A Cure for the Awkward Arm

Spooning

Today I am not writing about something I have seen.  Instead, I am writing about something I want to see.  I am writing about something that needs inventing.

The EZSpoon.

If you have spent much time sleeping with another person -- and I do mean sleeping -- then you know about "spooning."  That is, curled together like spoons in a drawer, one person's back to the other person's front.  The person behind (the big spoon) usually has one arm draped over the person in front (the little spoon).  And the other arm goes...

Where?

That is the dilemma.  There is a name for this problem.  It is called "the awkward arm," according to the Urban Dictionary.

Where?  Where?

It sounds like one of the lesser-known stories of Edgar Allan Poe: "The Curse of the Awkward Arm."

A young woman named Min has written about it on her blog, Married Minzilla.  When she first started sharing a bed with "The Hubby," she thought they had to be in constant contact, holding hands, spooning, etc.  She gave up on that.  "Man, was I naive!  At this point we sleep butt-to-butt."  

Another blogger, Joe Donatelli, has written about it.  He offers two solutions, one involves the variety of positions shown in this illustration and the other involves chloroform for the little spoon. 

"Spooning Couple"

Hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck has rendered the situation in one of his playful pieces, "Spooning Couple." 

My friend Dean Rader has a poem about it in his book Works & Days.  In “Waking Next to You on My 39^th Birthday, or The Other Arm,” he writes: “I’d like to unhook it at the shoulder,/ and set it on the nightstand./ I could use it to scratch your back/or your feet,/ all those places your fingers can’t reach.”

I got lucky.  My beautiful wife is my ideal height for a woman: 5-1.  I am just about 6-0.  That difference means my “awkward arm” will fit above her head, if we arrange ourselves just right – unlike the dude in this photo from an article in Glamour.  He is stuck with his awkward arm curled around his own head, like some night-time nimbus.  But getting ourselves arranged just perfectly is not always easy.  I frequently suffer from Awkward Arm Syndrome, too.

I have a solution to offer all of the big spoons out there.  I call it the EZSpoon.

It would be a fitted sheet and a mattress pad with corresponding slits, creating a pocket beneath them where the big spoon’s arm could fit comfortably.  The slot would be toward the top of the bed, near the couple’s backs.  The slot would make it easy for the big spoon to slide the awkward arm beneath the little spoon.  The mattress pad would cushion the little spoon from the lumpiness of the big spoon’s arm, and it would take some pressure off of the big spoon’s arm, reducing the chances of the awkward arm becoming numb.

Purrfect

I expect to get wealthy from this idea, just as soon as someone will pay me a lot of money for it and then go off to manufacture and market it.

This leaves another great spooning problem yet to be solved: The little spoon’s hair in the big spoon’s face.  

Goodbye, cruel word

WWJD?

That is, What would Jay-Z do?

What would he do if someone changed his lyrics the way Alan Gribben has changed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for NewSouth Books.  (Read about it here.)  You see, Gribben has eliminated the word "nigger" from two of Mark Twain's novels. 

He has removed it more than 200 times from Huck Finn alone.

He also removed the word "Injun," but that is not the word that got Twain's novel in trouble each year with school boards and parents and students.

Gribben's goal was to make the book acceptable to a broader audience for a Big Read event in Alabama.  A Big Read is a campaign to get everyone in a city or a state to read the same book at about the same time.  Gribben, who is a university professor and a Twain scholar, had encountered many people who refused to read the book because of that word so beloved by Mr. Beyonce Knowles.  Gribben felt the trade-off was not worth it: the benefit of avoiding that word for the price of not reading the novel.  He felt a different deal needed to be made: the alteration of a classic for an expansion in its readership.

So people have been debating whether this OK.  Is it OK to change the novel in this way?  Is it OK to broaden the novel's potential audience by making it less likely to offend readers, when making it more appealing may mean changing its impact?  The novel itself isn't racist, but it is about racism.  Perhaps removing the offending word will make the racist environment in which Huck grows up also less ugly to the audience.  Perhaps readers will think life wasn't so bad after all in the South for a person of African descent.

My friend, Dean Rader, writes for the San Francisco Chronicle's blog site, and he wrote about this issue this week.  His take: "For me, the Neosporined Huck Finn is not the right remedy for the injuries of slavery and racism; it's a band-aid that doesn't cover the wound." 

I have taught Huckleberry Finn and other texts containing "nigger."  What do I feel about this new edition?

I don't really care.  I wouldn't use it in my classroom.  But its existence doesn't cause me to worry.

After all, has Gribben really changed the novel?  No.  It still exists in its original version -- in millions of copies.  People who like Gribben's version well enough might be inclined to experience Twain's version.  That's good.  And everyone reading Gribben's edition probably will know they are reading the "Neosporined" version.  It's not like people who eat at Taco Bell believe they are eating real Mexican food.  Gribben's readers will know they have been given a version altered to fit their tastes.

That's the funny thing about censorship.  It so often calls attention to the thing it tries to hide.   

If you read my last posting, about the snow penis in Lafayette, Ind., you might have watched the video from the TV station that covered the story.  If you did, you would have noticed that the snow penis is never visible.  Instead, it is hidden by a pixelated blur.  But you know what?  Everyone looking at the blur was, in some fashion or another, imagining what the offending sculpture looked like.

Follow my instructions: Do not think of a snow penis.

See how that works?

Was anyone ever fooled by f--k?  Isn't "bleep" more effective than that?  At least then my mother could insert "darn!" or "dang!" in the place of "bleep."  But once a magazine or book is coy enough to present only the first and last letters of the offending word, the editors have forced my mother to hear in her head a word she would prefer not to hear.

Although we can create techniques for recalling information, it seems futile to create techniques for forgetting.  Italian writer Umberto Eco speculated on this in his essay "An Ars Oblivionalis?  Forget It!" -- "But this technique allows one not to forget something but to remember that one wanted to forget it."

For many of Gribben's readers, each time they see the word "slave," they will register at some level, "This word is replacing 'nigger'."  And so the offending word remains present by the marker of its absence.

The way true damage would be done to American literaray tradition would be if Gribben's version replaced all other versions of Huck Finn.  I don't think that is likely to happen.