Mark Twain

Twain with Jean and Susy

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I am sad to say that prior to this course I had let Disney be my Huckleberry friend in lieu of Twain himself. I don't know why I wasn't more interested. Could there have been another thing to attend? Whatever the case, I have only just begun a genuine reading, and I am mesmerized. It's not surprising. Aside from God, atheist Twain's my favorite author. Running a close third is Lewis Grizzard, although he was Twain incarnate so I'm not sure his rating counts.

Time being what it is as of late, a quick rundown of things I like about Huck Finn:

1. My kind of Thoreau:
"When it was dark I set by my camp fire smoking, and feeling pretty satisfied; but by-and-by it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the currents washing along, and counted the stars and drift-logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain't no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can't stay so, you soon get over it."

2. Mo' better Thoreau:
"...here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves..."

3. Illustrations of Twain's magical power with language:
A) "...it all belonged to me, so to say..."
B) "...it made me feel like a person had cut one of my breaths in two and I only got half, and the short half, too."

4. While reading the following paragraph, I was struck in the middle with awe at Twain's imagination. His written reality is fully dimensional. Life, the human experience is completely simulated. I am drawn in before I know it and taken to places far away from myself. He knew something about that, God love him.
The paragraph:

"We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher-knife without any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bed quilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet and some nails, and a fish-line as thick as my little finger, with some monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a leather dog-collar, and a horse-shoe, and some vials of medicine that didn't have no label on them; and just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry-comb, and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg. The straps was broke off of it, but barring that, it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn't find the other one, though we hunted all around."

Much as I love Twain and understand the dulled offenses of obdurate eras, I say, all the "nigger" stuff is thoroughly distracting. I just hate the classification of any man in obscene terms. Go away, bad things!

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
I sincerely hope Cooper was long dead by the time this scathing, witty review came forth, for were he not this surely would have done him in! I myself fainted quite a few times just witnessing the superb, hilarious massacre.

That being said of Twain and done, here is my favorite "Twainling" at this particular season (Take note, James; this is how you tell a story):

A Ghost Story (from Sketches New and Old; beginning half-way down epage 89)

The REAL Cardiff Giant

Visit Twain's grave.