One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(27)

December 23rd—It seems like Alice and Diary Guy are really close this week. Really happy for them. Hard to see other people so happy this week for some reason. Ahhhh. Going to focus on work.

December 25th—Why do I feel so lonely today?

December 26th—Why am I so fat?

December 30th—I told everyone I’m ending the year early. I know it was impulsive, but I just had to do it. I was ready for everyone to make fun of me, but it turned out people were way cooler about it than I thought they would be. “That’s great,” “About time,” “Just what I need.” It was actually the most praise I got since I invented the calendar in the first place.

This year just got away from me somehow. Looking back, I realize how much I got sidetracked and how many months slipped by that I can’t even remember. The one nice thing is seeing how I used to be so worked up about Alice, and now I realize I really don’t care at all anymore. We’re going to be friends in the New Year, and I’m really looking forward to that. And the Jane thing ended the right way, I think—better than some long, drawn-out breakup.

So this year wasn’t everything I hoped it would be, and I didn’t get all the months in that I wanted, but I know next year is going to be totally different. When the New Year starts, I’m going to wake up at dawn every day and get to work—see, I’d love to put a number on “dawn,” that’s why I think this new clock thing could be really big. I have so many ideas for it. For example: I either want seconds to be timed to a blink of an eye so people don’t have to say “in the blink of an eye”—they can just say “one second”—or I want to double the length of a second so people don’t always say, “Can you give me two seconds?!” They can just say “one second.” I have a lot of ideas like that.

December 31st—So many parties going on tonight. On a Tuesday?! Not complaining, just saying.

January 1st—Woke up at sun-past-mountain with a headache. So much for the “dawn” thing. But I still feel good.





The Ghost of Mark Twain





It was a dreary day in midtown Manhattan.

A middle-school teacher had requested a meeting at the offices of an editor of Bantam Scholastic Classics politely and persistently for sixty consecutive days. The editor finally agreed to the meeting, even though the subject line in each email, “Regarding the Language in Huckleberry Finn,” gave him reason to assume the teacher’s agenda was to discuss what he considered to be the most tiresome topic in all of literature.


“Hi. How are you? Please, have a seat.”

“Thank you.”

“Water?”

“No thanks—actually, sure.”


Both men were white and in their early thirties, with messy brown hair, mildly rumpled clothing, and a barely-but-always-burning glint of trouble in their eyes, like a pilot light. The minor mischief of the A-minus student was recognizable in each to the other as the two men nodded, smiled, and crossed one foot at a right angle over the opposite knee with a similarly delicate masculine casualness.

“It’s about Huckleberry Finn.”

“Yes!” said the editor. “What about it?”

“First: it’s important for me to say that I truly believe Huckleberry Finn is an American classic.”

“Yes.”

“And I love it.”

“As do I.”

“Well, I’m here to propose you make some minor changes to the version you issue to schools. But first I want you to know that I’m no fan of censorship—”

“Oh, but what you propose—‘minor changes,’ as you just put it—is actually far more destructive to a text than censorship,” said the editor, looking to ambush the teacher’s argument before it could assume its proper form. “In the face of censorship, a reader could hold out the hope of coming across the unaltered text at another point, through another means, and to experience it then with unbiased eyes. But when you change the material, and publish that as the material, you’re making it so that the material, in its true form, no longer has a chance to exist in any minds at all.”

“That is a very compelling point,” replied the teacher. “Except there are circumstances in which a work has been made stronger by its evolution through the different cultural periods and forces, aren’t there? Take, for instance, The Arabian Nights, evolving through centuries of oral tradition. Or the works of Shakespeare: thanks to faulty memories, plagiarism, and regional preferences, we now have variations across numerous quartos and folios, and perhaps we’re the richer for it—who’s to say?”

The editor smiled. This teacher seemed smarter than the usual Huck Finn controversialists, and was certainly the first one he had encountered who might be entitled to more than the simplest “please/no” exchange. Usually, the editor found those who sought him out to talk about Huckleberry Finn were the simplest-minded elitists who didn’t have the capacity to understand, let alone teach, historical context or irony—and yet who frowned sagaciously at him as though he were the literalist, the one who sadly just couldn’t get things like sensitivity and racial tensions and the way the world is today.

“In any case,” the teacher continued, “there is one word in the book that has a power today that it did not have in the time of the book’s publication, and, for that reason, this one word merits, in my opinion, special attention.”