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

Singing in the dead of night

This started out as something else. Something about Twitter, Tweets, twights, twats (sorry, it's just too tempting) and other things I can't get used to. Not so much the three-or-four-syllable "communications" that people fling at each other, using splng tht lvs a bt t b dsrd. It's the whole concept of alarmingly shorter and shorter attention spans resulting in messages that have been reduced to a nanosecond-long chirp.

Worse than that: like the frog in the pot, the water temperature gradually increasing until the frog is quite contentedly cooked, nobody seems to notice or particularly care what we have lost.


Anyway, tweets. Why tweets? Somebody (now probably massively wealthy) thought up this idiotic avian name. Couldn't be more idiotic, unless it was Cow Pat or something. Airbrained. Lightweight. Imagine Keats ("My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness. . .") twittering, tweeting Ode to a Nightingale. Shakespeare ("Love tweets not with the eyes, but with the mind/ And therefore is winged Twitter painted blind") chirping like the bloody chirper he actually was ("chirper" being a nasty name for a blithering Englishman).

"You'll have to learn how to do it," my husband says to me, "because you won't be able to survive if you don't." That's worse than sex. I'll have to do it, as if it's some dire and unpleasant bodily function you nevertheless can't avoid. But what alarms me is what fun everyone else is having, doing something I just bleepin'ly dread.


So anyways. Somebody had the bright idea that we should all become birds, and just twitter and twatter, nitter and natter at each other all the day long. Birds chitter and chatter, but they also kill. They evolved from dinosaurs, more directly than any other living species. In fact, they are now known to be the only direct descendents. Dinos ran around with feathers on, you see, long before they learned how to fly. I can't imagine how creepy that must have been.

Given the shrill vocalizations of most birds, including Jasper my addle-headed lovebird who must think he's a full-sized Amazon parrot, those dino-birds must have been deafening. They probably had the same cold round beady black eyes my pet bird has, those scaly feet (some remnant of lizard scales, no doubt). My bird feels a strong attachment to me, but that's because he's convinced I'm either his mother or his mate. Without the steady flow of seed mix, he'd completely ignore me.

So anyways. What am I getting at here? Nothing much. Why not Bark-bark or Neigh-neigh or Worm-bluggh (or whatever worms do to communicate)? No, it had to be Twitter.


I'd call that Twittiotic.