Next mayor has his work cut out for him

     Well, look at that. Turns out Paul Vallas wasn’t a Republican after all. How can I tell? Easy. His swift, gracious concession Tuesday night after losing the race for Chicago mayor to Brandon Johnson.
     “It’s critically important that we use this opportunity to come together,” Vallas said.
     Recognition of electoral reality is not the standard GOP go-to move. It isn’t just Donald Trump and Kari Lake. Look at the key state Supreme Court race up in Wisconsin this week.
     “I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede,” complained Dan Kelly, of the pro-choice woman who thumped him. “My opponent is a serial liar. She’s disregarded judicial ethics; she’s demeaned the judiciary with her behavior.”
     Classy. The only reason Kelly couldn’t challenge the results was how badly he was drubbed — 10 percentage points, 55 to 45, a reminder that, given a say in the matter, most Americans don’t want Republicans peering down their pants, checking their business.
     Returning to Vallas channeling the Beatles. “Come together.” But how?
     First by recognizing just how perilous the city’s situation is right now. Take the usual urban woes — crime, schools, jobs, pensions — and mix in the unprecedented, seemingly endless post-pandemic hollowing out of downtown, and you have a recipe for a cake that looks very much like Detroit. That’s bad.
     What should Johnson do? They say that to a hammer every problem looks like a nail, and, since I am a centrist, I’m going to plump for the middle way. It’s the only path to navigate a city that voted 51 percent for a fire-breathing union organizer who thinks a 3.5 percent flee-for-the-hills income tax is a good idea, and 48 percent for a corporate water carrier so in harmony with big money interests that gazillionaire Ken Griffin was blowing him kisses from Florida.
     Start with the cops. FOP capo John Catanzara has been threatening that a thousand police officers will quit rather than work for a man who doesn’t roll at their feet like a puppy. Somebody should observe that maybe Chicago wants those particular officers to take a hike, in the hopes they’ll be replaced with new hires who maybe don’t think their choices are limited to a) do whatever we want without consequence or b) curl up in a fetal ball and whine about how everybody hates them and they can’t do their jobs. There must be a third choice. Other professions sure don’t act that way. “If you’re going to insist the cookies not be poison, then maybe I won’t bake anything at all!”
     Here Johnson has some freedom. Because as the former Defund-the-Police guy, he will never win over the FOP crowd. He can shut off their body cameras and rename Chicago “Coptown” and it won’t help.

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"Time would find them generous"

Adams Memorial, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Smithsonian)

     Gordon Gregg was my friend in kindergarten, and still is.
     True, our relationship was not as close as I'd have liked it be in the 55 years after he moved to Arkansas in 1967. But I didn't forget him either, and when the internet became a thing, tried to track him down but couldn't. A lot of Gordon Greggs. So I was overjoyed when he reached out to me on Facebook in 2021. I sent him the book of mine — Complete and Utter Failure — where he makes a cameo, and while I haven't taken him up on his offer to visit him in Montana, I'm certainly open to the trip. It sounds like fun.
     That's me. Call it loyalty. Call it neediness — probably a blend of the two. I still think about everyone I ever cared for, even those who did something jerkish 25 years ago and vanished. The door is always open.
     Except of course for those who've died. Death makes friendship problematic, though I still manage to maintain a sort of relationship with my dead friends, still consider them, remember them, try to learn things from them. Each offers valuable lessons, for instance, on how to live, and how to die.
     Roger Ebert comes immediately to mind. Though I have to qualify my use of the word "friend." That seems like putting on airs. I was a colleague, one of his many fans, well removed in the third tier. We had lunch together once. Attended each other's parties. He was kind and generous to me, and I admired him.
     As he died, of two particularly cruel forms of cancer, Roger was unflinching and honest, without a drop of self-pity — that last part is going to be hardest for me. I'm more of a gnash my teeth and wail sort of guy. I hope when the dread times come, I'll not only think, "Be like Roger" — that's a certainty — but then I'll have the fortitude to follow through. Dying is a long-haul process.
     Except when it's not.
     Andrew Patner is a reminder of the occasional rapidity of death. I was doing his WFMT radio show one week, he was dead and gone the next, or so it seemed. A matter of days or weeks. You never know when your time has come, thus it's smart to live your life like you'll be dead tomorrow. Jeff Zaslow conveys that lesson even more plainly. One icy road, one speeding truck, and it's all over. For you, anyway. For your family and friends, it has only just begun.
     Which brings up Steve Neal. His lesson is clear: time will pluck you away soon enough. Don't hurry its hand. Suicide is a grotesque abuse of your loved ones. It offloads your pain to everyone who ever cared about you. Don't do it, if you have any say in the matter —  I know that survivors who have lost their loved ones to suicide find comfort in the idea that they don't, and I certainly don't want to argue with them. But we aren't automatons. We have free will. We can resist bad impulses. Tu ne cede malis, as Virgil writes. "Yield not to evil."
     The overarching message: enjoy every sandwich, best you can, long as you can, as Warren Zevon said when asked what cancer taught him.
     Speaking of cancer's lessons. Bill Zehme died a couple weeks ago. After I wrote his obit, I did what I believe every writer would want done to mark his passing — pulled down one of his books, Intimate Strangers, and started to read. Checking the inscription first, which startled me with its warmth. He was such a kind man. 

     Beginning with his 1995 profile on Sharon Stone, because it contains what I think it the best quote ever extracted from a celebrity (though I can't say for certain, since I haven't read every celebrity profile; in fact, I hardly read them at all, except for Bill's, which were masterpieces).
     The star of "Basic Instinct" arranged to have his-and-her massages with Zehme at her home.
     "Oh, look! It's your butt!" she playfully says, while they are under the masseuse's sheets. "I saw your butt."
     "You did not!" Bill countered, then writes: "Thinking fast, I said that I've seen hers, too."
     "Who hasn't?" she retorts. "Anybody with seven bucks can see my ass, buddy. What's your excuse?"
     There's something sublime about that, particularly when she adds, "Actually, it doesn't feel like they've seen my butt. That butt belongs to fictional characters, you know?"
     That's revealing, not only of Stone, but of all actors. The way they try to preserve some of their selves from public scrutiny. I suppose we all do that. While Bill getting naked with the "Basic Instinct" star gets mentioned a lot — I thought of putting it into his obituary, but didn't — even more marvelous is that, at Stone's direction, he skipped down a mountain trail with her, hand-in-hand. They baked cookies together.
     That is a life richly lived. At least on the celebrity metric. Which is not actually the yardstick by which life should be measured. I don't think Bill's passing was so deeply felt on the Chicago scene because he knew a lot of famous people and wrote about them very well. For me, I didn't care that he gave Madonna a lift in his car, impressive as that is. I doubt I ever asked him anything about that aspect of his life. 
     To me, Bill Zehme was a mensch, as my people say. He was reliable, caring, generous. He helped me when I really needed help. When I was in recovery, I'd phone him, we'd have coffee together. Bill was comforting in a world suddenly lacking in comfort. "It's a scary thing, buddy," he'd say. He got that right.
     But life gives to us, only to claw back. I was fortunate in getting lost in a mess that I could find my way out of, with time and his help. A labyrinth with a string marking the way out, something I had never noticed before, right there at my feet.
     Bill wasn't so lucky. Life served him a decade's worth of torment and an early death.
     Which, being Bill, he turned into a sharp, funny Chicago magazine piece called "What Cancer Taught Me." I'm reluctant to summarize it; just read it. His emphasis on humor. I hope I never go through chemo, but if I do, I'm spelling it "keemo," the way he did, to inject some desperately-needed silliness into the experience.
     He knew how important it is to be nice to the people helping him.
     "New people will begin to populate this key stretch of your life. Doctors. Nurses. Technicians. Orderlies. They’ll see and know things about you that you would never dream someone else would. You’d better be nice to these people. These are the most important relationships you’ll have."
     As far as previous relationships, those were deadweight holding him back. He chose to fight much of his decade-long battle without the discomfort of being under "the frightened eyes of friends."
     "I didn’t want people trying to cheer me up," he wrote, in boldface, and followed through. That was a hard choice for me to accept. I wanted to swoop in with cookies and company. I tried to respect that, even though I found it frustrating and dispiriting. I had to remind myself: this wasn't my fight, it was his. That's one lesson Bill taught: you can't choose when you die, but you can choose how.
     That said, he tried to be kind.
     "The people who are in my life, I love them more than I did before," he wrote. "Even if they don’t hear from me."
     So he was clear about that. And I decided, eventually, to trust him, and tried to remember he was adapting to a new and terrible situation. Who knows how one will respond to the dread news? Maybe I'd do the same.
     Maybe not. At the moment I imagine, being me, I'd want a conga line of friends working their way past the foot of my bed, in party hats, holding the hips of the person in front of them. Bump-bump, bump-bump, bump, "GET!" Bump-bump, bump-bump, bump, "BETTER!"
     But if I don't, I am going to make sure, at some point before the end, I call every single person I ever gave a damn about and thank them, specifically, for enhancing my time on earth, for tolerating me and talking with me and putting up with all the crap I'm sure I served up to them, in person and in print. You can't mold people to your liking — I've learned that much — but you can try to be the person you'd like for yourself. So when my turn comes, I think those farewells will be a little bit more intense, colored by the ones Bill didn't make. 
     Unless I don't — sickness and illness can change a person, and not in good ways. Ill people can become self-absorbed, perhaps by necessity. So I'm not judging them. But I don't want to emulate them either. Such is my plan anyway. Which might get quickly abandoned. Everybody has a plan, as Mike Tyson says, until they get punched in the mouth. Life punches us each in the mouth, at some point or another.

    When Bill died, I regretted his passing, especially the years and years it's been since we spoke, and felt bitter, until I thought of some comforting lines from James Fenton's threnody, "For Andrew Wood." The poem isn't perfect — some lines clunk — but the key part resonates for me. He imagines the dead, gathered in their post-mortem cave, and wonders: What do they want from us? What do the dead demand of the living? His answer:

I think the dead would want us

To weep for what they have lost.
I think that our luck in continuing
Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous
And less self-engrossed.

     I'm lucky. And recognition of one's luck can't help but make a person grateful. And forgiving, particularly of those less fortunate. The past 20 years, for me, have been a struggle to be kinder, more generous, and less self-engrossed. That challenge is a privilege to take on, and a plan worth clinging to, in health and in sickness. When I think of Bill Zehme, I remember so much. The first time I saw him, at John F. Kennedy Jr.'s George magazine party in 1996 at the Art Institute. I was glad to meet Kennedy, and Norman Mailer, and pleased to see Kevin Costner, and Aretha Franklin, but flat-out thrilled to finally meet Zehme. I remember us standing at the bar — in the Knickerbocker Hotel, I believe. In black tie, having escaped some unendurable dinner or event. We talked and drank — there was nobody as fun to talk with and drink with than Bill. That night, I poured my martini into his — he was 6'5, and could drink me under the table. Then turning to him, again and again, to help guide me through recovery. And the last time I saw him, when I forced him to go to dinner, even though he was sick and didn't want to, in the cracked theory that seeing me would somehow make things better for him. It didn't, and I'm sorry about that, though my heart was in the right place. As was Bill Zehme's. He had one of the biggest hearts of any man I ever met, and I only wish I could have helped him at the end in a fraction of the way he once helped me.

Thank God it’s finally over

     Passover begins Wednesday night. The holiday where Jews sit late into the evening, delaying dinner while they give thanks for freedom. Our most comfortable holiday, in that it blends food (eventually), family and gratitude. Not to forget obligatory pillow leaning and mandatory wine drinking. What’s not to love?
     Yes, a lot of the gratitude is scripted ritual in a language most participants don’t understand. And being Jews, who often have trouble sticking with the program, Seders often turn into general celebrations of freedom from all sorts of oppression. There is much ad-libbing. I certainly plan to give thanks for freedom, finally, from Chicago electoral politics, which have filled the airwaves for months, the past five weeks supercharged by the mayoral runoff.
     The simplistic solutions and buzzwords hammered by candidates must offend anybody grounded in the real world. If fixes were that easy, you want to scream, how come nobody’s done them yet? With crime the No. 1 issue, you’d think the choice was: a) let cops do whatever they like so they don’t feel sad and instead start arresting people again so crime goes away, the Paul Vallas plan; or b) fix everything in society — jobs, schools, families — so crime goes away, the Brandon Johnson solution. Good luck with either of those plans.
     There are valid reasons to be thankful for the election beyond that it is finally over. The campaigns were surprisingly civil, for a Chicago election. While race was always a factor — how could it not be? — there just wasn’t as much poisonous racial rancor as in years past. A low simmer rather than a rolling boil.
     Yes, great white hope Vallas played footsie with the Fraternal Order of Police. But he didn’t come close to Bernie Epton’s notorious “Before it’s too late.” At least not in so many words.
     And yes, Johnson, in one of what seemed like daily debates, accused Vallas of being “dismissive to a Black man.” Which approaches the Lori Lightfoot poor-me, you-hate-me-because-I’m-Black-and-not-because-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing quickstep. But both candidates were generally civil.

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Into the tent of Sarah

     "How did you know about this place?" I asked my wife. We were in Sarah's Tent Kosher Market, a sprawling supermarket/religious goods store on Oakton in Skokie.
     "I've been coming here for years," she said, narrowing her eyes. "You've been here before." 
    I have? No memory at all. 

    "Years ago," she said, in my defense. In its early manifestation as Hungarian Kosher Foods. We had come here now to pick up pupiks — chicken gizzards, somehow essential for soup — in preparation for Passover, which begins at sundown Wednesday. She picked out various esoterica needed for the holiday, and I began wandering the aisles, soaking everything in. Obscure Jewish foodstuffs. Ceremonials objects and garments. 
    Some was surprising, like a silicone mold to fake braided challahs. 

    "That's just wrong," I said, showing it to my wife. Who does such a thing? Is it really that hard to divide a loaf's worth of dough into three parts, rolling them into logs and braid them? Even I've done that. The mold seems an odd, unnecessary cheat. Though who am I to judge. Maybe when baking 50 challahs, you lunge for the mold.
      The vibe was different, and not just because some of the women were in sheitels — the wigs that Orthodox women wear. Shoppers greeted each other, paused, gathered, talked. When my wife accidentally took somebody else's cart, the woman laughed it off when my wife found her and returned it. I half expected them to go get a cup of coffee together.

     I puzzled over the "Sarah's Tent" name. It's a biblical reference, to a passage in Genesis when Isaac takes Rebecca "into the tent of Sarah, his mother." Without going into detail, it's considered a metaphor for "the quintessential Jewish home" where the candles never burn down and the bread never goes stale.

     For me, the store was a reminder of the vast world of tradition I generally turn my back on. It's kept going, by people who aren't me, and when I show up, on rare occasions, to load up on pupicks and kishke and carrot jam (how often do you get the chance?) it's always there, waiting.  I admired a display of beautiful havdalah candles — used to mark the end of the sabbath, and for a moment considered buying one. But then I'd have to use the thing, and that was a bridge too far.

    

     

Israel today, America tomorrow

     In my home office is a globe. Two globes, actually — it’s a big office — but the one I’m looking at is an old 16-inch library globe, quite regal with its three carved wooden lion’s feet. Manufactured, it informs us, by Replogle Globe of Chicago, Illinois — still in business here, I should add, having moved to Indiana, tested the waters in the Mississippi of the Midwest, found them bitter, then returned home, howling.
     There’s no date on the globe, but it seems very mid-20th century — there’s a French West Africa; the future Vietnam is “INDO-CHINA.”
     As a tool, the globe still works. When I needed to confirm that yes, contrary to expectation, in Chicago you turn Northeast to pray facing Mecca, a globe is the best way to see that. Republicans would love my old globe, as it shows Ukraine being part of a vast orange “UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS” spanning 11 time zones.
     And with the globe I can see that the United States is right there, on the surface of the earth, and not, as many Americans seem to believe, floating above it, some kind of special star twinkling in its own separate empyrean, a realm apart that the rest of the world looks up at and envies.
     We’re earthbound, in the midst. What happens elsewhere can find its way here. COVID should have taught us that. A virus dripping off some dead bat or sick turtle or whatever in Wuhan in December showed up in Chicago one month later.
     Nor is influence limited to physical contaminants. Bad ideas spread too. In June 2016, I knew for certain, in my gut, that Donald Trump was going to be elected president after the British bailed out of the European Union because they were afraid membership might mean that a Turk could move next door. Brexit was a disastrous blunder, akin to throwing yourself off a cliff to feel the breeze.
     Nationalism was in the air. Still is, around the globe. From Vladimir Putin lobbing missiles at Ukraine to Lopez Obrador fomenting violence against journalists in Mexico — at least 16 were killed there last year. Would-be tyrants are busy seeing just how much they can get away with. Short answer: a lot.

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Mail bag

      The defeated former president, Losey L. McLoser, being indicted for one of his lesser crimes on Thursday completed wiped Monday's Nashville school slaughter off the American mind as a topic of consideration.  It vanished like a ball in a magic trick. Which makes me doubly glad for this letter, one of the more thoughtful I've received in a long time.

Dear Mr. Steinberg:

     Even more quickly than usual, our national attention has turned away from the most recent school shooting in Nashville. Trump’s indictment has provided convenient cover, and no doubt, the NRA welcomes the distraction. 

     But the heart-broken families of those three innocent 9 yr. olds are finding little solace in the headlines. Their babies are gone. They have already become part of the statistic that makes gun violence the number one killer of youth in the United States. 

     “Almost forgotten,” you wrote just days after the shooting. “Nobody really cares . . . we allow this situation to persist . . . We’re complicit . . . Better to wait for something even more horrible. We know that’s coming. Yet we do nothing.” 

     As a retired school administrator, I can no longer do nothing. Offering thoughts and prayers, participating in demonstrations against gun violence, calling elected representatives, sending donations to the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation all feel like useless gestures at this point. 

     Like you, I have been following the rising arc of gun violence in our schools since Laurie Dann penetrated the cocoon of safety we thought our schools provided. Then Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland and Uvalde. The names roll off our tongues so easily. More evidence that we have made death-while-being-a-student a national norm. 

     I write to you today, Mr. Steinberg, to suggest a way to shatter that norm, to share an idea for action whose time has come. Actually, it’s long overdue: A nation-wide school strike until Congress passes a law to ban assault weapons. I propose that students and teachers refuse to return to school this fall unless a law is passed. This gives our slow-walking legislators time to pass a law and kids and staff time to mobilize with real leverage. Is this too drastic? Let’s ask the loved ones of the hundreds of victims of school murders. Let’s ask the parents of those lost 9 yr. olds in Nashville. As a lifelong educator, the last thing I want to encourage is the loss of precious learning time, but we can no longer conduct business as usual while wondering where the next school shooting will be, wondering what town we will add to our insidious vocabulary list of shooting sites. We cannot settle for thoughts and prayers. We must interrupt the cycle of violence killing our kids and doing irreparable harm to our system of education that is already buckling under the residual damage of the pandemic. 

     Mr. Steinberg, you and I met years ago when you generously took the time to attend a gathering of COR, the Catholic Schools Opposing Racism organization I began in response to the brutal beating of Lenart Clark by Catholic high school students. For ten years, we brought thousands of kids and teachers together to dismantle the racism embedded in our school system, and I’d like to think that we chipped away at some of the hatred and transformed school practices. We surely did not end racism in Catholic schools, but we did not content ourselves with doing nothing, with accepting racial violence as a norm because it was just too big a problem to tackle. 

     These days, I have continued to teach as a literacy volunteer for mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants, mostly undocumented. (Immigration reform is another big problem crying out for drastic action, but that’s the topic for another time.) I mention this only to draw a connection to the book we’re reading together, Elie Wiesel’s Night.
     What a privilege it has been to engage a group of adults in a meaningful discussion of the Holocaust, some of whom had never heard of it. A privilege, yes, but an overwhelming responsibility to expose the evils of antisemitism in history and as it thrives today. Last year, I had the honor of reading The 1619 Project with a couple of the students who wanted to learn the history of this country. These are challenging topics for speakers of all languages, but I don’t believe we should shy away from them because they are too big, too difficult, or as some Florida school boards suggest, too depressing. In my humble opinion, educators must not avoid the big issues; we must dive headlong into them. Avoidance would be the essence of having low expectations for students and would handicap them from developing as critical thinkers. 

     How else will schools in the United States ever develop critical thinkers among students who currently spend more time practicing hiding in school closets during active shooter drills? 

     Racism. Anti-Semitism. Violence. Our gun-sick culture. We must not avoid these issues. We must not settle for doing nothing because these problems are too overwhelming, too entwined in the greed and grievance that polarize our national discourse. 

     It is my hope that some angry teenager, or some exhausted teacher, or some exasperated school administrator will consider with seriousness the possibility of launching an effort to energize a collaborative school strike because we can’t settle for school violence as usual come September. Congress must act to ban assault weapons, or we refuse to go back to school. 

     We no longer wish to be complicit, Mr. Steinberg. A desperate measure for this desperate time. 

     Thank you for listening, and thank you again for taking the time to show up all those years ago, Mr. Steinberg. You, Sir, are the real deal — a journalist unafraid to probe the big issues. I am grateful that you use your voice for good, unafraid to be bold, unwilling to do nothing. Please help once again by printing this idea however you see fit. I remain hopeful that someone will run with it, maybe garnering the support of Senator Chris Murphy or Cory Booker, maybe Gabby Giffords or Michael Pfleger or David Hogg or X Gonzalez or Ashbey Beasley. 

     WE CAN’T GIVE UP. 

     Sincerely, Patty Nolan-Fitzgerald

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.