Today, April 20, 1910, renowned American author Mark Twain leaves Earth to keep his appointment with Halley’s Comet (The Adventures of Mark Twain, 1985, dir. Will Vinton)
Mit den ersten zwei Sätzen des unbekannten Schriftstellers #MaxGoldt kann ich noch mitgehen.
Hinsichtlich des Umgangs mit (politischen) Feinden hat er jedoch keine Ahnung. Da halte ich mich doch lieber an Leute, die im Leben Erfolg hatten, wie #HeinrichBöll und #MarkTwain.
Im Übrigen ist es falsch, Domatikern aller Couleur auf ihren Plattformen Paroli zu bieten, sie zu ÖR-Sendungen einzuladen oder sich in den #SozialenMedien mit ihnen auseinanderzusetzen. @2ndStar
Today in Labor History March 22, 1886: Mark Twain, who was a lifelong member of the International Typographical Union, gave a speech entitled, “Knights of Labor: The New Dynasty.” In the speech, he commended the Knights’ commitment to fair treatment of all workers, regardless of race or gender. “When all the bricklayers, and all the machinists, and all the miners, and blacksmiths, and printers, and stevedores, and housepainters, and brakemen, and engineers . . . and factory hands, and all the shop girls, and all the sewing machine women, and all the telegraph operators, in a word, all the myriads of toilers in whom is slumbering the reality of that thing which you call Power, ...when these rise, call the vast spectacle by any deluding name that will please your ear, but the fact remains that a Nation has risen.”
Blog post: Rachel Cohen's "A Chance Meeting: American Encounters" is a wonderful book offering vignettes of meetings between individuals who helped to shape American culture. Mark Twain and Willa Cather, William James and Gertrude Stein, and others. The conversations are interesting in themselves; they also have me thinking about how encounters with people and books have shaped the person I've become.
Coming up this evening, from one Sam reads another, as we return to the short stories of Mark Twain! Turns out, he could spin a yarn from anything. Come on over in an hour to listen in! https://www.twitch.tv/Chilliteracy
"Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done." - from a letter Mark Twain wrote to English newspaper editor William T. Stead, 9 January, 1899. #MarkTwain
“Among the most intelligent of animals” - Wikipedia.
“… the malaprop, the impertinent, the sly wag, thief, scoundrel, outcast, jackal of the bush, bon homme libre, as innocent as morning, as industrious as noon, as wicked as night. C'est le dernier des oiseaux.” - W. Leon Dawson, “The Birds of California” (1923)
“A jay hasn’t got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.” - Mark Twain, “Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn”, 1865.
“Thieves, every one of them.” - Acorn Woodpeckers, whose granaries are frequent targets of California Scrub-Jay robberies.
12/11/23 Open 6-9p. Mask recommended. No open containers, please.
It's unusual here, for so many popular topics & titles to be in one box. I must've once prioritized these, promptly been swamped, & forgotten them... 'til now!
@RickiTarr
Twain's book "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court".
Many aspects of the genera laid out here have been much copied, but seldom done so well.
Great how trying to alter the timeline starts out as fun then turns very dark.
I was about to take issue with a declaration of "fact" that was boosted into my feed. Then I remembered the aphorism: “Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
Instead , I went looking for who first said it, and found this (hint, it wasn't Mark Twain) #marktwain
My correspondent below makes the argument that any effort by an exploited class to end its exploitation will necessarily be violent.
People will want revenge. It will be bloody. The poor will rise up against the rich and murder them; all we have to do is look at an historical example like, say, the Romanovs of Russia to see that this is true.
I’d be remiss if I failed to note that my correspondent’s argument is not only empirically wrong, but also deeply morally repugnant.
All of these systems—American chattel slavery, the feudalism of ancien regime France or czarist Russia, modern capitalism—are deeply, intrinsically violent. Even if exploited people tended to free themselves through violence, and even if they took revenge against their former exploiters, that violence would still pale against the constant violence of the systems against which they fought.
A history that prioritizes a handful of high-profile examples of spectacular but brief violence against elites while downplaying millennia of elite violence against everyone else isn’t really history; it’s propaganda. As Mark Twain noted:
“A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is a #TerryPratchett#fantasy parody novel from 1889. Highly recommended! See also Cervantes' Don Quixote.