Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!

Here's some further listage on banned books -- or, to be more exact in these cases, banned prose. (Leaves of Grass and Howl, among other works of poetry, are missing.) A point worth making: One should not assume that the efforts to ban particular works necessarily represent a given political stance. Efforts to ban Native Son (the first line of which is the title of today's post) represent both those who object to its avowedly Marxist perspective on race relations during the 1930s and those who object to Richard Wright's (appropriate) use of the word "nigger." (This doesn't include the objection to the novel's sexual content, which would logically include both ends of the political spectrum.) It's worth remembering that poet John Milton, whose 1644 essay "Areopagitica" was the first and still among the most eloquent defenses of the freedom to publish and read, was a decade later serving as state censor for Oliver Cromwell. That freedom means that sometimes your own ox is going to get gored -- a situation that fewer and fewer people in our own Fox v. CNN world seem willing to countenance.

And so, a test: Today, in the opinion writing and blogging course, I handed out a 1973 Lester Bangs review of Anne Murray's Danny's Song that, were parents of some students in the course to read, would likely be up for banning. (e.g.: "Maybe you're so steeped in sleaze that it takes the sight of Linda Lovelace jacking off 14 braying donkeys with her nostrils while giving head to the entire class of '44 and playing pingpong on Henry Kissinger's nuts with her toes in Todd-AO just to get your attention.") Let's see how it flies. More on Thursday.