One of my fondest memories from childhood is when my dad sat down with me and read Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to me.  That’s right, every night we dutifully sat down, and my pops read the whole thing to me, word for word.  I believe this occurred around 1981.

Naturally, with Huck Finn being one of the seminal American novels, I have considered doing the same thing for my kids.  In preparation, I sat down and re-read it this weekend.  And it is as good as I (and most American literary historians) remember it.  It’s fascinating that when written, that book was meant for children – yet when compared to today’s literature, it is more complex and verbally advanced than 90% of the books meant for adults in modern times.

But, of course, there is “the problem.”  The book contains dozens of instances of the “n” word.  Of course, the book is told from the perspective of a 14 year-old uneducated boy, who in 1884 probably would have used the word liberally.  (Shakespeare has received similar criticism for his unflattering portrayal of Shylock the Jew in Merchant of Venice – although, again, that’s how Jews would have been portrayed at the time it was written.)  Further, one of the main themes of the book is exposing how de-humanizing slavery is.  But that really doesn’t matter now, when I am faced with reading that word to my kids a couple hundred times.  There are passages of the book that are really difficult to read, given how ugly the language is in the contemporary context.

Clearly,  I’m not the only one who has figured this out.  The American Library Association actually keeps statistics on the most objected to books in American libraries, and between 1990 and 2000, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ranks fifth – 124 years after its original publication.  Presumably, the main objection is the continued inclusion of a racial slur.  (Although the same people who make this objection are probably the same ones willing to fillet Sarah Palin for her supposed desire to ban books in the Wasilla library.)  Most of the other books in the list deal in touchy cultural issues, like “Daddy’s Roommate,” “Heather Has Two Mommies,” and “Little Hitler Learns to Love Gays.”  (Okay, I made that last one up.)

Maybe I’m being too touchy – after all, kids have heard the word in this book for a century and a quarter, and it doesn’t seem to have sparked a revival.  Maybe I’m not giving my kids enough credit for being able to understand context.  But reading the book aloud is probably enough to get me elected into the Klan hall of fame. (They can put my bust right next to Marge Schott’s.)

So what do I do?  Just forge ahead and hope they understand enough not to use that word?  Wait until they’re older and understand the context better?  Read it and do some self-editing, thereby desecrating an American work of art?

Did I ever show you that story written for the Atlantic by an anonymous professor who demonstrates the failure in pushing people into college who don’t belong there?  I didn’t?  Well here it is.  And it an outstanding read:

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it-try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

William Saletan at Slate.com argues that we need to rethink laws against marrying within the family:

Does science support our laws against incest and cousin marriage? If so, does it also support other laws that would restrict sexual or procreative freedom in the name of genetic health?

To longtime readers of Human Nature, this question should be, if you’ll pardon the term, familiar. A few years ago, we looked at the science and ethics of “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Surname.” Then we examined the prevalence of inbreeding in nature. Then we considered the awkward question of why, if incest is too genetically risky to permit, maternity in your 40s isn’t.

He goes on to cite statistics that show very low birth abnormality rates in cultures where marrying relatives is common, in an attempt to convince us that laws prohibiting such activity are overly restrictive.

I actually appreciate arguments like these that challenge conventional wisdom with facts.  Yet, in this case, I can’t go along with the thesis.  Facts or no facts, inter-family sex should remain illegal for one important, time-tested reason:

IT’S GROSS.

Throughout the entirety of Inauguration Week, I haven’t heard a better, more thoughtful, and heartfelt analysis of Barack Obama’s election than that of Los Angeles Times sports columnist J.A. Adande.  You can hear what I’m talking about on “The Sports Guy” Bill Simmons’ podcast here.  They talk about NBA stuff for a while, but when they move on to talk about Obama at the 26 minute mark, Adande gives a wonderfully erudite explanation of what Obama means to African Americans.  It gave me chills.