Greetings from Hartford!
Wednesday night’s “Trouble at Home” from Hartford plumbs Mark Twain’s olfactory humor – that is, his humor involving smells. Hearing this, I thought immediately of 1601: “In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore.”
Whether or not UC Davis English prof Hsuan Hsu will treat of this Clemens work in his talk, I don’t know; I’ll let the Mark Twain House describe the event below. I do know Dr. Hsu’s groundbreaking work on Clemens’s attitudes towards Asia, a rich subject for Hartford, where the first overseas group of Chinese students were based. It was an effort the Clemenses supported. The book is Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization.
Again, Wednesday, February 17, at 5:30 p.m. EST. To register for the free program, go to https://www.crowdcast.io/e/trouble-at-home-hsuan/register
Here’s the Mark Twain House blurb:
In a forthcoming essay, Hsuan Hsu aims to better understand how Twain's olfactory humor stages a little-explored aspect of Twain’s realism: the materiality of socially and geographically stratified atmospheres.
During his lecture for the second Trouble at Home of the season, Hsu will begin by surveying Twain’s scattered comments on the smells of rotting fish, the stench of Chinatowns, working-class odors bodies in a church congregation, plague-ridden corpses, and diseased immigrant bodies. In examples such as these, olfactory disjunctions establish a realist sense of atmosphere as a medium that intangibly structures social and economic life.
The second half of his lecture will offer an extensive reading of “The Invalid’s Story,” a humorous story in which Twain offers an extended gag associating the smell of Limburger cheese with a rotting corpse. The story complicates Twain’s realist treatments of smell by emphasizing both psychological determinants and its material connections with fermentation and human microbiomes.
Enjoy!
Steve

Steve Courtney, Curatorial Volunteer
The Mark Twain House & Museum
351 Farmington Avenue
Hartford, Connecticut 06105
860-302-8969


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