Tag: Author!

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18th Century

Fanny Hill

Have a drink with: Fanny Hill
Grin grin, wink wink, say no more?

Ask her about: Sex and the (eighteenth-century) city

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My friend Dan Klau, who writes a wonderful appellate law blog at Appealingly Brief, and who also just launched a government-accountability site at CT Good Governance – because transparency is very cool – recently posted this link about Ted Cruz’s advocacy as solicitor general in support of a Texas state law outlawing the sale or promotion of sex toys.

In 2007, Cruz and his team prepared a 76-page brief to the 5th Circuit, arguing to uphold the Texas statute and claiming in part that “‘any alleged right associated with obscene devices’ is not ‘deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.’”

I’ve got news for Ted: few things are a more consistent and popular part of the Nation’s history and traditions than alleging rights in the obscene.

Don’t believe me? Just ask the U.S. Supreme Court about Fanny Hill.

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Categories
20th Century

Dr. Seuss

Have a drink with: Dr. Seuss
Would you, could you, fight the war?

Ask him about: why Yertle the Turtle just might be Hitler.

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We know Theodore Seuss Geisel as a children’s author, a playful champion of absurdity and literacy who gave us green eggs, cats in hats and an absolute lock on what to buy for the high-school graduate in your life.

Because the world seems to love nothing more than the seemingly illicit thrill of getting “secret” material from beloved authors (Harper Lee, what?), there’s been a lot of attention recently to the “new” Seuss book What Pet Should I Get?, produced from a completed manuscript and uncolored artwork found in Seuss’ personal papers.

And this is pretty exciting, particularly since the “inspired by” or “in the style of” children’s literature trend usually serves mostly to illustrate the achievement gap between authors and their posthumous copycats (Seuss and Curious George come to mind).  So the thrill of new work from a master is legitimate.

But it isn’t what I love most about Dr. Seuss.  That’d be the Hitler cartoons.

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Categories
20th Century

Bruno Schulz

Have a drink with: Bruno Schulz
Writer, artist, cultural property puzzle, cult superstar

Ask him about: making hipsters’ heads explode.

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My husband recently bought a bag from a company whose gleeful tagline was, “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.”  If post-mortem squabbles are really how you know you’ve hit the big time, Bruno Schulz is fist-pumping his way through the hereafter.

A prolific author and artist, Schulz is perhaps best known for his two volumes of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles (also sometimes known as Cinnamon Shops) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Schulz lived in the city of Drohobycz – then part of Poland, now Ukranian – for most of his life, working as a drawing teacher and publishing works which tended towards the erotic and the grotesque.  His art and writing were bold, unsentimental and yet wildly fantastical; Schulz was too grounded to be a surrealist, too oddball for mainstream, talented enough to be thoroughly disarming.

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