Pen to Paper: Pulling Twain’s Fangs

“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.”
— Samuel L. Clemens, letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, February 7, 1907

You’ve seen the story by now: a book publisher is bringing out a sanitized version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nigger Jim will be Slave Jim; Injun Joe will be Indian Joe. I’ll be surprised if they’ve left Huck’s (and Twain’s) greatest line alone rather than change it to, “All right, then, I’ll go to heck.”

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Fiction: Staff Lounge

Owner and publisher Fred Koelpe didn’t see that he had a choice. One more issue of the Amidaville Banner before Christmas and then everyone got an unpaid two weeks off. There wasn’t enough money in the account to buy newsprint and keep the office open, so Koelpe did neither. He didn’t mind putting his small staff on the streets without a paycheck — never mind a Christmas bonus — but he did worry that all too few in the dying town would miss the weekly newspaper.

Koelpe was the first one out the door. He told his office and circulation manager, Sharon, to turn the thermostat down to 45 degrees before she left. Then he got away from the dirty looks and the general lack of understanding.

“Consider it a Christmas miracle I’m not just closing the place permanently,” he barked over his shoulder.

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Pen to Paper: Literary Devices in Haiku

Greg Bryant wrote and posted a fine haiku over at his site. I immediately caught the use of personification in it — giving a non-human object human traits. This, I had always read and been told, was one of the big no-nos in haiku, no matter how good the result might be.

Haiku (so I was taught) is the poetry of simply noticing and letting the reader draw his own conclusions. Simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, and all the other staples of Western poetry have no place in a form that seeks to describe in the plainest terms that which is.

But is that the case?

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