happy birthday chibi-r|2nd gig|a handmaid’s tale

last sunday was chibi-r‘s birthday – happy birthday r!

shenanigans included bowling, pictochatting (with ds x 3) eating food, and eating sugar. it’s important to separate the sugar because there was a mighty lot of it.

bowling was great. totally random. i don’t think any of us bar chibi-r because he’s been a few times before, knew what the knack was! we didn’t know what actions affected what changes on the outcome of our bowl… it was great! funny that what is supposed to be a competitive sport ended up being co-operative – we barely paid attention to the score and cheered like mad whenever anyone got a strike – fantastic! bowling certainly isn’t a sport i’d ever try and take seriously, but with a bunch of friends who aren’t competitive, it’s great fun!

ghost in the shell: stand alone complex – 2nd gig is simply mind-blowing. i’ve just finished the first ten episodes, and i am totally in awe. if you thought the laughing-man story arc was complex, this goes far beyond. i won’t say it’s better, because all 52 episodes in total are part of one whole story arc. by the same token that laughing-man develops into a deeper story, so the first series develops into 2nd gig. more politics, more psychological challenges, more dialogue! as chibi-r will attest, we find a deeper meaning than the laughing-man story arc in the first series, and though i haven’t encountered what i think to be a similar element in 2nd gig, i feel it is developing – and like all good anime, the true meaning will be revealed once the complete picture is revealed.

as for a handmaid’s tale – margaret atwood…
well…
i won’t say it was bad.
…
no i won’t say it was bad.
in all honesty i can see how people may find this a good book. it is a good book, it is well written… sort-of – haha – no look, it just wasn’t to my tastes. i’ve encountered all of these ideas before. it just didn’t wow me at all, nor did i find it exploratory or deep. i found her form to be different, yes, but stale in comparison to what my tastes are. i found the work quite immature, and at times inconsistent. i understand the narrator is supposed to be reciting things in a non-chronological order, and at random moods, but i found her chosen forms of communication deviated too much from the form outlayed in the first third of the book – which all in all, was quite repetative anyway.

i thought she spent too much time revisiting the premise – too much reference to the ‘time before’. also it all happened within less than one generation. humanity simply does not regress that quickly. in-fact cultural upheaval is always quite gradual. we just don’t revert to blatantly uncivilised behaviour like that. yes – i can understand that you need a sense of imagination and separation from reality when reading fiction, but if that was the case then the premise and the constant reminder of that premise was totally unnecessary. i’m too accustomed to abstract works like those of yoshitoshi ABe, and even william gibson’s novels, that don’t explain everything out for you, they just throw you immediately into the events that are occurring in whatever context you can make of it. i like that. i found that handmaid’s tale spent 90% of the time explaining the premise for everything, and %10 actually making a point, which really is getting tired.

also didn’t find it to be a brilliant futurist-feminist work at all. i don’t think it was even strong enough to be classed as post-feminist. i’ve read plenty of material, seen a lot of static and animated art that convey a much more powerful, more meaningful, and more complex feminist represtation than handmaid’s tale. perhaps it was because it was trying to be so blunt. there was no subtlety to it at all. sherri s tepper is the first author that comes to mind that far surpasses (for me) what was achieved in handmaid’s tale.

last comment is that i didn’t love or hate any of the characters. no sense of empathy or distaste for any of them. i don’t mind narration that portrays a horrible main character whom the reader doesn’t like at all, but if i didn’t like Offred, it was because she was so mediocre – or perhaps her story was. perhaps i’ve just encountered social oppression communicated better than this book, so everything was dulled. in reference to my earlier comments, i’ll still say it’s a good book. different at least, to the material i suppose most people read. and if you haven’t encountered much material commentating heavily on sociology and culture, it’s a fantastic exploration.

ok – last last comment – all the premise justification etc. was made worse by the mock-historical account at the end (don’t worry, no spoilers) – this is very amerikan, this further explaining of things. as abstract as this book is supposed to be, i found it closer to popular north-american narration and storytelling than to the more subtle abstract form. my comments about not liking/disliking Offred may be interpretted as my misunderstanding of the form – the stylised way in which atwood communicates everything – but for anyone who’s read gibson’s works, especially the virtual light series, moreso pattern recognition, these works abound in supposed clinical or detached descriptions of events and ideas. gibson’s form though is artful, and very very subtle. it’s like elite anime where the meaning is deeper than the subject matter – and i just didn’t find that with handmaid’s tale.

anyway – i’m not saying no-one should like it. for the third time, it’s a great book. i just didn’t like it is all.

______________________________

Commentary
May 29, 2010

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this in commentary before, but I used to write with far too much excitement. Thank god I’ve curbed my enthusiasm since then.

Regarding A Handmaid’s Tale, I think it suffers more greatly from something I tend to find with most literature in general. As a minimalist I tire of too much exposition quickly. Either that or I have far too active an imagination to allow myself to be locked into an author’s setting and presentation of events. My own writing is extremely minimalist and it’s how I prefer to read and write; for me there are actually so many things that are unimportant to a creative translation, I only ever include the most important things. I feel like traditional writing is weighed down so much in unimportant, forgettable excess that is often unnecessary, it’s just laborious to work through and in the end spends too much time setting up what is essentially a very simple thing. Maybe normal people need all of that crap – I still love being an elitist; haven’t lost it at all.