Linkskrieg (Final pass)

(She says that now, but who knows…)

1. Is this the face of God in a mixing bowl?

Ruth Davis walked into her kitchen and noticed the image on the side of the bowl after her son Paul had used it for cleaning the windows.

It appears that after mixing in the bowl for the last 40 years the image of a face has developed in the scratches and she believes it is not a half-baked tale.

I think it looks far more like the Joker.

2. Church softball team can’t play in its league because it’s run by a bisexual minister.

The minster of St. John United Church of Christ says he doesn’t even play for the church softball team, but his team felt pressured to drop out of the league, because other churches didn’t want to associate with them.

The sign outside St. John United Church of Christ says “All are welcome. No exceptions,” and it’s making a statement.

This is the first year of ministry for Rev. James Semmelroth Darnell. In October he became the pastor of St. John U.C.C.

“It’s been a bit of a difficult transition,” said Rev. Darnell.

Christian acceptance only extended if you’re the “right” kind of Christian, I guess. No surprise there.

3. School bans Dirty Cowboy book

“This is right on the edge of what our law in Pennsylvania considers obscenity, absolute obscenity,” said Carl Jarboe, who was at the meeting with his wife Abigail.

Thomas Tshudy, president of the Annville-Cleona School Board, said “reasonable minds can differ” regarding the controversy over the banning of the book.

No vote to reconsider the ban was taken. Tshudy was the only board member to speak on the matter.

The school board voted 8-0 in April to remove the book after parents of a kindergarten student lodged a complaint about it.

Saskatoon Public Library is the only public library in the province with a copy of this book. No idea if any schools have bought it but if you want your own copy, go get one. It’s been up for awards:

2004 Nominated Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Awards
2003 Won Golden Kite Awards
2004 Nominated Spur Awards
2007 Nominated Georgia Children’s Picture StoryBook Award

Boo to the Annville-Cleona School Board.

4. Iheartchaos links a livejournal link to Wayback Machine’s archived copy of When Same-Sex Marriage was a Christian Rite.

Contrary to myth, Christianity’s concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual.

Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the “Office of Same-Sex Union” (10th and 11th century), and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).

These church rites had all the symbols of a heterosexual marriage: the whole community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar was conducted w ith their right hands joined, holy vows were exchanged, a priest officiatied in the taking of the Eucharist and a wedding feast for the guests was celebrated afterwards. These elements all appear in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 CE) and his companion John.

Worth a read. Reminder also: Tonight Nate Phelps will be at Frances Morrison library talking about the abuse he went through growing up in the Westboro Baptist Church and other challenges he faced on account of being gay. It starts at 7pm, costs only $10 and is worth coming early for. I’m sure it’ll be quite the talk.

5. Phoenix high school baseball team balks over having to face team with a girl in title game

Sultzbach is a freshman at Mesa Preparatory Academy, which had been scheduled to play Our Lady of Sorrows Academy in tonight’s Arizona Charter Athletic Association state championship at Phoenix College.

But Our Lady of Sorrows, a fundamentalist Catholic school in Phoenix that lost twice to Mesa Prep during the regular season, chose to forfeit the championship game rather than play a team fielding a female player.

During Mesa Prep’s two previous games with Our Lady of Sorrows, Paige didn’t play out of respect for the opposing team’s beliefs, but that wasn’t going to be an option this time, Pamela said.

“We respected their school rule … but she took it hard,” Pamela said. “She didn’t like it and neither did her teammates. They went out and played the best they could because they wanted to prove a point.”

It would have been a much better point if her team had said “Fuck you guys. She plays and you learn to deal with the 21st century and equality for women.” OLS had done similar shit with a football team that had girl players, too.

6. Controversial nude statue in Tempe vandalized

On Friday morning, Tonnesen discovered someone had vandalized the statue with green paint.

This was the second incident involving the statue this week. Tonnesen said two days ago someone put a crude burlap apron on the statue to cover it up.

Tonnesen said he received permission from the city to display the statue, but the work of art has rubbed some people the wrong way because it is across the street from a preschool and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Roman Catholic Church.

In order to please critics, Tonnesen put $1 bills on the “private parts” in somewhat of a bikini shape. On Friday, those areas had been painted green.

Tonnesen said he is glad the statue wasn’t damaged further.

Sigh.

7. Orthodox Jewish spiritual adviser on trial for sex abuse

The rallying around Weberman, who goes on trial this month, and ostracizing of his accuser and her family reflects long-held beliefs in this insular community that problems should be dealt with from within and that elders have far more authority than the young. It also brought to light allegations that the district attorney was too cozy with powerful rabbis, a charge he vehemently denies.

“There are other people that claim misconduct and they can’t come out because they’re going to be re-victimized and ostracized by the community,” said Judy Genut, a friend of the accuser’s family who counsels troubled girls.

But, within the community, Weberman is seen as a good man doing good things and has a lot more support than this girl and her family are getting. I don’t care if they want to have their own secretive organized communities but when it comes to accusations of abuse, secular institutions should get involved and deal with it justly. It’s invasive but still better than covering things up, I’d say.

Banned Book Club – Catch-22

What’s the catch? For Captain John Yossarian and the rest of the characters in Joseph Heller’s classic novel it was Catch-22, a semi-unofficial rule best explained by the author. From chapter five:

Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

This was a hard book to follow. The events portrayed in it aren’t introduced in a chronological order, nor in a flashback format, really. Heller devotes some chapters to Yossarian’s experience of events from his life in general and on the job. The rest are used to relay those events as witnessed, explained or misunderstood by other officers and friends. It all gels in the end, apparently, if you can get that far. Only one in our group did and it wasn’t me. I only skimmed the end chapters without getting too involved with them. I lost interest in the book around chapter 35 but I did consider quitting sooner. It was most enjoyed by the one guy who’s actually experienced life in the American military. I’ll have to refer to the Yossarian write-up on Wikipedia to make sense of it.

Yossarian wants to get the hell out WWII and Pianosa, the remote little island off Italy where he’s stationed. Unfortunately, every time he gets close to completing the required number of bombing runs, his superior officer, Colonel Cathcart, ups the mission number needed to earn the flight home. (It starts at 25 but by the end of the book it’s up to 80.) He’s a liar, a malingerer, a saboteur and a very desperate individual. It’s debatable whether he’s actually crazy, or the only sane man in a crazy situation. Most of what he does is a reaction to the situation he’s been put in and has no other control over.

When a friend and one of his crew, Snowden, gets struck by flak that pierced their plane during a run, Yossarian does what he can to save the man but the injuries are far too severe.

Snowden’s death embodies Yossarian’s desire to evade death; by seeing Snowden’s entrails spilling over the plane, he feels that “Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage.”

The experience on the plane dramatically changes Yossarian’s attitude towards life. He now looks only to protect his own life and, to a lesser extent, the lives of his close friends.

And whatever faith he might have had in the military before that point vanishes in a heartbeat. He can’t save anyone anyway. Most of the people he’d consider friends die in the book, or disappear without a trace.

Some of our meeting focused on other characters that featured in the book. One we talked about was Milo Minderbender who runs the mess hall in a strange yet very efficient way. As the book progresses, we learn that he’s a crafty entrepreneur who nearly always manages to make a profit. (At one point he’s paid by the Germans to bomb his own squadron and gets away with it.) This led to discussion about capitalism in general and satirical points Heller was trying to make about war being a business like anything else.

This is probably a book that does need to be read a few times in order to get a sense of where Heller wanted to go with it. I don’t think I’d try it again though. There were some parts I did laugh out loud over: the absurdities of bureaucracy and the bit where Yossarian bitches about God’s incompetence. Other parts were surprising and truly cringe-worthy, like McWatt’s daredevil behaviour and what ultimately resulted from it. Reading about the finale, I see I missed a lot of critical events. Ah well. If I couldn’t generate enough interest in the story to stick with it to the end… Some books are just like that, and it doesn’t matter if they’re considered classics.

Banned Book Club – Grapes of Wrath

–Edit March 21/12 – I wrote this on the third and apparently I hit “Save draft” instead of “Publish” because it was still sitting in my draft folder. Ah well. You can enjoy it now.

Freedom to Read Week is wrapping up today and the only book club I’m in reads nothing but banned or challenged books, so it’s a good time to be writing about one. John Steinbeck’s seminal work was the book we’d picked this time around. If you’ve never read it, go get yourself a copy. Seriously.

The basis of the story, for those who are unfamiliar: Tom Joad has just been released from prison and is on his way home to rejoin his family. Unfortunately, his family’s already left the struggling farm they’d been living on in Oklahoma, forced off the land by circumstances beyond their control: the Great Depression. Tom runs into an old family friend in the meantime, a preacher by the name of Casy, who’s long since given up on the notion that a god gives a damn about what’s going on in the world. When the two of them hear that the Joad family has probably gone to stay with Uncle John, they hurry over; the Joads have decided to head for California like so many other desperate families and Tom and Casy arrive just in time to join them. There are thousands of jobs there — at least, that’s the rumour that gets everyone through their days. Are they ever in for a surprise…

Got another “Wanna read this book?” offer

My Banned Book Club read Vernon God Little last February (note to self: finish write up about last week’s book already!!) and Julia of Rare Bird Lit has offered to send me a copy of JOHNNY FUTURE by Steve Abee, something along similar lines – at least in terms of an anti-hero with an odd family. I haven’t read the review I just linked; I’ll check that out once I’ve read it for myself and then see if I agree or disagree with what’s in it.

It’s Freedom to Read Week in Canada

And every year at this time an updated list of challenged reading material gets posted. Here are some from this year’s list. One case had to do with a Saskatchewan school performing a version of Antigone which:

was originally written by Sophocles in Greece in the 5th century B.C. — tells the story of a woman who gives her brother a proper burial in defiance of a tyrant’s edict. Deanne Kasokeo’s adaptation of Antigone is set on a Canadian aboriginal reserve and features a character who is a corrupt band chief. The band’s council members provided no public explanation for banning the play.

Update—The actors defied the ban and performed Antigone in a school on the reserve. Approximately 60 people saw the performance. In press reports, Kasokeo said that the corrupt chief in the play was not a depiction of the Poundmaker Cree Nation chief.

I guess I can see why officials might have been concerned that it was less a play and more a Macbeth-style send-up of local politics but at least the performers weren’t cowed into cancelling their show altogether.

Larmee, Blaise. Young Lions

2011—Officials of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) seized this graphic novella in Buffalo, New York, while artist Tom Neely and a colleague were travelling to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

Objection—The customs officers found pencil sketches of fictional young people having sexual contact in the book.

Update—After reviewing the book, the CBSA concluded that Young Lions is legally obscene and banned its importation into Canada.

Some images from the book can be seen here, although none of the “obscene” drawings look to be included. Page 74 could be “obscene” to people who hate bathing suits, I suppose, though. Small run of only a thousand books, too. Hardly much of a threat to the morality of Canada’s youth, but whatever. They can see worse in other graphic books that have been allowed in and circulate in their libraries already. Not that I can name any titles, off hand, mind you…

Tremblay, Michel. Contes pour buveurs attardés.

2010—In Laval, Quebec, the religious mother of a student at the École d’éducation internationale tried to persuade the school to ban this collection of short stories. Contes pour buveurs attardés has been a staple of Grade 10 reading lists throughout Quebec for years.

Objection—In the book’s preface, the author says that his stories tackle homosexuality, incest and encounters with the devil (although these references are so allusive that they are almost undetectable). The complainant declared that she did not want her son exposed to “such promotion of Satanism and pedophilia.”

Update—The school board turned down the woman’s demand and teachers kept the book on school reading lists.

Nothing I’ve heard of or read (I don’t know enough French to get through Monsieur Mugs let alone a full novel) but I found an English review of some of its contents:

Sounds like nothing that’d grip me, but part of an English teacher’s job is to expand horizons and get kids reading things that might fall outside their comfort zones and get them thinking a little. I recall back in university my suitemate lent me her copy of Timothy Findlay’s Not Wanted on the Voyage. It was a strange book to say the least, but vaguely entertaining to me at the time. For her, if I recall correctly, it meant dropping that English class out of sheer repugnance over her professor’s choice to issue it. Each to their own, I guess.

Go back to that challenged book list if you get a chance and see if you’ve read any of those. If you did, what were your impressions of them? Do you agree with the idea that they needed to be challenged or do you think most of the time the challenges are ludicrous and never worth supporting?

File under: Makes no sense

The actual post is worth a read.

A look at the date I posted that sent me hunting for the next Freedom to Read Week. It kicks off on the 26th and runs to March 3rd. Tonight my banned book club gets together to talk Grapes of Wrath, a book that has been challenged on a number of occasions. Look for a write-up about that later this week.

So I read Deborah Feldman’s book “UNorthodox”

It was released by Simon and Schuster recently and was a pretty quick but interesting read. Feldman grew up in Brooklyn as part of the Williamsburg Hasidic community and has written a memoir based on that life and the steps she ultimately took within her life to surpass those mentally crippling limitations.

It was eye-opening in terms of me learning more about that stricter version of Judaism. I hadn’t known women were expected to shave all their hair off after marriage and wear wigs or some other head covering. There’s a point in the book where it’s discovered that natural hair wigs purchased for these Satmar women were made of hair that Hindus had shaved off themselves as part of their own worshiping ceremonies and the Rabbi demands all the wigs be burned. God truly forbid they wear hair that belonged to those who worship false idols. But God also forbid they be allowed to keep and style their own hair – it might give the men Ideas. It seems the men have enough Ideas as it is.

Men and women being kept separate in temple is something I might have known about before but the purity laws that keep the temple and thus men “safe” from menstruating women seem outright laughable, even though it’s clear they take that shit seriously. Feldman describes the ritual of self-testing for bleeding and rules about bringing one’s underwear to the Rabbi if one’s not sure the stains are blood. Once married to the man chosen by one’s parents, there are even more rituals and rules to abide by – special purification baths to take and men not allowed to touch anything a bleeding woman has touched. As an outsider looking in, it all sounds so damned ludicrous. What she describes about her sexual anxiety on top of all that wound up being the most fascinating part of the book, I have to admit. I thought I had hang-ups…

She didn’t come out of the experience a complete atheist but she grew to understand why her mother felt compelled to leave that world (she was gay) and her life-long secret love of secular books eventually helped her realize she wanted a better education for herself and her son than they’d otherwise get. Her relationship with her husband was also poor (not just because of the bedroom problems) and it seems like it was a fairly easy decision for both of them to divorce.

I’m not much for reading memoirs. The brain can be a terrible place to store memories. The bulk of them wind up flawed and changed by memories of experiences that occur later, either our own, or those we hear of from other people. No matter how “true” a story might feel to the writer, it’s up to the reader to take it with a grain of salt. (One “reader” goes a step further; RS has a whole blog dedicated to exposing Feldman as a fraud, and provides different background to some of the stories she shares in her book.)

In terms of the book itself, I’ve read a lot of books and this one feels green. Amateurish, I mean. 25 she might be, but a lot of writers got a start younger than that and their first books are a lot more polished. It might be on account of the style she chose to write it, mind you. It’s a present-tense first person kind of thing so that while she’s describing events that might have occurred when she was nine, it’s written like she is that age, writing pages in a juvenile diary. I agree with the opinion of The Forward blogger, Debra Nussbaum Cohen, too:

Whatever the truth, something about Feldman still seems very young, though she is now 25 and the mother of a nearly 6-year-old son. In photos in the Post, posing in a sequined, sleeveless mini-dress, and in pictures on the ABC News website, where she sits on a park bench, wearing high heels, tight jeans and holding a cigarette in her hand, she looks like nothing so much as a young girl posing the way she thinks grownups are supposed to.

She reminds me of 13-year-old girls I see at some bat mitzvahs, teetering around on stiletto heels and wearing minis so short they can’t safely sit down.

I’m trying to think back to what I was like when I was 25. I think I was probably something of a poser, too, without enough life experience to see what parts of my behaviour merely reflected those around me and what came directly from myself. I think that’s a struggle everyone goes through at some point, even if they don’t realize it.

Now living on the Upper East Side with her son, she said there is nothing she misses about life in the Satmar community. “Everything I miss I can have,” she said. “If I want cholent, I make cholent. I have it all now. I am just exhilarated by it. There is not even within me even one shred of regret.”

If she feels like she has to prove something, I hope she realizes she only has to prove it to herself. It does take some daring to write about yourself, I’ll admit. I’m not that bold. Then again, a lot of what I’ve done is boring and quite forgettable. Truthfully, I don’t think I could remember enough childhood events to fill a chapter, let alone nine of them. UNremarkable. That’d be the title of mine…

So I did receive “Unorthodox” in the mail this week

This weekend I’ll read Deborah Feldman’s memoir about growing up Hasidic and her “scandalous rejection” of those roots. I’d gotten an email offer last week to receive a free copy. So I’ll be reading about her family on Family Day weekend while enjoying the weekend with my own family. Regular readers will realize this also means several days of dial up internet and thus no updates. I expect to report my thoughts on it by Tuesday or Wednesday.

Banned Book Club double feature: Slaughterhouse-Five and Ham on Rye

I’ve fallen behind in my reporting of the Saskatoon Freethinkers and what we’re doing but I assure readers I’m still involved with the group and having fun with it. Some of the fun comes in the shape of our Banned Book Club. Anywhere from five to a dozen of us get together on a regular basis to talk about the month’s pick. We just finished discussing Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye last week but I neglected to write anything at all about Kurt Vonnegut’s classic from the time before so I’ll start there.

It’s been too long to remember what the group discussed about that one. I’d never read any Vonnegut before but some of the others were well versed in his work and the fact that he reused his characters sometimes, making each book a little bit connected rather than all stand-alones. Being unaware of that, I was set up from the get-go to assume Billy Pilgrim’s “time travel” experiences were probably all in his head, a result of post-war trauma mixed with the discovered love of Kilgore Trout’s weird science fiction novels. I read the book thinking his drifting between moments in his life (his capture in Dresden, illness, death of spouse, his own strange death etc.) was just him nearing the end of his life, completely unhinged and incapable of staying focused on the present. To learn that the Tralfamadorians appeared in other books kind of knocked my theory over.

Slaughterhouse-Five explores fate, free will, and the illogical nature of human beings. Protagonist Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time, randomly experiencing the events of his life, with no idea of what part he will next visit (re-live) — so, his life does not end with death; he re-lives his death, before its time, an experience often mingled with his other experiences.

Billy Pilgrim says there is no free will, an assertion confirmed by a Tralfamadorian, who says, “I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe . . . Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” The story’s central concept: most of humanity is insignificant; they do what they do, because they must.

To the Tralfamadorians, everything simultaneously exists, therefore, everyone is always alive. They, too, have wars and suffer tragedies (they destroy the universe whilst testing spaceship fuels), but, when Billy asks what they do about wars, they reply that they simply ignore them. The Tralfamadorians counter Vonnegut’s true theme: life, as a human being, is only enjoyable with unknowns.

So Pilgrim drifts through his life largely content, or at least accepting of the fact that life’s events are beyond his control. The same might be said of Bukowski’s character in the second book. Henry Chinaski grows up during the ’30s in Los Angeles, the only child of a poor and abusive father and a mother who tends to look the other way. He’s a loner who isn’t satisfied with the circle “friends” he finds himself in every school year but doesn’t seem to have any real desire to be like the rich and popular kids either. While he wants to be left alone, I think what he also wants is respect but doesn’t know the best way to go about getting it. He grows up under the weight of hideous acne besides and when he gets teased for that and other reasons, fighting is the first response that comes to mind. He’s a guy who can’t see much positive in his future, but knows he has to keep moving toward the future anyway. He’s not as confident as he could be, either. We see him do well playing ball and fighting (well enough to take up boxing as a career move, possibly) and seems to be prolific at writing (although picks strange things to write about) but none of those strengths are picked up and carried like they matter to him.

We kind of debated whether or not this made him a defeatist or realist. The Law of Success was published in 1928 but wasn’t one of the books Bukowski or the character modeled on him was drawn toward when spending time in the library. I think I wound up arguing that Henry was being realistic, that it didn’t necessarily matter how well he could play ball or fight or write if his circumstances weren’t going to bring him to a place where those skills would get noticed by others in a position to help him become successful at any of them. Then again, maybe he just didn’t want success enough to do the work required to achieve it. Same goes for a lot of people. Me included, I suppose.

Slaughterhouse-Five has been repeatedly challenged because of its profanity and sexual content. Same with Ham on Rye. My book group is made up of mostly men who totally recall what it was like to be young like Henry and his classmates, obsessed with the girls in their class or the sexy older women doing the teaching. They collectively guffawed over the scenes where the one boy masturbates in class every day as the teacher sits on her desk, apparently deliberately egging him on with her provocative pose and dress. They also liked the scene where Henry mistakes his teacher’s interest in him as sexual when the reality is she wanted to help him with his writing or something.

Both Vonnegut and Bukowski wrote these books using events from their own lives as the base. I think that gives the stories themselves a bit more weight than if they’d just invented places and people to fill them with. It makes me realize I should read more biographies or something. I tend to take work as it’s presented, without considering the history of the person who’s done the writing. Maybe I’d appreciate some books more if I knew more about the authors who created them.

Old news: God’s memoir faces censorship

David Javerbaum, the former executive producer for a program I’ve never watched, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, wrote a satirical memoir of God’s life and has run into a bit of trouble selling it. I know. Inconceivable. The Last Testament: a Memoir by God is the title. New York Magazine interviewed Javerbaum back in November and I’ll quote a few responses he had to their questions:

The Last Testament will not be on sale at Walmart, Target, or any of the other “big box” chains. My editor at Simon & Schuster and Jon Karp, the publisher, were surprised, but I suspected that if they wouldn’t stock America: The Book, they wouldn’t stock this one, either. Although these stores seem to have no qualms about selling piles of God’s two previous works.

I’m not sure what the definition of blasphemy is, but I know I’m guilty of it. There’s nothing in there that isn’t a joke or not based on something that’s true. God ran the manuscript by Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, and he worked with them before handing it in to make sure all three felt equally offended.

I did spend a fair amount of prep time reading the Old and New Testaments and the Koran. As someone not of that faith, I found the Koran’s style to be very repetitive. The New Testament is pretty good reading, and the main character is a very likable figure. And as a Jew, having grown up with the Old Testament — that’s just comedy gold.

Toronto’s paper, The Star, ran a piece about this book not long after, which is the article I’d run across first.

The satirical tome, written in God’s voice, is structured as chapter and verse. It presents a God that is by turns ironic, petulant, omniscient, playful, vengeful, boastful, bumbling, omnipotent and, more often than not, recklessly hilarious.

“The biggest joke is just that God would bother to do this,” says Javerbaum. “That God would use his last testament to make really cheap, ad hominem jokes about people like Andy Dick and Kate Gosselin.”

He also remarks on the fact that Simon & Schuster UK flat-out refused to publish it.

“The entire country of England is not carrying the book because Simon & Shuster UK refuses to publish it on the grounds that it is too inflammatory,” says Javerbaum. “I’m trying to make a bigger stink of this. It’s a stink that I think ought to be made.”

Argue on the grounds of age-appropriate content to keep certain books out of the hands of young children (the original bible comes to mind here) but when it comes to grown-ups pitching a hissy: nobody’s going to make you read it. Be offended because it exists if you want but remember that other people who recognize a joke when they see one should be allowed to enjoy it at leisure.

Javerbaum readily admits that he didn’t pick on Islam very much while writing. There was a doctored photo he’d planned to put in but agreed to omit it when his publisher asked. He’d planned to mock some architecture in what sounds like a very funny way – funny to anyone not Muslim, that is.

The section on Islam (the “Koranicles”) points out, more than once, the absence of any “Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad” in the book. God also indemnifies Simon & Schuster from all possible “outrage, fatwa, or all-out jihad.” But compared to what is written elsewhere about Christianity, Hinduism or Buddhism, this section seemed relatively safe.

“That’s partly because I don’t want to get killed,” says Javerbaum. “And it’s partly because I have to write about things that my projected audience will know about. My projected audience doesn’t know much about Islam, they really don’t.”

Javerbaum has at least read the Koran. As quoted above, he found it “repetitive.”

It’s a pity it’s a religion that can’t be mocked as vocally as the rest but the believers who take it seriously are willing to dole out serious retribution for any slight or slur, sometimes to the point of attacking those who have little or no connection to the original offender. It does make it difficult for anyone who wants to point out what seems ludicrous or behind the times.

It’s a pity stores would try to keep the book out of the hands of the people, and it’s weird to me that S&S UK would try to avoid publishing it completely fearing some future criticism – lots of which they are getting now anyway. At least the lot of us now live in a culture steeped in the notion of a global community. This ultimately renders such tactics moot. Those who want it can have it. Now that I know the book exists, I want to have it. At least, I want my library to have it, which is why I’ve put in a request. They don’t have to buy everything people ask for, but they don’t tend to turn requests down very often. Not sure when I’ll have it in my eager little hands but hopefully I’ll get the thing read and feel like writing about it. I know I’ve been bad about not reporting on the books getting read over here. I’d promise to do better on this end but I wouldn’t want to set up too many high expectations…