“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
“Mookie Blaylock dresses up as Mookie Blaylock for Halloween.”
What better way to celebrate the Super Bowl than by reading a poem about basketball?
Body Language
I’ve written before about By Heart, a series at The Atlantic in which authors write short pieces about their favorite passages in literature. This week, our own Edan Lepucki — whose new novel you may have heard about thanks to Stephen Colbert — writes about the metaphors in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. (FYI, Margaret Atwood wrote a Year in Reading entry for The Millions.)
“We call it Book”
Old but still as timely as ever: The latest and greatest in cutting-edge reading technology from Penny Arcade.
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Tigers on Your Tablet
“Calvin and Hobbes“ is going from print to digital. Now, you can read the strip of the boy and his famous tiger as a series of e-books: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, and The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes.
Soda Series
Tonight at 7pm in Prospect Heights’ Soda Bar: the 10th installment of the Soda Series. Short readings followed by conversation from Roberta Allen, Robin Grearson, John Haskell, and Kirsten Kaschock. The conversations will be moderated by John Dermot Woods and Greg Gerke. The Series also has a Facebook page.
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Perils of the Humanities Students
In Florida, legislators are wondering whether or not they should raise tuition costs for students studying the humanities, or really anything other than STEM fields. Likewise, James Dyson (yes, the vacuum guy) bemoans Britain’s abundance of “students choosing to read humanities at university.” As a rejoinder, one New Statesman blogger notes that the study of humanities does not inhibit technological innovation, and that as a bonus, “we gain from having people who reshape our cultural landscape and put things in new contexts.”
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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.