No, no, not a review of Ron Chernow’s book that happens to be called “Mark Twain.” I’m reviewing Mark Twain. And reading Book Mark Twain has caused me to lose a surprising amount of respect for Person Mark Twain. He gets three stars out of five.
Y’all, this dude was weird.
The person Twain is pictured with up there is Dorothy Quick. She is eleven years old in that picture. She and Twain were not related, and they literally met on an ocean voyage in 1907 and Twain, a man in his seventies, just decided to treat her like she was his best friend. They exchanged letters until he died, and he occasionally arranged for her parents to bring her for visits at his home. Multi-day visits.
And she wasn’t the only one. At two different points in his life Twain started a club for girls between ten and sixteen years old, and both times he was the only male member. He called the second group of girls his “angelfish.” They had membership pins. Chernow is quick to point out that there was never any kind of contemporary accusation that Twain’s relationships with these girls were sexual or predatory, but it becomes clear after a while that he recognizes how Goddamn weird the whole thing is and genuinely isn’t sure what to do about it. There’s lots of talk about substitute granddaughters– only one of Twain’s four children survived past her twenties, and his only grandchild was born after he died– but do you really need enough substitute grandchildren to call it a club? And do you stop talking to your substitute grandchildren after they get to be too old for you? Because that happened too. Once his angelfish got into their late teens he lost interest in them. This is not a joke.
Don’t even ask me about Lewis Carroll. Chernow talks about him in a throwaway sentence at one point (literally something like “at least he wasn’t drawing naked pictures of his preadolescent girlfriends, like Carroll was”) and oh my god I hate to talk about falling down a rabbit hole when literally discussing Lewis Carroll, but … yeah.
Twain was terrible at business, prone to falling for outrageous scams, deeply in debt for most of his adult life despite his royalties and his wife being ultra-rich, and held onto a grudge like Kate Winslet on a floating door. There was something vaguely Trumpian about him, where all his friends and business associates were brilliant, salt-of-the-earth, wonderful people until the moment they were no longer useful or Twain felt the need to blame them for something and then they were the worst poltroons and scofflaws in the history of poltroonery and scofflawism.
Like, I’ve read dude’s books. The fact that he was a sarcastic, irascible motherfucker is one of the things I like about him. But I feel like Chernow would have been a lot happier had he just had a chapter called “Look, this guy was a prick,” and gotten everything off of his chest.
There’s nothing genuinely damning in there. I’m never reading anything by any number of authors ever again because of their assorted bastardries and nothing Chernow reveals about Twain rises to that level. Even the angelfish thing is more of a massive ongoing WTF than something that was immoral or should have been illegal. But the last time I came out of a biography or autobiography feeling like I had less respect for its subject than I did going in was Ralph Abernathy’s And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, which I read nine years ago. The only other example I can think of is Jefferson Davis’ memoirs, and I didn’t exactly have warm feelings about that guy going into those books. It doesn’t happen all that often.
Chernow’s book is still a five-star read. Twain still has a ton of five-star books out there for you to read. Twain himself? Three. At best.
I’m going to finish the Chernow book if it kills me, and while I really don’t think it’s going to, I feel like I’m still tired from yesterday and pre-tired for tomorrow and Friday, so every time I sit down to read my brain is turning to mush.
The book is still five stars. Twain himself may have lost a star now that I know more about him.
I had to get to work half an hour early, because I had a ton of shit to bring into my classroom to get ready, burned my entire prep on getting ready for a meeting after school, said meeting lasted an hour and a half, left work and drove directly to my son’s band concert at his school, carefully threw McDonald’s down my neck so as to not aggravate either my tooth hole or the sore that has developed in my mouth from a bad reaction to the numbing shots (super fun), spent over an hour on working on stuff for class tomorrow since I’m being observed during 2nd hour and she wants lesson plans for some reason, like, ma’am, I’ve been doing this for 22 years and it’s all muscle memory by now, I don’t write lesson plans, and now it’s 8:44 and I’ve written a single-sentence blog post and I’m going to go talk to my family for a few minutes and then go to bed.
There’s a clip from this movie that I used to see on TikTok all the time, where Tom Hardy, playing 1960’s London crime boss Reggie Kray, talks shit to a bunch of rival gangsters who plan on “knocking the granny out of him” while Tom Hardy, playing 1960’s London crime boss Ronnie Kray, throws a fit that he’s not about to be involved in a gunfight, storms out, then sneaks back into the room behind everyone with a hammer in each hand. That’s where the clip ends. It’s a good clip.
I have planned to spend two hours of my weekend watching this movie for approximately nineteen straight weekends. I finally watched it this morning.
Let’s get this out of the way real quick:
Legend is the story of the Kray twins, notorious and apparently real Cockney gangsters from 1960’s London who worked out of the East End. Reggie is the levelheaded one; Ronnie is literally a dangerous psychopath who spends most of the movie off of his meds. Reggie falls in love with Emily Browning’s Frances early in the movie; Frances provides narration throughout the film, and their love story, such as it is, is the driving force behind the actual plot. She knows who she’s dating (and, eventually, marrying) and wants Reggie to go straight; Ronnie very much does not want that.
This is one of those movies that’s more about the actors than it is the plot, and … God damn, I had never really gotten Tom Hardy before, but he’s absolutely amazing in this. Ten years of development in movie effects means that Michael B. Jordan’s Smokestack twins look a little more seamless when they’re both facing the camera and talking to each other– you can tell some compositing is happening when both of their faces are in the same shot– but the distinction between the two characters is tremendous. Hardy’s wearing some prosthetics as Ronnie; his nose is broken, he’s a little heavier, and there’s something going on with his lips that I was never able to quite nail down, but what really distinguishes the two is the aura of utter malice that Ronnie radiates every single second he’s on screen. Neither of these men are nice guys, mind you, which the movie goes to great pains to remind you a few times– you are pushed away from identifying with either of them– but Reg is a scorpion and Ronnie is a pissed-off pit bull with a frayed piece of twine holding him back. Their voices are also slightly different– I have no idea what Hardy’s natural accent actually sounds like, but there’s a point in the movie where Reg does an imitation of his brother for a sentence or two and it feels like an impersonation rather than Hardy just briefly switching accents. It’s a tremendous, understated bit of acting and it was one of my favorite moments in the film.
But let’s talk about Emily Browning for a moment. I think this is the only thing I’ve ever seen her in, and she’s meant to be the stand-in for the audience– and, again, is also the narrator throughout the movie. You know from the jump that things aren’t going to end well, but unless you’re already familiar with the Krays you won’t know exactly how. Browning’s chemistry with Hardy as Reg is absolutely off the charts; their first scene together, where Reg asks Frankie out for the first time, is one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen on-screen, and the two of them barely touch each other. The tension is crackling between the two of them; I was surprised there weren’t literal sparks. Similarly, she and Ronnie never trust each other at all; during their first encounter, he explains that he’s a homosexual but that he doesn’t “receive,” and that’s about as comfortable conversation as they’re going to have at any point in the movie.
I mean, stuff happens in the movie, but it’s ultimately about the relationships between these three characters, and how Reggie is torn between loyalty to his brother and loyalty to his wife. That’s what drives all of the conflicts in the movie; there’s a subplot about a cop chasing the two of them that doesn’t amount to much and a couple of court scenes, but everything revolves around them. Frankie’s brother works for Reggie. Frankie’s mom loathes Reggie, showing up in black to their wedding and prompting one of Ronnie’s most terrifying moments, and Reggie’s mom, who dotes on Ronnie throughout the film, doesn’t like Frankie much either. There’s a scene between the two of them where Frankie makes her a cup of tea and Violet rejects it, which is apparently the British equivalent of killing someone’s dog.
I know it came out ten years ago, but if you haven’t seen it, definitely check it out.
I am not quite halfway through with Ron Chernow’s 1200-page biography of Mark Twain, so it would be unfair to call this a “review” per se, but … c’mon. It’s a book by one of America’s preeminent historians about very likely the most important writer ever born on American soil. I’ve already read and loved his biographies of Hamilton and Washington, and I’ll get to the Grant and Rockefeller books sooner or later. There’s no universe where this isn’t a magnificent book, and it’s not like there’s going to be any plot twists in the last five hundred pages. This is a great biography already and it’s enormously unlikely I’m going to encounter anything that will change my mind– and if I do, it’ll change my mind about Mark Twain, and not about Chernow’s book about him.
All that said, I learned something today, and I fell down a rabbit hole looking for more information about it, and I need to share this information with you.
If you buy one of the approximately one billion available editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that include the original engravings, you will encounter at some point this image of Huck, his Uncle Silas, and his Aunt Sally:
You will note the arrow pointing just underneath Uncle Silas’ crotch, and you will note the straight line of his pants. You may also note the look on Aunt Sally’s face, which I feel deserves more attention in general.
This is not the image that was in the first printing of the book. That image looked like this, known as the “curved fly” engraving:
See that curved line? That’s the original engraving by E.W. Kemble, whose name you’ll note in the lower right. Twain selected Kemble himself, and presumably did not vet this image of Uncle Silas for a single slightly, barely bulgey line in his pants.
After a few hundred copies of the first edition were printed, a salesman noticed that someone had somehow changed the engraving to … well, this:
That right there, folks, is Uncle Silas’ cock, although it appears to be growing out of his leg rather than in the usual location. Maybe that has something to do with the look on Aunt Sally’s face, I dunno. Maybe dicks were different in 1884. You’ll note that said penis is pointed directly at Huck, which isn’t relevant to the story but adds an extra little twist of creepy to it.
Anyway, the edition was very speedily recalled, and the offending pages destroyed, although an unknown number of copies remained in the wild. A book with the offending penis in it has never made it to auction or been sold publicly, and it’s not known how many might be out there. (Check out this absolutely amazing contemporary article about the controversy from New York World. The euphemisms. My God, the nineteenth-century euphemisms.)
The University of Virginia has at least one copy of the edition with the penis, which is where the image came from. They had to redo the engraving for the rest of the no-longer-“first” edition, and the new version of the engraving had a straight fly.
Copies of the “curved fly” edition (without the penis) go for lots and lots of money. My favorite detail about that $15,000 listing? Shipping is $4.00 and they accept returns within thirty days.
The person who altered the engraving was never identified.
I have to say, putting together the Minerals setis a perfectly pleasant way to spend a Saturday evening at the midpoint of a five-day break. I don’t want to be too much of a Lego wanker (who am I kidding) but this set, especially for something that only has 880 pieces and has to build three frames, has a ton of cool techniques that I’ve never used before. I’m going to have to find somewhere bright to display this so that all the translucent pieces look properly amazing.
Brace yourself; it’s possible I’m going to watch a movie later.
Having read an entire big-ass book on this thing (TEOTBB is 260,000 words) I can get to the meat of a review of my newest tech toy in a single sentence:
Reading a book on this thing feels like reading.
If you don’t know what I mean by that … I’m not sure how well I can explain it, to be honest. I have an earlier version of the Paperwhite– about ten years old now, so probably pretty close to the first generation– and on that device and every other Kindle I’ve ever touched, I was never able to forget I was holding a tech object with a screen and not a book. I couldn’t get into stories the same way I could with a book. I had trouble remembering details, or even keeping my place on a page. Reading short stories on the Kindle wasn’t bad, but entire books? Forget about it.
At some point in the last ten or so generations of this thing, they fixed that problem, and I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. I can say it’s tremendously faster than my old Paperwhite, which is no surprise, and since ebooks themselves haven’t really evolved all that much in that time you can really feel the speed difference in a way you might not be able to with a phone upgrade or a new laptop or something. It’s got a pleasing heft in the hand and while I wasn’t terribly happy with spending nearly $40 for a case at first, now that I have it I really like it. I got the fabric cover, and the texture is marvelous, both on the inside and the outside of the case, and the automatic wake-up/shut-off when you open and close the cover is a nice feature.
(Why did I spend $36 when I could have gotten a case much cheaper? It says “Kindle” on the cover and not some other random brand. If I’m going to put my device in a case, the case needs to be either featureless or branded for the device and not for whatever random company makes the case. Yes, I know that’s dumb. It’s how my brain works. That’s my original Paperwhite case under the new one up there, and you’ll notice there are no words on it.)
Battery life is going to be excellent– I’m not sure how long I spent reading that book, but it only ran the battery down to 81%. It says that “typical reading time” is just under 14 hours, but I don’t know if that’s how long I took in my one read or what. I was annoyed by the Kindle displaying when certain passages had been annotated by a ton of other people, but I was able to turn that off.
I spent a pleasant half-hour today rearranging my wish list on Amazon, moving fiction books by new authors into a new “Kindle Wish List” section, keeping books I know I want in print and nonfiction on my original wish list. I’m going to need to get into the habit of deciding I Shall Read A Kindle Book Now and buying the book right then from my wish list, because I still don’t like how this thing displays your library and anything I download and don’t read immediately is going to get lost. That will require a bit of an adjustment, but at least I know the reading part is going to work, and that’s good.
(Two more quick things: I just started Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain today, and it’s 1200 pages, and after holding it for a while I damn near shelled out another $17 to get a digital version that wasn’t going to torture my hands as much. I may still cave, we’ll see. Also, Bedlam Bride is unfairly fucking good; it’s the best book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, and as I’ve said repeatedly DCC already didn’t have any right to be as good as it is. I only have one book from the series left and then I have to wait for the rest of them to come out. I’m not happy about it.)
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