A Margaret Atwood Christmas

Atwood is a great subject for my PicMix art because every one of her images on Google is a posed, professional author photo. That means lots of blank space in behind - either that, or walls of books, and both of them gif up really nicely. As it turned out, there was a minimum of silliness in these (a little disappointing, really, but these aren't meant to be mockery). At the same time, the greatest weakness of these photos is that they are posed, professional author photos, meaning they are virtually interchangeable.

You have to try on all sorts of background effects for these things. One of them had her entire library in flames, and her in it. I didn't use it. This has some sort of vibrating Santa in the background, but that part doesn't show. The feverish, shifting stars are a nice touch. The animation is so bad in these that it's a kind of poetry.

Atwood as Santa was just too tempting to resist. 

In this one she looks uncannily like Barbra Streisand. I think the background of exploding roses is, if anything, restrained, so I had to use puppies and kittens to balance it.

This will cause seasickness if viewed for longer than ten seconds.

Jinglebell rock.

Cool and creepy: the wonder of Facebook

There is so much about social media that pisses me off that I often don’t know where to start.

I don’t even do Twitter. I’m not likely to start doing Twitter because of all the negative things I hear about it, the way it has gone sour, the way people attack each other. The Steven Galloway debacle is a case in point. Margaret Atwood casually swiped at a huge sector of the literary community, calling us frail maidens on fainting couches, claiming that firing Galloway because of his chronic sexual abuse of students was a “witch hunt” and “McCarthyism”.

Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet.

It gets worse, but it’s morning and I can barely get my brain around what I want/need to say. I’ve always had problems with people cadging sympathy on Facebook: “oh well, I guess it doesn’t matter that I'll have a migraine when I pick up my Giller Award tonight”, “Sick this week, don’t know how I’ll make my five-week holiday in Greece”, etc. There follows a chorus of sympathy, dozens of comments: “Oh, Diddums, just take care of yourself and I am SURE you’ll be in those Greek isles running around in your bikini before you know it.”

And then there is the “PLEASE, everyone. I am nearly at the 5000 Facebook friends limit and need to pick those last few precious spots myself, so don’t try to friend me! You will only be disappointed. I am so, so sorry, I know it's a hardship for you. But these last few names are absolutely crucial for the promotion of my next novel and might get me a spot on Ellen.”

Yesterday I saw “why do we only get to see posts from, say, fifty of our friends among the thousands we have?” As if it would be possible to see posts from 3500 people a day.

Such problems!

I know there are other things, but the one that is bugging me most right now is “I’m taking a break from social media, guys”. I see this one over, and over, and over again, and NOT ONCE has the person actually taken a “break” of more than two days. Recently it was a woman harmed by the Steven Galloway affair – bruised by a former friend who lit into her for thinking Galloway might actually have done some harm.

I can see this, can see being hurt. I’ve been hurt over and over and over again on social media, and in life. But what she said next, “I’m stepping back from social media for the rest of the year,” was remarkable, because somehow reality changed and the months of November and December collapsed down into two days, which is how long it was before she went back to posting on Facebook every day. But these posts may not even have counted: if she only posts three or four times a day, and the posts aren’t too long, is she somehow, mysteriously, still “taking a break”? Or was it all due to that Greek chorus of voices begging her to come back? Anyway, I am cynical enough now that I kept an eye on that situation, and it went exactly the way I predicted.

Am I in a sour mood? I don’t know. In a December mood, I guess. I’ve had worse. Lots worse. But this is the time of year one’s psyche adds it all up, and - BAM. I wonder what it has all amounted to.

I don’t know why I do Facebook anyway, except to put time in. It’s grey and wet out there, lousy even for taking a walk, and I am “behind” on Christmas preparations which I do not want to make.

I have people in my life, yes, precious and few, and given my family history it’s a good thing I’m not being treated like a punching bag every day. It was unlikely I would ever help co-create something this amazing (though there are those who’ve claimed it just dropped into my lap, undeserved). In truth, I would not change anything about it, or them. But they are growing up, growing away from me steadily. I am no good at loss.

Call it reality. I can’t take a break from life (then come back to it in two days!). It just keeps lumbering along. Already, atrocious things (I won't say what, but you already know) are seemingly normal. We have to do this, I guess, to stand it, to keep trying to enjoy our lives. I enjoy what I can; I honestly do, but they are all such small things.

Facebook reminds me that I will never achieve the big things I dreamed about for so long, though others did, and do. They endlessly shimmy around in their bikinis, Giller Prize in hand, to remind me of it.  Holidays. Awards. New babies. New friends. Exotic recipes that always turn out. And never a family fight. Never an alcoholic in the family. The smooth shiny facet is always kept turned towards your “friends” - but who knows what is on the other side.

Must be kind of exhausting, when you think about it.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. While thoroughly disgusted, and wondering whether I had already posted the Abbie poem and not wanting to look it up (but no one reads this anyway, so who cares), I stumbled upon something remarkable.

I cut this image out of the TV guide, the paper one I mean, back when it still existed. This was probably around 1990:

And I kept it, not knowing the provenance of the picture at all. I couldn't find anything about it, though it haunted me. It was in an ad for some sort of Billy Graham-like religious crusade. I put it in a book somewhere, not able to throw it out but not knowing what to do with it, and that was all, until it emerged again 15 or so years later, and I scanned it.

And then.

I found this, just now, just this minute! This. Is. The. Same. Puppet. It popped out at me on Google images while I searched for disaffected, desolate illustrations for this post.

Years, and years, and YEARS later, this anonymous, strange, unknown thing is now called "Cool Creepy Marionette". That is ALL I can find about this exquisite work of art. On site after site after site, the same image, replicated. 

It HAS to be the same! Even the eyes, even the mask, even the position of the hand - it's all the same. But why can't I find out anything about this except "cool creepy marionette"?

It's because the internet no longer cares about the provenance of anything. It's some sort of ultimate global Communism, everything held in common, nothing owned, least of all works of art that someone actually made - carved - imbued with a soul.

All I know is, this marionette, which looks fairly new, isn't new. In fact, I don't know how old it is.  It means something. Maybe if I keep digging, and digging, and digging, I'll find out - but I don't think so.

I don't know how to feel about this. In part, it filled me with amazement and joy - here he is again! Rediscovered: our puppet of sorrow. But then I wondered where he came from. Another lost boy? And does anybody besides me really care about it?

None so blind: the Galloway affair

May as well enter the fray, as most other writers have in this country.  But how to deal with the maelstrom of "issues" that have jumped out of the closet? Why is this strange jack-in-the-box suddenly exploding out of the container, if everything is going so well (as the more privileged writers insist)? Why are you so upset all of a sudden, why are "all you survivor people out there" in such a snit? God's in his heaven, all's right with CanLit: isn't it? Hey, MY paycheque is OK, how about yours? Gone to any signings lately? And let's not get into all the other issues. Better yet: let's.  It's my video and I'll kvetch if I want to. But after all these years, I believe I have a right.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author page!

@-would

Canadian Idol: a portrait of Margaret Atwood

No, really! And it's only because I found this cool picture of her. I didn't really need to do much to it. I have no artistic talent whatsoever, but I have never let that stop me. (If I could only do things I was good at, I'd be six feet under by now.) The animation is the usual semi-shitty PicMix, but it's still better than the wretched Blingee which would always lose your finished piece.

I want to be done with the CanLit kerfuffle, but when I saw this picture I had to do something with it. You can put whatever interpretation you want on it. Project on it all you want. What I settled on was quite simple: Vancouver rain; cat's eye. The rest, she did herself.

No one swings more weight than this gal in the literary world - the tight, stifling, incestuous Canadian literary world. She is one of the few who "broke out" (? Funny expression - when I reviewed books, every new title would be called the writer's "breakout novel"). I never broke out, which means - what? That I am still imprisoned? "Out" seems to mean bursting out of captivity, or revealing one's true sexual orientation.

Oh, but it's just words! I've been hearing that a lot lately. Break out. Thrown into. Incarcerated, with its echo of something cancerous. Witch hunt, McCarthy trials, etc. Perhaps, just perhaps there are echoes of that, but I have not yet heard of anyone being burned at the stake.

It's provocative language, and we all use it. Thing is, this is a whole bunch of pissed-off writers with the capability of ripping into each other in a nanosecond (and not in some private paper letter, but IN PUBLIC, sometimes in front of a huge audience. Whatever else it is, it is most definitely a performance.) I wonder if humankind can be trusted with such a capacity.

All right, so I did two portraits. I wasn't even going to do ONE. It's pure serendipity which animations will work, and I like how the gaudy Gothic rose flashes on and off and sort of wraps around her, while the rose on fire on the other side is fanned by a bat. What does it say: don't mess with me? It was never my intention to stick my tongue out. I just wanted to see where this would take me.

Reduce the stigma? How about the stupidity?

Like most writers in these parts, I’ve already written about the current Big Issue in CanLit, and don’t want to recap it. This is a side issue – maybe – but it’s an important one that, to my knowledge, no one else has touched on.

It's unpalatable to me to read about someone being “arrested”, “incarcerated”, subjected to a “Gestapo-style arrest”, and “thrown in a mental hospital” (all phrases I’ve read on Facebook), when to my knowledge this person was taken to a psychiatric facility for his own protection. It happened because according to two of his colleagues (now being horribly demonized by some), he was in danger of committing suicide. My understanding is that a person in this position is not “incarcerated” but under 24-hour observation only and can sign themselves out at that point.

I wasn’t there, of course, but the people making these provocative and alarming statements were not there either. Yet they report on it as if they were, in some cases even “naming names” about people who WERE there and blaming/shaming them for the incident, as if they caused it or at least allowed it to happen. 

The narrative has degradation/humiliation as its main theme. Being called "crazy" is still the worst, most career-destroying epithet of all - especially when, of course, you actually aren't but have been tarred-and-feathered with the same awful brush. I get the sense of people pointing at some dungeon of the soul and claiming that he certainly did not belong with THOSE people, who were being medicated to the gills and given ECT without their consent.

This is not 1962. He is not Jack Nicholson being shocked and lobotomized. And this is a stupid, stupid way to try to create sympathy for someone who, in my opinion, does not deserve it.

The implication of “incarceration” is alarming, because it implies punishment via imprisonment in the “madhouse” (a la Solzhenitsyn, a martyring rhetoric). It also displays the shame, horror and stigma STILL associated with psychiatric illness or even the suggestion of it, and portrays a scenario of a sane man being “committed” and dragged away in irons, kicking and screaming about his rights.

Did that happen? I don’t know. Though it does not seem likely, it’s being reported that way. At very least, it is being suggested by provocative terminology that smacks of "well, she told me" - "then HE told ME -" whispering around the campfire circle, the story amplified and distorted with each telling. As with campfire stories, ancient terrors usually pushed to the back of the mind begin to emerge, and the story takes on a life of its own.

Who better to invent stories (especially about the horrors of the madhouse, a favorite topic in fiction) than a whole bunch of pissed-off writers? What better medium than the Twitterverse, that strange otherworld of verbal hit-and-run? Stories and counterstories, letters and counterletters swarm around, and there is a virtually audible sense of heartbreak. 

Atwood's deliberate use of the phrase "witch hunt" (please forgive the Salem ads, they were left over from my last post) is a direct stab at the credibility of the complainants. Surely these claims were groundless, or at least blown far out of proportion: really, "not that bad", only what any attractive young woman should expect to experience with a charismatic, hip prof (and maybe even an advantage, come to think of it - why aren't these women more grateful?).

It's almost universal for abusers in positions of power to reverse the dynamics when under attack, suddenly flip-flopping into victim mode to gain professional and public sympathy: in which case, the dragged-off-in-chains scenario would only help. (If he were actually mentally ill, of course, it would be a whole 'nother story: he wouldn't know what he was talking about). It's obvious that the "victim" has tons of powerful supporters, a virtual Who's Who of CanLit - though some are apparently beginning to think better of it. Meanwhile, people post and tweet "at" each other. I have even seen Facebook posts in all-caps, displaying far more fulminating fury than that notorious “other side” who can’t seem to shut up about powerlessness. 

It's a kind of civil war among people usually exalted for their intelligence, insight and sensitivity.

Can’t we do better than that? This is 2016. I don’t know what happened there, YOU don’t know what happened there, but let’s dispense with this awful “thrown in the loony bin” rhetoric. The fact that people still think that way makes me wonder if there is any hope for the much-vaunted movement to “reach out for help” and “reduce the stigma”. 

Let’s reduce (eliminate!) the stupidity first.

POST-BLOG. Obviously I still need to write about this. It's the only way I can get my mind around the meltdown that is happening in my field (though, of course, I am forever on the fringes, and now quite relieved to be that way). So please forgive me if I seem repetitive. Illusions are biting the dust all over the place, elitism is rearing its ugly head, friendships are breaking apart, and new writers are wondering how they will ever have a future in this precarious field, or (given the bizarre, sick dynamics of it) if they even want to. And what are the alternatives? 

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author page!

Steven Galloway: outside of Canada, nobody cares

BLOGGER'S LAMENT.  I am absolutely exhausted. Just wiped out. I've been - somehow - don't know how - didn't want to do it, didn't want to do it - caught up in the Steven Galloway "affaire".

What's that, you ask? Who he? Outside of Canada, nobody cares. Steven Galloway is a former professor of Creative Writing at UBC (University of British Columbia, for my hordes of overseas fans). Professor Galloway had a habit of sexually assaulting female students, quite a number of them in fact, and some of them were beginning to actually complain about it. After an internal investigation, UBC dismissed him. 

But that is not the end, readers! The muck really begins here. In the past few days, 80 of Canada's creme de la creme/elite/"just plain old BEST" authors all lined up to sign an "open letter" to UBC protesting his dismissal. These Big 80, described in the press as "a Who's Who" of Canadian Literature, didn't think it was too gol-dern fair for The Professor to be held accountable for his actions - not to the point of actually losing his job! They insisted that a proper investigation be held to drag the situation out endlessly and allow Galloway to hire some crack lawyer who would blow down the (likely poor and marginalized) injured parties with one breath.

But the more people looked at this petition and the signatures under it, the more they smelled days'-old fish.

UBC is known as a sort of literary mill, a vast machine churning out new writers, who then, eventually, become Establishment: the new elite of CanLit. This is how the system renews itself: think of an immense, seething termite queen whose sole purpose is spewing out more termites.

If one unit of this family (and I use the term in a Sicilian sense) suffers in any way, the others must, according to their contract, rush to his/her aid. It is the termite way, and it is immutable.

The whole thing made me ill. To my mind, it was an extreme example of the wagons going in a circle, not to mention what Orwell might have called "wethink" (or, perhaps, "we-think"). A number of these CanLit muckety-mucks actually took their names OFF the "open" letter (which, to my mind, was about as closed a thing as I have ever seen), once they realized what it was they had actually signed.

Not to jest, because this has left me feeling like road kill. For the glittering Literatti will surely mass together when one of their own is under attack - while casually throwing a number of vulnerable, relatively powerless sexual assault survivors under the bus.

Or so it seems to me. 

Margaret Atwood, the Queen Bee or perhaps the Termite Queen of CanLit, wrote a letter of her own, which I won't reproduce here, but it's haughty. She tries to backtrack on her original statement, which compared Steven Galloway's dismissal to being burned at the stake in Salem. (Her references to a "witch hunt" strongly implied the students' claims were driven by hysterical delusion).

She has since made an effort to cover her literary ass, but it's a little late for that. Charmingly, she does remind us all that Galloway was "thrown in a mental hospital", which is apparently the worst fate which can befall a human being. The indignity of it - the horror, the shame - a Gulag Archipelago, UBC-style! It was all designed to cue the "He's Really The Victim" music.

If I jest about all this, it's so I won't cry. The whole thing exhausts me. Like Dorothy Parker, I only jest to keep from howling. (And please don't think I am comparing myself to her - I stopped drinking 26 years ago).

Margaret Atwood Follies: "gee, thanks, lady"

Margaret Atwood "can't write a novel," according to Norm Macdonald

(AARON VINCENT ELKAIM / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By PETER EDWARDS Star Reporter

Fri., Nov. 18, 2016

After kicking off something of a one-way Canadian literary feud, comedian Norm Macdonald has deleted a series of Twitter rants in which he called author Margaret Atwood “a no-talent mountebank bent on fooling fools” and other insults.

Some of the tirade from Macdonald, a former Saturday Night Live star, came late Tuesday night and Thursday morning of this week, after Atwood tried to console Americans after the election of Donald Trump.

Atwood: “Just like the Wizard of Oz, Donald Trump has no magical power”

Macdonald: “You make a very good, if utterly obvious, point. So, you’re saying he DOESN’T have magical powers. Thanks.”

And then Atwood, a Toronto resident, tries again to console American readers with: “Dear Americans. It will be all right in the long run. (How long? We will see.) You’ve been through worse, remember.”

Macdonald replies: “Gee, thanks, lady.”

Atwood, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for Literature, urges readers to take practical measures to help them cope with life under Trump, to which Macdonald adds: “How to SURVIVE in the era of Trump, lady? How about staying in your house with your money?”




Earlier, the 57-year-old Quebec City native observed, “Canadians have frauds and imposters just like everyone else. Most people in the arts are charlatans. One is @MargaretAtwood.” Macdonald later deleted the Atwood run of tweets (though they remain on his Facebook page), as he has done in the past with stories about meeting Bob Dylan, helping to write the SNL 40th anniversary special and more.

The comedian has a well-received book of his own currently out, Based on a True Story: A Memoir. Despite the title, Macdonald has described it, on Twitter and elsewhere, as a novel.

The shots he took online at Atwood went beyond her advice on life in a Trump America.

When Atwood sends a reader a handwritten quote from her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Macdonald jumps in and posts: “Oh, bad writing scribbled on a piece of paper. Well, who wouldn’t want that?”

Atwood has 1.32 million Twitter followers while Macdonald has 768,000.





Several of her fans jumped in to defend her. One posts: “as if I don’t have enough to deal with Norm hates Margret (sic) Atwood??”

Macdonald replies: “I don’t hate @MargaretAtwood. I hate bad writing.”

He then adds: “It isn’t her fault and I’d never have anything but pity for the talentless. But the Canadian school system makes you read her.”

One Atwood defender tries for some sort of anti-Trump solidarity but Macdonald has none of that.

“@normmacdonald In an authoritarian regime, the most important thing is whether you are ‘one of them’ or ‘one of us,’ ” he tweets.

“no,” Macdonald replies.





Macdonald accuses Atwood of “chasing celebrity and promoting anything for a buck” and compares her unfavourably to Canada’s Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro.

“It is nauseating to consider that through shameless self-promotion someone like @MargaretAtwood could care consider herself Munro’s peer,” Macdonalds writes.

“Unlike Munro, @MargaretAtwood is incapable of writing a novel, yet churns out chum at an alarming rate,” Macdonald continues.

“Munro is the greatest writer Canada has ever produced but feels herself incapable of writing a novel. On the flip side sits @MargaretAtwood,” Macdonald continues.

Atwood, 77 ,did not respond to the Star’s request for comment.





https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2016/11/18/norm-macdonald-deletes-anti-atwood-tweets.html

Christmas blues: the gaiety of grief

Dylan Thomas was once quoted as saying, “There is no gaiety so gay as the gaiety of grief.”

Somehow I sort of know what that means, though I can’t explain it.

Yesterday I was making gingerbread cookies with the grandkids (having had to throw out the entire first attempt at dough, so stinking horrible from the molasses that we ended up throwing it at the wall), and more or less feeling OK, but it was an effort. I had to pull myself up for it. For the first few days after my mother-in-law’s passing, I was laden with memories, great waves of memory breaking on the sand, so deep that they went back to when I was a girl of eighteen.

I said to someone I am close to, I have no bad memories of her, and she said to me, that’s because you didn’t see her that often. This is the way we “deal with” grief now. A kind of slamming of the door. Put up or shut up, she was 96 and had her life and a peaceful death, so just forget about it and get on with the cookies.

It’s hard.

Hard this time of year, which is hard already, for reasons I can’t even begin to probe.  Of course the child in me loves the sparkle and twinkling lights and angels and good food and having the family around. But I don’t know of a family that is universally loveable.

A family without tensions and trouble.

I feel over-grandma’d these days. It’s not that I don’t love it. I feel stretched thin sometimes, and I’m not even supposed to feel it, let alone acknowledge it. Everything I do seems to disappear into a black hole, leaving no trace.

I suppose my line of work is a factor. People don’t see me as “working”, in spite of writing six novels, 350-some book reviews, thousands of newspaper columns, dozens of published poems (and two anthologies), essays in text books, and serving as a juror in several competitions. It all just kind of vaporizes as it happens, and I know I am seen as “not working”.  In fact, people’s attitude probably mirrors that of a woman I knew (hardly a friend) who said, once my kids were both in school, “Goodness, Margaret, what on earth are you going to do with yourself all day?” (I was writing a novel.)

On the other hand, why should I expect them to understand? Margaret Atwood was once famously quoted as saying, “I can’t be fired because I don’t have a job.” I don’t either, though I have work. I even have paid work, the steady if not too thick income from my beloved alma mater, the Edmonton Journal. I’ve been reviewing more or less steadily since 1984, starting with the Journal and continuing with at least a dozen other publications. Most of these gigs were paid.

So if you’re paid for it, even if only an honorarium (meaning, a chintzy cheque), doesn’t that make you a professional?

YES. But it’s so much more than that.

This post was once another post, and I cut the second half because it was becoming just too bleak. Having a death in the family right at Christmas is hard. Already you’re assaulted by waves of memory that are beyond your control. But these layers run very deep and no doubt stir up my complete estrangement from my family of origin.

Okay, the “Sisters” post was me. No one saw it anyway, or only a few. And as usual, the person who needed to see it didn’t, or wouldn’t have cared even if she did.

So I had a sort of adoptive family when I got married, but didn’t really realize it for years and years. It grew slowly and without my awareness. Alliances have surged and faded, beyond my power to choose. (Do we choose to love? “Gee, I think I’ll love this person now. Stand back.”) There has been a sort of evolution. Now the lynch-pin has been withdrawn by the natural course of things. We will have to regroup. It remains to be seen who the new matriarch will be.


http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm