In “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Jim Smiley’s eagerness to bet on anything in the mining camp may strain belief, but it is relatively plausible that another gambler could weigh down Smiley’s frog, Daniel Webster, with quailshot and thus win forty dollars with an untrained frog. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is generally regarded as Twain’s most distinctive story, although some readers may prefer Jim Baker’s bluejay yarn, which turns subtly on the psyche of its narrator, or Jim Blaine’s digressions from his grandfather’s old ram, which reach a more physical comedy while evolving into an absurdly tall tale. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County In spite of their faults, Twain’s stories captivate the reader with their irresistible humor, their unique style, and their spirited characters who transfigure the humdrum with striking perceptions. Except when adapting a plot taken from oral tradition, Twain does better with patently artificial situations, which his genius for suggesting authentic speech makes plausible enough. Therefore, they too seldom interact effectively. Rather, just as Twain alternated between polarities of attitude, his characters tend to embody some extreme unitary state either of villainy or (especially with young women) of unshakable virtue. Although deeply divided himself, Twain seldom created introspectively complex characters or narrators who are unreliable in the Conradian manner.
His best stories are narrated by first-person speakers who are seemingly artless, often so convincingly that critics cannot agree concerning the extent to which their ingenuousness is the result of Twain’s self-conscious craft. To fully benefit from the museum's displays, we recommend that you begin anywhere and wander as you wish.Many readers find Mark Twain (Novem– April 21, 1910) most successful in briefer works, including his narratives, because they were not padded to fit some extraneous standard of length. Much of the building remains under construction at this time, and only a limited number of galleries are open, wherein objects are on display in new nonglare plexiglass cases - we are offering limited special access at this time for select donors connoisseurs who wish a sneak peak at coming attractions. Having outgrown its previous quarters in the basement of the Civic Center parking garage, the Museum of Folly is delighted to be nearly ready to reopen in a grand new building designed by the acclaimned architect Louis F. Highlights of the collection range from the wineskin from which the ancient Greek philospher Silenus drank before being ridden like a donkey by his beloved to a shiny computer on which John McCain proved unable to locate the internet without assistance, and from a jar of lice collected by the Zen teacher Ryokwan to an assemblage of custard pies that were prepared for Mack Sennett but never flung. The objects in our collection date from classical times to the present and include works from all corners of the globe. Our collection comprises more than 2,600,000 objects, and new works are added irregularly. Welcome to the Museum of Folly (MoFo), the world's largest museum devoted to the art of foolishness.
Xensen, a respected scholar with a long and distinguished history of tomfoolery. The Museum of Folly takes as its motto the words of William Blake - inscribed on one of the monumental columns in Erasmus Hall, the museum’s central gathering space - “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” Mark Twain wrote that “the gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad,” but we believe it is possible to obtain much of the same benefits that world travel confers by perusing masterworks from many cultures, carefully preserved and displayed in a world-class museum setting. So we encourage visitors to return often. Preservation and conservation of our priceless artifacts is our prime mandate and, to protect these sometimes fragile and light-sensitive works, at any given time most of our objects are in conservation or storage and not available for public viewing.īut the selection of objects in our galleries is rotated frequently, and we are acquiring new ones all the time. The Museum of Folly is widely recognized as the world’s foremost museum dedicated to educating an international audience about the contributions of clowns, jesters, oafs, and fools to the art and history of idiocacy, wrongheadedness, farce, and foolishness.ĭespite our recent relocation to an expansive new state-of-the-art facility ( view the front facade and main entrance here), display space remains limited, for, in the words of the Fool Societies of medieval Europe, numerus stultorum est infinitus - the number of fools is infinite.
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