RIP: Lee-Eco

It's a grim two months of reaping and, given that a particular generation must grow old and die, more in store this year.

Harper Lee, Umberto Eco, RIP.

These two bookended my teen years, with To Kill A Mockingbird at the beginning of it and The Name of the Rose at the end. In between, all the space their individual books provided to seek out and delight in the extraordinary: a particular voice or way of being in the world, a dimly grasped idea that a murder mystery was just an excuse for a lot of complicated things. And somewhere, the feeling that though reading these authors and others like them set me irrevocably apart from the rest of my peers, I didn't mind it much at all.

And whatever retrospective adjustments I may have made to how I think about these two writers, with their passing they take away one part of my teenage self. 

(I also find myself anxiously watching for news of Godard and Herzog.) 

the vampiric old south

I am fifty pages from the end of Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman and - not being in the best of moods this month - I cannot bring myself to finish it. I read five pages or a section, want to fling the book across the room and then I just stop reading instead of whipping myself into a frenzy.

Yes, it's that bad.

Alternatively, I want to do a Vanessa Place-lite* and cherrypick the egregious bits and blog or tweet them, one hot mess at a time. I mean, there's an art project in there, right? One that will get me attention and a place on some important jury?

I may write about it but I doubt it. There's nothing others haven't said before and I don't really have anything to add except maybe notice in public that it's the money the book was always going to make that made this a "good" idea, in a year such as 2015 has been.

You should go listen to Prince's Baltimore instead as antidote.

Oh, also - I happened to turn the TV on and watched to the grim and bitter end the ridiculousness that is Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill. I mean, it has a star cast but what are you going to do about the cliches, the white saviourness and the background score? Just how clueless are these guys?

I'm done ranting. I have a column to write and friends to meet and cats to feed. Oh yes, I must do a post about them. 

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* I'm making the Gone with the Wind comparison deliberately, seeing as how much the grown-up Scout, or Jean Louise as she is now known, shares with the honourable Ashley Wilkes, going all Götterdämmerung on Maycomb county.