MARK TWAIN

The Mississippi River - "The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book - a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day."
-- Mark Twain;Life on the Mississippi, 1883, Ch.9

Damn!!!

STOP RAINING!!!

APOLLO!!! WAKE UP!!!

McNeer, May. America’s Mark Twain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

The Scenery of Hannibal:
1. “Nowhere in the whole exciting country could a boy find a better place to live in than Hannibal, Missouri” (McNeer 8).
2. “Between Holliday’s Hill and the bluffs called Lovers’ Leap, the village of white frame houses and log cabins drowsed in the sun” (McNeer 8).
3. “Westward the prairie edges were already being invaded by farmers. And fields of wheat and corn fringed the wilderness” (McNeer 8).
4. “Eastward, Hannibal saw the sun rise over the broad and muddy waters of the Mississippi, with a distant line of Illinois forest beyond, and islands standing green along both shores” (McNeer 8).
5. “Bear Creek made swimming holes for boys who learned to move like fish in its stream—or drowned trying. Sam Clemens always said that he was almost drowned nine times before he grew up, but his mother made the tart remark that she didn’t worry. A boy born to be hanged was safe in the water” (McNeer 8).
6. The turbulence of Hannibal: “Although Hannibal was part of the South, and some of its people owned a few household and farm slaves, it did not have a plantation society. Immigrants going into the West came continuously through the town, and it did not have the settled life of the South before the war. Sight of death was not unusual, even for children. Once Sam saw his quite father, not naturally a violent man, stop a street fight by hitting one of the men with a stone cutter’s mallet” (McNeer 16).
7. As a young boy, “Sam had seen a man shot down in cold blood on the plank sidewalks of Hannibal. So he was used to violence, and he learned to hate it early” (McNeer 16).

The Mississippi:
1. To boys, the Mississippi was “a gaudy, gleeful, glittering excitement” (McNeer 8).
2. There were steamboats whistling and steaming up to the dock in the Mississippi. “Every boy in Hannibal wanted to become a pilot on a river steamboat. Every boy dreamed proud dreams of piloting the glittering floating palaces; and when a boy was not imagining himself a pilot, then he pretended to be the steamboat itself—backing and turning, making steaming and whistling noises, up and down the streets of Hannibal” (McNeer 8).

Quarles Farm:
1. Mark Twain and his family would spend their summer in Uncle John Quarles farm where he played with his cousins and the slave children.
2. Hunting Excursion: “Some nights he followed the coon hunters and returned at dawn with the tired Quarles men, slaves, and packs of dogs to eat a huge breakfast on the porch connecting the two big log cabins that made the farmhouse” (McNeer 9).
3. “Other nights Sammy lingered by the wide fireplace listening to the moaning sound of his aunt’s spinning wheel, or he joined the many children gathered in the kitchen” (McNeer 9).
4. Mark Twain’s fascination of fearsome stories told by the slaves: “Negroes sat there telling fearsome stories of old Raw Head and Bloody Bones—or the tale of ‘The Golden Arm.’ That one sent chills racing down Sammy’s spine, no matter how many times he heard it, and he went off to bed shivering with fright. But it was his favorite, just the same” (McNeer 9).

School Environment:
1. Mark Twain’s teachers used physical punishment to discipline their students.
2. The schools Mark Twain attended were replete with rules, physical punishment, and obedience.
3. “His schooldays, though filled with troubles, were not without fun. Sam scarcely ever came to school without bringing a pinch bug in a box , to set loose in a quiet moment, or persuading John Briggs to put a verse on the blackboard—a verse about ‘Cross Mr. Cross’—or doing some other devilment” (McNeer 11).
4. Mark Twain’s thought was dominated by Saturday. “Sometimes he played hooky because he couldn’t wait for the end of the week” (McNeer 11).

Family Environment:
1. Mark Twain’s Naughtiness: “Under a mop of sandy-red curls Little Sam’s gray eyes looked innocent enough—until a gleam of mischief would appear. He was very much like his mother and he enraged her one minute and made her laugh the next. His funny way of speaking Jane called ‘Sammy’s slow talk,’ but it was an echo of her own. Before he was old enough to go to school Sammy was already giving her more trouble than he rather children ever did. His innocent face hid an imagination and a sense of mischief that caused his harassed mother to shake her head and say, ‘Sammy is well of truth, but you can’t bring it up in one bucket’” (McNeer 5).
2. Henry, Mark Twain’s brother, was two years junior to him. “Henry was handsome and good, whereas Sam was only handsome—when dressed for Sunday School” (McNeer 11).
3. Henry liked to help his mother “keep tabs on Sam” (McNeer 11).
4. “When Jane sent Sam off to Mr. Cross’s school of a morning, she sewed his shirt at the collar so that she could tell whether he had played hooky to go swimming with Tom Blankenship, son of the town drunkard. And when she nooded in satisfaction at suppertime, seeing that it was still sewed, who but Henry would sing out, ‘Ma, didn’t you sew Sam’s short with white thread? It’s fastened with black now’” (McNeer 11-12).
5. Whitewashing the fence was the punishment for Mark Twain’s truancy, but he made his friends believe that it was a privilege. As his friends “began to ask permission, he was so reluctant to give up the brush, that they gave him their valuables in order to be allowed to whitewash—old doorknobs, apple cores, frogs, and a box of worms, among other things” (McNeer 12).


Mark Twain’s Happy Childhood (Games, Comrades):
1. “The boys of Hannibal were constantly forming themselves into bands of various kinds, and Sam was the leader of every band” (McNeer 13).
2. Mark Twain was “the Avenger of the Spanish Main, the chief Knight of the Round Table, Robin himself in the Band of Merry Men, and Blackbeard the Pirate. These rousing gangs operated in the woods on Holliday’s Hill, sometimes with the added pleasure of Tom Blankenship’s company” (McNeer 13).
3. “Tom went fishing, and condescended, as was the way of a great man, to take along Sam and John and Will. He knew the place to hunt for turtle eggs on the islands, and he taught the other boys to smoke corncob pipes and swear” (McNeer 13).
4. “Tom Blankenship was the envy of Sam and all of his friends. He slept in a hogshead barrel, and was nothing but nobody told him what to do, or how to do it. He didn’t have to go to school to Mr. Cross, or to the Presbyterian Sunday school in a clean shirt, after a painful scrubbing behind the ears” (McNeer 13-14).
5. “Sam was once lost in the caves after a picnic, along with his little sweetheart, Laura Hawkins, and the terror that he felt when he caught a glimpse of a murderer known as Injun Joe gave him nightmares for months” (McNeer 15).

Model Children

The very delight with which Mark Twain imagined his characters’ mischievous idiosyncrasies has the effect of dislodging any clear distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior—a distinction illustrated, on the one hand, through Tom’s brother Sid and ‘the Model Boy, Will Mufferson,’ and, on the other, through Tom Sawyer, Joe Harper, and Huck Finn, the ‘juvenile pariah of the village, [and] son of the town drunkard.’ As ever for Twain, abstractions were inadequate to the roiling turmoil of life he envisioned. And not until eight years later, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, would he be able to define the contorted implications of ‘bad’ behavior—behavior that paradoxically appears most ethical in its capacity to subvert the morally ‘civilized’ premises of a slave-holding South.

MARY'S RESPONSE

I sent a text message to Mary, asking her if she wanted to read the first part of my second chapter. She just gave me a single word as her response--"SEND!" Perhaps, I think too much again, but her succinct answer confirmed my worst fears that she did think of me as a pest.I just want to establish a friendly relationship with my adviser, but it seems she just thinks of me as a trouble-maker who keeps annoying her.

The Aftermath of Mental Acrobatics

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Sloan, Gary. “A Connecticut Yankee in God’s Court.” Skeptic 8.4 (2001): 86-89.

I. Abstract:
A. Focuses on the conflict over the issue on religion involving writer Mark Twain
B. Accounts on the disbelief of Twain on the divinity of Jesus Christ and the immortality of the soul
C. Interest in Darwinism and cosmology
D. Impact of the afflictions for aggravating the anger of Twain towards God

II. Synopsis:
Sloan Gary offers us a brief introduction of Mark Twain’s religious background throughout his life in which Mark Twain’s religion evolves from skepticism to nihilism via temporary piety:
A. Mark Twain’s impiety and skepticism of Christianity in his childhood was attributed to his parents’ heterodoxy and his own empirical proclivities.

B. As an adult, Mark Twain was imbibed with the Christianity of enlightened liberalism congenial with his deistic mind. He discarded heaven and hell, the immortality of the soul, and the divinity of Jesus Christ. For Twain, Christianity derived its authority from the so-called prophets who confined the grandeur of God to the narrow parochial imagination. Sloan holds that Mark Twain considered nature the true revelation. Moreover, Sloan notices that Mark Twain believed that one’s adversity is caused by the law of working: God did not interfere with human affairs, whether God was against the one man or in favor of the other.

C. Mark Twain embraced Darwinism. He was convinced that God did not meddle in human evolution.

D. Mark Twain was also fascinated by cosmology.
[In the Middle Ages, common people are prohibited to study astronomy, for the churched feared that people would get too much knowledge from God through astronomy.]

E. Despite his strictures on the church and Bible, Mark Twain long retained his respect for God. Before his personal afflictions in his twilight years, Mark Twain was still far from the entire negation of God.

F. Prior to the 1890s, Mark Twain’s criticism of religion was more bantering than acrimonious.

G. Buffeted by a series of blows from which he never discovered in the 1890s, Mark Twain fought back at his abusive God by his “words.” He ascribed his crushing afflictions to the malignant God.
[Although Mark Twain is skeptical of and usually pokes fun at God, he subconsciously recognizes His existence; otherwise, he would not give God fresh ammunition after a series of malicious blows in his twilight years.]

H. Mark Twain’s animus eventually spread to the impassive God of Deism, the thought in his youth.

I. Mark Twain, Sloan suggests, implies the Moral Sense of which its sole effect is to enable and to tempt human beings to do evil afflicts us:
Quotation:
Twain deprecated the Moral Sense (he always capitalized it) as a dastardly legacy of the Fall. By allowing humans to distinguish good and bad, its sole effect was to enable and to tempt humans to do evil. Without it, we would live in a state of idyllic innocence, unplagued by a bad conscience. With it, we are inferior to the creatures, spared the accursed faculty: "Whenever I look at the other animals and realize that whatever they do is blameless," wrote Twain, "I envy them the dignity of their estate, its purity and its loftiness, and recognize that the Moral Sense is a thoroughly disastrous thing."

J. Mark Twain sought refuge in solipsism after his wife’s death. He did not believe there was God or universe. For him, everything was in a state of nihilism and annihilation:
Quotation:
His own perfervid blasphemies, Twain recognized, were part of the appointed absurdity. Occasionally, he sought refuge in solipsism. After his wife's death, he wrote Twichell: "There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought." In his grief and despair, Twain arrived at an endgame of utter nihilism.

Surveillance

Jennifer M. Gore suggests that surveillance “was found frequently during our observations—where surveillance was defined as ‘supervising, closely observing, watching, threatening to watch, or expecting to be watched” (235).

Through surveillance, “teachers monitor students, and students monitor each other. Surveillance singles our individuals, regulates behavior, and enables comparisons to be made” (Gore 236).

Normalization

“Foucault highlighted the importance of ‘normalizing judgment,’ or normalization, in the functioning of modern disciplinary power. He explained that such normalizing judgment often occurs through comparison, so that individual actions are referred ‘to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed” (Gore 237).

“Educating is about the teaching of norms—norms of behavior, of attitudes, of knowledge” (Gore 237).

Exclusion

“The category of exclusion was used in my research to mark the negative side of normalization—the defining of the pathological. Foucault refers to exclusion as a technique for tracing the limits that will define difference, defining boundaries, setting zones” (Gore 238).

Discourse

Discourse is a term used in semantics as in discourse analysis, but it also refers to a social conception of discourse, often linked with the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Jürgen Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action (1985). Even though each thinker had personal and incompatible conceptions of discourse, they remain two important figures in this field; Habermas trying to find the transcendent rules upon which speakers could agree on a groundworks consensus, while Foucault was developing a battle-type of discourse which opposed the classic marxist definition of ideology as part of the superstructure).
In semantics, discourses are linguistic units composed of several sentences — in other words, conversations, arguments or speeches. The study of discourses, or of language used by members of a speech community, is known as discourse analysis. It looks at both language form and function, and includes the study of both spoken interaction and written texts. It is a cross-disciplinary field, originally developing from sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology and social psychology.
However, in the social sciences, a discourse is considered to be an institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic, or, as Judith Butler puts it, "the limits of acceptable speech" - or possible truth. Discourses are seen to affect our views on all things; in other words, it is not possible to escape discourse. For example, two notably distinct discourses can be used about various guerrilla movements describing them either as "freedom fighters" or "terrorists". In other words, the chosen discourse delivers the vocabulary, expressions and perhaps also the style needed to communicate. Discourse is closely linked to different theories of power and state, at least as long as defining discourses is seen to mean defining reality itself. According to Foucault's definition, discourse must be heard rather as synonym of his concept of episteme, not with standing important theoretical displacements (episteme was first thought as the condition of possibility of discourses). In other words, Foucault's discourse must both be understood as a singular discourse, as defined above, and as a more general discourse, meaning the boundaries given to any particular discourse. In this more general sense, discourse is not composed only of words, which would be to limit oneself to a dualist conception: as he demonstrated in Discipline and Punish, discourse is also composed of architectural dispositifs, such as Jeremy Bentham's panopticon or the map of a classroom, etc. A dispositif is "a resolutely heterogeneous assemblage, containing discourses, institutions, architectural buildings [aménagements architecturaux], reglementary decisions, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, philanthropic propositions, in one word: said as well as non-said [du dit aussi bien que du non-dit], those are the dispositif's elements. The dispositif in itself is the network that we can establish between those elements."
According to Foucault, discourse can't be reduced to an ideological reflexion, it is to be thought as itself a Kampfplatz or battlefield. Against Kant's conception, Foucault argues that truth is not the objective bounty that the winners can take; truth is not an absolute, it is on the contrary produced in this battle with strategic aims. This conception of truth may be related to Althusser's theory on the "epistemological break" between science and ideology (the "epistemological break" is not an event, but a process; "science" always has to fight for its truth against ideology, which keeps coming back). Since truth and power are intrinsically related, according to Foucault, he can thus say that power relations are immanent to discourses, whereas in the classic marxist conception, the discourse is conceived as the ideological superstructure - which, of course, interacts with the infrastructure, as did Marx always write, but this doesn't impede the power relations being essentially located in the economic infrastructure, afterward reflected in the superstructure. Furthermore, as he showed in Society Must Be Defended (1976-77), discourse is not anyone's property and thus has no essentialist meaning. The same discourse may change political sides quite often, being reappropriated and endlessly modified, as did Foucault show in his analysis of the historical and political discourse; there is a "polymorphic tactics" of discourses. In other words, specific discourses are not tied to the subject; rather, the subject is a social construction of the discourse, or, as Nietzsche said, a "grammatical fiction". Judith Butler would maintain this ambivalency of discourse, which can be performed in various contexts by different subjectivities.
Norman Fairclough's books, Language and Power (1989) and Critical Discourse Analysis (1995), are the origins of the term, which designs an interdisciplinary approach to the study of texts. It views "language as a form of social practice" and attempts "to unpack the ideological underpinnings of discourse that have become so naturalized over time that we begin to treat them as common, acceptable and natural features of discourse" (Peter Teo 2000). This analysis is founded on the idea that there is unequal access to linguistic and social resources, resources that are controlled institutionally. In terms of method, CDA can generally be described as hyper-linguistic or supra-linguistic, in that practitioners who use CDA consider the larger discourse context or the meaning that lies beyond the grammatical structure. This includes consideration of the political, and even the economic, context of language usage and production.
This approach is explicitely influenced by Althusser, Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu's analysis, in order to examine ideologies and power relations involved in discourse. Fairclough notes in a foucaldian statement "that language connects with the social through being the primary domain of ideology, and through being both a site of, and a stake in, struggles for power" (1989: 15).

The Aftermath of Mental Acrobatics

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Under the cover of night dotted with small, bright stars, a pack of fledgling gangsters unhitch a skiff and float down the river several miles to a steep cliff on a hillside where the chief of the gangsters, Tom Sawyer, shows his accomplices a small, hardly noticeable hole and guides them through the narrow passage to a room-like cave which he declares to be the robber headquarters of “Tom Sawyer's Gang” (Huck Finn 20). Getting out of a piece of paper on which he has written his two solemn oaths, Tom proclaims that anyone who wants to join his “high-toned” (Huck Finn 21) gang must abide by the rules he mostly plagiarizes from his pirate and robber books; otherwise, he will give the non-conformist a horrendous punishment. He demands that, for instance, all members are required to “take an oath, and write his name in blood” (Huck Finn 20), “stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets” (Huck Finn 20). Provided anyone divulges the secret or betrays the band, he will have the betrayer’s “throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off of the list with blood and never mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it and be forgot, forever” (Huck Finn 21). Despite of the fact that the regulations agreed on by internal consensus in the gang are acclaimed as “a real beautiful oath” (Huck Finn 21), there are some dissenting voices among those little gangsters when Tom interprets the meaning of ransom. With great aplomb, he says ransom means “we [the boys] keep them [the captives] till they’re dead” (Huck Finn 21). Being unsatisfied with Tom’s unconvincing explication, Ben Rogers immediately retorts that “I think that’s foolishness. Why can’t a body take a club and ransom them as soon as they get here” (Huck Finn 22)? Instead of being struck dumb by Ben’s quip, Tom stifles the voices of dissent quickly by emphasizing the importance of following the rules prescribed by the storybooks:
Because it ain’t in the books so—that's why. Now, Ben Rogers, do you want to do things regular, or don’t you?—that’s the idea. Don’t you reckon that the people that made the books knows what’s the correct thing to do? Do you reckon you can learn ’em anything? Not by a good deal. No, sir, we’ll just go on and ransom them in the regular way. (Huck Finn 22)
Children’s game as the gang is, it can be viewed as a childish form of a society in which a set of rules and regulations specify clearly what the boys can do and cannot do under given circumstances. In order to play their game “in the regular way” (Huck Finn 22), the gang strongly disapproves of and even smothers any voices or ideas different from the generally accepted standards. Even if its members are deeply suspicious of the feasibility of the rule, the boys still feel obliged to follow Tom’s command with blind obedience, never bothering to question what his purpose might have been, for they do not “want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up” (Huck Finn 22). Hence, the gang is governed by a code of behavior, ethics, and morals which the boys believe can ensure the success of their game.