Scattering Words

I've been having trouble focusing this week. I was talking to someone at work about this, and her opinion was that vacation followed by a blizzard/work at home leads to a relaxed mind and a difficult transition back to 6am commutes. She has a point. I hope that's all it is. This time of year, I always feel a little older than I am.

But at least I've been having thoughts. I was inspired by last week's snow (and the unbelievably lackluster job the city did in cleaning up after it) to write an article that I would try to sell to the same magazine that published one of my articles back in 2008. Yes, it's been that long since I did any writing that wasn't work or blog related.

So yesterday I started writing it, and I got three paragraphs on the screen. They were awful, but I would have kept going - if I could have. The words just wouldn't come. I guess I was lucky to get even those three awful paragraphs out. I didn't save them, though. They weren't worth remembering. It's a shame - I still think it would be a good article if I could just find the words that would say what I want to get across. I love writing, but sometimes, the muse refuses to whisper.

Maybe this disappointing writing exercise contributes to my anger about the new Mark Twain editions being released by Alan Gribben, although probably not. I think George Orwell has more to do with it than my difficult week at the keyboard. I'm upset, afraid, worried by this modern interpretation of an American classic. It smacks of censorship. How dare anyone have the audacity to alter someone else's work and rerelease it as if it were the original - or worse yet, as an improvement. If Mr. Gribben wants to release a version of Huckleberry Finn that is word for word the same as Mark Twain's, with the exception of selected word replacements, then frankly, I think he should put his own name in the author's place, and not put words in someone else's mouth. (He should probably then be sued for copyright infringement and/or defamation for stealing so wholesale from another author's work.) Mark Twain wrote what he meant to write, and people reading work from another era have to understand it in the context to which it belongs. If they find it offensive, they shouldn't read it. Or they can read it and criticize it - that's their right. But I don't think that people have the right to change it.

Yes, I get a little bit upset by modern interpretations of Shakespeare, too, but I can understand it better in theater, where so much of the experience is the performance. In a way, the script is secondary in theater, so the production team has more of a license to reinterpret how the play is presented. I'd still be upset if they strayed from the script, but I wouldn't be upset if they twisted the presentation to mean something that one might not normally take from simply reading the play. For example, I just saw The Merchant of Venice on Broadway (and Al Pacino was indeed wonderful, as was most of the cast, with the exception of the guy who played Bessanio), and I would have been more offended if the director would have tried to soften the derogatory references to Shylock as a Jew than I was by Shakespeare's politically incorrect writing. And I don't think that the fact that Mark Twain wrote more recently than Shakespeare should have any bearing on the situation: both wrote in the vernacular of their time. If someone wrote The Merchant of Venice today, I'd say it was inappropriate. If someone said that it was inappropriate to perform that play in today's cultural climate, I'd understand that well. But to rewrite someone else's work so that you can study it in its revised form? Not only do I think it's wrong and presumptuous and somehow un-Constitutional, I don't even understand why one would want to do that. But then, I've never been a fan of reading anything in translation. (Note to self: learn more languages!) Only the author has the right to choose his words, and altering the classics is simply shameful.