Earlier this morning, one of the guys at work tried to tell a “joke” involving, of all things, this classic essay by Mark Twain about James Fenimore Cooper. It was kind of sad, really, as the guy has absolutely no sense of humor, but no one has the heart to tell him so.
Anyway, about ten minutes ago, I’m randomly surfing the web, and I find this comic, which ends with the line, “A search for ‘James Fenimore Cooper’ yields the results, ‘Over-rated author. Probably an ass.’”
Truly, this is at least two more James Fenimore Cooper references than I was expecting to encounter before lunch.
Long, slow whistle Note to self: Put on no pretensious of personal writerly compentence within earshot of Samuel Clemens.
Now I don’t feel so bad about never having gotten past Chapter 2 of Last of the Mohicans. (I dimly remember something about a tattoo of a turtle. The rest is lost to me.)
I think I can beat that… I was in a meeting here this morning where somebody brought up James Fenimore Cooper (and how much Mark Twain hated him). So now that I’ve read your post, I’ve had three references in one day!
Yeah, I read the whole Twain piece after I read your post and thought I remembered “practical”.
Twain would have made a good Doper, he sure picked Cooper apart on his river/boat/bend/Indians jumping bit. “The Innocents Abroad” and “Roughing It” were a couple of my favorite books years ago, way better than any Cooper I had to wade through in high school. I might have to give them another shot to see if they still hold up.
I love Mark Twain. But he missed one of my favorite improbabilities; in Last of the Mohicans, when Chingachoo or whatever his name was killed a beaver, skinned it, then disguised himself in the beaver skin - head included - to sneak up on the Bad Guys and listen to their plans.
The Bad Guys were Indians, too; you’d think they’d notice the giant beaver lurking in the bushes.
The odd thing-when LOTM made it to Europe, it was a sensation! James Fenimore Cooper was lauded as a great author. Makes me wonder how the standards for great novelists have changed. LOTM is a pretty hard read today-I’d wager that those who’ve claimed to read it got a LOT of help from CLIFFS NOTES.
