Book censorship just isn't Right

     Several readers asked me why I, a literary sort with an affection for direct language, haven't registered any complaint with the publishers of Roald Dahl's books, for snatching away words and descriptions that have fallen out of favor in our sensitive times.

     In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for instance, Augustus Gloop has ceased to be "fat" and is now "enormous," a loss in nuance if not meaning. Meanwhile the Oompa-Loompas have been ungendered, shifting from "small men" to "small people" — I will leave it to the reader to decide whether that amounts to a promotion or not.
     At least the "small" got to stay, so far. Puffin, Dahl's publisher, made hundreds of changes. Words like "ugly," "black," "white," "mad," and "crazy" have been shown the gate. Yet I was not alarmed — well, perhaps because growing up, I was not a particular Dahl fan — we were a Dr. Seuss family, who has had his own recent issues, as when And To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street was retired, in part for depicting "a Chinaman who eats with sticks," which is not hate in the usual sense.

     Nor is it his best title, and so its loss isn't cause for concern. Publishing is a business, and you have to put the slop where the pigs can get at it. I'm more concerned about plucking the n-word out of "Huckebery Finn," a true distortion of the social context of the book and an offense against both literature and history.
     Returning to Dahl, perhaps I held my tongue because cannons far bigger than myself were already blazing away.

     "Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed," said Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses and no stranger to official disapproval.

     Honestly, I'm more worked up about some of the other elisions being committed in literature. Dahl barely registers compared to Vintage Books, which addressed "The Lolita Problem" raging in academia by re-issuing the 1955 novel under a new title, changing the nymphette whose seduction — whether she was the seductress or the seducer depends whether you are Humbert Humbert or not — that so rocked Eisenhower-era  America so she now nearing middle age. The plot is the same, or at least similar, only Lolita is now 39 and goes by her birth name, Dolores Haze. The copy changes are small but significant:

     “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing five foot three in one sock. She was Lori in slacks. She was Dolly at the insurance company where she worked. She was Dotty on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Dolores.”

     If you don't remember the original, Vintage has added five inches to the girl ... er, woman's height — to account for growth, I suppose — banished the risque "Lolita" and changed her school to an Allstate office. I've read the new version, or tried to, and while yes, it conforms to current standards regarding acceptable age differences in relationships, it loses something. It just does. Judge me harshly if you must.

     On the positive side, it isn't as if the past 65 years of the Lolita print run were unavailable — millions and millions of copies. They haven't plucked them from stores and libraries. At least not yet, though Florida is working on that. 

     Besides, everyone is not me. There seems to be a market for this kind of see-no-evil revision.  If the Harper Lee estate can gather up the scribbled leftovers from the writing of To Kill a Mockingbird and publish an excrescence like Go Set a Watchman than there isn't much room for complaint.

     In a similar vein, while I consider Lolita an amusing novel, it doesn't approach Nabokov's Pale Fire or Speak Memory. A greater vandalism, in my view, is what Signet did to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, now marketed under the title Death in Venice Revisited. In turning Tadzio, the object of Gustav von Aschenbach's panting fixation, from a 14-year-old Polish tourist into a 24-year-old hotel pool attendant, the axis the book revolved upon is plucked away, and it goes spinning into triviality. While doing so does remove the stain of hebephilia — it would be pointless meddling otherwise —the shift also sets up for the inevitable romantic tryst. To me, Aschenbach pining away in the original — the two never speak, never mind indulge in the bedroom gymnastics detailed in the new edition — is far less  objectionable than what transpires in "Death in Venice Revisited." 

     Plus, once you start updating culture, there is no end to it. With Ukrainians picketing the Joffrey's performance of "Anna Karenina" at the Lyric Opera House last fall (Tolstoy was a pacifist, but no matter) and Mothers Against Drunk Driving issuing that daft statement against all the vehicular drinking in On the Road, we risk either constant grappling over the misdeeds of characters which, remember, did not actually exist, or being saddled with literature so blanched of wrongdoing that it approaches the tedium of regular life. It's fiction folks. No real whale was injured in the creation of Moby-Dick, so needless to say, I think the PETA effort to get the Melville classic pulled from school library shelves is woefully misplaced.  I'd be reluctant to mention any of this, except that it's worth remembering that not all the efforts at censorship are from prudish, history-averse right wingers trying to scour the world of identities that trouble them. The left is busy too.

     There's more, but you get the idea. For a comprehensive list of books being challenged, click here.

     

Trump indictment changes nothing

   

Metropolitan Museum of Art

      In Al-Anon, the organization serving families of alcoholics and addicts, one of the first messages they impart to desperate wives and husbands, parents and children, is to step away from the drama of their loved ones thrashing about in recovery.
     You can’t fix them. You might not even be able to help. The afflicted have to figure it out for themselves. Or not. For the time being, rather than argue and grapple with their lies and ego and excuses, just turn away. Attend to yourself.
     Approaching the eighth year of all Donald J. Trump, all the time, first as presidential candidate, then president, defeated ex-president, and now, full circle, presidential candidate once again, leading the Republican pack for 2024, I’ve finally reached that step-back part. I can’t fix him. Can’t make him go away. There hasn’t been anything to write about him. Readers don’t need guidance: they either figured out Donald Trump long ago, or never will.
     There’s really nothing new to say. Being an expect-the-worst kind of guy, I simply assume Trump will win in 2024 against a senescent Joe Biden. Of course he will. The whole thing will begin again, the lies and bombast, grievance and cruelty, will roll over the country like a tsunami. Worse this time, because the shock has become blunted, and helpers have stepped up and are ready, with a Supreme Court, a third of whom he picked himself, ready to sing “Amen” to his every overstep. Abroad, tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu will be comforted by the success of a kindred spirit, and at home the people who live for this kind of thing will ululate like true believers, clap like seals, salaam in adoration, and the whole madhouse will thunder on for another four years.
     I don’t see how any of that changes because Trump now faces criminal charges in Manhattan for his botched attempt to cover-up his copulation — “affair” seems too elevated a term — with porn actress Stormy Daniels. The $130,000 Trump funneled to Daniels through fixer Michael Cohen, days before the 2016 election. Caring about the law, about morality, or even about the outcome of any given election, has become a partisan divide.

To continue reading, click here.

"Man Seated in Prison," by Victor Jean Nicolle (1781) (Metropolitan Museum)

 

Orchids — Like sex dolls for bees

 

     In March, I visited the Orchid Show at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Three times. Quite a lot, really, a sufficient number of visits to make an outside observer, such as you, suspect that I really like orchids a lot. Which I do not, particularly.
      Don't get me wrong. I don't mind orchids. They're a fine flower, even though they tend to look like colorful alien insects or the faces of screaming babies. There's certainly enough of them — 25,000 species of orchid scattered all over the world. They seem rare, and often are as individuals. But taken together, orchids are the most prevalent flower. And also the oldest, which makes sense, because they seem like something a brontosaurus would munch on under a purple Jurassic sky. 

     I just happen to prefer, aesthetically oh, zinnias, or daisies or irises, or roses, or just about any other bloomin' bloom. Flowers that are round, and less, umm, weird-looking, flowers without, as the Oxford English Dictionary demurely puts it, such notable "grotesqueness of form."*

     So how did I end up going to the Botanic Garden show three times? Quite organically. The first was with my wife, who wanted to see the show. I of course went along because where she goes I go. And the second with my sister, visiting from Dallas. I thought would like the show, and she did. And the third, last Sunday, with friends, scheduled by my wife.  

     The show ended Sunday, so I'm safe, for another year.
     "Orchid," incidentally, is a rather new word — the OED traces it only back to 1845. Though the word made up for lost time. No lesser scientist than Charles Darwin turned his attention to orchids, following up on his 1859 On the Origin of Species in 1862 with On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, not as well known, yet continuing his evolutionary theme by noting that orchids that are pollinated by the wind have pale, unscented petals, while those requiring insects to do the deed are equipped with bright petals and fragrant nectar to lure them in. 

     Better suited to the task at hand, though I suppose you could argue that this was due to intelligent design— there must be a God, because how else could certain species of orchid offer almost perfect approximations of female bee anatomy, so as to collect the pollen that scrapes off male bees as they try to fuck them. I wish religious sorts would. That's cosmology I would be tempted to admire, if not consider.

    Speaking of religion and other commercial endeavors, orchids do not have a lot of practical applications, beyond the horticultural display of the plants themselves. There's only one I know of, but it's a good one: the fruit of an orchid known as the vanilla planifolia, or as it is more generally called, vanilla.
    Anyway, while I don't have anything special to say about orchids,  I did take these photos of them that I thought I would pass along. If this all seems out-of-left field, the truth is, I had something else I wrote ready to go Wednesday night, regarding dead friends. But I want to hold it, and think about it a bit. We are allowed to think about things. Right? If only as a change of pace. Such as flowers. We can think about them. Not for long, true, particularly orchids. But they will have to do for today.

* On Twitter, my friend Bill Savage provides some literary backup for my lack of enthusiasm for orchids. "General Sternwood, in The Big Sleep, to Philip Marlowe re: orchids: 'They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.'"

More words about guns

World War I Memorial, Nashville

     Let’s see, guns blah blah blah. Children blah blah blah. Tennessee blah de blah-blah blah.
     There, am I done? Because this commenting on the latest school shooting — three 9-year-olds, three staffers and the shooter killed Monday at a religious school in Nashville — well, it gets tiresome. I suppose I could just join the great communal shrug that most people give, a sigh, a quick checking of the details, then forget about it and go about our business.
     Nobody really cares — or rather, these deaths don’t shake the deep, passionate, quasi-religious, quasi-sexual devotion that too many Americans have toward high-powered weaponry. They certainly care, intensely, about guns. They cared yesterday, they care now, and they’ll care tomorrow. Far more passionately than they care about children. That is clear.
     Nor do these killings stir the rest of Americans from our lethargy. We’re complicit. We watch the same movies, buy the same get-the-drop-on-the-bad-guy gun fantasies, and allow this situation to persist. For years and years.
     Three kids dead — not really all that many on the Columbine Scale. But it could be 30 or 300. What difference would it make? Does it matter if kids are picked off in bunches or one at a time? In a quiet Southern school or sitting on their stoop on the West Side of Chicago? Shootings are the leading cause of death for children in the United States, a kind of American folk illness, one that many other countries don’t have because they have sane gun laws.
     We have the Second Amendment. Which could still allow us to keep this from happening — it used to. Law is open to interpretation. The way the First Amendment stretches to allow any glittery-eyed parent with gumption enough to raise a fuss to start pulling books off the shelves at publicly funded libraries. Imagine if parents tried to tamp down gun ownership with half the zeal they use to go after books?

To continue reading, click here.

Galileo explains war on ‘woke’

     Whenever I’m cataloguing the benefits of being Jewish — bountiful comfort food, emphasis on education and family, interest-free loans from George Soros — I always include the advantage of being in an extreme minority. About 1% of Americans are Jewish.
     Not a lot. And steadily dwindling due to assimilation and intermarriage. Which is a shame. Because being an outsider has advantages. It sharpens your powers of observation. What is unquestioned, standard operating procedure to the majority is strange to you. It makes you think, even if that thought is, “Why can’t I celebrate Christmas like everyone else?”
     There are exceptions. Jewish ultra-Orthodox, like zealots everywhere, have the same tendency to live in uniform bunches, like grapes, and crave conformity. They emphasize learning, but won’t touch a book that isn’t approved.
     I’m thinking of mainstream American Jews, whose fish-out-of-water quality contradicts a central value of Christianity — that everyone should be like you, the culture revolve around you, and every shiny surface reflect a person just like you.
     They don’t know what they’re missing. Being an outcast encourages you to dance to strange music. To explore places not meant for you. Such as when my younger son was in high school and expressed interest in the University of Notre Dame. We took a road trip, then a tour. That doesn’t mean I left my personality in the car.
     “You can be the Jew,” I whispered to the boy — Notre Dame ranks last among the top 25 American universities when it comes to Jewish population.
     To Notre Dame’s credit, the cathedral-like stonework of the lovely Jordan Hall of Science includes not only Louis Pasteur and Madam Curie, venerated like saints with full-body statues, but Galileo, whom you may recall got in hot water with the Catholic Church for endorsing the Copernican notion that the earth revolves around the sun. This was heresy because in the Bible, the earth — and mankind — is the center of universe.

To continue reading, click here.

Bill Zehme, master of the celebrity profile, journalism’s ‘bastard stepchild,’

 

Cast of "Ocean's Eleven" (National Portrait Gallery)

     Bill Zehme was your pal, and Frank Sinatra’s.
     Whether you were an unknown Chicago writer just starting out, or a king of late-night television, Zehme would turn his full attention and his Midwestern charm in your direction and make you feel as cool as a Bombay Sapphire martini, straight up, with a twist, at Jilly’s.
     A writer for Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Playboy and other top-shelf magazines back when magazines really mattered, Zehme pierced the shiny veneer of celebrity to capture the flesh-and-blood person within, writing best-selling books on Jay Leno, Andy Kaufman and his idol, Sinatra.

     Zehme, 64, died Sunday at Weiss Memorial Hospital after a long battle with cancer.
     “Bill was first and foremost an incredibly talented writer who had this rare ability to get inside the head and heart of famous people, everyone from Andy Kaufman and Frank Sinatra, very much with my dad,” said Christie Hefner, the daughter of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner and former chairwoman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises. “He was a personal friend, one of the loveliest and funniest men I ever knew.”
     Zehme was a master of the celebrity profile, a form he looked askance at.
     “I’m really not interested in most people,” he confessed to Ted Allen in Chicago magazine in 1996. “The celebrity profile is the bastard stepchild of journalism, and I’m embarrassed sometimes to be associated with it.”
     He shouldn’t have been.
     “Bill got people to talk to him who wouldn’t talk to anyone else, even members of their own families,” said Bob Kurson, former Sun-Times writer and best-selling author of “Shadow Divers.” “And you only had to join him for a single dinner in a darkened corner of a good steakhouse to understand how that happened — he was genuinely interested in people, even if there was nothing in it for him, especially if there was nothing in it for him.”

To continue reading, click here.

    The photo atop the blog was shot in the Paris catacombs and translates as: "Happy is he who's been able to learn the causes of things, and set aside all fear, and unrelenting fate, and the noise of greedy Acheron under his feet."

Sunday mail bag

     The negative emails that my column used to draw by the dozen every day have dwindled away to practically nothing. I'm not sure why. Maybe newspapers have fallen off the table, culturally. Maybe email has died as a medium of conversation, joining Morse code and the semaphore flag on the shelf of defunct forms of communication. Maybe the haters have finally wandered off, disgusted. Maybe it's just a slow week. Maybe some other thing. 
     My page two update on a trans reader, "There's no downside," drew a number of compliments and just one critical email, two days late. Her opening sentence refers to my lede, where I describe going through the Reader classified looking for story ideas. It isn't that she doesn't have a point, somewhere. It's the tone of aggrievement that I object to, the idea that a slice of pie given to A must necessarily steal some pie from B, C and D.
     I try to carefully compose my replies, subtly delivering a point that in the past might have been conveyed more forcefully. The reader's name was shielded, as a kindness.

Date: March 22, 2023 at 6:50:48 AM CDT
To: Steinberg Neil <nsteinberg@sun-times.com>
Subject: Today’s Article

Read your article in S-T’s today in which you mention seeking news articles to write about. As my Dad always said “it’s right under your nose” as we missed the obvious. Jill Biden recently gave the International Woman’s Award to a male transgender. What a slap in the face to woman of today (and the past) who have accomplished so much on their own. This has nothing to do with male gender or the gay community as they could never walk in our shoes!

Margaret C.
S-T Subscriber

Steinberg, Neil <nsteinberg@suntimes.com>

Dear Ms. C.:

I don't pay much attention to awards and honors, and feel people put too much stock in them. Though that might be sour grapes, as I tend not to win many. As far as slaps in the face of women, I'd say with half the country taking away women's rights to conduct their own reproductive health as they see fit, there are bigger problems than the birth gender of someone Joe Biden hung a ribbon on. Though as a subscriber, you have a right to feel offended by anything you please, and I appreciate your reading, and your letting me know what bothers you. I do agree with you that someone who lived most of life as a male could never have the full female experience. Though I've met more than my share of biological women who supposedly had the full female experience yet seem to have missed out on the sympathy and compassion that the public often associate with being a woman. Thanks for writing.

NS