"To Kill a Mockingbird": A new book and documentary

Mary Murphy

Verb.org is a sponsor of Decatur Docs, a new series of indy documentaries being shown in downtown Decatur, GA. Tonight (Saturday January 22) the group presents the Southeastern premiere of Mary Murphy's new film Hey Boo: Harper Lee & '"To Kill A Mockingbird."

Mary Badham, who played Scout in Robert Mulligan's 1962 film adaptation of the novel, is scheduled to appear.

Murphy did not interview the reclusive author, now 84, who gave her last interview in 1964 and lives quietly in Monroeville, Alabama. “She has in the past written ‘hell no’ on the tops of letters from reporters,” Murphy said recently in the online Access Atlanta site. “I felt fortunate her agent even agreed to meet with me. I did not expect to talk to her.” The film does include talks with Lee’s sister Alice and her New York friends Joy and Michael Brown, who on Christmas 1956 gave Lee money to take a year off from her job as an airline reservations clerk. Lee used the money to work on the novel.

Lynn Peisner of Access Atlanta calls the documentary "an enlightened love letter." As the Verb site puts it, "In the popular mind, there are two giants of Southern Writing: Mockingbird, and that trashy thing whats-her-name wrote over on Peachtree Street." An hour before tonight's 8 p.m. screening at Decatur High School's Performing Arts Center, Murphy will be signing copies of the documentary's companion book Scout, Atticus and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill A Mockingbird, recently published by HarperCollins.

Reynolds Price (1933-2011)

Reynolds Price (1933-2011)

"Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation — potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world."

(The Paris Review, 1993)

Wilfrid Sheed (1930-2011): good-bye to the good word

"Suicide is the sincerest form of criticism life gets."

(Wilfrid Sheed, The Good Word, 1978)

It's funny how the words of some writers just stay locked inside your head. Much of that may have something to do with wit or style or language. I have a friend who can recite the first three pages of A Clockwork Orange; another parts of Major Major's ramblings from Catch-22, and a third who knows a pretty hefty chunk of Slaughterhouse Five. All three writers were masters of the shadow-play between word and meaning.

But reviewers and critics? Their words seldom reach that same level. This seems only fair since most reviewers are interested in telling readers in their estimation why the book is worth reading, and quit at that as deadline approaches. Wilfrid Sheed, who died yesterday at the age of 80, was one of a handful of critics who have actually picked up the quill and tried the high-wire act of fiction-writing. Among his works are the heady and unpredictable Pennsylvania Gothic, The Blacking Factory, and the politically-unhinged People Will Always Be Kind (1973). It may be for this reason that his reviews, written on deadline, had a unique prose style that was a delight to read and why their broader observations are worth recalling.

Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together: this Sheed remark, which has stayed with me for decades, steered me down memory lane today. As a weekly reviewer Sheed also wrote much other, more topical material of America in the 1970s. I picked up a copy of his book of essays, The Good Word, as an aspiring writer in 1978, and read in awe Sheed's ability to broaden his critical writing from literary review to observation. Some of his thoughts make remarkably fresh reading. Here, in no special order, a sampling.

"Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing)."

"Hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" — as if it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns."

"Chicago 1968 taught one how close any civilized country is to berserkness at all times; also how terrorism, even silly terrorism, strengthens the cops more than anyone. Yet already this European-style history lesson has been watered down by consensus into something crazy we did in the sixties, just as we "did" McCarthyism in the fifties. As if a nation changes its nature completely every ten years; as if social forces were as evanescent as hula hoops or skateboards, instead of as remorseless as glaciers."

"Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves — all plot and no characters, or made-up characters — Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the characters make the war, and the war unmakes the characters. The gods, fates, furies had a relatively small hand in it. The mess was man-made, a synthetic, by think tank out of briefing session."

"Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations — that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling."

"Once E.M. Forster was identified as a homosexual, a universal writer was diminished to the status of a propaganda counter in a winless war. 'We've got Whitman, and I'm pretty sure we've got Byron, and we're still working on the big case, Shakespeare,' say the Gays. And the Straights reply by hanging on to Shakespeare's Dark Lady for dear life and giving up Whitman altogether. But who can read any of them intelligently with all this gabble going on? In the big game of is he or isn't he, the author is the one sure loser."

(1970 photo of Wilfrid Sheed in his apartment by Leonard Mccombe, from Life magazine)

In Baltimore, Poe's visitor is a no-show for the second year

Poe centennial stamp, 1949

Edgar Allan Poe himself may have coined the best headline for this story: "Nevermore."

The Associated Press reports that the mysterious visitor who made annual visits to Poe's grave in Baltimore's Westminster Hall and Burying Ground every midnight on January 19th did not appear last night. This is the second consecutive year the unknown admirer called the "Poe toaster," whose visits date back to the 1940s, did not make an appearance.

Officials at Poe House and Museum are speculating the 60-year tradition has ended, although four impostors made a visit to Poe's resting place by 5 a.m. this morning. Poe was born January 19, 1809.

BALTIMORE (AP) — Telltale hearts beat with anticipation during a rainy, midnight dreary and beyond, hoping the mysterious visitor to Edgar Allan Poe's grave would return after a one-year absence.

Four impostors came and went. The real one never showed. Around 5 a.m., the dozen Poe fans who were left began to wonder if the eerie ritual is indeed nevermore, so they walked to Poe's tombstone and performed their own tribute by leaving roses and drinking a cognac toast.

A fascinating tradition that ran for some 60 years and was never fully explained appears to have ended. An unknown person who left three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe's grave on the anniversary of the writer's birth failed to appear Wednesday, the second straight year he's disappointed those who stake out the downtown Westminster Hall and Burying Ground.

"I think we can safely say it's not car trouble, and he's not sick," said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum. "This doesn't look good."

It would be an ending befitting of the legacy of Poe, the American literary master of the macabre who was known for haunting poems such as "The Raven" and grisly short stories including "The Tell-Tale Heart," ''The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Pit and the Pendulum." He is also credited with writing the first modern detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." He died in 1849 in Baltimore at age 40 after collapsing in a tavern.

Sometime in the 1940s, it seems, an anonymous man began the annual tribute at Poe's grave. It was first referenced in print in 1949 by The Evening Sun of Baltimore.

Those who have glimpsed the "Poe toaster" always saw him dressed in black, wearing a white scarf with a wide-brimmed hat. Jerome has kept watch over the vigil since 1978, watching from inside the Presbyterian church while Poe fans peered through the locked gates of the cemetery.

After last year's no-show, Jerome this year was expecting Poe toaster wannabes imitating the real thing, and they showed up in brazen style. One emerged from a white stretch limo shortly after midnight. Two others appeared to be women. The fourth was an older man. All walked in clear sight of the Poe fans, contrary to the secretive nature of the real Poe toaster. All wore black hats and left roses and cognac, and two left notes, but none of the four gave the secret signal that only Jerome knows, and none of the four arranged the roses in the unique pattern established by the Poe toaster over the decades. ...

"There's so many conspiracy theories," See said. "Like it ended in '98 and now the church does it. Or maybe in '09 they wanted to end it because it was the bicentennial. It just adds to the mystery. The best part of it is meeting people."

In 1993, the visitor began leaving notes, starting with one that read: "The torch will be passed." A note in 1998 indicated the originator of the tradition had died and passed it on to his two sons. ...

Jerome says he'll return one more year. If the visitor fails to show in 2012, he'll consider the tradition over and done.

"The Possessed," Elif Batuman: sharing the excitement of discovery

For readers who have always resolved to read those hefty Russian novels sooner or later, Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them is a great starting point -- her writing is witty and sharp, and she has a genuine appreciation for authors whose books (let's be politely honest here) require some attention. She falls in love with the books, their characters and stories, and lets us share in the excitement of discovering that great literature is more than "brisk verbs and vivid nouns." Great writing is about a million other things than craft. Batuman's best talent is creating the desire to get the books off the shelf and begin reading, a feat in itself for a literature most Americans consider oblique and daunting.

Her essays, detailing her own reading post-graduate experience, delve into reasons why these books continue to intrigue and thrill readers beyond their labyrinthine plots and tongue-twisting patronyms. Politics, intrigue, adventure, romance, deception, and more politics: the background of Russian literature is a vortex that drew Batuman to read Tolstoy, Chekov, Pushkin, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky over a seven-year period.

She admits in her introduction that the very "Russian-ness" of the literature was a draw. Apparently, so is her infatuation with the first Russian she met, her violin teacher at the Manhattan School of Music: "Maxim wore black turtlenecks, played a mellow-toned, orange-colored violin, and produced an impression of being deeply absorbed by considerations and calculations beyond the normal range of human cognition."

Love: the universal condition that propels Shakespeare plays and the gilt-foil covers of romance novels drives much Russian literature as well. And then, of course, there is the intrigue that swirls around the writers themselves, whether the politically-motivated persecution of Isaac Babel (his words on being arrested in 1939: "they didn't let me finish") or the possibility (for example) that the revered Tolstoy may have been murdered.

Her earnest proposal on that topic got her as far as a symposium in Moscow; after reading a Tolstoy biography she was inspired to write the following theory for a class:

"Arguably Russia's most controversial public figure, Tolstoy was not without powerful enemies. 'More letters threatening my life,' he noted in 1897, when his defense of the Dukhobor sect drew loud protests from the Orthodox Church and Tsar Nikolai, who even had Tolstoy followed by the secret police.

As is often the case, Tolstoy's enemies were no more alarming than his so-called friends, for instance, the pilgrims who swarmed Yasnaya Polyana: a shifting mass of philosophers, drifters, and desperados, collectively referred to by the domestic staff as 'the Dark Ones.' These volatile characters included a morphine addict who had written a mathematical proof of Christianity: a barefoot Swedish septuagenarian who preached sartorial 'simplicity' and who eventually had to be driven away 'because he was beginning to be indecent'; and a blind Old Believer who pursued the sound of Tolstoy's footsteps, shouting 'Liar! Hypocrite!' ...

'You are certainly my most entertaining student,' said my advisor when I told her about my theory. 'Tolstoy -- murdered! Ha! Ha! Ha! The man was eighty-two years old with a history of stroke!'

'That's exactly what would make it the perfect crime,' I explained patiently.

The department was not convinced. They did, however, give me the $1000 grant to present my paper."

The Possessed provides an entertaining first resource for readers, and the book's light-heartedness conceals a hefty amount of research in Russian literature. Batuman's book is a kind of literary autobiography, as her own coming-of-age shaggy-dog stories lead into the twists and turns of the novels she reads. While that approach doesn't always lead to great insights, it certainly makes scaling the heights of Russian masterworks easier to contemplate.

Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

"Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested story plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: 'A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.' This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a big house, a great "world house" in which we have to live together -- black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other."

(Excerpted from Martin Luther King's Nobel Prize lecture, December 11, 1964 in the Auditorium of the University of Oslo. This text is taken from Les Prix Nobel en 1964.)

Poet Susana Chavez, a stilled voice

From reports in the LA Times and the BBC:

Susana Chavez, a poet and long time activist who spoke out against the decade-long murder of women in Juarez, was found murdered on January 6. She had been tortured and suffocated; her left hand had apparently been cut off with a saw. Officials have said the murder and mutilation were the result of an "unfortunate encounter" and the mutilation was an attempt to make the killing appear to be the work of a drug cartel.

Her death marks the latest addition to a grim figure. By Christmas Eve of last year, 978 women had died violently in the Juarez area since the state began recording the figure separately in 1993. Significantly, at least 300 of those deaths, or just under a third, occurred in 2010 amid skyrocketing bloodshed due to a war between drug cartels.

Ms Chavez was active in an organisation called May Our Daughters Return Home, which represents the families and friends of the killed women.

Attorney General for Chihuahua State Carlos Manuel Salas says her death was the result of an "unfortunate encounter" with three teenagers, since identified, who got involved in an argument with Ms Chavez and strangled her. Human rights group Amnesty International said that although her murder did not seem to be related to her activism, Ms Chavez's killing was another sign that violence against women was still rising in Ciudad Juarez.

Her death has caused an uproar because she had been one of few to speak out against the growing number of murders, coining the phrase Ni una más (“Not one more") and routinely criticizing local authorities for refusing to properly investigate the crimes. Her death has cast new suspicions about local authorities’ ability to handle the cases. That is to say, that they’ve largely chosen to ignore them; so far, 92 percent of cases of women who’ve been murdered in the region remain unsolved.

Chavez’s killing happened less than a month after the murder of Marisela Escobedo, the mother who set up shop in front of the state governor’s office to demand the arrest of the killer of her 16-year-old daughter. Escobar alone investigated the whereabouts of the perpetrator, who was eventually set free by a panel of judges despite confessing to the crime. The judges are currently being investigated for the decision.

The case is bound to set a legal precedent in Mexico because it is the first time a panel of judges may stand trial for apparently ignoring evidence presented by the state’s district attorney.

(photo of Ni una más rally from the blog radiar noticias mx)