"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"

That's the fifth most "liked" quote on the topic of "sin" at goodreads. It's from Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (which is a novel, not a diary). The forth most liked also involves poor old Adam. It's by Mark Twain:

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

But I've heard snake is tough, tougher than dog (and less crunchy than grasshopper).

Sorry for the gratuitous Obama-eats-dog/snake punchline. It was not my motivation to look up quotes. I was actually searching for a quote about boredom, something like the only sin is being boring. Interestingly, the most-liked goodreads quotes on the topic of "boredom" are boring. Seriously, how many ways are there to say If you're bored, it's because you are boring? And now I've lost track of what somebody said that made me what that sin-of-boringness quote, which might not even exist.

“Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.”
― Elizabeth I

Am I boring you? You must be boring.

IN THE COMMENTS: Sweetbriar and Jody both point me to the answer: Christopher Hitchens, in his memoir, "Hitch-22." Page 13. His mother used to say:  "The one unforgivable sin is to be boring."

And I think what got me looking in the first place was a comment by Patrick over in the "Predictable Althouse Is Predictable" post:

Honestly, when I first came to this blog, back in the day, I assumed that you, a law professor especially at Madison, would be a typical lefty law professor. In fact, I likely put off reading the blog for awhile because I assumed it would be the same old boring lefty stuff. This is a very interesting blog, and your political opinions or votes are part of that, but really, there's a lot more to it. Vote for Ron Paul for all I care, or Dennis Kucinich. Just don't be boring about it!

Everything Mark Twain wanted to eat...

... when he arrived home in the United States of America after traveling around in France and Italy in 1870:

Radishes. Baked apples, with cream Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, Southern style. Porter-house steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Hot wheat-bread, Southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Clear maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points, on the half shell. Cherry-stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clam Soup. Philadelphia Terapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style. Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad. Baltimore perch. Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce. Celery. Roast wild turkey. Woodcock. Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore. Prairie hens, from Illinois. Missouri partridges, broiled. 'Possum. Coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, Southern style. Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips. Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus. Butter beans. Sweet potatoes. Lettuce. Succotash. String beans. Mashed potatoes. Catsup. Boiled potatoes, in their skins. New potatoes, minus the skins. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot. Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn, on the ear. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Hot hoe-cake, Southern style. Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings, with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, Southern style. Peach cobbler, Southern style Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry.

Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice-water--not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

Funny about the frogs! I thought that's what they ate in France that we think is yucky.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

ADDED: I've redone the text so it looks the way it appears in my Kindle version of 300 works of Mark Twain. It's not written in list/poem form. It still, however, says "Prairie liens, from Illinois," which Nichevo, in the comments, surmises is a misscanned Prairie hens, from Illinois. Ah, yes, here's an article about "The 'Prairie Hens' of Illinois" with the subtitle "Mark Twain’s favorite birds ... to eat." I'm going to correct the text above.

10 things wrong with the Freedom From Religion Foundation's atheist nativity scene.

(Here's my video showing the details of the creche, which is on the first floor of the Wisconsin Capitol, near some other holiday displays. You should watch the video to understand this list.)

1. Of the many figures in the display, only one is naked, ans it is a woman. This is the "clothed male, naked female" fantasy — promoted, presumably unwittingly.

2. The naked woman is Venus (the famous Botticelli Venus), and Venus is a goddess, a supernatural religious character, and therefore inconsistent with the overall theme of the display, which is that there is only the natural world and it's all we need.

3. The baby in the manger is huge in relation to the Venus figure, who is ostensibly the mother, so that is some scary cephalopelvic disproproportion, and yet naked Venus shows no signs of the C-section she would have needed to avoid death, unless we're to assume that baby got out of her body in some miraculous way, which is inconsistent with the theme of the display.

4. Atheism is promoted through a set of quotes from prominent figures — Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, and Mark Twain — in other words, by reference to the revered words of authority figures, which is the same method of arriving at beliefs used by religionists — whom we're invited to disrespect for thinking like that.

5. A sign says "may reason prevail" and ends: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds," which is not even a remotely credible belief, because it is falsified by every example of a person who is moved to altruism and charity by religion. Reason doesn't prevail on the very sign that says "may reason prevail."

6. In 2 places, the display invokes the solstice as an occasion for contemplating the natural world as the totality of what is. We're told it's "the reason for the season." Reason is a buzz word for these atheists, but what reason is there for a reason-fixated atheist to pay any special attention to the solstice? It seems they've gotten their atheism mixed up with paganism, which betrays the religious component of their thought structure.

7. There's a sign saying "Thou shalt not steal" — a quote from God, as reported in the Bible.

8. Right behind the "Thou shalt not steal" sign, there's an array of brochures titled "About FFR's Natural Nativity," which I think they want you to take, but I didn't take one because of the intimidating God quote about stealing.

9. There's a sign that says "Heathen's Greetings," but "heathen" is a religious designation. "Heathenism" is Germanic neopaganism.

10. Unless only one heathen is greeting us, they've got the apostrophe in the wrong place in "Heathen's."

The atheist creche in the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda.

We checked out the Christmas displays today...

"I suffered through Huckleberry Finn in high school, with the white kids going out of their way..."

"... to say 'Nigger Jim' and the teacher’s tortured explanation that Twain’s 'nigger' didn’t really mean nigger, or meant it ironically, or historically, or symbolically. Whatever. I could live my whole life fine if I never read that book again. If some teachers have the audacity to believe that Mark Twain’s work is still meaningful, even absent the words 'nigger' and 'injun,' more power to them. If other teachers think keeping those epitaphs in is worth the pain they will cause students of color, I understand that too. This isn’t about censorship, it’s about choice. Either choice will have unfortunate consequences."

From the law professor's contribution to the series of essays in the NYT on an edition of "Huckleberry Finn" without the n-word. There are 11 essays total. (The lawprof is Paul Butler of George Washington University.)

I must say that I think there should be an edition with the offensive words removed. It's not as though the uncensored versions disappear as a result of its existence. If you think seeing those words is crucial to understanding the book, that's fine, but not everyone does, and there's also the opinion that it's detrimental, as Professor Butler explains very well. I think high school and middle school students are inclined to dislike anything you impose on them. They might be more interested in Mark Twain if they knew the teachers were pushing the censored version and an uncensored version is accessible — like porn — through the internet. Here, kids, you can get right to it, the instant you want.

UPDATE: "keeping those epitaphs in..." Hey, NYT! Can we get a word editor?!

UPDATE 2: The NYT heard my plea and corrected "epitaphs" to "epithets."

95.83% of NPR website readers think it's wrong to publish an edition of "Huckleberry Finn" with the n-word removed.

Of NPR readers.

"Mark Twain had a very tender heart."

"He liked to say nasty things – he's really good at it – but he didn't like the idea of being there when the person heard them, and was hurt by them!"

An interesting definition of a tender heart!

***

Please use this link if you want to buy Mark Twain's autobiography.

Shed a tear for the clown trapped in the place of no mirth.

The NYT does.

Cobwebbed by senseless rituals, speeches which no one listens to and rules that make it all but impossible to act on the will of the people, the Senate cries for more ridicule, decorum breaches and old-fashioned wit.

To get through that sentence you need to believe: 1. If only the Senate didn't require 60 votes for cloture, the bills that would pass would be what the people want, and 2. When the legislative process is dysfunctional, what you want is hilarity. Now, the column is about the Sad Clown of the Senate Al Franken, so we come to that sentence bearing another burden of credulity: that Al Franken is a rich source of wit and ridicule. As for decorum breaches... this is a different sort of mental obstacle for me. Under what circumstance is it good for an individual member of a legislative body to make himself an exception to the rules of decorum? Who does he think he is? He's not the star of a movie satirizing government. He's one of a group of equals who have taken on the public service of making laws.

... Little has changed since Mark Twain offered this assessment: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

If Al Franken is such a wit, why are you quoting Mark Twain? Answer, via Mark Twain: Al Franken is an idiot.

Hmmm... would it breach decorum for me to say that Al Franken is a big, fat idiot?

... Absent any structural change, what the Senate badly needs is a jolt of humor, a clown to shame fellow members of the circus. More ridicule, more mirth under the spotlight to fight a mildewed sense of entitlement, could have the ironic effect of forcing senators to act like adults.

A clown to shame.... oh, yeah! You know the rich comic tradition of The Shaming Clown.

"Rand Paul can't play 'Tom Sawyer' on the campaign trail? Rush says no!"

There's a headline I completely misinterpreted. I imagined Rush Limbaugh had made some argument that Rand Paul can't behave like the Mark Twain character. Was Paul attempting to pass himself off as a good-hearted, mischievous boy? But no, "Rush" is the rock band Rush, and "Tom Sawyer" is one of their songs. Paul had been blasting the song at rallies and the band — which is Canadian, by the way — has objected, citing copyright law. The song, despite copyright law, is embedded at the link. Here are the lyrics. Sample:

Today's Tom Sawyer
He gets high on you
And the space he invades
He gets by on you

No his mind is not for rent
To any god or government
Always hopeful, yet discontent
He knows changes aren't permanent
But change is

Hmmph. Silly song. God rents? God owns.

What did Mark Twain write...

... that he insisted we wait 100 years after his death to read?

J.D. Salinger has died.

Link.

ADDED: "He was 91"... so a long detailed obituary was ready to go. You can read it at that link. Who here was not entranced by "Catcher in the Rye" at some point in their lives?

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”...

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.

And yes, yes, there are all those murderers who have that book in their back pocket. So don't get too entranced by it. Move on, read other things. But don't be a goddam phony.

MORE: A big question is, now that he's dead: Are there unpublished manuscripts that we'll get to see? Will we learn more about his retreat from the world?

In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish, N.H. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”

Or do we you really want to hear about it anymore, now that all these years have passed,  years of a hermit life almost as long as my whole life? (And I'm pretty old.)

Well, there will be no more goddam stupid conversation with anybody anymore for him, but I've got to say I hope he held up some kind of one-sided end of a conversation with us for the past quarter century and we'll get some more readings.

But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of any real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn’t written a word for years. Or like the character in Stephen King’s novel “The Shining,” he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or like Gogol at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all up. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, although she had never seen them. Quote TK from Salinger’s agent about surviving manuscripts, if any, and plans for them.

Ha ha. That last sentence is now edited out of the NYT obit at the link. Come on, TK!

Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, [Joyce] Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for diner). [Margaret] Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other exotic enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.

Ugh! Maybe I don't want to read anything more.

"FLEE AT ONCE — ALL IS DISCOVERED."

"Both Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle supposedly sent similar telegrams to a dozen prominent men, all of whom packed up and left town immediately."

From a nice piece about telegrams, which have been discontinued.

"For God's sake, please don't name an award after me."

That's what Steve Martin, accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, read from a slip of paper that he said contained his favorite quote from Mark Twain.

Readability.

Stephen Bainbridge and Gordon Smith are fooling around with a website that purports to calculate the readability of your webpage. Gordon is especially fascinated by two quite different scores, both of which purport to represent how many years of schooling one would need to read his writing. Steve seems to assume that a smarter person writes harder-to-read prose -- which would put Kevin Drum on an unusually high level. [UPDATE: Steve's only kidding.]

But if you read how the calculations are done, you'll see it's all about the length of your words and sentences. So a person who likes to start a new sentence with "and" or "but," instead of going with a comma when there's an independent clause, will get a lower grade level score. So will a person who follows Strunk and White and chooses Anglo Saxon rather than Latin-derived words. I'd say you're probably writing better if you end up with a lower grade-level score.

These simplistic calculations don't encompass enough factors to really tell us how hard or easy it is to read someone's prose. Mark Twain scores lower than Reader's Digest in one calculation, because, I'm guessing, he likes to insert periods, spices things up with some very short sentences, and edits out stuffy polysyllabic words. But I'll bet you can skim through Reader's Digest faster, because there aren't so many surprising observations.

The real question is how sophisticated your ideas are. If you are saying simple things in convoluted prose, you're a terrible writer who doesn't deserve to be read. Point me to the writer -- like Mark Twain -- who's saying striking, new things in clear prose! Blogs, especially, should be easy to read. But blog posts should contribute something new to the mix. Do you seriously think you're doing a better job if you're writing something harder to read? Don't you think Mark Twain worked over his prose to make it readable?

Frankly, I'm disgusted by the atrocious writing I have to read every day as part of my job. Frequently, reading judicial decisions and law review articles, I struggle to get the point, I take the time to decode the eye-glazing verbiage, and when I get it translated into plain English, I see it's a pretty simple point. This kind of writing is a product of laziness, the lack of genuinely interesting ideas, a careerist effort to seem smart and high-level, and a selfish lack of consideration for the reader.

UPDATE: Sissy Willis agrees with me and is nice enough to point out that my post is easy to read and adds something to the mix -- which is the standard I set for blogs. Also, people seem to be assuming that these calculations are something new, but I can remember when a grammar check on Microsoft Word ended with these numbers. And there's another problem with assessing a blogger's writing this way: a good portion of the writing on a blog is in the quotes. I'd like to see my numbers with the quotes excluded: a lot of the fusty writing is in the quotes.