RinkWorks: Stupid Emails: The Handmaid's Tale

509. The Handmaid's Tale

To:  dave@rinkworks.com, sam@rinkworks.com
Subject:  Feedback On Handmaid's Tale, et al.
Date:  Jul 23, 2007, at 12:27:00

Dear Dave 'n' Sam,

Business first: not a flame, just a clarification to the closing
statement:

"A Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Condensed by David J. Parker

(There is a good speculative fiction story going until the END, which
is INANE and LITERARY, because it is ILLEGAL for a work of LITERATURE
to have CLOSURE.)"

I'm thinking you speed read this just a bit too fast, Dave.
Margarate Atwood is not a "closure" sort of gal, and she definitely
understands the principles of ambiguity (and subtle ambiguity, at
that).  The ending of the Handmaid's tale does not, in fact, allow
closure and is distressingly, clingingly disturbing (at least, I
found it so); one does not know whether the "ambulance" which takes
the narrator away is "real" (to disappear her) or is, in fact, a
"rescue" van of the "underground"...  When I think of the novel, I
still debate w/myself and find no answer; when I first read it, the
ending made me think of the disappeared of Chile after the 1973 US
backed coup...  That, my dears, is not "closure".

I once saw an interview of Atwood (on BookTV) in which she described
once teaching literature to engineering students in a quonset hut
classroom at 8:00 a. m.; she said, I taught them Kafka; I thought it
would be useful to them in their later lives and work. (I paraphrase
here, from memory).  And if you've ever known, been around or worked
w/engineers and appreciate Kafka (a man of true and lasting
ambiguity)you will appreciate just how funny was her observation...).

Please do reread the last couple pages, at least, and reconsider your
conclusion on this one. Though I fully subscribe to the general
principle that it is "illegal" to have "closure" in works of
"literature".  Indeed, I have always liked D. W. Winnicott's remark
that "literature gives us tools for living; poetry is for celebration
and the saying of right words by the grave...".  And life is
certainly ambiguous and rarely gives us closure, even when we--or
someone else--is dead.  Literature sometimes gives us poetic justice
and the taste of revenge, though, and that can be occasionally
pleasant.  (Gore Vidal made this hilarious observation in an essay on
Oscar Wilde (who, in the exact opposite of your own proposition,
maintains a single joke for the entire length of a play, in _The
Importance of Being Earnest_):  "Must one have a heart of stone to
read "The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing?  (In life,
practically no one gets to kill the thing he hates, much less
loves.)" <1>

Not to mention literature so often doing it's job of cataclysmically
shaking up our world and changing our lives; and, sometimes, keeping
us alive, in a dark hour or several.  (that's why prisons take
reading material from political and literary prisoners, and deny
paper and writing implements...)

[1]  Gore Vidal.  "Oscar Wilde: On the Skids Again", _Essays 1982 -
1988:  At Home_ (New York:  Random House) 1988: 204 - 11.  The entire
hilarious essay is well worth a read; I recommend it.

And getting all that in a minute, in our supposedly "fast-paced"
contemporary "lifestyle"--why, what's not to love?  ROTFLMAO--Better
even than, "...reading the book reviews like they was books." (And
faster, too!)

I find the entire site absolutely hilarious, in every category.
Equally hilarious is your "Read Before You Flame..." page.  That
really had me laughing, in the Dept of IF You Need it Explained...

YOU are BOOKMARKED!

How about branching out and adding a page for history in a minute?
(Very important, given that most schools no longer teach civics and
most history textbooks are "formulated" by a committee to please
their largest purchaser--TEXAS, fer cryin' out loud--which has some "issues"
with the facts of history, not to mention its interpretation.

And given our current adminstration and the constitutional crises
facing our ("leader of the free world") nation, every citizen can use
"history in a minute" as a resource to fill in those "gaps" left by
the lack of civics/history from kindergarten to post-grad school; it
would be an immeasurable contribution to the--nearly moribund--body
politic.  After all, as I'm wont to say, if I may quote myself to
random strangers, "It's all going to hell in a handbasket and the
last thing any of us can do is to see the humor in the situation."

This request (and your site) particularly resonates w/me, an
historian, because I recently wrote a rather time-consuming and
thoughtful REPLY to a QUERY posted to a listserv (working class
history) in answer to a request by a college teacher, regarding the
"experiences" of those forced to "work off" their welfare (this would
be desperately poor mothers, NOT, as you might imagine, middle-class
recipients of government-subsidized home mortgages, or multinational
corporate welfare recipients, like Halliburton or Exxon).  As New
York City (my current place of residence) has the largest welfare
load in the nation (we host the South Bronx, poorest neighborhood in
the nation) and lived through the nightmare of woman- and people of
color-hating Giuliani and, at present, woman-hating and people of
color-disinterested Bloomberg, as mayors, I am qualified to speak to
those educating future (I'm not sure whom doing what work, it was not
explicated) citizens/workers.

I sent it off and received a request by the listowner (it's a
moderated list) asking if I were "willing" to "condense" my reply
(causing me to think, "What is this, the Reader's Digest Condensed
Working Class History Listserv?", as she had apparently transferred
it into a Microsoft Word Document (quelle horreur!) and found it to
be (quelle, quelle horreur!!!) THREE single-spaced pages (as an
historian well-versed in Netiquette, I did NOT snippily ask her if
that was with the "default" left/right margins of 1.25 inches (preset
by nearly illiterate MS Word programmers to frustrate literate
editors) or "standard" document margins of one inch all round).
Worse, she did a "byte count" and advised me of the "average number
of bytes" v. "my byte count".  Apparently, three pages is far too
lengthy for contemporary historians to read.  She suggested that this
"condensation" (what am I, moisture in winter, dripping down the
window, fer cryin' out loud?!?) would provide me with the "widest number of
readers".

After banging my head on a brick wall to clear out the cobwebs and
gooey substance created by shock, I replied that I would NOT consider
"condensing" my reply as it had been carefully and concisely written,
and was info pertinent to anyone speaking, thinking or teaching the
subject which includes, presumably, more than solely the Person of
the Original Query, reading the referenced listserv.  In addition, I
pointed out that quality of text, NOT number bytes was, perhaps, a
preferred criteria of historical and informational content.  (WHAT
was I thinking?)  I suggested she post it as written and that, if
interested in the topic, list members would read it; if not
interested, that's what the delete key is for.  And I would note that
the listserv has no "maximum number of bytes" rule.  Unsurprisingly,
It was NOT posted to the list, as is.

Clearly, I've become, against my most desperate efforts, an Old Fogey
Historian, unable to "Keep It Short Enough" for the attention spans
of faculty, students and listserv readers of TODAY!!!

Your site, (URL sent by book dealer friend) just after this
unfortunate incident, has shown me the light of realization
(Hallelujah! Brothers...) that there IS a redemptive ANSWER for we
OLD FOGEY Historians--better even than Cliff's Notes for struggling
students, teachers and moderated list owners: the Minute History.

So, I hope you'll consider my suggestion and branch out from
literature to other fields, for the entertainment of us all.  You
could start by condensing Robert Caro's FOUR VOLUME (three published,
working on fourth, maybe there will be a fifth) bio of Lyndon B.
Johnson into a Book-a-Minute.  Two friends have repeatedly urged me
to embark on reading this multivolume bio, and I have yet to summon
the courage to start (having lived through his era). This would save
me a LOT of time, and I could tell my friends I'd read it... ;)

Then you could move on to the historically related three volume
Taylor Branch bio of MLK and the civil rights movement... Then,
wherever; maybe the Federalist Papers, the Civil War and more!

Wow, what a time saver, not only for historians, but for activists
(not to mention politicians), too!

Hell's Bells! Even George Bush could read your Book(s)-a-Minute and
stay focussed.

(Science would be swell, too. I can envision Darwin in a Minute...)

By way of thanks, I'm also sending you Beckett's Complete Lecture on
Symbolism (from a bio of him).  Apparently, he would spend long
periods staring out the window, would turn, state a sentence or two,
then turn back and stare out the window some more. This allowed
students to write down his complete lectures verbatim, w/o difficulty
or abbreviation.  It seems a bit longer than your Lit in a Min, so
perhaps you will take on the task of further condensing his lecture
so that it is both timely and palatable to current readers' attention
spans:

Complete Lecture on Symbolism by Samuel Beckett from _Samuel Beckett:
A Biography_ by Deirdre Bair:

Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire were the precursors of symbolism.
Baudelaire provided the text in "Correspondence."  Verlaine the
music. Rimbaud the dislocation of verse as affected by the
Symbolists.  Romanticism plus irony equals Symbolism.  LaForgue
invented composite words like "eternulite"."  He died at the age of
twenty-seven.  It was fashionable to die young, and to be
pessimistic.  Some hold him to be a poet without genius or spleen.
Others think him a worthy follower after Baudelaire.  He was
overshadowed by Rimbaud.  LaForgue hand no poetic development as he
grew older.  He is called a whiner by some.  There is recurrence of
motif in every one of his poems.  Reminiscences of Rimbaud in his
work.  A symbolist because he is concerned with evocation of Mood.

Thanks for the Laugh, I Needed It!
History Grrrl (and reader of literature)

From:  "Dave Parker" <bigdave928@gmail.com>
To:  sam@rinkworks.com
Subject:  Fwd: Feedback On Handmaid's Tale, et al.
Date:  Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:28:00

Man.  I have tried three times now to get through this freaking novel and I
just can't do it.  I want to reply with something like "Crazy broad.  Go
make me a sammich." or something equally un-PC just to push buttons, but I'm
not sure it's even worth the effort of trying to decipher her inevitable
25-page rebuttal.

-- Dave

Surely the novel is easier to get through than that email about it. I am, however, dying from anticipation as I await the chance to read Robert Caro's complete five volume bio of Lyndon B. Johnson, just so I can condense it on Book-A-Minute.