Words don’t matter anymore.

[jackshoegazer]

The holiday season is finished, there is a dead pine tree in my front lawn, lanced upright into the snowbank. The decorations are back in the basement, the stockings are folded, and the dining room looks strangely empty.

Tomorrow, I bring Jacquelyn back from Crete via Chicago. Next week, school starts back up and that means, yes, dear reader, more posts in French. I should be doing them now. I haven't thought in French in three weeks. J'ai oublié français!

Which means it is time to put away childish things, like Civilization V and GarageBand and MythBusters and George Carlin and Brian Regan and Steven Wright and Demetri Martin and Zach Galifianakis and Mitch Hedberg and Richard Pryor and the other comics I've been overdosing on while doing graphic work and making icons.

Also, I watched a couple episodes of this show called Ghost Adventures. This guy, who looks like someone from Jersey Shore, goes around to haunted places with sophisticated equipment and locks himself in these haunted buildings and runs around yelling and insulting and trying to provoke ghosts. It's Ghostbusters for frat boys. The history and stories surrounding these places is fantastic, which made it worth watching, but listening to that guy yell was so annoying.

This semester I'm taking an American lit class (which will be interesting, since I just did a semester of all non-American authors) and one of the books we're reading is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I have not read this since the fourth grade, so I am curious to read it as an adult. Also, it has obviously been in the news lately because of the whole n-bomb censorship thing. One friend suggested that the n-bomb should be replaced by "ninjas" which would be hilarious, but I'm half-tempted to buy this:



Yes, dear reader, the n-bomb has been replaced by "hipster" which is equally hilarious. But seriously, censorship is fucked up. And this is especially fucked up. Sanitizing the past is not going to make the present any prettier.

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” -Mark Twain

Comments

[nerdwerds.livejournal.com]

There's also a difference between censorship and editing - the distinction is whether or not you're an author trying to preserve his art or a publisher looking to make a quick buck.

[castleclear.livejournal.com]

Dear Jack,
Maybe there could be some balance between the "childish things" and the reasons for them away (tho' maybe not, I don't know.) My knowledge of the French language mostly, um, isn't - I know this makes me an uneducated, uncivilized person, or worse, but c'est la vie.

I know nothing about the replace of the word "n-bomb" (I presume that means neutron bomb) with "hipster" or where this change is circulating but it sounds very odd. Rather like the LARP I participated in at a con where we were instructed to use the word "kazoo" when referring to the in-game bomb that was integral to the plot of the M.I.T. Society of Interactive Lit game we were playing, so as not to alarm the hotel staff or other patrons. (This was post 9/11.) LOL, what people must think when they overhear gamers talking!

Loved the Twain quote! Hope you're thriving!

[castleclear.livejournal.com]

Eep! Apologies for the typos and omitted words. I gotta slow down and review more thoroughly before hitting that Post button.

Oops! Bad me!

[castleclear.livejournal.com]

I see, belatedly, that I should have looked at the link to the The Hipster Huckleberry Finn. LOL. I've read Twain's original classic, indeed was required to in school, a couple of times. While hatred is offensive, I never found Twain's use of the word "nigger" in this novel to be offensive, nor I think intended so; merely a reflection of how people spoke.

"Sanatizing the past" A. is impossible, short of event-changing time-travel. B. is misrepresenting the truth and human history. C. leads to other distortions, that in turn make it even more difficult to learn from history, even recent history. (e.g. a few years back on Bill Moyers Journal findable at pbs.com, Moyers interviewed/discussed with a fellow journalist US newspaper articles on the war in Iraq and how it was going, contrasting it with US newspaper articles and reports from the late 60's and early 1970's on the state of the war, I mean of course Police Action, in Viet Nam.) Perhaps not so strangely, writing about this in your journal brings Orwell's "1984" to mind yet again.

[heatherlrowe.livejournal.com]

Censorship is dumb. Period.

So is Ghost Adventures. I watch Ghost Hunters, on SyFy. Much better!

[lipsoflove.livejournal.com]

That is one of my favorite quotes ever. I think about it every time I sit down to write.

This whole censorship thing really pisses me off. It is not because I'm black and I need people to see that the n-word is straight up vulgar and wrong, but because it is our history. I very much dislike when America thinks that sweeping (what it considers) bad things under a rug will somehow make us better as a nation in the future.

It reminds me of the schools that have "edited" Shakespeare plays in their textbooks. The morning lark scene happened in Romeo and Juliet! They had sex, people; get over it!
/rant

Good luck on your semester! I'm sure you are going to be awesome as usual. :)

[kiwikat.livejournal.com]

When we read Huckleberry Finn in high school my teacher (one of my favorites of all time) would say "neighbor Jim" when reading aloud, but the text had the original. He didn't feel right saying it, but felt it was important for the historical context.