don't act like you forgot
Jul. 11th, 2015 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotessetwo things make a post:
-I'm starting a first watch of Lois & Clark; i hear it gives good het, and Dean Cain is a toothsome fucking morsel. 20 minutes into the first ep and I'm (mostly) hooked: the 90s gender stuff is egregious, but the Due South-y/Quantum Leap-y sugar and social responsibility vibe is v. nice. And also damn the old lady reciting Chekhov in the condemned theatre is giving me all kinds of feelings about my own grandmother and maybe choking me up a little.
-Apparently the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman this week is actually going to be really exciting? Because according to early reviews, it's a much more ambivalent and complex take on things than Mockingbird ended up being; Atticus Finch goes to Klan meetings, everything's complicated and disappointing, and Jean Louise Finch is in her twenties, starting to feel alienated from her home/family/childhood/culture.
I am so fucking fascinated by what this is revealing about Lee's artistic trajectory. And I feel like it's giving me Mockingbird back, in a way - I'd been falling out of love with it, precisely because it takes such a gentle/naive approach to race, and because it gives white people too much space to pat themselves on the back. It's telling, that so many people are flipping about Atticus not being a Perfect White Savior. But, because he's not, man - I'm super interested again.
GSaW seems to indicate that Lee set out to write an ambivalent thing and then deliberately walked herself back into the innocence of her childhood perspective; and that strikes me as really weird and really really interesting, man. To re-assemble your own fantasy of your Good Father, when you'd already written the book of your confrontation with his failure and mere humanity. I think I always assumed she started with the childhood stuff first, that the drive of the book was to tell a childhood story, but that doesn't seem to be all or even most of it.
(there's going to be so much scholarship. like, easily a decade of publications. a big first wave in a year or so. I can't wait.)
-I'm starting a first watch of Lois & Clark; i hear it gives good het, and Dean Cain is a toothsome fucking morsel. 20 minutes into the first ep and I'm (mostly) hooked: the 90s gender stuff is egregious, but the Due South-y/Quantum Leap-y sugar and social responsibility vibe is v. nice. And also damn the old lady reciting Chekhov in the condemned theatre is giving me all kinds of feelings about my own grandmother and maybe choking me up a little.
-Apparently the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman this week is actually going to be really exciting? Because according to early reviews, it's a much more ambivalent and complex take on things than Mockingbird ended up being; Atticus Finch goes to Klan meetings, everything's complicated and disappointing, and Jean Louise Finch is in her twenties, starting to feel alienated from her home/family/childhood/culture.
I am so fucking fascinated by what this is revealing about Lee's artistic trajectory. And I feel like it's giving me Mockingbird back, in a way - I'd been falling out of love with it, precisely because it takes such a gentle/naive approach to race, and because it gives white people too much space to pat themselves on the back. It's telling, that so many people are flipping about Atticus not being a Perfect White Savior. But, because he's not, man - I'm super interested again.
GSaW seems to indicate that Lee set out to write an ambivalent thing and then deliberately walked herself back into the innocence of her childhood perspective; and that strikes me as really weird and really really interesting, man. To re-assemble your own fantasy of your Good Father, when you'd already written the book of your confrontation with his failure and mere humanity. I think I always assumed she started with the childhood stuff first, that the drive of the book was to tell a childhood story, but that doesn't seem to be all or even most of it.
(there's going to be so much scholarship. like, easily a decade of publications. a big first wave in a year or so. I can't wait.)
no subject
Date: 2015-07-12 04:18 am (UTC)