“After years of reading, teaching, and writing about the book, though, I’ve come to believe that… our understanding of what is comic and what is serious in Huck Finn says more about America in the last century than America in the time Twain wrote the book.” Andrew Levy writes for Salon about childhood, race, and “dedicated amnesia” in Mark Twain‘s controversial classic.
All Wrong
What’s a Literary Short Film?
Book trailers are one thing, but what’s a literary short film? According to Red 14 founders Adam Cushman and Mike Sandow, “it's not advertising a product; it gives a cinematic glimpse into the book, one which will ideally make the viewer interested in learning more about the author, the author's current book, and the author's past and future work.” Together, the pair has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund four such films about four worthy titles (Matt Bell’s awesome debut novel among them).
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The search for absurdity
How The Daily Show may have an advantage over mainstream news, by virtue of its refusual to take "View from Nowhere." Conor Friedersdorf makes the compelling case that comedy writers, with their eyes rooting out the absurd in the world, can put give the news some much needed perspective.
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“Copywrong”
"At bottom, the argument about copyright is not really a philosophical argument. It’s a battle between interest groups." Louis Menand writes about American copyright law in the digital age for The New Yorker, and his essay pairs well with the many articles on copyright we've published over the years.
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Buy Me A Drink
In what reads like someone’s answer to the “who would you invite to a literary dinner party" question, novelists Jeanette Winterson and Marlon James sat down for a fantastic conversation at a Miami hotel bar. James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Man Booker prize earlier this year.
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Writermaker
At The Daily Beast, a reading list by the novelist Nick Harkaway, who claims that he reads so many books at once that “if the stack fell on me I’d be injured." Back in March, our own Emily St. John Mandel reviewed his second novel, Angelmaker.
Twain wrote: “PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
Well, didn’t that fly over the head of academe!
The Salon article is very insightful. Thank you for highlighting it.
What stood out for me:
Forgetting is the partner of illusion.
In popular culture the minstrelsy stage paint has been discredited but songs, dances, jokes, and cultural strategies endure.
Twain can help us acknowledge that, but only if we care to.
The book begs the question whether we are truly more equal and open-minded compared with Twain’s day. Some might say we’re not. And that doesn’t fit the narrative of linear progress, ever onward and upward.
That, in my view, is what academics and school administrators dislike in the book: it’s not the word, it’s the mirror. Something that makes them uncomfortable.