Reader Roundup

Hi all!

I’ve spent the last week tirelessly investigating Spotify—an investigation that involved lots of Broken Social Scene, Bat for Lashes, The Hold Steady, and Iggy Pop. I suggest you jump on the bandwagon now, before the commercials get too long and irritating.

Aside from the fascinating Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Beach, I finally got to see the James Franco- helmed film Howl, which came out in 2010. It does quite an innovative job of reconstructing Allen Ginsberg’s youthful discretions, writing process, and the obscenity trial of his poem. Lots of neat visuals. Great acting, of course, especially Franco’s recitation of “Howl”.

I loved Milton Glaser’s advice for creative types in this essay (via Longreads)

And here’s the 2007 Rolling Stone article on Amy Winehouse. Read it and be haunted.

On Thursday, I went to the Newberry Library Book Fair (Chicago)! There were so many awesome books. So many! More than my tiny muscles could carry, in fact, and I ended up leaving a few good soldiers behind.

Anyway, here’s what I did get:

March by Geraldine Brooks (I’m reading her latest, Caleb’s Crossing right now. More on that later. If you’re into historical fiction, as I am, you should pick up People of the Book. )

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers (Last summer I read The Member of the Wedding, one of my favorites.)

In the Time of the Butterflies, Julie Alvarez

Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury (Remember when I reread F41? Good times. As I was leaving the fair, some poor soul wistfully asked me if there were any other copies of ZAW. Alas, there was not.)

The Diary of Anais Nin 1931-1934, Anais Nin (I know almost nothing about her, except that her diary is one of those great works of literature. It’s rare that a diary gets that kind of status. I mean, besides Anne Frank.)

Lawler Literature: The Media on Fire

There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals. P. 58

So, the Supreme Court just recently ruled that the sale of violent video games to minors need not be restricted. Coincidentally, I just finished re-reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. For those of you who have heard rumors about the book’s contents, rather than actually skimming through it, you may be surprised to learn Bradbury’s actual stance on censorship.

He was not, after all, advocating blanket protection for all mediums, no matter their profanity, offensiveness, and insipidity. In fact, the text is staunchly against mindless entertainment. In the above passage, It is mindless entertainment that replaces good books, thus necessitating that those good books burn. The public was allowed to keep comics, confessions, and trade journals, or anything that had more spectacle than substance. (That’s not to say that I think these formats lack substance, necessarily, today. At the time F451 was written they were each a bit more concerned with visual appeal.)

The point was to keep people happy, content, and unquestioning. Deep thoughts tend to make people unhappy, restless, and prone to question the validity of, say, international warfare. And so Montag’s version of the United States is perpetually involved in global excursions, with fighter jets streaming across the sky night and day.

Sound familiar?

The Supreme Court’s ruling is not a victory. It’s a distraction. Scalia claims that a ban on violent video games is a restriction on “ideas,” which the first amendment protects. Bullshit. Violent video games aren’t ideas, they’re images. Often, they’re meant to discourage ideas, to induce thoughtlessness.

I’m not against video games. I thoroughly enjoy them, in fact. But it’s just too much to decidedly sanction an activity where young kids can watch themselves virtually beat a prostitute or ram over a pedestrian.

As the passage points out, effective censorship comes from below, not from above. Scalia and company can’t really enforce such measures, Not really. They can slap a label on an extreme game, but that’s about it. True censorship would involve forbidding the manufacture of them in the first place. I’m not endorsing that either, but simply reveling in the pointlessness of the Supreme Court’s involvement. The best action, I think, would be to introduce a wide variety of quality alternatives. Americans vote with their wallet, after all.