"You have to watch out for being idolized too much. It can very quickly go from that to, ‘I thought you were God and...'"

"'... you didn’t solve my problem, you betrayed everything you stand for,' which was actually not everything you stood for, it was something they decided you stood for."

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).

The crafter of language, Margaret Atwood, proffers a "hints"/"details" distinction and now proclaims what she knew but did not know to be "horrifying."

From "'I knew this day was going to come': Alice Munro associates say they knew of abuse/A biographer of the Canadian writer says he was among those who knew that Munro’s daughter had been sexually abused by her stepfather" (WaPo)(free access link):

The story has shocked much of the literary world, which widely mourned [Alice] Munro with glowing tributes after her death in May at 92. 

"I did not learn the details of this until everyone else did, though I’d had hints not long before this past weekend. Horrifying," Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, a friend of Munro’s, said in an email to The Post.

If something horrifying might be true, but you only have "hints" and not "details," you have some responsibility. Not only was Atwood Munro's friend, but Atwood writes books that purport to nudge and instruct us about morality. "The Handmaid's Tale" seems to be taken as a perceptive observation of the evils inherent in our culture, a warning to see and to act before it is too late. 

"I guess we can add Atwood to the list (that includes other notables like JK Rowling) of misogynists' useful idiots."

Says the first commenter on a Metafilter discussion about this article in the Independent, "Why Margaret Atwood’s defense of the word ‘woman’ is misguided – and why it’s so important to get it right/An author whose work challenges biological essentialism has staked out a place on the wrong side of the argument. People like me have long paid a dire price for this wrongheaded thinking."

Margaret Atwood — Margaret Atwood — retweeted an article that defended the use of the word "woman," as opposed to things like "person who menstruates," and she's on the "wrong side" and she's "wrongheaded." There's a right and a wrong, and you'd better not even muse about whether the line is perfectly clear or you are will be blamed for the "dire price" paid by the people who are allowed to say "people like me."

Are women being erased? After 200 years of work, feminists are supposed to hold their tongue and not even ask, because there's another group whose interests have been advanced to the foreground. You can't even begin to think about whether that advances the patriarchy. You will be crushed. 

In which I pick 3 sentences from a NYT Valentine's Day column so you can talk about something you haven't read.

"More than two decades later, here I was breaking my rule, agreeing to go out on a second date when the first hadn’t done anything for me. And sure enough, this one was falling flat too. We weren’t running out of topics, but our chat about the prescience of 'The Handmaid’s Tale,' our children’s endless college tours and the decline of the subway, felt generic."

The piece is titled: "How My Worst Date Ever Became My Best/Agreeing to see him again would require a minor miracle. A minor miracle is exactly what happened."

Imagine a milieu in which the idea that "The Handmaid's Tale" was prescient is so well engrained that to agree about it is experienced as generic.

"The Handmaid's Tale" came out in 1985 and tells this story:

After a staged attack that killed the President of the United States and most of Congress, a radical political group called the "Sons of Jacob" used quasi-Christian ideology to launch a revolution. The United States Constitution was suspended, newspapers were censored, and what was formerly the United States of America was changed into a military dictatorship resembling a theonomy, known as the Republic of Gilead. The new regime moved quickly to consolidate its power, overtaking all other religious groups, including traditional Christian denominations. In addition, the regime reorganized society using a peculiar interpretation of some Old Testament ideas, and a new militarized, hierarchical model of social and religious fanaticism among its newly created social classes. Above all, the biggest change is the severe limitation of people's rights, especially those of women, who are not allowed to read, write, own property or handle money....

In this era of declining birth rates due to increasing infertility caused by environmental pollution and radiation, [fertile woman are] forcibly assigned to produce children for the "Commanders", the ruling class of men... Apart from Handmaids, other women are also classed socially and follow a strict dress code.... [A Handmaid] is treated poorly by a... Commander's wife... [T]he Commander [engages in] a sexual ritual obligatory for handmaids and intended to result in conception in the presence of his wife....

What in hell about the way the real world turned out was more like that story than that story was like the way things were in 1985? And yet these 2 date-goers couldn't figure out how to be anything other than dull because they could only toss around the conventional wisdom that the United States is on track for the Canadian writer's fever dream.

(If you can read the NYT story, it does have an interesting twist that makes it fun.)

"We didn’t think about women and men. We never thought we’d make a living."

Said Laurie Anderson, talking about living as an artist in NYC in the 70s and 80s, quoted in "Margaret Atwood and Laurie Anderson talk art, age and more" (a very skimpy AP article).

Responding to Anderson's affiliation with the set of persons called "artists" and not "women," Atwood said: "I’m from Canada... there weren’t any other artists."

I'd like a full transcript of that conversation, but there's basically nothing in the AP article but those 2 quotes. So here's Laurie Anderson on Letterman in 1984:

"At the first Women’s March, protesters carried signs with slogans like, 'Make Margaret Atwood fiction again!' and 'The Handmaid’s Tale’s not an instruction manual!'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg in "Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, and Ours" (NYT).

You could argue that all this is melodrama; living under Trump may be degrading, but American women are incomparably freer than those in, for example, Saudi Arabia, a society that seems far closer to Gilead than our own. Then again, in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” America hadn’t crumbled all at once. Recalling her old existence, the book’s heroine wondered at how normal life went on even as horrors filled the newspapers. “Nothing changes instantaneously: In a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it,” she says.

And in a world of gradually heating bathtubs that boil you to death before you notice, you'd never be able to take a bath. But who sets up bathtubs to heat gradually to the boiling point?! Oh, that Margaret Atwood, she's quite the comic writer! Except that wasn't a joke. She really did take that old trope of a frog in a pot of water on the stove — a stove, which is designed to bring pots of water to a boil — and turn it into a bathtub, so it could be a boiling woman and not just a frog.

And, you know, that thing about the frog is false. The frog jumps out when it gets too hot. He doesn't just sit there in the water getting used to it while he cooks to death. So you really don't have to pre-jump based on hyped up fears. In that analogy. Assuming it's a good analogy. It's certainly a trite analogy. But so helpful in drumming up hysteria. Nothing happening yet, but we'd better act now, because otherwise if something does happen, we won't notice. So we notice the nothing now because later we won't notice the something because it will seem like nothing. So learn to think that nothing is something because future you thinks something is nothing. How crazy would life be if we used that theory?!

Anyway, Margaret Atwood has a new novel, a sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale," called "The Testaments." Goldberg (with a spoiler alert) reveals the plot. I don't care about the plot or the book other than the way it's important to some people as they go able coping with the reality of Trump's presidency.

“Writing dystopias and utopias is a way of asking the reader the question, ‘Where do you want to live?’” Atwood said when I talked to her last year. “And where you end up living is going to depend partly on what you do now.” “The Testaments,” it turns out [SPOILER ALERT] isn’t a dystopian work at all. It’s utopian. By the time it’s over, Gilead is a relic, and scholars in a more enlightened time are studying the women who subverted it. Praise be! Our descendants should be so lucky.

I went to Amazon to get a link for "The Testaments," and I was amused by the collection of things Amazon suggested for me to "inspired" by my search. Which one of these things is not like the other?



What the hell, Amazon??!!

Feminist anxiety when a supposedly feminist TV show leans into the torture of women.

Lisa Miller (at The Cut) decides to stop watching "The Handmaid’s Tale."

There was Episode 1 of Season 2, where "our favorite characters are unrelentingly tortured — electrocuted with cattle prods, kicked, threatened with dogs, chained to a gas stove and burned, left alive on a gallows covered with urine."

And Episode 2: "[A] vast army of female slaves, barely alive, forced to dig all day in toxic waste until they die.... ]T]he soundtrack is mostly a constant, minor-key moan, like the wind through a cracked window, punctuated by the wailing and coughing of women, and screams."

Miller wonders:

Why am I watching this? It all feels so gratuitous... For season one, I agreed with the critical consensus. This is Important Television. A feminist parable, adapted from a novel by a woman, which was awarded eight Emmys — mostly to women — about the potential excesses of patriarchy, not so unimaginable now in the era of Pence and Trump.....

So you went along with the crowd that seemed like the right crowd. Why didn't you think for yourself? Why would the excesses of patriarchy take that form in the United States? Physically cruel, enforced captivity? That's not how we get people to submit to limited sex roles. So what if a woman dreamed up the idea? It's not an aptly imagined vision of how the subordination of women would be accomplished in American in our time. It's a sadistic, titillating fantasy, and it distracts the viewer from the way the real America tempts you into a cage with an open door. How lamely self-soothing to think that the problem is over there with Pence and Trump.

After one season and 2 episodes, Miller has a glimmer:

It’s feminist to watch women enslaved, degraded, beaten, amputated, and raped? How exactly am I participating in a women’s revolution by sitting on my comfy cozy bed and consuming this?...

The idea crosses her mind: Am I watching... porn? I'm paraphrasing. She puts it ditheringly. I mean, it's dithering just to put it in question form. To be straightforward, to talk like my idea of a feminist, you should say: I am watching porn! But Miller goes like this:

This question of porn in particular preoccupies me. There are many definitions of porn, many varieties, and the dilemma of whether pornography is a freedom or a tool of oppression continues to divide feminists. My concern in this case is fairly clear: that the violence against women in season 2 is indulgent, operatic, and designed to rouse if not pleasure then a visceral, physical response, that The Handmaid’s Tale has devolved from feminist horror into very conventional misogynistic entertainment. It’s a fantasia of women being debased and dehumanized, individually and en masse but disingenuously packaged as virtuous dystopian prophesy.

It's devolved. And only in Season 2. Please challenge yourself to critique Season 1 and the Atwood novel itself. If you're this slow picking up clues, how the hell will you notice when subtle, insidious cultural trends are subordinating you?!

Is the positioning of Handmaid’s Tale as smart, leftist political commentary protective against charges that it exploits women?...

It is if you let that sort of thing work on you. But you could put real feminism first.

Feminist backlash against "Handmaid's Tale" author Margaret Atwood for advocating some #MeToo moderation.

The Guardian reports.

“In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated" [Atwood wrote]....

Many online took issue with her view. “If @MargaretAtwood would like to stop warring amongst women, she should stop declaring war against younger, less powerful women and start listening,” wrote one person on Twitter. “In today’s dystopian news: One of the most important feminist voices of our time shits on less powerful women to uphold the power of her powerful male friend,” wrote another....

How to photograph a celebrity.

From "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)," the new David Sedaris book, this entry from May 5, 1994:

As part of the publicity I’m doing for the book (Barrel Fever), I was interviewed and photographed for Avenue magazine. The talking part I’m fine with, but I hate having my picture taken. First the photographer had me pose with Dennis (my cat) while wearing a cat mask. Then she had me pretend to hang from the antlers in the living room. Next I was told to close the louvered doors on my neck and then to hold my freeze-dried turkey head up to my nose. Just as she was running out of film, the photographer said, “Can we try something silly?”

That made me remember I wanted to promote this book Chris Buck sent me, "Uneasy: Portraits 1986-2016." It has 338 photographs of celebrities — including one of David Sedaris (that's not from 1994) — often photographed in some odd, quirky way.

For example, there's Billy Joel sitting on the end of a bed holding one of those theater "applause" signs, there are separate photos of Moby and Ike Turner doing that old little boy's trick of positioning a finger to make it look like his naked penis, there's Margaret Atwood pushing the side of her face and outspread hands against a screen door (photographed from the other side of the door), Casey Affleck lying on a table pushed into the corner of a gaudily wallpapered room, Russ Meyer burying his face in cake shaped like 2 breasts, Philip Seymour Hoffman half-hiding behind underpants hung on a clothesline, and George McGovern wearing just a Speedo and (apparently) doing the twist. Much more!

I recommend it highly, having looked at all the pictures and admired the great variety and the gameness of the celebrities. Since they are mostly not actors and models but writers, musicians, and politicians, people who haven't spent their lives figuring out how to look interesting, it takes some ingenuity: Where can you put them, what can you say to them to try to get a photograph that will affect us in a way that has something to do with who this person is?

"I’ll watch ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ with you if you’ll watch Sean Hannity with me."

Caption on The New Yorker's "Cartoon of the Day."

I think you can see that without a subscription, but if not, it's just a man and a woman sitting side by side on a sofa, looking forward at the TV. The woman has the remote control and is vaguely smiling. The man has his mouth open, signifying that he's the one delivering the remark we're to see as a zinger.

It's funny because:

Men and women can never agree on the same show.

The man really, really doesn't want to watch "The Handmaid's Tale."

Both shows are equally bad, but no one person can perceive them as equally bad.

Men think in terms of making a deal, and, like Trump, they go for the "big ask."

When the woman gets the remote control, the man needs to compensate by seeking a feeling of control in some other way, which is why he's attracted to right-wing politics.

She's smiling because her show is first, and given the theme of rape and the oppression of women, he'll ruin their living-room "date night" if he insists on compelling her to do anything.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED:

How Trump tromps into an otherwise promising intellectual discussion.

I was listening to the audio of this very nice New Yorker piece by Rebecca Mead about Margaret Atwood. Walking along by the lake, I was transported by this scene and so delighted by the time I got to the word "lubricious" that I ordered myself to remember that word so I could find it in the text and make a blog post when I got home. But then Trump barged in:

One evening in Toronto, Atwood invited me to her home, where we sat in its spacious kitchen on tall stools at a counter, overlooking her wintry, barren-looking garden. Graeme Gibson poured three glasses of whiskey while Atwood sorted through Christmas cards, dispensing with the chore as efficiently as if she were slicing rhubarb. I remarked on an aspect of “Oryx and Crake” that had moved me. The protagonist, Snowman, apparently left alone in the world, strives to remember unusual words he once knew. Atwood writes, “Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’ve gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.” Reading this passage in recent months led me to think about the catastrophic devaluation of intellection that seems to have occurred in American society: the willful repudiation of rigorous thinking, and objective facts, that helped propel Trump to victory. I remarked to Atwood that it felt like a prescient metaphor.

Why does crap like that keep happening?! It's like it's a... catastrophic devaluation of intellection.

It seems that these days all trains of thought lead to Trump. But perhaps the pibroch summoned him.

Pibroch? What does it mean? We know "lubricious," but "pibroch"? Here it is in Sir Walter Scott's  "Lady of the Lake":

No rude sound shall reach thine ear,
Armor's clang or war-steed champing
Trump nor pibroch summon here
Mustering clan or squadron tramping.

"It’s not a matter of pro-choice and pro-life... It’s about a matter of our daughter’s wishes not being honored by the state of Texas."

"All she is is a host for a fetus... I get angry with the state. What business did they have delving into these areas? Why are they practicing medicine up in Austin?"

Quotes from the mother and father of a 33-year-old woman who is 14 weeks pregnant in Texas, where the statutory law bars doctors from withdrawing life support from a pregnant patient. 

"Brave New World" or "1984" — "Which template would win"?

We used to wonder, Margaret Atwood writes.

During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from Aids, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama: Brave New World was winning the race.

That picture changed, too, with the attack on New York's twin towers in 2001. Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us, it appears, though it's no longer limited to the lands behind the former iron curtain: the west has its own versions now.

On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the gene-rich and the gene-poor - Huxley's alphas and epsilons - and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and - to go one better than Brave New World - for immortality.

Atwood's fear: We get both.

Read the whole thing.

I especially like the part about how she, as a 14 year old girl, struggled to understand Huxley, who wrote things like:

"Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor."

(Here's the line in it's chapter, which includes this sex talk: "'Hug me till you drug me, honey.'...'Kiss me till I'm in a coma. Hug me, honey, snuggly …'")

She asks:

[H]ow close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents?...

We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe... that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough.

Clones.

"Never Let Me Go," the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, with themes that remind me of "The Handmaid's Tale," is reviewed in Slate by Margaret Atwood, the author of "The Handmaid's Tale."

Hailsham [a mysterious school] exists to raise cloned children who have been brought into the world for the sole purpose of providing organs to other, "normal" people. They don't have parents. They can't have children. Once they graduate, they will go through a period of being "carers" to others of their kind who are already being deprived of their organs; then they will undergo up to four "donations" themselves, until they "complete." (None of these terms has originated with Ishiguro; he just gives them an extra twist.) The whole enterprise, like most human enterprises of dubious morality, is wrapped in euphemism and shadow: The outer world wants these children to exist because it's greedy for the benefits they can confer, but it doesn't wish to look head-on at what is happening. We assume—though it's never stated—that whatever objections might have been raised to such a scheme have already been overcome: By now the rules are in place and the situation is taken for granted—as slavery was once—by beneficiaries and victims alike.

All this is background. Ishiguro isn't much interested in the practicalities of cloning and organ donation. (Which four organs, you may wonder? A liver, two kidneys, then the heart? But wouldn't you be dead after the second kidney, anyway? Or are we throwing in the pancreas?) ...

[T]he book is also about our wish to do well, to attract approval. The children's poignant desire to be patted on the head—to be a "good carer," keeping those from whom organs are being taken from becoming too distressed; to be a "good donor," someone who makes it through all four "donations"—is heartbreaking. This is what traps them in their cage: None of them thinks about running away or revenging themselves upon the "normal" members of society. Ruth takes refuge in grandiose lies about herself and in daydreams—maybe she'll be allowed to get an office job. Tommy reacts with occasional rage to the unconscionable things being done to him, but then apologizes for his loss of control. In Ishiguro's world, as in our own, most people do what they're told.