October 20, 2012 @ 7:58 am | Filed under:
Links 
From our sunset walk the other night.
Heading out soon to sign books at the California Reading Association conference, but before I go, some gems to share:
Kindred spirit Sarah Elwell on Huck Finn:
I love Huck so much, I want to just hug anyone else who loves him too. Specifically, I love that other people appreciate Huck, are fond of him, are proud of him – part of the human experience of love. Everyone who reads Huckleberry Finn, and feels like I do about the boy, has know the same love I have felt, and that connects us on a profound level.
Author/illustrator Jon Klassen on I Want My Hat Back (which we loved):
In a way, it’s a story about empathy or lack of empathy. The idea with the rabbit was capturing indifference. The characters’ expressions barely change with just some movement of their eyes. If the rabbit is too characterised, then he becomes too cute. If he shows no reaction, then it’s okay to want consequences for him. When you’re a kid and you’re being picked on, this is the big question: what do you do when you actually find the person who’s done something wrong to you and they’re indifferent? Amoral. They’re blank. The bear can’t talk to the rabbit and can’t reason with him. So the only thing he can think of doing is to eat him. I’m not endorsing it but it’s what you can feel like doing!
Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon—add your recs in the Mr. Linky.
I loved this post by my fellow GeekMom Judy Berna about a major development in the world of prosthetic limbs:
Residual limbs often change in volume. Heat, humidity, weight loss, weight gain…. There are many reasons a socket on a prosthetic leg might not fit correctly. When I take long car rides it’s not uncommon for me to take my leg off and throw it in the back seat. It gets too tight when I sit for too long.
When I walk a lot, ride my bike, or am generally very active, my residual limb shrinks. If I’m extra good about watching what I eat and drop a few pounds, my leg shrinks. I’ve even noticed that when I’m sick for more than a day or two, my leg will temporarily shrink.
To those of us in developed countries, the answers are easier. If I have a volume change in my leg (like losing weight and keeping it off…. I’ve heard rumors that can happen) I can just schedule a five-minute visit to my prosthetist. With a few socket adjustments, I’m once again comfortable. For a Haitian farmer, it’s not so easy. Once his limb changes shape or volume, he’s out of luck. If he needs adjustments, there is no local prosthetist to tweak his fit. He’s left living with a leg that isn’t comfortable and eventually unusable. Joe couldn’t stop thinking about the Haitian amputees he’d left behind and wondering how he could help them have a better quality of life.
A few years later Joe found himself on the ski chair lift, taking a call from a patient as he took in the mountain views. His patient desperately needed one of those five-minute adjustments before she left town later that day. But for that to happen Joe would have to cut short his ski date on a blue bird powder day and drive all the way back down the mountain, just for a five-minute tweak. Once again, this time for more selfish reasons, he wished his amputee patients could adjust their own leg sockets.
And then he got an idea…
October 18, 2012 @ 6:48 pm | Filed under:
Books In bed at night I’ve been reading a few pages of Mark Twain’s Roughing It, an account (mostly true) of his journey through the Wild West in the 1860s. I can only read a few pages at a time because to continue longer would almost certainly be to drive my poor husband out of the room—I cannot help laughing out loud. Two, three times a paragraph. It’s ridiculous. The laughing, I mean. Scott is wonderfully understanding about my ongoing love affair with Twain; it helps that Huckleberry Finn is one of Scott’s own favorite books, and we agree that it contains one of the finest moments in American literature.
(Longtime readers of Bonny Glen may recall that Huck was a very serious contender for the actual, real-life name of my youngest child. We made it his blog name instead. Which means, now that I think about it, more people call him that than the name on his birth certificate.)
Anyhow, Roughing It. Twain at his best: capturing a landscape and its people in the most vivid, lively manner—and hilariously, but that goes without saying. Here’s one of the passages that made me giggle—in this case, not so much because of the manner of expression (usually it’s his turns of phrase that slay me) but because of the unbelievable (and yet apparently true) ridiculousness of his having followed through on the impulse to commit what he calls a ‘boyish prank’ and a court of law might very well term ‘reckless endangerment’:
On the summit we overtook an emigrant train of many wagons, many tired men and women, and many a disgusted sheep and cow.
In the wofully dusty horseman in charge of the expedition I recognized John —. Of all persons in the world to meet on top of the Rocky Mountains thousands of miles from home, he was the last one I should have looked for. We were school-boys together and warm friends for years. But a boyish prank of mine had disruptured this friendship and it had never been renewed. The act of which I speak was this. I had been accustomed to visit occasionally an editor whose room was in the third story of a building and overlooked the street. One day this editor gave me a watermelon which I made preparations to devour on the spot, but chancing to look out of the window, I saw John standing directly under it and an irresistible desire came upon me to drop the melon on his head, which I immediately did. I was the loser, for it spoiled the melon, and John never forgave me and we dropped all intercourse and parted, but now met again under these circumstances.
We recognized each other simultaneously, and hands were grasped as warmly as if no coldness had ever existed between us, and no allusion was made to any. All animosities were buried and the simple fact of meeting a familiar face in that isolated spot so far from home, was sufficient to make us forget all things but pleasant ones, and we parted again with sincere “good-bye” and “God bless you” from both.
December 13, 2008 @ 12:51 pm | Filed under:
Books Scott and I (especially Scott) have a great fondness for Huckleberry Finn—the character and the book. Fondness, respect, admiration. It’s funny that whenever I’m asked to name my favorite authors, I never think to include Mark Twain among their number. Yet I have only to read a paragraph, a sentence even, of his work, and I’m reminded what a prominent position he actually holds on the list.
I’m not alone. Roger Ebert, in a lyrical, hilarious, and touching piece about his longtime friend Bill Nack (“Perform a Concert in Words“), speaks with great enthusiasm of Twain’s singular gifts:
I still have the first real book I ever read…It is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The inscription says, “To Roger from Uncle Bill, Christmas 1949.” I was halfway into second grade.
My grandmother, Anna B. Stumm, said, “Do you think Roger can read that, Bill?”
Uncle Bill said, “Bud, can you read?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then he can read it.”
I lay down on my stomach on the living room rug and started reading. I hardly stopped. “That boy always has his nose in a book,” my Aunt Mary said. “Mary, he’s reading,” my Aunt Martha said. I didn’t know a lot of the words, but the words I did know were a lot more interesting than “Run, Spot, run!” and I picked up new ones every time through, because I read it over and over for a year, getting to the end and turning straight back to “You don’t know me without you have read a book by Mr. Mark Twain…” It was the best book I had ever read.
Snip—but do go read the snipped part, which contains Twain’s blisteringly funny critique of James Fenimore Cooper’s work. For that matter, read Ebert’s entire post, which is full of gems. He continues with a quote from Huckleberry Finn:
Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale under-side of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest — fst! it was as bright as glory, and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs — where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.
How did you think Mark Twain wrote? Four sentences. The fourth one 179 words long. As a boy, I thought it was the realest thunderstorm I had ever seen. It plays like Beethoven. Mark Twain introduced America to its vernacular. Not how we speak, but how we caress and feel words. Before him, there were great writers like Poe and Melville, who I still read with love. But I sit on the porch steps next to Sam Clemens in his rocking chair, and he speaks in the voice of his Hannibal childhood–straight and honest, observant and cynical, youthful but wise, idealistic and disappointed, always amused, and sometimes he rolls the words down stairs–where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know. They bounce themselves right into poetry.
The long sentence isn’t a stunt. Thunderstorms do seem to sustain themselves forever and then suddenly lull and regather. The flashes and claps punctuate the constant rolling uneasiness. I don’t know if you can describe one in short sentences. That was the limitation of Hemingway’s style. “Grumbling, rumbling, tumbling” when it comes is not an effect, but like all good descriptions simply the best way to say it, evoking the way storms wander away from us, still in turmoil. Look how he uses fst! to break the flow.
Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. The word was throughout is always better than the word were, and keeps Huck’s voice in view. The remarkable thing is that we accept this poetic evocation as the voice of an illiterate boy. Darkened up is better than darken, and darkened down would be horrible. Lighten is the right word, perhaps never before used like this, allowing him to avoid the completely wrong thunder and lightning, without having to write the pedestrian and there was thunder and lightning. It keeps it in Huck’s voice. An English teacher who corrects lighten should be teaching a language he doesn’t know. And look at these words: It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely…No, don’t look at them. Get a musician to compose for it. Notice how lovely softens the blue-black and nods back to it soothingly.
It isn’t merely Twain’s language that makes him a master, however; it’s his understanding of human nature, and his honesty in writing about people as they really are. I recently read blogger and newsman Fred Clark’s entire page-by-page review of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind (no mean feat, that; Clark spent some four years critiquing the book in weekly posts on his blog, Slacktivist, and his shrewd and informed insights are well worth your time). In one post Clark hits upon exactly what it is about Huck Finn that Scott and I so admire:
Jesus was always saying this kind of thing: You want to live? Die to yourself. You want to be first? Be last. Want to come out on top? Head for the bottom. Want to win? Surrender.
You want to get saved? Get lost.
Which brings us to what is, for my money, the greatest scene of salvation and redemption in literature:
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:”All right, then, I’ll go to Hell” — and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. … And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
This is, of course, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The piece of paper that poor Huck tore up was the letter he had written to turn in his friend, the escaped slave Jim. Huck had been taught, and he sincerely believed, that doing so was his duty as a good Christian (and as a good, law-abiding American). He had been taught, and he sincerely believed, that failing to do so would damn his soul to Hell.
Study that a minute. Turning in Jim would condemn his friend to years of misery in this world, but his own immortal soul would be damned for eternity — and what are a few mortal years compared with that? Weigh such a choice on the scales that [LaHaye and Jenkins] use in Left Behind and Huck’s choice is clear. But that is not the choice he makes.
“All right, then, I’ll go to Hell!” he says. And the angels in heaven rejoice.
