Christian clergy in Iran have gotten Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code banned from being sold in the country. What do you all think of this? Does this seem bizarre, that in Iran the Christian community (which is about 100,000 compared to 69,000,000 Muslims) banned an "anti-Christian" book? How does that reflectf Christianity in Iran? Banning books is never good, right, even if it's the Da Vinci Code?
It's just a blurb story in the NYT, but I'm fascinated by this move.
*update*
Looks like azf and diedan were right on this one. Here' s an article describing the rush in Iran to buy Da Vinci Code before the copies run out. The government allowed remaining copies to be bought, but no new copies to be sold.
Luckily, "Iranians...can still buy videos or DVDs of the film version on the black market, the usual way in which Western films circulate in the country."
10 comments:
I heard there will be a new book coming out: Reading Da Vinci in Tehran.
It, meaning "The Da Vinci Code," was one of the most worthless books I've ever read. I'm usually not that harsh on pulp, in fact I love pulp(you should see my romance collection...) but the fact remains that the Christian community should have let this book pass by the wayside. It isn't anymore damning than Kazantzakis' "The Last Temptation of Christ" which didn't really get a backlash till the movie came out.
It is interesting that Christians got legislation passed which allows for the banning of a book. A book which seems to try to prove the non-viability of the Christian faith. That being said there is nothing more infuriating to my faith than people seeking to ban something which contradicts their beliefs in the slightest.
I don't believe in banning books, under any circumstance. And it seems to me that by banning a book you give it more credability that it maybe even deserves. I would think it would be better just to let this book fade into nothingness which it will undboutly do if it's as awful as everyone says. Of course, I am open to there being a situation in which this could be appropriate to ban a book, but as of yet no one has written a negative biography of my life.
thats a work in process, honey
I feel like banning a book seems to have the opposite effect intended; people are more interested in reading a banned book than one that has garnered no controversial aura. Why do you think people read Catcher in the Rye?
So...I'm all for banning books if it will boost black market, underground, super-secret sales, which it inevitably will.
people read catcher in the rye because its fucking awesome.
Oh...and just call me Mr. I-Repeat-What-Others-Have-Already-Stated-In-This-Comments-Thread-Because-I-Skim-Other-People's-Posts-And-Don't-Realize-It-Until-I've-Already-Hit-"Publish."
Wrong: Catcher in the Rye is goddamn awesome, not fucking awesome.
The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Laetitia Landon, and others who just can't write. A fourth-rate playwright like Aphra Behn is being taught instead of Shakespeare in many curriculums across the country.
Recently I spoke at the funeral of my old friend Thomas M. Green of Yale, perhaps the most distinguished scholar of Renaissance literature of his generation. I said, "I fear that something of great value has ended forever."
Today there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now share this "distinguished contribution" award with Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt find something funny to say about it. There's Cormac McCarthy, whose novel "Blood Meridian" is worthy of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and Don DeLillo, whose "Underworld" is a great book.
Instead, this year's award goes to King. It's a terrible mistake.
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