Trouble Begins at Eight

The Trouble Begins at Eight is a lecture series held annually in the Fall and Spring of each year. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the Barn at Quarry Farms in Elmira, NY. Each lecture is digitally recorded after the event and made available in audiofile MP3 format. 

Spring 2012 Lecture Series Events

Editing Tales from Inside the Mark Twain Project
Victor Fischer Mark Twain Project The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley

Wednesday, May 23rd in the Barn at Quarry Farm 8 p.m.

With some choice words from Mark Twain about his contemporary editors and proofreaders, Vic will talk about what it means to the Project editors to ‘edit’ Mark Twain, giving examples that range from The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969) to Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), with emphasis on Mark Twain’s Letters (1988–2002) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by the Project the first time with only half of the manuscript known to survive (published 1985, 1988), and again after the missing half was discovered in a Hollywood attic in late 1990 (published 2001, 2003).

About the Project:
More than forty volumes edited by the Mark Twain Project have been published by the University of California Press to date, and in 2007 the Project launched The Mark Twain Project Online, a web-based edition of Mark Twain’s works (marktwainproject.org). The Project is based in the Mark Twain Papers of The Bancroft Library, at the University of California, Berkeley, the world’s largest and most comprehensive archive of manuscripts and documents by and about Mark Twain.

Victor Fischer has been an editor at the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library since 1967. Among his most recent publications are the trade and scholarly editions volumes 3 and 4 of Mark Twain’s Letters (1992, 1995), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2001, 2003), Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living: A Handbook for the Damned Human Race (2004), Mark Twain’s Letters, 1876–1880 (2007, web publication only), a special 125th anniversary edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2010), and, as one of a team of editors, the first volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (2010).

Doors open at 7:30. The Trouble Begins at Eight.

Mark Twain and the Philippine-American War: “Hogwash” and “Pious Hypocrisy”
Susan K. Harris University of Kansas

Wednesday, May 30th in the Barn at Quarry Farm 8 p.m. 

The United States annexed the Philippines in 1899, rationalizing its colonization of Filipinos as “benevolent assimilation.” Twain, furious that his country was trying to become a colonialist power, called the rationale “hogwash” and “pious hypocrisy.” Susan K. Harris examines the rarely seen political side of Twain, a man deeply engaged by world events and deeply disturbed by his country’s foray into global imperialism. The questions that Twain posited publicly about America’s role in the world remain as relevant in 2012 as they were in 1900.

Susan K. Harris is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas, where she is a Twain specialist. She is author of God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (The War that Sparked Mark Twain’s Conflict with America), The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain, and Mark Twain’s Escape from Time, among other publications.

Doors open at 7:30. The Trouble Begins at Eight.

“The Noblest and Best Man after Washington”: The Role of President Abraham Lincoln in Mark Twain’s Reconstruction
Joe B. Fulton Baylor University

Wednesday, June 6th in the Barn at Quarry Farm 

“One mournful wail is heard from shore to shore; A Nation’s heart is stricken to the core,” wrote Albert Evans in the April 17, 1865, issue of the San Francisco newspaper the Alta California. Mere days after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Evans expressed the nation’s grief with his heartfelt poem, “The Martyr.” Not everyone was impressed, least of all Mark Twain, who criticized the poem’s ending “Gone! Gone! Gone! Forever and forever!” by writing, “I consider that the chief fault in this poem is that it is ill-balanced—lop-sided, so to speak. There is too much ‘gone’ in it, and not enough ‘forever.’”

With signs of mourning everywhere, most writers were respectful even of bad poetry written about the martyred president. Twain, by contrast, lampooned such poetry, and even joked about Lincoln’s assassination. It was only in later years that Twain began using Lincoln’s special status as a martyr to exhort the country to live up to the slain president’s ideals. Twain’s evolving use of Lincoln for satirical purposes charts the evolution of the writer from a “damned secessionist,” as one government official called him, to his reconstruction as the “Lincoln of our literature.”

Joe B. Fulton is Professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he has been honored as an “Outstanding Professor for Scholarship” and as a “Baylor University Class of 1945 Centennial Professor.” Dr. Fulton has published numerous books and articles on American literature. In addition, he has published four books on Mark Twain: Mark Twain’s Ethical Realism: The Aesthetics of Race, Class, and Gender (University of Missouri Press, 1997); Mark Twain in the Margins: The Quarry Farm Marginalia and the Composition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (University of Alabama Press, 2000); The Reverend Mark Twain: Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content (The Ohio State University Press, 2006); and The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker became the Lincoln of our Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 2011), winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Southern Studies. The Reconstruction of Mark Twain has also been honored by Choice as an “Outstanding Academic Title.”

Light refreshments will precede this concluding lecture of the Spring series. Doors open at 7:15. The Trouble Begins at Eight.

 

PDF of Lecture series Schedule

Directions to Quarry Farm for local attendees:
From Elmira College, head east on Washington across the Clemens Center Parkway to Sullivan Street. Turn right on Sullivan. Turn left on East Avenue. Turn left on Crane Road. Quarry Farm will appear on your left. Please park on the grassy area behind the Barn. Quarry Farm is a fragile, natural environment. Please exercise care.

If using a GPS, enter: 131 Crane Road, Elmira, NY 14901.

The Trouble Begins at Eight is made possible by the support of the Mark Twain Foundation and the Friends of the Center.

Elmira College
Center for Mark Twain Studies
(607) 735-1941
twaincenter@elmira.edu

Director of Mark Twain Studies, Dr. Barbara Snedecor
Center for Mark Twain Studies Secretary, Christy Gray ’10 
Quarry Farm Caretaker, Timothy Morgan