Harper Lee

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.