Many thanks to Mark Weiss and Keneth Wolman for their generous, luminous
posts on this subject. I feel wiser.
Best
Árni
--
Árni Ibsen
Stekkjarkinn 19
220 Hafnarfjördur
ICELAND
Tel. +354-555-3991
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http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/
on 03-05-20 15.41, Kenneth Wolman at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> At 08:41 AM 5/20/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>> I doubt the veracity of this claimed banned list.
>>
>> The ALA's Web site features Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, which is on
>> the list, as their selection for a nationwide librarians' bookclub read.
>
> Nothing connected here.
> * I don't doubt for a moment the veracity of the list, especially if
> The Handmaid's Tale is on it. A book about an American theocracy of the
> future that anatomizes, so to speak, its sexual dimension? Written by a
> self-identifying feminist who is not as doctrinaire as she is downright
> talented? Muy peligroso!
> * The United States has become a funny sort of place. Correction: the
> country seems always to have had an oddly divided point of view on creative
> work. On the one hand, writing--unless you're Mickey Spillane, Irving
> Wallace the Stroke Book King, or Louis L'Amour--is regarded as the province
> of pointy-headed intellectuals, homosexuals, artsy-fartsy types, and other
> people of no consequence. Poetry doesn't even rate. To the government's
> I-suppose credit, the United States has never "disappeared," imprisoned, or
> shot a poet for committing a poem. Robert Lowell went to Federal prison
> during World War 2 for refusing induction into the Army, not because he
> wrote something considered treasonable ("Memories of West Street and
> Lepke," the acknowledgement of his imprisonment, is a wonderful mad
> poem). Poets do not have to listen for the knock on the door at 3 AM. We
> have no Mandelstams or Akhmatovas here. Neither, however, do poets and
> fictionalists become significant social leaders here, a la Carlos Fuentes,
> Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, Pablo Neruda (who was lucky enough to die before
> Pinochet could shoot him), or Octavio Paz. We do our poets a paradoxical
> favor: we let them publish but rot in the land of Coterie. It's not that I
> hold great store in getting shot. But the question "Can poetry matter"
> gets answered at least in part by who's willing to kill us. Poets Against
> the War could not have happened in El Salvador or the old USSR but here
> it's just another site and a book.
> * Yet. The works of poets, fiction writers, etc., when they are
> disseminated into the school systems, become a matter of scandal and
> concern and all of a sudden the authors of said books and poems can be
> perceived as dangerous radicals, subverters of public order, enemies of
> God, ring-wingers, left-wingers, Commies, pinkos, Stalinists, Trotskyites,
> John Birchers, neo-Nazis, you name it. Hence Margaret Atwood, whose
> Handmaid is periodically mechanistically seeded like a heifer by another
> woman's husband--in the wife's presence--because to do so fulfills a
> Scriptural interpretation. Hence Vonnegut, whose Slaughterhouse Five
> suggests radically that exposure to the extreme horrors of war kills the
> ability to feel or at least warps the sensibilities of ordinary men (I knew
> a Professor of English at Binghamton who was in the same bunker as Vonnegut
> at Dresden and he never "got over it"). Catch-22 goes the same way: the
> people who fight wars turn into desensitized morons like Milo Minderbinder
> (who probably showed up that way); the innocuous or decent ones like Kid
> Sampson have their guts and life spill out all over their flight suits; or
> like Yossarian they demonstrate that the ultimate civic virtue even in a
> "good war" is to desert. You bet it's subversive--the problem is there
> isn't nearly enough of it.
> * Well, we KNOW why Huckleberry Finn and Merchant of Venice are on the
> shitlist. But whose? Here, sorry to say, we might be dealing with a
> "progressive" or leftist agenda at work. Maybe they would like to amend
> the text to "Afro-American Jim." I can only imagine what would happen if
> someone tried to teach or--God save the mark!--produce Marlowe's The Jew of
> Malta, never seeing that it is an equal opportunity offender that goes
> after Jews, Muslims, and Christians with equal venom.
> * To follow the same thread: At one time an editor expressed interest
> in a poem of mine but insisted I change or otherwise get rid of the word
> "Jewess." He compared it to using the world "Negress." Granted, in the
> context of 2003, both words are foul. However: context, anyone? The poem
> he was looking at was set in Poland in 1655 and the person doing thinking
> the word was a Swedish peasant-turned-army enlistee who was about to rape
> the poem's "heroine," a Jewish woman still in her teens. And if I were
> writing something with a setting outside our own period, I'd use either
> word again in a heartbeat. I'm more interested in accuracy than in
> avoiding offending someone's delicate sensibilities.
> * Fairy tales. The Grimm Brothers? The Grimm Brothers are
> ghastly. So is John Ruskin's children's story "King of the Golden River"
> in which the hero's three nasty brothers are turned to stone. But nobody
> talks (as far as I know) about banning Anne Sexton's versions of fairy
> tales, which are far more subversive, ugly, and funnier than anything the
> Grimms ever thought up. Because it's poetry and poetry doesn't matter.
> * I can see why Maurice Sendak is on the list for Night Kitchen. Oh
> God, a penis! How about Where The Wild Things Are, where rebellion is
> expressed (Max's "wolf suit")? How about Outside, Over There, a
> wonderfully drawn and sensitive understanding of love-hate in sibling
> rivalry. Well, we are only supposed to have niiiiiiiiiice thoughts,
> right? Nothing about wishing our sibling dead, nothing about
> rebelliousness. By the same token, that accounts for the ban on Shel
> Silverstein: "If your parents make you wash the dishes / Just drop one on
> the floor. / Maybe they won't let you / Do the dishes anymore." Defiance,
> rebellion, subversion of God-given parental authority, and fucked-up feng
> shui. Any side can find any reason to ban anything.
> * If they want to ban fairy tales, go get the Disney movies, which are
> uniformly frightening and meretricious. How about The Wizard of Oz because
> of that nasty old poppy field and those flying monkey? Talk about an opium
> dream!
> * Censorship cuts across the political spectrum. I am as terrified of
> an Empire of Virtue run by so-called progressives from Pacifica Radio as I
> am of the growing tyranny of what Gore Vidal calls the Cheney-Bush Junta.
> As for as Diane Ravitch's book--I admit to not yet having read it. I did,
> however, hear Ms Ravitch as she made the radio talk-show rounds in New
> York, plugging her new creation. Politically, she is hard to "pin"--I
> would describe her more as a "conservationist" than as a
> conservative. Cutting words out of texts because someone might get upset
> at seeing them in print is not preservation: it's censorship and rape, no
> matter who's doing it. Their motives are identical: control.
>
> Sorry to go on for so long.
>
> Ken <dismounting soapbox>
> http://www.kenwolman.com
