Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale is one of my favorite books ever. I've read it many, many times and I always find new things to love about it. I also taught it several times back when I was running undergrad English and writing classes in graduate school. I think it's an astonishing book, not just for its powerful, uncanny vision of the not-so-distant future, but also for the beautiful, poetic ways that Atwood uses language. Indeed, language—how it is used, how it changes, who get to use it, private versus public voices and vocabularies, and, to quote another great poetic work, "who lives, who dies, who tells your story"—is one of the main themes of the novel. Ugh, I just love this book. If you haven't read it, you really should, ESPECIALLY if you, like me, live in or around Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the book is set. Reading The Handmaid's Tale has been an even richer experience for me since moving to Cambridge. I can walk through Harvard Square and see glimpses of Atwood's Gilead superimposed upon the walls or ready to rise from beneath the surface of the streets, like the palimpsest that Atwood herself evokes on the first page of the novel.
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The Villain in Your History
In my best of 2015, part 1 post, I mentioned that one of my favorite albums of the year was the original Broadway cast recording of the musical Hamilton. I became obsessed with Hamilton pretty much as soon as I listened to it, and of course once I become obsessed with something, I want to write about it. I'm certainly not the only person who had this experience with Hamilton over the past few months, nor am I by any means the only person to write about it. This is the musical that has launched a thousand thinkpieces, appreciations, and glowing reviews. I have not actually seen the show yet (I HAVE TICKETS FOR MARCH, AAAAHHH!!!), but after many, many, many, many times through the cast album, I think I feel okay putting down a few ideas.
Read MoreThe Confessional Poetics of Taylor Swift, or: Does Too Much Knowledge Ruin Art?
I wanted to write up some quick notes about something that I've been thinking about a lot this past week. The topic came up in conversation with my friend Margaret in conjunction with an episode she recently recorded for my favorite podcast, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. (We had our conversation before the episode went live; I then listened to the episode and later we continued the conversation on Twitter.) On the episode in question (which is great, as all of that show is great), one of the topics discussed was credulity, mostly in terms of what elements of pop culture strain credulity for a person when they show up. As Margaret defined the term in this context, credulity is invoked when "some amount of knowledge you have about the subject at hand interferes with how you're capable of consuming the show or song or sporting event or anything...any time your real-world information is interfering with your ability to consume this artificial, constructed simulation."
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