Margaret Atwood

[Matilda]

I read a book by Margaret Atwwod, The Handmaid's Tale, and I found it really interesting, also her style of writing fascinate me.

Have you read it, and if so what did you think of it? Which other books by her can you reccommend?

I would love to hear your opinions. :nod:

[beer good]

I've only read "Oryx And Crake", but I liked it a lot and definitely recommend it. Slightly Vonnegut-ish dystopy.

[Matilda]

Thanks!

only, could you repeat that Vonnegut bit? :confused:
;)

[beer good]

Thanks!

only, could you repeat that Vonnegut bit? :confused:
;)
Well, I just meant that "Oryx And Crake" reminded me a lot of some of Kurt Vonnegut's more apocalyptic novels - especially "Galapagos" - only not quite so much with the dark humour and a bit more modern (obviously) in that it includes genetics and the Internet. I'm still not completely sure if it presents an optimistic or a pessimistic view of humanity, but it's a great read.

[~Maude~]

I really like Margaret Atwwod, I've read and enjoyed the Blind Assassin and Alias Grace, by her as well.

[Helga]

I've read 'Oryx And Crake' and I liked it a lot, but I have mainly read essays by her I have found on the internet, both on literature and social issues... she is a good pen.

[benni2007]

„The Handmaid’s Tale“ by Margaret Atwood – A review

After having read this novel about a dystopian society, which emphasizes the role of religion but restricts the rights of women, I am wondering how on earth the author could choose this way of presenting her story.
I do not doubt its earnestness and there are, of course, a lot of reasons why one should concern oneself with religious fundamentalism and the oppression of women. But I’ll say clearly that Margaret Atwood’s novel seems inappropriate and unfitting to me. The society she describes is more like a parody of a dystopian society. The characters’ attitudes remain undefined; in the novel as well as in the movie.
These judgements are certainly also a result of the boredom that caught my mind while reading “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Usually I “swallow” new books within a couple of days. This one took me several weeks to get through with.
But what else could you expect of a novel which mainly consists of passages where the protagonist’s boredom is described?
Anyway, the feelings the novel arouses can be limited to two different kinds:
On the one hand it is boredom! On the other hand disgust caused by the explicit description of several scenes like the “Ceremony”.
Altogether I wouldn’t advice anyone to read “The Handmaid’s Tale” if he or she doesn’t have to do so. Atwood’s work might seem interesting to those who are keen on getting to know how to evoke boredom through written words. But there is one thing this novel can definitely not do: This is to captivate its reader!

[mad_mc]

Totally agree - I love Atwood! I did The Handmaid's Tale for A-Level English Lit, and I've also read Alias Grace, Negotiating with the Dead and Dancing Girls. I think it's to Atwood's credit that I studied Handmaid's for an exam and didn't end up hating it!!!!!

[jon1jt]

„The Handmaid’s Tale“ by Margaret Atwood – A review

After having read this novel about a dystopian society, which emphasizes the role of religion but restricts the rights of women, I am wondering how on earth the author could choose this way of presenting her story.
I do not doubt its earnestness and there are, of course, a lot of reasons why one should concern oneself with religious fundamentalism and the oppression of women. But I’ll say clearly that Margaret Atwood’s novel seems inappropriate and unfitting to me. The society she describes is more like a parody of a dystopian society. The characters’ attitudes remain undefined; in the novel as well as in the movie.
These judgements are certainly also a result of the boredom that caught my mind while reading “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Usually I “swallow” new books within a couple of days. This one took me several weeks to get through with.
But what else could you expect of a novel which mainly consists of passages where the protagonist’s boredom is described?
Anyway, the feelings the novel arouses can be limited to two different kinds:
On the one hand it is boredom! On the other hand disgust caused by the explicit description of several scenes like the “Ceremony”.
Altogether I wouldn’t advice anyone to read “The Handmaid’s Tale” if he or she doesn’t have to do so. Atwood’s work might seem interesting to those who are keen on getting to know how to evoke boredom through written words. But there is one thing this novel can definitely not do: This is to captivate its reader!

This is a balanced review and I got a lot out of it. Well done.

[Charles Darnay]

Has anyone here heard of/read Penelopaid by Atwood? If so, what do you think.

[dramasnot6]

I have just started Handmaid's Tale a few hours ago and LOVE it. The description is so wild and fantastic, i can hardly put the book down. Plus she has a fantastically dark,dark wit that really comes through

[ryguy]

I read Alias Grace, and I really liked it. Atwoods writing is very poetic. At times her writing seems to droan on and on, but otherwise, I still think she is a great writer.

[vili]

An interesting resurfacing of an old thread. :)

From all the works by Atwood that I have read, my personal favourite is probably Surfacing. It is a very well crafted and beautifully written novel.

Atwood's poetry and short fiction are also well worth exploring. Murder in the Dark and Good Bones are both really good collections. I am actually not one to usually like short stories that easily, but hers I have always enjoyed almost as much as I enjoy her novels or poetry.

To answer Charles Darnay's question -- quite late, I admit -- I read The Penelopiad about a year ago, and thought of it more as an exercise than a fully fledged novel. It is interesting, and fun to read, but I think that it doesn't quite have the same reach, or even attempt to have the same reach as Atwood's other novels.

[Nightshade]

Totally agree - I love Atwood! I did The Handmaid's Tale for A-Level English Lit, and I've also read Alias Grace, Negotiating with the Dead and Dancing Girls. I think it's to Atwood's credit that I studied Handmaid's for an exam and didn't end up hating it!!!!!

well I read it and did hate it.... but Ive since read alis grace and LOVED that, her writing stylr is amazing and hugley enjoyable its just Ididnt like most of the themes in HT.

[liesl]

I am a reader in love with Margaret Atwood's style of writing (can i hear dissertation?! lol!). 'The Handmaid's Tale' is certainly my favourite but i would definately recommend 'Oryx and Crake' for another take on nightmarish future and 'Alias Grace' for her interesting take on fictionalising a historical account. I aim to read more Atwood but am just far too busy at the moment with giant novels for university :(

[srpbritlit]

I read The Penelopiad to get Atwood's feminist viewpoint of Penelope's suffering in The Odyssey during Odysseus's 20 year absence.

[Nightshade]

I read The Penelopiad to get Atwood's feminist viewpoint of Penelope's suffering in The Odyssey during Odysseus's 20 year absence.

Ive been looking at that one for ages is it one of her extreeme ones or not?

[morgane]

I also like Margaret Atwood a lot. The first book I read by her was The Handmaid's Tale, a few years ago, but I did not like it that much. But last year, I read The Blind Assassin and I totally adored it! I read it in just a few days (it's 500 pages long), it was so gripping and most importantly, so well written. A short while after, I read Alias Grace and I also adored it, for the same reasons. I will read Oryx and Crake soon and I hope it will be as good as the others.
Personally, I think that Atwood is one of the best contenporary English-writing authors. I am not a native English speaker bit for me, her novels show all the beauty of the English language.

[THX-1138]

i really want to read The Handmaid's Tale but still didn't find a copy yet.

[cuppajoe_9]

I like Atwood alot, although I've only read Handmaid's Tale and Oryx & Crake, and some of the poems, all very good. She turns up in used book stores quite a lot where I live, apparently donated by people who went on a CanLit guilt trip but then decided they didn't want to go all the way through Alias Grace. Interestingly, she's supposed to be my cousin, a fact that has earned me quite a few blank stares and one offer to have my children.

[jewells]

"The Handmaid's Tale" was definately a great read. I haven't read anything else by her yet, but I'm planning on it. :)

[andave_ya]

sounds good. Another book on the list!:nod: :nod:

[Francis Parker]

Hand Maids Tale and Oryx And Crake are great novels- I love dystopian post apocalyptic worlds where anything can happen and she keeps it human enough that you have absolutely no trouble believing in that alternate world.

I didn't find either one "boring", but the kind of novels you can hardly put down until you've reached the end.

[Derringer]

Atwood is an excellent author. I would recommend Alias Grace as well.

[Elinor Dashwood]

„The Handmaid’s Tale“ by Margaret Atwood – A review

After having read this novel about a dystopian society, which emphasizes the role of religion but restricts the rights of women, I am wondering how on earth the author could choose this way of presenting her story.
I do not doubt its earnestness and there are, of course, a lot of reasons why one should concern oneself with religious fundamentalism and the oppression of women. But I’ll say clearly that Margaret Atwood’s novel seems inappropriate and unfitting to me. The society she describes is more like a parody of a dystopian society. The characters’ attitudes remain undefined; in the novel as well as in the movie.
These judgements are certainly also a result of the boredom that caught my mind while reading “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Usually I “swallow” new books within a couple of days. This one took me several weeks to get through with.
But what else could you expect of a novel which mainly consists of passages where the protagonist’s boredom is described?
Anyway, the feelings the novel arouses can be limited to two different kinds:
On the one hand it is boredom! On the other hand disgust caused by the explicit description of several scenes like the “Ceremony”.
Altogether I wouldn’t advice anyone to read “The Handmaid’s Tale” if he or she doesn’t have to do so. Atwood’s work might seem interesting to those who are keen on getting to know how to evoke boredom through written words. But there is one thing this novel can definitely not do: This is to captivate its reader!


I have to say I totally disagree with your review: 100%! I think the way Atwood chooses to present the story as a found document by anthropoligists makes it all the more interesting. It is a much better way of presenting the story, from the point of view of the protagonist we get a clear insight into her life. It makes it all the more frightening for the reader that we do not know what became of her.

It is not that the characters views remain undefined, it is that they live in fear of revealing their true feelings and if they do they risk death, again you are fogetting that the story is supposed to be a manuscript. The nature of an oppressed society means that people cannot show their true feelings or opinions. I do not know how you can say its boring, we the reader are not truely sure what kind of world this is, with every sentence we are given clues and must put these together to see the larger picture. As for the "Ceremonies" you must be very prudish if they cause offence to you, Atwood has not added them for sensationalism, they are an important part of the story.

This book is great to read, wether you plan on studying it in detail or are simply reading for pleasure.

[kratsayra]

I actually haven't read The Handmaid's Tale yet, although I have read a good number of Atwood's other novels.

One of my favorites, that no one has mentioned yet, is The Robber Bride. It is just very intriguing and you really get into the characters' lives.

Some of her books are a bit weird - Surfacing and The Edible Woman are two of her books that are just a bit too bizarre for me to really get into. I finished them, but then at the end I was kind of like "what?!"

I like Cat's Eye as well. But I've always thought of it as a junior version of Robber Bride.

[Elinor Dashwood]

Some of her books are a bit weird - Surfacing and The Edible Woman are two of her books that are just a bit too bizarre for me to really get into. I finished them, but then at the end I was kind of like "what?!"
[/I].

I agree with you about The Edible Woman, I read it when I was about 17, so maybe i was just too young to understand the full meaning behind it, I will definately re-read it and see if I understand it a bit better now I've "matured" a bit. Not that 22 is a mature age, LOL!

[spartanyr]

Hey I represent spartan youth radio, Canada's only highschool podcast radio station. Check out our interview with Margaret Atwood @ spartanyouthradio.com

[myrna22]

I read a book by Margaret Atwwod, The Handmaid's Tale, and I found it really interesting, also her style of writing fascinate me.

Have you read it, and if so what did you think of it? Which other books by her can you reccommend?

I would love to hear your opinions. :nod:

Surfacing by Atwood is interesting. Her style in this novel is stream of consciousness.

[Ron Price]

Margaret Atwood(1939- ) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She graduated from high school in Toronto the year I entered my last year of primary school in Burlington just 30 miles away: 1957. We are both war-babies or members of what some social scientists call the silent generation. Atwood was always about 5 years ahead of me since she was born at the start of the war, while I was born toward its end.

Considered by one generational descriptor as “cautious, unimaginative and withdrawn,” members of our generation, the war-babies, grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s at a time of social conformity and, “looking for a type of rebirth.”(1) They needed a cause. Both Atwood and I only fit some aspects of this generation descriptor. We both needed a cause. For me it became the Baha’i Faith. Atwood is one of Canada’s most successful writers with more than a dozen volumes of poetry and 20 volumes of prose to her credit.

Atwood got her M.A. in 1962 in literature, the same year I finished my last year of hometown baseball, entered my last year of high school and began my travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community in the small town of Dundas Ontario. As my teaching career developed from primary, to secondary, to post-secondary levels, and as I travelled and worked from town to town in both Canada and Australia, in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, Atwood published book after book. She was catapulted to celebrity status in 1972, the first year I left Canada and began living in Australia as an international pioneer from Canada, the year I helped establish the first elected Baha’i group in the steel-port city of Whyalla South Australia.

Her book: Survival provided for Canadians like myself a wonderful insight into Canadian literature and into our very sense of identity.2-Ron Price with thanks to (1) M. Nowak and D.T. Miller, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday & Co. Inc., N.Y. 1977, p.18; and 2Joyce Carol Oates, “Margaret Atwood’s Tale,” The New York Review of Books, 2 November 2006.

Yes, Margaret Atwood, I liked
your characterization and your
leitmotifs of Canadians about a
sense of survival….not triumph
or victory, like the Americans, &
not about those who made it….
but those who made-it-back……

I made it back, Margaret, from a
Baffin Island crash: ‘here I stand’
as Martin Luther said about half a
millennium ago at the outset of a
Protestant-German Reformation.(1)

(1) Luther is sometimes quoted as saying: "Here I stand. I can do no other". Recent scholars consider the evidence for these words to be unreliable, since they were inserted before "May God help me" only in later versions of the speech and not recorded in witness accounts of the proceedings. -Richard Marius, Luther, Quartet, London, 1975, p.155.

Ron Price
8 January 2012

[Ron Price]

On my Facebook profile page yesterday Random House Inc posted "Margaret Atwood's 10 rules for writing" and, after reading them, I was inspired to add the following pieces I'd written over the years in relation to the ideas and life, the writing and influence she has had on my own writing. And so---I add these pieces to the 3rd page of posts at this thread at Literature Network Forums in relation to this famous Canadian writer.-Ron Price, Tasmania:auto:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The physical landscape where the events of our story, our narrative, our life, occurs is unavoidably a focus for our activities, our meanings. There is also a spiritual, a historical, a psychological landscape which is equally, if not more, a focus for much that has significance in our lives. Much has been written about these two types of landscape; indeed, a separate book could be devoted to their associated themes and the vast literature now available which explores them.

This physical and psychological landscape has an influence on us which is really quite immeasurable. The developmental psychologist and specialist in the history of childhood, Lloyd deMause, argues that at the centre of any understanding of history and of our own lives we must see our primary relationships with parents, siblings and close friends. DeMause goes so far as to construct a philosophy of history based on our experiences in childhood.

(1) Margaret Atwood has analysed attitudes in Canada, England and the United States to nature and landscape in her book Survival, Anastasi Press, Toronto, 1972. In Australia I've always liked Ronald Conway's analysis of the Australian psyche spread over several books among which are: The Great Australian Stupor, 1971 and The End of Stupor?, 1984.
(2) Lloyd deMause, The History of Childhood, 1974 and a host of articles in The Journal of Psychohistory.
-------------------------------
AMBIGUITY

Price’s poetic meanderings, his immersion in the process of defining his journey, is partly his way of discovering his past, his childhood, his ancestral roots, his psycho-history; partly his way of defining his identity, his complex personality, his many selves and what composed them; partly his way of giving form and substance to a religious conviction that had, in one way or another, consumed his life and given it meaning; and partly his way of giving expression to the relativity and multiplicity of truth’s many-coloured glass.-Ron Price with thanks to Margaret Atwood in Women Writers: Margaret Atwood, Barbara Hill Rigney, Barnes and Noble Books, Totowa, NJ, 1987.

Yes, Margaret, they defy classification:
men, women, ideas: grey, complicated,
multidimensional, like everything else.
Yet, we classify the ambiguous, the
inexact, the passionate waters, the
incorrigibly murky rivers of our days.

We strive for precision with our
fastidiousness and our disposition
to overcome the casual. With our
logic, our science and our desire
to sanitize our art we assault all the
ambiguity and create our universal
definitions, ah, but, but to no avail.

In the end, though, we are left with
the subtle, the allusive, figurative,
the nuances, the ironic, ambivalent,
the handmaiden of mysticism, and
a savouring of mystery: ambiguity,
the promoter of community in our
quest for meaning, our quest far, far
beyond the univocal into a thousand
faces, a thousand voices, a 1000 eyes.

Ron Price
13 February 1999 to 10/10/’12.
-------------------------------------------
MY STORY IS DIFFERENT, MARGARET

The writer, the poet, is an observer, a witness, and such observations are the air they breathe. The poem, the writing, is a vehicle, for their human responsibility. It is a form of testament, a form of eye-witness account, an I-witnessing. The overall opus can often be said to comprise one story. For Margaret Atwood it is what she calls the story of the disaster which is the world.1 For Ron Price it is what he calls Pioneering Over Five Epoch: An Autobiographical Study and a Study in Autobiography,-Ron Price with thanks to 1Margaret Atwood in Women Writers: Margaret Atwood, Barbara Hill Rigney, Barnes and Noble Books, Totowa, NJ, 1987, p.17.

Yes, Margaret, there is pain, tragedy,
disaster, fatigue, fear and loathing in
this Age of Transition, this eve of a
destruction as Barry McGuire called
it back in the ‘60s on that first LP I
bought while living above that little
restaurant in Dundas, the place they
called the Golden Horseshoe in Ont
by the lake in mid-North America!!!

I’ve played my part. I’ve told it as I’ve
seen it in these poems, Margaret, in the
border country, this half-light, this new
generation of dawn-breaking, in this
burgeoning world of the dazzling and
the chaotic, in this waiting world, the
.......
the not-yet-arrived, the not here yet,
the dream-&-the reality, a beginning,
chrysalis, the endless repetition, the
hearing of the story and its meaning
again and again until it has dried out
your soul inside...despair’s bleached
skull as Roger White once called it!!!

Ron Price
13 February 1999 to
June 12th 2006 and 10/10/’12.
----------------
PINNING

Margaret Atwood, famous Canadian writer, said in an interview in 1978: “I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16. And have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.” I did not have the feeling that writing was “the only thing I wanted to do” until 1992. Sensibly and insensibly, incrementally and increasingly until I retired from teaching in 1999 that desire took more and more definite shape in the field of action. By then I was 55.

Atwood also made the comment that in North America people have “a somewhat romantic notion….about what an author is. They think of "writing" not as something you do but as something you are. The writer is seen as "expressing" herself or himself; therefore, their books must be autobiographical. If the book were seen as something made, like a pot, we probably wouldn't have this difficulty.” As a North American I hold some of this romantic view. As a person who has lived more than half his life in the Antipodes I see my writing a little like a pot or a painting, a garden or a fine meal made by a chef, among other analogues.

Atwood went on to say: “My parents were great readers. They didn't encourage me to become a writer, exactly, but they gave me a more important kind of support; that is, they expected me to make use of my intelligence and abilities. But they did not pressure me in any particular direction. My mother was rather exceptional in this respect from what I can tell from the experiences of other young people my own age. Remember that all this was taking place in the 1950's, when marriage was seen as the only desirable goal and parents pushed their kids this way and that.”

This could very well describe my parents. My mother, like Atwood’s, was a very lively person who would rather read poetry than scrub floors. My father scrubbed a lot of floors and did many things in life I scarcely appreciated then. -Ron Price with thanks to Margaret Atwood in “Margaret Atwood: Poet,” Joyce Carol Oats, The New York Times on the Web, May 21st 1978.

I am absolutely dependent on the details
of the material world to make a space
for my prose-poetry to move around in.
It's dangerous to lift a statement out of
context, out of my poem, and take it as
my view, the poet’s view. The cultural
attitudes in poems are not invented by
the poet; they are reflections of some
thing the poet sees in society around
him. Yeats once said that the solitary
imagination”…..makes and unmakes
mankind and even the world itself, for
does not the 'eye alter all'?" Poetry is
one of those things that can't ever be
quite pinned down, but still I do a lot
of pinning trying to define a process.1

1 Much of this prose-poem is taken from this interview published in The New York Times seven months before I left Ballarat for Tasmania in 1979.

Ron Price
May 28th 2006 to 10/10/’12.
-----------------------------------------
MORE TRUSTWORTHY?

Yesterday, while reading in the Launceston library I read some of a biography of Margaret Atwood. On the front page it read: "Never trust biographies. Too many events in a man's life are invisible, as unknown to others as our dreams." The autobiographer, on the other hand, can tell of these invisible events and of his dreams and, to that extent, autobiographies are potentially more trustworthy. My autobiography, spread over several genres, certainly tells of this invisible world, as best I can. It is my hope that it provides, not only a more trustworthy document but one that is a pleasure to read. -Ron Price with thanks to Anne Michaels in Margaret Atwood: A Biography, Nathalie Cooke, Ecw Press, Toronto, 1998, p.5

We need to feel we understand
the world we live in, making
sense of these our days with
a persuasive portrait of who
we are as people and what
our lives are or should be...
about......can it be recorded
here in thoese prose-poems?

Is this philosophico-religious
vision of reality with answers
and values to live by....is this
a need only for some? Is a cry
of anguish only given to some?(1)

With so many there seems to be
no cry at all.....just a sort of live
and let live.......a "she'll be right
mate" attitude, as they say down
here in the Antipodes-Downunder.

1 Ayn Rand(1905-1982) wrote about this idea of the individual cry of anguish, Le Cri du coeur, the French title of the French language film The Heart's Cry. Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.
-----------------------
ende of document

Ron Price
7 November 2001

[Ron Price]

FULFILLING HIS TRUST

Margaret Atwood, Canadian author, explained how she wrote a series of poems that became The Journals of Susanna Moodie:1 “They came as separate poems and I had no idea when I began that I was going to end up with a book of that size. It wasn’t planned that way. I wrote twelve at first and stopped and thought, you know, this is just short of a long short poem, twelve short poems, that’s it. And then I started writing more of them but I didn’t know where it was going. I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like novels.”22

My poetry was similar to Atwood’s in terms of the process of writing. My pieces too “came as separate poems and I had no idea when I began that I was going to end up with a book” or books of poems the size or the extent to which I now have. “It wasn’t planned that way;” I wrote some 200 poems until the age of 47; of these I kept about 170. That’s about 5 poems a year from adolescence, the age of 13, to 47--35 years—or a poem every 75 days. Not exactly prolific. “And then I started writing more of them” in 1992. “But I didn’t know where it was going.” In the years 1992 to 2005 I wrote some 6000 poems. “I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like novels.” I write a batch of about 100 and put them in a plastic binding and give them to some Baha’i group.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Oxford UP, Toronto, 1970; and 2Margaret Atwood in Graeme Gibson, Eleven Canadian Novelists, Anansi, Toronto, 1972, p.164.

This is no novel but there’s
a central character, a story,
a set of ideas, a philosophy,
a serendipitous arrangement,
sequentially ordered with pattern
and images in a clear, an especially
modern sensibility, millions of words.

There’s a darker side to this persona,
this self in society and its exploration
is part of the trip, the journey through
a complex society and a new religion,
a series of coming to terms with people,
jobs, self, religion, the land, change---
as a tempest sweeps the face of the earth
in unpredictable, unprecedented ways.

After seeing little meaning in my world
around me at the start of my pioneering
journey in ’62, slowly, a union, vision,
past, present and future fell before my eyes,
insinuating, unobtrusive, with wonder,
awe, the foundation of the poetic me1
in a poem that is never finished and
helps me fulfill in my life His trust.2

1 D. H. Lawrence quoted in The Psychic Mariner: A Reading of the Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Tom Marshall, Heinemann, London, 1970, p.3. 2 Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words, p.1

Ron Price
September 18th 2005
---------------------------------------------------------------------
KEEPING IT IN

The novelists Iris Murdoch and Margaret Atwood1 say that people need secrets. They are a right and proper part of being human. The world today is obsessed with not having secrets, with letting it all hang out, with telling it all. These novelists argue that someone with no secrets is an impossibility. Beginning, perhaps, with St. Augustine, but certainly with the diarist Samuel Pepys in 1659-1669,2 we find men and women who loved themselves and from a fullness of their knowledge they felt a love for others. They were curious about the world; with their eyes and ears wide open they observed the world. With a genuine and sometimes superficial gregariousness Pepys hid his secret, self-obsessed, hermetic existence, the place where he wrote for himself in such a delightfully frank way with a special zest to tell it all and with fresh observational details and a less than deep analysis.--Ron Price with thanks to 1 Helen Elliott, "The Sting in the Tale," The Australian: The Review, 3 March 2001, pp.4-5 and 2 Robert Louis Stevenson, "Modern History Sourcebook," Samuel Pepys, 1886.

You can't tell it all:
that's plain to see.
Not everything can
be disclosed.
It's better to keep it in
sometimes, the wise course,
the sensible middle,
a question of timing,
suited to the ears,
the sane line.

I've said this before.
I don't tell it all;
I keep some back,
just about all the time,
in poems and in life.


Ron Price
3 March 2001

[aaron stark]

I've read Oryx and Crake, as well as The Year of The Flood. The last one was (in a way) a sequel to OAC. Definitely liked OAC a lot more though!

[Ron Price]

Thanks aaron, for your post. You might like to take a look at: Jennifer Byrne Presents Margaret Atwood abc1 10:00 pm Tuesday, May 28 2013. Atwood is a colossal talent and one of the most heavily awarded writers of recent times. She is a woman of prodigious talents. "It was an absolute delight to interview her in front of a packed house at the Perth Concert Hall," says Jennifer Byrne. Discussion ranged from her unconventional upbringing to her most influential work, The Handmaid's Tale, and so much more in between. Their "conversation was unexpectedly funny, Atwood fans and novices alike will thoroughly enjoy it!" says Jennifer Byrne

Margaret Atwood has a truly stellar literary career. Achieving her first professional publication at just 20, she won her first award at 22. With over 50 titles published, including 13 novels and 10 non-fiction books, as well as poetry, short stories and children's books, Atwood is as prolific as she is venerated. She has accumulated numerous awards and accolades spanning over five decades.

[Ron Price]

Margaret Atwood talked tonight, in her interview with Jennifer Byrne, about a writer in love with what they are writing but that the process is work. The historian Huizinga has written about the combination of pleasure/fun/love and work in the following book. Having fun is one of the chief aims of the citizens in western civilization and it is also a good idea for those, like myself, who are serious people. I recommend an orientation to fun embraced by Johan Huizinga(1872-1945) in his book Homo Ludens (1938).

In this book he discusses the possibility that play is the primary formative element in human culture. Huizinga also published books on American history and Dutch history in the 17th century and these I do not recommend for your reading pleasure. Indeed, over the years when I do recommend a book--always take the recommendation with a grain of salt. The world is drowning in books, in words, to say nothing of images.

Alarmed by the rise of national-socialism in Germany, Huizinga wrote several works of cultural criticism. Many similarities can be noted between his analysis and that of contemporary critics such as Ortega y Gasset and Oswald Spengler. Heavy dudes they were too. Huizinga argued that the spirit of technical and mechanical organisation had replaced spontaneous and organic order and cultural as well as political life.
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WHAT IS PLAY?

"Activity that proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action, mirth and relaxation follow."1 This is the definition of play by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga(1872-1945) in his book 1Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, 1950(1944), p. 132.

I have had, according to this definition, a lifetime of play beginning as far back as I can remember, as far back as my first memory, with those Meccano toys in the snow in a late winter day in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. The year was 1948, the year of the formation of the NSA of the Baha’is of Canada which I have been associated with now for nearly 60 years.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 17 June 2012.

You wanted to write, Johan;
indeed, you had to write, as
you said. Writing is playing,
is creative….it creates order
between the poles of frivolity
and ecstasy…..It functions as
a play-ground for the mind in
a world of its own and creates,
civilization which arises in and
as play…do I play too much by
writing all this prose and poetry?1

(1) Huizinga sees the essence of play as it is found in the ancient Greeks. “Plato understood creativity as play,” he asserts. Aristotle’s had another, simpler and more popular view. According to Aristotle music had a very definite function technically, psychologically and above all morally. It belonged to the mimetic arts, and the effect of this mimesis was, he stated, to arouse ethical feelings of a positive or negative kind.

(1) Huizinga’s most famous work was The Autumn of the Middle Ages, or The Waning of the Middle Ages published in 1919. In this work he reinterpreted the later Middle Ages as a period of pessimism and decadence rather than rebirth.

Ron Price
17/6/’12