How Did I Miss This?

Well, apparently I missed this year’s Massey Lectures. Quite a change from last year, when I was even part of the broadcast, eh?

This may be in part because this year’s lecturer was Margaret Atwood, and I have a deep-seated and utterly irrational dislike of the woman. (I’m not saying that it’s irrational to dislike her, just that my particular dislike is not founded on any well-thought out rational response to anything–although my particular dislike does make me believe that it’s quite likely rational to react this way.)

However, the topic of the lecture threatens to be quite interesting:

Margaret Atwood delivers a surprising look at the topic of debt. In her wide-ranging, entertaining, and imaginative approach to the subject, Atwood proposes that debt is like air – something we take for granted until things go wrong. And then, while gasping for breath, we become very interested in it.

Payback is not about practical debt management or high finance. Rather, it is an investigation into the idea of debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies.

Margaret Atwood writes “These are not lectures about how to get out of debt; rather, they’re about the debtor/creditor twinship in the broadest sense – from human sacrifice to pawnshops to revenge. In this light, what we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.”

Yeah, I’m going to have to at least give that a try, and see if my interest in the topic can suppress my misatwoody for a while.

You can stream the lectures from the Ideas page dedicated to the Massey Lectures. I have the Ideas podcast in my “podcatcher”, so I can just go into the archives and pull out MP3s for car listening. If you weren’t already capturing the Ideas podcast, though, the MP3s aren’t available any more from CBC, so you’re stuck with the streaming versions. (I also hear that if you aren’t afraid to sail into those scary bays where the pirates are–wink, wink, nudge, nudge–that you might find the MP3s among the torrents of bits that populate such places.)