The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College kicked off the 2026 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series last night. The lectures take place on Wednesdays throughout October at Quarry Farm. Located at 131 Crane Road (Elmira), the lectures are free and open to the public. The next lecture in the 2026 Fall series will take place on Wendesday, October 14.
Caroline Levine presented “To Sit Home and Grumble: Politcs and Agency in Our Own Gilded Age.” Levine is the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University.
In The Gilded Age, the public is furious when political corruption is revealed, but they take no action. “They may have thought that to sit at home and grumble would some day right the evil,” Twain and Warner comment wryly. In our own gilded age, something similar is happening. We see corruption, and we grow cynical. Many of us sit at home and grumble. This talk will focus on climate change, perhaps the most profound threat to our collective life. Most US adults know that it is harmful and human-caused; most say that they want governments and corporations to do more for the environment; and many claim that they are willing to do more themselves. But vanishingly few take action. This talk will explore why people sit at home and grumble instead of feeling empowered to act, and it will explore ways of taking meaningful action in our oligarchic present.
Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University and author of four books, including Forms (2015) and The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (2023). She is a climate activist who was part of the team that pushed Cornell to divest its endowment of fossil fuels and is now on the coordinating committee of TIAA-Divest. She is writing a book that fights back against cynicism and feelings of powerlessness in the climate crisis.
The 2026 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series Schedule. All lectures start at 7:00 p.m., at the Barn at Quarry Farm, and are free and open to the public.
- Wednesday, Oct. 14: “Mark Twain, Hemispheric Humorist,” by Todd Nathan Thompson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
- Wednesday, Oct. 21: “Mark Twain’s Election Advice: Vote Your Conscience! Elect Candidates of Integrity Who Put Your Country’s Interest above Party Loyalty and Aggrandizement” by Donald T. Bliss, Independent Scholar
- Wednesday, Oct. 28: “The Mundane Transcendence of Mark Twain’s Late Style” by Ray Horton, Murray State University
About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series
In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.