Tag Archives: Mark Twain

I Appreciate You. Now Fuck Off.

Posted on by

If you were to ask me how I’m doing, I would say I’m pretty good. A bit tired but getting some reading done, recharging my battery, all that. And then I’d ask how you are, and we would go on like that, like usual. But I’m not. Doing well that is. On a scale of 1-10, I’d give myself a one or two. I’m low. I’m losing the point of this. Fight on. I can’t go on. I must go on. All that. But we’re in the shitter. I am anyway. I’ve lost the faith, if I ever had it. It’s not just Trump & Putin, although they’re sure part of it. It’s the hubris, the lies and hate, mine too.

I’ve always enjoyed reading biographies, Mark Twain, Robert Kennedy, Orville & Wilbur Wright, Georgia O’Keefe, Mahatma Ghandi, Leo Tolstoy, Judy Garland, Agnes Varda, Zenobia. The story is clear: You’re born, you do stuff and you die. They all struggled, found success in something, struggled again, maybe found success again, and then died. I just finished When Breathe Becomes Air, the autobiography of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. It is a rumination on mortality, littered with literary references, including Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” He dies before he finishes the book.

I also read Matthew McConaughey’s Green Lights. As facile as it sounds to consider an actor best known for “Alright, alright, alright”, it still has all the same moments, struggling and succeeding, trying to make sense. Alright, it is a trite read, and a little tiresome in the end, but he’s earnest and banged a whole beautiful women. And he’s not dead. Yet. Yeah, and he’s hot.

It’s better to live a life doing things, finding some sort of meaning and ‘indulging’ as McConaughey confesses. Then what? The key seems to be remembering, reflecting and sharing. But what if you don’t? What if you lose all that? You forget it all? My mother succumbed to dreaded Alzheimer’s and remembered nothing in her last years. Once a very insightful and intellectually demanding woman, she forgot everything including her beloved Mozart and The New Yorker. It was the one way she wanted to go. I’ve forgotten moments too, entire nights, years gone by and indulging too much, and all of the enjoyment I assume I had, is gone too. Like everything.

Whether we lay this planet to waste or not, this will all be forgotten. Not just my little old blog but everything else, Barbie, Mozart, Krakatoa, This space we fill will be empty and dark. There will be nothing at all. And so maybe I’m being generous with myself. I’m definitely not a two. I’m more like a one or zero.

Ice Friday: Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”

Posted on by

I took the paper 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, holding my breath, and then I 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 more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. 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.

Bob Pollard Plays Mark Twain at The Stone Pony

Posted on by

Micaela says I’m pushing it, but while watching Guided by Voices last night at Asbury Park’s famed The Stone Pony, I was thinking that Bob Pollard was a Mark Twain superstar kind of guy.

Click the image below to see him nail Tractor Rape Chain. Bob Pollard Plays Mark Twain at The Stone PonyTrue, he got so drunk that he not only told the audience to “Fuck off” more than several times and played I am a Scientist twice, but also fell down in a heap at the end. Bob Pollard Plays Mark Twain at The Stone PonyBut I stick to my theory, based not only on his out-spoken, sardonic nature and belligerence, but Bob as an exhaustive, creative force. Bob Pollard Plays Mark Twain at The Stone PonyAnd he drinks a lot too.

Mark Twain: Cursed to Live a Fascinating Life

Posted on by

Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers is an intimidating work not only from its physical weight (3 pounds of text) but more from the iconic burden of the man. Mark Twain, as he himself wrote, lived “in the midst of world history”, charging through an epoch of change, realizing many of his dreams, and yet suffering through as much misery. marktwainHe captained steamboats at the outset of the American Civil War, mined for silver in Nevada during the Comstock Lode, and went on speaking tours world-wide, all the while developing the “American” voice in literature, a life famously beginning and ending as Haley’s Comet appeared in the sky. Mark Twain: Cursed to Live a Fascinating LifeHe was a witty, demanding man and deeply reflective, offering rebukes to governmental policies that would ring true even today. “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” Mark Twain: Cursed to Live a Fascinating LifeBut most interesting of all, he had plans for many unrealized books, including a follow-up to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Twain wrote in his journal: Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where & crazy. Thinks he is a boy again & scans every face for Tom and Becky.

Mark Twain: Cursed to Live a Fascinating LifeTom comes, at last, 60 from wandering the world & tends Huck & together they talk the old times; both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful is under the mould. They die together.

Sadly, Twain outlived much of his immediate family, surviving his wife and three of four children.