Banned Books Week Review #4: LOLITA

LOLITA
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Everyman's Library
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

My Review: Humbert Humbert was the name of my 1999 Buick LeSabre. It was unreliable, stodgy-looking, and all too easy to sink into and enjoy the glorious creature comforts contained therein. (I miss the cassette/CD/AM/FM combo, if I'm honest.) Hum, our narrator, is a terrible man, a pedophile, a sociopath, and a complete scoundrel on so many levels it's hard to count them all.

And I *adore* him. But I'm weird that way. I adore Walter White, too.

Nabokov's third language, English, gave him the most incredible and flexible of tools for creating word-magic. This book, about the passion of an old man for a little girl, contains some of the most gorgeous sentences ever written in English.

And it's a deeply disturbing book. Lolita...Dolores Haze...is almost heartbreakingly absent from the story, which centers around Hum's sense of himself and his perceptions of his worth. The most terrifying beginning of any book I've read in my life. "Light of my life, fire of my loins," eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww. But how gloriously sonorous is Hum's breakdown of the name he gave his victim. "Lo. Lee. Ta."

This book is, unsurprisingly, one of the most challenged books in the American Shamefest of Ban-Ban-Ban what *I* don't like!!!! Such a stupidly self-important way of looking at the world. "I don't like that, it offends me, it's evil, it's wrong." Then don't read it. "My child! My child could see it!" Then move to Utah or Idaho, they don't have books there, just the Book of Mormon or whatever it's called.

Take your calls for censorship somewhere else. Like church. And leave the grown-ups alone.

Does Lolita deal with horrible, offensive subject matter? Yes. Does it do so in a positive, accepting light? No. And that's unlike the "sacred texts" of every religion I've ever read...Bhagavad Gita has almost innumerable mass murders, Qur'an and Bible and Torah *very* questionable ethics like bar bets between gawd and Lucifer about just how hard they can fuck over one guy before he snaps, incest as the source of humankind (eg, Noah and family), not to mention a truly freaky-deaky kind of self-sex between Adam and Eve, who is made from Adam's body parts. But that's moral instruction, and Lolita, which savagely beats the shit out of a cultural norm of solipsism and male privilege, gets challenged regularly by the ignoranuses who can't be bothered to read it.

Or, and I suspect this is even more true, are too dimwitted to get it. Just because someone doesn't understand a literary work, or a work of art, does not make it bad or wrong or an evil influence.

Since this book was published in 1955, it's been in print. I suspect it will be in print long after I'm dead and gone. The more the haters hate on it, the more contrarians and the self-defined intellectuals will buy it.

So ban on, boobs. One day the banning you're so busy advocating will reach right back to you and your pet loves. I, for one, welcome the day no one can get religious crap without showing ID and paying through the nose and ending up on a persecution list. I hope to live so long as to see it.

No, I don't. I'd have to protest it and demand that the censorship stop. NO ONE'S IDEAS OR EXPRESSIONS THEREOF SHOULD EVER BE STIFLED just because they make me, or you, uncomfortable. Don't like something? Walk away.

Walk. Away.

Surveillance, Meet Sousveillance: Banned Books Week Review 27 September 2013

My review of THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY is up.

So is my blood pressure.

In the ongoing waiting game Goodreads is playing, hoping users won't notice a draconian case of surveillance plus censorship, the score is even. They've said nothing and done as they like. We've yelled and hollered, and a lot of us have found new homes for our old data. Many more have decided to stop contributing new data until the whole thing shakes out.

David Brin's 1999 book offers his expert advice: Don't stop looking back, and don't shut up. I agree with him. I think we should do this all the time, in all situations, or we're in for a future that will make Orwell and Huxley look like Ren and Stimpy.

Banned Books Week Review #2, again

How Many Loads Have U Taken 2nite?
You're open 24/7 if ya know what I mean
You taken so many loads damn you're a machine...

Think that's dirty and should be reported? Watch the video. See what you think after that.

All censorship starts with that "no, no that's clearly BAD!" impulse to control. Things go very badly when that rules the day. No one knows enough to censor what another person says because of what they think the other person means.

CHRISTIAN NATION, a cautionary tale about believing the Believers

CHRISTIAN NATION
FREDERIC C. RICH
W.W. Norton
$25.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5 appalled, terrified stars of five


It's Banned Books Week, so we are well advised to think about what the ability to ban a book really means.

“The biggest mistake that we can make is that we don’t believe that they believe what they say. And for many of them, they do mean exactly what they say," says author Frederic C. Rich in his Politico.com interview from this past July. Look at the Texas school textbook adoption wars over presenting creationism as a scientific theory. All of those folks are elected...by the few who bother to show up, and those are usually the wingnuts from the religious right with an agenda to impose.

Start where you are. Do what you can, what you're capable of doing. Fight the small battle here, and win or lose, the war's course will change. Maybe you'll even live long enough to be glad that you did. I only hope you won't live long enough to regret that you didn't.


The Publisher Says: “They said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.”

So ends the first chapter of this brilliantly readable counterfactual novel, reminding us that America’s Christian fundamentalists have been consistently clear about their vision for a “Christian Nation” and dead serious about acquiring the political power to achieve it. When President McCain dies and Sarah Palin becomes president, the reader, along with the nation, stumbles down a terrifyingly credible path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said.

In the spirit of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, one of America’s foremost lawyers lays out in chilling detail what such a future might look like: constitutional protections dismantled; all aspects of life dominated by an authoritarian law called “The Blessing,” enforced by a reconfigured Internet known as the “Purity Web.” Those who defy this system, among them the narrator, live on the edges of society, sustained by the belief that democracy will rise to triumph over such tyrannical oppression.

My Review: Every Banned Books Week we are well advised to think about what the ability to ban a book really means. In Author Rich's novel, banning a book is no longer a concern. The apparatus of theocracy has taken over the libraries. Nothing so trivial as banning A book is necessary, slate entire areas of human knowledge for destruction. Pulp those books that don't tell the story you want told. Knowledge dies, after all. We saw that after the fall of the Roman Empire. The only libraries were in monasteries, and the only works supposed to be preserved were dogmatic, didactic christian texts. Fortunately, some subversives hid works by Lucretius, Epicurus, Juvenal, Suetonius, in their stacks. As theocracy self-destructed, as all -ocracies (including dem-) inevitably do, sharp-eyed secularists found these works and brought them out into the public gaze for the first time in as much as a millennium. (For more about this, see my review of The Swerve.)

Think about that. For a millennium, a thousand years, knowledge that might have led the world out of pervasive hunger, away from destructive hatred and war over trivia, was hidden away so it would at least survive as words on paper. It couldn't be discussed, because it couldn't be read. It was banned. Very effectively and efficiently banned. When the ban was lifted, the world's best brains went into overdrive and they've never slowed down since.

Yet we still, after this excellent example of the benefits of freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom from the fear that censorship breeds, we still have to fight the well-meaning, well-intentioned, and always wrong "moral protectors" and "nicey-nice police." It doesn't have to start big, and in fact, that is author Rich's point in this novel. His story, of a subversive in the Christian Nation, a convert to the Church of God in America from the losing side in the Seige of Manhattan, starts with the run-up to the 2008 election. In Rich's horrifying nightmare, McCain and Palin won, and then they did what they said they would do: They "restored American to a Christian Nation." They used your smartphone with its eternal connection to communication satellites to track you. It's the law that you must have it on you. It's the law that every device you use must be connected to the Purity Web (which we call universal wi-fi connectivity, and long for!) that your every utterance or interface with another person be monitorable.

Imagine how many petaflops of information this state collects. And sifts. And uses against its citizens, but only in the kindest of spirits and in the expectation of their draconian rules and totalitarian controls bringing all souls to the Rapture as pure as is possible.

This kind of nightmare is all too possible. Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan. Look at the rhetoric coming out of the Tea Party. No, no, says the complacent and lazy citizen, who can't be bothered to vote for school board members or participate in electioneering, no way can that happen here.

“The biggest mistake that we can make is that we don’t believe that they believe what they say. And for many of them, they do mean exactly what they say," says author Rich in his Politico.com interview from this past July. Look at the Texas school textbook adoption wars over presenting creationism as a scientific theory. All of those folks are elected...by the few who bother to show up, and those are usually the wingnuts from the religious right with an agenda to impose.

This novel is set in a world that didn't happen, where the battle against censorship costs lives. Those lives are lost because, in that world like this one we live in, so very many of us can't be bothered, don't want to, are too tired or bored or stressed or lazy to, stand up and say NO MORE when censorship is proposed or imposed. And Rich, a high-powered financial industry lawyer, works with the kind of people whose money-making and self-interest are tightly bound up with the trends in thought and speech around the world. In short, if he doesn't know from the inside whereof he speaks when he speaks about the consequences voicelessness, of stifled freedom to speak and think as one desires, no one alive does.

Start where you are. Do what you can, what you're capable of doing. Fight the small battles and, win or lose, the war's course will change. Maybe you'll even live long enough to be glad that you did. I only hope you won't live long enough to regret that you didn't.

Read the entire review at Shelf Inflicted, a Group Blog.

ELLA MINNOW PEA, Mark Dunn's progressively lipogrammatic send-up of rigidity

ELLA MINNOW PEA
MARK DUNN
Anchor Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: There are two book descriptions, both good; this first is for the hardcover, published by MacAdam/Cage, that I read years ago:

Ella Minnow Pea is an epistolary novel set in the fictional island of Nollop situated off the coast of South Carolina and home to the inventor of the pangram The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog. Now deceased, the islanders have erected a monument to honor their hero, but one day a tile with the letter �z� falls from the statue. The leaders interpret the falling tile as a message from beyond the grave and the letter is banned from use. On an island where the residents pride themselves on their love of language, this is seen as a tragedy. They are still reeling from the shock, when another tile falls and then another.... Mark Dunn takes us on a journey against time through the eyes of Ella Minnow Pea and her family as they race to find another phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet to save them from being unable to communicate. Eventually, the only letters remaining are LMNOP, when Ella finally discovers the phrase that will save their language.

The second is for Anchor's trade paper edition, which seems to me to give a better flavor of the book:

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet

My Review: This novel is about the unintended bad, and ridiculous, consequences of a very good idea. Nollop, an island off the American mainland, is a society rational and reasonable in its organization and actions. Its usage of the English language rests on the existence of the pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The founder of Nollop invested the pangram with great significance.

And now, in Ella's time, the letters of the pangram start falling off the founder's statue! And the leaders say, "It's a sign! A sign! Whatever letters have fallen may no longer be used, in writing or in speech! An omen, a sign!"

And the people nodded, smiled, and did nothing to stop the madness. After all, it's the leaders' job to lead, right? And why would the leaders want bad things for us? After all, we all want the best and the brightest to flourish, right?

Of course! Now, take your Soma. Dr. Orwell will be along soon.

Delight. Dialogue, description, the lot. It's fun to read the book because the story is so very absurd. Imagine an entire country that's established around the veneration of a weirdo who invented a sentence to exercise your typing skills with! And imagine further the populace of such a place, held in thrall to language, ruled by a council of puritans who do their damnedest to make sure the entire island respects the gift of the English language...to the exclusion of all other considerations, personal, practical, political.

The book was published in 2001. That was, for those of failing memory, the year (in my never-humble opinion) Shrub Bush stole the presidential election for the first time. It was clear to anyone not conservative and/or christian that there was a bad set of rapids ahead, and a lot of it would turn on public and private discourse, its nature and its tenor. The novel foretold the increasing gag effect imposed from Above on reporting and discussing the various wars, the various and nefarious doings in and around the Oval Office, and on and on. Dunn could see it coming, and he pointed and hollered the best way he could, via a highbrow high-concept novel that would fly above heads and under radars.

I lapped it up like it was the dust on the mirror and began begging people I knew to read it, even buying several of them copies. (I had a good job in those days.) And to my increasing despair, not ONE of them so much as read it until poked; after reading it, not one of them was even lukewarm.

Ella and her family living like Anne Frank and her family, Ella making the discovery of a new pangram, Ella obeying the lipogrammatic tyranny of the Council in her letters to those who have left, escaped, the madness engulfing Nollop...this was sunshine and I was heliotropic in following it wherever it led. And not one soul to keep me company.

And now, eleven years on, someone reviews it, and I am all back in the fray. Please, do everyone involved a favor and get a copy so you can revel in the pleasures of an honorable woman telling a surreal, Dali-and-Kafka-have-a-baby kind of story and, in the end, revel with her in the joy of open and free speech.

Banned Books Week Post #3...more concerns about silence

♡KarLynP♡, a Goodreader, posted this message on the Feeedback thread that threatens to swallow the internet due to its length.

"The following article came out a few hours ago and gives several recent quotes from GR mgmt, VP of communications Suzanne Skyvara

http://gigaom.com/2013/09/24/as-goodreads-grows-up-it-cant-please-..."

I then posted this expansion on the theme:

This para {in that article} explains the silence about the concerns on this thread:

“Over time we plan to better use all of the data we have around reviews so that we are putting the best reviews – the ones that will be most interesting and useful – at the top. This is a big data problem, and we are hiring a data scientist to work on it. At the same time, we already personalize how you see reviews – you see your friends’ reviews first and then you see reviews by people you follow, all people that you know and trust.”

It's official, from someone at GR. They are deliberately becoming Amazon. So all the hollering and all the points we've all made are, in the end, for naught. They aren't going to make any compromises, they aren't interested in user input, they are the big boy on the block and we aren't. Fuck a bunch of the people whose labor made them rich.

All good things come to an end. The good Goodreads is over. I'll still be here, but will fade into irrelevance (I wonder if I was ever actually relevant) because I'll participate less and less as I move my data.

And it won't matter a speck. The site will go on, the relevance will remain, until someone one day twigs to the fact that this is Amazon now. Like Shelfari, Goodreads will just be a sales mouthpiece for the corpocracy. Indie authors beware: When Amazon is done bludgeoning the publishing industry into submission with y'all's work, you'll see what it feels like to be pressured in a way you can't even fathom yet.

For me, I'm going to shout from the wilderness. I'll post protests and I'll post reviews that are explicitly anti-censorship and tie them into these concerns. And most people will learn to ignore me, more than they already do, because "what's that noisy old coot hollering for?" is easier, safer, less trouble than thinking about what this explicit statement means for your own future."

Then I saw a very good Mediabistro article about why censorship is censorship even when the censors say it's not. This piece shows there is some reasonable hope of interest in the topic {of Goodreads' ham-fisted censorchip} remaining alive. But with Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite including a Goodreads app from the get-go, it's easy to see why Goodreads must change its old, open culture of discussion and opinionated debate to suit Amazon's horrendous, untrustworthy Land of the Five-star Review Or Else sales sales sales or bust ethos. It's disheartening still, but it's clear why it had to happen.

Still, I'd remind those whose butthurt instigated this debacle in the first place of the Soviet-era Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov's words about censorship:

To struggle against censorship, whatever its nature, and whatever the power under which it exists, is my duty as a writer, as are calls for freedom of the press. I am a passionate supporter of that freedom, and I consider that if any writer were to imagine that he could prove he didn't need that freedom, then he would be like a fish affirming in public that it didn't need water.

Banned Books Week Post #2

It's Banned Books Week, and I blogged about a related Censorship issue on Shelf Inflicted.

Most of us who read more than one or two books a year rely on some social media or another to find our next book. We talk about books, us readers, and we shouldn't have to worry about what we say or how we say it UNLESS we threaten harm on someone's person. When a social media outlet takes it upon itself to censor what we are allowed to say, the conversation is headed to oblivion and eventually there won't be room for any opinion that isn't GLOWING.

That's a horrible thought. And it won't stop there, either. Happy-clappy fivestarland is also known as the Big Brother is Watching kind of totalitarian state that Orwell railed against. It's a truism that Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, expressed best: "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." When all that's available are second-rate crappy books that get praised to the skies, how does a culture hook readers? Classics?

I don't know about your experiences with English class, but my teachers almost made a TV watcher out of me by teaching to the curriculum and compelling me to read, for example, The Scarlet Letter, and discuss it with the mouth-breathing trogs I went to school with. The curriculum was aimed at the trogs. I was asleep in my corner. Unlike most people, I was hugely lucky in that my mother was a voracious reader who liked to talk about books, and my much older sister owned a bookstore. I watched a few other natural readers who didn't have my advantages sink into indifference.

So I suspect classic books aren't likely to lead folks to reading. In fact, it's my observation that most readers of more than a book or two a year found classics after getting hooked on chick lit, or science fiction, or mysteries, and finding the literary world was chock-a-block with amazing stuff! And quite a lot of them...20 million on Goodreads, at least 2 million on LibraryThing, and the smaller sites are growing...turn to social media for help navigating the *stunning* amount of material available.

So when a big player in the field, like Goodreads, starts a ham-fisted campaign to make opinions nicey-nice, and then makes that error worse with a tin-eared social non-response to the original screw-up, well it's cause for worry. Whether or not you belong to Goodreads, it's going to affect you sooner or later. The chilling effect of censorship is insidious. It's actually not the formal, overt, clearly (or vaguely) articulated censorship that is most harmful.

It is the erosion of your internal sense of freedom. Censorship kills free thought, slowly, quietly, and indirectly. This rule today breeds that habit of avoidance that stifles that thought tomorrow. Who knows what the consequences of that stifled thought will be? A genius stifled, a mass murderer stopped, an invention unrealized...there is no way to know.

But I do know this. The risk of stifled thought depriving the world of good, important things outweighs the cost of hurt feelings and offended sensibilities. Even mine. I don't lobby for the banning of religion or the wholesale execution of gun nuts. I'd like to. I think those things should happen. But the precedent I set by advocating such draconian action EXTENDS TO ME.

Likewise censoring opinions about books, authors, publishers, etc. The precedent set extends to the censors, and those advocating the censorship.

Think about that carefully before advocating that a Rule be Established.