Damn. I wish I could get Micheal Chabon to stop by and do a guest post!

And, speaking of the n-word...

I had the idea last night to make a version of Huck Finn where every word other than "nigger" is replaced by white space.

You'd have a mostly empty book, with 200+ "nigger"s sprinkled throughout the 300-odd pages. It would be a provocative work of art, you see.

I don't know what the stereotypical garb d'artiste is these days (I assume the beret, goatee, round glasses, and black turtleneck look is 60 years out of date), but I'd have to wear whatever it is, while I claimed my creation was "a work of art intended to open a dialogue on the place of the n-word in our society and the effects of bowdlerization of classic works. By stripping the text of Huckleberry Finn of all but the parts which offend us most, I have forced us to... yadayadayada." (I think there's a website that can spit this stuff out automatically). I'd need to maintain a pose of ironic detachment, too.

I will not do this, of course. I actually hate this kind of 'art'. Plus, it's kinda dumb. But, I could see someone else doing it, and me giving it a short side-link and an eye-roll.