Skip to main content

Mark Twain

I'm listening to Mark Chernow's book about Twain. Clemens is idealistic and doesn't like racism until he goes to New York, and then he becomes an out of town rube from Hannibal Missouri, and racist. He rejects a religious life because they support slavery. He's a prankster, joker, comedian, story teller. He works as a printer, but he's fairly internerant. His brother found a slave on an island, and that is the basis for Jim in Huck Finn, the point of listening to this book is to give some background to understand a rereading that book. 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. Samuel refused to go to school. His mother was the story teller and held the family's emotion. The family's fortunes would go up and down and at one point his mother had to cook for a family so the family could have housing. The father was a humorless judge, among other things. Clemens remembers one joke in his life with his father. His father got sick and died young.




Links:

New York Times review by Dwight Garner. There's a beautiful picture of his wife and 3 daughters. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Manet and Degas

  Brilliant video explaining the exhibit. Go to the Met and see the exhibit! It's really quite special.  In the last gallery the painting this sketch is based off of, of the execution of a Mexican president. The painting has been cut into sections, and the surviving Degas has reassembled them. NY Times review
Post a Comment
Read more

The case for Harris

Motley Kamuka Blog endorses Kamala Harris. In general, Trump just wants to lower taxes on the rich, and do nothing, sell whatever influence he can to line his pockets. Apparently the emoluments clause in the constitution has no teeth. Harris has a set of ideas about policy that are fairly middle of the road. In most countries she's would be seen as a centrist. Spin about her radical agendas are exaggerated.  I'm not sure how he got past " grab them by the pussy ", but he did and here we are. Women: Obviously the idea of giving women pregnancy tests at the borders of the state, and then if they come back and don't have a baby, they go to jail, isn't really what most women want. Pick Harris.  I understand if you think abortion is murder, maybe you've been told that by the Catholic church, which has the same ideal of Buddhism that you don't kill--so follow your religion for yourself. Not everyone is Christian or Buddhist or even has a religion. Women are ...
Post a Comment
Read more

AOC

Dark Brandon meet Dark Alex. I see her advising the republicans to stick to their guns and never compromise. They don’t want to do anything, only obstruct. So they don’t actually need to be unified. Chaos isn’t organized. This is fine. Read all about it from Heather Cox Richardson , a historian who covers current events. "As their policies threatened to lose voters by concentrating wealth upward and hollowing out the middle class, Republicans increasingly warned that minority voters wanted socialism and were destroying the nation to get it. Trump rode that narrative to power, and now tearing down the current government is the idea that drives the Republican base." While we're at it, here's another funny photo from the Onion: And then: I listened to the Times podcast about George Santos . He basically lied about, I don't know, 80% of his resume, and has a mysterious $700k in his "corporation" which has no clients. So he's a Russian or Chinese plant, o...
Post a Comment
Read more