“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
More XX at the C-Level, Please
“Are things getting worse for women in publishing?” The Guardian asks, and while the article focuses on the UK, it also touches on the state of affairs in the U.S. What both situations share is a lack of female representation at the executive level, based partly on “a generation of women retiring and the amalgamation of publishing houses, which has left fewer c-circle jobs to compete for.” Oh, and sexism.
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That’s A Wrap, Says Alice Munro
Alice Munro announced her retirement from writing this week. “Perhaps, when you’re my age,” she told a National Post reporter, “you don’t wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be.” Previously the Canadian author announced her retirement in 2006, but that didn’t stop her from publishing two more books – including her latest story collection, Dear Life (Millions review). The uninitiated can get a primer on her entire oeuvre by checking out our comprehensive Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro. See also: “Can Writers Retire? Let Us Count the Ways”
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Shock and Auden
A lost journal of W. H. Auden, one of three that the poet is known to have kept, has recently been discovered.
The Alfar
If you run into trouble in Iceland, blame the elves. 54.4 percent of Icelanders believe in the invisible creatures, and elves cause environmental protest today. “Beliefs in misfortune befalling those who dare to build in elf territory is so widespread and frequent that the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration has created a five-page ‘standard reply’ for press inquiries about elves,” Ryan Jacobs writes for The Atlantic. Pair with: our essay on Icelandic writer Sjón.
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Letting Autism Actually Speak
“If we have no internal lives, then artists are free to make them for us, or to use us as tools for providing depth and motivation to the non-autistic characters, the real ones.” Sarah Kurchak writes for Electric Literature on the abysmal state of autistic representation in books, film, and television, namechecking both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which we considered here and here, respectively.
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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.