Mark Twain Fried Chicken

[snurri]

Mark Twain Fried Chicken
Originally uploaded by Snurri.

Chicago's been kind of a lonely place lately, so I decided to turn 36 in Hannibal, Missouri. I didn't meet any ghosts, but I saw a lot of statues and several young fellows who may or may not aspire to become Huck and/or Tom. (Apparently, there is a tradition in Hannibal where a boy and a girl of the appropriate age are chosen to be Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher for the year. Hm.) I did not spend $70 on a set of Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn volumes illustrated by Norman Rockwell. I did go to the Mark Twain cave. I did not ride on a riverboat. I did eat a steak at a restaurant that was once a whorehouse. Also, I did take pictures, so my Flickr account actually has something on it now.

Also, ouch.

Comments

[gregvaneekhout.livejournal.com]

Hm. I thought "Five Hundred and Forty Doors" was funny, smart, and poignant, and I admire it very much.

Happy belated birthday, Huck.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Greg. That means a lot!

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, I was just there this summer! My closest friends and I took a sailboat down the Mississippi and this was one of our stops. That fried chicken place has great milkshakes.

Did you enjoy the various places which claimed to be "Becky Thatcher's ACTUAL House"!1! etc?

I bought a bonnet and a river pilot's license. And two very, very obscure Twain books--Christian Science (I was raised such) and Joan of Arc.

Hurrah for weird vacation stops!

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Ooh, sailing down the Mississippi! That sounds awesome. I've always wanted to do a riverboat cruise, myself. That, or a raft :-) And yeah, you can't say that the people of Hannibal are shy about using Twain's name and the names from his works to attract guileless tourists . . .

I had never heard of Twain's Joan of Arc either! But I think I had heard of his take on Christian Science; wasn't he all up in Mary Baker Eddy's face?

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

He totally was, which is awesome. The church managed to have a lot of the book's copies pulled at the time, so it's pretty rare. I am entirely not CS anymore, so I truly enjoy his bitch-slapping her.

The river trip was something of another world entirely. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to write about it. But there is this huge green expanse in my mind now which is the river. It was deeply moving and profound and unrepeatable.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Back in my HS composition class we had to do an anthropological paper on a subculture we were unfamiliar with, and I ended up doing one on Christian Scientists. A friend of mine's mom was an on-again, off-again member of one of the local churches, so I was able to go to a meeting. It was interesting. Almost more like group therapy than what I thought of as organized religion, which was the rote and ritual of Catholicism.

I grew up on the Mississippi (in St. Paul), but aside from a few day trips on riverboats I've not spent much time on it. And yet my novels, particularly, always have rivers at the center of them. I'm jealous of your trip! I'm going to have to take one of my own sometime.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Group therapy...except for the very fucked up parts that make most of us recovering CS folks bent in the head. Your body isn't real, your emotions are error, if you're sick it's your fault for not being pure enough, doctors are evil and by the way you should totally let your kid die instead of giving them insulin. I didn't get any immunizations till I was 6 years old. It's actually a really dangerous religion and one which has hurt so many people, and killed more than a few.

I recommend God's Perfect Child--it's a great book on the origins of the church that is not colored by the very powerful lobby of Boston.

And yes, go. It is a magic place. Clams and fireflies and herons and lockmasters who have been reading Huck Finn for five years and are only fifty pages in, green, green water and strange winds and coyotes. Worth every second.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I wasn't saying I thought it was group therapy of the good variety. I was kind of creeped out by the level of rationalization on display (although I couldn't have articulated it then), and by the way they hovered around me as if I was fresh meat. (The only time I've felt that weirded out was during my one visit to a Scientology center.) And of course the illness as a weakness of faith. Strange thinking. I'll buy that there is a psychosomatic component to health, but that's taking it too far.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a dying faith. There's not many left, and hardly any of them are young, so they do tend to vulture any new faces. I keep threatening to take my river-compatriots to a service, which I think would be hilarious, since one of them has asthma and probably could not make it through a service without horking on her inhaler.

But then, I have kind of a sick sense of humor.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Hee! That would be an expedition; get a pack o' folks to sit in the second row, sucking on inhalers, popping antihistamines, giving themselves insulin injections . . .

[bondgwendabond.livejournal.com]

Joan of Arc is actually reallllly interesting. It's worth reading.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Good to know. It's been a couple of years since I've read any Twain, and there are still a few I've not yet read. It was odd, going through the A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court exhibit in the Mark Twain gallery, and trying to figure out how old I was when I read that book.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

And happy birthday.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

Ramadan mubarak, fellow mid-winter conception.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Bows in acknowledgement.

[tim-pratt.livejournal.com]

Re: Ouch -- I know, right? My story "has some charm but no real depth." Funny, some women have told me the same thing...

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I disagreed with her take on several of the other stories as well, yours being chief among them. But it would be bad form for me to argue with a review . . .

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

Your story ended with "Don't go." That was awesome.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the ending was where that story made the jump from good to great, IMO.

[tim-pratt.livejournal.com]

I suck at endings, usually, and I do think that's the best ending I've ever written. But, hey, one person's ambrosia is another's poison. I disagreed with a lot of the reviewer's assessments (your story is easily one of my favorites in the book, Dave), so I suspect our tastes are just calibrated differently.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

I suspect our tastes are just calibrated differently.

Yeah, that's the view I'm taking as well.

(And thanks.)

[scarypudding.livejournal.com]

I was actually of two minds about sending the review out, but I figured y'all are tough, and the folks whose stories she did like deserved to hear that.

As one of the editors, I'm not allowed to have favorites, but I will say that it's always interesting to me which stories stand out for different readers. (Looking forward to those Locus reviews, Tim!)

[scarypudding.livejournal.com]

P.S. Happy birthday, Dave!

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Dude!

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Sending it out? Did I miss something?

[scarypudding.livejournal.com]

Ah! Sorry, my collection of "everybody epic" email addresses still had your old SBC address, it looks like. (But you found it about as soon I sent the notice out, I guess.)

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Ah. That was my guess as well.

Is there an ETA on Locus reviews? Or is that an annoying question?

[scarypudding.livejournal.com]

According to Tim, October and November. (And no.)