OT: Labor Day

The official unemployment number came out Friday: 9.1 percent. That’s 14 million Americans without work. Not counted are the underemployed who can’t make ends meet or the people labeled as discouraged workers, more than 200,000 unemployed people who have tried so hard and for so long to find a job that they’ve given up, at least for now. The Congressional Budget Office does not expect the unemployment rate to fall below 8 percent for two more years and says we won’t see 5 percent unemployment until 2017. Further, mass layoffs – when 50 or more workers lose their livelihoods at once – rose 3 percent in August.

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Pen to Paper: The Isolating Storm

You’ve seen this exchange in movies and TV shows and plays and you’ve read it in books and short stories:

“Oh! Cuthbert!” Margareta exclaimed. “We need help! Quickly! Telephone the authorities!”

“Please, my dear; despite the dreadful circumstances, you must try to calm yourself. Calling the police is exactly what I was about to do.” Cuthbert picked up the handset and listened for the dial tone, but only silence greeted his eagerly waiting ear. He flicked the hook several times in rapid succession but failed utterly to establish a connection. He slowly, deliberately replaced the handset on its cradle. “The storm has knocked out the lines,” he reported grimly. “We’re completely cut off from the outside world.”

The lightning flashed and the thunder crashed as if to underscore Cuthbert’s announcement.

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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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Pen to Paper: Mark Twain’s Writing Advice

Mark Twain is back in the news, not that he ever really left it. His unexpurgated autobiography is being published shortly, and I expect more than a few graveyards will hum with all the spinning some of the residents will be doing. (N.B.: I wrote the phrase “unexpurgated autobiography” before hunting up the NYT article that also uses it. Great minds, and all that.)

Twain had something to say about most everything, and he certainly did not spare his own field. He left us a great many thoughts on what makes a good story. Here is one collection of those thoughts. Finally, we have his masterful blast against novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Early on, Twain gives us twelve solid notions of what a writer should and should not do, and he makes note of how Cooper violated these points of literary order.

Enjoy, and make good use of what the old master taught us.