You Do You, Boo

I'm feeling some pressure now, as I'm just getting through the first half of To Kill a Mockingbird. A scientific survey of everyone I've ever, ever met proved to me long ago that I am apparently the last one to have read it. I can only reach the conclusion that the high school English classes I attended were either generally substandard or specifically HORRIBLY RACIST, although since people of color made up about 65% of the student population, I'm not sure exactly against whom the racism was aimed. Hey, maybe me!

I picked it up with no real agenda or motivating force. I've been working my way through some classics in an effort to be better read, in preparation for the off chance I'd finally get my invitation to a New York elbow-patches-and-sherry mixer hosted by Christopher Hitchens. It's definitely possible my pace might have been slowed slightly by the fact that the man died three years ago. I've been "reading" this book for close to a year now. There was a loooong period after the first chapter where my progress looked a lot like a binge-rewatch of most of Game of Thrones. Once I picked the book back up again, as far as I can tell so far, it's about colloquial speech patterns and the systematic harassment of a neighborhood special-needs shut-in by two asshole kids. There hasn't been a lot for the Gregory Peck guy to do but phlegmatically "parent" through a series of grudging interactions lurching between Socratic and passive-aggressive. He manages his children through a combination of stoic aloofness and the looming threat of overwhelming violence he's certain never to deliver on; as a parenting posture, he's basically Soviet Russia. You sure know how to pick your heroes, America. I'm sure things will stay pretty much the same throughout the rest of the book.

I'm only getting to this book now, and look, suddenly there's a goddamned sequel out I have to worry about. Harper Lee waited half a century to publish this thing, like it would have killed her to give me a few more weeks. It's almost like her schedule to have her affairs seized by an opportunistic lawyer following the death of Lee's protective elder sister, while succumbing to senility or some other incapacitation didn't take me into consideration at all.

Now that I think about it though, it's not like these are Harry Potter books, which I read on a regular schedule right after they came out, one by one, all the way through. If I'm setting my own pace here, it took me 41 years to get to To Kill a Mockingbird; at that rate of completion, I have until 2056 to power through Go Set a Watchman. Of course that presupposes that I'll finish TKaM in calendar-year 2015, which is irresponsibly optimistic, frankly. I'm not making good time, but it's with good reason. For instance, right now I'm typing this. Later tonight and for the next several days, I'll be devoting most of my concentrated intellectual, spiritual and emotional energy to preparing myself for episode six of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, on BBC America this Saturday. In case you haven't seen it, it's about this guy Jonathan Strange doing, like, all kinds of cool magic shit like killing French dudes with giant mud-fists, and the great actor Eddie Marsan, playing the master practical-magic-user Norrell, sitting in various libraries and putting together dramatically fussy variations on the same line over and over again containing some combination of the words "English," "magic" and "respectable." Mud-fist, you guys!

There are only two episodes of that show left, and immediately after that I've got about four to twenty-four months marked out for sitting alone in the dark in a quiet room, getting my mind right before deciding if I'm grown enough to tackle the other book fighting for the top of the best-seller lists with Harper Lee, Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. I read an excerpt of it in The Atlantic. Anybody here in a giant hurry to face down the very-present, self-destructive, destabilizing reality of the legacy of slavery in the United States? Who doesn't love a poetic, searing and unavoidably personal confrontation between national self-perception and practical, bodily reality? Actually, all overeducated white liberals like me, that's usually who. But this one doesn't seem to be in a hurry to offer me a safe place to stand while talking about white supremacy and the systematic destruction of black men. So maybe just a note for Mr. Coates for next time: helps to frame discussions of race in a way that absolves the reader of all complicity, active or passive. You sacrifice some authenticity and maybe some personal integrity, but you'll sell so many more copies of a book we're more comfortable discussing at brunch. Also maybe consider including more English magic. Your current book, as I understand it, contains close to zero, which will not do, sir. Doesn't have to include a giant disembodied mud-fist specifically, but you know, like maybe a tree-elbow or a rock-foot... I don't know, I'm spit-ballin'. You're the writer, man. Whatever you decide to shoehorn in there, I'll definitely be surprised to see it.