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Wednesday, July 15, 2015
The Waterboard, by M.W. Thomas
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Lane Cake
In greeting, Miss Maudie makes a Lane cake that Scout says was "so loaded with shinny it made me tight." Miss Maudie Atkinson is known for her superior Lane cakes, which are...?
That question led me to a 2013 article by Tom McNamara called The Cake That Made Maycomb Famous: The Lane Cake. You can read the article (which includes a recipe), but the upshot is that it is a cake with a sugar and bourbon ("shinny") filling usually involving finely chopped raisins or pecans. Judging from the comments section, many of Mr. McNamara's readers expected coconut in the filling. It is topped by a standard Boiled White Frosting.
Have ya'll ever had Lane cake? Do you make Lane cake? If so MIO wants to hear from you. If you have your own recipe, you can email it to myirrefutableopinion@gmail.com, and I'll be glad share it in this space (with your permission, of course.) I may even pick my favorite and try it myself!
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Saturday, July 11, 2015
Watchman: Is Your Head Exploding?
Jem dead? Atticus a racist? These are the spoilers spilled in the pages of the NYT Review of Go Set A Watchman. Do you have the vapors? If so, you seem to be in good company. Say It Ain't So tweets the universe. The comments page drips with pissing and moaning that no doubt spells "$$$" for the publisher HarperCollins.
Given recent events, it is timely to ask why we ever accepted To Kill A Mockingbird's hero, Atticus Finch, as a two-dimensional paragon of moral purity in the first place. After all, was he not a man of his times? How could such a man in the deep south not be affected by the prevailing attitudes about race and segregation?
We are told that Mockingbird is a rewrite of Watchman. I will be interested in reading Harper Lee's original painting of Atticus for myself (I am not on the publisher's list of advance reviewers, if you can believe it. The book is scheduled for publication on Tuesday, July 14.)
Are the Atticus's of Watchman and Mockingbird truly inconsistent with each other? Mockingbird's Atticus is six-year-old Scout's Atticus. He is seen through a child's eyes, strong and heroic, bravely standing up to a mob mentality that would railroad an innocent black man to his rendezvous with death beyond all reason.
Watchman's Atticus is 26-year-old Jean Louise's Atticus. How differently does this grown-up young woman see her father since those days? How much has Atticus changed over the years with age? Is he different twenty years on, or does Jean Louise simply see him differently? Or did the character evolve in Ms. Lee's mind in a zig-zag of cultural criticism?
Unlike the TIMES reviewer, I have not had the opportunity to explore these questions with Ms. Lee's book for myself yet. But to me, the Tale of Two Atticus's is at least potentially the legitimate stuff of American Literature. And if it makes my head explode, maybe that's because it's good writin'.
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Please leave a comment below, or you can email your comments to: myirrefutableopinion@gmail.com. I am looking forward to hearing from you!
Given recent events, it is timely to ask why we ever accepted To Kill A Mockingbird's hero, Atticus Finch, as a two-dimensional paragon of moral purity in the first place. After all, was he not a man of his times? How could such a man in the deep south not be affected by the prevailing attitudes about race and segregation?We are told that Mockingbird is a rewrite of Watchman. I will be interested in reading Harper Lee's original painting of Atticus for myself (I am not on the publisher's list of advance reviewers, if you can believe it. The book is scheduled for publication on Tuesday, July 14.)
Are the Atticus's of Watchman and Mockingbird truly inconsistent with each other? Mockingbird's Atticus is six-year-old Scout's Atticus. He is seen through a child's eyes, strong and heroic, bravely standing up to a mob mentality that would railroad an innocent black man to his rendezvous with death beyond all reason.
Watchman's Atticus is 26-year-old Jean Louise's Atticus. How differently does this grown-up young woman see her father since those days? How much has Atticus changed over the years with age? Is he different twenty years on, or does Jean Louise simply see him differently? Or did the character evolve in Ms. Lee's mind in a zig-zag of cultural criticism?
Unlike the TIMES reviewer, I have not had the opportunity to explore these questions with Ms. Lee's book for myself yet. But to me, the Tale of Two Atticus's is at least potentially the legitimate stuff of American Literature. And if it makes my head explode, maybe that's because it's good writin'.
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