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#129181 06/08/04 03:38 PM
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Just heard this on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac and thought some of you might enjoy it. Since I'm an ol' Missouri gal, I have a soft place in my heart for Mark Twain:

It was on this day in 1867 that Mark Twain set off on a tour of Europe and the Middle East, a trip that gave him the material for his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). He traveled with a large group of American tourists, on a steam-driven side-wheeler called the Quaker City. It was the first transatlantic cruise on a steamship.

Twain was just starting out as a writer at the time. He was living in New York, working as the travel correspondent for the San Francisco newspaper the Alta California. He convinced the editors to pay for his cruise, and in exchange he would write 50 letters from the cruise ship to be published in the paper. He had just started using the name Mark Twain a few years ago, and he was still trying to build his reputation. His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), hadn't sold very well, and he thought a travel book would be a good way to make a name for himself.

Travel narratives were growing very popular at the time, but Twain didn't want to write a conventional travel book. He hated how travel books made it seem like every church and every museum was worth visiting. He wanted to write a book about what it was actually like to travel—with all of the inconveniences and disappointments and fatigue. He said the purpose of the book was "to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him."

In Florence, he wrote, "It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it. They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good to wade."

When Twain got back from the cruise, his publisher gave him six months to write a 600-page book, even though he still had to make a living by writing newspaper articles. He wrote most of it in Washington, D.C., in a tiny room full of dirty clothes, cigar ashes and manuscript pages. He used a lot of the material from the letters he wrote during the trip, but he made several changes to make it more appealing to an eastern audience. He took out some of the cruder jokes and the racier passages, such as a description of nude bathers at Odessa. He thought easterners were more likely to be offended then westerners, and he wanted to reach as large an audience as possible. And he didn't use as much slang, because most easterners would have no idea what it meant. He wrote about 200,000 words in two months, or about 3,500 words per day, and finished just before his publisher's deadline. The Innocents Abroad sold more than 125,000 copies in ten years, and it established Twain's reputation.


Innocents Abroad Homepage
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/innocent/iahompag.html


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Here's an excerpt from Twain's Following the Equator that amused me:
"The Moa stood thirteen feet high, and could step over an ordinary man's head or kick his hat off; and his head, too, for that matter. He said it was wingless, but a swift runner. The natives used to ride it. It could make forty miles an hour, and keep it up for four hundred miles and come out reasonably fresh. It was still in existence when the railway was introduced into New Zealand; still in existence, and carrying the mails. The railroad began with the same schedule it has now: two expresses a week-time, twenty miles an hour. The company exterminated the moa to get the mails."




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R
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Preservation v. Profits. No contest.


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I share your views on corportate ethics (oxymoron), but in this case, of course, either Twain or his informaant was kidding. The moa was extinct before Europeans arrived. It is one of the things that most irks me about the "noble savage living in harmony with nature" crap that gets bandied about by white liberals. I hold the pre-European inhabitants of this country responsible for robbing me of the opportunity to see not only the giant moa but also the hapgornis, which preyed on it.


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You got another spelling for that hapgornis, Max? Google ain' never heard of it.


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Haast's eagle, mebbe. whoops. Make that harpagornis


#129187 06/09/04 07:22 PM
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moa's the pity.



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Reminds me of the story of Queen Victoria's birthday party, where all of the young ladies dressed as various birds. A courtier gushed to Vickie that he thought they looked great in their emu costumes. She explained that they were actually ostriches and dismissed him, saying, "We are NOT emus."



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Hi sjmaxq!
Great quote! I love the way Twain exaggerates. He would have made a great uncle to listen to by the fire at night. Luckily we can all still read his entertaining stories and not really worry about the accuracy of the details; for many of them were in fact false by design. What a character!

I liked this quote about his visit to Pompeii:

But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to modern research, was that grand figure of a Roman soldier, clad in complete armor; who, true to his duty, true to his proud name of a soldier of Rome, and full of the stern courage which had given to that name its glory, stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could not conquer.

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves. Let us remember that he was a soldier -- not a policeman -- and so, praise him. Being a soldier, he staid, -- because the warrior instinct forbade him to fly. Had he been a policeman he would have staid, also -- because he would have been asleep.


No, nothing was sacred to Twain. Thank goodness.




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