Thursday, March 3, 2011

"Medals, Boris! Medals!"

(A favorite Woody Allen quote from Love and Death.)  There IS something a little grade-school-assembly about the idea of medals or trophies for artists, but who cares?


Harper Lee got a national arts medal for To Kill a Mockingbird!


One of great American novels.  Maybe THE Great American Novel.  (In my opinion it's a knock-down drag-out fight between Mockingbird and Huck Finn, with Steinbeck holding both authors' coats.)  To Kill a Mockingbird has been hugely important in dismantling Jim Crow and fighting race prejudice in our country and remains so today: a friend is painting a new a stage production of it as I type...  It's still read and loved.  One of my all-time most-loved books, Mockingbird had me at the word "teacakes" in the quote that follows:


"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."


That writer knows the South.  


Other winners I was thrilled to see?  Meryl Streep, James Taylor, and our local boy, Van Cliburn.

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