Leslie, your embittered-sounding post prompted me to reread Daven's post,
which I had been saving unread; unfortunately, I deleted Stahl's, and now
cannot remember it.  Frankly, the aspect of your post that I find most
incomprehensible is the notion that Daven and Stahl are somehow
professionals whose professionalism militates your posting as an
amateur.  Where have they identified themselves as professionals?  Please,
please let's not get hung up on the issue of professionalism here.  I, for
instance, do have a PhD in English, but in modern British, so when it comes
to Huck I am on this list precisely as an amateur lover of Twain, though I
have been guilty of teaching Huck to college students in one course.

Anyway, I would like to know precisely what it is about Daven and Stahl's
posts that you find so troubling.  I found Daven's post, at least, to be
a rather sensitive and nuanced response to a remarkably difficult problem,
and while I'm not sure that Daven convinced me that *Huck* need not be
foisted upon children and highschoolers (even though I was the first person
to broach that possibility during the current discussion), Daven's post
prompted me to think about the downside of *Huck* for young readers in a
new, and I think useful, way.

Yes, Daven's ideas about Jim and Bill Cosby *are* painful to consider, for
Cosby is a genuinely endearing cultural figure, and yet I would ultimately
have to agree that Cosby is a painfully compromised figure *as*, and only
as, a prominently successful as an African-American.  For instance, Cosby
appeared on Leno's Tonight Show last night and, in response to Leno's
seemingly serious question "is there anything you wish you'd done that yoiu
(you) haven't?", spoke eloquently, and in seemingly serious fashion, of the
majesty of Dizzy Gillespie's solo during the "interlude" in "Night of
Tunisia," and how he (Cosby) really wished he could have played something
like that.  Not surprisingly, this conversation turned out to be the staging
of a parodic scene of Cosby "playing" Diz's famous break with Marsalis's
band, while Leno duly, dully clowned beside him.  The problem in all this,
as I see it, is precisely that Cosby spoke so movingly of the beauty of jazz
(and how often does *that* happen in mainstream culture!?!), only to allow
that beauty to be co-opted by Leno's desire (need) to make a stupid little
joke out of it.  That is, I was pained by the ease with which Cosby's
clowning turned something beautiful into something dumb, or worse, something
that (as most of Jay's viewers probably think) just doesn't really *matter*
(who needs that be-bop stuff, anyway?).  To be fair, my displeasure with
this incident pertains to my overall irritated perplexity at the fact that
Leno has at least hired a wonderful group of jazz musicians, on the one
hand,
but finds ways to insult their *music* every damn time he *talks* with them
(or about them), on the other.

In short, I agree with Daven that younger students might be too
impressionable
to understand how Twain (and not just the world depicted in the book)
compromises Jim, and how Cosby compromises himself in the very way that he
*uses* his considerable popularity and prestige, but think that college
students are much more likely to understand these problems, and that *Huck*
may very well be more appropriate for college students than for younger
ones.

Anyway, Leslie, I would very much like to hear your views on these matters.
I'm sorry if my own post has contributed to your feelings of effrontery,
but these *are* painful issues, and I think we have to accept a certain
amount of pain in order to confront them fairly and squarely.

All the Best,
m mcdonald