In the New Yorker...

[Jeff Wrangler]

I read that last week online and thought it was really well done.

Yes, I did, too--thought it was well done, I mean. I thought he handled well both the novel itself and the suspicions about its provenance.

NYT columnist Joe Nocera today wrote something to the effect that there's no dissonance between the two Atticus Finchs, because both are fictional creations. I think it's more interesting than that. I assume the character is based at least in part on Harper Lee's own father, and her own feelings about him. And like you, I don't see anything astonishing about the idea that a lawyer could both respect law and justice and also be racist, especially in a small town in the 1930s South.

Gopnik says pretty much the same thing, or something similar, IIRC.

I've kind of wondered, too, whether some of those people who are so upset about the apparent "difference" in Atticus don't have their idea of Atticus influenced as much by Gregory Peck in the movie as by the book.  

I sort of had to laugh at Gopnik's comment about Mockingbird being on eighth grade curricula. I guess I'm just too old because it sure wasn't on my eighth grade curriculum! All I remember reading in eighth grade was Fail-Safe. My English teacher was a young hottie with curly brown hair named Jim Hontz--oh, never mind!  

Gopnik's essay also makes we want to know more about the Southern Agrarians. Obviously I recognized the name Robert Penn Warren, and I've heard of John Crowe Ransom, but I don't know anything about him.

Edit to Add:

Here's the Wikipedia article on John Crowe Ransom. The second paragraph under "Career" discusses the Southern Agrarians.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crowe_Ransom

And on the Southern Agrarians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Agrarians

[serious crayons]

I just read the Malcolm Gladwell 2009 article. It's prescient at describing exactly the kind of man Atticus Finch could easily be if you take both books into account. And Gladwell obviously hadn't seen both books. To be fair, his article is at least partly based on the work of scholars who hadn't, either.

I think this helps explain why I was so much more "meh" than most people when I finally got around to reading Mockingbird about 10 years ago (I liked it pretty well, just as I liked Gone Girl pretty well). By then, I had lived in the South and had seen firsthand that people could both be perfectly nice to black people and also be racists. I was somewhat more politically sophisticated than your average 8th grader and knew that racism could be nuanced without necessarily being self-contradictory -- there's a lot of space between civil-rights activist and raging white supremacist, and most small-town Southerners of the '30s probably stood somewhere within that spectrum.

I don't think I've ever seen more than a snippet or two of the movie. A lot of people who love TKaM seem to love the movie even more than the book.

It's interesting that it was such standard reading for Gopnik's 8th grade curriculum, given that he grew up in Canada (and I think still lived there then).

[Jeff Wrangler]

It's interesting that it was such standard reading for Gopnik's 8th grade curriculum, given that he grew up in Canada (and I think still lived there then).

Holy crap! According to Wikipedia, Adam Gopnik was born right here in Philadelphia. He's living in New York City now (I think I remember reading that in one of his New Yorker articles).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Gopnik

[Jeff Wrangler]

I read Jon Lee Anderson's July 20 piece on Cuba over lunch today. I wanna go to Havana.

[Front-Ranger]

I was so delighted to be browsing through the July 20 issue when I came upon a review of the latest translation of "The Tale of Genji" by Lady Murasaki, written in the 800s in Japan and set in the Heian Period. It is one of my favorite books, and I have owned a copy since my early 20s. I have read it several times even though it is about 1300 pages long. Murasaki is Japan's Proust, in my opinion. The article is called "The Sensualist".

[Jeff Wrangler]

Right after I read Gopnik on Go Set a Watchman, I turned to Jill Lepore's article, "Joe Gould's Teeth," because she is certainly one of my favorite writers. When I got to the part where she quoted someone quoting the tag line, "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" I laughed out loud (which, in context, perhaps wasn't very nice of me), because I knew what Flit was, and who was responsible for that line. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flit

[serious crayons]

I was so delighted to be browsing through the July 20 issue when I came upon a review of the latest translation of "The Tale of Genji" by Lady Murasaki, written in the 800s in Japan and set in the Heian Period. It is one of my favorite books, and I have owned a copy since my early 20s. I have read it several times even though it is about 1300 pages long. Murasaki is Japan's Proust, in my opinion. The article is called "The Sensualist".

Impressive! I'd be happy to get through France's Proust.

Or, for that matter, the 1,100 page Infinite Jest, by an American of my own time and in fact one of my favorite writers (his essays, anyway). My son read it. It took him three years -- the first 10 pages or so during the first two years, and the rest over a couple of months last summer.

The only 1,000+ page book I've ever read is Gone With the Wind. Though I guess Stephen King's The Stand is pretty long, and I've read that, but in the original edited and shorter version.

[serious crayons]

What's the world coming to? Here's the subject line from the daily digest the New Yorker emails me:

Today from The New Yorer‏

[Jeff Wrangler]

What's the world coming to? Here's the subject line from the daily digest the New Yorker emails me:

Today from The New Yorer‏

Oh, my God. 

Somewhere, Mr. Shawn and everybody back to Harold Ross weeps.

[serious crayons]

I should clarify (in case I wasn't already clear) that that's just from today's digest. Normally it's fine. But still! I get a handful of publications' digests -- from the Atlantic, New York, etc. -- and I've never seen one that wasn't typo-free. Somebody's probably in trouble tonight.