![]() ![]() They revered it, elevated it, and then, with bewildering capriciousness, decided to destroy it, through misguided attendance by island leaders to a dead man’s perceived postmortem wishes. ![]() The nation of Nollop, dolloped off the coast of South Carolina (which was founded by former American slaves and abolitionists in the nineteenth century), had always maintained a special, adulatory relationship with the English language. Upon the publication by Dzanc Books of the twentieth-anniversary special edition of my novel Ella Minnow Pea this month, a friend of mine noted sadly, “It’s like America has become the island of Nollop.” Or, perhaps, when you do expect it, given the full-stop cultural clashes now insulting the country. The censorship of books-this most venerable manifestation of thought preservation in America-can undergo periodic, politically-engineered recrudescence just when you least expect it. Fox has written a book that gives an almost textbook recipe for how to damage yourself in your early years with incredibly long working hours (in his mid-teens, 20 hours a day sometimes, with correspondingly less sleep) with heavy drinking with lots of marijuana, again at an early age with a horrendous diet. ![]() The removal from classrooms and school libraries of material deemed injurious to young minds is nothing new, but its recent resurgence as promulgated by many of the school and library boards of today reminds us that the freedom to share ideas via the tools of language has never been inviolate. ![]() Freedom of expression in America-especially the use of language to imprint thoughts and ideas upon a page-has always been under assault. ![]()
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