Well, tonight I had a really good conversation with a friend. And then on the way home, I was happily bouncing my keys in my hand when my key chain exploded and sent one of my keys tumbling to the ground in a dark alleyway. And of course it was the dull one that barely reflects anything.
After 10 minutes of looking like a drunk loser (not the former, perhaps the latter) and running my hands through gravel that smelled a little urine... esque, I found it. I'm glad none of you were around to see my awkward victory dance.
But trying to interpret this mix of good and bad signs meant I just didn't get around the writing the long, overdue blog post I had planned. I'm sorry. Until I come up with something of substance, check out Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker, writing about Atticus Finch. And not holding back either. Gladwell doesn't criticize To Kill A Mockingbird for the usual reasons, namely that it is less progressive and more condescending when it comes to race. Or, as my Grade 9 English teacher put it, "I feel like this book is a little 'white people to the rescue!'" Rather, he gets at something that bothered me way back then: the villification of Mayella. As condescending as the book can be towards Tom, at least it views him as a person instead of a cliched bit of trash. Even Mayella's implied sexual abuse at the hands of her father isn't used to justify her actions but condemn her character and make her seem even more grotesque. It bothered me then, and reading about it now made me remember how much.
1 comment:
I spent many hours last night painting abstract (or not so abstract) pictures of naked women while slowly becoming more and more drunk into buffoonery.
Was is worse, is that I was pining them up along the wall to 'dry'; now what you can imagine 'drying' is one of two things: the paint or the 'paint.' I mean both were splattered upon the paper, one came before the creation and the second came after...
Snicker. We should hang out soon.
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