YouSaid · the spoken record

Margaret Atwood

lines on the record: 115
first: 2022-02-23
most recent: 2022-02-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And not all of them are exactly like me. So you can put a general heading over something just as you can put a general heading over science fiction, speculative fiction, stories about werewolves, Dracula, Frankenstein, ghost stories. They're all wonder tales. You can call them all wonder tales. So you can call There's a lot of other things that can be added to that. So Dracula is not the same as War of the Worlds. They're both wonder tales, but they're very different like that. So sure, let's say woman writer 82, generational, okay, country, city, height, hair, curly. That's important to him. So like that. So you can build out the picture. You can start with a few labels, but it's not the whole story for anybody.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. The reason I resist closed boxes is that nature does not deal in closed boxes. Yeah, it doesn't. If it did, there wouldn't have been any evolution. If it did, you and I would not exist. So everything in nature is on a bell curve. There are a lot of liminal beings, or let's say, forms that cannot be put into closed boxes, such as, for instance, the platypus. So I just don't like closed boxes, and labels are a way of filing people. Oh, you're a this. We're going to file you there under this letter. Your box is going to go there. And that's who you are, and that's all you are. And I don't think that's true of anyone. I do think we all contain multitudes. So that's probably why you can say, sure, I'm a woman writer. I'm a woman. I'm a writer. But that's not the end of the story. There have been a lot of women writers.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is going on here? It's like the sack of Troy. I actually knew him a bit. I met him. I thought he was very interesting. And he was a huge advocate for the future of life on Earth and an early advocate. And a lot of the early advocates for the kinds of things that we are now very concerned about now, they came from the world of biology. So my parents, for instance, were early Sierra Club and early environmentalists and Very clear from any study of biology. Life is interconnected. So you contain multitudes, Tim, just telling you.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a biologist. He's a biologist. I was familiar with his work from an early period because, of course, he was an entomologist. He was an ant guy. And my dad started out as a bee guy. And as you will know from your deep study of entomology Those are both hymenoptera. So my dad was very interested in his work on ants, and I read it pretty early on. I followed him along, and I was in fact the reviewer for his only novel. And you can probably find that review in the New York Review Books. And I was well equipped to do it because I knew about ants. And the central section of that book, which is the life and death of an ant colony, is the most gripping one. You think, wow, this is so epic.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I liked them a lot, and it was very instructive because the things that the 19-year-old liked frequently, the grown-ups would not like, and the things that the 19-year-olds really didn't like, the grown-ups thought were terrific. So middle March by George Elliott, the 19-year-old said, we don't like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions in their careers and they marry the wrong people, and we're not going to do that. And the adult said, this is a great book. Make the wrong decisions in their careers. They marry the wrong people. It's just like life. So, a big difference in experience. And what's the lesson? The lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are, the age that you are and the experience that you've had. And it's the same for everyone.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would argue with you, object to things, and really, really give you the old run-through. And that was pretty stimulating. So I taught 19th century novels to those people, and I also taught American romanticism. And it was they who gave me a button that said, Moby Dick is not a social disease. So they had a sense of humor.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always enjoyed it. I think the most intense year of teaching that I did was in Montreal. I taught it a place that doesn't exist anymore because it's been amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams, and it was a downtown city establishment. You taught your subject to 19-year-olds in the day. And then in the evening, you taught the same subject to returning adult students. That was very instructive for me. The 19-year-olds weren't too sure why they were there, except their mom and dad wanted them to, and really they would rather be drinking beer or going to hockey games or something. And the adults were there because they wanted to be a couple of reasons they wanted to be there. They wanted to up their credentials, but also they were very engaged.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sounds like a lot of fun part of the week. Well, the folks singing and jazz went on on other nights of the week, such as Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. That's how they supported the poetry meetings. So we did that in the early 60s. And then the poetry reading spread to universities, some of them, and then to bookstores. They decided that they could do that too. And the big festivals didn't start happening until the mid-70s, I would say. All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around, or you did see it before COVID, they didn't exist yet. They sprang up out of this subculture of coffee houses.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a different kind of coffee shops. Let me not say shops. It should be houses. So they didn't have liquor licenses, so basically people brought flasks in their handbags, pockets, and things like that. And you had the usually condemned warehouse or something, and the little tables with the checkered tablecloths, the little wine bottles with the candle stuck in them, and the open mic. So poetry night usually on a Tuesday. Sounds good.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of poets. They would turn up here and there and give readings in out of the way places, and some of them, do you remember, no, you don't, sorry, coffee shops, coffee shop readings. No.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely, we were all love sharing our stuff around because we were editing each other's work. We were publishing each other's work. We were all of the poets were connected through this kind of spider web network of little magazines. both in Canada, the US, England, there were these little magazines that published poetry and people knew each other through them. So the poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country. The poets were more paripate. They would get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at your door and sleep on your rug. And you, in your turn, might cut on the Greyhound bus and turn up at somebody else's door and sleep on their rug. So it was a sort of a rug exchange.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Its place. So it was hardbacks and I've always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact, I was associated with a small publishing company in the late 60s and early 70s. And a lot of it was about money. Like, how many can we sell? What can we publish to support these works of cutting edge experimental fiction that nobody's going to buy? What can we publish? So we did. We published The first book on venereal disease, it was called VD. You know idiots guides? These were sort of idiots guides before there were idiots guides. We got as far as warts, but we didn't get to AIDS because nobody knew about it yet. It's like that.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of short stories in the 20s and 30s made a living out of selling to glossys. That was dwindling by that time. Some of them still existed, but not in the same way that they had. So we weren't really thinking in those terms. And there were no agents in Canada at that time. We didn't even really quite understand what they were. There were some publishers, but they didn't publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn't a market for them. So if you wanted to publish a novel, your publisher would say, well, we have to get a partner either in London or in New York. And that was easier said than done. So the book publishing that had been going on in the 30s of cheap hardbacks kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be a little more certain about that. It was gone, having had paperbacks taken.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mean deny everything I would make a living out of it? No, people in my age group, in my country at that time didn't think that way. They might have thought that way in the 30s and even in the 40s where there were a couple of bestsellers written by people in our country. But right after the war, during the 50s, a couple of things that happened. And one of them was that the paperback book industry had taken off. I think it started with a penguin in the UK and then it was pocketbooks and Canada didn't have, it had some nascent book publishers, but paperbacks were not included in them. So the glossy magazine market was also drying up. So writer-like Morley Callahan.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, well, how are you going to support yourself? I said, you know, I'll get a job, which I did. I got lots of jobs. And then my mother said, rather caustically, if you're going to be a writer, you better learn to spell. And I said, others will do that for me. And you know they have. Now we have spell check.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You didn't get away with it. Yeah, That's what was on offer, and being a mercenary child, I looked up what they made. Because I did grow up in a family in which it was expected. But then I decided no, this is not for me. I'm going to be a biologist. There's going to be a botanist because I was actually quite good at it. But then along came this writing, much to my parents' dismay, but being the bite your tongue kind of parents, I think they just hoped it would be a phase that would grow out of it.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the guidance textbook had five things that girls could do. And they did not include astrophysicist. Let's see if you can guess what they were in 1952.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was very interesting to me, and I had been trying out these potential careers like I was going to be a painter, and then I revised that. I was going to be a fashion designer, and then I revised that and I went into home economics because in the textbook that was called Guidance in grade nine, you were supposed to decide what your career was going to be. Can you imagine who knows anything when they're that old?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the Eureka moment, Tim. Yeah, a big thumb came out of the sky. You believe that? What else would you like me to tell you that you will also believe?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dress crossing the football field and a poem occurred to me. It wasn't a very good poem, but it was a poem. I was very excited about it. And this is how these things start. You write some pretty terrible poetry that you're very excited about. And luckily there's nobody there to tell you this is really terrible poetry. And then you go on from there.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Princess line, it had these panels and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great, loved it. It had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have. I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd gone into home economics instead of the secretarial sciences which I should have done had I known. I would have done that. And then I would know how to touch type, which I don't. And it's too late now, Tim. So there I was in my pink princess line.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I started writing poetry in grade 12. And the story I tell about that is that I was crossing the football field and a pink princess line dress that I had sewed myself, a work of art”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No matter what, no matter what she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings, and she made the immortal comment because I showed her one of my poems. She said, I don't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had no idea then that I was going to be a writer. Didn't strike me until the next year when I had a different English teacher who I've also put into a story because she was a legend in her own time. She took hold of the people in her class and she yanked them through the curriculum.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so my great English teacher who I put in a book, because she was a peculiar people go back and they do documentaries about you, right? And usually the teacher says, oh yes, I could see instantly great, brilliant Sean right out of her head and I can tell she was slated for greatness. But she told the truth. She said she showed no particular ability in my glass, which was true. I didn't show any particular ability in her glass.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a while, I was sort of normal size, but that's no longer true. There's all these enormous kids who drank a lot of milk with vitamins in it. Anyway, there I was in high school. I love my grade 11 teacher. That would be one, two, the third year of high school. What do you call that?”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's only when you get to the last part of the story that they actually have any legs. So I don't start books that way anymore, Tim. But I did then. So then I stopped writing. I took to drawing. I drew a lot. Then I ended up in high school. It's slightly too early an age. They skipped people then. I think they've stopped doing that. So I was 12 and some of the people in my class were almost 16 because they failed people then, Tim. So it was a slightly daunting experience.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Him because ants don't do anything until they're in the fourth stage of their life. They don't do anything when they're an egg. They don't do anything when they're a larva. They do nothing when they're a pupa.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's sort of true. Your previous question What did growing up in the woods have to do with being a writer? There wasn't anything to do except when it was raining except reading, writing, and drawing. So there were no other things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no television, no, what else can you think of? None of those things. So therefore, I fixated on writing pretty early. And it was a narrative family. People told stories. And my older brother was a gung-ho writer. He wrote lots of things at that age. He turned into a scientist, but he was very narrative when he was, say, ten, nine. Anyway, back to the football field. There I am, having written my first novel at the age of seven. It was about an aunt, some structural difficulties there.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writers make stuff up, Tim. You ask them questions that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway, so I'll tell you what I made up. But it's kind of true.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had running water, but it was out of a pump, and they didn't have electricity. The transportation was by boat, so railroads There. You could get to, I think, by 1939 there was this horrible road which I remember very well. You'd always get cars that going over it. And then you get to a place where you left the car and then you'd get in a boat. So then it was during the war, so there weren't even a lot of motorboats because gasoline was.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, she seems to have managed pretty well, although some of her city friends, because they were in cities during the winter. My dad was a forest entomologist, it meant he was up in the woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, you could take it as almost a hundred percent, they don't do much in the winter insects Pretty quiet insect wise in the winter. So they would go up and say April or so And they would go back in, for instance, November. But this is, I think, quite a lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods. Tim, I think you're thinking of a more southerly location.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any of that. He really didn't like it, didn't fancy it. She liked dancing like fast and furious waltzing and things like that, square dancing, but she didn't like the frilly part. And up in the woods was great for her because she said you didn't actually have to do much housework. You just swept the dirt out the door and you didn't have to worry about, you know, all of the stuff that people have in their houses usually like brickabrac and china and things like that. You don't have to worry about those. So she didn't. And she doesn't seem to have had a problem in the woods except my brother almost drowned once because he got out and fell off the dock. But apart from that and a few other somewhat hairy moments It's probably safer on the whole than being in a city.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I can tell you what Jay said. Yeah, he's kind of still here. So my mom was an unusual person in that she liked being outdoors most of the time. She was very athletic. She grew up in rural Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She loved horses. She had horses. She rode them hither and thither. And she was also a speed skater and, of course, a skier and this kind of thing. So I think she married my dad because he was a very bushy guy and he grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia, like really rural. So they were so rural that I don't think they got electricity until the late 50s. I was lucky enough to be able to see a 19th century farm operating pretty much the way it would have done. So I think she, who didn't like That little white gloves tea parties”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But unfortunately he died before we got there, so we ended up having a memorial service at Comic-Con for Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors in several fields, really. So read all of those things, John Wyndham, I was reading in the 50s. And I think what you read as a teenage person often goes on to influence what you were then writing when you're able to, you know, when you have these skills. So I think I had it in my mind for a while. I would like to write a 1984 only with women like that. So meanwhile, along comes Ursula K and a number of other people that I was following. So really it's partly what you're drawn to and partly what you have the skills to do. As I say, I can't do dragons.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“partly was but not much really so my copy of 1984 had this woman with an enormous cleavage in the foreground and the guy standing behind her looking down her front which does get in there a bit but that's not the general import of the book so I mainlined all of those books I read Ray Bradbury a lot you'll notice that I ended up writing in one of his obits I think for the Guardian I went to Comic-Con for the first time because we”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up in the fifties as a teenager and I read a lot of those things at that time. So I read nineteen eighty four just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically sleazy cover of the early 50s. They put classics into these, what shall we say about those covers? They made you think that you were buying a really trashy book. So I think a lot of people got enticed into reading War and Peace and things because they thought it was about ladies and negliges lying on bets.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I just cannot do them. So there are some things that you can do that you have the ability to do and other things that you may admire, but you cannot do. So dragons outside my range of capabilities in any way, or as a Luke Le Gwynne, is kind of sewed up dragons. She'd call it sort of the dragon franchise. Yeah, so Game of Thrones, the dragons are basically sort of like bazookas, but her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that are usually attributed to dragons. In the English tradition, but they are in the Chinese tradition, etc. We could go on about that, but we won't today. Now you wanted to know sort of what's behind it.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They might say that about an automobile that they bought. The seat belts don't work. I want you to fix them. You did that with things that you have bought, but things that you have received as a gift, you do not do that too. You do, however, have obligations towards gifts. You need to pass them on. You do not keep them. You need to either give somebody else a gift or pass on the gift that you have received in some way. So I do recommend it if you want to understand some of the odd ways of artists.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's in the world of commerce. Somebody who then reads your book on the other hand and loves it doesn't say, well, I didn't get 2295 worth out of this book. I mean, some people do, but usually they don't say that.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“to get to the other side where your thing, whatever it is, turns back into a gift in the hands of the recipient, say the ideal reader. So you write the book that's in the world of gift, it then gets turned into this thing with pages and everything, and it gets something called sold.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the gift, on the other hand, is very useful for people going into the arts because it differentiates quite clearly the world of commerce from the world of the arts, although if you're in the arts, you may get your inspiration as a gift, but at some point you have to go through the valley of the shadow of commerce and”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just going to let that float in the air. I like it. This is a business that you're in. You're in that side of the Hermes constellation.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hits a lot of them really good shot. It is Hermes who conducts these souls to the underworld. He's what we call a psychopomp, a conductor of souls to the underworld. So people in my configuration are very interested in plumbing. Sewer system underwear thieves, criminals, secrets, and anything that's buried.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, thieves' jokes, money, communications, travel. He's the opener and closer of doors, the garter of secrets, also the revealer of secrets, and the only one of the gods that can go down to the underworld and return from it. So he is the conductor of souls to the underworld. And as you'll recall, Tim, from the end of the Odyssey. Of course. When Odysseus shoots all these people.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it means not exactly. It means that. So just to go a little deeper into the astrology, the governing planet of Gemini Hermes. Okay, otherwise known as Mercury. And what is Hermes the god of”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It kind of doesn't matter whether I agree or not. It is what it is. I just throw it out there for you because you wanted an explanation as to why I'm always sticking my nose into things. And what keeps me going. So, what keeps me going is you never know. And the other thing that keeps me going is Don't open that door. Why not? I'm going to open the door.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About demonstrating that, and during the long cold Edmonton winter nights when nobody went out because it was very slippery and cold and people's car tires froze in squares. Jets of Bisma taught me astrology and palmistry. So I know those things. So if you want to do the astrology, we can go there, Tim.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, our hand gestures still mean things, but our hand gestures have changed over the years. Anyway, back into the Renaissance, they believed in astrology, and that's when the tarot cards arise. So if you were studying TS Eliot, you had to know something about the tarot because it turns up in the wasteland. So lucky me, I had somebody called Jetska Sibisma living below me when I was living in an apartment. And she was from Holland. And she was studying hieronymous Bosch, the painter. And it was her thesis back in 1969 that these funny little figures and hieronymous Bosch's weird paintings were not figments of his Freudian subconscious, but they were astrological symbols.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, you didn't. Yeah, so what do I know about astrology? Because a long, long time ago, I was an English literature. And I was a Victorianist. And one of the things that you had to know for the kind of English literature that I was in at that time, which began with Anglo-Saxon and ended with T.S. Elliot, was people's world views. And especially as you get into the Renaissance, that's what people believe. They believed in astrology. They believed in palmistry, which is connected, and therefore it was interesting to know about things because you could see, you could, for instance, look at a portrait, a Renaissance portrait, and look at the rings on the fingers. Because what fingers those rings were on meant something to the people looking at the picture. And the positions of the hands meant something, so like this. You see a lot of saints going like this. Let me see if I can show you. Yes.”
2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT