HOME |
RSS | 
Image supplied by Stanley Gould
On September 8, 1908, Mark Twain's home was burglarized. From that point forward, the author had this "Notice To The Next Burglar" posted prominently on his front door.
From the always fascinating Letters of Note:
NOTICE.
To the next Burglar.
There is nothing but plated ware in this house, now and henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of kittens. If you want the basket, put the kittens in the brass thing. Do not make a noise — it disturbs the family. You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonier, I think they call it, or pergola, or something like that.
Please close the door when you go away!
Very truly yours,
S.L. Clemens
Mark Twain was a ramblin’ man, and was so intent on living life to the fullest that he was brought back from the dead and lived another hundred years, according to Michael Kupperman, who selflessly agreed to illustrate Twain’s autobiography so that folks who can ‘t read all the words can stare at the pretty pictures. Click the link and find out a bit more of what Twain got up to after his first death!
Comments Off
It kind of gets you right here to see the manliest men in history putting a pen to paper to express their soft side. We saw that in Teddy Roosevelt’s diary entry not long ago. On a happier subject, here’s a note that Samuel Clemens (also known as Mark Twain) wrote to his wife Olivia in 1888.
Hartford, Nov. 27/88
Livy Darling, I am grateful — gratefuler than ever before — that you were born, & that your love is mine & our two lives woven & welded together!
SLC.
See the full size version at Letters of Note. Link
(Image credit: The Mark Twain House & Museum)
I recently read an NPR piece about the book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, in which researchers determined that the most universally annoying thing ever is listening to someone talk on a phone. When I came across this reprint on The Atlantic from Mark Twain in 1880, I realized that this has been the situation since the advent of telephonic communication.
I consider that a conversation by telephone—when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation—is one of the solemnest curiosities of this modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room.
Read the rest at The Atlantic. Link
Image credit: Bettmann / Corbis
Minnesotastan read the entire first volume of The Autobiography of Mark Twain and posted a review. The short version is that he’s not putting it on his recommended book list. However, he reprinted a story from the book in which Twain meets the then 14-year-old Helen Keller. He labeled the story with the tag “impressive.” Link
Comments Off 
Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been republished without the n-word, a term now deeply offensive to American sensibilities. But Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine think that this change doesn’t go far enough. They have a Kickstarter project to republish the novel with the word “robot” replacing the n-word, and further alternations to the text to make the character Jim clearly a robot instead of a human. At the link, you can view a hilarious video that they’ve put together explaining the venture.
Huckleberry Finn, the American classic written by Mark Twain and staple of high school English class everywhere, has always been controversial for its use of the "N-word." (I mean, I even remember my own high school English class debate on the appropriateness of using such word – as I’m sure every class before and after mine had as well)
Now, Twain scholar Alan Gribben plans to do something about it: he’s going to replace the word with something less racially offensive.
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger."
Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don’t read." Rather than see Twain’s most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."
"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he’s spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. "Race matters in these books. It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."
A classic case of cencorship by the politically correct or the appropriately sensitive approach to racial injustice of the past? What do you think?
Upon his death, Mark Twain left behind 5000 pages of an autobiography that included a hand-written note stating that the memoir was not to be published until 100 years after his death.
Now that we’ve reached that deadline, the publishing is beginning, and his estate has split the pages into a trilogy, the first volume of which is coming soon.
Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by nmiller.
I’m a little late in posting this, but it’s too awesome to pass: Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note has a copy of a 1905 letter sent by Mark Twain to a patent medicine salesman who tried to sell bogus medicine. Twain was furious to have received the pitch as he was recently widowed after his wife suffered heart failure:
Dear Sir,
Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link.
Read the rest: Link – via The Litter Box
Comments Off
| Hey, Michael Jordan, just because you're good at basketball doesn't mean you can swing a bat. And a syrupy sweet voice doesn't make you a poet, Jewel. Oh, and Paul Newman, you're a fine actor, but your salsa is ... well, it's really good, actually, but you're the exception. Sometimes, the talented and famous begin to experience delusions of multi-famed grandeur. For all those tilting at windmills, mental_floss is here to provide the ridicule and reality check. Prose and Cons: Mussolini's Writer's Block
Curiously, Mussolini isn't the only dictator with a weakness for romance novels. Saddam Hussein has anonymously published three, and another is purportedly on the way. None of them have been translated into English, though we hear they make Mussolini's stuff read like Proust. Cantor Battles Shakespeare: Left Brain Takes a Right
But even before then, he wasn't exactly a picture of mental health. Toward the end of his life, he became obsessed with proving that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's plays via complicated schema and hidden codes the likes of which haven't been seen outside "A Beautiful Mind." Cantor's extensive writings on the subject aside, nearly all Shakespearean scholars agree on two things: William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote the plays attributed to him, and Cantor should have stuck to math. Isaac Newton: Putting the Pseudo in Science
[Note - See previously on Neatorama: 10 Strange Facts About Newton] Mark Twain Gets Business-Schooled
A massive typesetting machine with 18,000 moving parts, the Compositor was a complete commercial failure. Twain invested at least $190,000 and 14 years worth of anxiety into the invention and came away with two prototypes, neither of which worked for very long. All was not lost, though. One of those prototypes was willed to Columbia University, which donated it to a scrap metal drive during World War I. That means the Compositor became bullets ... and finally served a purpose. |
|
 |
The article above appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the Sept - Oct 2005 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!
|
While
noted fascist Benito Mussolini eventually found a fulfilling career as
a tyrannical dictator, his earlier ambitions were literary. Fourteen years
before taking power in Italy, Mussolini penned a serial novel titled The
Cardinal's Mistress for a weekly supplement in an Italian newspaper.
Apparently, it was quite the bodice-ripping romance. You know, the kind
filled with lines such as, "The common brutes of the market-place
satiate their idle lusts on your sinful body." It goes without saying,
but the book didn't do much to secure Mussolini's reputation as a writer.
Georg
Cantor is widely regarded as the most important mathematician of the 19th
century. He invented "set theory," which - in addition to making
life miserable for Calculus II students everywhere - proved that some
infinities are (prepare to have your mind blown) bigger than others. That's
the sort of realization that can make your head hurt. And sure enough,
Cantor eventually went bonkers. 
Forget
Isaac Newton's famous falling apple. (For starters, that story was quite
possibly made up by Enlightenment stalwart Voltaire.) Many scholars argue
that Newton's theory of gravity was the product of his obsessive fascination
with what was, at the time, the decidedly unenlightened science of alchemy.
Newton spent more of his life studying alchemy than "real" math
and science. And without his beliefs about occult forces operating in
a vacuum, he might never have understood gravity. So when Newton famously
said, "If I have seen further than others, it's because I stood on
the shoulders of giants," many of the giants to whom he was referring
were probably cranks, pseudo-scientists, and alchemists.
Mark
Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the first novel composed
on a typewriter. Yet, ironically enough, the author formerly known as
Samuel Clemens was nearly driven into bankruptcy by the Paige Compositor.
