More Atwood vs. Harper

14 comments on “More Atwood vs. Harper”

1. Bill Peschel says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 3:39 pm

   So, she’s saying at heart that the government should support writers not because they create and build a vibrant culture that benefits all, but because they make a profit?

   How very American of her.

2. Nathan says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 3:40 pm

   She could at least get the title right…

3. Anne C. says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 3:55 pm

   Life of Pi, The Life of Pi, whatever.

4. Nathan says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

   Oryx ‘n’ Crake, Surfaced, Surviving.

   Tomayto, tomahto.

5. LM says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

   You carry that chip on your shoulder home with you at night, Nathan? I’d hate to be your wife or kid.

6. Nathan says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 5:00 pm

   I’d hate to have you as a wife or kid, so we’re even.

   (Actually, my kids can be pretty snotty and narrow-minded, too, but I forgive them because they’re, you know, kids.)

   Everyone’s got a shoulder-chip, LM. You only notice the ones you don’t agree with. Which is kind of ironic given this is a post about Atwood “dropping the gloves.”

7. susan says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 5:05 pm

   oh my goodness, who needs Harper to attack the arts when artists are so good at pummeling each other!(BTW, Atwood was adopting politico-speak for the audience she was addressing, not that she had become “American” or whatever!)

8. ed says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

   Harper is the democratically elected PM. The great, great majority of Canadians have no interest in high culture.
   They’re mostly hicks and philistines. Canada’s not Europe, its northern Indiana. Why are people surprised?

9. Nathan says:
   April 25th, 2007 at 6:12 pm

   Actually, Susan, I tend to judge the healthiness of an art form by the willingness with which its practitioners scrap in public. It’s why everyone loves reading about Vidal vs Mailer, Vidal vs Capote, Nabokov vs Wilson, Hemingway vs Gertrude Stein, Tom Wolfe vs Updike and Mailer, etc, etc, etc – scrapping is an important part of life, and life is supposed to what art is about. Most great works of literature are not marked by their love of amiability, consensus, and compromise. Why should the people making it?

   One might even say that art itself has a chip on its shoulder.

   ed – I agree with you, in a way. But you could have said similar things about Joyce’s Dublin or Chekov’s rural Russia. So what if we’re not Paris? The rest of France isn’t Paris, either. Great art happens no matter where it is born, and furthermore, it justifies itself, and should have no need to resort to lame profit-speak.

   And by the way, I actually agree with Atwood about the short-sightedness of the new overseas cultural spending cuts, I just don’t agree with her justifications or her tone of entitlement. Plus I wish she – or the editor of the piece – had got the title right for Martel’s book, one which I reviewed when it first came out – before it first came out – and have recommended and given as a gift a number of times since, ironically enough.

10. ed says:
    April 25th, 2007 at 6:33 pm

    Nathan,

    I’m not saying anything about Canadian artists. Noble bunch. Some interesting. But the society, Canada? Hicks, sir, yobs and hicks.

    And they banned Jimmy J. back in his hometown for years and Chekov was writing ABOUT landed rural Russia for relatively sophisticated
    Moscow and St. Petersburg’s audiences (premiere of The Seagull in St. P was one of the great opening night disasters).

11. Nathan says:
    April 25th, 2007 at 6:53 pm

    ed – but that was sort of my point: just because Dublin hated Joyce doesn’t mean A) Joyce stopped writing or B) stopped writing about Dublin. He wrote about it because he loved it. He lived abroad because he hated it.

    Canada is mostly a backwater, culturally. But so what? Some of our best writers’ best work has derived much of its heat from that very fact. Richler, Munro, even Atwood.

    Every society is full of hicks and yobs, even if they don’t always recognize themselves as such. The best writers realize what a fertile territory that gap in self-awareness provides.

12. panic says:
    April 26th, 2007 at 3:19 pm

    Uh, ed?
    “Harper is the democratically elected PM. The great, great majority of Canadians have no interest in high culture.”
    I’m not really sure how or if these two thoughts are connected, but the great, great majority of Canadians didn’t vote for Harper. Thus, it’s a bit hard to make the leap the Harper’s thoughts on the arts represent those of a majority of Canadians.

13. J. Larue says:
    April 26th, 2007 at 5:06 pm

    ed – Hicks, yobs, philistines? Wow. Such contempt for us regular folk. For a second I thought I was reading the Saturday Globe and Mail. The Style section, no less. With an attitude like that, I can’t imagine why working class people aren’t fawning all over you big city writers. Teach me teacher. And what’s this whole high culture thing? Wasn’t that low vs high culture debate resolved, like, oh, I don’t know – decades ago? (Let me guess: comic books are bad and the music of John Lee Hooker is monotonous and primitive.) What writers need to do is come on down from the mountain top and get their hands dirty. As Nathan suggests, there was a tradition of this in Canada. However, it seems such a practice is “looked down upon” these days. Most writers get sucked up in the university system and rarely come down from the tower. It’s too bad. You’d be amazed at what you can learn when you engage people instead of dismiss them.

    susan – I’d have to agree with Nathan when it comes to writers conducting public battles. It is healthy. Unless we start to refer to the scraps as Beefs. Then I take it back.

14. ed says:
    April 30th, 2007 at 2:51 pm

    J.,

    You don’t sound at all like a self-appointed spokesman for the masses. Get out there and engage! After a while John Lee Hooker can get monotonous. You should try this instead, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F39RS3I0D0Y

    Ed

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