If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Mark Twain 

One of my favourite writers. He wrote, among other classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), one of the few novels that at certain times in my life, I've picked up and read, if only a few pages, again and again.

A rennaisence man, into everything, literature, art, philosophy, politics and science. I would describe him (poorly) as the American Charles Dickens but I would be referring to stature rather than style. Twain was particularly fascinated with scientific inquiry and developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla (another of my heroes), the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory.

There was and still is a controversy over whether Huckleberry Finn is racist or anti-racist, and because the word "nigger" is frequently used in the novel many have questioned the appropriateness of teaching the book in schools. This questioning of the word "nigger" is illustrated by a school administrator of Virginia in 1982 calling the novel the "most grotesque example of racism I've ever seen in my life".

Using the same system of name replacement that I employed in my entry: The Way Of The Sausage: The Hipster Huckleberry Finn is an edition with the word "nigger" replaced with the word "hipster". The book's description includes this statement "Thanks to editor Richard Grayson, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn are now neither offensive nor uncool."

Well, this is ok, because names, in the end are just names, but is there any real need to pander? I mean we are all grown-ups aren't we? Anyway we've gone full circle on that particular name which was used over 200 times by Tarantino in the film "Django Unchained" and is used by people of colour worldwide in general conversation and rap lyric alike. It was never about the word was it? ("the N Word" as a substitute is somehow worse) it is and always was about the underlying intention. Even allowing for his own family background, I refuse to believe that Twain was ever a racist.

On one of his tours of the United Kingdom, Mark Twain is known to have visited my local library,  Kensal Rise Library in Queens Park. In mid-1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House, located in North West London. Twain wrote then that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world." To think he was talking about fields which bordered the North Circular Road in the environs of present day IKEA.

The title of this blog is robbed from the man himself:
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Read more Twainisms here

Photo: Mark Twain. I hold the original print, negative destroyed, Thanks Bodger!