UNIQUE AND SEXY WALLPAPER

People are still having lousy debate on the word nigger. Very strangely, some are concerned how terrible this word is, but they don’t give a damn how does a person who is discriminated may feel. This book is about Mississippi adventures & we all know what kind of a place Mississippi is. Discrimination sucks big time, but it’s going to stay till the end of time. When they don’t care about humans, we can’t expect them to think about work of art.

Huck goes into hiding from his tyrannical father & he escapes to Jackson’s Island where he meets Jim, a runaway slave. Huck & later Tom Sawyer help Jim & that’s the main story.

Very rightly Mark Twain says in the book:

“Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”

Mark Twain couldn’t have depicted a very different picture. Things were bad at that time. Things have always been bad. This story is about helping a slave. If this message escapes idiots, nothing can be done about it. By removing a word, things are not going to alter.

Anyway I went through the book once again. Some of the passages are really very funny. I won’t call The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a masterpiece, but the humor is mind blowing.

I just loved this part when Huck Finn tells Tom Sawyer about Jim.

‘There’s one more thing – a thing that nobody don’t know but me. And that is, there’s a nigger here that I’m a –trying to steal out of slavery - & his name is Jim – old Miss Watson’s Jim.’

He says;

‘What! Why, Jim is _ _’

He stopped & went to studying. I say:

‘I know what you’ll say. You’ll say it’s dirty, low-down business; but what if it is? _ I’m low-down; & I’m agoing to steal him, & I want you to keep mum & not let on. Will you?’

His eye lit up, & he says:

‘I’ll help you steal him!’

Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard _ & I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell, considerable, in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer a nigger stealer!

I think it’s the spirit of these boys that count & how they were trying to help Jim. And it’s because of the humor, you don’t get depressed. I think it’s a marvelous story. The message is beautiful.

And it was damn hilarious when Tom asked Jim to raise a flower & water it with his tears, cause some other prisoners had done that & it’s the way it’s always done.

Well I think it’s ridiculous to get rid of the word nigger from The adventures of Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer. It just shows that people have no respect for the work of art. And what do they achieve by using the word slave instead? A time will come when someone might find that word slave offensive as well.

I think people like Roger Ebert are mad. You need to change the mindset, if you’re so very offended by the word nigger. Although I agree nigger is a racially insensitive word, but they don’t realize that they would ruin a great work of art. I don’t think any writer would approve of it.

Huck Finn is a masterpiece & yet it has been challenged by the world from time to time. Being politically correct will not change the world. There are far bigger things to worry about rather than raping a novel, cause people cannot stand a certain word.

Don’t you think school kids need to know about the real world & how things were at that time? We need to wake up. It’s like deceiving ourselves. And what the hell is less offensive word? The meaning doesn’t change by using pretty word. When a writer uses a particular word, there ought to be a reason. Slavery itself is offensive & we shouldn’t treat anyone as a slave. But in order to know how bad things are, we need to know the truth…how slaves were treated at that time. By using the word slave, the concept of slavery doesn’t become any better. We are just lying that things were not bad in the past. And For God’s sake, even today people use the word nigger! It’s like using the word love child rather than bastard & presuming that it doesn’t sound that bad. Although it’s the same thing but people are not that nice in any age. Spiteful tongues are alive even today & they were not different 100 years ago.

Doug Mataconis very rightly said:

“Huck Finn is an historical novel for us now. It’s a window into a past that some would say we haven’t fully confronted. Whitewashing (an ironic term for fans of Tom Sawyer) the racism out of Twain’s novels is whitewashing the past, it’s sending the message that hey things really weren’t that bad, when in fact they were that bad, and worse.”

I really like one of the comments:

“Anybody who attempts to degrade anybody because of moral indignation is no better than those they are degrading - no matter what word they use - they're just better at convincing others that they are.”

I think it’s very annoying for the writer when you try to fuck with his work. Many a time, people don’t understand as to why something is written. In both these books, it’s quite obvious that the word nigger must have been common at that time. Some closed minds have problem with everything. If they can’t take a particular thing, they can just fuck it, but no, they would make a noise & make sure the work of art is mutilated beyond recognition. Editing 2 books would not change the things that happened in the past. It just proves that we want a better past & so it’s okay to alter it to some extent.

Last but not least, these are some pertinent question that idiots need to ask themselves:

“Would you rewrite Shakespeare? How about T.S. Eliot? Would you change the words of Maya Angelou? If you didn’t like what Malcom X had to say would you attempt to rewrite what was said in new textbooks? Then why change the words of Mark Twain?”

One more thing. This is what Roger Ebert tweeted in response to New South Publishing’s announcement that the N-word which appears in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a total of 219 times would be deleted : "I'd rather be called a N***** than a Slave."

And Roger Ebert got some very nasty tweets lately. You can’t call it constructive criticism. Actually his wife is African American. Anyhow he apologized immediately after being besieged by extremely harsh criticism.

"You know, this is very true. I'll never be called a N***** or a Slave, so I should have shut the **** up," Roger Ebert tweeted.

Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and “Tom Sawyer” will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in ”Huck Finn” and four times in "Tom Sawyer." He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those "which people praise and don't read."

"It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers," Gribben said.

Yet Twain was particular about his words. His letter in 1888 about the right word and the almost right one was "the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

Another Twain scholar, professor Stephen Railton at the University of Virginia, said Gribben was well respected, but called the new version "a terrible idea."

The language depicts America's past, Railton said, and the revised book was not being true to the period in which Twain was writing. Railton has an unaltered version of "Huck Finn" coming out later this year that includes context for schools to explore racism and slavery in the book.

"If we can't do that in the classroom, we can't do that anywhere," he said.

He said Gribben was not the first to alter "Huck Finn." John Wallace, a teacher at the Mark Twain Intermediate School in northern Virginia, published a version of "Huck Finn" about 20 years ago that used "slave" rather than the N-word.

Some parents and students have called for the removal of "Huck Finn" from reading lists for more than a half century. In 1957, the New York City Board of Education removed the book from the approved textbook lists of elementary and junior high schools, but it could be taught in high school and bought for school libraries.

In 1998, parents in Tempe, Ariz., sued the local high school over the book's inclusion on a required reading list. The case went as far as a federal appeals court; the parents lost.

Published in the U.S. in 1885, "Huck Finn" is the fourth most banned book in schools, according to "Banned in the U.S.A." by Herbert N. Foerstal, a retired college librarian who has written several books on First Amendment issues.

Gribben conceded the edited text loses some of the caustic sting but said: "I want to provide an option for teachers and other people not comfortable with 219 instances of that word."

In addition to replacing the N-word, Gribben changes the villain in "Tom Sawyer" from "Injun Joe" to "Indian Joe" and "half-breed" becomes "half-blood."

Gribben knows he won't change the minds of his critics, but he's eager to see how the book will be received by schools rather than university scholars.