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Odds and ends
Last Sunday, the Nevada Herald censored my column, "How Do You Define 'Travel?'" Writing of the cantankerous 19th-century American naturalist-philosopher Henry David Thoreau, I'd written that I personally wouldn't want to bark sharply at my readers, as Henry did, on a regular basis, at his. I wouldn't want to be, as I said, "a pain in the a**" Now, as coincidence would have it, last Monday night, that very common, if admittedly vulgar, phrase was sounded without apology on the infantile TV series "Everybody Loves Raymond."
You wanta bet that none of his viewers fainted dead away from shock; or even phoned the TV station to object? Hey, in case you haven't heard, we live in a pornographic society. But, the publishers of the (Nevada) Sunday Herald evidently found the phrase objectionable and possibly offensive to their readers because, instead of "pain in the a**," they printed, instead, "pain in the a**."
One of the things about their decision to delete "pain in the a**" that gave me a such a "pain in the a**" was that no one from the newspaper showed the least inclination to phone and tell me that they were going to do it.
The newspaper ownership has, of course, every legal right to do whatever they wish with whatever is submitted to it, free, for publication, but I would have thought it one of the fundamentals of journalistic ethics to notify any newspaper writer of its decision to change his wording.
Maybe I'm wrong. And maybe I'm over-reacting, creating a tempest in a teapot. But I think there's a matter of principle here.
I believe any writer worth his/her salt positively blanches in indignation at the very word "censorship."
That, I think, is why "freedom of the press" is not number 7 or even number 2, in the list of our amendments, but solidly and unequivocally number 1.
Because how can any reader possibly trust any source of news that tampers so cavalierly with its writing?
I think it's maybe what they call "hard news."
Look what happened -- and rightly so -- to Dan Rather of CBS News.
Early in the checkered Victorian history of English writer D.H. Lawrence's rather silly novel Lady Chatterly's Lover, even faintly erotic passages were dealt with accordingly by the publisher: "And then, with her head thumping so strongly that she thought Mellors should surely be able to hear it from across her bedroom, Connie closed the door and, walking to her lover, she--" Of, course, the omission and straight line, are not so much obscene as utterly laughable.
And so, I believe, is the locution "pain in the "a**."
For all readers of English, instead of whizzing over the passage as it was originally written, will stop, if only for a microsecond, and figure out what the two asterisks stand for -- or, instead, dream up something far more lascivious than Lawrence intended.
And that, and not the language as first printed, is why modern readers rightly call the censored Lady Chatterly's Lover truly "obscene.'
Readers are forced to make up their own "bad words." And that, I suspect, is what even the "purest" of readers will be encouraged to do with "a pain in the a**."
So, next time the Sunday Herald is about to censor my column, may I hope to expect a call in advance? I'll agree to pay the telephone bill for it.
Every time Ginny and I drive south to Joplin, we observe an unwavering ritual, which consists of two parts. First, we have lunch at the Olive Garden (she has Italian ancestry), then we stop at Hasting's to replace the books and CD's we've discarded since our last trip. For the first stage, Ginny scours the store's entire holdings for the films she's heard about but not yet seen.
For the second, I head straight to the discount tables, where the least-selling volumes by the small, courageous publishers are piled up, for immediate liquidation.
Low price has very little to do with their attractiveness to us. Subject matter and the reputation of the writer have everything to do with it.
This last trip, for example. I'm not awfully familiar with the 20th-century American poet and sociologist Robert Bly, but when I noticed the title of the lone, most recent, book by him on their discount table (The Sibling Society, published in 1996) and the dust jacket biographical smidgeon ("With his wife, Ruth, he lives on a lake in Minnesota"), I knew my Thoreauvian heart had just skipped a beat.
Bly's main point is that, until about fifty years ago, public education at all levels was consciously designed to help the student move beyond his/her current level of maturing and into the next, until, by the time he/she graduated from college, at age 20 or 21, he/she had gained from above, where true maturity lay, everything he/she needed for a responsible and rewarding adult life. Beyond all the tired psychobabble, Bly reports that in our current American society, "we tolerate no one above us and have no concern for anyone below us. Like sullen teenagers we live in our peer group, glancing side to side, rather than upward, for direction." Without what Bly calls a "vertical gaze," "we have no longing for the good, no deep understanding of evil.. We shy away from great triumphs and deep sorrow.
We have no elders and no children; no past and no future. What we are left with is spiritual flatness. The talk show replaces family. Instead of art, we have the Internet. In the place of community we have the mall." What I find in Thoreau is what I'm finding here in Robert Bly: the capacity to put into passionate words some of the thoughts I already had but hadn't been able to express in words myself. True, he isn't a feel-good writer.
Writers of truth very seldom are.
But, if "the truth will set you free" from all the psychobabble that enchains us, I'd say it was a good trade.
Wouldn't you?
Editor's note:
Our style of printing certain words is certainly not cavalier nor dishonest -- much thought and concern has gone into such decisions. Editing the words Nash used in the column he refers to is a matter of style and policy; and we did so, just as we would, for example abbreviate states when the city is also listed.