Down the Mississippi
November 30, 2010 will mark the 175th anniversary of the birth of Sam Clemens, and one of several related books to hit store shelves this spring is entitled "Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens," by Jerome Loving.Loving writes about the greatest of American writers,
It had started with the Jumping Frog in a story that wasn't original with him. Like Shakespeare, he had many sources, but his adaptations of the works of others were always original. Twain had come out of the oral tradition of the Old Southwest and proven to be its culmination. But that feat was just the starting point for his greatness as a writer. He turned harmless humor into profound tragedy, always reflecting his times and the nation that had nurtured him. He couldn't have started out from a less promising place than Florida, Missouri, but then Whitman was the son of a drunkard and Dreiser was the twelfth of thirteen children of impoverished parents. These democrats of our literature thrived because they drew from the nutriment of their native soil and humble beginnings. Yet all three employed the American vernacular in literary plots that were sharpened by their sense of competition with world literature. Like Whitman and Dreiser, who objected to European pretentiousness, Mark Twain couldn't have achieved the heights of his humor without the sham of English aristocracy and its American claimants.
In addition to everything else he did and was, Twain stood very publicly opposed to American imperialism and foreign policy (through essays in magazines and literary journals), particularly late in his life in reference to America's annexation of the Philippine Islands in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. Loving proffers that Twain's high-profile opinions put his literary reputation on the line during that era, and that today he would be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for such contribution and courage.
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I just spent a long, music-oriented weekend in Memphis, Tennessee. Highlights included tours of both the Stax and Sun Record Studios, a visit to the Gibson Guitar factory, and three nights on Beale Street. Under the Stax label, my traveling companions and I agreed that the best song titles in the publishing catalog were "If You Don't Cheat On Me (I Won't Cheat On You)," "Try To Leave Me If You Can (I'll Bet You Can't Do It)"-- two songs that incorporate the marvelous use of parentheses-- along with a third tune lacking parenthetical citation entitled "Stop Half-Loving These Women."
Miss Vicki, making vocal melody with the house band at Morgan Freeman's "Ground Zero Blues Club" on Beale, also introduced us to a tune called "Your Husband is Cheating On Us."
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Moeller TV Listings 6/22/10: Proud musical sons of New Orleans, Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, make their "Late Show with David Letterman" debut Tuesday night.
posted by CM @ 6:34 PM
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