), a disjointed account of his time spent getting to, and living in, the Territory of Nevada. At least, I guess that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m only about a third of the way through the thing and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to know.<\/span><\/p>\nThough it was written as a sort of travel and adventure journal, it reads today as a history. He leaves \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the states\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to head out to the territories. Utah is run by Brigham Young. The Indian threat is everywhere.<\/p>\n
[Twain has some nasty things to say about Indians. On the one hand, he preaches charity, but in the other, his words practically drip with venom. While he does use harsh language about other people, too, he never uses quite so broad a brush as he does when painting the Indians.]<\/p>\n
It reads as etymology as well, of course, as does any author writing from another time. For a word guy, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot of fun.<\/p>\n
But what surprises me the most is the fact that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not really very good as a general read. That is, when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not enjoying it as history, and when Twain isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t being hilarious (which he can be at the drop of a hat), I suddenly find myself bored. And disappointed.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m pretty sure that Roughing It was written for serial publication (that is, a bit at a time, in a magazine or something), which may start to explain why each chapter is practically unrelated to the ones before and after it. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also written in such a rambling style that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to figure out what the man is trying to say. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll go for a while, being funny, then say something like, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But seriously,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and then kill his own joke.<\/p>\n
Maybe he was trying to give a true account of things, while also keeping his humorist fans happy. In any case, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure how much more I can take. I should just decide that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all about the historical American west and stop trying to read it as anything else. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see how it goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m reading Mark Twain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Roughing It (link), a disjointed account of his time spent getting to, and living in, the Territory of Nevada. At least, I guess that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m only about a third of the way through the thing and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to know. Though it was written as a sort of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languagelit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}