Said Margaret Atwood, quoted in "For a Literary Saint, Margaret Atwood Can Sure Hold a Grudge/She had to be pushed to write her new memoir, 'Book of Lives.' The result reveals the experiences (and a few slights) that have shaped her work" (NYT).
She was condemned by some on the left for a 2018 op-ed in The Globe and Mail that questioned whether the #MeToo movement had gone too far and subverted due process for falsely accused offenders.... Atwood lays some blame on the left for the rise of book banning, which has surged in the United States in recent years.
“Let us not forget that the people who started canceling books and saying you couldn’t teach them in schools were the left,” she said, citing, as an example, the removal of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” for its use of racial slurs. “It started with, words are weapons, they can hurt you,” she continued. “And the right looked at this and thought, well this is a pretty good tool, let’s do it ourselves.”
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37 comments:
Careful - this sort of thing leads to creeping Rowlingism.
Something she has in common with Rowling.
She has the integrity I guess to point out that the Progressives were the ones to ban books. When I hear about irate parents getting books 'banned', it almost always means sexually explicit, deviant material being moved out of the section for children, into older age groups, in the same school library.
The Progressive Left is quick to pull on the 'Handmaid's Tale' costumes and make dramatic scenes, but slow to own up to their own mistakes.
It probably amazes her that the fans of "The Handmaidan's Tale" are so avidly supporting the importation of Islam into the western nations.
I know right,
The New York times authoress of the arcticle claims that in her debut novel The edible female, men found it unsettling so of course I had to get some verification using Gemini AI:
"Dismissal as "heavy-handed" feminism: Some male critics interpreted the novel's themes as overly simplistic or one-sided "second-wave feminism," which they felt "blamed all of the female character's problems on the men around them"."
Sounds like we have come half circle where conservative MAGA men experiencing second wave bromanism were they blame all of men's problems on the women around them.
Thats was incoherent Howard
If she hadnt ripped off heinlein poorly would anyone know her
Someone who holds grudges and plays the blame game is not going to get a lot of respect from me. Especially one who claims to be an early feminist. Women like Marie Curie, Ida lupino, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Sanger, Gertrude Stein pave the way with real accomplishments when it was still legal to beat the s*** out of your wife.
I dont think much of her anyways but ocassionally she finds a nut
She also claims that the left book banning and me too cancellation culture was subsequently copied by the conservative right in the backwards red States that started banning all sorts of books and school libraries. Complete apples and orangutan comparison. The MAGA book banning has been a dream of the Evangelical conservative White supremacist uneducated and proud of it backwards movement since forever. With the ascendance of trump, they were unafraid to do what they have wanted to do all along.
The headline sounds like a bad answer to "describe your greatest weakness" in a job interview.
Stop while you're ahead howard
...too late
She is a much more precise writer than Heinlein. She does not write broad themes or wonderous adventure stories. She writes speculative fiction of feminism and its complaints, there is no unique or imaginative problem solving plots or interesting male characters.
The Handmaid’s Tale is probably the most deliberate lie novel since Roots.
Publisher push degenerate trash and one chooses not show it preschoolers (stuff you cant describe in public)
The handmade tale is a #MeToo teachable moment of liberal license that progressed a Democratic disaster with forward-looking collateral damage. Let them bray.
"Hold a grudge" = criticizing the Left.
The irreconcilable Choice, choice.
Leftists are still talking about "the blacklist" and "McCarthyism". But that's not "Holding a grudge". Its like the Holocaust, we seem to hear more about it, the further we away from 1945. No "Forgive and Forget". No one says "Let it go, it was 80 years ago".
It seems imposssible to read literary criticism today without getting hammered by political jargaon and judgements based purely on whether the novel supports or detracts from the appproved narrative.
If its an old novel then the current criticism will be based purely on "Is it antisemtic"? "Is it racist?" Is it anti-woman?"
She's written exactly one scene that has stuck in my head. In "Handmaid" there is an incident where a young woman is being hanged, and all the other handmaids are lined up to watch. The noose has a long free end, and all the watching girls are forced to hold it; to "participate" in enforcement of order.
That's scene-setting. Her literary style I found otherwise uninteresting.
GatorNavy, are you familiar with Heinlein's short stories? Check out "Our Fair City" and "-- We Also Walk Dogs"
"The noose has a long free end, and all the watching girls are forced to hold it; to "participate" in enforcement of order."
See the scene in "For Whom the Bell Tolls," where the communists force the villagers to participate in the execution of the "fascists," who were basically local businessmen like store owners or farmers, by beating them with flails as they are marched off of a cliff.
The difference being that this was something that the communist really did in Spain. But like a good propagandist, Atwood ascribes the crime to the "far right" in her fictional world.
Thank heavens she issued her clarion call against sex-based totalitarianism, violent religious extremism by non-Muslims, and the loss of women's reproductive rights. Those are the most important practical issues that we face today. But no matter how much you kowtow to the left, Margaret, it will never be enough until you agree to advocate a mass capitulation to the new Leader. Four legs good, two legs bad!
What “all sorts of books”? Links
Please.
"Sounds like we have come half circle where conservative MAGA men experiencing second wave bromanism were they blame all of men's problems on the women around them."
Not just MAGA men, Howard.
She has nothing in common with Rowling. She literally believes that the United States oppresses women more than any Islamic state, for example. And she was one of the dumb bunny "feminists" like Steve Bannon's latest hairpiece, Naomi Wolf 2.0, who tried out the burka and found it liberating.
She's also a sleazy limousine collectivist. I had to drive her to the airport once when I was in college, and after she got paid a bundle to bitch about American consumerism and capitalism, she bitched at me about my roomate's extremely well-used but tidy family Audi, which I had to borrow since all I had was a bicycle.
Yet you never hear her bitch about Canada's extremely, increasingly repressive speech laws that are second only to Britain's in investigating and prosecuting and getting people's professional licenses pulled (Jordan Peterson, for one example) for refusing to address people as magic unicorns or complaining about "migrant" violence.
She's a morally despicable hypocrite.
Obviously Atwood has read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" BTW, where she stole that image; any person with her education from her generation will have read it.
My first thought was that many writers are big grudge-holders. The resentments goad them into writing their books, but taking revenge in novel after novel isn't enough for them.
But the headline makes no sense. She's a great grudge-holder but she had to be goaded into writing her memoir? She reveals "a few" slights and that makes her the big grudge-holder? I suppose the explanation is that resenting what those further left have done is holding a grudge, while what those on the right have done must be resented forever.
The MAGA book banning has been a dream of the Evangelical conservative White supremacist uneducated and proud of it backwards movement since forever. With the ascendance of trump, they were unafraid to do what they have wanted to do all along.
Three moves: 1) make everything about Trump and MAGA, 2) make everyone who was ever conservative or rightist MAGA and Trumpist, 3) make them all racist and repressive.
4) use apples and oranges comparisons that make you remove all doubt
BTW, one of the points of that scene from Hemingway that Atwood cribbed and reversed, was how casually the communists in Spain threw around the term "fascist" to anybody who didn't buy 100% into their ideas, and the brutal consequences being called a fascist by the communists, when they had the power, were.
Tina Trent comes through again.
I had read a number of Atwood's books years ago. I tend to get them mixed up when I think about them now. And frankly don't remember much of any of them at this point. I guess that says something about their greatness to me. Some books stay with me. Hers didn't. I remember thinking they were good stories, but she was not my favorite writer. That happens a lot. Great storyteller, mediocre writer. Or great prose writer with weak storytelling ability. Sometimes you find one who can do both.
Anyway...Tina Trent got a first hand dose of what Atwood has appeared to be to me, from years of reading and hearing interviews of her and seeing her comments.
She is of a class of writers who get to hate the very systems that gave them a life that is better than 98% of those around them. And they seem unable to understand that very system that gave them what they have. Instead they loathe its imperfectness.
Margaret Atwood said she did not invent any part of The Handmaid's Tale; instead, she stated that everything in the novel had already happened in real life somewhere at some time. Her rule was to avoid putting anything in the book that human beings hadn't already done, as a way to show it could be a real-world possibility and a warning. Iran and Nazi Germany were two countries she had in mind when writing the book, according to Google AI.
Except she made allusions to every other place ljke the phillipines
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