Garrison Keillor writes about the days when being a tortured literary soul, wrestling for your livelihood with the printed word over a typewriter, was worth something. Money, to be specific.
Mark Twain's fight with God
Phil linked to a story yesterday, about the impending release of the first volume of Mark Twain’s Memoirs, withheld from publication, at the author’s request, since his death in 1910. People speculate that the reason for the embargo was that Twain (Sam Clemens) didn’t feel the world was ready for his freethinking ideas.
I think they’re probably right. I suspect he figured mankind would be rid of this Christianity nonsense by 2010.
My own history with Mark Twain has been complicated. I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in school, as pretty much all kids did in my day. And somewhere in my high school years, somebody gave me a copy of The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain for Christmas (I got the old hardcover Doubleday edition; you can get the current version in paperback here). At the beginning, my delight was great. Here were hilarious stories, crafted in masterful English (only P.G. Wodehouse has ever impressed me so with his ability to wring hilarity out of simple word choice), that made me laugh out loud, stories I had to read to my long-suffering brothers. Continue reading Mark Twain's fight with God
After the storm
OK, so I’m mowing my lawn tonight. The mower is sputtering off and on, threatening to die. I stop and rinse the air filter out in gasoline, and while I’m letting it dry I come in and check my e-mail. There’s a message from a Viking friend, the guy I drove out to Annandale with on Saturday (more on that below). The subject line says, “What Wrong With Your Lawnmower?”
I swear we didn’t discuss lawnmowers during our drive on Saturday. We did talk about Sea Foam gas treatment, which I had just put in the mower, but we hadn’t discussed mowers. I’m sure.
Pretty sure.
Anyway, it’s weird.
Our Viking group was asked to set up a display for a big Boy Scout event at a Scout camp in Annandale, Minnesota on Saturday. It’s about an hour away, so we got up early and drove out. The weather forecast called for a bright, hot day.
And it was. After the thunderstorm.
The pounding rain drove us under cover for most of the morning. When the skies finally cleared, we got heavy winds for a while. This is a perfect scenario for loosening the pegs that secure my sun shade, which you can see in the picture above. I kept pounding them back in with the poll of my Viking axe. I also had to do my second field repair on the canvas, with artificial sinew and a needle. Finally the winds died down, and I was able to sell a few books and try to ride herd on all the little boys who wanted to handle my swords. Also to have a different friend take the picture above, which I wanted so I could record my new Viking outfit. I made both the tunic and the trousers all by myself, and I’m relatively proud of them. The pants were the second pair I made. The first pair taught me what not to do on the second pair.
The tunic is about 50% better than the one I made last year, from the same light blue cloth. My only big complaint with it is that the facing is crooked. You’ll notice how it (the dark blue around the neck) is hanging crooked? That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. I don’t mean it’s how I intended it. I mean it’s how I sewed it. It’s not just hanging crooked. It’s always like that. (Last year’s shirt has the same problem.)
Still, I’m learning. And that’s about all you can ask for in these things.
Or so I’ve learned.
Twain on Twain After a Long Silence
Mark Twain’s autobiography, which he forbid to be published for 100 years after his death, will be released in three books UC-Berkley. The first will come in November.
Daggers on the Table
“The shortlist for the International Dagger award of the Crime Writers’ Association was announced at Crime Fest.” (via Books, Inq.)
DeLillo in The Secret History of Science Fiction
Ed Parks writes about a sci-fi anthology with a short story by Don DeLillo in it. Parks states, “Despite the advanced state of my DeLillo worship, I haven’t pursued his short fiction. There isn’t much of it, it’s uncollected, and despite DeLillo’s capacity for inhuman linguistic precision, his most indelible works are generally the ones that sprawl.”
He was ecstatic to find a short story he’d never read by this favorite author and manages to talk about the anthology a little too. (via Conv. Reading)
Books, The End of the Making of
Mark Bertrand has an essay on the printed word.
When Ken Myers interviewed me for Mars Hill Audio Volume 90, for example, he kept asking about the decline of literacy, only to have me scoff at the pessimism. Little did I know that the flipside of Volume 90 would feature an extended chat with Dana Gioia about the NEA’s depressing literacy study. Fortunately that part of my interview was excised from the final version, sparing me the indignity of appearing unsuitably optimistic and glib. Ever since, I’ve kept what little optimism I possess to myself.
(via S.D. Smith)
John Cleese Goes on Tour to Pay for Divorce
John Cleese is touring England soon to pay off his third wife–or something like that.
John Cleese is to embark on his first-ever UK tour next year at the age of 71. The comedian, who recently agreed a divorce settlement believed to be in the region of £12m, has dubbed it the “Alimony Tour”.
Cleese, who rose to fame with Monty Python, promised the show would be “an evening of well-honed anecdotes, psychoanalytical titbits, details of recent surgical procedures, and unprovoked attacks on former colleagues, especially Michael Palin”.
The white churchman's burden
Over at The American Spectator, Mark Tooley examines the continued pattern of condescension and patronization demonstrated by mainline Protestant denominations, in their dealings with their more conservative (and soon to be more numerous) African counterparts.
Liberal church activists are reluctant to acknowledge that African Christianity has a firm mind of its own, preferring condescendingly to portray it as primitive and easily manipulated by conservative U.S. religionists. It is true that much of African Christianity is new, somewhat similar to fast growing, early American frontier revivalism in its earnest faith, populism, and strong sense of the supernatural. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia of 2001, Africa was less than 10 percent Christian in 1900 but was over 45 percent Christian by 2000. (This compares to Islam’s growth in African from 32 percent to 40 percent.) About 20 percent of the world’s Christians now live in Africa, and rates of active church attendance are higher in Africa than in much of old Christendom. One Congolese bishop estimated that more Congolese are in a United Methodist Church on a typical Sunday than in all the United States.
From C. S. Lewis
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” (From “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” paragraph 8, from God in the Dock [Eerdmans, 1970]. p. 292.)
Picture credit: Getty Images.