Horizon

Wow, that's got to be the rudest website I've ever seen. First it resizes your browser, which is particularly obnoxious for a page that contains only a tiny link in the center of your page. That link opens a tiny window — why did my browser get resized again — via a javascrip link which won't work on half a dozen browsers. Then any navigation within that opens a brand new window. Hello, ever hear of "target="? Remind me again why my original browser window got resized?

Sorry Martha, but if there's anythign compelling there, I'm not going to fight my way to it.

I just showed the website to our HCI person, who said "people like this shouldn't be allowed near any software that could create a website, even by accident."

That sounds like a candidate for a Meaning of Liff-like neologism - 'possession of a technically offensive website.'

Amateurs, whaddaya, whaddaya. My admiration is for the writer, not the fansite -- actually Atwood herself has her Blind Assassin protagonist say some pretty vicious things about lit-crit types, e.g. "Problematize is not a verb." But you know she would want you to persist despite adversity: it takes only two clicks (though one of them an extra-laborious right-click) to get to this collection of essays. There, was that so hard?

Thanks for the deeplink, Martha. I'll check it out.

Back on topic... I loved Handmaid's Tale. It was very formative in my high school years, and is probably responsible for my choice of women's studies as a second major in college (really!). I enjoyed her short stories (Bluebird's Egg), but got sidetracked reading either Robber Bride or Alias Grace and haven't gone back to her writing. It's been over 10 years -- maybe I should give her another try. Martha, do you recommend The Blind Assassin (over her other novels)?

Haven't read Handmaid's Tale -- think I dipped into it when I wasn't ready for so much grimness. I've recently read both The Robber Bride and Alias Grace. Do you remember which one put you off? I think The Robber Bride was slower going for me because it spends too much time on resentments and doesn't move the plot along so well.

Are all her stories fundamentally mysteries?

...Ish, I read Handmaid last night. It's always a feat when a cautionary tale becomes more so after it's written.

Good grief, she never gives the reader a break. Public executions on the Harvard Yard graduation stage being the least of it. She still isn't exactly kind to her readers in the newer books but at least the heart-yanking is a little subtler.

She's playing off Orwell consciously all the way through, isn't she? E.g. increasing dramatic tension by showing us a recognizable O'Brien figure and making us wonder if he'll behave as Orwell has led us to expect. Making us realize the secret lover isn't Winston because Winston is already gone. Julia's defeat with a nasty twist. Plus a couple of lightly incongruous references to mint humbugs and seaside postcards.

Then Charles wrote this morning with this:
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/articles/col-atwood.htm. Think I read it before but forgot.

Hm. After re-rereading Atwood's Orwell essay... It's not that Winston is the Handmaid protagonist's vanished husband. She's Winston.

And about time, too. I'm on my umpteenth post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, and have only read one with a female protagonist.

I read Handmaid last night.

I am astonished, and not a little envious, by your ability to get through books so fast. Fair enough, not having a two-year-old is part of it, but even when I was a less-than-swinging bachelor my reading pace was comparatively torpid. The ugly truth is that books, all books, good and bad indiscriminately, send me to sleep.

Back in college I read programming manuals to go to sleep. Nowadays I find myself descending into mental argument with the author and working myself up until sleep is impossible.

If it's any comfort, I have a terrible time doing assigned reading for any kind of class. I keep going over and over a paragraph to be sure I'm absorbing the proper information from it & then there's no time to finish the rest of the text. When I'm reading for work or pleasure it's different because I'm reading a text for my own reasons, not trying to divine what a professor will expect me to have found in it. As you may imagine I think the Socratic Method is for the birds.

I should send you The Little LISPer, the text for my introductory CS class. Written by someone who believed the Socratic Method could be conducted through a textbook, with lots of cutsey jokes about peanut butter sandwiches thrown in. Utterly nauseating.

I think the reason I liked Handmaid's tale is that it was a woman's dystopia. Choose your favorite female archetype: perfect wife, breeder, hard working housekeeper, or untouchable. Oh yeah, don't forget the misfits -- if you don't fit into any of the previous categories you can be a whore.
You can imagine how that would affect a literal minded 16 year old.

I can't really comment on the parallels to 1984, since I haven't read it. It sounds like none of the guys have read Handmaid's Tale, so I don't know how far we'll get on that discussion. However, if the protaganist is Winston, she doesn't come to as comprimised of an end, does she? (Or does she? It's been years, remember.)

As for other woman's dystopia, the only other one I can think of is Sheri Tepper's Gate to Woman's Country. And in some ways it's a utopian story. (Although I guess everyone's dystopia is someone else's utopia...)

Do you remember which one put you off? I think it was Alias Grace.

In a utopian world of Martha Bridegams (pause for ironic shudder) then I agree that the Socratic Method might be redundant. In the real world of Alan Allports (resigned shrug) then it's invaluable as a teaching aid, if only to put the wind up the little bleeders.

I am thinking of introducing a lawsuit forcing apple-polishers like Martha to run around the block at the completion of every page to give the rest of us catch-up time.

By the way, when 'Sara Brumfield' speaks are we to understand that it is actually Sara Brumfield and not Ben in e-drag? I have been a bit confused on this point hitherto.

Oh dear. I'd always heard that after years of marriage you'd start to resemble your spouse, but never knew that applied to prose.

http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html

I'm really quite curious about your confusion. Care to elaborate?

No big mystery really, it's just that it's not unknown for spouses to 'sign in' as their better halves, perhaps through error, particularly given the rather casual comment attribution protocol demanded by MT (which simply asks you to declare who you are rather than checking same). I have done it myself occasionally.

Sara -- I really hope you'll read 1984. I think you'll recognize right away that Handmaid was written as both an echo and a reproach to it. (Am I really the only contributor here who's read both, and in my case only as of last night?)

You might like Blind Assassin better than Alias Grace. There's that same too-long stringing out of mysteries but Assassin keeps things moving with a nifty weave of four variously reliable storylines that make a whole only at the very end of the book.

Ben and I do tend to protect our independent online identities as much as we do our offline ones... So, no, when I post it's always me and not Ben in e-drag. But, amusingly enough, we have started thinking more like each other. Case in point -- we both responded to Alan's post with the same comment about couples starting to look like alike.

I'll see if I can trade Ben Handmaid's Tale for 1984... But I'd rather read Blind Assassin.

Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite authors. Not favourite enough that I read every one of her novels (I gave the Penelopiad to my girlfriend for Christmas but am indifferent to reading it myself) but favourite enough that I read around 75% of her work. The Blind Assassin was really good--I loved the 1930s pastiching--even though the ending was blindingly obvious well before the half-way point of the novel. The Handmaid's Tale was unsettling when I read it as an 18 year-old but deeply memorable. I remember being deeply disappointed in the film version (and even more dismayed by Atwood's defence of it! It seems to be a Canadian tradition-- Timothy Findley praised the terrible film adaptation of The Wars, though he at least wrote that dreadful thing).

My favourite novel of hers remains to be Cat's Eye, which is a stirring account of how one can be haunted by their childhood and at the same time seems like Atwood's most optimistic work. It's also a wonderful documenting of the evolution of Toronto as a city between the fifties and the late eighties. I really should re-read it sometime.

Alias Grace is also great. She's also a wonderful poet. "Variations on the Word 'Sleep'" is one of the most moving poems about love and sex I've ever encountered.

Thanks, Graeme. Can you tell us anything about Penelopiad?