Sailing Down the Mississippi with Huck and Jim

Huckleberry Finn is the first modern American novel. No it dasnt Huck. Yes it is Jim. Why is that? Because in the rough colloquialisms of eighteenth century America is the country as seen by two nederwells that is really all Americans are. Even though we currently have our head so far up the Internet we can't see light ,there is still this natural world that is America and we lament for having lost so much. We stare out the window at the sunlight and the storm clouds approaching the way Huck watches a storm over the river and sees the trees in the distance, swaying in the storm wind.

Peculiarly American. We are children of the country and see it with a childs eye. I had to walk back from a flat tire today on my bike way out in the country. Three mile walk past barns with and empty silos with the hot tar sticky underfoot. Cars whooshed by. People glued to their cellphones. The same way Huck and Jim watch life whoosh by on the Mississippi, people glued to their commerce, their destination.  But we have a view of the country from the underside. We get to watch all these people and see the big river and the big sky that Huck stares up to and smokes under the constellations of creation

These moments are in our soul.  Much the same as we yearn to be in the sun and kick off our shoes and walk along the beach. Huck and Jim are modern Americans dissatisfied with  the powers that be and the economic system that has used and abused them. Jim the product of a slave system and Huck the orphan who inherits six thousand dollars and never sees a dime of it. Widow Douglas cannot reform him and he pushes back against bourgeois life even though he doesn't even know what it is. Same as the Americans  vaguely dissatisfied with the trappings of bourgeois success...now more than ever.

But even the structure of the novel is modern. Short chapters of character driven scenes. First chapter we get background and are introduced to Hucks father who  is his tormentor. He occupies the lower strata's of eighteenth century society and forces Huck to run for his life and begin his journey down the river. This is all set in motion in the first four chapters. No meandering, just let's get on with it. And finally there is the patois of Jim and Huck which is the way we like our books and movies. Authentically spoken voices of the common folk. And funny, really funny, the wry humor of the country.

You simply cannot write a modren  American novel and not owe a big debt to Mark Twain.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man blasts off this summer

Times Editorial Suggests Huck go to College

An Editorial in the New York Times written  by a  novelist suggests that Huckleberry Finn with it's Nword pedagogy hit the road and go to college. Her rational is one that African American students could not decipher the onslaught of NWord idioms and that the racism of the nineteenth century to the IPhone hip hop generation just simply would not compute nor should it. African American students should wait until they get older and by the time they are in college they will be able to decipher literary intent from out and out racism or at least they would understand verisimilitude and all it's connotations. This is idiocy.

Surprising to hear a writer sign on to this kind of have it your way literature. I would like my Huck Finn sans Nword and hold the mayo and any other characters that smack of prejudice. I hope her novels are as ubiquitous in their appeal as cable television where there is a channel for every viewer. It would seem the essence of literature must again bow to the fatuous demands of Twain scholars and novelists who write politically correct essays for the Times. What is more PC than saying yes this is offensive, lets hold off until the laboratory of college where the adults can dissect this ante-bellum sickness.

This is exactly the type of thinking that got the scholar revved up enough to think that because we run around with smart phones and IPADs that we can just delete the offensive material from literature and serve it up in the same way we download a tune for ninety nine cents. The novelist brings up the fact that African Americans hearing the same NWord spoken in their music will not be offended as much by the silent printed word of Mr. Twain. That it is quite fine for their contemporaries to sing the Nword, rap it, because this has been sanctioned, but the repetitive hurtful rants of Huckleberry Finn is just really a burlesque show of racist minstrels and white people whooping it up. Rubbish.

To the novelist who wrote this editorial, I would simply say this. Literature stands. Period. If thy book offends thee pluck it out does not apply to art. You should know this. If a high school decides not to teach Huckleberry Finn then so be it, but that is a disservice to the student. Literature is not about our time. It is not about our twenty first sensibility. It is about saying what cannot be said otherwise. Literature defines things we cannot and brings it down to us through the ages. It is an intellectual exercise that informs the same way a painting or watching a great ballet performance or music does. There is something there we cannot lay our finger on, yet it speaks to us.

To say that African American High school Students cannot handle Huckleberry Finn or until college is demeaning to them. Worse, it cheats the students from the literary experience of reading the first modern American novel. Literature should not be held hostage to the winds of contemporary taste.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in February

How To Read Twain's Massive Autobiography

Ok. So you bought the monster book for the monster price (34 smackers). The book is so physically big I can't put it in my back pack, but carry it like the old testament under my arm. So you transport this big bastard from coffee house to train to bus to wherever you are going. It is so big I let it ride in the back seat of my car as an extra passenger. Strapped in of course so it doesn't kill me if I can get in accident by knocking off my head. When I pull up to a coffee house I reach in the back like I am bringing in a toddler and carry the book cradled to my breast. Well, you get the picture.

Then you sit down and open the tome of tomes and wade through the editor's explanations that Twain started and stopped his autobiography over a period of twenty years and this is how they stitched it together from notes and typists and essays and secretaries who listened to the great man ramble and that if you put manuscript 56A and connect it to manuscript 100C from 1901 then you get a continuity that Twain really wanted and that was why this version is the authentic Twain biography and....By now you have lost your scholarly interest in the process and really want to read some Twain.

So it begins. It is interesting historically to hear the thoughts of a nineteenth century man who is witty and observant and who rambles on about all sorts of things but then you find yourself reading about his thoughts about a typesetting machine or his servants or the taxi in London or Grants stoic manner when dealing with publishers and you start to....drift....zzzzzz. Now being Mark Twain you rally again and that is when you begin to find a method...you, well, you...skim.

Now skimming is an art. You want to find the real nuggets of gold and maybe it is all gold but it is the twenty first century and you really don't have all this time to read about making a bust of General Grant and how the good general posed for the artist and, and....zzzzz...skim! Now you are to a section on Twain's thoughts on writing. Interesting. Very interesting. You read that and hope for more and read on and on and now you are in Europe and Twain is ruminating on the difference between Europe and the United States and you start to slow down...down...down...and so you...skim!

Blasphemous. I know. But the book has a lot of gold and maybe if you read every word you would be a better man or woman, but for me, I am after the Twain nuggets,so, I....SKIM!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in February

3/5ths OF A Person, SLAVE, or that darn NWORD!

Seems the 'publicans don't like the word SLAVE that darn Twain scholar used for the NWORD and they don't like 3/5ths OF A PERSON neither. They just read the Constitution in the Senate and conveniently skated right over the part about a slave being 3/5 of a person which is exactly what that Twain scholar decided the NWORD in Huck Finn should be replaced with: SLAVE. Good thing that Twain scholar studied up because I'm sure he wouldnt' want to use a whole person when he can use three fifths. I wonder how much of a person an NWORD is? Makes you think don't it.

But the 'publicans don't believe there were SLAVES no how. Seems they forgot the part in the Constitution that said if a slave escaped up north to a free state then they were not automatically free. In fact Dred Scott proved they could be sent back down South. So I guess they were still 3/5ths, NWORD, or SLAVE. Seems we just don't like to think a-tall about our history and we can't decide what word we like. We would just assume it didn't happen except them pesky books keep laying around with those bad words that we sure don't want our highschool kiddies to read with their IPODS of Kanye and the boys. Lord knows they are virgin ears that might be scorched by them 3/5 people.

You know come to think of it maybe we should just get rid of the NWORD altogether and go with 3/5. Kind of has a ring to it and not as clumsy as NWORD. Course now the 'publicans don't seem to like 3/5 neither so that won't work. And SLAVE dont' work. And the NWORD don't work. How about we just call em 7/8? Its a little higher than 3/5 and don't have none of them slave connotations that the Twain scholar likes to use for everybody. We could just put 7/8 where ever an NWORD existed and we could maybe put that in the Constitution to show our liberality. Then 'publicans could read that and say if a 7/8 person escaped to a free state and picked up an 1/8 then they could become a whole.  Just to show they are forward thinking group of people. Huh. Wonder if that makes em' free?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man should blast off in February

Twain and TRIGGER

When I was a boy in Baltimore i picked up a book called NIGGER by Dick Gregory. At the time there were riots in the city since King had been shot and I had been mugged a few times by kids from the very tough inner city school. Strife Strife Strife. My parents were big time Kennedy liberals from Virginia and my mom taught in the  inner city schools and everything just seemed to be falling apart. Robert Kennedy's assassination, Kings, Wallace. The Vietnam war seemed to be the fire behind everything. And in the middle of all this on the paperback rack in the Enoch Pratt library was Dick Gregory's book, NIGGER. I checked the book out under a librarians horn rimmed stare.
 
 I read NIGGER on our porch and on the roof of our house. I didn't want anyone to see the book because I was sure there would be punishment. NIGGER told of Dick Gregory's childhood in Chicago and his struggle to become a comic while enduring incredible racism. He was jailed, beaten, threatened, evicted, and all through it he just kept on going. By the end he was marching with King and others and then he wrote this book with the inscription to his mother that said if she heard this word again, then maybe they had published his book.

The thing that fascinated me about Dick Gregory's book, NIGGER, was the way he described his ordeal as a poor black boy in the ghetto. It was just so heartfelt and dead on in it's brutality. The way he shined shoes and got kicked in the mouth when he dared to look at a white woman. The countless times he was beaten by his mothers boyfriend Big Prez and the way he just kept on with his dream of becoming somebody. The way he started to use humor to his advantage and how he broke into show business against incredible odds. By the end of the book I understood (as much as a ten year old can) why he named the book NIGGER. He told the story of that word.

 I had to special order Dick Gregory's book from the library to read it again. It seemed it was nowhere to be found. And when I picked up the book the librarian stared at me the same way. My wife and my kids stared at that title on our kitchen table. NIGGER. It seemed someone was shouting in the house. My wife turned the book over to it's less offensive back. I reread the book and tripped back to those hot Baltimore days and I was back there with Dick Gregory struggling in the ghetto again, driving through a snowstorm with his pregnant wife to get to a comedy club. Dick did his routine and was heckled many times during his show and then someone called him a NIGGER during his monologue. Gregory paused as the audience went quiet and turned and said, "did you hear that, that man? He just called me Roy Rodger's horse: TRIGGER! The audience broke up.

Even though Dick Gregory named his novel NIGGER, it seems we haven't learned a damn thing. We still have fools who think they know best about our past and want to do things like take the NIGGER out of Huckleberry Finn so high school students can read the book.  I will say it was hard to find Dick Gregory's book, but I was glad to see no one had renamed the book, TRIGGER, so high school students could read it. The book stands as NIGGER. So it should.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man should be out soon

You Can't take the N-WORD out of the Huckleberry

No sir. You cant. Cant do it. The N-WORD is as much a part of Huckleberry Finn as the Mississippi or Jim or Huck or the Duke or the King or the Widow or his drunken no good father. You can not take a piece out of the painting just because you don't like the color. Nor can you take a word from the book because you don't like the word. You just can't do it because you happen to be a Twain scholar (so called) in the year of our Lord 2011 and think that you have the right to tinker with someone else's book because you want high school students to read it. You dont' own that right and the faster you are dust the better.

Mr. Twain did not prefer the word slave over his colloquialism. It is not a matter of offence. Literature or art or books do not bow to the latest PC movement. If it did we would have no art, no books, no music. For literature cannot be made to bow to some man's idea he knows more than the author. He don't. He never did. He never will. The author made the book and it is stone for better or worse. Forget that the offending word now comes out nine year olds IPOD. It does. I have heard it more than once. Or that our most famous rappers broadcast that word the way you would say hello now. Forget all that. You do not tinker with a man's book who is not around to defend it.

But if Mr. Twain were here he would surely laugh and then he would be angry as hell. He cared about his words so much that in his autobiography he took out the commas and exclamation marks and little inflections his typist had put in for flow. In my second novel Tobacco Sticks I too used the NWORD. A man who listened to one of my readings with repetitive NWORDS came up to me at the end. I was very nervous as he was an African American. He nodded to me and said I liked your reading.  Now would he have liked it more if I had taken out the offending words? Should I care that he liked it? Or should a book stand as written regardless of the consequences?

Sad to say we will pass on and Huckleberry Finn will persevere. Our all important ultra self conscious sensibilities will pass on too. And mabye some boy or girl somewhere will pick up Mr. Twain's book or some adult and he or she will read it and laugh and be entertained and maybe offended and maybe cry and maybe throw the book down in disgust. But he or she should not be restricted from reading the book as it was written. Censorship of any kind is an insult to all and the gravest of insults to Mr. Twain's book. You just can't have your cake and eat it too. The man whose biography is selling so many copies the press cannot keep up would not condone such a bastardization. You just can't take the NWORD out of the Huckleberry and still have Huckleberry Finn. It just don't work that-a-way.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man should roll out this month