American South

Wednesday

Julia Friedman

What monuments stand to teach Americans about themselves

Why do we raise monuments? Why do we tear them down? These questions hover over MONUMENTS, now on view at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick. The premise is straightforward enough: gather the remains of America’s shattered sculptural conscience – decommissioned Confederate statues and their graffiti-marred plinths – and display them alongside contemporary works on racial topics. This comparison is supposed to reveal something about America’s nature and history, and it certainly does: it shows us just how attached we are to grievance. Both the raising and the destruction of monuments nourishes convictions on either side, ensuring that the argument can never end.

monuments

Tuesday

Philip Womack

Another collection of Harper Lee’s writings arises

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird hardly needs an introduction, as I expect everyone in the world has read it, or has seen the film starring Gregory Peck. (If you haven’t read it, perhaps you should.) Lee, incidentally, went to visit the film set, and had this to say about Peck: “an inspired performance. In some mysterious way, Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch transcended illusion.” If that seems a tad clichéd and not especially insightful, then I’m afraid to say that this is the general tenor of the nonfiction pieces in The Land of Sweet Forever, alongside eight previously unseen short stories. Go Set a Watchman, a novel which was largely viewed as To Kill a Mockingbird in embryo, appeared ten years ago, to not much acclaim.