Writer’s Mail
July 17, 2005
“I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn’t know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn’t have loved her more.” – The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson
Notes from July, Week 3, 2015
Second and Fourth: No notes were sent so here’s a super over-dramatic review of what happened.
It was a hot and sultry Tuesday night. The kind of night you wouldn’t want to leave a dead body lying around to cook in the suffering heat. Several souls gathered at Barnes and Noble that night, a safe place as it would seem, to discuss various writings submitted throughout the week. Things started off well enough, each person respectfully listening to the first reader, patiently waiting their turn to ravage the group with their tasty treat of literature. Suddenly, the lights went dim and all was dark, including the outside. It was if God himself had flipped the switch off. A strong, powerful wind blew the doors open. Books and people flew through the air, smashing into anything in their path, but our fearless members in Second and Fourth weren’t having it. No unholy freak force of nature could prevent them from finishing their meeting. Everyone scrambled to grab pens and paper, laptops and tablets to read their work during this hell rising event, shouting over the screams and howls of flying patrons and 100 mph winds. Finally, when it was all over, the wind had stopped, and the light returned, Second and Fourth stood proud and vowed that no matter what evil gets thrown at them, they would always finish their meeting after the last person has read.
The End.
Other Odds and Ends
Amber had a baby it’s a boy.
Honors for Jeannie
From Jeannie Bergmann, second-and-fourth: “I’ve won the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award for the Long Poem for ‘100 Reasons to Have Sex with an Alien,’ which you can read at http://www.sfpoetry.com/contests/14contest.html (scroll down). I won the Rhysling for the Short Poem back in 2008, for ‘Eating Light.’
“And I just had this poem published: http://www.kaleidotrope.net/summer-2015/summer-palace-by-f-j-bergmann/ ”
Harper Lee’s new novel
“Fans of To Kill a Mockingbird are in for a shock: In Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, the beloved Atticus is a racist.”
That was the set-up NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday’s interview of book critic by Lynn Neary.
Said Corrigan, Atticus Finch, at the beginning of Go Set A Watchman, is the Atticus Finch we know from To Kill a Mockingbird.
“He’s wry, he’s wise, he’s absolutely unruffled by anything the 26-year-old Scout does. But as the novel progresses, and certainly in its central moment, which takes place at the courthouse once again, we see a different sort of Atticus. We see an Atticus who’s arguing for state’s rights. And this is in, you know, 1954, 1955. So the Civil Rights Movement is really taking hold across the South. He’s arguing against the NAACP. He’s talking about black people not being as a developed intellectually and emotionally as white people. He’s a much more disturbing character. He’s not the heroic character of To Kill a Mockingbird.
“At first, I thought that Atticus had something up his sleeve. At first, I thought that he was the Atticus of old and that he had some master plan to further integration by, you know, pretending to go along with the citizens council and find out what they were up to and then there would be another turn in the novel, and he would come out as the Atticus we know and love. This Atticus is not ahead of his time, however, and he’s arguing that integration should move at a much slower pace than what the Supreme Court in Brown v. the Board of Education has just decreed that it should move at.”
Corrigan calls the book a story of disillusionment, that Scout, now an adult, has to come to terms with her father’s beliefs, beliefs she really abhors.
“Yes, and by the end of the novel, Atticus, again in his wise, paternal, benevolent way, is saying to Scout, here called Jean Louise, you kind of had to kill me. And what he means by that – it’s a very Freudian kind of reference – you’ve got to slay the father in order to develop your own conscience. It’s not satisfying, though. It’s a messy book. I mean, honestly, it reads like a failed attempt at a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird.”
The reality is that Harper Lee wrote Go Set A Watchman first, then she wrote the book we know as To Kill a Mockingbird.
“Yes, the official story is that it (Go Set A Watchman)was the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and that Harper Lee’s editor at the time said, why don’t you flesh out the 1930s part? Why don’t you flesh out Scout’s childhood. That seems to be where the real interest is. Now, if I had just picked up Go Set A Watchman without hearing any of the back story, I would have thought this is a failed attempt at a sequel. It reads like it was written after. There’s constant references to the action of the earlier book. And it almost doesn’t make sense without having To Kill a Mockingbird in your head.”
Knowing how disappointed Corrigan was with the book, Neary put one last question to the reviewer: Do you think that Go Set A Watchman shouldn’t have been published?
Said Corrigan, “Here’s what I think. I think that people who love To Kill a Mockingbird – and we are legion – will be disappointed, that we will be as disillusioned as Scout is with Atticus. I do think, though, that there’s an interesting angle to this book, and that is how does a character like Scout, who’s, what, 6 to 9 years old in the original book, how does a female character like that grow up? She’s a tom-boy in the language of the time. She’s 26 years old here in the mid-’50s. The Civil Rights Movement is rocking this world. The second women’s movement hasn’t happened yet, and that’s what this Scout needs. She does not have a place within the traditional southern society. She’s just not that kind of feminine woman. And I feel like it’s almost like this Scout needs to fast forward to 2015 and then she’d be happy. She’d see available roles for women that simply didn’t exist in the mid-1950s.”
Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University.
Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times chief book critic, wrote an extensive review of Go Set A Watchman that is well worth you time to read. The newspaper published it on July 10. Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/review-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-gives-atticus-finch-a-dark-side.html?_r=0
And if you’d like to read the first chapter of the book, here’s a link to that: http://www.wsj.com/articles/harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-read-the-first-chapter-1436500861
Great bookstores
The Canadian Broadcasting Company recently posted photos on its website of 10 spectacular bookstores we should visit if we’re ever in the neighborhood. Here’s the link so you, too, can see them: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/06/10-of-the-worlds-most-stunning-bookstores.html
Great word
Courtesy of Word Spy Paul McFedreis:
Antilibrary
Meaning: (noun) A person’s collection of unread books.
Examples:
“I like the concept of the antilibrary, mostly because it justifies my habit of incessantly acquiring new books while lacking the time to read them all. There’s something very comforting about owning stacks of books – particularly non-fiction – and having them immediately on hand, should you want to know something about (say) Hitler, inequality, cats or economics.”
– Hazel Phillips, The Importance of the Antilibrary – Converting Unknown Unknowns Into Known Unknowns, Baldwin Boyle Group, January 12, 2015
“Never too many unread books for my #AntiLibrary. #RetailTherapy #Procrastination – at Barnes & Noble 86th Street…”
– Sean Cusack, Never too many…, Twitter, May 12, 2014
“I wasn’t asked, but here is a sample of my antilibrary…”
– My Antilibrary [Updated], Purpleslog, May 2, 2008
Earliest:
“[A] private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, Random House, April 17, 2007
Coming Soon…
July 21: Lisa McDougal (chapter 32, Tebow Family Secret), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapters 25, Coastie Girl), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Mo Bebow Reinhard (short story, “Life of a Job as Told in Fortune Cookies”), Bob Kralapp (short story, part 4, “Flamingo”), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 4-8, Killing Ham).
July 28:
August 4: Pat Edwards (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapters 25, Coastie Girl), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Millie Mader (chapter 64, part 2, Life on Hold), and Judith McNeil (short story, part 3, “Seriously”).
Look who’s editing Writers Mail . . .
This month, it’s Lisa McDougal.
Tuesdays with Story 
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