CENSORING PERFORMANCE WRITING

The Hays Code: Adopted 31^st March 1930

Hays

In 1922, after some risqué films and a series of off-screen scandals involving Hollywood stars, the studios enlisted Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays to rehabilitate Hollywood's image. Hollywood in the 1920’s was expected to be somewhat corrupt, and many felt the movie industry had always been morally questionable. Political pressure was building, with legislators in 37 states introducing almost 100 movie censorship bills in 1921. Hays was paid the then-lavish sum of $100,000 a year. Hays, Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding and former head of the Republican National Committee, served for 25 years as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), where he "defended the industry from attacks, recited soothing nostrum remedia, and negotiated treaties to cease hostilities."

Daniel Lord

In 1929, lay Catholic Martin Quigley, who was editor of the Motion Picture Herald, a prominent trade paper, and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord, created a code of standards (which Hays liked immensely), and submitted it to the studios. Lord was particularly concerned with the effects of sound film on children, whom he considered especially susceptible to their allure. Several studio heads including Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), met with Lord and Quigley in February 1930. After some revisions, they agreed to the stipulations of the Code. One of the main motivating factors in adopting the Code was to avoid direct government intervention. It was the responsibility of the SRC headed by Colonel Jason S. Joy (a former American Red Cross executive) to supervise film production and advise the studios when changes or cuts were required. On 31^st March 1930, the MPPDA agreed that it would abide by the Code.

Resolved, That those things which are included in the following list shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated:

1. Pointed profanity-by either title or lip-this includes the words "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Christ" (unless they be used reverently in connection with proper religious ceremonies), "hell," " damn," "Gawd," and every other profane and vulgar expression however it may be spelled;

2. Any licentious or suggestive nudity-in fact or in silhouette; and any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture;

3. The illegal traffic in drugs;

4. Any inference of sex perversion;

5. White slavery;

6. Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races);

7. Sex hygiene and venereal diseases;

8. Scenes of actual childbirth-in fact or in silhouette;

9. Children's sex organs;

10.           Ridicule of the clergy;

11.           Willful offense to any nation, race or creed;

12.            

And be it further resolved, That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized:

1. The use of the flag;

2. International relations (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country's religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry);

3. Arson;

4. The use of firearms;

5. Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc. (having in mind the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron);

6. Brutality and possible gruesomeness;

7. Technique of committing murder by whatever method;

8. Methods of smuggling;

9. Third-degree methods;

10.           Actual hangings or electrocutions as legal punishment for crime;

11.           Sympathy for criminals;

12.           Attitude toward public characters and institutions;

13.           Sedition;

14.           Apparent cruelty to children and animals;

15.           Branding of people or animals;

16.           The sale of women, or of a woman selling her virtue;

17.           Rape or attempted rape;

18.           First-night scenes;

19.           Man and woman in bed together;

20.           Deliberate seduction of girls;

21.           The institution of marriage;

22.           Surgical operations;

23.           The use of drugs;

24.           Titles or scenes having to do with law enforcement or law-enforcing officers;

Excessive or lustful kissing, particularly when one character or the other is a "heavy."

IT'S A GREEK THING

In 1967 the repressive nationalist, right-wing Regime of the Colonels took power in Greece after a coup d'état. After two years marked by widespread censorship, political detentions and torture, Giorgos Seferis took a stand against the regime. On 28^th March, 1969, he made a statement on the BBC World Service, with copies simultaneously distributed to every newspaper in Athens. In authoritative and absolute terms, he stated "This anomaly must end".

Seferis did not live to see the end of the junta in 1974 as a direct result of Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, which had itself been prompted by the junta’s attempt to overthrow Cyprus’ President, Archbishop Makarios. At his funeral, huge crowds followed his coffin through the streets of Athens, singing Mikis Theodorakis’’ setting of Seferis’ poem Denial / Άρνηση (then banned); he had become a popular hero for his resistance to the regime. There is a touch of performance writing about writing in the sand.

On the secret seashore


white like a pigeon


we thirsted at noon;


but the water was brackish.



On the golden sand


we wrote her name;


but the sea-breeze blew


and the writing vanished.



With what spirit, what heart,


what desire and passion


we lived our life: a mistake!


So we changed our life.

Six years prior to the BBC statement he had received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his Nobel acceptance speech he made the following statement:

I feel at this moment that I am a living contradiction. The Swedish Academy has decided that my efforts in a language famous through the centuries but not widespread in its present form are worthy of this high distinction. It is paying homage to my language - and in return I express my gratitude in a foreign language. I hope you will accept the excuses I am making to myself.

I belong to a small country. A rocky promontory in the Mediterranean, it has nothing to distinguish it but the efforts of its people, the sea, and the light of the sun. It is a small country, but its tradition is immense and has been handed down through the centuries without interruption. The Greek language has never ceased to be spoken. It has undergone the changes that all living things experience, but there has never been a gap. This tradition is characterized by love of the human; justice is its norm. In the tightly organized classical tragedies the man who exceeds his measure is punished by the Erinyes. And this norm of justice holds even in the realm of nature.

«Helios will not overstep his measure»; says Heraclitus, «otherwise the Erinyes, the ministers of Justice, will find him out». A modern scientist might profit by pondering this aphorism of the Ionian philosopher. I am moved by the realization that the sense of justice penetrated the Greek mind to such an extent that it became a law of the physical world. One of my masters exclaimed at the beginning of the last century, «We are lost because we have been unjust» He was an unlettered man, who did not learn to write until the age of thirty-five. But in the Greece of our day the oral tradition goes back as far as the written tradition, and so does poetry. I find it significant that Sweden wishes to honour not only this poetry, but poetry in general, even when it originates in a small people. For I think that poetry is necessary to this modern world in which we are afflicted by fear and disquiet. Poetry has its roots in human breath - and what would we be if our breath were diminished? Poetry is an act of confidence - and who knows whether our unease is not due to a lack of confidence?

 Last year, around this table, it was said that there is an enormous difference between the discoveries of modern science and those of literature, but little difference between modern and Greek dramas. Indeed, the behaviour of human beings does not seem to have changed. And I should add that today we need to listen to that human voice which we call poetry, that voice which is constantly in danger of being extinguished through lack of love, but is always reborn. Threatened, it has always found a refuge; denied, it has always instinctively taken root again in unexpected places. It recognizes no small nor large parts of the world; its place is in the hearts of men the world over. It has the charm of escaping from the vicious circle of custom. I owe gratitude to the Swedish Academy for being aware of these facts; for being aware that languages which are said to have restricted circulation should not become barriers which might stifle the beating of the human heart; and for being a true Areopagus, able «to judge with solemn truth life's ill-appointed lot», to quote Shelley, who, it is said, inspired Alfred Nobel, whose grandeur of heart redeems inevitable violence.

In our gradually shrinking world, everyone is in need of all the others. We must look for man wherever we can find him. When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was: «Man». That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of the answer of Oedipus.

PEACEFUL PROTEST

The 26^th March saw two rather different gatherings.

One in New York’ Central park on what was Easter Day, 26^th March 1967, 45 years ago.

The Easter be-in was organized by Jim Fouratt an actor, Paul Williams editor of Crawdady magazine, Susan Hartnett head of a the Experiiments in Art and Technology organization and Chilean poet and playwright Clau Badal. With a budget of $250 they printed 3,000 posters and 40,000 small notices designed by Pteer Max and distributed them around the city. The Police and Parks Departments quietly and unofficially cooperated with the organizers.

An estimated 10,000 people participated in the event at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The majority of participants were hippies. They were joined by families who had attended the Easter Parade and members of the Spanish community who were notified of the event by Spanish language posters. The New York Times described them as “poets from the Bronx, dropouts from the East Village, interior decorators from the East Side, teachers from the West Side and teeny boppers from Long Island” and said that “they wore carnation petals and paper stars and tiny mirrors on foreheads, paint around the mouth and cheeks, flowering bedsheets, buttons and tights”.

The event was guarded by small number of police. At 6:45 a.m. the first police car arrived. The car was covered flowers with while the crowd chanted of “daffodil power” at which point the police quickly retreated. While police held their distance most of the day, 5 officers did approach two nude participants, at which point the officers were surrounded while the crowd chanted “We love cops/Turn on cops”. The situation was defused when the crowd at the urging of other participants backed off.  At 7:30 at night the police beamed lights on the group and used bullhorns to tell participants to disperse. Again the police were rushed by participants. Following a brief period of tension the police decided to let the event continue.

The second event was the 2011 anti-cuts protest in London, also known as the March for the Alternative, was a demonstration held in central London on 26^th  March 2011. Organised by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), it was a protest march against planned public spending cuts by the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government.
Various sources estimated that the demonstration was attended by between 250,000 and 500,000 people. It was described as the largest protest in the United Kingdom since the 15^th February 2003 anti-Iraq War protest and the largest union-organised rally in London since the Second World War.

Demonstrators marched from the Thames Embankment, via the Houses of Parliament to Hyde Park where a rally took place with speakers including the TUC general secretary Brendan Barber and leader of the opposition Ed Milliband, who addressed the assembled crowds.

Several independent protesting groups, some of whom had moved from the main march, assembled further north in the heart of London's West End, where shops and banks were vandalised and some individuals clashed with police. Further clashes were reported later in Trafalgar Square. 201 people were arrested, and 66 were injured, including 31 police officers.

Admittedly there were over 25 times plus, as many people in London 2011 than in New York in 1967, but no one got hurt, not even police officers. 1967 was a year full of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations all over the world, many took place in Central Park in New York. It is a surprise that an Easter Day event in 1967 was so peaceful.

Here is another peaceful event in Central Park – not on the 26^th March, but who cares.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO LANGUAGE

The 25^th March is a day for controversy on contributions to language.

On the 25^th March 1811, Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.

Hogg

The Necessity of Atheism is a treatise on atheism by Shelly, printed in 1811 by C. and W. Phillips in Worthing, while he was a student at University College, Oxford. A copy of the first version was sent as a short tract signed enigmatically to all heads of Oxford colleges at the University. At that time the content was so shocking to the authorities that he was rusticated for refusing to deny authorship, together with his friend and fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg.

Shelley

"As a love of truth is the only motive which actuates the Author of this little tract, he earnestly entreats that those of his readers who may discover any deficiency in his reasoning, or may be in possession of proofs which his mind could never obtain, would offer them, together with their objections to the Public, as briefly, as methodically, as plainly as he has taken the liberty of doing."

On the 25^th March 1957 the United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsburg’s poem "Howl" on the grounds of obscenity.

"Howl" contains many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices, both heterosexual and homosexual. On the basis of one line in particular "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy" customs officials seized 520 copies of the poem on 25^th March, 1957, being imported from the printer in London.

And more recently, but less controversially:

WikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25^th  March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository (the website was also later known as "WardsWiki"); the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first wiki software (it was later renamed "WikiBase"); the original general term for wiki websites; and the original term for wiki software.

Cunningham

The software and website were developed in 1994 by Cunningham in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier. The concept was based on the ideas developed in HyperCar stacks that Cunningham built in the late 1980s. He installed the software on his company's (Cunningham & Cunningham) website, c2.com, on 25^th March, 1995. Cunningham came up with the name WikiWikiWeb because he remembered a Honolulu Internationl Airport counter employee who told him to take the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, a shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian language word for fast. Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, so he initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb". 

GO BHUTAN

Bhutan held its first general election on 24^th March, 2008 for the National Assembly. Two parties were registered by the Election Commission of Bhutan to contest the election: the Bhutan Peace and Prosperity Party (DPT, for Druk Phuensum Tshogpa), which was formed by the merger of the previously established Bhutan People's United Party and All People’s Party and is led by Jigme Y. Thinley, and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) led by Sangay Ngedup. The third political party, the Bhutan National Party (BNP), had its application for the registration cancelled.

Thinley

Ngedup

The elections for the 47 seats of the National Assembly were planned to be held in two rounds: In the first round, voters would have voted for a party. The two parties with the largest share of the national vote would then have been able to field candidates in the 47 constituencies. However, as only two parties successfully registered for the election, the election was held in one round. The DPT have 45 seats and the PDP have 2. - Next elections December 2012.

   

There are over nineteen languages of Bhutan, all members of the Tibeto-Burman language family, except for Nepali which is Indo-European. Dzongkha, the national language, is the only language with a native literary tradition in Bhutan, though Lepcha and Nepali are literary languages in other countries. Dzongkha is one of 53 languages in the Tibetan language family. Other non-Bhutanese minority languages are also spoken along Bhutan's borders and among the Lhotshampa community in South and East Bhutan. One assumes all ballot papers were written in Dzongkha, but what about the outlying districts? Bhutan is a seriously hilly country as can be seen from the topographical map.

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

The 20^th March brings up the subject of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Whether or not one considers that the book is essentially a racist’s text, reeking of stereotypes, it was, for its time, an extraordinary example of performance writing. Its impact was immense.

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, prohibiting assistance to fugitives. At the time, she had moved with her family into a home on the campus of Bowdoin, where her husband was now teaching. On 9^th March, 1850, Stowe wrote to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the weekly antislavery journal National Era, that she planned to write a story about the problem of slavery: "I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak... I hope every woman who can write will not be silent." Shortly after, In June 1851, when she was 40, the first instalment of her Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in the National Era. She originally used the subtitle "The Man That Was A Thing", but it was soon changed to "Life Among the Lowly".  Instalments were published weekly from 5^th June, 1851, to 1^st April, 1852. Because of the story's popularity, the publisher John Jewett contacted Stowe about turning the serial into a book. While Stowe questioned if anyone would read Uncle Tom's Cabin in book form, she eventually consented to the request.

Published in book form on 20^th March, 1852, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin soon sold out its complete print run. A number of other editions were soon printed (including a deluxe edition in 1853, featuring 117 illustrations by Hammatt Billings).

In the first year of publication, 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold. At that point, however, "demand came to an unexpected halt... No more copies were produced for many years, and if, as is claimed, Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe in 1862 as 'the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war,' the work had effectively been out of print for many years." Jewett went out of business, and it was not until Ticknor and Fields put the work back in print in November 1862 that demand began again to increase.

The book was translated into all major languages, and in the United States it became the second best-selling book after the Bible. A number of the early editions carried an introduction by Rev James Sherman, a Congregational minister in London noted for his abolitionist views. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold equally well in Britain, with the first London edition appearing in May 1852 and selling 200,000 copies. In a few years over 1.5 million copies of the book were in circulation in Britain, although most of these were pirated copies (a similar situation occurred in the United States)

After the outbreak of the Civil War, Stowe travelled to Washington, D.C. and there met President Abraham Lincoln on 25^th November, 1862. Legend has it that, upon meeting her, he greeted her by saying, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." In reality, little is known about the meeting. Stowe's daughter Hattie reported, "It was a very droll time that we had at the White House, I assure you... I will only say now that it was all very funny—and we were ready to explode with laughter all the while." Stowe's own letter to her husband is equally ambiguous: "I had a real funny interview with the President."

Slavery in the 13 Colonies – 1770. Numbers show actual and estimated enslaved population by colony. Colors show enslaved population as a percentage of each colony's total population. Boundaries shown are based on 1860 state boundaries, not those of 1770 colonies.