
The Making of Margaret Atwood - apollinaire
https://thewalrus.ca/the-making-of-margaret-atwood/
======
jfengel
I gave a book of her poetry (Penelopiad) to a friend of mine, a talented poet
herself. She said it made her angry: this was what she'd been aiming for her
whole life, and Atwood made it look easy.

I'm glad that Handmaid's Tale has brought her to a wider audience. It would be
easy for her to be shunted into "genre fiction" for that book, or into "chick
lit" for most of her other novels. But she's one of the most gifted prose
stylists I've ever read. Her nonfiction book Payback, about debt, is actually
quite insightful as well -- it came out at the heart of the financial crisis,
but was developed before it began and is a very astute criticism of the entire
financial system.

~~~
magneticnorth
I'll have to read payback, I was unfamiliar with it, thanks for bringing it to
my attention.

I have to say, though, this comment seems an odd mix of praising Atwood and
seriously underestimating the scale and longevity of her fame and
international regard. Like yes, her standard fiction novels are written by a
woman and have female main characters, but nearly all of them were nominated
for major international literary awards and many of them won - I don’t think
any would qualify as “chick lit”, unless you’re taking the extremely broad
stance of putting any novel written from a female perspective under that
umbrella.

And assuming that your poet friend was unfamiliar with Atwood seems bizarre to
me - I’m not a poet or in a literary field at all, but I was under the
impression that she is one of the most well-known living poets (as a poet, not
only a novelist), it’s just that poets/poetry don’t tend to be that well known
in general.

~~~
jfengel
She is well known in literary circles, but I didn't think of her as a
household name. My friend the poet knew her from Handmaid's Tale, but her
poetry was less well known. (There are so many poets that even people who read
a lot of poetry can easily miss a great one.)

------
cosmic_ape
The context is that various authors comment on Atwood:

>> The office of Jonathan Franzen: While he was pleased to receive your
invitation, he must decline due to the fact that, although he is aware of Ms.
Atwood’s love of birds, and he loves her for it, he’s never birded with her
personally and can’t speak to any specifics regarding her conservation work.

------
klunger
She looks down her nose at "science fiction" and claims that her work is
"speculative fiction" instead. It is a pretentious, pedantic distinction and,
as a lifelong scifi fan, it makes me deeply ambivalent to anything she
produces. Even if it is good science fiction.

~~~
techstrategist
To be fair to Atwood, there was a lot of junk sci fi over the years that she
would want to distance her work from.

~~~
psychometry
Hell, even some of the most popular sci-fi today (cough— _Three Body Problem_
—cough) would fit that bill. If I was an author in complete command of my
craft like Atwood is, I wouldn't want to be explicitly associated with the
genre, either.

~~~
techstrategist
I’d love to hear your opinion on Three Body Problem.

------
pksdjfikkkkdsff
I'm still flabbergasted that she and others seriously proclaimed Trump's
election would bring about the scenario of the handmaids tale. I guess she
should be excused for being ridiculous because of her old age, but I've lost
all interest in her work.

(downvotes incoming in 3...2...1....)

~~~
dang
Please don't post political flamebait to Hacker News, and please don't
downvote-bait. Both those things are in the site guidelines, and if you'd
review and follow them, we'd be grateful.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
pksdjfikkkkdsff
Doesn't that apply to the submission about Atwood, though? It seems to me the
"political flamebait" rule is applied rather selectively on HN.

~~~
dang
How to handle politics on HN is a hard question. We've worked out an answer
over the years that derives from the site guidelines, is not rooted in any
particular politics, and seems to have proven stable.

To see why it's a hard question, look at the two extremes of the solution
space. One would be to ban every topic that you find politically
provocative—i.e. every topic that _anybody_ finds politically provocative,
since there's no reason to privilege one user over others. That would exclude
most stories that get posted here. Certainly everything about economics,
history, philosophy, literature, city planning, etc., but also most stories
about business and industry. Even many stories that appear purely technical
would have to go. Probably everything would, once people got done being
provoked by what remained. As some are fond of pointing out, everything is
political when you get down to it.

The other extreme would be to allow every political topic and all escalations
and flamewars. That would turn this place into scorched earth and kill it as a
site for intellectual curiosity, which is its mandate
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).

Since both extremes are impossible for HN, we need to draw a line somewhere.
Where should it be? If we're optimizing for intellectual curiosity, we have to
cast a wide net, because curiosity likes to meander. Any topic that supports
intellectual curiosity is ok, even if it has political overlap. The topics
that aren't ok are the ones that are (a) purely political, (b) purely
sensational, (c) have inevitably turned into flamewars in the past. (If a
thread does turn into a flamewar, we moderate it, but that isn't necessarily
an on-topicness issue of the submission.)

What about stories that don't gratify your curiosity? Well, that's always the
case, in the sense that no one likes every story and no story is liked by
everyone. It suffices to gratify curiosity for some segment of the audience.
If you run into one that doesn't work for you, there are plenty of others to
read. If you run out, the 'past' link in the top bar is guaranteed to find
popular threads that you missed. And if a submission really breaks the site
guidelines, you can flag it. What's _not_ ok is to start posting comments in
the thread from a place of provocation rather than curiosity. That's not in
the spirit of HN and the guidelines ask you not to.

All these concepts require interpretation, so any line we draw is fuzzy. Other
moderators might make different calls. But the OP is obviously on topic by
that standard, and while I understand how it can appear that we apply the
rules selectively, I'd caution against leaping to a belief in moderation bias
motivated by secret political preferences (inevitably opposed to your own of
course!
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20oppos&sort=byDate&type=comment)).
All political sides get moderated and/or not moderated at times. When it comes
to politics, the mods do something for everyone to dislike—which unfortunately
distorts how people perceive moderation.

If you see a case that violates this standard, the likeliest explanation is
that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything on HN. The
second-likeliest explanation is that we thought it over and came up with some
reason that is based on the site guidelines. Sometimes that leads to
counterintuitive places. People are always welcome to ask.

If that's not enough, there are plenty of prior explanations:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20political%20overlap&sort=byDate&type=comment).
Take a look, and if there's still something I haven't addressed, I'd be
curious to know what it is.

~~~
pksdjfikkkkdsff
Thank you for taking the time trying to explain!

Obviously, I disagree with many things about the approach HN has taken, but of
course it is your site, you can do as you want.

For starters, if you say people can just skip things that don't satisfy their
curiosity, I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to political controversies.
I can understand if you want to moderate the "root articles" (the once that
are listed on the homepage), but why do you care about the comments? If people
discuss something, obviously it interests them (strikes their curiosity). What
does it matter if they make a 10000 comment thread about it? I think you have
some sort of algorithmic counter measures against long threads, which does
nothing but enrage (presumably based on some heuristic PG once made, when he
felt long comment threads signal flame wars)

Ultimately it seems to me all about the people you attract here to vote on
things. I've just tried to read that article about Atwood, and it is entirely
too long-winded for me. If HN had been founded by some famous literary
professor, you would probably get only submissions like that, and nothing
about technology or science. But it was founded by PG and now it is associated
with YCombinator, so it draws a different crowd.

Just saying I don't think the "curiosity" rule is really what makes HN, it is
the people you manage to attract.

And to that I personally can say, I wouldn't mind some other user ripping into
me in comments for some political or other reasons. I do mind HN itself
telling me I am not wanted here , which it does in so many ways.

Of course, again, that is your right to do, as it is your site. It just makes
me sad (unsurprisingly), having been on HN since the early days. And
ultimately it does seem to boil down to political opinions, even if you don't
consciously target certain opinions above others, as you claim.

~~~
dang
It matters what people post in the comments because the comments very much
affect what sort of people HN manages to attract. You seem to be treating
these two things as independent, but they are intensely interdependent.

Since the value of HN is its community, we have to regulate the comments
carefully. The main tool for doing that is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Not to do so would cause HN to suffer the default fate of internet
communities, which tend eventually to become burnt-out husks of their former
selves. The idea here is to stave that off for as long as we can:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20stave&sort=byDate&type=comment).

That's why we keep asking you to follow the site guidelines. It's not just
because your individual comments get better when you do that. It's also
because the feedback loops involved (the effects of comment quality on the
community) are large and existential for HN.

------
billfruit
She do get a lot of press, may be perhaps that is so because she is tune with
the political fads of the time, rather than anything else. But shorn of their
topicality, does her work has lasting value?

Even considering women writers writing in English only, she'd be considerably
behind writers like Marilynne Robinson, Donna Tart, A.S Byatt or Arundhati Roy
in the accomplishment of her work.

~~~
journalctl
Considering that _The Handmaid’s Tale_ was published in 1985, I’d say her work
has lasting value.

------
mlang23
"A worldwide cultural phenomenon"? I have never even heard her name, not a
single time. Maybe your world is smaller then I thought.

~~~
dan-robertson
What they mean is that her books were popular and read throughout the
(developed I guess) world. And this is true. They were also made into tv
series many people watched and radio plays. So obviously producers thought
they would be popular. The books are also very critically acclaimed.

I think it would be hard to somewhat regularly buy books or go to a (typical
English language) bookstore without seeing anything about Margaret Atwood.

But maybe there is a large world of English speaking people who don’t at all
follow book releases or tv or even headlines in the mainstream news (where her
winning of awards would be announced).

~~~
big_chungus
I read a ton of books, and recall only briefly hearing of it maybe a year ago.
Didn't read it; too culturally-political for my taste, and didn't hear of it
again. I'll admit, however, I don't go to bookstores much anymore.

~~~
astura
It? What is it? The Testaments? The Handmaid's Tale?

Margaret Atwood has written much more than those two books - she is a prolific
author. According to Wikipedia she's she has published 17 books of poetry, 16
novels, 10 books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight
children's books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press
editions in poetry and fiction. Her works are popular, both with the general
public and with critics.

~~~
big_chungus
_The Handmaid's Tale_, which seems to be her best-known work. See above as to
why I didn't read it. I didn't specify an antecedent as I meant to reply to
Freak_NL's comment; mea culpa.

~~~
bregma
She actually has other far more important and well-known books and has won
many prestigious international literary awards for them. A few have even been
made into successful TV shows, if your knowledge of literature is based on
what is available on internet streaming services.

~~~
big_chungus
Right. I've heard _of_ her in passing, but wasn't that interested in what I
heard; that was my point. It seems her work is targeted at a different
demographic, so fine. Most of her work appears to be "feminist literature",
which is not how I prefer to spend my free time. Not necessarily bad, just not
that high on my reading list. Anyway, my point was that there are plenty of
people who aren't as familiar with this particular author. I don't subscribe
to streaming services; that did not influence my opinion.

~~~
detritus
Just read the book. It's not "Feminist literature", although I suppose it
could be, it's just a damn good book, with a distinctly feminine perspective.
As a not particularly 'woke' British bloke, it's one of my favourite ever
books.

~~~
danbolt
I love how the book has a strong first-person perspective, and you're often
not seeing all the workings of the dystopian society, but the moments where
you do get a bit revealed to you (eg: the US congress being attacked) are
incredibly satisfying to read since it's so built up.

