The best thing about Margaret is how she’s so amused by herself! I love her wit and straight forward meds and curly head of hair. Such a wonderful writer and one of my favorites ❤
I return to this video over and over again, each semester, when I teach O&C. This is 2022. Very useful novel for so many reasons and one which makes the students realize there is a real person behind those marvelous words and futuristic world view. Many of my students are not literature majors. This work of fiction attracts students from all fields.
I've been a bit Atwood fan for years. I first read Oryx and Crake many years ago and many times since then but never heard Margaret Atwood speak. To my delight, she's as peculiar, charming, shy, and frighteningly clever as I hoped she would be.
I recently finished Oryx n Crake, my first MA book. Wow, mind-blowingly brilliant!! I was a little apprehensive after reading reviews mentioning the nasty porn habits of the lads. However I so glad I read it. Made me feel so many emotions and really got me thinking about the state of the world we are in. It's terrifying as I could see our world ending up the same. I'm half way through the 2nd book in the trilogy now. Margaret Atwood, what an awesome author. Looking forward to reading the final MaddAddam book next.... Then discovering more of her work. Enjoyed this vid. Thanks
"I like to leave room for the reader to join in the invention." And that's why we read her so avidly. But she understates her genius in creating narratives that demand our "joining in."
I just read Atwood's outstanding story of an apocalyptic future for the second time. I realized a major logic flaw in the plot and character inconsistency. Crake's biggest desire was to replace humanity with Crakers. Plus, his best friend was Jimmy, and his love was Oryx. Oryx knew the Crakers best, and they thought of her like a God. Crake was absolutely logical. There is no logical world where he kills Oryx. The only explanation is Atwood's morbid inner thoughts that resonate through many of her stories. The real plot has Jimmy and Oryx happy together and taking care of the Crakers like their own children. And they all lived happily ever after. ❤
I started reading this book in 2018/19 (not really sure) and i thought i had lost it before actually finishing it. Fast forward to the begining of 2020 when i went though a deep clean in my room, found the book and finished. I was happy to finally finish the book, but boy I became a bit paranoid about covid and everything lmaoo
I wonder how consciously Atwood made Snowman's interior monologue on the technological etiology of toast Crake-deprived? Because Crake-a numbers guy-would have gone to the heart of the matter. Once upon a time, there was a hominid that was good at eating fruits, nuts, fish and game-and perhaps also a few mushrooms and and tender shoots and sun-dried tubers (for those still possessed of sturdy molars). And they looked around at all the things they _couldn't_ eat-wheat and stone and timber-and thought to themselves "wouldn't it be great if we could eat these too!" Only it turns out that it's not easy to eat stone. You have to gather up many heavy stones of uniform dimension, and then pile them just so, with as many small holes as possible in just the right places to inspire air in a voracious vortex, and then you have to hew trees, and hack the trees to bits with sharp flakes of obsidian (a stony vitamin O), and leave those bits exposed to the hot sun for weeks or months, and then pile those bits into giant piles inside the stone cavities just right, and then inject a little piece of lightening-imbued ember-so _very_ dangerous and difficult to gather and tend-and then put even more stones on top-extremely select stones usually from far away-and then finally the stones on top release a shiny liquid which in this form can be shaped into many things not ordinarily found in nature, and then hardened again into ductile stone, making cavities from which not even steam can escape except precisely where directed; these hermetic, thin-walled "metallic" cavities were called "boilers", and the steam generated required hewing yet more wood-or an alternative form of wood, a kind of wood-stone hybrid, mostly found deep underground, requiring the digging of extremely dangerous holes, using sharp-lipped flakes of "metal" affixed to shafts of wood-our war on the forests now having no boundary-these implements known as "shovels" (obsidian being too brittle for this job). Stream thus pressurized under metallic confinement becomes a kind of magic genie, able to perform hard physical labour you would never wish to do yourself, such as turning a giant flat stone weighing as much a ten or twenty people together round and round for all the daylight hours over top of a stationary surface of another hard flat stone. Into the gap between these stones, one fixed and one revolving, they put the wheat they wished eat. These crushing stones function as a giant pair of circular molars, with the chewing power of a million souls, only under dry conditions instead of wet, so that the wheat becomes a very find, dry powder-which these hominids _still_ can not eat. To this "flour" is added nearly as much water again and the sticky paste is poured onto hot stones-more burning of wood involved, yet again-and the heat of the stones acts like an exterior stomach, and breaks the paste down on a chemical level, as your stomach would do if you were an organism would could eat wheat in its natural state (as many other organisms can). And so you now have a soft and fluffy cake of wheat flour about the size of a human buttock, and it has been pre-chewed by the giant stones (set into constant motion by the genie steam), and it has been predigested as a wet paste applied to a very hot stone (but not so hot as to melt rock), and it is already perfectly fine to eat, and yet some _still_ do not think it has been predigested enough. The last stage of predigestion-mostly optional-is applied only to the surface of the giant "bun", but the bun has limited surface area in a bun-like shape, so another sharp edged flake of metal is affixed to a wood handle (this one termed a "knife") and the bun is sawed through again and again to create many parallel surfaces of uniform separation, each such shard now termed a "slice", having a the cross-section of a fat mushroom about as large as you can surround with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, together, and about as thick as an adult finger. These hominids could use fire again for this purpose, but along the way in this very long story, these hominids discovered an extremely clever way to make thin metallic wires glow on command that it would curl the skin off your hands into dry flakes reeking of char within moments of proximal contact; the briefest direct contact would render your limb disfigured and useless for the remains of your days, and yet no family of these hominids-of any means at all-failed to procure for itself this insanely dangerous "toasting" contraption in one form or another. This new form of motive steam that passes directly through metal wires these hominids called "electricity" and it's story is a _thousand_ times more intricate than the story I have so far told; it is yet another descendant of lightening from the sky, now captured more directly than merely by the flames it instigates in the forests, which were used to ignite the original "kilns", those arduous stone piles back from where this story began. These wires are so hot and dangerous they barely serve even for the toasting process unless tended with great precision, and thus a special contraption was invented to do this tending for us, and these hominids called it a "toaster". But this was a fiddly contraption, and often made a bad job of it, leading to toast of a black and inedible colour rather than brown and crisp and delicious. But the giant stones with the teeth of a million souls produce _so_ much wheat powder that every family possesses a near-endless reservoir close to hand, and it's a fairly quick process to discard the ruined slices and try again, shedding no tears over the fruitless outcome of so many thousand steps involved. Even when you get lucky and the toaster ejects the slices crisp and brown and delicious, they are _still_ not precisely edible in that form, lacking any other constituent but the tiniest portion of the wheat plant, especially the fat which these hominids were already _very_ good at digesting in its natural form, with hardly any of this fuss and bother. And the very best form of this fat was their own milk, but the many, many infants demanded much of this in its natural form, and there was no great excess to manipulate as these hominids had done to turn wheat into toast, but then these industrious and injudicious hominids discovered that with sufficiently cruelty they could confiscate the milk of large, dangerous bovines, at a scale you can scarcely imagine, once these hominids gained total control over their reproductive life-cycles. Only milk is far too wet to apply directly to toast without making the toast unappealingly soggy (to most palates) and so more churning and more heat and this time also chilling (which paradoxically can also be powered by fire, though this is another _very_ long story) until it makes a rich, flavourful yellow paste, supplemented by tasty salt, yet again produced by heating or mining on a vast scale. Toast is now soft and chewy on the inside, with a crisp and flavourful surface on the outside, impregnated by luscious, salty butter (as these hominids termed the yellow bovine paste) but this was _still_ not good enough, so these unsatisfiable hominids raided from the honeybees their winter stores of honey-rich with sugar-and slathered _this_ on, too. And this finally was as palatable as a fistful of nuts and berries, only now available every day of the year, without ever having to leave your shelter-where they now spent so much time recovering from all that frantic, insatiable industry-so that every shelter became palatial, each one costing the lives of another two-dozen trees, just for the bulk of the exterior frame and internal platforms. Toast is the story of the great triumph of hominid exodigestion, and yet at the same time being an extremely fragile confection, that goes from delectable to disgusting if the electric fire is neglected for barely as long as it takes to speak a long sentence. Had I started the toasting process at the beginning of this explanation-and then forgotten to rescue it from the electric fire in a timely manner-the toast would now be so far past disgusting if would have disincorporated into a sticky black powdery vapor that's horrific to smell and dangerous to inhale. Toast is thus a cautionary metaphor for the extremely rapid progression from delectable to disgusting to dangerously disincorporated dating all the way back to when mankind-as these ancient hominids were known-first dreamed of turning rocks into sustenance. The nut of this story is that once you begin to figure out how to arrange for the world around you to predigest your food-including many food substances you couldn't previously eat-your newfound digestive efficiency leaves you with much time and energy to contemplate pressing this initiative to ever greater extremes, at least until the trees run out, or the underground tree-surrogate's residue begins to imbue the whole of the Earth's atmosphere with a newfound heat propensity, turning the entire planet in a kind of giant toaster, implacably roasting the entire hominid species-and many other lifeforms, too-into disgusting, disfigured embers of their once natural glory.
Blue-hued children: My, that's a lot of guilt to lay at the foot of a crisp, nutritious wafer. Snowcrake: Oh, you have _no_ idea about guilt until that crisp, nutritious wafer is consumed with a side of fermented grape juice. Blue-hued children: What's "fermentation"? Snowcrake: More exodigestion, but this time exploiting not fire, but the whole of the microbial kingdom. Blue-hued children: Wow, these ancient hominids rarely missed a trick, did they? Snowcrake: Their collective inability to miss a trick was their primary calling card as a distinct primate species. Blue-hued children: And yet even with all these tricks, they somehow could not solve the volatile-cindered toast problem. Snowcrake: They might very well have got there eventually, had they not first turned into over-toasted toast themselves. Blue-hued children: Who knew Earth had the potential to itself become a giant toaster? Snowcrake: More or less the first person to take a really good look at Venus. Blue-hued children: The star in the morning sky? Snowcrake: Figuring out that it's not actually a star is but the first step. Blue-hued children: Tell us, just _how_ does one gaze upon Venus in a some superior way? Snowcrake: Well, it involves more- Blue-hued children: -let us guess, a _lot_ more fire and a _lot_ more rock? Snowcrake: Gracious, it seems that _you_ don't miss a trick, either. Blue-hued children: So you gaze upon Venus through some _other_ form of toast coaxed from rock and fire. Snowcrake: Supposing you regard sand as a form of rock, which it is, if you take a really good look. Blue-hued children: Your stories are beginning to seem ... vaguely _circular._ Snowcrake: Ah, but you don't have to first _know_ that sand is a form of rock before you melt it into a transparent liquid, which then hardens into a transparent solid, of any shape you wish to give it. Blue-hued children: And this _shape_ somehow matters a great deal? Snowcrake: Shaped like your own eyeball, it becomes exo-visual. Blue-hued children: Well _that_ finally makes sense; bulging eyes to furnish your gaping mouth. Snowcrake: Indeed it does. Blue-hued children: We're bored now. Cut to the chase here, where does this circular exon-fueled madness finally end? Snowcrake: _[suddenly shocked]_ Did you just say "Exxon"? Blue-hued children: Uh, slip of the tongue, this strange new lingo is not yet familiar to us. But never mind, we're bored now, where does this circular exo-fueled madness finally end? Snowcrake: Exon stage right.
Ms. Atwood, Would you concede that your book Oryx and Crake is a empowerment book to those women that are certainly not of breeding material? Thank you. Sincerely, R.W.N II
The best thing about Margaret is how she’s so amused by herself! I love her wit and straight forward meds and curly head of hair. Such a wonderful writer and one of my favorites ❤
I return to this video over and over again, each semester, when I teach O&C. This is 2022. Very useful novel for so many reasons and one which makes the students realize there is a real person behind those marvelous words and futuristic world view. Many of my students are not literature majors. This work of fiction attracts students from all fields.
5:53 The great Margaret Atwood starts talking at 5:53 thanks for uploading MIT
I've been a bit Atwood fan for years. I first read Oryx and Crake many years ago and many times since then but never heard Margaret Atwood speak. To my delight, she's as peculiar, charming, shy, and frighteningly clever as I hoped she would be.
You nailed the description; frighteningly clever. I FEEL THE SAME 😂
I've recommended this trilogy for years. We've been living through what Margaret Atwood envisioned in this speculative fiction. She's a gem 💎
Thank you for posting, excellent lecture
I recently finished Oryx n Crake, my first MA book. Wow, mind-blowingly brilliant!! I was a little apprehensive after reading reviews mentioning the nasty porn habits of the lads. However I so glad I read it. Made me feel so many emotions and really got me thinking about the state of the world we are in. It's terrifying as I could see our world ending up the same. I'm half way through the 2nd book in the trilogy now. Margaret Atwood, what an awesome author. Looking forward to reading the final MaddAddam book next.... Then discovering more of her work. Enjoyed this vid. Thanks
What is a MA book?
@@blablablahssorry I’m two years late but I think it just means Margaret Atwood
I like Margaret Atwood, she's super. I love the books of hers I've read so far; I really should get round to reading more of her work.
Many thanks for uploading this!
a legend
Kinda scary to watch - October 2023. Maggie hits the nail on the head.
I wonder what her thought process is when going to a school like MIT, considering how similar it is to her creation of Watson & Crick...
Someone shouldve asked her that question!
Ummm.... isn't it based on the Francis crick institute in London?
"I like to leave room for the reader to join in the invention." And that's why we read her so avidly. But she understates her genius in creating narratives that demand our "joining in."
I loved the introduction 😅
Hunter B same!
I wish I could meet her someday
I just read Atwood's outstanding story of an apocalyptic future for the second time.
I realized a major logic flaw in the plot and character inconsistency.
Crake's biggest desire was to replace humanity with Crakers.
Plus, his best friend was Jimmy, and his love was Oryx.
Oryx knew the Crakers best, and they thought of her like a God.
Crake was absolutely logical.
There is no logical world where he kills Oryx.
The only explanation is Atwood's morbid inner thoughts that resonate through many of her stories.
The real plot has Jimmy and Oryx happy together and taking care of the Crakers like their own children.
And they all lived happily ever after. ❤
Atwood is mother to me
36:00
This oryx and crake is not a joke to analyse,,,,,,
I started reading this book in 2018/19 (not really sure) and i thought i had lost it before actually finishing it. Fast forward to the begining of 2020 when i went though a deep clean in my room, found the book and finished. I was happy to finally finish the book, but boy I became a bit paranoid about covid and everything lmaoo
I wish I was a part of that audience
I wonder how consciously Atwood made Snowman's interior monologue on the technological etiology of toast Crake-deprived? Because Crake-a numbers guy-would have gone to the heart of the matter. Once upon a time, there was a hominid that was good at eating fruits, nuts, fish and game-and perhaps also a few mushrooms and and tender shoots and sun-dried tubers (for those still possessed of sturdy molars). And they looked around at all the things they _couldn't_ eat-wheat and stone and timber-and thought to themselves "wouldn't it be great if we could eat these too!"
Only it turns out that it's not easy to eat stone. You have to gather up many heavy stones of uniform dimension, and then pile them just so, with as many small holes as possible in just the right places to inspire air in a voracious vortex, and then you have to hew trees, and hack the trees to bits with sharp flakes of obsidian (a stony vitamin O), and leave those bits exposed to the hot sun for weeks or months, and then pile those bits into giant piles inside the stone cavities just right, and then inject a little piece of lightening-imbued ember-so _very_ dangerous and difficult to gather and tend-and then put even more stones on top-extremely select stones usually from far away-and then finally the stones on top release a shiny liquid which in this form can be shaped into many things not ordinarily found in nature, and then hardened again into ductile stone, making cavities from which not even steam can escape except precisely where directed; these hermetic, thin-walled "metallic" cavities were called "boilers", and the steam generated required hewing yet more wood-or an alternative form of wood, a kind of wood-stone hybrid, mostly found deep underground, requiring the digging of extremely dangerous holes, using sharp-lipped flakes of "metal" affixed to shafts of wood-our war on the forests now having no boundary-these implements known as "shovels" (obsidian being too brittle for this job).
Stream thus pressurized under metallic confinement becomes a kind of magic genie, able to perform hard physical labour you would never wish to do yourself, such as turning a giant flat stone weighing as much a ten or twenty people together round and round for all the daylight hours over top of a stationary surface of another hard flat stone. Into the gap between these stones, one fixed and one revolving, they put the wheat they wished eat. These crushing stones function as a giant pair of circular molars, with the chewing power of a million souls, only under dry conditions instead of wet, so that the wheat becomes a very find, dry powder-which these hominids _still_ can not eat.
To this "flour" is added nearly as much water again and the sticky paste is poured onto hot stones-more burning of wood involved, yet again-and the heat of the stones acts like an exterior stomach, and breaks the paste down on a chemical level, as your stomach would do if you were an organism would could eat wheat in its natural state (as many other organisms can). And so you now have a soft and fluffy cake of wheat flour about the size of a human buttock, and it has been pre-chewed by the giant stones (set into constant motion by the genie steam), and it has been predigested as a wet paste applied to a very hot stone (but not so hot as to melt rock), and it is already perfectly fine to eat, and yet some _still_ do not think it has been predigested enough.
The last stage of predigestion-mostly optional-is applied only to the surface of the giant "bun", but the bun has limited surface area in a bun-like shape, so another sharp edged flake of metal is affixed to a wood handle (this one termed a "knife") and the bun is sawed through again and again to create many parallel surfaces of uniform separation, each such shard now termed a "slice", having a the cross-section of a fat mushroom about as large as you can surround with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, together, and about as thick as an adult finger. These hominids could use fire again for this purpose, but along the way in this very long story, these hominids discovered an extremely clever way to make thin metallic wires glow on command that it would curl the skin off your hands into dry flakes reeking of char within moments of proximal contact; the briefest direct contact would render your limb disfigured and useless for the remains of your days, and yet no family of these hominids-of any means at all-failed to procure for itself this insanely dangerous "toasting" contraption in one form or another.
This new form of motive steam that passes directly through metal wires these hominids called "electricity" and it's story is a _thousand_ times more intricate than the story I have so far told; it is yet another descendant of lightening from the sky, now captured more directly than merely by the flames it instigates in the forests, which were used to ignite the original "kilns", those arduous stone piles back from where this story began. These wires are so hot and dangerous they barely serve even for the toasting process unless tended with great precision, and thus a special contraption was invented to do this tending for us, and these hominids called it a "toaster". But this was a fiddly contraption, and often made a bad job of it, leading to toast of a black and inedible colour rather than brown and crisp and delicious. But the giant stones with the teeth of a million souls produce _so_ much wheat powder that every family possesses a near-endless reservoir close to hand, and it's a fairly quick process to discard the ruined slices and try again, shedding no tears over the fruitless outcome of so many thousand steps involved.
Even when you get lucky and the toaster ejects the slices crisp and brown and delicious, they are _still_ not precisely edible in that form, lacking any other constituent but the tiniest portion of the wheat plant, especially the fat which these hominids were already _very_ good at digesting in its natural form, with hardly any of this fuss and bother. And the very best form of this fat was their own milk, but the many, many infants demanded much of this in its natural form, and there was no great excess to manipulate as these hominids had done to turn wheat into toast, but then these industrious and injudicious hominids discovered that with sufficiently cruelty they could confiscate the milk of large, dangerous bovines, at a scale you can scarcely imagine, once these hominids gained total control over their reproductive life-cycles. Only milk is far too wet to apply directly to toast without making the toast unappealingly soggy (to most palates) and so more churning and more heat and this time also chilling (which paradoxically can also be powered by fire, though this is another _very_ long story) until it makes a rich, flavourful yellow paste, supplemented by tasty salt, yet again produced by heating or mining on a vast scale.
Toast is now soft and chewy on the inside, with a crisp and flavourful surface on the outside, impregnated by luscious, salty butter (as these hominids termed the yellow bovine paste) but this was _still_ not good enough, so these unsatisfiable hominids raided from the honeybees their winter stores of honey-rich with sugar-and slathered _this_ on, too. And this finally was as palatable as a fistful of nuts and berries, only now available every day of the year, without ever having to leave your shelter-where they now spent so much time recovering from all that frantic, insatiable industry-so that every shelter became palatial, each one costing the lives of another two-dozen trees, just for the bulk of the exterior frame and internal platforms.
Toast is the story of the great triumph of hominid exodigestion, and yet at the same time being an extremely fragile confection, that goes from delectable to disgusting if the electric fire is neglected for barely as long as it takes to speak a long sentence. Had I started the toasting process at the beginning of this explanation-and then forgotten to rescue it from the electric fire in a timely manner-the toast would now be so far past disgusting if would have disincorporated into a sticky black powdery vapor that's horrific to smell and dangerous to inhale. Toast is thus a cautionary metaphor for the extremely rapid progression from delectable to disgusting to dangerously disincorporated dating all the way back to when mankind-as these ancient hominids were known-first dreamed of turning rocks into sustenance.
The nut of this story is that once you begin to figure out how to arrange for the world around you to predigest your food-including many food substances you couldn't previously eat-your newfound digestive efficiency leaves you with much time and energy to contemplate pressing this initiative to ever greater extremes, at least until the trees run out, or the underground tree-surrogate's residue begins to imbue the whole of the Earth's atmosphere with a newfound heat propensity, turning the entire planet in a kind of giant toaster, implacably roasting the entire hominid species-and many other lifeforms, too-into disgusting, disfigured embers of their once natural glory.
Blue-hued children: My, that's a lot of guilt to lay at the foot of a crisp, nutritious wafer.
Snowcrake: Oh, you have _no_ idea about guilt until that crisp, nutritious wafer is consumed with a side of fermented grape juice.
Blue-hued children: What's "fermentation"?
Snowcrake: More exodigestion, but this time exploiting not fire, but the whole of the microbial kingdom.
Blue-hued children: Wow, these ancient hominids rarely missed a trick, did they?
Snowcrake: Their collective inability to miss a trick was their primary calling card as a distinct primate species.
Blue-hued children: And yet even with all these tricks, they somehow could not solve the volatile-cindered toast problem.
Snowcrake: They might very well have got there eventually, had they not first turned into over-toasted toast themselves.
Blue-hued children: Who knew Earth had the potential to itself become a giant toaster?
Snowcrake: More or less the first person to take a really good look at Venus.
Blue-hued children: The star in the morning sky?
Snowcrake: Figuring out that it's not actually a star is but the first step.
Blue-hued children: Tell us, just _how_ does one gaze upon Venus in a some superior way?
Snowcrake: Well, it involves more-
Blue-hued children: -let us guess, a _lot_ more fire and a _lot_ more rock?
Snowcrake: Gracious, it seems that _you_ don't miss a trick, either.
Blue-hued children: So you gaze upon Venus through some _other_ form of toast coaxed from rock and fire.
Snowcrake: Supposing you regard sand as a form of rock, which it is, if you take a really good look.
Blue-hued children: Your stories are beginning to seem ... vaguely _circular._
Snowcrake: Ah, but you don't have to first _know_ that sand is a form of rock before you melt it into a transparent liquid, which then hardens into a transparent solid, of any shape you wish to give it.
Blue-hued children: And this _shape_ somehow matters a great deal?
Snowcrake: Shaped like your own eyeball, it becomes exo-visual.
Blue-hued children: Well _that_ finally makes sense; bulging eyes to furnish your gaping mouth.
Snowcrake: Indeed it does.
Blue-hued children: We're bored now. Cut to the chase here, where does this circular exon-fueled madness finally end?
Snowcrake: _[suddenly shocked]_ Did you just say "Exxon"?
Blue-hued children: Uh, slip of the tongue, this strange new lingo is not yet familiar to us. But never mind, we're bored now, where does this circular exo-fueled madness finally end?
Snowcrake: Exon stage right.
bread is no more complicated than chocolate. A huge amount of processing is required to turn a bean into a chocolate bar
Ms. Atwood,
Would you concede that your book Oryx and Crake is a empowerment book to those women that are certainly not of breeding material?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
R.W.N II