Topics: Did you know that since 2021 PEN America has documented 23,000 book bans, more than at any other time in US history? In July, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Bettering Myself” caused a stir at South Florida State College when a professor was suspended for teaching it by college president and inbred moron Fred Hawkins. We also discuss online pile ons, rightwing v. leftwing censorship, the Moral Majority, the PEN America banned book list, JoAnn Wypijewski, people we’d like to ban, A Clockwork Orange, Tony Soprano, unlikable narrators, anti-heroes, suckers, orphans.
After chatting about censorship, we discuss Clarice Lispector and decide to ban her and her terrible books. Also discussed: poisoned solidarity, Roger Lancaster, Orhan Pamuk, Jon Ronson, Ryan Boudinot, Quentin Tarantino, Barbara Ehrenreich, Judy Blume, Mark Twain, Bret Easton Ellis, Anthony Burgess, Harold Bloom, Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center, Leonora Carrington, the recent death of John Crowley, his novel Little, Big, le wokisme, outlaws, violence, dissidents, dimwits, nonces, moralists, ninnies, whiners, losers. The concluding poetry reading is Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” and the concluding music is Debussy’s “Beau Soir.”
