They say that being President of the Mark Twain Circle is a thankless job. It is not! To prove it, I hereby say "thank you" to Michael Kiskis, my predecessor, whose generosity, enterprise, and unfailingly good sense allowed him to lead the Mark Twain Circle with grace and skill. Thank you, Michael, for all you've done to make the Mark Twain Circle such a thriving organization!

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Many thanks, as well, to the scholars who presented their Twain research at the San Francisco MLA: David Bradley (La Jolla, CA), Gregg Camfield (U the Pacific); Rosmarie L. Coste of the (U of Texas, San Antonio); Joseph L. Coulombe (U of Tennessee, Martin); Philip Fanning (San Francisco); Susan Harris (Penn State); Hamlin Hill (Texas A&M); Fred Kaplan (CUNY and Queens College); Debbie Lopez (U of Texas, San Antonio); Joe Towson (Spartanburg, SC), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Wesleyan U); Henry Wonham (U of Oregon); Jim Zwick (Syracuse U). We are grateful for your lively ideas and your willingness to share them. It was a shame that Bob Hirst (the Mark Twain Project) was unable to attend due to illness; we hope he is fine for the rest of 1999. And we extend our sincere condolences to Susan Weil (Whittier College), who could not present her paper due to a death in the family.

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The high point of the MLAC for those of us lucky enough to survive the heavy fog and the killer-flu that delayed and detained so many who would have liked to be there--was the evening Hal Holbrook spent in our Mark Twain suite at the Marriott. With charm, grace, candor and wit, Holbrook let us peek behind-the-scene and behind his act for well over an hour. He let us in on the secrets of his timing (he shoots for a full laughC not a chuckleC every 15 seconds in the first act), and described some of his efforts to embody Twain physically (he always has the chair and platform used in his performance constructed slightly oversized so that he'll appear smaller, closer to Twain's actual height).

He acknowledged that his art doesn't strive to replicate Twain's performances to the letter; Twain's slow drawl, for example, would try the patience of a modern audience, so Holbrook speeds up his delivery. Doing justice to Twain's ideas and voice and impact on an audience often requires editing rather than simply reciting any given text. His recent "Mark Twain Tonight!" show in Eugene, Oregon was so relevant to current political scandals, that a Twain Circle member who had caught the show wondered how he had put it together. The heady pleasure in the room was palpable as Holbrook ran through some of the new routine in character, letting the group in on the ways in which he cuts and pastes Twain's words to produce a routine as topical as the evening news (sources for the new material included "A Presidential Candidate").

He shared some of his successful methods for keeping an audience's attention (cutting away to another routine if the one he'd started wasn't going wellCa technique not unfamiliar to college professors, as Susan Harris observed). And he told the story of what happened when PBS approached him about making a new video of his show "Mark Twain Tonight!": plans were fully under way for the new production when PBS asked him to cut the passages from Huck Finn because the word "nigger" was too controversial. Holbrook, to his credit, refused and the project was scuttled. Holbrook told us that after the PBS project fell through, he took another look at a 1967 televised tape of "Mark Twain Tonight!" and joked that "it wasn't as bad as he thought." He was surprised that it contained as much material relevant to the Civil Rights Movement as it did. Everyone in the room was delighted to hear that that 1967 performance of "Mark Twain Tonight!" will be available on video soon.

Holbrook's modesty prevents him from calling himself a Twain scholar. But whether he was quoting at length from obscure speeches and essays, or holding forth on the relationship between Huckleberry Finn and the breakdown of Reconstruction, or meditating on the role of timing in Twain's humor, the depth and breadth of his knowledge of Twain was clear to all the Twain scholars in the room. They came from New York and Nevada, from Tokyo and Texas, from North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, Oregon,and Connecticut. Each brought to the evening an appreciation for Holbrook's special gifts; each took away an even sharper sense of just how special he is. As Jim Zwick observed, the occasion was "a rare opportunity to meet and discuss Mark Twain with the person most responsible for forging the public's image of the author during the past forty years. The conference included nearly one thousand other panels and presentations, but that meeting will undoubtedly prove to be the most memorable for those who were able to attend.

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There will be three stimulating Twain sessions at the American Literature Association conference in Baltimore May 27-30, 1999. A session on "Mark Twain and Racism" will feature a paper by Louis J. Budd (Duke U) entitled "Mark Twain and the Sense of Race, " which will be followed by comments from Ralph Wiley (Washington, D.C.), David Lionel Smith (Williams C), and Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua (the Dallas Institute). A session focused on "Mark Twain's Daughters" will feature papers by Linda A. Morris (U of California, Davis), Laura Skandera-Trombley (Coe C); Barbara Taylor (Cornell U ); and Victor A. Doyno (SUNY Buffalo). And a session on "Mark Twain and Others" will feature papers by Brandon Arthur (George Mason U); Larry Marshburne (North Carolina State U); James Leonard (The Citadel); and Robert C. Comeau (Union County C).

The organizers of the ALA conference this year are two widely-respected scholars who are well-known to the Mark Twain Circle: Michael Kiskis (Elmira C) and Laura Skandera-Trombley (Coe C), past president and current vice-president, respectively, of the MTCA. The ALA is in good hands;

it promises to be an exciting and enjoyable conference.

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The Mark Twain Circular would not appear in your mailbox without the indefatigable efforts of its editor, James Leonard, to whom Twainians everywhere owe their gratitude. Hats off to Jim Leonard for all his hard work!