Campfield said Friday that his point in the radio show is valid in that, within the United States, heterosexual encounters almost never result in AIDs “unless you’re having sex with someone from Africa or an IV drug user.”

“The odds of men catching it from women are very, very, very low,” he said.

To quote myself when I was providing a statistic Rachel helped me with this morning, “In the United States, heterosexual transmission accounts for how 65 percent of white women and 74 percent of black women acquired the infection. “

I can’t help but wonder if this is Campfield’s mistake or Humphrey’s. But seriously. The only way heterosexual encounters “almost never result” in HIV/AIDS is if women don’t count.

And, frankly, though Humphrey is not the only one to do this, he’s drawing my ire because I’m linking to him, this is something that can easily be fact-checked. It is a provable matter of fact. Do straight people having sex “almost never” get HIV/AIDS unless they’re fucking Africans or IV drug users? Any reporter can do five seconds of internet research or call the health department. It’s not a matter of “some experts say” and “other experts say.” There isn’t unsettled territory.

So, why can’t reporters report the facts? This is a matter of people’s health. Don’t they have the right to know the truth?

I’m just at the point where he admits to being born in the South (and has been making fun of Southern male authors for being too prone to flowerly language when women are nearby), but I must say that I’ve always thought of Twain as a Midwestern writer. And nothing about the section in which he says he was born in the South makes me feel otherwise, because the national pastime of the Midwest after not telling each other things and then being mad or hurt when we don’t know them and having potlucks in our church basements is indeed wondering what the hell is up with Southerners. If you could combine all those things–a bunch of passive aggressive Midwesterners eating casseroles while talking hilarious smack about their Southern cousins (or the Southern cousins of their friends)–you’d have the quintessential Midwestern experience.

Twain doesn’t mention eating casseroles, but I think we have to assume he was. Ha ha ha.

I’ve been trying to decide what it is about him that makes me lump him more into “Midwestern” than “Southern.” But I don’t know if those are legitimate differences or just based on stereotypes I have. I think Midwestern literature is more prone to a skeptical eye toward organized religion (even as people are predominately religious) because of a mistrust of it being a kind of busybodying, whereas I think Southern literature is soaked in religion and religious belief. I wasn’t surprised when Twain’s brother just showed up out of nowhere to die off. That seems right to me, that a Midwesterner would just assume that we’d all know he had a family and not be alarmed by a brother magically appearing. Whereas, in Southern writing, family relationships are central. Even the way he’s nostalgic strikes me as different from Southern writers, since he’s so keen to be clear that the times and places he misses had their problems back in the past.

But I don’t know. I feel like I have a good idea what constitutes Southern literature, but it’s hard for me to put my finger on what I think Midwestern literature would be.

But, he had a brother named Orion. Granted, I don’t know how it was pronounced. Oh-rye-un, fine. The Clemenses could be Southern. Ore-eee-un and there’s no doubting that they’re Midwestern.

I find it a little annoying that the government is all “just don’t have sex with that many people, okay?” since there are enough non-sexual ways to contract HIV and rape is common enough that concern trolling over slutty behavior just doesn’t seem that constructive to me. After all, if you have sex with 50,000 people who don’t have HIV, you’re never going to get it from sexual contact. But if you have sex only once with one person who is also a virgin but got it from being stabbed with an infected needle when he reached into a garbage can to rescue a kitten, you are at great risk. Plus, not everyone can control who fucks them or how, sadly.

Anyway, don’t miss Campfield in the comments of Meador’s post passing off twenty-five year old information as definitive. I don’t know about you, but I use 1988 as my guide for everything. That’s why I’m afraid of the Soviet Union and think the Taliban are our friends.

Anyway, the back end of the book is apparently just Twain snarking on everything, including the Atheneaum in Columbia. I love his description of the mule race and wish we could have one here in town. Or, shoot, Columbia, once you forgive him for making mean comments about the Atheneaum, you could have mule races I would attend.

1. Stacey Campfield has some strange ideas about what airline pilots get up to in their free time.

2. While I don’t believe you should fuck Stacey Campfield just out of general principle, you should for sure now not fuck Stacey Campfield, because he doesn’t understand how sexually transmitted diseases are transmitted. And he is a grown up. With internet access. And he doesn’t think straight people can get AIDS. And he’s an elected official. In charge of making the laws that govern us. People, he’s MY AGE!!!!

3. He’s not ashamed to be out in public spouting his monkey-fucking airline pilot giving gay people AIDS which heterosexual people cannot get from heterosexual sex conspiracy theories.

My mind continues to be boggled by this nincompoop.

But I dreamed about Mark Twain all night. In my sleep. Which I had! Solid and uninterrupted.

I don’t want to get too excited because lord knows I thought this cold was going away last Friday and here it is almost Friday again, but I slept through the night.

It’s the small victories, people.

Anyway, if we lived in a mansion, I’d have just gone into the library and read Mark Twain.

Of course then I’d be complaining that the Butcher and I never spend time together.

So, there you go. Nothing makes me happy, except the possibility of finally not being sick.

Fowler, everything you say is uncivil and little of it has any merit.

It’s high time everyone just treated you like this was so, rather than playing nice hoping that you’d treat them nicely in return.

Honestly, it’s Floyd and Fowler who make you realize just how revolutionary something like “Treat others as you’d like to be treated” is. These dumb jackasses are literally braying in alarm that they’re actually being treated how they treat everyone else.

Did they think that Jesus just issued that dictate for fun?

Hint: No.

It’s basically a law of human nature that people will treat you how they see you can be treated. And one of the ways they learn how you think you can be treated is to see how you treat others. Run around talking shit about everyone you think you’re better than and eventually the people who think they’re better than you are going to talk some shit about you.

What the fuck? Did they just sit around being all “Well, we don’t have tv. What can we do to entertain ourselves? Let’s creep the fuck out of the future!” and, seriously, why are we not sitting around thinking of ways to creep out the future?

But the thing I find incredible is that, while Life on the Mississippi is supposed to be an autobiography of sorts, he’s doing novel-type shit with the book.

I mean, all along the way he has repeatedly mentioned Napoleon, repeatedly mentioned how people easily reroute the river in ways that dick other people over, and repeatedly developed these themes of loss and change. So, no, he doesn’t have to spell out what happened to Napoleon (though it’s possible his initial readers would have been more familiar with it than I was), but he tells you, over and over, before he tells you that the town is gone.

It’s a remarkable bit of writing, carried out over the course of almost three hundred pages. I’m curious about what’s going to happen in the back half of the book.

I am just enjoying the shit out of it. Possibly more than I’ve enjoyed a book in a long time.

There was a war. And the Confederates sat out in the Beulah bend, just east of Napoleon, firing their artillery at the union forces on the north side of the bend, waiting for them to skirt past Beulah, and then firing the same guns at them again on the south side. In March of 1863, Lieutenant Commander Thomas O. Selfridge of the Union Army had his men dig a channel in the soft earth, using the force of the river to aid in its creation. The Mississippi’s beer belly became Lake Beulah and the river, when it was done stretching to its full size in the new channel, ran right up to the front steps of Napoleon and a flood in 1874 wiped Napoleon off the maps.

I’m honestly surprised no mischief makers have tried this just north of Tiptonville, though I suppose these days that would get you sent to prison for a good long time.

But still, the amount of rerouting of the river done by folks who aren’t the Corps is a real eye-opener to me.

But I am not shocked that there is even more evidence that this whole “investigation” was hinky. When a kid ends up dead after being at the house of most people, those people get hassled. The fact that there was so little hassle has never sat well with me. This is just more evidence of how strange the absence of hassle is.

And I sincerely hope the TBI is investigating, since the social circles of relatively comfortable white people who all abuse the same kinds of drugs in Knoxville has got to be pretty small. I think one answer the whole state deserves is whether Henry’s death was “investigated” how it was in order to shield the judge or other high-ranking Knoxvillians from discovery.

If it’s just a shitty investigation, fine. That sucks for Henry’s family, but fine.

But folks, I just don’t feel like this is incompetence, you know?

You could publish with Amazon, but you weren’t going to find your book in Barnes & Noble.

Except that now Amazon has signed a deal with Harcourt for distribution. Amazon’s books will appear to be Harcourt books. Now, bookstores could just refuse to carry Harcourt books, but that’s a little harder to accomplish than just cutting off Amazon. So, it appears for now that a work-around had been found.

I’m curious to see how the industry responds to this.

I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle yesterday which I expected to like more than I did. I just had a hard time getting into the rhythm of the language of the book. I do think Mary Catherine is an incredible character, though.  And I think some of the subtler touches are incredibly done. I mean, they say almost nothing about the brother, but the threat the cousin plays to the sisters’ relationship and the fantasy Merricat has about her whole family doting on her, it’s just not hard to guess why he had to be dispatched.

I also am about halfway through Life on the Mississipppi, which I wish I were reading in a reading group with barge captains now. Hell, I might even be civil to an Army Corps of Engineer person, if he or she were in my Life on the Mississippi reading group. One factual thing that interested me was that Twain says it regularly happened where there’d be a curve in the river and jackass land owners would go out and cut a ditch from where the curve started to where it ended, thus changing the river in order to give their property riverfront and strand some previous river-front property owner in the middle of Missouri. This sounds similar to how W. told us they ended up with those problems down at the big dam in Louisiana.

Also, he keeps mentioning Napoleon, Arkansas, which I cannot find on any map. It supposedly used to be right across the way from Wellington, Mississippi, but I didn’t find any evidence for a Wellington, Mississippi in Bolivar County. I did find a Lake Whittington which is an old bend in the river now cut off from the river. But whereabouts along the river there opposite Bolivar county Napoleon might have been, I can’t say.

Twain did tell a cool little ghost story about a boat that didn’t realize that the bend in the river wasn’t the main river any more, but being in the middle of forming one of these horseshoe lakes, and so the boat went down the bend, got stuck there with no way out, and even still may be seen out in the middle of some dude’s field, trying to take a way the river doesn’t go any more.

Obviously, I’m enjoying the shit out of Twain.

Edited to add: It should go without saying that I laughed when I realized Rosedale was in Bolivar County, thus adding to the legend that everything in this blog can be brought back around to Robert Plant. Well, and thus probably Robert Johnson. But still.