Postscript: Ulysses, Or Another Reason I Won't Be Buying an iPad

Censorship of Ulysses has seemed like a non-issue for nearly a century, but the New York Times reports that a new graphic-novel treatment of the book has been bowdlerized by Apple for its release on the iPad.

Sigh.

I am less concerned about Ulysses--an old warhorse of the censorship battles, sturdy enough to weather this assault--than about the broader implications of Apple's policy. Female nudity was evidently one of the offending components. I can think of several excellent graphic novels that have nudity (Sandman, From Hell, Watchmen, Preacher, and the list goes on), and it's beyond dismaying that they--and most of the classics of the form--might be inaccessible to a whole group of readers.

Scott McCloud notes, in Reinventing Comics, that nudity and obscenity battles have historically been one of the most reliable ways for culture warriors to suppress and devalue graphic storytelling, and that artists will probably have to continue fighting those battles for a while. For an established classic like Ulysses, the battle is more ridiculous than anything else. But I shudder to think of the stories that aren't being written and drawn because the artists can't figure out how to get past these self-proclaimed cultural gatekeepers.

At the same time, there's a huge opportunity for the Kindle or the Nook to establish a definitive anti-censorship stance. I'd be rather delighted, I must admit, to see the iPad receive some of the same consumer backlash generated by Blockbuster's and Walmart's stealthy soft-censorship practices.

When a technology clearly aspires to become the dominant vehicle of media consumption, we must pay very close attention to what media it allows us to consume. I've quoted Ray Bradbury before about how there's more than one way to burn a book, but damned if he doesn't keep being right.

For me, the publishing industry's potential for waste, particularly when sustainable materials are available, seems more obscene than the objectionable contents of nearly any book. If you feel the same way, behold the Environmental Defense Fund's Paper Calculator, now appearing inside books that are at least partly made from recycled materials.

An aside: ebooks are at best an imperfect solution to the problem of waste, since they rely on electricity, the production of which is one of our largest sources of environmental pollution. They're also distinctly inferior to real books in one or two practical particulars: they don't smell like library paste; a real book's battery never dies; and reading a narrative should be a physical--sometimes geographical--experience. Claiming that the two reading experiences are equal misses the point as badly as the fourth edition of The Elements of Style did when it claimed that a word processor's Cut function was the same as a pair of scissors. It's not, and any writer who has physically hacked through a manuscript knows that there is no substitute for tactile interaction with a book.

An anniversary related to a different sort of moon

This morning, the New York Times published an excellent description of the legal arguments for and against the censorship of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court's decision stripped the U.S. Post Office of the right to refuse to mail content it deemed obscene--a practice that had previously resulted in books such as Ulysses being shipped in dust jackets bearing different titles and bylines. Amazon ought to be grateful.

Pardon the recent lack of posts. I've been working on a book that, I trust, will meet with strenuous parental opposition, if not outright censorship. But I should be back soon.

The writer, redefined

Spotted today in a classified ad calling for writers:
"You don't have to be a professional writer who understands sentence structure."

That all separating amateurs the pros from is the? Knew who?

Quote of the day

"Every time I read something masterful, I can feel my life getting better."
--Writer Philipp Meyer, in a guest blog for Powell's Books

R.I.P. John Updike

We've lost far too many literary luminaries in the past year. For me--although the end of Rabbit, Run sings through my mind sometimes when I am running and it feels just right, and I don't think anyone has ever described that feeling any better--Updike's death doesn't quite have the artistic and emotional resonance that Harold Pinter's or David Foster Wallace's did.

But it does have a personal resonance. Updike I actually met. In college the Assembly Series offered student groups the opportunity to sponsor visiting lecturers, and so the literary magazine for which I was an editor got to sponsor Updike. After his talk, the student editors and a small group of English professors had lunch with him at the alumni house (which represented by far the nicest meal most of the students were going to have all semester).

I wish I could offer some reminiscence of the perfect phrases that left Updike's lips. What sticks in my memory, though, is the awestruck silence in which the students ate, while the English faculty tried very hard to say impressive things. It was fairly awkward, all told. Updike was quiet and gracious. It must be difficult to eat your lunch when everyone around you is holding their breath, waiting for you to be brilliant.

Don't wait for brilliance. Eat your lunch.

That's actually a fantastic lesson for a young writer. Perhaps I learned more from him than I thought.

Further thoughts on lazy writing

In the wake of the Fear of Flying post, I was thinking some more about why exactly I get so cranky about lazy writing. It's not because I'm a snippy grammarian who cares about correctness for the sake of correctness. (I can be, I'm afraid, but that's not the impulse that's operating here.) Rather, it's a much larger issue: why aesthetics matter at all.

I think it's because, at heart, all art deals in what we could be--or perhaps, what could be, period, with or without us. Along with religion and science, art is one of the arenas in which we reconcile our imaginations with our senses, the limitless universe we envision with the all-too-finite one we experience. Even the dourest forms of documentary-style realism are, in some measure, expressions of disappointment: they present what is as a contrast with what might be, so they offer a sad commentary on how far we fall short of our possibilities.

One way or another, art lets us peer through a spyglass at a different world. And it's sad when the lens is cracked, or dirty, or spotted, or blurry. All we want is to see.