... and Twain was not jesting. Though he did make one very pertinent point about censorship which is overquoted.
Yup. Huckleberry Finn was very important and I'm glad he wrote it. Tom Sawyer was really funny. His biography of Joan of Arc was to my understanding the only sincere thing he ever wrote, and though I can't say it was especially well-written or talented (funny how he didn't have much style when he couldn't hide behind wit), it was the best secondary source we had for something like 100 years. I feel like much of his other work was (though he did not necessarily intend this) a bitter backlash against intellectualism and sentiment, transports of feeling, all that. And you know, we've got populist writing now and genre fiction. And that's great. I may not like it much, but I recognize that it satisfies a need. But that doesn't mean that the great, sweeping, layered books of the past are bad, that symbolism is inherently bad, that his hated "weather scenes" are bad for their lack of realism.
Previously I objected only to the "Twainism vs. Austenism" literary debates, where people rely on each's reputation and witticisms to attack the other's position on realism vs. symbolism. I didn't think his writing was all that clever, but I was willing to give him a pass for the era he was in. Now I'm feeling much less kindly.
Other sad: my former best friend just finished a degree in linguistics at Reed and is looking for work as a proofreader. And can't find any. I really dislike this person and hate the way she's treated me, from her stupid fixation with being blonde to her smacking me around because she has a status-conferring boyfriend (handsome and extremely wealthy), but she's demonstrating that she doesn't have the shoulder muscle to build a good life for herself.
She'll probably be fine and very happy, but she wanted to be great. We used to be so similar that she would be constantly mistaken for me, even though we had very different looks. Now
no one would call us at all alike. Our trajectories are so disparate, our ethics so contradictory, that we could not possibly even be friends, I don't think. She considers my very existence a threat to her well-being, since I am willing to work hard and do without and don't seem especially put off by it.
I guess I'll just have to be great for two. But still--I'm sad things are turning out this way. It's not that she's lacking in skills or talent. It's that she doesn't want to claw her way into life and hold on, and thinks she deserves to have people kneel at her feet because some of her family has a bit of fame. Yes, she could go to graduate school and get a job, but she doesn't seem to know that you're going to have to claw to get a posh job after grad school, too. She's been living in a bubble, and choosing that bubble over trying things out, for so long that I don't see her changing her mind.
I don't especially like the reversed "re/er" in several words, it definitely feels a bit archaic.
It's also French. A lot of the "Americanized" spelling is a movement towards straight-up English phonetics and away from traits absorbed when French words drifted into the language.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9419485 times)