At 10:12 AM 1/5/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>Mark Weiss wrote:
>
>>As to the accusations, my own feeling is that I ubnderstand the 
>>motivation but still think it's pretty silly. Language belongs to all of 
>>us. It's not that Chandler uses black speech, it's the agendas, declared 
>>or hidden within that use, and a failure to make that discrimination has 
>>led to Huck Finn's removal from the shelves of High School libraries.
>
>Can you teach Huckleberry Finn in college English courses anymore or has 
>it been pushed out there too?


Yup, taught it several times myself, with in fact a discussion of the use 
of the word nigger, which remains in fact in uncontroversial use among 
black people--I overheard a bunch of kids on my subway line using it 
extensively just yesterday. Tho use in other contexts is of course verboten.

I don't know how I'd put over "Nigger of the Narcissus," tho. I have 
managed "Heart of Darkness, " which is essentially counter-racist. But in 
all of these things level of education makes a difference. Huck was forced 
to vacate the HS libraries of mostly less well-read communities, where 
describing someone as a niggardly scotsman would be assumed to refer to his 
appearance.


>I am going somewhat afield here, but since loaded words are involved, it 
>feels like fair game.  The Kern-Hammerstein 1927 musical Show Boat was 
>filmed for the first time in 1936, and featured the amazing Paul Robeson 
>singing "Ol' Man River," a song he later revised to suit his political 
>beliefs.  No one "dast blame this man" for his rewriting.  OMR in its 
>original state opens with one of the vilest words in the English language 
>being sung on stage.  I'm at work, I cannot type it out, it begins with 
>"N" and describes who works on the Mississippi.  This word was softened to 
>"colored folks" then to nothing because the song was cut in later productions.
>
>When the musical tragedy (for that is what it is...listen to the overture) 
>was staged in New York in 1927 people were shocked to hear the "n-word" 
>sung from the stage.  One thing saying it among your friends about the 
>household help, quite another hearing it sung by a Black chorus and 
>leading bass.  Or used as part of the dialogue, set at first around 1880 
>in post-bellum Mississippi. "N., where'd you get that brooch?!"  "Anyone 
>in these parts with even a drop of N. blood is a N. as far as we're 
>concerned in Mississippi."  And so forth.
>
>Could Show Boat get a fair hearing today?  The "reference" recording--it 
>was never staged, AFAIK--was made in London in 1987-88 with a fabulous 
>crossover cast: Jerry Hadley, Frederica Von Stade, Teresa Stratas, and the 
>late Bruce Hubbard.  It has Hubbard who played Joe in the production, and 
>who had difficulties with the attempt to scrape off the paint and get back 
>to the brickwork.  He found it impossible to say "n----r."  His mentor was 
>Eartha Kitt, who had had that word hurled at her in the 1950s when she was 
>something like the first Black sex queen of records and TV who refused to 
>crash-dive like Dorothy Dandridge.


I'd throw in Lena Horne here in terms of precedence, which is to take 
nothing away from Eartha Kitt.

Wasn't there a NY production in recent years, maybe at one of the opera 
houses, or am I hallucinating?

>Kitt said to him (paraphrased) "It is distasteful, it is disgusting, but 
>you owe it to our people and history, you owe it to the people who had 
>that word thrown at them when there wasn't a play going on.  It was the 
>truth."  Hubbard sang it "come scritto."  It's still shocking.
>Hammerstein went on to a chameleon career writing hardassed lyrics for 
>Kern, then Lorenz Hart, and finally increasingly sticky treacle for 
>Richard Rodgers.  I doubt that either Kern or Hammerstein wrote as well 
>apart as they did as a team.


Kern wrote wonderfully with a lot of people, among them P.G. Wodehouse! 
"'Till the Clouds Roll By" is a favorite of mine. Rodgers was considerably 
less treacly when he wrote with Harte, by the way.


>Some shows deserve to disappear.  I'm still mystified why George M. 
>Cohan's "Little Johnny Jones" was remounted for the likes of Donny Osmond 
>some years ago.  Some reviewer said they cut the really grotesque items 
>that might have worked in 1901: "March of the Frisco Chinks" for 
>example.  On the other hand, having heard Show Boat sans censorship and 
>with all the music intended for the 1927 production, it may be the 
>greatest American musical play before Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.
>
>This opinion is worth what you're paying to read it.
>
>PS--I'm resigning from here early this afternoon, which means I'm about to 
>unsubscribe from this site and retain the Comcast account.  I will delete 
>all my non-work mail.  I don't feel like having my files audited.  Yes, 
>I've got something else beginning the 16th.  Much better work, appreciably 
>more money, almost as bad a drive but you can't have everything.
>
>ken
>
>--
>Kenneth Wolman
>Proposal Development Department
>Room SW334
>Sarnoff Corporation
>609-734-2538
>
>I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up 
>where I needed to be.
>                                 -Douglas Adams