You wouldn't think Margaret Atwood said it. Correction, I was surprised Margaret Atwood said it.
I've always had an image of her, something like this:
Intellectual. VERY intellectual, To be found only in the hallowed halls of academia.Not outside, up to her knees in mud.
"The Economist called her a "scintillating wordsmith" and an "expert literary critic", but commented that her logic does not match her prose in Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a book which commences with the conception of debt and its kinship with justice. Atwood claims that this conception is ingrained in the human psyche, manifest as it is in early historical peoples, who matched their conceptions of debt with those of justice as typically exemplified by a female deity. Atwood holds that, with the rise of Ancient Greece, and especially the installation of the court system detailed in Aeschylus's Oresteia, this deity has been replaced by a more thorough conception of debt."
Look, I'm not stupid. I already had a bit of a headache. My headache is now worse. That's not to say I don't love her writing. I share her opinion about science fiction - the differentiation between it and speculative fiction. She says "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." Science fiction, as opposed to what she herself wrote, was "talking squids in outer space."
Science fiction (if we are to endorse her definition) leaves me cold. Speculative fiction - I love. I write.
However, her father was an entomologist, and she spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec. She lived on a farm in Alliston, Ontario, not at all far from where my boy Jamie now lives (so she MUST be okay!)
Very well, Margaret Atwood. I shall now revise my most awful stereotypical opinion about you and who you are.
Here's a kinder image.
At the end of today, I can promise you I shall smell like dirt.
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