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The questions about race in Huck Finn tend to center around the presence in the book of the word "nigger", but my guess is that, if the book were free of the types of missteps described above, and if the ending weren't such a fiasco, that word might not be such a problem. That is, if our wishful dream of the book (in which Jim is always fully human and three-dimensional, and in which Huck steadily and then definitively comes to understand this) had been perfectly realized, I think most readers would tolerate the n-word as an important and even essential indicator of character. It is crucial that we understand Huck as a possible nascent racist, and so he had better talk like one. [...]
[...] Can we ever really know to what extent this man or his book was, or is, racist? When we identify racism in the book, aren't we really just identifying racism in the culture out of which it came? Is it fair to expect Twain to have vaulted himself out of his own time and place and arrive, clean-booted and upright, in our own? Isn't the book still funny and deep? Aren't I actually enjoying it? How does one do the complicated math of Ultimate Racism: If we determine that, relative to our time,
Twain was a 40 percent racist, while relative to his own, he was only a 12 percent racist, or was in fact a 0 percent racist--what do we know, really?
good point--it's not a blanket judgment, but it has to do with sensitivity, and so it's very case-by-case (a point that a lot of "omg free speech" people ignore)
though tbh I'm still annoyed when people use "racist" to refer to individuals as concentrating on cultural and systemic factors (maybe it's a spectrum not a binary idk)
[...] Huck Finn is a great book because it tells the truth about the human condition in a way that delights us. It is a great work of our national literature because, more than any book before or since, it locates itself squarely on our National Dilemma, which is: How can anyone be truly free in a country as violent and stupid as ours? The book still lives, because the question does.
the perfect ending to a great essay
Because we feel ourselves first and foremost as physical beings, the physical comes to dominate us: Beloved uncles die, parents are displaced, cousins go to war, children suffer misfortune, love becomes a trap. The deeper in you go, the more it hurts to get out. Disaster (sickness, death, loss) is guaranteed and in fact is already en route, and when it comes, it hurts and may even destroy us.
We fight this by making ourselves less vulnerable, mastering the physical, becoming richer, making bigger safety nets, safer cars, better medicines.
But it's nowhere near enough.
"Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who's also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who's enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he'll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn't regard himself as funny at all."
also: checks himself out in the mirror but pretends not to
I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen's impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: "We are not aroused." I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I am awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.
"[...] He keeps pretending it's different people asking for you, holding his nose, putting a hankie over the phone, trying this totally pitiful English accent, pretending it's outside calls for you, which he should know I can tell it isn't because he knows the way the console light flashes all fast when they're in-house calls. [...]"
Candy speaking
Lenore, come to work, where I am, remove yourself from the shower immediately and come to work now, I'll not come down for my paper until you are here, Mandible is getting suspicious when I call.
see also note 552
MR. LUNGBERG: Don't quite a few people live around there?
GOVERNOR: Relocation. Eminent domain. A desert respects no man. Fits with the whole concept.
[...]
MR. OBSTAT: Hey, my mother lives right near Caldwell.
GOVERNOR: Hits him, eh Neil? Part of the whole concept. Concept has to hit home. Hewing is violence, Neil. We're going to hew a wilderness out of the soft underbelly of the state. It's going to hit home.
[...]
MR. LUNGBERG: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state: the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white, the sun's pretty bright here. . . . What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand? Talk about sinister. And the black would soak up the heat a lot better.
pure comedy
[...] Now that it's become undeniably apparent even to me that I have a son who lends to the expression "fruit of my loins" whole new vistas of meaning [...]
Rick on Vance
[...] I recall that at this point her mechanical chair on its track was caused to move toward the door of the inner office of Dr. Jay--whose fondness for useless gadgets would, I'm convinced, be of significant interest to his colleagues--and we called goodbye. [...]
Other than a brief mention of "fabric track-chair", this is the first time the mechanical chair situation is really explained. Pretty good