Category / Censorship

by DrMabuse

Bright Lights, Big Menu

I was going to pull some second-person take on Jay McInerney as New York Times restaurant critic. But, dammit, Liz Spiers beat me to it.

Kate DiCamillo has won the Newberry this year for The Tale of Despereaux. The book concerns a mouse who falls in love with a princess, which is a story that (in all seriousness) I’m likely to get behind. In her early days, DiCamillo collected more than 470 rejection letters, which shows not only that persistence pays off, but that it probably kills a lot of trees in the process.

Monotori Kishi’s Misshitsu, a comic book depicting gonads and, well, a lot of sex, has been ruled obscene in Japan. The obscenity precedent was laid down in 1957 with a Japanese translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Meanwhile, here at home, the Supreme Court has said no to an appeal in the Tony Twist/McFarlane battle.

Marginalia and Other Crimes shows library book damages in all their sad glory. (via Maud, who’s now back from her trip in Florida).

And, damn, Spalding Gray is missing. (via Bookslut)

by DrMabuse

The Cincinnati Enquirer is a Purveyor of Filth

Cincinnati Enquirer: “And for those outraged that the low-rated Doonesbury survived while Boondocks didn’t, we made the decision to drop Boondocks because we did not want to keep publishing a comic that we regularly needed to censor. During the past year, Boondocks was substituted a number of times because it was deemed inappropriate for a family newspaper. And not just this family newspaper. Editors across the country were making the same decisions.”

Well, you have to give the Enquirer credit for a creative excuse. Some folks have caled Boondocks unpatriotic or racist. But this is the first time I’ve heard of it being “inappropriate for a family newspaper.”

But is the Enquirer really a family newspaper?

August 5, 2001: This expose trying to demystify the N-word, mentioning “nigger” ten times and “nigga” ten times.

Peggy O’Farrell, April 9, 2003: “Dr. Safwat Zaki, a urologist with UC Physicians at University Pointe, says products purported to enlarge the penis don’t work. Some surgical options are available: Pumps can be implanted into the penis, and fat can be injected to increase its girth. But the injections don’t last, and the implants carry the risk of infection and scarring.” The Enquirer informing its readers on how to increase penis size? Indecent!

Margaret A. McGurk, Boogie Nights review: “Mr. Anderson handles the porn-making scenes with restraint; by focusing on the onlookers rather than the actors, he achieves an almost romantic mood. A few other sex scenes are hard to watch, particularly one that ends with a savage beating. Yes, there is some nudity, including a brief, display of Eddie’s claim to fame.” Reporting sex scenes! What is this? Adult Movie Guide? Indecent!

Jane Prednergast, March 25, 2000: “The Fort Thomas suspect used a condom, leaving detectives without semen to identify in the first home-invasion rape Fort Thomas has seen in years. That’s one aspect of the case that makes it different from the serial rapes being studied by investigators in Mason, Mont gomery and Colerain Township.” You don’t talk about semen or condoms in a family newspaper. Indecent!

Mike Boyer, September 29, 2002: “Pedro’s is planning a semen collection facility serving the entire Midwest on its farm, with Wisconsin-based Genex Cooperative Inc.” Indecent!

Tom Loftus, November 8, 2003: “Seelye said his jail’s procedure is to search new inmates ‘down to their undergarments’ in most cases. A thorough strip search was not done in Hawks’ case because such searches are done only when there is some suspicion that an inmate is bringing contraband into the jail, he said.” Groping inmates! Beyond indecent!

The Starr Report on the Enquirer servers: Colorful langauge all over the place.

Indecent, I say! Why stop with Boondocks? Why not shitcan all the writers?

(via Old Hag)

by DrMabuse

I Love You Too, Irvine (Sort Of)

To his supreme credit, Alexander McCall Smith claims that his remarks about Irvine Welsh have been “misinterpreted.” Welsh’s status has been downgraded to “a partially indecent hooligan whom I’ll never buy a drink for.”

A new Michigan law requires publications that depict “explicit content” to be covered up. Booksellers and reading groups are furious. And they’ve filed a lawsuit. In the meantime, they may want to consider covering up Ann Coulter’s books. Pretty explicit stuff, given that she’s advocated blowing up the New York Times building, as well as suggesting, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” (via Sarah)

Catherine Kennan has a very juicy piece on highbrow personals. It doesn’t get any closer to understanding the phenomenon (who can?), but it does feature a very amusing exchange between Kennan and one of the guys behind a personal ad. And it’s impossible to resist this ad: “Find the 10th coefficient in the expansion of the binomial (1+x) to the 20th power. Then love me some more. Mathematical Ms, Cambridge.” (via Chica)

The latest culprit behind declining book sales? USA Today suggests it’s the DVD.

Sarah Waters has turned down a Who’s Who entry because she’s not sure how relevant the directory is to today’s world.

Columbia Journalism Review has a piece on former New Republic editor Gregg Easterbrook. It’s another guy fired because of blog story, but the cause here is far more nefarious (and strangely immediate).

And more on Norr from the Daily Planet. Efforts to track down settlement terms are nice from an outside source, but there are few conditional questions revealed.

by DrMabuse

Bonfires of the Vanities

Demonstrating to the world that nihilism begins in India, a mob has destroyed 30,000 ancient manuscripts because Oxford University Press spilled the beans about a Hindu king’s parents. Strangely, a similar book in the United States, Bill O’Reilly’s Who’s Lapping Up for You Now?: My Early Days as a Salamander, has not spawned any mobs or burnings. But there have been a few interview walkouts. (via Bookslut)

Martha Freeman’s The Trouble with Babies is a children’s book with a brief passage referencing two gay fathers. Predictably, the yokels are now damning it, citing the book’s “homosexual agenda.” The book’s been removed from library shelves and sales have dropped off because of this misperception. And the proposed Queer Eye for the Straight Dad spinoff series has been cancelled.

by DrMabuse

Shorties

And the Whitbread goes to Mark Haddon’s The Very, Very Curious Incident of the Dog Who Was Let Out by the Baja Men in the Morning, Afternoon and Night Shortly After He Was Fed His Meal, which I’ve been meaning to read. Except I can never remember the exact title.

David Mamet is insane.

I didn’t realize the Alexander McCall Smith/Irvine Welsh thing had legs, but even in Scotland, they need their “bag of bones”/”entertainment not literature” Vidal/Mailer in-fights.

Andy Hamilton won’t write for BBC1. Hamilton claims that Auntie Beeb has pressured a writer to remove lesbian characters from a script to “incorporate the conservative tastes of focus groups.”

Modern Humorist: “Where are all the R’s? Is it a typographical error? Does the writer simply not like R’s? Or are there mysterious deeds at play, and are the R’s somewhow involved?”

Birnbaum talks with Jonathan Lethem. Birnbaum even gets Lethem to fess that Laura Miller is “making a contribution to literary journalism.” Birnbaum also shoots the goofy gale with Neal Pollack. Among the revelations: “[Eggers] said he didn’t want me along because my stuff was much more confrontational and in your face and aggressive and loud and profane. He wanted to take McSweeney’s in a more respectable direction. And then one day I woke up and my link was off the site. And I wasn’t a McSweeney’s guy anymore. Overnight. My main conduit for communicating over the Internet had been removed, so I had to start my own site.”

And The Chronicle has apparently reached a settlement with Henry Norr.

[1/23/06 UPDATE: It is quite likely that the Henry Norr story will be slipped under the rug. But I think it stands as a remarkable testament as to how a journalist’s outside activities are controlled to a great extent by his employer. As the newspapers continue to cut the coverage and eventually begin to drop, I am wondering if they’ll become even more controlling. Henry Norr, happily, is still writing — largely for online outlets. He can be found contributing reports for Macintouch and is still actively filing no-bullshit Macworld reports from the front lines.]