Finished Writing With Intent

 Just finished reading Margaret Atwood's Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983-2005 (2005). I remain impressed with Atwood - she is more than The Handmaid's Tale - but now I see she has a smart aleck streak to her. 

Atwood confirms what I felt about the Canadians since I first read Robertson Davies (who gets a mention in this collection): there are correspondences between Ontario and Indiana. I'm thinking there is a similar Scots-Irish-Protestant culture in both areas as well as an uncertain relationship with the culture of New York City. The differences probably accrue more to the Canadian side.

Atwood mentions one Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in her review of "The Birth of the World and Other Stories, by Ursula K. LeGuin" at page 245: 

In brilliant hands, however, the form can be brilliant, witness the virtuoso use of sci-trash material in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five...

It is easy to like opinions that gibe with one's own such as that The Night of the Hunter is a great movie or that Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues is worth reading. A bit harder is getting me interested in books and writers I have never heard of such as these:

• Italo Calvino's Different Lives
• Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God
• Antonia Fraser's The Warrior Queens
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth
• Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats
• Hilary Mantel's An Experiment in Love
• Mordecai Richter
• Hjalmar Soderberg"s Glas
• Alice McDermott's Child of My Heart
• Morley Callaghan
• Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition
• H.G. Well's Island of Dr. Moreau

I also learned that Carol Shield's who wrote The Stone Diaries died in 2004. Just putting this in to note how ignorant are who are imprisoned. [Ms. Shields had an Indiana connection:

Carol chose Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana. Since its founding in 1827, Hanover College's purpose has been to provide a liberal arts education. The setting is idyllic — 650 acres overlooking the Ohio River.

Added 6/14/21]

The limit of  Ms. Atwood's talents? She cannot being me to read Anne of Green Gables.

General opinion: short pieces full of good writing, an engaging personality coming through the writing pulling one into the writer's enthusiasms make for a enjoyable hours expanding one's mind.

I'm off ot finish Jack London's The Iron Heel. I want to get back to my own reading and also get through my reading list.  Time for finding out if there is any quality in what is fermenting. Except I also need to do my laundry and get to commissary - some sabbatical, eh? And we have outside inspectors. So hectic afternoon... only writing will be this note.

2/13/20