The Old Pornographers: Richard Nash and Mike Edison on Banned Books

by Aaron Lefkove

EVERYONE LIKES TO BURN A BOOK NOW AND THEN

The last week of September is traditionally reserved as a time of reflection and celebration of one of America’s favorite pastimes, and no, I’m not talking about post-season baseball here. I’m referring to the banning, censoring and otherwise challenging of the printed word. So this coming Wednesday at Housing Works bookstore, Mike Edison, the author of 28 pornographic novels and a memoir about his time spent at Hustler, Screw, Cherry, Penthouse and High Times (plus a stint behind the drum kit for ultimate freedom of expression advocate GG Allin) is throwing the third annual Banned Book Party. He’s joined by publishing guru Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull and now of Cursor, and the attorney Herald Price Fahringer, who famously defended Larry Flint against numerous allegations of obscenity and went head to head with Rudy Giuliani over the desmutification of Times Square. I caught up with Edison and Nash this week to grill them a little.

Since 1982, the American Library Association has sponsored their annual Banned Book Week and this year’s celebration is, in a word, timely. Earlier this month we watched with the morbid fascination usually reserved for car crashes or insects eating other insects as a vocal minority of Americans grabbed the news cycle by the status updates and exercised their First Amendment rights in order to challenge some other people’s First Amendment rights (namely freedom of assembly and freedom to worship).

Also, it should be noted that Edison is a former co-worker. We spent a lot of time on the clock watching Piper’s Pit clips, which is how I learned how to do a real interview.

In a recent interview about The Social Network, writer Aaron Sorkin was quoted as saying “There’s just too much bad information getting out there, and I have to believe that’s mostly the fault of the Internet, which isn’t held to any standards of accuracy” and furthermore “While everyone deserves a voice, not everyone deserves a microphone.” That may very well be true but who is the onus on to make that determination?

Richard Nash: Well this is a classic “not covered by the First Amendment” issue. So of course he’s right, in the narrow sense. But it’s also just plain dumb. The Internet has helped people parse information, test assertions. When a story of a hoax gets out, everyone says “Oh there goes the Internet again.” Nonsense. What’s happening is that the Internet is in fact exposing the hoax. In the past, hoaxes went on indefinitely!

Mike Edison: I should make that determination. Me. I want to be the arbiter. I also want to decide what gets played on the radio, what bands need to stop playing immediately, and who will be the next WWE champion. By the way, it’s not just the Internet. There is this thing called cable news, not exactly a font of objective truth, either. We are going to attack all of that, plus I get to read some really filthy poetry with a bongo player. It’s my kind of party.

There’s been a lot of hypocritical rhetoric going around about freedom lately-I mean, there’s pundit demagogues pushing this pervasive ideology of fear any chance they get and nudging people down this real slippery slope of total intolerance. That really manifested itself in this whole Quran burning thing. But they’re actually getting real close to the culture they’re protesting against. Like this kind of shit would totally fly in Saudi Arabia no questions asked, right?

Mike Edison: Well, there’s no law against burning books per se. It is protected speech, just like burning a flag. The problem isn’t one of censorship, it is one of abject hatred, ignorance, and racism and the image of burning books is very difficult for people of conscience to tolerate-it recalls Nazi Germany, not to mention a bunch of Southern Christian teenagers burning Beatles records after John Lennon made that wisecrack about Jesus. Mostly I bet they feel pretty silly about it now-at least until they heard John’s solo records. But when you have one hate-filled prick like that jerk-off preacher in Florida and his three followers…it’s like go ahead, burn the Quran, burn the bible, set yourself on fucking fire, I really could not care less. Clearly the mistake was to engage in the first place. Not everyone is so smart. People like a spectacle.

I mean, how far does free speech extend with regard to books or other media? For instance last year’s Banned Book Week was marred by allegations from an organization called PFOX whose offer to donate reparative therapy books or “ex-gay” books to school libraries was rebuffed, so where exactly do you draw the line?

Mike Edison: Librarians as a race are as noble, honest, hardworking and admirable as it gets, and they know the difference between presenting all points of view and presenting hate-filled, intolerant lies, especially in schools where people’s agendas are often suspect and where young people cannot always parse the truth.

Mike, I know you come from a background in the porn industry which is traditionally very embattled but also, for better or for worse, has revolutionized every type of media — film, VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray, Pay-Per-View, the Internet and online video-but in a lot of cases you’re going on very shaky and subjective moral grounds and opinions…porn is one thing but Lord of The Flies or whatever is something else entirely.

Mike Edison: Some of my audience is always surprised when I say, Hey, banning some books in some libraries is not the worst idea… meaning, I don’t think 12-year-olds need to be seeing Hustler. At least they should have to work to get a copy, like I did! Seriously, even the fine people at Hustler don’t want their product in the hands of children. But we have to put things in perspective. No one wants their kids exposed to pornography, and parents have a right to protect them. And adults, too, have a right not to be exposed to explicit sex unwillingly. I am against banning material, certainly anything that happens between consenting adults, but one of the arguments you always hear is, “We are corrupting our children, we have to protect our children.” These are the same assholes who don’t want the government telling them what to do, right? Fucking tea-bagging libertarian hypocrites. Take your kid to the fucking zoo, talk to them, be a fucking decent parent and you’ll have nothing to worry about. Beyond the traditional prudishness of America, we are constantly facing new kinds of more insidious censorship born out of media conglomeration and new intellectual pathologies, like the concept of net neutrality.

Al Franken recently called it the First Amendment issue of our time. And we’re edging closer to a fully paperless exchange of information and the respective companies that own the proprietary rights to various e-reader devices theoretically have already become arbiters of what does and does not get through.

Richard Nash: In a way it is already beginning-Apple’s App Store is heavily censored. So we need to be advancing the use of the open web, rather than the App Store. For everything, not just the dirty stuff.

Earlier this year, Richard, you gave a widely lauded talk in which the elitism of publishing’s old guard, and, one could extrapolate, the established way of doing things, was confronted. But now with open source coding and media gravitating away from the institutional in favor of the entrepreneur and life increasingly centered around text boxes and screens is this kind of suppression of information even going to remain a problem in a few years time?

Richard Nash: The way I look at technology-it’s a tool. It can be used for any purpose, to expose and to conceal. To disseminate and to suppress. I don’t think we can ever let down our guard. And in times of transition, of change, there is a level of fear and confusion that can be used for suppressive purposes for in a time of chaos, people tend to be sympathetic to forces offering “order.”

Given the scale of a select few we’re potentially on the cusp of seeing that shifted over to telecom corporations. Essentially they’d have the power to silence the opposition. Is this going to be the defining moment… the Lady Chatterley’s Lover of this generation, so to speak?

Mike Edison: We talk about this all the time-the censorship you have to worry about isn’t this overt book banning sort of thing, it is more about media conglomeration and who is controlling the means of distribution-like getting Dixie-Chicked by Clear Channel. It is very easy to squash dissent on a large scale.

Richard Nash: I’m not sure the process will be as clearcut as it was with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Everything’s more subtle and incremental now. Government really doesn’t bother with censorship-it just lets oligopolists run things, who aren’t subject to the First Amendment and are prone to focus on controversy avoidance. Neatly accomplishing censorship, without fingerprints on the weapon. I think then that it does become the defining issue, but it’s going to be muddier and more vague than clear censorship.

Mike Edison: There will always be someone on the Internet telling the truth, some muckraker in an overcoat being marginalized as a kook when they really know what is going on, who killed Kennedy, where the alien spaceship is, or more seriously, just what the fuck Dick Cheney and his A-Team of scumbags was really up to. But most of America never gets to hear it, or at least not in a venue they feel is authoritative. Half of the country watches Bill O’Reilly, who is as big a lying sack of shit as you will ever see, but he is so fucking good at what he does it is intimidating. People believe him. Being the flagship douchebag on a channel like Fox News has a lot more stroke than anything you actually have to look for and read on the Internet.

Aaron Lefkove still advocates fucking the PMRC.

Photo by aurevoirkatie from Flickr.