must have gone on the bus. It was surely an adventure for me, but a pain for my parents.

We’re more fortunate now. My family and I can walk to the library. It takes about 5 minutes — longer if we are distracted by a friendly dog or the need to jump off a wall.

I borrow picture books and music for their kids; books, comics, DVD and CDs for me. I request most of things from the library website. I can do it whenever something comes to mind or I read about it online. The books (and it is mostly books if I am honest) come from libraries across the city and I get a call at home when they arrive at my branch. I don’t know how many books I can borrow at once — I’ve never hit my limit (not for lack of trying, however) — but I must have at least 7 or 8 things out at the moment. It is an amazing service.

Our library is always busy — no matter the time of day — with people of all ages and from all walks of life. Some, like me, are borrowing books, movies or music. Others are reading newspapers and magazines. Some are making use of the programs that the library runs. Some are using the only computers they probably have any access to.

But here in Toronto, as in many towns and cities in the UK and US, library cuts are now being seriously discussed by politicians who do not appreciate their value to neighbourhoods and who apparently wouldn’t recognise Margaret Atwood on the street. It is hard to imagine they have visited to a library recently, let alone made use of its services.

On yesterday’s CBC news show The Current there was a lengthy and interesting discussion of libraries and their future. Contributors included librarian Ken Roberts, local councillor Sarah Doucette, and Julia Donaldson, the UK’s Children’s Laureate and author of The Gruffalo:

CBC RADIO THE CURRENT: Whither the Library?

If you live in Toronto, you can sign an online petition in support of the public library system here.

Comments closed
Published March 18, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Pushing Paper — Ben Kafka asks why is there no Norton Anthology of Paperwork?:

My Norton Anthology of Paperwork would include some of the finest historical examples of boilerplate, alongside selections of letterhead, fill-in-the-blank forms, fine print, and the history of that wonderfully poetic instruction, “last name, first.” Indeed, the boilerplate metaphor could itself be a metaphor for a larger transformation, two centuries in the making, that has taken many of us away from extracting coal and forging iron and assembling boilers toward waiting for an inspector to come sign off on a certificate that needs to be filed with the local Department of Buildings. Paperwork occupies us and preoccupies us, whether we are maritime lawyers or nail-salon owners, congressional aides or human-resource managers, college professors or freelance web designers.

Hard Times — Sam Jordison on the EU investigation into the agency model of e-book pricing and what it means for publishers in The Guardian:

The customer may be unpleasant, but he or she is always right. It’s clear that publishers do need to up their game to accommodate the new demands. There’s also the fact that they’ve been pretty dreadful at digitising the backlists of their living authors, while those of dead authors are widely — and often freely — available. Publishers have to do something to win over…pretty much everyone.

The trouble is that… digital editions still cost money to produce (and indeed that the physical costs of a printed book are only a small percentage of their price), that rights are hellishly complicated, and that authors fear losing out hugely if publishers start putting up their backlist digitally (since they would never go out of print and so never be able to escape their contracts).

And on a related note…

Tearing Their Hair Out — Margaret Atwood discusses e-books with Rosalind Porter in The Globe & Mail:

[P]eople sit there putting words on the page, and some of them make a lot of money for their publishers and others create huge losses because the publishers placed their bets wrong. When people say publishing is a business – actually it’s not quite a business. It’s part gambling and part arts and crafts, with a business component. It’s not like any other business, and that’s why when standard businessmen go into publishing and think, “Right, I’m going to clean this up, rationalize it and make it work like a real business,” two years later you find they’re bald because they’ve torn out all their hair. And then you say to them, “It’s not like selling beer. It’s not like selling a case of this and a case of that and doing a campaign that works for all of the beer.” You’re selling one book – not even one author any more. Those days are gone, when you sold, let’s say, “Graham Greene” almost like a brand. You’re selling one book, and each copy of that book has to be bought by one reader and each reading of that book is by one unique individual. It’s very specific.

See also: Margaret Atwood’s keynote speech at TOC.

Comments closed
Published February 18, 2011

Margaret Atwood : The Publishing Pie

Author Margaret Atwood used to come by the bookstore where I worked in Toronto. It was always slightly surreal selling books to her, but certainly no more so than watching her on YouTube (YouTube!) deliver a great keynote speech at O’Reilly’s recent TOC Conference:

Atwood expands on her talk in this interview with Gretchen Giles:

3 Comments