Browse content similar to Margaret Atwood: You Have Been Warned!. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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When you're in the middle of a story, | 0:00:03 | 0:00:05 | |
it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion. | 0:00:05 | 0:00:09 | |
A dark roaring, a blindness, | 0:00:09 | 0:00:13 | |
a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:17 | |
Like a house in a whirlwind, | 0:00:18 | 0:00:20 | |
or else a boat crushed by the icebergs, or swept over the rapids, | 0:00:20 | 0:00:24 | |
and all aboard powerless to stop it. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, | 0:00:29 | 0:00:34 | |
when you're telling it, to yourself, or to someone else. | 0:00:34 | 0:00:38 | |
The celebrated and eminent Canadian novelist, poet and critic, | 0:00:38 | 0:00:42 | |
Margaret Atwood. | 0:00:42 | 0:00:44 | |
I have been reading a lot of stuff about you, | 0:00:44 | 0:00:46 | |
trying to find out about Margaret Atwood. | 0:00:46 | 0:00:49 | |
I've read a lot of stuff, | 0:00:49 | 0:00:50 | |
but I still don't know anything about Margaret Atwood. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:52 | |
You have a marvellous sense | 0:00:52 | 0:00:53 | |
of not communicating anything about yourself. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:55 | |
You haven't asked me anything about myself. | 0:00:55 | 0:00:57 | |
Do you think you frighten people? | 0:00:57 | 0:00:59 | |
-Do you ever get that sense? -Oh, yeah, sure I frighten people. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
GENTLE LAUGHTER | 0:01:02 | 0:01:03 | |
Don't ask me why, it's not my problem. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:05 | |
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE | 0:01:05 | 0:01:07 | |
During a writing life spanning more than seven decades, | 0:01:10 | 0:01:13 | |
Margaret Atwood has made a deep impact | 0:01:13 | 0:01:16 | |
across continents and generations. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:18 | |
I think about what Atwood broke through. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:23 | |
I think about the prejudices, I think about the preconceptions. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:26 | |
She just blew away all the borders, | 0:01:26 | 0:01:29 | |
all the shut doors, she just blew them all open. | 0:01:29 | 0:01:31 | |
Her best-known work, The Handmaid's Tale, | 0:01:34 | 0:01:37 | |
remains a terrifying warning against the misuse of power... | 0:01:37 | 0:01:41 | |
WHISTLE | 0:01:41 | 0:01:43 | |
INDISTINCT SHOUTING | 0:01:43 | 0:01:45 | |
..and following recent political events, | 0:01:47 | 0:01:50 | |
the novel has taken on an alarming new resonance. | 0:01:50 | 0:01:53 | |
You know what? It's time in our country | 0:01:55 | 0:01:57 | |
that we had somebody with a strong temperament, I hate to say. | 0:01:57 | 0:02:02 | |
She does sort of warn us, I feel. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:06 | |
This is what will happen if you pursue this route. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:10 | |
She's a visionary. She's as much a visionary... | 0:02:11 | 0:02:15 | |
as HG Wells was. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:17 | |
As a writer and a woman coming of age in post-war Canada, | 0:02:18 | 0:02:22 | |
Margaret Atwood forged into uncharted territory. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:26 | |
She was and is a literary pioneer, | 0:02:28 | 0:02:31 | |
who blazed a trail that others would follow. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:34 | |
Margaret had, like, 40 years of being a creative force. | 0:02:36 | 0:02:40 | |
It's been inspiring for me to work with her and learn from a master. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:43 | |
Our country is large in extent but small in population, | 0:03:01 | 0:03:07 | |
which accounts for our fear of empty spaces... | 0:03:07 | 0:03:09 | |
And also our need for them. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:13 | |
Much of it is covered in water, | 0:03:16 | 0:03:19 | |
which accounts for our interest in reflections... | 0:03:19 | 0:03:21 | |
..sudden vanishings, | 0:03:22 | 0:03:24 | |
the dissolution of one thing into another. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:27 | |
Much of it, however, is rock, | 0:03:30 | 0:03:33 | |
which accounts for our belief in fate. | 0:03:33 | 0:03:36 | |
Margaret Atwood was born in Canada in 1939. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:44 | |
At the time, the country was not known for its literature. | 0:03:50 | 0:03:53 | |
What could there be to say about such a vast expanse of nothingness? | 0:04:00 | 0:04:05 | |
But Margaret Atwood would change all that. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:16 | |
And when you were a child, | 0:04:17 | 0:04:18 | |
there were hardly any of these buildings here? | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
-They weren't here at all, no. -None of them? -Nothing. | 0:04:20 | 0:04:23 | |
The highest building was the Royal York Hotel, | 0:04:23 | 0:04:25 | |
which looks so short now, was considered immense. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:29 | |
At what age did you become aware of not just Canada, | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
but what its place was in the world? | 0:04:32 | 0:04:34 | |
-What year are we talking about? -Let's talk about your teenage... | 0:04:34 | 0:04:37 | |
My American boyfriend, when I was 18, | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
used to tell me about Chicago and how big it was and how much more | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
-wonderful it was. -I mean, what did you tell him about Canada, | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
-if he told you about Chicago? -Nothing! What was I going to say? | 0:04:46 | 0:04:49 | |
The Canada that I grew up in thought of itself as a cultural backwater. | 0:04:56 | 0:05:01 | |
First-rate artistic items - books, films, music - | 0:05:01 | 0:05:05 | |
were known to come from elsewhere. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:07 | |
If you wanted to be serious about writing, | 0:05:08 | 0:05:12 | |
it was taken for granted that you had to leave the country. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:15 | |
You yourself, as you were growing up, | 0:05:17 | 0:05:20 | |
could see that somehow literature and culture in Canada was either, | 0:05:20 | 0:05:24 | |
you know, borrowed or acquired? | 0:05:24 | 0:05:26 | |
You know, basically, I didn't think much about it | 0:05:26 | 0:05:29 | |
until I was writing about it. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:31 | |
So I passed my teen years in a state of blissful oblivion. | 0:05:31 | 0:05:35 | |
It was an unusual childhood. | 0:05:39 | 0:05:41 | |
Margaret's father was an entomologist, | 0:05:44 | 0:05:46 | |
and her family spent most of the year in the backwoods of Canada | 0:05:46 | 0:05:50 | |
while he studied insects. | 0:05:50 | 0:05:52 | |
Every spring, my parents would take off for the north. | 0:05:59 | 0:06:03 | |
Every autumn, when the snow set in, they would return to the city... | 0:06:03 | 0:06:07 | |
..usually to a different apartment each time. | 0:06:08 | 0:06:11 | |
At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods | 0:06:12 | 0:06:16 | |
in a packsack, and this landscape became my home town. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:20 | |
You must not think electricity, you must not think running water. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:27 | |
You must not think lavatories? | 0:06:27 | 0:06:29 | |
No, you must not think those, no. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:32 | |
Margaret's father came from rural Nova Scotia. | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
Her mother was the daughter of a country doctor. | 0:06:38 | 0:06:42 | |
They met while they were still at high school. | 0:06:42 | 0:06:45 | |
My dad saw her sliding down the banister of the central staircase | 0:06:45 | 0:06:51 | |
and said to himself, "That is the woman I will marry". | 0:06:51 | 0:06:55 | |
It took him two tries, but he finally accomplished it. | 0:06:55 | 0:06:59 | |
She had never tented outside or done any of those woodsy things, | 0:06:59 | 0:07:03 | |
so what he introduced her to was a way of life | 0:07:03 | 0:07:06 | |
that did not involve getting dressed up | 0:07:06 | 0:07:09 | |
and putting on a hat and gloves, | 0:07:09 | 0:07:10 | |
which she basically hated, or very much housework, | 0:07:10 | 0:07:14 | |
because in the woods you don't have to do a lot of housework. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:18 | |
There are no vacuum cleaners. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:19 | |
So she said, "I would just sweep up the dirt and throw it out the door". | 0:07:21 | 0:07:25 | |
For Margaret and her older brother Harold, | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
it was a close-knit, carefree childhood | 0:07:34 | 0:07:36 | |
that seemed alien to visitors from the city. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:39 | |
We met as teenagers at a summer camp. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:44 | |
She was called Peggy Nature then, | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
and I used to visit her up in Kipawa, in northern Quebec. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:51 | |
I was this city kid who found myself extremely uncomfortable | 0:07:51 | 0:07:56 | |
in a situation where there was no running water | 0:07:56 | 0:07:59 | |
and there was no electricity or anything - | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
but they were totally in sync with it, | 0:08:02 | 0:08:04 | |
it was fine, they never had a problem. | 0:08:04 | 0:08:06 | |
I remember, there was a mouse running up and down the rafters | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
of the exposed brick roof, | 0:08:09 | 0:08:11 | |
and I was kind of freaking out | 0:08:11 | 0:08:12 | |
because I thought it was going to end up in my sleeping bag, | 0:08:12 | 0:08:15 | |
and Margaret had a humane trap | 0:08:15 | 0:08:18 | |
that caught the mouse and then we got in a canoe | 0:08:18 | 0:08:20 | |
and we took the mouse to a neighbouring island. | 0:08:20 | 0:08:23 | |
That's the way she was. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:25 | |
From an early age, we got instructions | 0:08:29 | 0:08:31 | |
about avoiding lethal stupidity. | 0:08:31 | 0:08:34 | |
Don't set forest fires, don't fall out of boats, | 0:08:35 | 0:08:39 | |
don't go swimming in thunderstorms, that sort of thing. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:43 | |
Squeamishness and whining were not encouraged. | 0:08:46 | 0:08:48 | |
Girls were not expected to do more of it than boys. | 0:08:50 | 0:08:53 | |
Crying was not viewed with indulgence. | 0:08:53 | 0:08:56 | |
Rational debate was smiled upon, | 0:08:57 | 0:09:00 | |
as was curiosity about almost everything. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:03 | |
Did you see yourself as a bit of a tomboy, yourself, or not really? | 0:09:07 | 0:09:11 | |
No, I did not consider any of this in any way unusual. | 0:09:11 | 0:09:16 | |
You don't wear frilly skirts in the woods. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:20 | |
-Right. -For several reasons - | 0:09:20 | 0:09:21 | |
but one of them is that the black flies and mosquitoes | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
would get up under them. You don't want that. | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
As well as being well-drilled in woodland survival, | 0:09:30 | 0:09:33 | |
the Atwood children were schooled at home. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:35 | |
The University of Toronto Library | 0:09:37 | 0:09:39 | |
holds hundreds of their early creative works. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:43 | |
This is Annie The Ant, which was my first novel, and it... | 0:09:45 | 0:09:49 | |
Could you read me a bit of Annie The Ant? | 0:09:49 | 0:09:51 | |
Well, it's very boring at the beginning. | 0:09:51 | 0:09:53 | |
Well, why don't you go straight to the middle? | 0:09:53 | 0:09:55 | |
You have to go from the beginning | 0:09:55 | 0:09:56 | |
to realise that I've learned something about narrative, | 0:09:56 | 0:09:58 | |
which is that you shouldn't be so boring | 0:09:58 | 0:10:00 | |
at the beginning! | 0:10:00 | 0:10:02 | |
It starts in a quite boring way, because Annie is an egg. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:06 | |
Then Annie is a larva. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:09 | |
"The larva that would produce Queen Ant had to be fed royal jelly, | 0:10:09 | 0:10:12 | |
"but she was just a worker, | 0:10:12 | 0:10:13 | |
"so she could eat all the crumbs and things that the grown-up worker ants | 0:10:13 | 0:10:17 | |
"brought in and in a while she'd be able to turn into a pupa | 0:10:17 | 0:10:20 | |
"and then into an ant". You hooked yet? | 0:10:20 | 0:10:22 | |
Yeah, yeah, actually I'm enjoying this, go on. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:25 | |
So inside the pupa... | 0:10:25 | 0:10:26 | |
"She was slowly turning into an ant. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:29 | |
"When it was time, Annie came out. | 0:10:29 | 0:10:31 | |
"She looked around at this strange new world, | 0:10:31 | 0:10:33 | |
"then she went out and worked with the other ants". | 0:10:33 | 0:10:36 | |
Kind of like Brave New World, isn't it?! | 0:10:36 | 0:10:38 | |
-Yes. -Very much. -And how did it end, the Annie book? | 0:10:38 | 0:10:40 | |
How did it end? "The end". | 0:10:40 | 0:10:43 | |
So, not nearly as exciting, I would say... | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
As The Handmaid's Tale? | 0:10:45 | 0:10:47 | |
For instance! | 0:10:47 | 0:10:48 | |
In 1945, the family moved to Toronto | 0:10:54 | 0:10:58 | |
and Margaret began to have more to do with cities, | 0:10:58 | 0:11:01 | |
and with other children. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:03 | |
After moving between several different schools, | 0:11:09 | 0:11:12 | |
she arrived here, at Leaside High. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
For a young girl used to home-schooling, | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
the rigours of the school routine came as something of a shock. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:27 | |
It was the military phase of schools. | 0:11:29 | 0:11:32 | |
The girls marched in the girls' door, | 0:11:32 | 0:11:34 | |
the boys marched in the boys' door, | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
and then you had to sit in rows and put up your hand | 0:11:36 | 0:11:40 | |
and all of these kinds of things - | 0:11:40 | 0:11:43 | |
and also the pace at which things moved was glacial. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
So I think I did develop an ability to look very attentive | 0:11:49 | 0:11:53 | |
while thinking about something else. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:55 | |
Elements of that experience of school | 0:11:59 | 0:12:02 | |
would one day feed into her novel Cat's Eye. | 0:12:02 | 0:12:05 | |
"So I am left to the girls, real girls at last, in the flesh, | 0:12:07 | 0:12:12 | |
"but I'm not used to girls or familiar with their customs. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:16 | |
"I feel awkward around them. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:18 | |
"I don't know what to say. | 0:12:18 | 0:12:19 | |
"I know the unspoken rules of boys... | 0:12:22 | 0:12:23 | |
"..but with girls, I sense that I'm always on the verge | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
"of some unforeseen calamitous blunder." | 0:12:28 | 0:12:30 | |
Cat's Eye is about a girl who comes to a new environment, | 0:12:34 | 0:12:38 | |
she's come from the country, | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
rather like Margaret Atwood did herself, | 0:12:41 | 0:12:43 | |
and goes to school and can read no codes. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:48 | |
And, as we all know, the codes of girlhood are just... | 0:12:49 | 0:12:53 | |
They're labyrinthine, they're mean, they're set for exclusion, | 0:12:55 | 0:12:59 | |
they're set for cliques, all sorts of things. | 0:12:59 | 0:13:02 | |
-FILM: -Why don't you come over to my house | 0:13:02 | 0:13:03 | |
and we'll work it out together? | 0:13:03 | 0:13:05 | |
And I remember when we published that book, that people said, | 0:13:05 | 0:13:08 | |
"Oh, it's like Lord Of The Flies, for girls". | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
People hadn't really put it on the page before, | 0:13:11 | 0:13:13 | |
what little girls do to each other, actually, | 0:13:13 | 0:13:15 | |
and how wicked that is, and how they can destroy people. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:19 | |
I mean, that's a brutal book in lots of ways, isn't it? | 0:13:19 | 0:13:23 | |
"Perhaps she's forgotten the bad things, what she said to me, | 0:13:27 | 0:13:31 | |
"or what she did - or she does remember them, but in a minor way. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:36 | |
"As if remembering a game, or a single prank, | 0:13:36 | 0:13:40 | |
"a single trivial secret of the kind girls tell and then forget. | 0:13:40 | 0:13:44 | |
"She will have her own version - I am not the centre of her story, | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
"because she herself is that... | 0:13:48 | 0:13:50 | |
"but I could give her something | 0:13:50 | 0:13:52 | |
"you can never have except from another person - | 0:13:52 | 0:13:55 | |
"what you look like from the outside, a reflection. | 0:13:55 | 0:13:59 | |
"This is part of herself I could give back to her. | 0:13:59 | 0:14:02 | |
"We're like the twins in old fables, | 0:14:02 | 0:14:04 | |
"each of whom has been given half a key." | 0:14:04 | 0:14:07 | |
Although Cat's Eye contains elements of Atwood's own childhood years, | 0:14:11 | 0:14:15 | |
the plot itself is purely fictitious, | 0:14:15 | 0:14:18 | |
a fact that many critics were determined to ignore. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:21 | |
People make the very naive connection between what they read | 0:14:25 | 0:14:28 | |
in your books and who they think you are, | 0:14:28 | 0:14:30 | |
often feel cheated when you tell them that you have invented | 0:14:30 | 0:14:34 | |
things in your books, but truly that's what a writer is. | 0:14:34 | 0:14:37 | |
-Yes. -A writer is a person who writes, you know, fiction or poems, | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
and that's different from... | 0:14:40 | 0:14:42 | |
..factual books, books of biography. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:47 | |
Yes, if your novel was merely, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:48 | |
or your poem was merely an autobiography... | 0:14:48 | 0:14:50 | |
-You could only write one book. -Yes. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:52 | |
By now it was the late 1940s. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:58 | |
Women, no longer required for wartime production, | 0:14:58 | 0:15:02 | |
had been herded back into the home. | 0:15:02 | 0:15:04 | |
The baby boom was on. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:11 | |
Marriage and four kids were the ideal, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:15 | |
and remained so for the next 15 years. | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
In the '50s you were given a guidance textbook, which was grey. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:25 | |
This was supposed to help you choose your future career... | 0:15:25 | 0:15:29 | |
..and in this guidance textbook, | 0:15:30 | 0:15:31 | |
there were a lot of future careers for persons of the male gender. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:37 | |
There were five for girls. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:39 | |
Let's see if you can guess them... | 0:15:41 | 0:15:42 | |
Nurse. | 0:15:43 | 0:15:45 | |
Public school teacher. | 0:15:47 | 0:15:48 | |
Airline stewardess - that was a new one - new, very glamorous | 0:15:50 | 0:15:55 | |
at that time - you got the pillbox hat. | 0:15:55 | 0:15:57 | |
Secretary... | 0:15:59 | 0:16:01 | |
and home economist. | 0:16:01 | 0:16:02 | |
I was 15 when Elvis Presley made his debut. | 0:16:05 | 0:16:09 | |
This was the era of sock hops, of going steady, of drive-in movies, | 0:16:09 | 0:16:15 | |
of well-meant articles by grown-ups | 0:16:15 | 0:16:18 | |
about the dangers of necking and petting. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:20 | |
Take me home! | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
The pill was far in the future. | 0:16:23 | 0:16:26 | |
Girls who got pregnant disappeared from sight. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:30 | |
Gee, I haven't seen her since she left school. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:33 | |
Either they'd undergone abortions, which had killed or mangled them, | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
or they'd had shotgun weddings and were washing diapers... | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
..or else they were hidden away, in homes for unwed mothers. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:45 | |
This was a fate that needed, at all costs, to be avoided. | 0:16:46 | 0:16:50 | |
Given such conditions, how is it that I became a writer? | 0:16:55 | 0:16:58 | |
It wasn't a likely thing to have done, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:03 | |
nor was it something I chose, | 0:17:03 | 0:17:04 | |
as you might choose to become a lawyer or a dentist. | 0:17:04 | 0:17:08 | |
I was walking past the football field and I wrote a poem, | 0:17:10 | 0:17:14 | |
and then I thought, "This is what I want to do." | 0:17:14 | 0:17:17 | |
-Just like that? -Just like that. | 0:17:17 | 0:17:19 | |
It was completely ignorant, you know, | 0:17:19 | 0:17:21 | |
I had no idea what that might involve - | 0:17:21 | 0:17:24 | |
but the main thing is that my parents being Depression-era | 0:17:24 | 0:17:29 | |
-Nova Scotians... -"Make some money." | 0:17:29 | 0:17:31 | |
"You're going to have to support yourself, | 0:17:31 | 0:17:33 | |
"how are you going to do that?" | 0:17:33 | 0:17:34 | |
So I figured out, "I will be a journalist," said I. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:38 | |
My parents... | 0:17:38 | 0:17:40 | |
..dredged up a real journalist, who was a third cousin or other - | 0:17:42 | 0:17:45 | |
we had a lot of those - | 0:17:45 | 0:17:46 | |
and invited him to dinner to tell me about journalism, | 0:17:46 | 0:17:49 | |
and obviously dissuade me from doing any such thing. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:54 | |
And what he said was... | 0:17:54 | 0:17:56 | |
..that if I worked for a newspaper, as he did, | 0:17:57 | 0:18:00 | |
as a female person I would end up writing the obituaries | 0:18:00 | 0:18:04 | |
and the ladies' pages, and that's it. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
So I thought, "OK, I'm not going to be a journalist. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:10 | |
"I guess I'll just have to go to university." | 0:18:10 | 0:18:13 | |
I was 17 when I enrolled at the University of Toronto. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:21 | |
The year was 1957. | 0:18:21 | 0:18:23 | |
Our professors let it be known that we were a dull lot. | 0:18:25 | 0:18:29 | |
By and large, they were right. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:31 | |
The boys were headed for the professions. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:35 | |
The girls - for futures as their wives... | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
..but there were also the others. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:43 | |
The others wore black turtlenecks. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:47 | |
They were few in number, | 0:18:47 | 0:18:49 | |
often brilliant, considered pretentious, | 0:18:49 | 0:18:52 | |
and were referred to as the "artsy-fartsys". | 0:18:52 | 0:18:55 | |
At first they terrified me... | 0:18:57 | 0:19:00 | |
then I, in turn, terrified others. | 0:19:00 | 0:19:04 | |
"It is dangerous to read newspapers. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:06 | |
"While I was building neat castles in the sandbox, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:11 | |
"the hasty pits were filling with bulldozed corpses, | 0:19:11 | 0:19:16 | |
"and as I walked to the school, washed and combed, | 0:19:16 | 0:19:19 | |
"my feet stepping on the cracks in the cement, detonated red bones." | 0:19:19 | 0:19:24 | |
All of this time I'd been writing, compulsively, badly, hopefully. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:34 | |
I used my initials instead of my name. | 0:19:35 | 0:19:38 | |
I didn't want anyone important to know that I was a girl. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:41 | |
I want to ask you now about your first acceptance letter. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:47 | |
-It must have been quite a moment when somebody said, "Yes". -Yes. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:50 | |
Yes. That was a now-defunct little magazine called the Canadian Forum. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:56 | |
That was a thrill. So I ran out to the kitchen and said to my mother, | 0:19:56 | 0:20:00 | |
"I just got an acceptance letter from the Canadian Forum", | 0:20:00 | 0:20:03 | |
and she said, "What's that?" | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
It was kind of crushing! | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
Not everybody was in my world, Alan. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:11 | |
By the late 1960s, | 0:20:15 | 0:20:17 | |
Margaret was confident enough to write under her own name | 0:20:17 | 0:20:20 | |
and published her first novel, The Edible Woman. | 0:20:20 | 0:20:24 | |
Set in Toronto, | 0:20:26 | 0:20:28 | |
it was the tale of a bright young woman | 0:20:28 | 0:20:30 | |
who found herself pressured into an ill-advised engagement. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:35 | |
As a result, she gradually became unable to eat. | 0:20:35 | 0:20:38 | |
The thing that I found most winning about The Edible Woman | 0:20:40 | 0:20:44 | |
was the way in which it tackled very serious issues, | 0:20:44 | 0:20:46 | |
but with a kind of light, comic touch. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:48 | |
That was the thing that won me over and made me think, | 0:20:48 | 0:20:50 | |
"I'd like to read more work by this author." | 0:20:50 | 0:20:53 | |
People come up about The Edible Woman and they say, | 0:20:56 | 0:20:59 | |
"Did you ever stop eating?" And I say, "No." | 0:20:59 | 0:21:02 | |
And they get all upset about this, | 0:21:02 | 0:21:05 | |
-because usually they have. -Mm-hm. Yes. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:07 | |
Usually they have had the experience that I have written about | 0:21:07 | 0:21:10 | |
and they can't figure out, how come I have written about it | 0:21:10 | 0:21:13 | |
without having had it? But it's very simple, you say, | 0:21:13 | 0:21:17 | |
"Well, did Agatha Christie really commit all those murders?" | 0:21:17 | 0:21:20 | |
Mm-hm. Yes. | 0:21:20 | 0:21:21 | |
It wasn't just the subject matter - | 0:21:22 | 0:21:25 | |
the Canadian setting was also unusual. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:27 | |
The setting of Toronto really just jumped out at me. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:32 | |
I, later, as an academic and a scholar, | 0:21:32 | 0:21:35 | |
discovered that one of the early drafts of the novel | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
placed the events of the novel in a city called Goronto, | 0:21:38 | 0:21:43 | |
which I couldn't help but think was a kind of playful acknowledgement | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
that Toronto had yet to make its way into literary fiction. | 0:21:46 | 0:21:48 | |
Atwood's rise as a writer coincided with Expo 67... | 0:21:55 | 0:21:59 | |
..a world exhibition in Montreal | 0:22:02 | 0:22:05 | |
billed as the greatest show on earth. | 0:22:05 | 0:22:07 | |
For the first time, Canada felt forward-thinking and modern. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:15 | |
A player on the world stage. | 0:22:16 | 0:22:18 | |
If you think that the Canadian flag as you know it today... | 0:22:20 | 0:22:24 | |
We only got that in 1965, | 0:22:24 | 0:22:26 | |
so there was a lot of feeling of something starting. | 0:22:26 | 0:22:29 | |
Lots of conversation, I do remember this. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:34 | |
"What is the Canadian self-identity? | 0:22:34 | 0:22:36 | |
"What is the Canadian self-identity?" | 0:22:36 | 0:22:39 | |
And literature was definitely asking that. | 0:22:39 | 0:22:40 | |
Expo 67 coincided with the birth of the Anansi Press, | 0:22:43 | 0:22:48 | |
a progressive publishing house that championed Canadian authors | 0:22:48 | 0:22:51 | |
in their native country. | 0:22:51 | 0:22:54 | |
At Anansi, populist how-to guides funded new work by upcoming talent. | 0:22:54 | 0:23:00 | |
Margaret Atwood was involved from the start. | 0:23:02 | 0:23:05 | |
We had this line of books. | 0:23:06 | 0:23:08 | |
Do you know the Idiot's Guides? | 0:23:08 | 0:23:10 | |
-Yeah. -OK, so this was early Idiot's Guides. | 0:23:10 | 0:23:12 | |
One of them was called Law, Law, Law, | 0:23:12 | 0:23:14 | |
and it was how to write your own divorce and your own will | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
without having to pay a lawyer - | 0:23:17 | 0:23:19 | |
and one of them was called VD. | 0:23:19 | 0:23:22 | |
It was the first VD book. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:24 | |
So we were sitting around having an editorial meeting... | 0:23:24 | 0:23:27 | |
..a financial editorial board meeting, | 0:23:29 | 0:23:32 | |
and what was going to be our next thing? | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
Should it be a cookbook? | 0:23:35 | 0:23:38 | |
Those kinds of ideas - | 0:23:38 | 0:23:39 | |
and I said there isn't really a relatable and understandable | 0:23:39 | 0:23:44 | |
direct book on Canadian literature, | 0:23:44 | 0:23:48 | |
something that answers the question that people are always asking me, | 0:23:48 | 0:23:51 | |
which is, "Isn't it just second-rate British or American? | 0:23:51 | 0:23:54 | |
"Why should we bother? Surely it's just a blank on the map." | 0:23:54 | 0:23:58 | |
So we decided that we were going to write the VD of Canadian literature. | 0:23:58 | 0:24:03 | |
She called the book Survival. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:11 | |
In it, Atwood boldly made the case | 0:24:13 | 0:24:16 | |
for a unique and distinctive Canadian literature, | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
centred around victims | 0:24:19 | 0:24:21 | |
and their ability to survive the elements. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:24 | |
It's not surprising to me that she wrote a book about Canadian writing | 0:24:27 | 0:24:31 | |
because she embodies that sort of relationship, I think, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
between a person and the landscape. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:38 | |
For me, that's a very Canadian concern... | 0:24:38 | 0:24:40 | |
..and I think that connection is really crucial to her writing | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
and really crucial to her thinking | 0:24:45 | 0:24:47 | |
and crucial to Canadian thinking, I would say, too. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:49 | |
"Every country or culture | 0:24:53 | 0:24:54 | |
"has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core. | 0:24:54 | 0:25:00 | |
"The central symbol for Canada is undoubtedly survival. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:04 | |
"Our stories are likely to be tales from awful experience. | 0:25:09 | 0:25:12 | |
"The north, the snowstorm, the sinking ship | 0:25:14 | 0:25:18 | |
"that killed everyone else. | 0:25:18 | 0:25:20 | |
"The survivor has not triumph or victory | 0:25:22 | 0:25:25 | |
"but the fact of his survival. | 0:25:25 | 0:25:27 | |
"He has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:33 | |
"except gratitude for having escaped with his life." | 0:25:33 | 0:25:36 | |
We thought we might sell 5,000 copies, which was big in our world - | 0:25:40 | 0:25:44 | |
and for some reason it just hit that moment. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
When Survival was published in 1972, it sold 30,000 copies. | 0:25:51 | 0:25:56 | |
Huge, for that time. | 0:25:57 | 0:26:00 | |
Suddenly Margaret Atwood was a household name. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:03 | |
Well, it was a double-barrelled shotgun. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:06 | |
That was the moment which Farley Mowat, | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
a well-known writer of the time, | 0:26:09 | 0:26:11 | |
said to me, "Now you are a target and people will shoot at you." | 0:26:11 | 0:26:15 | |
-And was he right? -Absolutely. | 0:26:17 | 0:26:19 | |
I think that a certain kind of thing happens to people | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
when they achieve a certain degree of work - | 0:26:22 | 0:26:25 | |
we might call it success or we could call it notoriety - | 0:26:25 | 0:26:29 | |
but people think of them... | 0:26:29 | 0:26:32 | |
I mean, they stop thinking of them as a writer | 0:26:32 | 0:26:36 | |
and start thinking of them | 0:26:36 | 0:26:37 | |
as a kind of substitute preacher. | 0:26:37 | 0:26:40 | |
It turns you into a sort of cardboard cut-out. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:42 | |
That same year, Margaret published Surfacing, her second novel, | 0:26:47 | 0:26:52 | |
which was later made into a film. | 0:26:52 | 0:26:53 | |
It's a story of self-discovery | 0:26:55 | 0:26:57 | |
set against the landscape she knew so well. | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
'Surfacing, to me, so much epitomises a woman | 0:27:02 | 0:27:06 | |
'in a landscape in Canada, | 0:27:06 | 0:27:08 | |
'particularly in Ontario, a province full of lakes and woods.' | 0:27:08 | 0:27:12 | |
It's sort of a '60s book in some ways, too, | 0:27:13 | 0:27:15 | |
cos it's about finding yourself. It's pre-feminism in many ways - | 0:27:15 | 0:27:19 | |
but it's so much about the landscape, | 0:27:19 | 0:27:21 | |
it's so much about the water. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:22 | |
So much about diving into yourself... | 0:27:24 | 0:27:27 | |
..and I think there was that sense of mapping this country. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:35 | |
She also had this wonderful phrase, "A country needs its own voice", | 0:27:35 | 0:27:39 | |
and I think she was part of that generation | 0:27:39 | 0:27:41 | |
that were just rising all up to answer those questions. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:44 | |
For a Canadian woman coming of age in the 1960s, | 0:27:59 | 0:28:02 | |
the expectation was courtship, love and marriage - | 0:28:02 | 0:28:07 | |
and the sooner, the better... | 0:28:07 | 0:28:08 | |
..but Margaret was in no hurry to conform. | 0:28:10 | 0:28:12 | |
There were two broken engagements, and one short-lived marriage | 0:28:14 | 0:28:18 | |
before she met the writer, Graeme Gibson, | 0:28:18 | 0:28:21 | |
who would become her lifelong partner. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:23 | |
How did you meet, and was it instant attraction? | 0:28:28 | 0:28:30 | |
No. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:33 | |
It was a noisy...this noisy party at Grossman's in Toronto, | 0:28:34 | 0:28:37 | |
and she told me she thought that my book should have won | 0:28:37 | 0:28:40 | |
the Governor General's Award when hers was one of the three. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:43 | |
And conversely, you said... | 0:28:43 | 0:28:44 | |
No, he didn't. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:46 | |
I said, "My goodness..." I've forgotten... | 0:28:46 | 0:28:48 | |
I was overcome, Peggy, as I so frequently am. | 0:28:48 | 0:28:51 | |
Graeme is a gentleman, he's kind and loving, attentive, | 0:28:53 | 0:28:58 | |
totally in awe of her. | 0:28:58 | 0:29:00 | |
She's so lucky to have him | 0:29:00 | 0:29:02 | |
because not a lot of men in such a relationship | 0:29:02 | 0:29:05 | |
would be able to deal with her intensity, her drive, her ambition, | 0:29:05 | 0:29:11 | |
and yet he's there for her at every turn. | 0:29:11 | 0:29:14 | |
In 1973, | 0:29:17 | 0:29:18 | |
Margaret and Graeme moved to a farm in the rural community of Alliston. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:25 | |
Three years later, | 0:29:25 | 0:29:27 | |
their daughter Jess was born. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:29 | |
I remember what a lovely mother she was. | 0:29:32 | 0:29:35 | |
She wasn't a doting mum, and she treated Jess as a little adult. | 0:29:35 | 0:29:40 | |
"With a choked cry, | 0:29:40 | 0:29:41 | |
"Israel Hands loosed his grasp upon the shrouds and plunged headfirst | 0:29:41 | 0:29:46 | |
-"into the water." -How come? | 0:29:46 | 0:29:48 | |
He shot him by mistake. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:49 | |
-Who did? -Jim Hawkins shot Israel Hands by mistake. | 0:29:49 | 0:29:54 | |
Hmm... | 0:29:54 | 0:29:55 | |
OK, that's the end of that chapter. | 0:29:57 | 0:29:59 | |
When I was an aspiring female poet, | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
the notion of required sacrifice was simply accepted. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:10 | |
The same was true for any sort of career for a woman... | 0:30:10 | 0:30:13 | |
but art was worse, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:16 | |
because the sacrifice was more complete. | 0:30:16 | 0:30:18 | |
You couldn't be a wife and a mother and also an artist, | 0:30:20 | 0:30:24 | |
because each one of these things required total dedication. | 0:30:24 | 0:30:28 | |
SHE WHISTLES | 0:30:29 | 0:30:31 | |
"Spelling. | 0:30:35 | 0:30:36 | |
"My daughter plays on the floor with plastic letters. | 0:30:36 | 0:30:39 | |
"Red, blue and hard yellow. | 0:30:39 | 0:30:42 | |
"Learning how to spell, spelling, how to make spells. | 0:30:42 | 0:30:47 | |
"I wonder how many women denied themselves daughters, | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
"closed themselves in rooms, | 0:30:50 | 0:30:52 | |
"drew the curtains so they could mainline words. | 0:30:52 | 0:30:55 | |
"A child is not a poem, a poem is not a child. | 0:30:56 | 0:31:00 | |
"There is no either or." | 0:31:00 | 0:31:01 | |
Is parenting done equally? | 0:31:05 | 0:31:07 | |
Parenting isn't a job, it's a condition of the universe. | 0:31:07 | 0:31:10 | |
Margaret Atwood is often described as a feminist writer, | 0:31:14 | 0:31:18 | |
but she maintains that her popularity | 0:31:18 | 0:31:20 | |
amongst the feminist community was unsought. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:23 | |
I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, | 0:31:26 | 0:31:30 | |
but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do - | 0:31:30 | 0:31:34 | |
I began to describe the world around me. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:36 | |
Women suffer in my novels because most women I talk to | 0:31:38 | 0:31:41 | |
seem to have suffered. | 0:31:41 | 0:31:43 | |
In 1984, | 0:31:47 | 0:31:48 | |
Margaret spent several months in Berlin | 0:31:48 | 0:31:51 | |
on a cultural fellowship programme. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:53 | |
At the time, it was a city divided. | 0:31:55 | 0:31:58 | |
It was in Berlin that she began the novel that would make her | 0:32:00 | 0:32:04 | |
an international name. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:06 | |
The Handmaid's Tale is a work of speculative fiction, | 0:32:10 | 0:32:12 | |
or dystopian fiction, in which women have been reduced | 0:32:12 | 0:32:15 | |
solely to their reproductive function. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:18 | |
The Republic of Gilead is a terrifying world in which women | 0:32:18 | 0:32:22 | |
are denied access to any kind of autonomy, | 0:32:22 | 0:32:25 | |
any kind of right to control the course of their own lives. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
"The lawns are tidy, the facades are gracious, in good repair. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:39 | |
"They're like the beautiful pictures they used to print in the magazines | 0:32:39 | 0:32:42 | |
"about homes and gardens and interior decoration. | 0:32:42 | 0:32:46 | |
"There is the same absence of people, | 0:32:47 | 0:32:50 | |
"the same air of being asleep. | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
"The street is almost like a museum, | 0:32:55 | 0:32:58 | |
"or a street in a model town | 0:32:58 | 0:33:00 | |
"constructed to show the way people used to live. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:05 | |
"As in those pictures, those museums, those model towns, | 0:33:05 | 0:33:10 | |
"there are no children. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:12 | |
"This is the heart of Gilead, where the war cannot intrude, | 0:33:13 | 0:33:17 | |
"except on television. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:20 | |
"Where the edges are, we aren't sure. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:23 | |
"They vary according to the attacks and counterattacks, | 0:33:23 | 0:33:27 | |
"but this is the centre, where nothing moves. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:31 | |
" 'The Republic of Gilead,' said Aunt Lydia, 'knows no bounds. | 0:33:31 | 0:33:37 | |
" 'Gilead is within you.' " | 0:33:37 | 0:33:40 | |
The Handmaid's Tale is, of all your books, | 0:33:46 | 0:33:48 | |
it's one that everyone talks about. | 0:33:48 | 0:33:50 | |
I know - and increasingly, now. | 0:33:50 | 0:33:52 | |
The Handmaid's Tale I wrote partly in answer to the question, | 0:33:52 | 0:33:57 | |
if you were going to put in a totalitarian regime | 0:33:57 | 0:34:00 | |
in the United States, what kind of totalitarian regime would it be? | 0:34:00 | 0:34:05 | |
As we know from the history of the 20th century, | 0:34:05 | 0:34:09 | |
both the USSR and Nazi Germany | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
came in as utopian plans. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:16 | |
On the other hand, if you have no plans for making things better... | 0:34:16 | 0:34:19 | |
..they get worse. | 0:34:20 | 0:34:22 | |
So we're always caught between these two things. | 0:34:22 | 0:34:27 | |
What do we mean by better? | 0:34:27 | 0:34:29 | |
How do we get from here to that better? | 0:34:29 | 0:34:33 | |
And does that better involve a big hole | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
with a lot of dead people in it? | 0:34:36 | 0:34:39 | |
As has frequently been the case. | 0:34:39 | 0:34:41 | |
It was also partly in answer to the question, | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
if you were going to put women back into the home, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
as the right was already saying they should be put in the 1980s, | 0:34:47 | 0:34:53 | |
how do you make them go back in? | 0:34:53 | 0:34:56 | |
Now that the... | 0:34:56 | 0:34:57 | |
box has been opened and the butterflies are out | 0:34:57 | 0:35:01 | |
and flitting about, how do you cram them all back in? | 0:35:01 | 0:35:04 | |
By what method? | 0:35:04 | 0:35:05 | |
Kneel. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:11 | |
'In The Handmaid's Tale, their method | 0:35:14 | 0:35:17 | |
'is to force women to reproduce | 0:35:17 | 0:35:19 | |
'for the good of the state.' | 0:35:19 | 0:35:20 | |
You girls will serve the leaders, | 0:35:25 | 0:35:28 | |
and their barren wives. | 0:35:28 | 0:35:30 | |
You will bear children for them. | 0:35:30 | 0:35:32 | |
Oh, you are so lucky! | 0:35:34 | 0:35:37 | |
'The red cover-ups that the handmaids are required to wear, | 0:35:39 | 0:35:42 | |
'where did that come from?' | 0:35:42 | 0:35:44 | |
It came from several different sources. | 0:35:44 | 0:35:46 | |
Number one, I was frightened as a child | 0:35:46 | 0:35:49 | |
by the Old Dutch Cleanser packet. | 0:35:49 | 0:35:51 | |
-Tell me about... -Old Dutch Cleanser | 0:35:51 | 0:35:54 | |
was something you cleaned sinks with. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:57 | |
On it was a picture of a Dutch woman in a big blue outfit | 0:35:57 | 0:36:01 | |
with a bonnet that hid her face. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
So, I was quite frightened by it as a child, this was... | 0:36:04 | 0:36:07 | |
You were looking into the abyss when you looked at that package. | 0:36:07 | 0:36:12 | |
Another one was, in Canada, during the War, | 0:36:12 | 0:36:16 | |
in prisoner of war camps, the outfits were red, | 0:36:16 | 0:36:21 | |
and the reason the outfits were red is that you could see anybody trying | 0:36:21 | 0:36:25 | |
to run away across the snow. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:28 | |
The other idea of course is from Christian colour iconography. | 0:36:28 | 0:36:32 | |
So, European painting, | 0:36:33 | 0:36:35 | |
you will always see in these pictures the Virgin Mary wears blue, | 0:36:35 | 0:36:39 | |
Mary Magdalene wears red. | 0:36:39 | 0:36:42 | |
So, red went on a woman in a picture of that kind, | 0:36:42 | 0:36:45 | |
it is a very sexualised colour. | 0:36:45 | 0:36:48 | |
The Handmaid's Tale resonates with troubling attempts | 0:36:53 | 0:36:57 | |
to control women's lives throughout history. | 0:36:57 | 0:36:59 | |
From the Salem witch trials, to Nazi Germany, | 0:37:01 | 0:37:05 | |
where they tried to breed an Aryan race. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:08 | |
To Romania under Ceausescu, | 0:37:11 | 0:37:13 | |
where birth control and abortions were banned. | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
One of my rules for the book was I would put nothing into it | 0:37:19 | 0:37:22 | |
that had not already been done somewhere. | 0:37:22 | 0:37:25 | |
So there was a precedent for every single thing in it. | 0:37:25 | 0:37:28 | |
The shocking thing was that I took all of these precedents | 0:37:28 | 0:37:32 | |
and put them into Cambridge, Massachusetts, | 0:37:32 | 0:37:35 | |
supposedly the home of liberal democracy. | 0:37:35 | 0:37:39 | |
Why is that? Because, having been born in 1939, | 0:37:39 | 0:37:42 | |
I never believe it can't happen here. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
Illegal immigration is so rampant and so dangerous and so bad | 0:37:49 | 0:37:53 | |
for the United States, OK? Period, that's it. | 0:37:53 | 0:37:56 | |
When are we going to get smart, folks? | 0:37:56 | 0:37:58 | |
When are we going to get smart? | 0:37:58 | 0:38:00 | |
Three decades after it was first published, | 0:38:02 | 0:38:05 | |
The Handmaid's Tale has once again struck a nerve. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:09 | |
It was quite telling | 0:38:11 | 0:38:12 | |
that a lot of the women's marches around the world, | 0:38:12 | 0:38:15 | |
days after the inauguration of Donald Trump, | 0:38:15 | 0:38:19 | |
they sported signs and carrying quotations, | 0:38:19 | 0:38:23 | |
slogans and mantras from The Handmaid's Tale... | 0:38:23 | 0:38:26 | |
..and there's a good reason for that. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:29 | |
It's a novel that is a work of speculative fiction | 0:38:29 | 0:38:31 | |
or dystopian fiction, if you prefer, | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
but it's a novel that, as Atwood insisted as the time, | 0:38:34 | 0:38:36 | |
was really also recording things that had already happened | 0:38:36 | 0:38:39 | |
and were happening in the world in the present moment, | 0:38:39 | 0:38:42 | |
and I think that the fact that in 2017 | 0:38:42 | 0:38:44 | |
we are going back to The Handmaid's Tale | 0:38:44 | 0:38:46 | |
really speaks to the power of the novel | 0:38:46 | 0:38:48 | |
as a kind of prophecy | 0:38:48 | 0:38:50 | |
and as a novel that could almost enter into any chapter of history | 0:38:50 | 0:38:54 | |
and find resonance. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:55 | |
I think the urgency is in everything, | 0:39:00 | 0:39:01 | |
I think it's been in everything she's ever written. | 0:39:01 | 0:39:04 | |
She's always understood the ways in which the power can go wrong | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
in our lives, the ways in which we have to embrace authority, | 0:39:07 | 0:39:11 | |
and at the same time understand that authority | 0:39:11 | 0:39:14 | |
is at all points undermineable - | 0:39:14 | 0:39:17 | |
and should be, to check its structures - | 0:39:17 | 0:39:19 | |
and she checks the power structure with everything she writes. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:22 | |
Margaret's fascination with science fiction, | 0:39:30 | 0:39:33 | |
both as a writer and reader, goes right back to her childhood. | 0:39:33 | 0:39:37 | |
Like a great many children before and since, | 0:39:42 | 0:39:45 | |
I was an inventor of other worlds. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:47 | |
Mine were rudimentary, | 0:39:49 | 0:39:50 | |
as such worlds are when you are six or seven... | 0:39:50 | 0:39:53 | |
..but they were emphatically not at this here-and-now Earth. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:57 | |
I wasn't much interested in Dick and Jane. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:01 | |
The creepily ultra-normal characters did not convince me. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:05 | |
Saturn was more my speed, | 0:40:05 | 0:40:07 | |
and other realms even more outlandish. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:10 | |
Our earliest loves, like revenants, | 0:40:12 | 0:40:16 | |
have a way of coming back in other forms - | 0:40:16 | 0:40:19 | |
or, to paraphrase Wordsworth, | 0:40:19 | 0:40:21 | |
the child is mother to the woman. | 0:40:21 | 0:40:23 | |
So, when you started your first storytelling ventures, | 0:40:25 | 0:40:29 | |
they involved your brother Harold, didn't they? | 0:40:29 | 0:40:31 | |
Well, we drew comics. | 0:40:31 | 0:40:33 | |
He was much more prolific than I was, | 0:40:33 | 0:40:35 | |
cos he was practically three years older, | 0:40:35 | 0:40:37 | |
and he had great sagas going on, | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
and they, of course, were very warlike, | 0:40:39 | 0:40:43 | |
because it was the War and immediately post-war | 0:40:43 | 0:40:46 | |
and we were all very attuned to that as kids. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:50 | |
Oh, this is good. I love this. | 0:40:51 | 0:40:53 | |
What's On Neptune? | 0:40:53 | 0:40:55 | |
"Introduction. This story is not true. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:57 | |
"Of course, there is a planet called Neptune, | 0:40:57 | 0:41:00 | |
"but its inhabitation is unknown. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:02 | |
"I have made up a number of things | 0:41:02 | 0:41:04 | |
"that will be used in the next two volumes. | 0:41:04 | 0:41:06 | |
"Harold L Atwood, author of Alfred's Youth, etc, etc. | 0:41:06 | 0:41:11 | |
-"Read on." -Go on, then, read on. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:13 | |
I think every author should put that at the beginning of their book. | 0:41:13 | 0:41:17 | |
Number one - a number of things are not true. | 0:41:17 | 0:41:20 | |
We know, it's called fiction. | 0:41:20 | 0:41:22 | |
Here's what else you've written, and then read on. | 0:41:22 | 0:41:24 | |
In contrast to her brother's epic sagas, | 0:41:26 | 0:41:29 | |
Margaret's stories took a softer approach. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:32 | |
Painting the Easter egg. | 0:41:32 | 0:41:33 | |
Yes. | 0:41:33 | 0:41:35 | |
Slight mystery about the gender of the Easter Bunny. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:39 | |
Always spoken of as "he", but where were those eggs coming from? | 0:41:39 | 0:41:44 | |
To date, Margaret Atwood has written five novels | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
that could be described as science fiction... | 0:41:51 | 0:41:54 | |
..but, rather than the far-flung galaxies of her childhood, | 0:41:55 | 0:41:59 | |
her adult novels are firmly rooted on planet Earth. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:02 | |
The MaddAddam trilogy takes place in, let's say, nearish future. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:10 | |
Human beings have done horrible things with technology - | 0:42:10 | 0:42:13 | |
as we are trying to do. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:15 | |
There are various rather disgusting biological things | 0:42:15 | 0:42:18 | |
that are being done, the internet has grown, | 0:42:18 | 0:42:21 | |
there are more different kinds of drugs available - | 0:42:21 | 0:42:24 | |
and there's an apocalyptic event. | 0:42:24 | 0:42:28 | |
There is an event that essentially destroys most of the human race, | 0:42:28 | 0:42:35 | |
and then we see what becomes of the remnant. | 0:42:35 | 0:42:37 | |
"Men can imagine their own deaths. | 0:42:41 | 0:42:43 | |
"They can see them coming, | 0:42:44 | 0:42:46 | |
"and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:50 | |
"A dog, a rabbit, doesn't behave like that. | 0:42:51 | 0:42:54 | |
"Take birds. In a lean season, | 0:42:56 | 0:42:58 | |
"they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. | 0:42:58 | 0:43:01 | |
"They put their energy into staying alive themselves | 0:43:03 | 0:43:06 | |
"until times get better... | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
"but human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, | 0:43:09 | 0:43:14 | |
"some new version of themselves, and live on forever. | 0:43:14 | 0:43:17 | |
"As a species, are we doomed by hope, then? | 0:43:18 | 0:43:22 | |
"You could call it hope - that... | 0:43:23 | 0:43:26 | |
"or desperation." | 0:43:26 | 0:43:28 | |
For Margaret, science fiction is a bit like | 0:43:33 | 0:43:37 | |
a fire and brimstone sermon, | 0:43:37 | 0:43:39 | |
where you might say, "This is where you're going, | 0:43:39 | 0:43:43 | |
"this is what could happen to you if you don't mend your ways today." | 0:43:43 | 0:43:47 | |
She does sort of warn us, I feel. | 0:43:51 | 0:43:52 | |
If you don't take care of the landscape, | 0:43:55 | 0:43:56 | |
you don't take care of the wildlife. | 0:43:56 | 0:43:58 | |
If you don't prize what's important between human beings, | 0:43:58 | 0:44:02 | |
this is what will happen. | 0:44:02 | 0:44:03 | |
We grew up in Canada knowing that it's dangerous. | 0:44:06 | 0:44:10 | |
The landscape can be dangerous. The weather's dangerous. | 0:44:10 | 0:44:13 | |
You can be in places that can overwhelm you. | 0:44:13 | 0:44:15 | |
What I like about the sort of length of time | 0:44:18 | 0:44:20 | |
that Margaret Atwood's been writing and talking about the natural world | 0:44:20 | 0:44:24 | |
is that, in a way, it started off | 0:44:24 | 0:44:26 | |
thinking the natural world could kill us, | 0:44:26 | 0:44:29 | |
and now she is very much saying, "Actually, wait a minute, | 0:44:29 | 0:44:32 | |
"we're killing the natural world ourselves." | 0:44:32 | 0:44:34 | |
"I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:47 | |
"I am also what surrounds you, my brain scattered with your tin cans, | 0:44:48 | 0:44:53 | |
"bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions. | 0:44:53 | 0:44:57 | |
"I am the space you desecrate as you pass through." | 0:44:58 | 0:45:01 | |
Both Margaret and her husband Graeme | 0:45:09 | 0:45:11 | |
are passionate environmental campaigners | 0:45:11 | 0:45:14 | |
and honorary presidents of Canada's Rare Bird Club. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:18 | |
See it? | 0:45:20 | 0:45:21 | |
-The one inside - oh, it just stuck its head out. -Oh, OK. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:25 | |
Every year they return to Pelee Island, | 0:45:25 | 0:45:28 | |
a bird-watcher's paradise in Lake Erie. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:31 | |
Did your love of birds and the preservation of birds - | 0:45:32 | 0:45:36 | |
did it come from your childhood? | 0:45:36 | 0:45:38 | |
Oh, I grew up with it. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:41 | |
I'm like a person who grows up with a religion | 0:45:41 | 0:45:44 | |
and therefore takes it for granted, whereas Graeme is like a convert, | 0:45:44 | 0:45:48 | |
and you know they are always more enthusiastic! | 0:45:48 | 0:45:52 | |
So, he is really the main mover behind our bird activity. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:57 | |
There is a problem, there's no question. | 0:45:58 | 0:46:01 | |
I've been doing this now for 15 years, now, | 0:46:01 | 0:46:04 | |
with the birds here on this island, | 0:46:04 | 0:46:06 | |
and there's far fewer now than when we started. | 0:46:06 | 0:46:09 | |
So, in bird conservation, | 0:46:16 | 0:46:18 | |
cats are thought to be responsible in North America | 0:46:18 | 0:46:21 | |
for the largest numbers of migratory bird deaths, | 0:46:21 | 0:46:27 | |
and conservation organisations have traditionally tiptoed around that, | 0:46:27 | 0:46:33 | |
because cat owners are quite passionate about their cats. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:37 | |
Therefore, how do you tackle the problem | 0:46:37 | 0:46:39 | |
without losing your major donors and attracting a lot of hate mail? | 0:46:39 | 0:46:42 | |
Margaret's latest venture is a comic book take | 0:46:51 | 0:46:54 | |
on Canada's cat-bird problem, | 0:46:54 | 0:46:57 | |
starring a superhero who is part cat, part bird. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:01 | |
Angel Catbird. | 0:47:04 | 0:47:05 | |
To bring the character to life, she enlisted the help | 0:47:09 | 0:47:12 | |
of Vancouver-based artist Johnnie Christmas. | 0:47:12 | 0:47:15 | |
Angel Catbird is a story about a scientist | 0:47:18 | 0:47:22 | |
who is working on a gene-splicing formula. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:24 | |
He has a mysterious accident one night where he gets hit by a car. | 0:47:24 | 0:47:29 | |
This cat and this owl comes along, | 0:47:30 | 0:47:32 | |
and then the gene fluid splashes on him | 0:47:32 | 0:47:34 | |
and he gets merged with these creatures. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:37 | |
The character of Angel Catbird is based on an idea | 0:47:41 | 0:47:44 | |
that Margaret's been sketching since childhood. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:47 | |
-Oh, here we are. -What's this? -OK. | 0:47:50 | 0:47:51 | |
This is the original flying cat. | 0:47:51 | 0:47:54 | |
-Oh! -There it is. | 0:47:54 | 0:47:56 | |
Where did the flying cat come from? | 0:47:56 | 0:47:58 | |
Well, I wasn't allowed to have a cat because we were up in the woods, | 0:47:58 | 0:48:02 | |
so, I very much wanted to have one, | 0:48:02 | 0:48:04 | |
and, of course, here is somebody with their cat on a leash, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:08 | |
various wish-fulfilment pictures of having cats. | 0:48:08 | 0:48:13 | |
So you only came back to the flying cat, to the Angel Catbird... | 0:48:13 | 0:48:18 | |
-In later life. -In later life. -That's true. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:20 | |
-Really later life. -Yes, but think of... | 0:48:20 | 0:48:22 | |
..all the repression that must have gone on to produce such an outburst. | 0:48:23 | 0:48:27 | |
Yes! | 0:48:27 | 0:48:29 | |
One thing I really enjoy about working with Margaret on this | 0:48:33 | 0:48:36 | |
is that, if the idea's good, that's what we go with. | 0:48:36 | 0:48:39 | |
There's not a lot of ego in the... | 0:48:41 | 0:48:42 | |
"Well, this is my idea and this idea has to stand because it's mine, | 0:48:44 | 0:48:49 | |
"it's the best idea." | 0:48:49 | 0:48:51 | |
Margaret gave me bullet points on the important things. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:55 | |
She wanted, like, feathery feet, owl features, cat features | 0:48:55 | 0:49:00 | |
sort of thing, but she left it very open. | 0:49:00 | 0:49:02 | |
I thought he was just going to be kind of fur, | 0:49:05 | 0:49:07 | |
he was just going to be this fur man, you know? | 0:49:07 | 0:49:09 | |
There's no need to put on pants because you wouldn't see | 0:49:09 | 0:49:12 | |
any genitalia, because he's just covered in fur - | 0:49:12 | 0:49:15 | |
but Margaret immediately was like, "Is he going to be wearing pants?" | 0:49:15 | 0:49:19 | |
Like, none of that is going to be going on - | 0:49:19 | 0:49:21 | |
and then there were like... | 0:49:21 | 0:49:22 | |
..I don't know how many versions of superhero pants we went through. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:27 | |
Then we conferred on pants, and you can find them. | 0:49:27 | 0:49:30 | |
Sketches of the pants. I sent him a book on feathers. | 0:49:30 | 0:49:33 | |
I said that they should be feathered pants. | 0:49:33 | 0:49:35 | |
So, this is the design that we chose. | 0:49:35 | 0:49:38 | |
Simple and elegant - | 0:49:38 | 0:49:39 | |
and that translated into this, but then he said, | 0:49:39 | 0:49:43 | |
"We need an origin story for the pants, cos they can't just appear." | 0:49:43 | 0:49:48 | |
So you will read in the comic that we added an origin story | 0:49:48 | 0:49:53 | |
for the pants. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:54 | |
We all remember Superman and how puzzled we were as children. | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
I mean that question about where Superman's clothes were | 0:49:58 | 0:50:02 | |
when he was Clark Kent - | 0:50:02 | 0:50:03 | |
that was never really satisfactorily answered. | 0:50:03 | 0:50:06 | |
He just would go into the phone booth, | 0:50:06 | 0:50:08 | |
take off his clothes and come out as Superman. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:11 | |
You know, where did his civilian clothes go when he did that? | 0:50:11 | 0:50:14 | |
So where does Angel Catbird put his? | 0:50:14 | 0:50:17 | |
I'm not going to tell you, it's in the text. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:19 | |
-Oh, it's in there, is it? -Yeah, it's right in here. | 0:50:19 | 0:50:21 | |
-It's in the story. -I'll find it. -Yes, you will! | 0:50:21 | 0:50:23 | |
The double life led by all comic book superheroes | 0:50:25 | 0:50:29 | |
is something that's always been second nature to Margaret. | 0:50:29 | 0:50:33 | |
Or should that be Peggy? | 0:50:33 | 0:50:35 | |
You might say I was fated to be a writer, | 0:50:38 | 0:50:40 | |
because I was endowed at birth with a double identity. | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
Due to the Romanticism of my father, I was named after my mother - | 0:50:45 | 0:50:51 | |
but then there were two of us, | 0:50:51 | 0:50:53 | |
so I had to be called something else. | 0:50:53 | 0:50:55 | |
Thus I grew up with a nickname, Peggy. | 0:50:56 | 0:50:59 | |
Waste not, want not - I was bound to do something | 0:51:00 | 0:51:03 | |
with this extra name of mine sooner or later... | 0:51:03 | 0:51:06 | |
..so, the author's the name on the books. | 0:51:07 | 0:51:10 | |
I am the other one. | 0:51:10 | 0:51:12 | |
She's Margaret Atwood to everyone, | 0:51:19 | 0:51:21 | |
and then sometimes when you get in, slightly in on the inner circle | 0:51:21 | 0:51:25 | |
you get to call her Peggy... | 0:51:25 | 0:51:26 | |
..but I think she's quite clever with that, | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
because when you're as big a public figure as she is, | 0:51:32 | 0:51:35 | |
you need to protect yourself. | 0:51:35 | 0:51:37 | |
Margaret, your stories make me very sad. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:41 | |
Oh, that's too bad. | 0:51:41 | 0:51:42 | |
I thought the characters were all so very lonely. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:46 | |
Well, a lot of people are. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:47 | |
It's nice she has Peggy to kind of retreat to. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:52 | |
You know, kind of Margaret Atwood can be the person | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
who can take the flak or the praise, but Peggy can go home. | 0:51:55 | 0:51:58 | |
Do you care, as a matter of interest, | 0:52:04 | 0:52:05 | |
how the critics respond to your books? | 0:52:05 | 0:52:08 | |
You mean when I'm writing the book do I worry what critics will say? | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
Well, or even afterwards? | 0:52:11 | 0:52:12 | |
You can't predict it, but when you write a book, | 0:52:12 | 0:52:16 | |
you already know yourself what's wrong with it. | 0:52:16 | 0:52:20 | |
-You don't need to be told. -You know where the weak points are. | 0:52:20 | 0:52:23 | |
You hope you've papered them over enough | 0:52:23 | 0:52:25 | |
so that people won't see them! | 0:52:25 | 0:52:27 | |
Sometimes it's just... | 0:52:27 | 0:52:28 | |
The book is what it is, | 0:52:30 | 0:52:31 | |
and some people are going to have ideological troubles with it, | 0:52:31 | 0:52:35 | |
no matter how good it is or bad it is as a book. | 0:52:35 | 0:52:39 | |
Margaret's received numerous literary accolades, | 0:52:41 | 0:52:44 | |
but for years the Booker Prize eluded her. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:47 | |
When The Blind Assassin was shortlisted, | 0:52:48 | 0:52:50 | |
it was the fourth time she'd been nominated for this coveted award. | 0:52:50 | 0:52:54 | |
She said to me, | 0:52:57 | 0:52:58 | |
"Shall I come over for the dinner?" | 0:52:58 | 0:53:00 | |
Because she'd been twice before and hadn't won, | 0:53:00 | 0:53:05 | |
and there was murmurs about, oh, you know, | 0:53:05 | 0:53:11 | |
"God, it's going to be three times the bridesmaid, never the bride." | 0:53:11 | 0:53:15 | |
She said, "Do I need this? | 0:53:15 | 0:53:18 | |
"Shall I come? What do you think?" | 0:53:18 | 0:53:20 | |
And I said, "I think you should. | 0:53:20 | 0:53:23 | |
"I think it would be a great shame if you didn't come, | 0:53:23 | 0:53:27 | |
"whatever happens." | 0:53:27 | 0:53:28 | |
And the winner, the first Booker Prize of the 21st century, | 0:53:28 | 0:53:32 | |
Margaret Atwood. | 0:53:32 | 0:53:33 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:53:33 | 0:53:35 | |
It was such a big relief! | 0:53:37 | 0:53:39 | |
I mean she's won so many prizes, | 0:53:39 | 0:53:41 | |
but somehow this was getting to be a bit of a burden, | 0:53:41 | 0:53:44 | |
I thought, you know. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:46 | |
It would just be wonderful to just tick that one off. | 0:53:46 | 0:53:50 | |
First of all, Margaret Atwood, | 0:53:50 | 0:53:52 | |
congratulations on winning the Booker. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:54 | |
Do awards still matter to you? | 0:53:54 | 0:53:57 | |
Oh, I think they always matter in some shape or form. | 0:53:57 | 0:54:00 | |
Particularly that one, because it was the fourth go. | 0:54:01 | 0:54:04 | |
"Why is it we want so badly to memorialise ourselves? | 0:54:08 | 0:54:13 | |
"Even while we are still alive. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:16 | |
"We wish to assert our existence like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. | 0:54:16 | 0:54:21 | |
"We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, | 0:54:21 | 0:54:26 | |
"our silver-plated cups. We monogram our linen. | 0:54:26 | 0:54:29 | |
"We carve our name on trees. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:31 | |
"We scrawl them on washroom walls. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:34 | |
"It's all the same impulse. | 0:54:34 | 0:54:35 | |
"What do we hope from it? | 0:54:37 | 0:54:39 | |
"Applause? Envy? Respect? | 0:54:39 | 0:54:41 | |
"Or simply attention of any kind we can get? | 0:54:41 | 0:54:45 | |
"At the very least, we want a witness. | 0:54:46 | 0:54:49 | |
"We can't stand the idea of our own voices | 0:54:49 | 0:54:52 | |
"falling silent, finally, like a radio running down." | 0:54:52 | 0:54:57 | |
Throughout their friendship, | 0:55:17 | 0:55:19 | |
Margaret has been a muse to Charles Pachter, | 0:55:19 | 0:55:22 | |
who has painted her many times over the years. | 0:55:22 | 0:55:25 | |
Well, honey, that's 60 years ago. | 0:55:28 | 0:55:31 | |
Isn't that frightful? | 0:55:31 | 0:55:33 | |
When you think about it. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:35 | |
Can you believe it? | 0:55:35 | 0:55:36 | |
Keith, bring my scarf in, the yellow one. | 0:55:37 | 0:55:40 | |
-Please. -Please. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:41 | |
You want me to wear it...?! | 0:55:43 | 0:55:45 | |
But the eyes are the mirror of the soul, | 0:55:46 | 0:55:48 | |
and when you get the eyes right, | 0:55:48 | 0:55:49 | |
everything else follows suit. | 0:55:49 | 0:55:51 | |
She's got these gorgeous blue eyes, | 0:55:51 | 0:55:53 | |
and sometimes you can see the blue and sometimes you can't. | 0:55:53 | 0:55:57 | |
Anyway, I'm having a good time. | 0:55:57 | 0:55:59 | |
What are you going to do here? | 0:55:59 | 0:56:00 | |
You're going to make the background blue? | 0:56:00 | 0:56:02 | |
-Yeah. -You're going to ruin that nice drawing? | 0:56:02 | 0:56:05 | |
This is looking really good. I'm pleased. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:08 | |
You were mesmerising at age 27. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:14 | |
Look at you. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:16 | |
Oy. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:17 | |
You're still doing pretty good, honey. | 0:56:17 | 0:56:19 | |
MARGARET LAUGHS | 0:56:19 | 0:56:21 | |
You know how to mesmer, don't you? | 0:56:21 | 0:56:22 | |
OK, here we go. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:30 | |
HE CLEARS THROAT | 0:56:30 | 0:56:32 | |
Owl And Pussycat, Some Years Later. | 0:56:32 | 0:56:35 | |
"So, here we are again, my dear, | 0:56:35 | 0:56:37 | |
"on the same shore we set out from years ago, when we were promising - | 0:56:37 | 0:56:42 | |
"but minus, now, a lot of hair. | 0:56:42 | 0:56:45 | |
"Or fur, or feathers, whatever. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:47 | |
"I like the bifocals. | 0:56:49 | 0:56:51 | |
"They make you look even more like an owl than you are. | 0:56:51 | 0:56:55 | |
"I suppose we've both come far, | 0:56:55 | 0:56:57 | |
"but how far are we truly from where we started?" | 0:56:57 | 0:57:00 | |
All right. I'm going to do the teeny-weeny... | 0:57:00 | 0:57:02 | |
-You can do that little bit in there, yeah. -..little bit. | 0:57:02 | 0:57:05 | |
"Under the fresh-laid moon, when we plotted to astound, | 0:57:05 | 0:57:09 | |
"when we thought something of meaning could still be done | 0:57:09 | 0:57:11 | |
"by singing, or won, like trophies. | 0:57:11 | 0:57:14 | |
"I took the fences, you the treetops, | 0:57:16 | 0:57:19 | |
"where we hooted and yowled our carnivorous, fervid hearts out. | 0:57:19 | 0:57:23 | |
"And see? We did get prizes. | 0:57:23 | 0:57:26 | |
"There they are. | 0:57:26 | 0:57:27 | |
"A scroll, a gold watch | 0:57:27 | 0:57:29 | |
"and a kiss-off handshake from the stand-in for the muse, | 0:57:29 | 0:57:34 | |
"who couldn't come herself but sent regrets. | 0:57:34 | 0:57:37 | |
"Now we can say flattering things about each other on dust jackets. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:42 | |
"Whatever made us think we could change the world?" | 0:57:42 | 0:57:44 | |
"Well, my dear, | 0:57:48 | 0:57:50 | |
"our leaky cardboard gondola has brought us this far. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:54 | |
"Us and our paper guitar. | 0:57:54 | 0:57:56 | |
"No longer semi-immortal, but now moulting owl and arthritic pussycat, | 0:57:57 | 0:58:03 | |
"we row out past the last protecting sand bar towards the salty open sea, | 0:58:03 | 0:58:10 | |
"the dog's-head gate, and after that, oblivion. | 0:58:10 | 0:58:13 | |
"But sing on, sing on. | 0:58:15 | 0:58:18 | |
"Someone may still be listening besides me. | 0:58:18 | 0:58:21 | |
"The fish, for instance. | 0:58:21 | 0:58:23 | |
"Anyway, my dearest one, we still have the moon." | 0:58:23 | 0:58:28 |