How to Be Obscene (1927) | Hacker News Reader

How to Be Obscene (1927)

newyorker.com

54 pointsdredmorbius39 comments

> But then some good angel puts it into the head of a Boston preacher to read your book and take it to the Boston police, and the police go and arrest a bookclerk for selling your book, which is obscene. Instantly the press agencies flash the name of your book to every town and village in the United States, and your publishers get orders by telegraph from Podunk and Kalamazoo.

This reminds me of Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College a couple of weeks ago.

This was a speech by a fairly obscure guy (he is a place kicker) at a fairly obscure college. But because he said something our culture considers obscene, his speech was on the front page of all the news sites and talked about on Twitter.

Normally, maybe a few hundred people would have heard his speech. Now likely millions of people have at least heard a portion of his speech.

Similar tactics were used by the YIP and Situationist International some decades later. Abbie Hoffmann's Steal This Book had a rather long reach, for example both the hip-hop act Coup (1998) and the rock orchestra System of a Down (2002) released records called something like Steal this Album.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party

I have a feeling this advice still works pretty well, albeit probably not centered on Boston in the current age

It's really quite horrifying to read about common police actions in cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco even just 50 years ago.

Then again, it was worse elsewhere.

What I (submitter) had noted about the piece was that the time and place have changed, the topics, tactics, motives, and consequences rather less so.

Noting that classic works and Biblical passages also tend to cross tripwires is another constant.

https://archive.is/zSjKf

It bugs me that I can read New Yorker articles using the Apple News app but I can’t read it on its own website.

I have no trouble reading New Yorker articles on their website.

I disable JavaScript by default. No JavaScript is required for newyorker.com, and apparently allowing it would be a downgrade.

I discovered archive.ph here a few weeks ago, and it likely solves your problem.

I think the problem with this is that the things that would be offensive enough to enough people to get attention are exactly the sort of things that publishers would refuse to publish.

The world has changed and its not obscenity that offends anymore, its racial slurs and the like that would get the most attention. Its also harder for most people to do honestly because its not the subjects you cover, but what you say about them that will offend. That kills the " deal with the facts of life frankly and honestly" idea - it would only work if your honest view is one that people will find objectionable - but then so will most publishers.

Plenty of books got banned in the deep south for things that are hardly obscene. Just add a teenage LGBT character, have some paragraphs that are written from his point of view, mention harassment by bigots and you have a very bannable book.

You can always count on the small mindedness of a small percentage (unfortunately growing) of the population.

> Plenty of books got banned in the deep south for things that are hardly obscene. Just add a teenage LGBT character, have some paragraphs that are written from his point of view, mention harassment by bigots and you have a very bannable book.

Banned meaning "not stocked in school libraries" and that only in a particular part of the US. That is a long way short of arresting booksellers.

It sill not get you the level of attention "obscenity" would get you, now will it it promote your book. I have read several articles about US school book bans and I cannot recall the title of a single one or the name of a single author - because the media attention is on the issue rather than on a single book.

I have always relied on the unkindness of strangers...

Do you include Idaho, Montana, Illinois, the Dakotas, Alberta and Saskatchewan in "the deep south"?

In the case of Racism and Anti-Racism there are some aspects of Anti-Racism that is akin to fashion in how they change over time - https://medium.com/luminasticity/racism-racism-and-its-modes...

so books that when published were Anti-Racist, like To Kill A Mockingbird, can now be banned in places due to charges of Racism.

> so books that when published were Anti-Racist, like To Kill A Mockingbird, can now be banned in places due to charges of Racism.

What that shows is that some people are incapable of understanding anything from outside their own cultural context - they cannot understand the past or other cultures. This is a common problem with anything from the Bible to a contemporary work by a foreigner.

Racism is, like race, a cultural construct. It is not the same thing over time or in different places. I have my own take on that, mostly from my own experience: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

I think its always been a high risk strategy but if you have enough popularity / power to survive the attempted censorship/ cancellation you are golden. A modern version would surely be J.K Rowling.

State loudly and publicly that trans-women are men. Real world mothers, who buy most children's books, would find this uncontroversial to the point of being obvious but the resulting publicity from the outrage and attempted cancelling has at least in part driven her to have multiple books on the Amazon bestseller lists for YEARS at time.

Where is JK Rowling subject to censorship? Around the time her first movie was put out, I recall pastors railing against the "Satanism" in her books, but that's an exercise of speech. Since then, religious folk see her as more of an uneasy ally, as LGBT folk are now critical of her, another exercise of speech. What censorship do you refer to?

I have not looked at the numbers, but did her sales increase after the controversy?

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