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Tuesday, January 11, 2011
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.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
The French, of all people, seem to be having troubles in the bedroom.
According to a recent survey (conducted by the makers of the erection-enhancing drug Levitra, so grain of salt and all that) 76 percent of the French sometimes suffer from lack of sexual response. We may think of the French, with their cafes and all those weeks of vacation, as being less-frazzled than the rest of us, but they aren’t, necessarily — and it’s dinging their reputation as lovers.
But was that reputation ever justified? Do the British deserve their image as cold, if polite, fish in the bedroom? Are Latin lovers really more passionate? And are Americans boringly vanilla lovers?
But it turns out the stereotypes we all know and love, like the “French lover” and "the icy Brit," were mostly created by literature.
The modern idea of an international publishing industry started around the mid-1660s and, as books spread, so did stereotypes, explained Pamela Cheek a professor of languages at the University of New Mexico and author of “Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex.”
Books became an important, if often infrequently acknowledged, part of the Enlightenment revolution, the same revolution that inspired America’s founding fathers.
Partly because of such “dirty books,” and partly due to French PR, France got the reputation of being sexually free.
Not to be outdone, the British began publishing their own explicit books like “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” more popularly known as Fanny Hill, in 1748. It did wonders for creating the stereotype of British men as conflicted spanking fetishists.
Likewise, the fact that Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the writer of the sado-maschochistic novel “Venus in Furs” (and the man who gave his name to masochism) was an Austrian, helped propel the idea that Germanic men liked disciplinary Helgas.
One theory had it that warm climates fostered passionate appetites, while cold climates led to more reserved sexual lives.
Porn sites, adult movies, and sex tourism industries all play up the idea of national, racial, ethnic difference. “We have become very adept at using media to feed our sexual practices and notions of stereotypes,” Cheek said.
The reality, of course, is much more mundane. A survey sponsored by Pfizer (maker of Viagra, naturally) showed that similar percentages of people all over the world thought sex was “important” to leading a fulfilling life.
Similar percentages of “hot blooded” Spanish men and women, and “puritanical” U.S. men and women reported being sexually satisfied. (Mexicans reported the highest percentage of countries surveyed; 78 percent of men and 71 percent of women said they were very satisfied.) In general, people in poorer countries say they are more sexually satisfied than people in richer countries, which probably tells us more about the expectations of consumer cultures than it does bed skills.
