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‘Lolita’ Escaped Obscenity Laws and Cancel Culture
- leephillips 6y agoI’m proud of the Times for publishing this fine appreciation of the great novel, especially in the context of their continuing slide into cowardice. But I was surprised to see its title set in quotes, not only in the headline but throughout the text. I had assumed that the Times had gotten a handle on basic typographic conventions by now.
- maxerickson 6y agoThey publish their own style guide. Kind of tedious to bitch about them staying consistent with it. It's not like English is actually prescriptive.
- leephillips 6y agoI’ll cop to the tedious bit. But consider that, while “English” may not be prescriptive (odd idea, that), people can be. For example, the people who wrote this style guide: they were exactly prescribing usage for Times editors and writers. Yes, the thing I am tediously complaining about follows this guide. But the guide is wrong.
- maxerickson 6y agoIncoherent. Usage at the times is prescriptive, English ain't.
- meepmorp 6y ago>”English” may not be prescriptive (odd idea, that) Natural languages can’t be descriptive or prescriptive, they merely are. Grammars for those languages can be either descriptive (i.e., describing the language as used by speakers) or prescriptive (i.e., prescribe how the language should be used). In the former case, it’s perfectly fine to freely split infinitives; in the latter it is something up with which one does not put.
- leobabauta 6y agoJust a note that the split infinitive prohibition was largely a 19th century thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive
- meepmorp 6y agoOk?
- blakesterz 6y agoThey have an entire book on the basic typographic conventions they're supposed to follow there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manual_of_Style_and_Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manual_of_S... The one that always looks odd to me is C.I.A. and F.B.I.
- leephillips 6y agoMe, too. It’s quaint, but distracting. But remember that for a good part of its history they had a period after the title of the paper on the front page.
- blueline 6y agoWho cares?
- quesera 6y ago> I had assumed that the Times had gotten a handle on basic typographic conventions by now. NYT sets typographic conventions. For decades. They publish an entire in-depth guide on their style, and they adhere to it with great consistency. They've thought a whole lot more about the issue than you, or I, ever have or ever will. PS: Beware The New Yorker and The Atlantic.
- leephillips 6y agoI applaud the New Yorker’s lonely persistence in using the dieresis.
- cafard 6y agoThe obscenity laws are left behind, but the cancel culture is on Lolita's heels. There was an admonitory letter in the Sunday Book Review section of the Times earlier this year.
- sigzero 6y agoIf Dr. Seuss can be cancelled everything is up for grabs.
- kolektiv 6y agoSigh. Nobody has cancelled Dr. Seuss. The publisher has decided not to publish a small number of his works which contain some stereotypes and characterisations which are pretty far from what most people would see as "fine" now. Nobody has made them do this, nobody is going round collecting and burning copies already in print. Many books stop being published all the time for all kinds of reasons - being out of step with contemporary mores and experiences is, and always has been, one of them.
- bjt2n3904 6y ago"It's not censorship, it's just <...>. And any ways, you still have <XYZ>". No, it absolutely is censorship. This is a cowardly defense of it, trying to reframe it as something understandable. Edit: The intellectual dishonesty from the censorship apologists is more than I can bear. Is it so hard to delineate between a publisher ceasing to print a book because there is no demand, and a publisher refusing to publish a book because it is offensive? We've become a society that can't tell it's right hand from it's left.
- question000 6y agoOk then you've convinced me censorship is good. Don't downvote this just because you disagree, that would expose your hypocrisy.
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- eplanit 6y agoPeople should buy physical copies of movies and literature they enjoy or respect, because we're in bizarre farenheit 451 territory.
- draugadrotten 6y agoNo. Having a taboo book in your zoom credibility bookshelf is a very bad idea.
- sandworm101 6y agoIf we fear that they might not be available in the future, yes, buy the physical copies. But if we fear that ownership of such material may be made illegal in the future, purchasing of objects is probably not the safest thing to do. A digital copy of an illegal book acquired anonymously and then hidden carefully using encryption is less likely to be discovered in the back of a closet years after you have forgotten you owned it. If anyone here keeps a porn collection saved on a drive somewhere, or on a bookshelf, be careful. Mistakes happen. Struggling upstart actors lie about their age. Material that was purchased legally on day one can suddenly become very dangerous to possess on day two. The laws in this area are draconian. If you have any reason to believe the material dangerous, such as a website disappearing for no apparent reason, delete the material. (This is not rare. It happens regularly. Though they would never admit it publicly, nearly every large porn studio has had some sort of issue at some point.) Of course I would never advocate for the breaking of laws. If material is deemed illegal to possess then it must be destroyed. I speak only in the hypothetical in order to better educate those in authority on how they might discover and destroy illegal works of art.
- strathmeyer 6y agoBooks were burned not digital copies.
- maxwell 6y agoDue to lack of interest.
- zajio1am 6y ago
- ltbarcly3 6y agoIn Lolita the pedophile is explicitly a creep. He's the bad guy, it's an exploration of a sick mind. Not that content matters at all in this debate. Certainly I would say if you wanted to cancel Lolita, you would have to cancel Silence of the Lambs and any other fiction about serial killers, right? Since abusing and then killing them and then eating them is at least as bad as abusing them, but not killing them and not eating them? However, I don't think that really gets to the heart of this. Morons have been locally banning books since books have existed. This isn't new at all. I think the real 'story' here is the response to it. Any time some small confederacy of imbeciles manages to announce that something is 'canceled', the media blasts it through a loud speaker and there is a huge response. The fraction of people who change their behavior in any way due to something being canceled is tiny. Most people just don't care. The actual way these pressure campaigns work is to convince people that decision makers personally know, and who are not really paying attention, that some situation is vaguely 'icky'. For example, the whole thing with Gina Carino. What she said was stupid and ignorant, but I doubt it would have reduced the popularity of The Mandalorian by even 1%. However, in the minds of Disney executives, people in their social circle might judge them if they keep Carino around. The exec's friends won't know the details, all they'll know is Disney didn't fire someone 'gross'. It will be a topic of conversation, the execs will have to talk about the situation at parties, and it's not easy to explain a nuanced decision. It's so much easier to just fire someone. So, because these campaigns get picked up by the media and amplified, they can get people fired because it's just the easiest way for those making the decisions wash their hands of the situation, even though maybe 0.001% of people really care about the situation at all. (For the record, I think Gina is a horrible actress and the stuff she said was extremely ignorant, so I don't care if she gets fired or not. The point is, I don't really care, if they didn't fire her I would still watch the show.) That's why I think the content doesn't matter at all. Any book is equally likely to end up canceled, all it takes is a handful of people who are trying to make a name for themselves by being outraged on Twitter, and for the media to keep amplifying the phony, self serving outrage they are Tweeting. At that point, it's just easier for people making decisions to ban whatever content or person the fake outrage is targeting.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> In Lolita the pedophile is explicitly a creep. He's the bad guy, it's an exploration of a sick mind. Nabokov explored infatuations with "nymphets" in multiple works, Lolita was just the most famous. This has led many (even big fans of the writer) to assume that Nabokov did feel a certain attraction that he apparently never acted on, though this observation does not imply that he or the works deserve condemnation or scorn.
- hugh4life 6y agoIf you want to get canceled, say that Vladimir Vladimirovich was obviously partly confessing when writing a story about Humbert Humbert. Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754944?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754944?seq=1
- crumbshot 6y agoThe headline doesn't really match the detail of the article, which notes that the work was subjected both to the obscenity laws of the time and what has been contemporarily rebranded as 'cancel culture': > It had been initially rejected by all the big publishing houses in the United States, so Nabokov resorted to the pornographic French publisher Olympia Press, only to have it banned in France and also in Argentina, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. In England, all copies were seized by customs from 1955 until 1959, when it was finally published to huge consternation and controversy.
- tarboreus 6y agoThis is actually a great article. The Times seems really split down the middle right now, you get these great articles that would fit in with the paper at its peak, and then you have some real dross. They're basically becoming their own sort of tech giant, like Google, they have tons of factions and the right hand doesn't know what the left, top, bottom, charm, strange, up, down, or left hands are doing.
- leephillips 6y agoThey’ve always had a dizzying mixture of world-class, unique reportage and writing, and idiotic filler. What’s happening now, which is new and depressing, is stuff like firing a top reporter because the Daily Beast recycled some boring complaints by a couple of teenage girls.
- tablespoon 6y ago> This is actually a great article. The Times seems really split down the middle right now, you get these great articles that would fit in with the paper at its peak, and then you have some real dross. They're basically becoming their own sort of tech giant, like Google, they have tons of factions and the right hand doesn't know what the left, top, bottom, charm, strange, up, down, or left hands are doing. Which really makes the people who talk about it as a monolithic boogeyman look pretty foolish.
- hprotagonist 6y agohttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/nabokov-steinberg-and-me https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/nabokov-steinb... America construes itself as a game that anybody can play, and Russians know how to play it well, as we learn and relearn. In “Lolita,” Nabokov gave us a copy of ourselves we couldn’t tell from the original. No American writer has done the reverse—has written a novel about Russia that understood the country so profoundly, and that Russians themselves read widely and loved. “Lolita” is an American book in a way that no novel by a native-born American is a Russian book. It’s an American masterpiece of the atrocious-hilarious, like “Huckleberry Finn.” We encounter these works as best we can, and fail to civilize them, and pass by in our generations, and they remain.