Category: Mark Twain

Mark Twain House Gets a Boost

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain

Because one gets a little weary reading about bankruptcies and more bankruptcies, it’s nice to see a little good news—the troubled Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn., recently received a $500,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation, which should help the nonprofit make its debt payments. The Greenwich Time finds a dignified way to celebrate the cash infusion while pointing out that it’s not nearly enough:

Cost overruns have resulted in the layoffs of more than 30 museum staff members over the last four years, leading to fears the house itself might have to go out of business. Officials say they “overbuilt and under-fundraised” when they put up the acclaimed visitors center, and now the 68,000 annual visitors could be turned away if the situation isn’t reversed.

The state would be expected to step in before the worst happened, but officials have made clear that all attractions will need to get used to less support from Hartford. There is no aspect of the state budget that won’t see some tightening, and the Mark Twain House would do well to look elsewhere.

So it falls to private citizens and businesses, themselves facing a difficult economy with the worst likely yet to come. It won’t be easy, but any help would go toward preserving the greatness of Connecticut. We owe it to the next generation.

Links: Prairie-Dogging

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Willa Cather

(Apologies for the quick-hit stuff over the past couple of days—the weeks before the holidays, combined with some added deadlines, tend to make life a little more complicated.)

News to me: Book-It Repertory Theatre, a Seattle company that interprets novels for the stage. They’re working on Willa Cather‘s My Antonia.

Also onstage: Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. Still. Forever.

The Washington Post‘s book blog, Short Stack, reports from Maya Angelou‘s reading in D.C. the other night. Angelou’s writing process: “[S]he rents a hotel room by the month and tells the management to remove everything from the walls. She works all morning with a Bible, a Roget’s Thesaurus, the New York Times crossword puzzle and a good bottle of sherry. ‘I try to enchant myself to hear my language,’ she said. ‘Once I can almost remove myself from the ordinary, I get to my yellow pad.'”

Toni Morrison on the state of African-American fiction: “I’m not terribly up on it, but my impression is that it is thriving. Really thriving. You have everyone from Edwidge Danticat to Colson Whitehead. And of course, the literature of young Asian writers is also very interesting to me. The range is what is so fabulous.” Plus, her thoughts on the death of John Leonard.

And just for fun: Billy Joel registers a weak defense of one of his worst songs.

Links: Selling Points

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Horace Engdahl, John Dos Passos, Mark Twain, Richard Russo

A Cape Cod home that was once owned by John Dos Passos and regularly played host to parties featuring the likes of Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and Arthur Schlesinger is up for sale.

A teach-the-controversy idea worth getting behind: A Chicago-area school had students stage a debate over whether Huckleberry Finn should be taught in schools.

After all, who the hell knows what’s going to get high-schoolers interested in reading these days?

Would Horace Engdahl‘s bloviations have been more acceptable coming from an American?

Richard Russo knows Main Street. Main Street is a friend of his. A Sarah Palin, he says, is no Main Streeter: “”Her view doesn’t work in either small-town world, the nostalgic one or the more realistic one. She just misses both points.”

Tom Perrotta’s Good Timing

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain, Tom Perrotta

If your schedule is free on Sept. 23 and you happen to be in Hartford, Conn., it’d only make sense to attend the fundraiser to help save the Mark Twain House. There’s a pretty good lineup of readers and speakers: The event is led by Jon Clinch, author of Finn (reviewed here), and he’s joined by Stewart O’Nan, Arthur Phillips, Tom Perrotta, and more.

Perrotta, plugging the event in the Boston Globe, figures this week’s political foofaraw over teen pregnancy might help the paperback release of his most recent novel, The Abstinence Teacher (reviewed here). “Everyone’s talking about abstinence,” he says. “It’s like free advertising.” Maybe so: As of this writing the book is #14 on Amazon’s bargain-books list.

Time and Twain

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jane Smiley, Mark Twain

I confess I missed Time magazine’s recent big to-do over Mark Twain, partly because it spurs some guilt. Mr. Clemens isn’t exactly a blind spot in my reading—I’ve read the essential novels, and more than a handful of short stories and essays—but I’ve also missed plenty, and I wasn’t much in the mood for a reminder when Time‘s cover package came out. David Kipen‘s approving blog post on Time’s efforts notes that I have plenty of cheats when it comes to catching up on Twain—particularly twainquotes.com, which has an entire page dedicated to quotes on Teddy Roosevelt alone. Kipen’s post also notes that, news to me, Jane Smiley prefers Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Huckleberry Finn. Smiley clarified this point in a 1998 interview:

People seem to remember my saying that Huck Finn is a lesser novel than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and that Uncle Tom’s Cabin should be taken as the greatest American novel. I didn’t say that. I just said that I didn’t think Huck Finn was the greatest novel ever written and that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was better than its reputation.

“Paddle Faster, I Hear Banjo Music”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in James Dickey, Mark Twain

The latest edition of the Oxford American, as usual, is full of great reading: Among the riches are an essay on food writer Charles H. Baker Jr., a visit to Joseph Mitchell‘s hometown of Fairmont, N.C., and a guide to epitaphs of ten Southern writers. (Mark Twain: “Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow.”) What I keyed in on, though, was “The Last Wild River,” an essay by Bronwen Dickey about the legacy of the Chattooga River, immortalized in her father James Dickey‘s novel Deliverance. The piece details some of the consternation among residents of northern Georgia about controls over access to the river; some of it involves concerns about the feds taking control of the land, and some of it involves complains about what Deliverance, especially the film version, did to the area’s rep. Dickey writes:

The sadistic mountain men in Deliverance were, of course, fictional, as were the town of Aintry and the Cahulawassee River, but the residents of Rabun County were left to contend with the peculiar legacy of the film long after the cameras stopped rolling. The theme music from the movie, “Dueling Banjos,” is used in commercials to sell everything from dish detergent to SUVs. “Paddle Faster, I hear Banjo Music” is printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers all over the South. The character actor Bill McKinney, who uttered teh improvised line “squeal like a pig” (the line does not appear in either the novel or original screenplay), now maintains his official website at www.squeallikeapig.com. It’s hard to get away from.

The overwhelming majority of the pieces in the OA, including Dickey’s piece, aren’t online, but it’s well worth picking up.

Roundup: While You Were Out

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles W. Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Tobias Wolff, Walter Hines Page

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Still making people mad.

Tobias Wolff speaks with Australia’s The Age (where his latest story collection, Our Story Begins, has just been published). He recalls the experience of reading galleys of his first novel, Ugly Rumours, a book he now disowns: “”I thought I had gotten way ahead of myself. I wasn’t smart enough to be Pynchon, but I liked the almost 19th century Dickensian layering of perspectives, the kind of wild sense of humour that Pynchon allows himself and the mingling of realism and urban myth and absurdity. Nothing is a waste of time for a writer, but this was not my medium.”

Penguin Classics is launching its African American Classics series with a collection of works by Charles W. Chesnutt. The Atlantic‘s Web site pointed to some of his work in January.

Scott Romine revisits Walter Hines Page‘s The Southerner. The 1909 novel has just been reissued by the University of South Carolina Press.

Lastly, if it’s true that we’re all not reading anymore, at least the book titles are still good for something: “If you decided to name your horses after classics in American literature, you could have horses named Red Badge Of Courage, Tender IsThe Night, The Last Tycoon, O Pioneers, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Absalom Absalom, A Moveable Feast, Travelswithcharley, Tortilla Flat and many others. I’ve just scratched the surface.”

Roundup: Bait and Switch

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Gore Vidal, Herman Melville, Joe Meno, Lionel Shriver, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson

(If you’re arriving here from the Readerville Journal, welcome. If you’re not arriving here from the Readerville Journal: The folks at that venerable site have been nice enough to dub this site its Blog of the Week.)

Frank Wilson‘s Books, Inq. points to a review of Lionel Shriver‘s The Post-Birthday World, an exemplar of very divisive novels. (Wilson’s taken this up before regarding Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road.) It was one of my favorite novels of last year; my review for Kirkus is floating somewhere on the Barnes & Noble review page.

Coudal Partners, a Chicago-based marketing firm, has put out its latest edition of Field-Tested Books, in which various writers contribute short essays about their experiences reading outside of the usual contexts of libraries, living rooms, and public transit. Bless Joe Meno‘s essay on Winesburg, Ohio, which I blogged about at Allvoices.

Mark Twain‘s home in Hartford, Conn., is in deep trouble; a visitors’ center wound up costing double what was anticipated and energy costs are way up. I’d suggest putting on a short play and charging customers a ton for it, but maybe that’s a little too glib. Seriously: Donate here.

Superman is 70.

Guy Sorman, writing in City Journal, enthuses about the Amazon Kindle. Walking in Central Park one day, he convinced his wife that she needed to read Herman Melville‘s Billy Budd, right now, and uploaded it to his Kindle: “I typed “Billy Budd” on the keyboard. It took five seconds to complete the wireless download and cost me approximately $6, debited from my Amazon account.” Had Sorman talked to me, I could’ve saved him six bucks, but I will concede that the Kindle is preferable if you’re insisting your spouse read something outside at that very moment.

I knew that Gore Vidal was bitter at how he’s been treated by the New York Times over the years, but yeesh:

What do you think is your own best novel? I don’t answer questions like that. Ever. And you ought not to ask them.

Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you. I doubt that.

Roundup: To Build a Fire

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Donald Ray Pollock, Henry James, Jack London, John Updike, Kevin J. Hayes, Mark Twain, Maxine Hong Kingston, Paul Auster, Paul Theroux, Walter Mosley

Kevin J. Hayes is back with another question. Last time he was looking for tips on travel writers (glad I could be somewhat useful); this time he’s hunting for authors who’ve mastered multiple genres: “Take Henry James for instance,” he writes. “Best known as a novelist, James was also a fine travel writer and memoirist. I can justify discussing James in two or three different places, but I do not have room to discuss every genre of every author. So, here are my questions. Which American authors excelled in more than one literary genre? Where should I discuss them? Are they important enough to deserve discussion in more than one chapter? Boy, that’s a loaded question. Here’s a more fundamental one: what constitutes literary importance?”

Hell if I’m going to address that last question before breakfast. But a few names that immediately spring to mind: John Updike (see John Gross‘ excellent piece in the new NYRB on his most recent nonfiction collection); Mark Twain; Paul Theroux; Maxine Hong Kingston; Paul Auster (stretching here, but I do admire his memoir, Hand to Mouth). There has to be more. Maybe Walter Mosley gets credit for at least attempting his recent literary-erotic works?

How about Jack London, allegedly the most-read author in the world? Today marks the first day of the Geneva’s international book fair, and among the displays is Francis Lacassin’s 52-volume set of London’s works, translated into French.

An AP story explains just how lucrative the life of the much-hyped short story writer can be: According to the piece, Donald Ray Pollock‘s new collection, Knockemstiff, has sold all of 3,000 copies. It’s early yet, but that’s still short of the 27,000 hardbacks that were run off. So how do you avoid the remainder bin?

The Twain Shall Meet

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain, William Dean Howells

At the NEA’s Big Read Blog, David Kipen is doing some interesting musing on how Mark Twain‘s reputation was built, using a piece on The Innocents Abroad by William Dean Howells in the December 1869 issue of Atlantic Monthly as a launchpad. Here Howells keys in on Twain’s sense of humor:

And it is always good-humored humor, too, that he lavishes on his reader, and even in its impudence it is charming; we do not remember where it is indulged at the cost of the weak or helpless side, or where it is insolent, with all its sauciness and irreverence. The standard shams of travel which everybody sees through suffer possibly more than they ought, but not so much as they might; and one readily forgives the harsh treatment of them in consideration of the novel piece of justice done on such a traveller as suffers under the pseudonyme of Grimes. It is impossible also that the quality of humor should not sometimes be strained in the course of so long a narrative; but the wonder is rather in the fact that it is strained so seldom.

In a post published yesterday on the Big Read Blog–it’s dated January 48, 2008, must be some government thing–Kipen fast-forwards a few years to Howells’ piece on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the May 1876 Atlantic, and Kipen finds some amusement in the critic’s characterization of Twain’s Missouri as the “southwest”:

Still more intriguing is his reference to “the Southwest,” someplace I always thought of as closer to Pike’s Peak than Pike County, Missouri. And then it hit me. To a Brahmin tenderfoot like Howells, 19th-century Missouri was the Southwest, just as Illinois was the Northwest — and wound up with the anachronistically named Northwestern University to prove it.