Gratuitous Literary Posting (TM)

We are off this weekend to my God-parents house near Fredericksburg (known among some folks as "Fred-Vegas"), there to turn the Llama-ettes loose on pumpkins, hay-mazes, wagon rides and the like.

Also, Uncle is planning to take me to a meeting of some sort of Sam Clemens literary group Saturday evening. I know virtually nothing about the group or what kind of discussion I have to look forward to, but I received the rather alarming news last evening that I was to bring along "something that reminded my of my favorite work of Clemens."

Well, after swallowing my initial reaction and deciding to try and be a good sport about it, I started to ponder what I had ought to take. My eventual solution? A hatchet.

And why a hatchet, you might ask? Well, because one of my very favorite pieces of Clemens' writing is the hatchet job he does on James Fenimore Cooper in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," easily one of the cruelest, funniest and most deserved pieces of literary criticism ever to have been penned. A sample:

The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern ears. To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

Go read the rest.

I don't know if this is exactly what the organizers of this little event had in mind, but I'm sticking with it.

UPDATE: Well, I couldn't find a hatchet so I went with a mallot instead. The metaphor of hammering isn't quite the same as hatcheting, of course, but it did well enough in a pinch and my little joke was kindly received.

And yes, we actually had a pretty interesting discussion about Twain. Given the season, our topic was the Victorian obsession with the Occult, and specifically with speaking to those "on the other side."