classic consignment Laughter
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Eukaryote Meninigitis
Henri Bergson wrote in his monograph "Laughter" (1899) to laugh at the fact we are instructed on the procedures of the human imagination, and, more particularly on the social imagination, collective and popular. That is, you never laugh-out or because he wants to, but at the time of a spring that something or someone working within us. When we read almost any work of the vast literature of Mark Twain, the chances of a smile on every page, even laughing out loud at the end of a chapter, exceed the average number of stories and authors that inflame the mind. In this humorous collection of fifteen stories we pay tribute to an author who understood life and wrote about it almost exclusively with humor.
Mark Twain (1835-1910), pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in Florida, a small Missouri town situated on the edge of the western frontier. His father, John Marshall Clemens, was an emigrant from Virginia who was trying to make a fortune with land speculation at the height of gold fever, and his mother Jane (Lampton) was a woman of character that came from a family of English aristocracy. The Clemens had four sons and two daughters, and shortly after the birth of Twain moved to Hannibal, a port city on the Mississippi. The young writer spent a happy childhood and dissipated that serve as a source of inspiration for his distinguished works, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1885). At the age of twelve years after the death of his father, Twain was forced to abandon their studies at a local school to start working. One of his first jobs was as an apprentice printer in the local newspaper "Courier", and that experience opened the appetite of Twain to the field of communication. His eagerness adventurous, curious, slightly bohemian and a perfect fit critical to a prosperous situation for American journalism, a business publications proliferated all walks of life. Twain decided to work for his brother Orion, a businessman who owned several newspapers and opened the doors to future collaborations in the sector. It was at this stage of early youth when Twain was released as an author and published several humorous stories that appeared in a sports magazine in Boston in 1852, entitled "Carpet-Bag."
His "sketches" as he insisted on calling those stories were stories unassuming and innocent look that betrayed a tendency to caricature and social observation. For Twain, the American landscape border, the customs of its people and human nature, especially their strengths and weaknesses-starred his particular satirical view of the world. How best to translate it was through a narrative style stuffed full of slang and colloquial expressions of a spicy taste all-American. Among the different variants of ears of corn and marsupial species, the pen of Twain not only stands as mocking, but that feeds on energy, color and movement that lead to inertia and entropy of his characters: men and women who insist on seeing the world in their own way and do not skimp on exaggerating details, refusing to acknowledge the obvious, or resorting to hyperbole, even to bragging. Not to lie, they decide to believe their own lies as an athletic trainer famous frog in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Some are poor devils, garrulos of people like Colonel Jack and Colonel Jim can not see the difference between a car and a bus, and others are women on the verge of a nervous breakdown: the unbearable see Mrs. McWilliams and his peculiar against diphtheria. But everyone from the layman agricultural newspaper editor who mistakes the turnips and apples suffered European hotel guest who can not stand the continental breakfast, make a bold portrait of an America that no longer exists but whose wake persists in the groundwater of modern American society.
sense of humor of Twain requires the reader the ability to laugh at apparent vagaries and exaggerations that belong to a classical school of comedy: find a rogue who laughs at the expense of the unwary and take advantage of it, or recreates hyperbolically in an alternative scenario reminiscent of another well-known by the reader. When Twain occurrences provoke our laughter, we realize that is laughter that belong to other times, other ways of understanding the ridicule and scorn, however, inevitably tie in with the cynicism and bitterness of our current mood. Twain never left his caustic and funny stop throughout his literary production, and in fact it fueled his success as a cult writer for much of his life. Works like "The Innocents Abroad" (1869), "A Tramp Abroad" (1880) or "White Elephant Theft" (1882) boast a comical that transcends the boundaries of the home, the American and known to venture into territories that are inspired unpleasant trips to Europe and made Twain Saint Louis, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Connecticut. In 1870, at the height of his career, and nearly a decade after struggling for weeks to brief the Confederate Army in the Civil War, Twain married Olivia Langdon, daughter of a prosperous businessman Elmira, New York. It was a well-matched couple who sought to Twain some measure of financial stability and emotional refuge, however, would not prevent his penchant for telling their local journeys under a picture of social and political issues topical at the time: slavery, speculation financial, political corruption, poverty or duplication of religion. Mark Twain was not a friend of moralizing or signaling pathways or responsible, for him, literature is a fiction about other fiction, that is our life. Therefore, reality is a metafiction and all that really matters is to sit on the porch of your house to contemplate the eternal "commedia dell'arte" that is existence. Only then is worth writing, because that's all we can laugh about it. Carme Font
April 2010
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