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From:
Kathy O'Connell <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 15 Jul 1998 14:43:13 EDT
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Here is the story itself, and the website address:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/071598author-twain.html

 By GLENN COLLINS

          [H] ere now in the high noon of fence-whitewashing
              season, when sivilized people like Becky Thatcher
          and Aunt Polly might seek refuge in the shade of a
          porch, comes the latest Imax adventure. It's a colorful,
          noisy, globe-trotting three-dimensional celebration of
          -- Mark Twain?

          Yes, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who adopted the pen name
          Mark Twain, will take his place on the eight-story-tall
          screen, superseding the flicker of previous Imax
          extravaganzas that have portrayed the quest for the
          summit of Everest, the hunt for the Titanic and the
          pedal-stomping proclivities of professional race car
          drivers.

          Indeed, the premiere of the film, "Mark Twain's America
          in 3-D," on Friday in Manhattan is a testament to the
          continuing mass appeal of the cynosure of Hannibal, Mo.

          Improbably, 88 years after his death and 122 years after
          the publication of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,"
          America is sustaining a Twain boom that betrays no sign
          of abating.

          "His popularity is growing," said Shelley Fisher
          Fishkin, professor of American studies and English at
          the University of Texas at Austin, the editor of the
          29-volume "The Oxford Mark Twain" (1996). "Twain
          scholarship is increasing, articles are coming out by
          the dozens, there are new films in the works, and Twain
          is the subject of exchanges on the Internet."

          Researchers say the Twain phenomenon -- fueled by the
          author's wicked wit, enduring seductiveness and flat-out
          subversiveness -- keeps captivating audiences in each
          new generation. Twain himself put it this way: "My books
          are water; those of the great geniuses are wine.
          Everybody drinks water."

          Nonetheless, said Justin Kaplan, a Twain biographer: "It
          is too easy to sentimentalize him as the foxy grandpa of
          American letters, the author of wholesome books for the
          young.

          Twain was a man with an                          [Image]
          extremely dark imagination and a           University of
          low threshold of annoyance." Mr.   California-Riverside,
          Kaplan won the Pulitzer Prize       California Museum of
          and the National Book Award for              Photography
          his study, "Mr. Clemens and Mark
          Twain."                          Mark Twain, in an
                                           image produced from a
          To some scholars, the 20th       19th-century
          century bears the mark of Twain. stereopticon negative
          They see the current nostalgic   and used in ''Mark
          hoopla over this Victorian as an Twain's America in
          emblem of the intense millennial 3-D.''
          preoccupation with the 19th      -----------------------
          century.

          But though that era has been idealized as the golden age
          of invention, exploration, colonization and the mass
          industry that fueled a pivotally unifying civil war,
          Twain grappled with many of the messy issues that still
          torment the fin-de-siècle American psyche.

          "As the millennium approaches," Dr. Fishkin said,
          "scholars are looking back a century ago and seeing
          Twain as a truth-teller. There is virtually no issue on
          the horizon right now that Twain didn't deal with then,
          in his work." The roster includes animal rights, the
          impact of technology, the tension between heredity and
          environment, the boundaries of gender and the
          interracial debate.

          A century and a half after the famously riverine Twain
          worked as a printer's apprentice in Hannibal, he has
          Java-star status on the Internet. For example, the Mark
          Twain Forum (reachable through many search engines)
          provides information of interest to Twainians, as
          Clemens buffs call themselves.

          It offers links to dozens of Twain sites including the
          Mining Company Guide, which posts the latest Twain
          flashes, like the movement in Manila to celebrate
          Philippine-American Friendship Day by building a Mark
          Twain monument, or the popularity of juvenile
          horse-riding in a Japanese amusement park called the Tom
          Sawyer Bokuju.

          There are also Internet bulletins about the latest
          attempts to banish "Huckleberry Finn" from bookstores
          and library shelves, including the recent move by the
          Pennsylvania State Conference of the National
          Association for the Advancement of Colored People to
          remove the novel from required-reading lists in the
          state's schools.

          Often Showing Up As Himself in Fiction

          The public television station WGBH in Boston is
          preparing a documentary on "Huckleberry Finn," and Ken
          Burns -- of baseball, Lewis and Clark and Civil War fame
          -- is working on a two-part Twain documentary to appear
          on PBS in 2001; even a Hollywood producer is approaching
          Twain scholars for advice on an animated Twain movie.

          So powerful is the Twain presence that contemporary
          writers have made him a character in their fiction. They
          include Gore Vidal, in his novel "1876"; Joyce Carol
          Oates in her novel "A Bloodsmoor Romance"; the
          "Riverworld" series by the science fiction author Philip
          Jose Farmer, and the Mark Twain mysteries of Peter J.
          Heck, author of "Death on the Mississippi."

          And not only was Twain a character in "Bonanza" and
          "Cheers," but also a time-travel episode was built about
          Twain on "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

          "Twain has more marquee value than ever," said Mark
          Katz, a vice president of Sony Pictures Classics, which
          is distributing the Imax film and is a co-producer.

          Old Photographs, New Techniques

          The Imax documentary -- which is told in Twain's words
          and reaches across two centuries, as did Twain's life --
          will make its debut on Friday at Sony Theaters Lincoln
          Square; it will be playing on 10 large-format screens
          across the country by the end of the year. The film
          interweaves the life and times of Twain, as depicted in
          black-and-white archival photographs, with full-color
          portrayals of the lives of current-day enthusiasts who
          revel in the 19th-century Zeitgeist and seek to recreate
          it.

          Its producers see the $6 million Twain film, the first
          Imax biography, as something of a breakthrough in the
          evolution of a new entertainment medium. Imax -- which,
          like its predecessor Cinerama, never saw a roller
          coaster it didn't want to film -- is still dismissed by
          some as a novelty medium. "But we think of the format as
          an alternative cinematic art form that is undergoing a
          maturation process," Mr. Katz said.

          Stephen Low, the 3-D film's 47-year-old director, says
          the documentary allows theatergoers "to look into the
          eyes of their ancestors and wonder what they were like;
          these are not actors, and this is not fiction."

          Indeed, the 1998 film is based on an extraordinary
          19th-century trove of three-dimensional stereopticon
          negatives from the collection at the University of
          California-Riverside, California Museum of Photography,
          many of which present Twain himself, in all his fierce
          attention, as if he were poised to speak.

          The film has been enhanced with archival two-dimensional
          photographs of the era that have been digitally
          converted into three-dimensional images. This is
          believed to be the first time such images have been used
          on the big screen.

          The film appears even as Twain buffs are girding for a
          summerlong binge of Clemensiana. For example, this
          weekend the city of Hartford will hold its annual Mark
          Twain Days festival, with, naturally, cane-pole fishing
          events, and frog-jumping and fence-painting contests
          sponsored by the Mark Twain House there.

          Thus far the most high-profile Twain bash of the season
          was mounted on Monday night at the Players, the New York
          City club that Twain helped found in 1888 and where he
          lived in 1904. (His pool cue is enshrined in the
          billiard room.) At a Victorian fund-raiser, 200 guests
          saw the Imax film, then consumed 19th-century food and
          were serenaded by banjo, tuba and trombone.

          "I never pass up an opportunity to attend an event in my
          honor," said Mr. Twain himself, greeting the guests in a
          splendid white suit. When pressed, he allowed that he
          might be masquerading as an actor by the name Munro
          Bonnell.

          The real Twain "would unleash his barbs at the slightest
          provocation" at considerable risk to his reputation,
          said Mr. Kaplan, the biographer. Twain had reason to be
          provoked, having lost much of his money to unprescient
          investments, and most of his family to illness. That
          included his daughter Jean, who died at 29, during an
          epileptic fit on Christmas Eve. Twain died three months
          later, in the year of the return of Halley's Comet,
          1910: he had been born 75 years before, in 1835, during
          the year of the comet's previous appearance.

          From the Riverboat To the Automobile

          The new documentary portrays Twain as a quintessentially
          American presence whose life marked the milestones of
          the 19th century. Twain's arc spanned the era of the
          riverboat on the Mississippi to that of the motorcar on
          Fifth Avenue. He fought in the Civil War (briefly, for
          the South), became wealthy and famous, lost most of his
          fortune and lived until the era of powered flight.

          To be sure, Twain is still a world-class
          controversy-magnet, not only for the way he refers to
          blacks in "Huckleberry Finn," but also for his portrayal
          of female characters.

          Some black academics, including Julius Lester, a
          professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
          have adamantly proclaimed Twain's racism, and feminists
          have charged that his sexism was epitomized by shallow
          portrayals of women.

          The novelist Jane Smiley has attributed Twain's grand
          reputation to the hype generated by a small group of
          literary critics who canonized "white, Protestant,
          middle-class male authors."

          Other black scholars, like David L. Smith, a professor
          of English at Williams College, have pointed out that
          Twain portrayed the interracial friendship of Huck and
          Jim positively and indicted the ethical myopia of white
          characters who claimed to be moral while condoning a
          racist system of law and custom.

          "His greatest works have relatively limited roles for
          female characters, but some of Twain's lesser-known
          works show a greater range," contended Dr. Fishkin,
          whose most recent book, "Lighting Out for the Territory"
          (1997), explores these controversies. "Calling him a
          sexist or a racist is selling him very short. He was
          neither."

          Views of Progress And Its Dark Side

          Though Twain once said that "the 20th century is a
          stranger to me," some see the author's sensibility as
          especially modern because "he was conflicted, divided,
          ironic and not at peace with himself," Mr. Kaplan said.

          A century before cyberphiles rushed to buy Windows 98,
          Twain was clearly an early adopter, intrigued by the
          cutting-edge technologies that produced cash registers,
          typewriters and photography. He claimed to be the first
          author in the world to apply a typing machine to
          literature and proclaimed himself the first book author
          to use phonographic dictation (for "The American
          Claimant").

          In that 1892 book, he posited a wild-eyed inventor who
          dreamed up ideas that prefigured the fax machine, the
          photocopier and DNA cloning. But Twain also wrote about
          the dark side of progress, envisioning, for example, a
          technological dystopia in "A Connecticut Yankee in King
          Arthur's Court."

          Not the least of Twain's accomplishments was that he was
          "wildly funny," Mr. Kaplan said. "This was a man who
          worshiped laughter as a weapon. Twain was not afraid of
          hurting."

          Indeed, "we need Twain now," Mr. Kaplan added with a
          laugh. "Imagine the kind of satiric and logical
          intelligence he would apply to the whole Kenneth
          Starr-Monica Lewinsky business. Twain would be having a
          ball."


                Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

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