Spontaneous Musings

Learning quite a bit about the censorship laws of the 1920s and 30s, and how the courts interpreted the First Amendment. Including a brief history on Ernst Morris, the co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU.

Interesting quotes :

1. Margaret Anderson, the editor of The Little Review, insisted that the genuine art rested upon two principles:

"First, the artist has no responsibility to the public whatever." The public, in fact, was responsible to the artist. "Second, the position of the great artist is impregnable... You can no more limit his expression, patronizingly suggest that his genius present itself in channels personally pleasing to you, than you can eat the stars."

This reminds me of a discussion that I had this weekend with two women from India, who stated prior to colonialism - they had more freedom of expression. The influx of the British and the missionaries had to a degree quelled that and made them self-conscious. They began to self-police themselves. The culture responsible for the Karma Sutra was now afraid to talk about sex at all.

Art was quelled.

It also reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend once regarding Margaret Mitchell and Flannery O'Connor's racism - she stated that she would rather it wasn't suppressed, because it enabled her to understand how they thought better - so she could come up with a counter-argument.

Ernst Morris's take on Censorship was slightly different and more encompassing. Morris started his career fighting the ban on a sexual education guide or pamphlet.
Then eventually chose to take up the fight regarding Ulysses, in an effort to change the censorship laws of the US. Ernst Morris thought of Freedom of Speech and the First Amendment as a way to keep the culture roiling not as a source of stability.

Censorship was a tactic used by entrenched powers to quell democracy's inherent turbulence, and groups like the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Ernst thought, were their moral instruments. Censorship was what happens when power brokers who benefit from the status quo team up with moralists who believe society is perpetually on the brink of collaspe.

To fight for the freedom of books was to fight for the priniciple of self-governance that had inspired the American Revolution. For Ernst, there was no strict separation between political and sexual ideas - burning books sent a chill across the entire culture.

"Censorship," he wrote, "had a pervading influence on the subconscious recesses of individual minds." It altered the way the country approached science, public health, psychology and history. Only a blinkered Victorian mentality, Ernst thought, could think that the Roman Empire fell because of its moral decadence."

[This is just my personal opinion, gathered from various studies, I can't guarantee that is absolutely true: No, the Roman Empire ironically fell for the same reason the British Empire eventually did. If the Victorians had a been a wee bit more self-aware - they may have stopped the downfall of their own empire. Over-expansion. In short they took on more than they could chew, over-drew on their resources, and went bankrupt. It's also the same reason the Soviet Union and US are running into problems now - again taking on far more than you can afford - or allowing your grasp to outstretch your reach. WWI just about did Britain in. Rome was pretty much done in by all the wars and territorial fights that they were constantly dealing with. Had zip to do with culture, or sex, and a heck of a lot to do with violent and somewhat pricy warfare.]

The worst part about the censorship regime was that it was maddeningly arbitrary. Books that circulated for years might be banned without warning. Customs officials might declare a book legal only to have the Post Office issue it's own ban. A judge or jury could acquit a book one day and condemn it the next, and the wording of the statues themselves stoked confusion.

Apparently the NY Criminal Law Statute had about five descriptive words, while the Federal Law just had one - obscene. So Ernst decided to go after the Federal Tariff Law. So instead of going after the law regarding the transit of publications through US Mail, he went through the law governing imports from foreign countries. This way no one went to jail and they might get it over-turned.

Only one problem? The customs officials didn't make a habit of searching every packaged imported, hence the reason people had been sneaking the book in by importing it. Ernst had to take the package back to the customs officials and insist that they search it, so that it would be seized and he could fight the law in court.

I found this to be hilarious. He also had Joyce's assistant cut and past critical praise in the front of the book - so that he could use the critical praise in court.

Fascinating book - amongst the more informative and interesting non-fiction or historical novels that I've read. Most have a tendency to put me to sleep. Not that this one doesn't as well...but not quite as often.

Warmer day today...yet still cold. Work not as hectic, calmer.

The Most Dangerous Book: Battle over James Joyce's Ulysses - continues to enthrall me on my commute to and from work, even on occasion, I fall asleep. But not this morning -- even though I may have needed the doze, considering I dozed while reading an Request for Proposal and Technical Statement of Work that I was editing.

While on its face "The Most Dangerous Book" appears to be just about Ulysses or publishing Ulysses, it isn't. If anything it is a snapshot of the time period and a discourse on how publishing Ulysses and this book changed things, by depicting what happened before and during. It's a story with a vast cast of characters and themes told in a somewhat humorous and jaunty style, by a writer who clearly knows his subject matter. And how to tell it in a manner that is accessible to readers outside of academia. Which makes sense, considering we are talking about James Joyce - who pretty much thumbed his nose at the formalistic style of academic and literary realist writing. Most modernists did.

The latest? Or a brief summary of what I read today?

Is the struggle to publish it --- in serialized form, while Joyce was still writing it. And he wasn't rushing. It took him months, sometimes years to write a chapter. ("Sirens" he had been working on for five years. He skipped around and didn't necessarily work on one chapter at a time.) Ulysses wasn't published altogether as one unit or just after it was completed. That's not how they did things, also they couldn't afford to do that way - what they hoped to do was send it out or rather sneak it past the Postal service in segments or episodes as he wrote it, in the hopes of acquiring interest and enough backers to actually publish it as a complete novel. Back then, they tended to publish books as they were being written in magazines. There's a whole chapter on magazines and the cost of magazines at the time. Periodicals and magazines, particularly literary mags were quite the rage in 1917. Oh, and believe it or not? Postage was 25 cents during WWI, it went down to 3 cents later.

But convincing a printer to do it - was still a problem. Harriet Weaver went to Virgina Woolf (yes that Virgina Woolf - the one who wrote Mrs. Dalloway) and her husband Leonard - who operated their own printing press - Hogarth's Press. Woolfe was from a literary family and unlike Joyce had money. Her favorite writer of the time was Charlotte Bronte - who she believed was a brave and courageous voice. She didn't think much of HG Wells though (Wells was another big supporter of James Joyce). [This all explains why I'm not a huge fan of Woolfe. Since I rather enjoy HG Wells whose works play with my head, but found Bronte to be a bit on the melodramatic end of the spectrum, although I admittedly enjoyed Jane Eyre quite a bit. Let's face it I'm not a literary realist - which Woolf tended to be.] Woolf considers Weaver's plea, reads the manuscript which is episode one or two of the book, and the literary critic McGarthy, one of her houseguests, finds it hilarious. Woolfe declines to print it - for three reasons: 1) it was a huge risk - under the UK censorship laws, if she printed the book, her press could be confiscated and she could be fined and serve up to two years in prison, 2) the most she'd printed were two short stories at 30 pages, and it was hard to do, she had to set each letter herself, and 2) she didn't like Ulysses. But she couldn't stop thinking about it either - it played with her mind. Her friend TS Eliot (much like today, famous novelists appear to hang out together) was raving about it. And later she writes in her diary that whatever Joyce is doing, he's doing it better than she is. And she's starting to wonder what she's doing.

Her friend Katherine Mansfield, wrote to a friend: "I can't get over the feeling of wet linoleum and unemptied pails and far worse horrors in the house of his mind (meaning Joyce). But there's something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature."

The other problem was Quinn who was the financier behind the Little Review, edited by Ezra Pound, Harriet Weaver and feminist Margaret Anderson - which was serializing Joyce's work. While Quinn loved Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, he did not like Ulysses. He found the words ugly and unnerving. [He was ill with colon cancer and found the phrase "the scrotumtightening sea" more than he could deal with.] Ezra Pound actually was the first to censor the book - and took out many sentences. For instance, there's a chapter where Leopold Bloom is described as unzipping his pants and the loosing of his bowls. Pound deletes the unzipping of the pants and bowls. But he apparently didn't go far enough - because it still got confiscated and Quinn was still upset by it.

Then of course, Joyce's episodes or chapters were...well different. Keep in mind this is before post-modernism, before such writers as Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Pychon, Gaddis, Burroughs, David Wallace, Joyce Carol Oats, etc - all of whom were directly influenced by Joyce. No one had written a book like this before. There was a specific style they were used to. As Virgina Woolf writes in a literary review - Joyce took off all "the handrails for readers to grasp hold of". This was also during the War, so the Postal Service was actively looking for treasonous works. They decided after attempting to decipher one of Joyce's latest chapters that he must be writing in a complex code.

And even if you weren't of Virigina Woolf's somewhat discerning taste, you'd be forgiven for having troubles with Joyce's Ulysses. For one thing - Joyce refused to label his chapters, the chapters were provided out of order of the Homeric journey of Ulysses. And all the detailed references to the journey threaded throughout them were rather obscure and hidden - a treasure hunt for pedants. Joyce also was writing about the body - and focused on all its functions. He wrote the first two pages of one chapter, Sirens, as a fugue poem or overature, where the words were meant to represent sounds, the reader was to let go of the need for meaning and hear the sounds the words made. It was a song that the barmaids (sirens) were singing to Leopold Bloom. The reader was not meant to hunt meaning in the words themselves but to hear the sounds they made as they brushed against each other.

This is what Birmingham states about what Joyce intended:

The overture requires the readers to read in bewilderment as the meanings of the words dissolve into their sounds. It requires readers to abandon, for a moment, their expectations of what words are supposed to do. They would have meaning in retrospect.

[Which is why I sometimes think you have to be a bit of a poet to enjoy Joyce or at the very least have the mind of one. I tend to naturally think like that...so Ulysses worked for me, while a lot of other books - which lack that rhythm of sound, don't work as well.]

And here - in regards to quotation marks and the chapter "Wandering Rocks", where the focus is on subsidiary characters:

Joyce's tendency to shift seamlessly from one perspective to another began with his long-standing objection to quotation marks. He thought they were unnatural - "perverted commas" - because they barricaded voices from narrative text, and he wanted words to flow through and around characters like water. Ulysses was becoming a river of voices.

So, in between descriptions of the expanded powers of the US Post Service, not to mention their abuse, and censorship laws, we get also get an explanation of what Joyce was doing with Ulysses, how he wrote it, and why. I was told last night that if you haven't read Ulysses or liked it, you wouldn't find this book the least bit interesting. I doubt that. There's so much else here.

For example? I discovered that the first censorship laws in the US were signed by Abraham Lincoln, and the Comstock Law by President Ulysses S. Grant (hee, ironic that). The laws did not discriminate between pornography such as "Lord K and his rapes and seductions" and contraceptive materials and pamphlets. Anything describing how to use a condom, induce an abortion, or birth control was illegal under these laws. And the punishment was far more severe for possession or distribution of these works than going to a brothel. It was that insane. They felt it was okay, since, hey,
literary classics aren't included because no one is reading them.

Wow. Considering I had a discussion last week regarding how France was more "restrictive" in their censorship laws than the US and the UK historically, I've since learned, nope, really not. The US and UK were far more stringent - they just used the obscenity laws to get the job done.

Was asked two questions this week by a friend I'd met online, which are oddly related to what I've been thinking about regarding my own writing lately and whether or not to keep focusing on it.

1. What I was planning on doing with my lj. Would I continue writing in it? Was I leaving it completely? (In case you missed it, I wrote a brief entry (since deleted) that I was considering discontinuing my lj.)

2. Do I really think there is a hidden subtext in Supernatural?

In regards to the first question? Whether or not I planned on continuing my lj? I found myself blabbering incoherently about feeling over-exposed and vulnerable. Truth is I really don't know. I've never really known what to do with this blog to be honest. I resisted doing it to begin with - when I was prodded way back in 2003 by yet another person I'd met online. I remember asking her what it entailed. And later discussing it at length with another much closer friend, who remarked - doesn't that lead to a sense of over-exposure? Do you really want to tell a bunch of people you don't see in person and aren't in personal contact with - your thoughts or feelings? The second friend felt, and I don't disagree, that face-to-face contact was needed to really understand what someone else was saying. He didn't like phones or letters for that - he felt that there was a superficial quality to them. Without body language and eye contact, he told me, you don't know what someone is telling you, you can't read their intent, their tone, their feelings. All you have are the words. Phone is a bit better - since you have a voice and its tonal qualities. But it can still be misread.

The people I see daily don't understand why I blog online (they'd never do it themselves), and the one's I interact with online - don't really know me outside of what they read in my blogs, which I've realized can be as wildly interpreted as well just about anything else that ends up in print. The fact that I still make spelling errors, errors in syntax, and well have a tendency to think I wrote one word when in reality I wrote another - does not help matters.

But there's another problem, the feeling that as I write, someone out there is bringing to my words their own subtext. Their own list of concerns, prejudices, judgements and criticisms. I can almost hear them as I type my words, carefully editing and pulling out that which may or may not offend. People are walking landmines - filled to the brim with buttons and levers that you can push or pull with little more than a word or a letter. Not knowing the person on the other end of the correspondence - makes it all the more difficult to avoid pushing or pulling those buttons and levers.

This brings me to the second question...is there a hidden subtext? Not just in Supernatural but in anything for that matter? I remember stating that I didn't know in regards to Supernatural. But, that to some extent, we always bring a subtext to whatever it is we read, see, listen to, or interact with. When I first started to actively interact online in 2002, I and others like me, were unearthing all sorts of interesting things in the cult tv hits Buffy and Angel. Having read and listened to the writer's commentary on the subject, I'm convinced most of what we found we brought to the shows ourselves, from our own shared or unshared experiences. To the extent we agreed, the experiences had been shared, to the extend we didn't - they weren't.

Most disagreements, I've learned, are due to the fact that we have different experiences. Example: Years ago, I wrote a short story about my grandfather who had three cancerous brain tumors, which they were able to eradicate with radiation, leaving my grandfather feeble-minded as a result. One of my readers was offended by my story. Informed me that I was wrong to write this. That my clear exaggeration of the character's illness was an insult to anyone who had *really* experienced a loved one dying of this disease. How could I? Apparently one of her close relatives had died of a brain tumor which was also cancerous. My experience was contradictory to hers. The teacher told me that since the experience I related contradicted the *universal* one, that I had to change my story. Otherwise my readers would not believe me. If it does not resonate for them or fit with their experiences, they will dismiss it. The memory sticks in my mind, because of how angry it made me at the time. I remember thinking - what is the point of writing a story when the only way someone else can read or understand it is if it relates to their own experience?

Of course that isn't entirely true. The rest of the class bought my story. It just did not ring true to that one person who had the contradictory experience and due to the emotional depth of that experience was unable to conceive or understand or appreciate one that was similar yet at the same time very different, almost contradictory to her own. She did not see past the three brain tumors - to realize that my grandfather had not been healed. It was not a miracle cure. He had no mind left. He was feeble. A fate worse than death, in my mind at least. He was a little more than a baby left in the care of his wife, who was using a walker and in the story, fell, breaking her ribs, unable to get up, and he, being feeble-minded, was unable to help her. But all the woman saw was the three brain tumors.

The magic of writing particularly fictional writing is so much of it is unconscious. The story comes from dreams and nightmares spun in that part of our brain that disseminates and analyzes our experiences to come up with some sort of way of handling them, learning from them, and communicating them. The process is not completely conscious, since our mind protects us from things we have not yet figured out how to emotionally handle. Things may come out in our stories that we are not consciously aware of. Those things are then processed and judged by people who have had experiences similar and dissimilar to our own.

A really good writer - who has something to say - and isn't just writing a formula story guaranteed to bring in viewers or readers - will more than likely have an emotional impact on his or her audience. And yes, there's a subtext to that type of story-telling. Even if the writer does not know what it is or is completely unaware of it. And part of that subtext may be intentional, may even sprout from the writer, the other half probably sprouts from the reader. The reader, like it or not, must take a little responsibility here for what they see or do not see in the work. They are not a passive entity. What they choose to focus on tells us more about the reader than it often does the writer.

James Joyce once wrote in an interview that he preferred not to explain the meaning behind his words. The reader's interpretation was often he felt more interesting. The writer of The Kite Runner, echoed this view, when he stated in another interview that he found that when writers told readers what they meant by a metaphor - they often disappointed the reader. Speaking for himself, he didn't remember what he meant. More often than not the word just sounded right or that sentence just worked for him.

I've been struggling with my writing lately. This always happenes when someone is reading my work or when I'm attempting to write something new. I worry about the interpretation. And I worry that they'll attempt to make me follow some pattern.

The story I'm currently working on is strange. It's a tale about a woman who is to a degree trapped inside her own fantasy, but not as an active participant, she is watching it. Her own life is lost to her. All she remembers is the fantasy - to the extent that she believes the fantasy is her real life and she has been whisked away from it. If she can only find her way back to this world where she is the hero and has a lover. It's a story within a story. Told via blogs or posts to an unknown audience. I'm struggling with it - because I'm not sure anyone would want to read it. And I'm telling it because it's the story I can't find elsewhere. See that's why I write - because the story I'm craving isn't on the bookshelves or it is but not the way I want it to be told. I write to tell the stories I can't find. It's why I tell stories. It's not to be "popular" or to get rich or to be a best-seller. It's because I need to tell this story even if no one else wants to read it.

I think it's why I write on my lj as well. Sure I want to connect with folks, but I'm not niave. I know that the connection is limited by distance. Distance that can only be circumfrenced by my ability to travel and visit people - which I don't have at this point in time. I write because I need to say this, to communicate it both to my conscious self on some level and to others. I need to read it. And I need someone else to read it too. I hope that they will interpret it to some small degree the same way I have, because it makes me feel less alone somehow. But I know from experience, that it is more likely they will bring their own subtext and see things in and behind my words that I never intended and may not even be there. That's the risk we all take when we blog or post our words online. That the words will be interpreted in ways we really wish they weren't. But - as is true with any risk worth taking - the opposite can happen as well - someone may find something in what we said or didn't intend to say that makes it meaningful in ways we never imagined. They may inform us of something about ourselves and the world we've written about that we did not know, that was kept hidden from us by our own mind. In that respect a reader can often act as a funhouse mirror to the writer.