Censoring Twain

So, I recently saw a news story about a new bowdlerized edition of Mark Twain's classic THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN that's just out. Why would anyone censor what's widely considered the single greatest American novel? Because in portraying racists, like Pap Finn, Twain lets them rant and reveal their shortcomings out of their own mouths. Which means that some of the things his villains say are (and are meant to be) deeply offensive, as is the language they say it in. That those characters say such things, and in such language, is meant to demean them and undercut their position. But inevitably this means children that read the novel get exposed to some rough stuff. The new editor's solution? Remove the N-word and replace it with "slave" or some similar elocution throughout. Leaving aside the more-politically-correct-than-thou response of some who even object to the use of slave (they feel it's more respectful to say "enslaved person" -- as if Twain meant ignorant bigots to sound respectful!), I see their point but don't think bowdlerizing is the solution.

What I'd suggest is to follow the practice of Twain's own time. Twain was very fond of using a favorite profanity which cdn't be printed in books and papers in his day and so was indicated by an initial followed by a dash: d---.* Why not replace the offensive word in HUCK FINN with N+dash, just as news reports do as standard modern practice? Maybe someday we'd actually get to the point where a reader might genuinely not know what word this stood for. And that would be a happy day.

Even better would be to leave the text alone. If we're to assume that readers Huck's own age can't handle the use of racist language, wait until they're a little older to let them have the real book, not some watered-down version that distorts the reality the author was attempting to convey. Racism was ugly and to neutralize the ugliness of his portrayal of it distorts the picture. Twain famously maintained that the importance of using just the right word was the difference between lightning and a lightning bug; he deserves better than to be abandoned to the Bowdlers of the world.

--JDR

*this particular taboo was not broken until a half-century or so after HUCK FINN, in Clark Gable's closing line in GONE WITH THE WIND.

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The Day's Canto (Canto 5)

. . . on the barb of time.

The fire? always, and the vision always,

Ear dull, perhaps, with the vision, flitting

And fading at will . . .

--Ezra Pound [circa 1930]

UPDATE (Friday Jan. 7th)

I've turned off the comments, since several of the posters used the very word I'd carefully avoided. I'm simply not comfortable having what is, after all, a racist slur included in anything that has my name attached to, like this blog, whatever the context. I apologize to the posters, who to a man were thoughtful and well-informed; I hope they'll repeat their points on their own blogs, which I'd happily link to from here.

Also, after I'd posted, it occurred to me that I'd wound up agreeing with Tolkien's point of view, which probably won't surprise anyone who knows me. When discussing in OFS whether some of the more disturbing of the Brothers Grimm's tale shd be re-written to avoid exposing children to things like cannibalism, parents murdering their own children, & the like, Tolkien can down firmly on the side of no: keep the tales as they are, and if they're too strong for today's audience then hold them back until they're ready for them (cf. p. 48 of the Fleiger-Anderson edition, esp. the footnote at the bottom of the page). --JDR 1/7-11.

Blackbird Dying in the Dead of Night

So, recently I've been following the weird news out of Arkansas: thousands of red-winged blackbirds plummeting from the sky in Beebe, not far from Searcy, between Little Rock and Jonesburo. It's apparently co-incidental that the day before there'd been a massive fish-kill on the Arkansas River, since that was all the way over on the far side of the state, or that the next day there was a smaller similar sudden death (amounting to several hundred) of red-wing blackbirds, grackles, and starlings in SE Louisiana (down near Baton Rouge). So far the various explanations have been singularly lacking in plausibility -- so much so that you can actually hear the skepticism in the NPR reporter's voice (a rare thing in itself) when the Arkansas official explains that birds drop dead all the time from "stress".

Here's the initial story:

#1: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/01/04/132621511/arkansas-mysteries-why-did-thousands-of-fish-and-birds-suddenly-die

And here's a follow-up:

#2: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=132619466

--JDR

Mannin Veen

So, writing up my post about Breton music got me thinking about some other Celtic music, and in particular my favorite Manx music, an old folktune we played in band years ago, called Mannin Veen. I tried a few years back to find this, without success, but this time I found it pretty quickly -- suggesting that either there's a lot more available online now than just a few years ago, or that search engines have improved, or that I simply guessed better on how to spell the name this time around.

It turns out that what I liked so much when we played it in band is a 'tone poem'* that adapts four old Manx folksongs: "The Good Old Way", "The Manx Fiddler", "Sweet Water on the Common", and "The Harvest of the Sea". The tone poem compilation/orchestration is by Haydn Wood, a once-popular composer in the earlier parts of the twentieth century, and dates from as long ago as 1933 (and hence was already more than forty years old when the Magnolia High School Band tackled it).

The question now becomes, how to get it? Itunes has several versions available, but one is the Vaughn Williams piece and the others are somewhat syrupy performances. One online site ("The Sheet-Music-Store") has the sheet music available, but only if you buy the entire band score (all thirty-two parts); there doesn't seem to be a way of getting just, say, the clarinet part or the master (band director's) score. ArkivMusic.com, an invaluable source for out-of-the-way classical music (e.g., Joseph Holbrooke) has a recording of it on one cd, but again their version errs towards the softly symphonic.

A much better idea of what the piece should sound like comes from various entries on you-tube; here's the one that I thought sounds the best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUUGgeoN0uY

So, now I've found it again, but the search for a good recording I can put on my i-Pod or play on the stereo will continue for a while.

--John R.

current audiobook: The Gospel According to Luke.

current book: TROY AND HOMER

*not to be confused with the choral piece of the same name by Vaughn Wms

Lord Nann

So, some days you just can't find a Breton melody.

Last year, as part of my Kalamazoo paper, I did some work on Tolkien's "The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun", his reworking of the traditional Breton ballad Aotrou Nann hag ar Gorrigan ("Lord Nann and the Corrigan"), which comes from Vicomte Hersart de la Villemarque's BARZAZ-BREIZ. One of the things I found interesting was that in the first English translation of Villemarque's book, by Tom Tyler,* Tyler's wife Laura (a talented composer in her own right) had included as an Appendix to the book as a whole a page of sheet music for most of the songs contained therein, including "Aotrou Nann (The Lord Nann)" (p. 222).

Unfortunately, I've never been one who could hear music just by looking at the score: I have to actually play it to find out what it sounds like. And being woefully out of practice on the clarinet (my embouchure is shot), and without access to a piano, meant that I still don't know what the original tune to this piece sounded like.

That's when I found a reference to a French edition of the book (BARZAZ BREIZ: CHANTS POPULARIES DE LA BRETAGNE), which came with a cd of people performing the original songs. Accordingly, I ordered this -- only to find when it arrived from France that the accompanying cd, while it covers a dozen pieces, didn't actually include the one I was looking for.** Alas.

So here's a query for folks: does anyone out there have, or know where I could find, a recording of "Lord Nann" in the original Breton?

Oh, and Happy Tolkien's Birthday, everybody

--John R.

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*better known today as an early editor of PUNCH and the author of the play OUR AMERICAN COUSINS, which Lincoln was watching when he was shot.

**it's still well worth having, of course, since it does include sheet music for twelve bars of the "Aotrou Nann hag ar Gorrigan" melody in the back (p. 536), which shows that Laura Tyler adapted the melody slightly to match the English translation.

Conan Doyle's Favorite Weird Tales

So, as part of my recent spate of reading several quirky little minor books by Conan Doyle, I read THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR --something I'd picked up maybe a decade ago, I think down near Pike Place Market, in the assumption it dealt with his spiritualism (a la PHENEAS SPEAKS). Turns out it's him reminiscing about his favorite books and why he likes them. There's far too much in it about manly men displaying magnificent manliness (as Napoleonic solders, as bare-knuckle boxers, &c) but also some interesting comments on what the eighteenth and nineteenth century classics means to one particular writer of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. He has a lot to say about some authors (Scott), and almost nothing about others (Austen is only mentioned once, dismissively; Twain not at all). Many of the names and titles he covers are still held in high repute today (Dr. Johnson, Richardson, Pepys), while others have faded to specialty interests only (Macaulay, Borrow, Reade).

One chapter that particularly interested me was Doyle's take on short stories. He was himself a master of the short story in its detective story form, and also wrote a few interesting other pieces of short fiction ("The Horror of the Heights" is a pretty gd Cthulhu Mythos precursor-tale, while "Danger!" dramatizes England's vulnerability to unrestricted submarine warfare in the years leading up to The Great War.

Of them all, it's Poe Doyle admires the most,* calling him "the master of all . . . Poe is, to my mind, the supreme original short story writer of all time . . . the world's supreme short story writer." As he goes along, Doyle singles out his favorites, his "list of masterpieces", which turns out to have a strongly weird-tales bent. Here are the stories Doyle includes in his listing:

Poe: The Gold Bug

Poe: The Murder (sic) in the Rue Morgue

Bret Harte: The Luck of Roaring Camp

Bret Harte: Tennessee's Partner

Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Stevenson: The Pavilion on the Links

Kipling: The Drums of the Fore and Aft

Kipling: The Man who Would be King

Bulwer Lytton: Haunted and the Haunters

[anon; Blackwoods Magazine]: Metempsychosis

Grant Allen: The Reverend John Creedy

Quiller-Couch: Old Aeson

Maupassant: La Horda

Bierce: In the Midst of Life

All in all, I found it surprising how many of these might be considered horror stories, or at least weird tales. There are obvious omissions -- for example, he dismisses Hawthorne, saying that he always preferred his son Julian's work. A few are now considered classics (the Poe, Bierce, Jekyll & Hyde), while others I'd never heard of ("The Pavillion on the Links", "The Reverend John Creedy", "The Drums of the Fore and Aft"). After having read the whole book, despite some points of agreement I'm dubious that I'll find Doyle a guide to my tastes, but nonetheless I may at some point track down some of the short stories he praised and give them a read.

So, if anyone wants to put out a 'Doyle's Favorite (Weird) Tales', like the several Lovecraft's Favorites volumes from a few years back, the raw material is ready to hand.

--John R.

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*not surprising, given that Doyle's most famous work, the Sherlock Holmes series, derives directly from Poe's work.

Global Warming in Your Cup

or, A Tempest in Your Teacup

So, the last day of the year Janice shared with me an interesting, though ominous, sign of Things To Come. People often talk about Climate Change in the abstract (e.g., projected rates of icemelt), which is easy to discount or deny, rather than looking at specific examples (e.g., wintering ranges of birds), which remove all doubt. Now here comes another manifestation that really hits home for some of us: climate change is now affecting the tea crop in India. Specifically, the amount of tea being grown and harvested is dropping precipitously, by 100 million tons in three years in one area (Assam) -- and that's a LOT of tea. What's worse, the remaining tea is turning out to be second-rate, producing a weaker brew.

What does all this have to do with the price of tea in China, you may ask? Well, Assam produces more than half of India's tea. And India produces about a third of the whole world's tea. So a dramatic change, in both quality and quantity, in Assam tea has a direct impact on about one-sixth of all the tea out there. Image if you drank a modest three cups a day: now every other day one of those would be bland. If that happened with coffee at yr local coffee shop -- one in six cups was seriously off -- you'd probably switch to a new coffeeshop. The fact that the change happened in such a short time is particularly worrying for remaining tea plantations in, say, Ceylon.

For that matter, I've been having trouble buying good Keemun and Yunnan lately. My favorite tea shop has been out of both for months, forcing us to make do with trying other suppliers who so far have come through with some pretty good Yunnan substitutes but only the mildest of Keemuns, alas. I'd heard this was because after centuries of making black tea for the export market, the Chinese had recently begun drinking it themselves, so that less of the really good stuff is available outside China these days.

Given that tea is a fairly delicate crop, I hope the troubles in Assam don't spread. I'm not that big a fan of India teas -- Assam tastes flat to me, as does Ceylon (though they can be pretty good when doctored with cream and honey), while Darjeeling is too weak for my taste (always excepting the excellent Darjeeling we used to get in the old days from The Coffee Trader in Milwaukee, alas long gone). Most of America's tea, in teabags, comes from Argentina of all places, or so I understand from James Norwood Pratt's account -- but if the home of one of the world's two main strands of tea-plant, Assam, is in sudden decline, what must be in store for those places it's been transplanted to where it's less well adapted?

Do I think this news will serve as a wake-up call? Having read Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE, I'd say: Not really. As the saying goes, there are none so blind as those who will not see. Now if the same sort of thing were to befall coffee or wine drinkers, then maybe folks wd get serious about trying to mitigate the damage (the idea that there's still time to "stop" climate change is like suggesting drawing up blueprints for an avalanche-prevention sytem after the snow and rocks are already heading down the hill).

Here's the original post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/31/climate-change-effects-tea-leaves_n_803049.html

Happy 2011, all!

--John R.

current reading: TROY & HOMER

just finished: THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR by Conan Doyle

Recent Good Anime (II)

So, another really good series I watched at about the same time as WHEN THEY CRY is THE STORY OF SAIUNKOKU -- which, ironically, met with a similar fate although the two are unalike in almost every way.* Whereas WHEN THEY CRY is set in a v. specific time and place (the rural village of Hinamizawa, Japan in the month of June 1983), THE STORY OF SAIUNKOKU takes place in an imperial China of the mythical past. Rather than a series of ever-shifting tales, SAIUNKOKU is uses an epic backdrop to tell a very personal story, perhaps in the belief that great deeds ultimately come down to the hard work and personal relationships of individual people.

In brief, this is the story of Shurei Hong, the impoverished daughter of a noble house who agrees to take a position at the imperial court** in order to cause the careless young emperor to bestir himself. She quickly establishes a platonic but intense relationship with the emperor, who inspired by her deep-rooted optimism and an endless capacity for hard work undertakes to begin to actually govern. But successes come with a price, and each victory has consequences that the story embraces and follows up on.

One particularly interesting theme is Shurei's lifelong desire to take the official examination that is the pre-requisite for holding any administrative post -- an exam which women are not eligible to take -- and the emperor's desire to reward her by changing custom and the law to make that exam open to women; a decision with many consequences. The latter parts of the story suffer somewhat by separating the two main characters for long periods of time, but it's still a compelling story as it shows Shurei growing up and making hard choices.***

That's no more than a bare summary, of course; what makes the show worth watching are an appealing cast of likable characters, a compelling story, an interesting setting, and an undefinable something that makes it all stand out from the crowd. You come to care deeply about these people while watching this series. There are also a lot of nice touches, like their using a proverb for each chapter title ("A Frog in the Well Knows Not About the Ocean", "A Genius Can't Better a Hardworking Man").

In short, highly recommended.

--JDR

current audiobook: HUMAN SMOKE

current book: TROY & HOMER, PHENEAS SPEAKS

current anime: CANAAN

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*That is, both were overtaken by the collapse of Pioneer/Geneon, which left the US releases of the remainder of each series in limbo. This was particularly egregious in the case of SAIUNKOKU, since WHEN THEY CRY had already given three of its constituate chapters in full and reached its mid-point, while SAIUNKOKU had released only two disks, containing only the first ten episodes out of a total of thirty-nine, barely a quarter of its run. Moreover, while fairly good copies of W.T.C. were available on import, the foreign subtitling of the rest of SAIUNKOKU left much to be desired (for example, changing character's names erratically from episode to episode, so it was hard to figure out exactly who they were talking about). Luckily, once again Funimation came to the rescue, releasing a third disk (ep. 11-15) with a box for holding it with the two already out, plus two later slimpacks that contain all the rest of the series in a form that won't take up too much shelf-space.

**technically as imperial concubine, comforting herself with the (false) reports that the emperor is gay.

***[SPOILER] one good example of the show's avoidance of easy solutions is the long-term solution Shurei eventually comes up with for a province devastated by brigands, scheming nobles, lack of stable government, and scanty resources. Her suggestion? Establish a university, which can draw people (and money) from around the empire but does not require a hospitable climate or fertile soil. Of course, she points out, it may take a century or so for the project to reach fruition, but that's all the more reason to start now.