http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/books/review/Keillor-t.html?_r=1&hp
Has Sam Clemens hoodwinked us, and having a good laugh in some other dimension?
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Hi, there rantbo(2),
It was Hal Holbrook who made a fortune of Sam Clemens/Mark Twain.
I used to love life on the River, when I lived in East Wobegone and other places like New Orleans where we just took it for granted until that was a mistake. You can never go back again.
My godmother being Irish had a buddy, not that kind as she was an old maid, his name was Garvey, Irish too, head of the local Democrats. But, she took me to see his new house which he had built on the point of land jutting out into the Mississippi, and as he made us steaks on his kitchen-grill and the tinkling of ice-cubes was heard in tall Summer glasses, I sat there at Sundown looking upriver as the barges came down and still mark twain.
If I recalled at the time that Reagan was just beginning the disaster era, how I had once figured it was the most beautiful adventure to cook on a river boat making the run between Cape Girardeau,Missouri and New Orleans, with time off on each end, something of which my mother would never have approved, but I so loved New Orleans where I walked to the river each day for my grocery shopping in the French Market when there was no refrigeration.
I wonder what Garrison Keillor would have thought of the adventure when about twenty years before sitting at Garvey's watching the evening sun go down, two schoolgirls who went to that teacher's college, a girls' school, nowadays known as Downer (that's the real name) and one of whom we used to entertain because she was far from home in Sweden.
But of course, the girls also read Mark Twain as this was their English year in the Swedish academic system. I had the displeasure of meeting the Literature Teacher at Downer some years prior to being married. They put the most hapscape guys in charge of teaching Literature in Girls' Schools but it makes good movies. He was one of our fellow residents at Pillsbury Manor where Pete Chalifont, who had been Louis Armstrong's manager, was our landlord.
Of course, the girls, the two who met each other at the Teachers' College, wanted to do something adventurous for their summer vacation while still in America, having finished their junior year, they believed Mark Twain and his stories. So they went out there to East Wobegone and got themselves a raft of sorts and started down the Mississippi.
It was a disaster. In the middle of the night, they had to be rescued from the River, this is slow tide season but, life is as Mark Twain described it and they were in the way of river-traffic that uses bull-horns and shout-outs and bells to mark twain and have to get out the flood lights when something is there that shouldn't be there. They were put up someplace for the night (the girls) and made the newspapers and the television news-stories which meant they were famous and they could go on to California to see more of the state before going back across the Atlantic again. Until then, our occasional Swedish guest was offered a job by comedian Dick Gregory out in San Francisco. And that is the way life is, as written about by Mark Twain.
Do you suppose that Garrison Keillor had any idea that somebody wanted to bowdlerize those stories and wipe the nigger off of Jim, when G.K. reviewed for The New York Times? I heard Melissa Lacewell Perry, formerly Melissa Harris Lacewell ( I can't keep her names straight anymore!) give a cultural lesson to Lawrence O'Donnell the other night in which she said it is perfectly and historically correct to keep Nigger Jim in the high-school literature class because Mark Twain said so; and I agree with her. Melissa said furthermore all the kids today are culturally aware, it is all around them in their music, the movies, tv, etc. so why not respect Samuel Clemens knew what he was talking about. lanssakes.
