Mark Twain: search and destroy

how central to the idea of the american canon is twain? is he taught in schools?

I can rank his books according to my own tastes, but there's nothing he wrote I'd destroy. No even Tom Sawyer Abroad, a stinker by Twain standards. Or Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - one of my sister's favourites, but not mine.

As a western USAer, I love Roughing It best. Up there with it: Innocents Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, Life On the Mississippi. In the middle ranks: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, The Mysterious Stranger and Other Tales, Tom Sawyer, and many of his short stories and occasional pieces. Also worthwhile: Puddinghead Wilson and 1601 (this used to be hard to get ahold of, but I think it is on the net now).

Since I started this thread I got a book of short stories that are hit and miss. You can tell this is a guy who just loves to talk and sometimes he lets it get the better of his stories, he just keeps on going long after he's lost the big Mo. Two that stand out for me are 1) the story of a pocket watch that keeps breaking, and the clockmaker's increasingly complicated excuses and 2) the story of a "modern" alarm system whose peculiarities and shortcomings end up with thieves inevitably living inside Twain's house

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

^ essential reading

'huck finn' gets better with every reread. it prob is the actual no-kidding 'great american novel.'

Fenimore Cooper takedown has been praised to the skies. It makes some pretty decent points if you take it as lit crit, but it is better if you take it as a big ol' whiff of Essence of Twain.

my man predicted president tom sawyer 140 years ago and here we are

pap finn is p much the original trump voter

the duke and the king = w/cheney; grangerfords v. shepherdson's = perpetual (non-advantaged) "conservative" v. "liberal" cold civil war. 'connecticut yankee' and 'the prince and the pauper' should be required reading at the moment imho

I'm reading Tom Sawyer to my kids and my god it's fantastic. I think maybe Huck Finn is so famous and so feted that the OG gets a little underrated. The specificity of a country boy's life - set in a time some unspecified number of years before it's actually written - so, pre-Civil War, maybe? is just incredible. How can Twain have remembered all of that? All the secret codes of kids?

Twain gets a lot of mileage out of describing the most rough-and-tumble details in a high literary style but I'm.... here for it. My kids don't understand a lot of the more expensive words but they don't mind because they feel these situations, they know them. The triumphant, excited feeling when your brother gets caught doing something he shouldn't. Or the dramatic brooding that sets in when you're blamed unjustly. The pinch-bug. Tom's scheme to win a Bible. His aunt's gullible adoption of quack remedies and cures, and her subscription to periodicals that explain what frame of mind to have, and how to sleep, and how to eat, and how it all contradicts what the same publication said the previous month.

It is said with justice that all of American literature has its start in Twain. His only rival who might vie with him for that title is Washington Irving. But Twain is funnier, more vivid, has a more complete sense of the American language, captures human nature on a deeper level, and just has all around better chops. Even his worst, hackiest failures are worth reading for small excellences hidden amid the verbiage.

Part of what's so exhilarating about it for me is how these different registers jam up and rub against each other so shamelessly - church language, taunting, administrative-ese, parodies of high romance, etc. It's like being pinged around a pinball machine. And you turn a corner and suddenly there is quite serious bit of scene-setting or description of someone's inner state that's been properly hewn out of the fabric of something greater than all of us.

In Chapter XIII:

About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham and a few trifles, and stopped in a dense undergrowth on a small bluff overlooking the meeting-place. It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay like an ocean at rest. Tom listened for a moment, but no sound disturbed the quiet. Then he gave a low, distinct whistle. It was answered from under the bluff.

Now the raft was passing before the distant town. Two or three glimmering lights showed where it lay, peacefully sleeping, beyond the vague vast sweep of star-gemmed water, unconscious of the tremendous event that was happening.

Now the battle was at its highest. Under the ceaseless conflagration of lightning that flamed in the skies, everything below stood out in cleancut and shadowless distinctness: the bending trees, the billowy river, white with foam, the driving spray of spumeflakes, the dim outlines of the high bluffs on the other side, glimpsed through the drifting cloudrack and the slanting veil of rain. Every little while some giant tree yielded the fight and fell crashing through the younger growth; and the unflagging thunderpeals came now in ear-splitting explosive bursts, keen and sharp, and unspeakably appalling. The storm culminated in one matchless effort that seemed likely to tear the island to pieces, burn it up, drown it to the treetops, blow it away, and deafen every creature in it, all at one and the same moment. It was a wild night for homeless young heads to be out in.

Tracer how old are your kids? My dad read this to me back in the day and I’m itching to read it to my kids but they’re still really young.

11 and 8

Sweet just 8 more years

lol

If I ever had a kid I'm gonna read A Connecticut Yankee to it starting in the womb.

have had whatever, I'm no Twain

lol is it wrong that the first thing I did when loading up this 14-year-old thread was Ctrl-F for my name and then breathe a sigh of relief when it said 'no results found'?

i've just received from my mom a USB stick containing audio recordings of my great-grandfather, who lived in georgia. i had no idea this recording existed, and i actually had no idea ANY recording of his voice ever existed. the whole thing's kind of blowing my mind. he's a pretty major figure in family lore - a professor of classics at emory university, coach of the baseball team, father of 8 children, husband to a pretty good local impressionist painter. he raised my grandmother as vaguely progressive methodist. anyway, i had known that bre'er rabbit stories were special in her family, on both sides. my mom’s father would read bre’er rabbit stories to my sister and i when we were little. anyway, that’s what’s on the USB stick. that’s what he’s reading - "br’er rabbit down the well." and, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s audio blackface. it’s something very few people, particularly white people, would ever do today. he does a good job of it. in fact it comes really naturally. he’s a great reader of it and he’s not struggling for grasp of the idiom. but it’s a weird artifact.

lol whoops wrong thread :) (i had DJP's 'racism' thread open!)