BARREL OF MONKEYS: "GENESIS" in Reverse


I consider myself a Democrat. Been called a Socialist. Definitely a bleeding heart liberal.


As a child from a traditional southern family, playing Barrel of Monkeys on the floor, church every Sunday, doing well in public school, learning a trade; in every sense privileged .........


Comfortable in middle age, an avid news reader, on learning the tragic story of a full grown chimpanzee destroying the face of a woman who offered a toy, only trying to help it's owner coax her surrogate child back into his cage......


Today being confrontational, ribald, offensive, restless, rebellious.......


How did I get here from there?


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Monday, July 12, 2010

Mark Twain’s Unexpurgated Autobiography - NYTimes.com

“I can see the farm yet, with perfect clearness,” he writes. “I can see all its belongings, all its details.” Of slavery, he notes that “color and condition interposed a subtle line” between him and his black playmates, but confesses: “In my schoolboy days, I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it.”"



"In popular culture today, Twain is “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” Ron Powers, the author of “Mark Twain: A Life,” said in a phone interview. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.”"


“Paine was a Victorian editor,” said Robert Hirst, curator and general editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, where Twain’s papers are housed. “He has an exaggerated sense of how dangerous some of Twain’s statements are going to be, which can extend to anything: politics, sexuality, the Bible, anything that’s just a little too radical. This goes on for a good long time, a protective attitude that is very harmful.”

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"One thing I like about the Digital age: having the dictionary at my fingertips, how easy it is to look up unfamiliar words as I go along reading." "At least....... until, I played my first game of SCRABBLE on the internet. Wow! I had no idea you could spell so many words with seven letters every time." "Now I feel pressured to catch up!"