“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
Tuesday New Release Day
New this week stateside is buzzed-about Booker shortlister Room by Emma Donoghue. Also out: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, a new collection by “20 Under 40” lister Yiyun Li; Sigrid Nunez’s post-apocalyptic Salvation City; and a McSweeney’s-published memoir Half a Life by Chang and Eng author Darin Strauss.
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Epic Fail In the Wall Street Journal
“Mr. [Mark] O’Connell is an intelligent and very funny writer,” says Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. “But Epic Fail will also prompt you to consider how shallow—and ugly—humans can be.” (Bonus: a reference to getting pitted, just so pitted.)
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To Boldly Go
“[Maria] Bamford’s newest show…is a more polished product, but equally radical—as unsettling as anything Andy Kaufman ever did.” Is the Internet the comedy world’s final frontier?
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How to Write about Art
Possibly inspired by YiR alum Elizabeth McCracken, who tweeted out tips for applying to MFA programs last week, Zak Smith (the man who painted every single page of Gravity’s Rainbow) tweeted a series of tips for aspiring art critics. Among other advice, he dictates to his tweeps: “If Andy Warhol could have made it, do not write about it.”
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Lee’s Co-Conspirator
Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the famously reclusive Harper Lee, and with good reason – her long-awaited second book, Go Set A Watchman, was released last week, and isn’t quite what readers expected. Over at The Atlantic, Ari N. Schulman takes a slightly different approach to Lee and her work by focusing instead on Maurice Cain, Lee’s longtime agent, friend, and “co-conspirator.”
If Nobel Laureates Wrote for Home Depot
The Paris Review presents a spread of paint chips “sourced from the colors in literature.”
Speaking Of Violence
Recommended Reading: This beautiful essay from The Rumpus on the ambivalence of Jewishness and a whole lot more nuance than this Curiosity can communicate. Here’s an essay by Gabriel Brownstein from The Millions on what it means to be labeled as a Jewish writer.
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.