Harper Lee

Scout in the City

jezebel and random conspiracy theorists on twitter are not enough to convince me that this isn't a legitimate and authorized publication. there are lots of reasons a person of her age, maybe in failing health, might want to do this.

there are very few reasons to believe the MS is even legit, and approximately none to believe that it's being issued with Lee's awareness and approval.

Given the both the track record of belatedly released lost books or sequels (Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, etc.) as well as the aggressive wrangling over Lee's rights/estate, I am suspicious. Also not sure, per Heller's "Closing Time," that I want a sequel to such a beloved, perfect book.

well this thread got depressing fast

God knows Mockingbird kicks the ass of a lot of other Required Reading of my HS years (A Separate Peace, anyone?) but c'mon, it's just a particularly memorable white-savior tale.

the movie's a lot better than it should have been.

that's 80% due to Mulligan's direction of the child performances, i think.

it's just a particularly memorable white-savior tale

It's also beautifully written, which puts it ahead of most books, period, white-savior tale or no. And frankly, I don't think it's fair to taint its reputation with the countless white-savior tales that have followed in its wake.

it's probably the only required reading that everybody i know remembers fondly, so it must have done something right.

that's 80% due to Mulligan's direction of the child performances, i think.

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, February 4, 2015 11:19 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that and his customarily subtle subjective camera. i like the book a lot, but it's precisely the kind of book that was more likely to get the white-gloves stanley kramer treatment. we're lucky mulligan and pakula optioned it.

the movie's a lot better than it should have been.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, February 4, 2015 5:06 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've only seen the movie once, in sections, while at school and didn't enjoy it - found it stuffy and really jarring compared to my interpretation of the book, particularly the father/children relationship. May give it another go, though.

it's worth seeing again, esp. if you have a little more distance from the book.

About 16 or 17 years should do the trick!

http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/02/friends_say_harper_lee_was_man.html

worst url yet

It seems pretty incredibly shady?

http://the-toast.net/2015/02/04/questions-harper-lee-editor-interview/

Harper Lee — we call her Nelle

What do you mean "we," white man?

She’s getting progressively deafer and more blind

she’s very deaf and going blind

Yeah, tell me about, things seem to be progressing very quickly from "deafer" to "very deaf."

If they knew what was right they would put this manuscript under glass in a museum somewhere and let people look at it but never read it.

you guys know Dill was Truman Capote, right?

And isn't Harper Lee also in Other Voices, Other Rooms?

isn't there a crazy (sexist) rumor that Capote actually wrote To Kill a Mockinbird?

yes, but i prefer the rumor that lee actually wrote "in cold blood."

it's a pretty persistent rumor.

has anyone done that statistical prose analysis on the book. obviously that sort of thing is far from definitive, since even if some dominant similarities were to be found, lee could have been influenced by capote... or if few similarities could be found, capote could have been consciously trying to write in a different style. but it'd be interesting, perhaps.

xpost

I've only seen the movie once, in sections, while at school and didn't enjoy it

^^ for me too, though it may also have been the old VHS tape which meant Scout's high-pitched voice was blurred into incomprehensibility that didn't help

Once, in sections, at school, on VHS seems like the worst way to watch anything.

Add in teachers unable to work out how to switch TVs onto the VCR-in channel, so each segment was preceded by 10 minutes of loud white noise and snow

all movies are unsalvageable at school, most books too tbh

(so jd otm that tkam has something going for it)

I've never read To Kill the Mockingbird.

all movies are unsalvageable at school, most books too tbh

What about the Romeo buttocks movie?

had forgotten about olivia. powerful point.

We had to fast forward through a breastfeeding scene in "Clash of the Titans," iirc.

we had a cardboard box held over the screen during a sex scene in the fishburne othello. (irene jacob!) smothering's fine tho obv.

can't remember what we did and didn't watch during the 400 class periods we spent on apocalypse now but even if we saw every second of the redux bunnies i still want my life back

wtf crazy schools are these where you watch ray harryhausen movies and apocalypse now

we were doing conrad, see

we didn't see clash of the titans :( BUT we did see jason+the argonauts, in the same ancient greece unit where we also watched spartacus because the teacher thought it was about the spartans. (in his defense he was a substitute and this was a summer makeup class i had to take cuz i failed freshman history.)

in fairness i did have a science class where we watched day of the triffids, earthquake, soylent green, and star trek IV

i think my teacher had a pretty good defense for the scientific relevance of all of them except the last one

our school opted for a new & exciting "local author" program the year we were supposed to read To Kill A Mockingbird

>:(

assumed last one was marine biology unit xp

Time travel unit, probably.

wtf crazy schools are these where you watch ray harryhausen movies and apocalypse now

We watched Threads, which was pretty soul-destroying

We watched Goodbye Lenin in French class for some weird reason.

french class was a cool grab bag because basically anything went as long as it had been dubbed into french

like kissing?

totally played footsie during la petite sirene

in my driver's ed class we were shown the car crash parts of FACES OF DEATH

uhh...

"Ms. Lee — known to many as Nelle, her legal first name — had a stroke in 2007 and has severe hearing and vision problems. But friends who visit her regularly say she can communicate well and hold lengthy conversations if visitors yell in her ear or write questions down for her to read under a special machine. (A black marker is kept in her room for this purpose.)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/arts/artsspecial/harper-lees-ability-to-consent-to-new-book-continues-to-be-questioned.html?_r=0

the whole thing is depressing

yeah, even if she turns out to be somewhat "coherent" (as they say) i highly doubt she would have OK'd the release of this book without some undue pressure from people who stand to make $$ from it. sad.

that reporter's Harper Lee biography painted a picture of someone who wouldn't do something like this. And she seemed pretty leery of the entire publishing industry in that book, too.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/13/living/feat-harper-lee-kill-a-mockingbird-elder-abuse/index.html

that settles that?

had to LOL at this in the times story:

The writer Marja Mills, who lived next to the Lee sisters in Monroeville for about 18 months beginning in the fall of 2004 and wrote a book about the experience, “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee,”

it gets the point across i suppose but jesus what a witless title

To Kill an Albatross? The 800 Pound Mockingbird? The Mockingbird in the Room? Mockingbird is the Word?

Bird Up?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/books/harper-lee-go-set-a-watchman-may-have-been-found-earlier-than-thought.html

plot thickens, again

whole situ is v weird & confusing (at least to me)

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/review-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-gives-atticus-finch-a-dark-side.html?_r=0

Wtf

Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

Apparently this is more of an early draft of Mockingbird than a sequel. This Atticus is like a prototype. Very weird it's being published

Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion. How could the saintly Atticus — described early in the book in much the same terms as he is in “Mockingbird” — suddenly emerge as a bigot? Suggestions about changing times and the polarizing effects of the civil rights movement seem insufficient when it comes to explaining such a radical change, and the reader, like Scout, cannot help feeling baffled and distressed.

closest to in i've been yet

two friends in college used to call me Patticus Finch

i feel ambivalent about this now

Apparently this is more of an early draft of Mockingbird than a sequel. This Atticus is like a prototype. Very weird it's being published

welcome to February 2015

http://i.imgur.com/Fej5kQd.jpg

My wife read that Laura Ingalls Wilder "Pioneer Girl" book, which is essentially an early draft of what became "Little House on the Prairie," and she found it very rewarding. They probably should have done something like that here. Rather than release it with any fanfare just snuck it out as an early draft of "Mockingbird." Also, they should have waited for Lee to be dead.

Good essay:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/sweet-home-alabama

(Lee's) Southernness, however much it is now the material of cliché, is still the most pleasing thing about the book—the kind of easy, Agee and McCullers Southernness (as against Tennessee Williams’s more Gothic version) that was as much a part of the postwar American novel as Jewishness, of which it was the alternative construction. Jews (in Bellow, Malamud, early Roth) were urban, worried, and compellingly neurotic; Southerners (in Capote, McCullers, Harper Lee) were rural, carefree, and absolutely crazy. As always with such things, neither construction makes sense unless you see the missing central panel that both are reacting to: the Wasp ascendancy, only just about to be called so—that average American whiteness from which Southern drinking and Jewish schmalz alike could seem welcome refuges.

RIP

never read the new one but it's hard to overstate the impact that mockingbird had on american culture

wait really?

aw man :(

RIP

:(

rip harper

what a fiasco with go set a watchman. such a blemish, horrible to see her be taken advantage of like that

my son's 7th grade English class just did a whole multi-week segment on To Kill A Mockingbird and connections to the civil rights movement.