Buy My Friend's Book

. . . or I'll kill this dog. (No I won't. Please don't cancel me, PETA.)

The book is Huckleberry Finn In Love And War: The Lost Journals. (You have to admit, that's a lot of title for the money.) The author is an old friend of mine.

If you happen to have Kindle Unlimited, you can download the e-book for free; if not, the download will cost $9.95 (which strikes me as steep, but blame the publisher, not the author). The dead-tree paperback is $14.95, which is closer to reasonable.

If you're into Mark Twain and/or the Civil War, I think there's a good chance you'll like it. If not, probably not. It took some chutzpah for the author to get in the ring with Sam Clemens. If you want to judge whether he's got the chops, there are a couple of excerpts below the "Read more." Also, you can read the first seven chapters at the Amazon link; they mostly take place during the Mexican-American War.

Shelley

Percy Bysshe "Please" Shelley wrote a poem. I have heard the poem and liked it but never paid attention to the author thereof.

You may be familiar with Mark Twain's critical takedown of James Fennimore Cooper's work, it is well worth reading, although on the point of "using the wrong word" the same can be said about Twain. The English language changes rapidly enough that what Cooper thought was the correct word sounded odd to Twain, and now a hundred years on, the same can be said about Twain. But other than that his criticism is well aimed.

I recently read Twain's takedown of Shelley's biographer Edward Dowdin entitled In Defence of Harriet Shelley. Twain, being a plain spoken midwesterner cuts right to the chase and calls out Dowdin's denial of the facts of Harriet Shelley's life and Dowdin's inability to point out just what a bad person Shelley was. He was a walking, talking horrorshow of a human being. Nothing he did in life was defensible. That he died young, either on purpose or in an accident is actually a saving grace - he was no longer able to abuse others with his charm and wit.

While Twain's account of Shelley's life is not linear enough for me to follow I did read the Wikipedia page about Shelley. That cleared up some of the timeline for me and helped me with the names of the players involved. What a slagheap of humanity. Blighters, one and all.

Here is the poem - for all of his moral failings the boy did have a way with words. I turned on the CC so I could understand it - Bryan "Comrade" Cranston does not enunciate well:

Link.

I think that poem applies to Shelley's life, to Obama, and countless others. But that's just my opinion.

Hey, the big dummy died in Italy, so why not?

Did someone say baseball?

Tom Wolfe has died

He was 87 and lived a good long life. He accomplished much and I will allow others to laud his work and write his accolades. 

I first encountered his writing when I was living in Woodstock NY where I found a copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in my B-I-L's house. I read it. That was different. It was a story about  places I had only heard of but never been to - San Francisco, La Honda, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and so on. But I started my journey there and within a year I had actually seen Furthur in person and I had traveled a bit more. Within 15 years I was riding my bicycle up Old La Honda grade where the Hells Angels once rode their choppers to get to Kesey's place.

A few years ago his daughter graduated from a nearby university and Mr. Wolfe spoke there. I attended his talk and the first thing that struck me was his Richmond accent. Who knew? Makes perfect sense as he was born in Richmond in 1931 and he carried his roots with him throughout his life.

After the talk I got in line and got to meet him I had him autograph my copy of From Bauhaus to Our House, my favorite book on architecture, and I got to talk to him for ninety seconds. I asked him who his favorite current architect is and he said "Michael Graves". Well, what are you going to do - you can't argue with someone in a white suit so I nodded and said "Yeah, he does good work" or something to that effect. So from then on he was "My close personal friend Tom Wolfe".

Was Tom Wolfe our latest Mark Twain? Or, how did American writers go from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe - maybe that's something that could be explored. I am currently reading Twain's autobiography and I will say this - those two dressed in a very similar way.

I am only a reader, not a scholar, but I do know this - we are an amazing country to have produced two authors of that caliber in less than 200 years.

By the Mark Twain

As I have mentioned before I bought the complete works of Mark Twain for $1.06 and loaded them on my Kindle. I have been reading them steadily all year and he has been traveling all over the world, or at least that's how it seems to me as I go from book to book. He tramped through German, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. He went to the Sandwich Islands. He covered Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. Everywhere he goes he writes with wit and insight. I learn more from his writing than I did when I was over there. He went to India, visited the Taj Mahal. Then on to South Africa, and after 13 months he completed his circumnavigation of the earth.

There are two or three versions of Life on the Mississippi in this collection and yesterday I read about steamboat racing - that was something that was always kind of on the periphery of my understanding as a youth, and now I have learned a bit more about it, specifically the race between the Robert E. Lee and The Natchez, in 1870. And while nostalgia ain't what it used to be, I had a notion to call my brother and ask him if he still has the plastic model of the Robt. E. Lee steamboat that my father put together 60 years ago or so. Turns out he does and he sent me this picture of how it looks today:

It's not in bad shape after spending decades sitting on various shelves. Here a link to the story of the original ship. I can't even imagine what riding on one was like, much less piloting something like that in the wilds of the Mississippi as Samuel Clemens did. I also can't figure out what they did with all that cotton in St. Louis, but such are the mysteries of life.

In succeeding chapters Mr. Clemens tells the story of how his brother Henry died when the boat he was on blew up. Very tragic story, and not a story for the faint of heart.

But back to the storyline we have been following today -- since we have already reviewed Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, at this point there is no way that anyone can be offended, triggered, put off, upset or otherwise require a safe space by any racially insensitive role played by Mickey Rooney. His Mr. Yunioshi is far more offensive than this, right?

Cue SJW outrage!

Say, is that Lena Horne or Judy Garland? My eyesight is not too good, I can't tell from here.

Now that I review this post I find that I am offended. I hereby denounce myself for knowing history.

I never eat food*

...due to profound food allergies, so I don't usually post recipes. But while reading A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain I found a recipe I simply could not pass up. Top notch writing, and the food sounds divine, to wit:

RECIPE FOR AN ASH-CAKE

Take a lot of water and add to it a lot of coarse Indian-meal and about
a quarter of a lot of salt. Mix well together, knead into the form of
a "pone," and let the pone stand awhile--not on its edge, but the other
way. Rake away a place among the embers, lay it there, and cover it an
inch deep with hot ashes. When it is done, remove it; blow off all the
ashes but one layer; butter that one and eat.

N.B.--No household should ever be without this talisman. It has been
noticed that tramps never return for another ash-cake.

That's my kind of eats right there, simple, wholesome, high fiber, plenty of carbon - and butter. Mmm, butter...

His pie recipe and description of German coffee are also excellent.  Makes me thankful that I avoid the stuff.

*Not true, I exaggerate a bit. But not by much.

Twain mentioned this song, too. I had never heard it, but he liked it. Here you go.

Etymology bugs me

Around here people use the word "stob" to mean stick or fencepost. I had never heard it prior to moving to this area, and while reading Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad he wrote about the origin of the "buchstaben", which he says means "alphabet" in German, and is based on the words "beech stick". I have done some research and there may be some truth in what he said, as Buche is German for beech, as in tree, and both Buchstabe and Buch, which means book, derive from the name of that tree, with stabe meaning staff or stick. So that seems somewhat settled.

However, "stob" is Scottish for broken stick or stump. Sounds similar, but maybe CL can shed some light on whether or not they are cognates. Track down the family tree of that branch of the language, as it were.

These are my bamboo stobs from last year - they are the sprouts of giant Japanese bamboo that I planted in my backyard - in theory they will eventually grow to 60 feet tall. 

I am enjoying A Tramp Abroad - Twain's humor holds up even after all these years. I like his stories from the golden age of Alpinism, and it's almost enough to make me want to go back to Switzerland just to see the Matterhorn. I saw Mont Blanc when I was there in 1992, and it is pretty impressive, but the Matterhorn has a very different shape and a lot of lore. Inspired by Twain I have been reading the history of mountain climbing in the Alps. In years past have read a bit about other mountains, like In the Hall of the Mountain King about McKinley and some books about the Himalayas but years ago I gave up the idea of doing any technical climbing. Heck, even hiking would be a chore these days, but I still enjoy the idea of being in the mountains.

That's the cover of Twain's book, showing him with his gear, including his Alpenstock, which was a precursor of a climbing ax. So besides enjoying the humor I am also learning stuff - words, and stuff like that.

We are getting a bit of winter weather here now, but I am almost certain that no glaciers will form in the immediate future. For that I am thankful, as I have no ice at hand.

Bassoons! Tympani! Pizzicato strings! What more does one need?

Löwendenkmal

I bought the complete works of Mark Twain for my Kindle for $1.06, including tax. How and why I have a Kindle is a long story, suffice it to say, it was not my idea, but now that I have it I like it a lot. Imagine having the entire output of a writer as excellent at Mark Twain in a tiny little device. Ain't technology wonderful?

So far I have read Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It, the latter which I can highly recommend - his knowledge and stories about mining and the Comstock lode and life in Virginia City Nevada are funny and educational. The fact that the stories he wrote 150 years ago still make me laugh is amazing to me -- his insight into human nature and his ability to find humor in everyday situations is fascinating. He was truly a genius.

Now I am reading Tramps Abroad - he has just walked around Germany, including a walk through the Black Forest and the way he described the houses there made me do some research -- how about that -- he nailed it. What a guy -- he had a good eye and he could write about what he saw. Impressive.

I am currently up to his tramping through Switzerland -- he was in Lucerne and saw the lion that was carved into the living rock as a memorial to the Swiss Guards who died fighting in Paris. It is a very sad memorial, a very expressive piece of sculpture and his description, once again, is spot on.

However, being Twain, he uses that great art as a source of humor while describing the conversations he had and overheard on a steamer roaming around a Swiss lake. The American he describes sounds like a guy we have all encountered at one time or another. So from a very serious, somber subject to laughing with and at a boor -- Mark Twain proves once again that he was a true American Treasure.

I'll wrap this up now with one final story -- years ago I visited his house in Hartford Connecticut. It is a beautiful house in a town that is now so sketchy that I would probably not revisit that area on a bet.

I went with Ferde Grofe - because he was a brilliant American too.

The New Yorker: How America Learned to Hear Itself Talk

"Twain earned local notoriety cranking out newspaper columns in Nevada and San Francisco (often for Harte, whom he had befriended), but in 1865 he had his nationwide breakthrough. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which Twain had heard improvised by a backwoods forty-niner during a prospecting trip, is a somewhat inexplicable comic anecdote about a man who gets cheated in a bet about his pet frog. But the point of the story is all in the telling. Twain assumes the voice of a grizzled, plausibly drunken old miner who buttonholes an unfortunate visitor and weaves his way through the shaggy-dog tale. Something about the story, Tarnoff writes, “spelled the beginning of the end of the old guard in American letters: the decline of a genteel elite that looked to Europe for its influences and the rise of a literature that drew its inspiration from more native sources.”...



"Twain’s innovation was to invert the expected form of narrative, so that unrefined idiomatic English—what Tarnoff repeatedly calls “living speech”—dominated the storyline rather than being slotted into the framework of distinguished prose like specimens in a Victorian hall of wonders. When Twain assumed the gentleman-scholar affect, it was as satire. (This is the strategy of his first book, “The Innocents Abroad,” which takes the perspective of bumbling middle Americans trying to appear sophisticated as they travel through pretentious Old Europe.) He was happiest when attempting a kind of inspired mimicry, touched with artful exaggeration, of the myriad voices in the American cacophony." (read more)

The Awful Chemical Language

I was often asked to explain chemical nomenclature in the context of such and such intellectual property law matter and one day I surprised a trial lawyer — an elderly gent — with my knowledge. He was actually annoyed at first, perhaps because he felt hostage to knowledge which he did not possess. Actually, he probably just resented that I could bill time for knowledge which I already possessed — just like he could. Had he known what it had cost me to acquire my art, he would also have known that it would break any law firm to buy it. Meanwhile, I had been hard at work learning legal terminology for several weeks, and although I had made good progress, it had been accomplished under great difficulty and annoyance. But he was greatly impressed and after I had explained a while, he said my explanation of the chemical language was very rare, possibly "unique" and he wanted to add me to his litigation team.

Friedrich Wöhler, the father of modern organic chemistry, already remarked in 1835:

Organic chemistry just now is enough to drive one mad. It gives me the impression of a primeval forest full of the most remarkable things, a monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way of escape, into which one may well dread to enter.

A person who has not studied chemistry — especially organic chemistry — can form no idea of what a perplexing language describes that thicket. Or perhaps they can, but can come up with no logical explanation for why things are so. I aim here to simplify.