Censorship
October 1, 2008
- Before I learned to stop practicing poetry-reading in the mirror, I would declaim in the hallway in front of the full-sized glass. One of the poems I was memorizing, "Global," concerned my mother's move to New York from Alabama, her resentment, her racism. My mother had been a real Southern Lady, who never liked airing dirty laundry. She died in 1997. Only after her death was I ...
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October 1, 2008
- The trouble with censorship is that once it starts it is hard to stop. Just about every book contains something that someone objects to. ~Studs Terkel A Texas town has banned the Harry Potter books because they glorify magic, and learning to read. ~Craig Kilborn There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ~Joseph Brodsky Banned ...
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September 30, 2008
- Dear Martin,Keep heart! I am writing to admonish you to courage. Martin, if you let a few thugs frighten you away from publishing The Jewel of Medina, they have won a very great victory and freedom of speech has taken a huge blow not only in Britain but throughout the free world.I'm not saying this to you in self-interest. I'm speaking to you as a staunch defender of free speech. That is ...
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September 7, 2008
August 22, 2008
August 13, 2008
- By now those of you with your ears to the ground will have heard the following: publication of The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel by Sherry Jones, has been indefinitely postponed by its publisher, Random House. The reason? The novel, which chronicles the life of Aisha, a wife of the Prophet Muhammad, could provoke violent backlash from conservative Muslims. One excerpt, in which Aisha ...
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August 6, 2008
- Something I have never had to do because I'm an author.This link is to the New York Times article about Solzhenitsyn's death. There is a chance it will help me mute my complaints about my literary career.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dieshttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=books
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July 16, 2008
- The Carl Cherry Center for the Arts is tucked into a woodsy residential area of Carmel, California. If you didn't know otherwise, you'd assume it's someone's weekend getaway. But for six decades it's been home to theater, art and poetry, often of an edgy nature.So it's not suprising that the Center has taken on the theme, through early August, of blacklisting and censorship. ``Blacklisted: ...
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July 4, 2008
- In these trying times, it is easy to believe that we might have somewhere along the way been abandoned by God. Either that or we simply don't know how to apply the rules to lives that bear no resemblance to those peope that Jesus walked amongst 2,000 years ago. There are some that insist that God is dead. There is always some kind of new age bullshit that is foating around, trying not so ...
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July 4, 2008
- For the two hundred and thirty-second time, we celebrate our independence today. Independence from tyranny, from oppression, from religious persecution. We celebrate our rights to free speech, revel in the joys of living in a nation that encourages diversity of thought, faith and action. We are the United States of America, and we are mighty because of our tolerance. So can we get real for a ...
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