January/February 2012

It's Obscene
Childhood hunger is obscene.  Childhood poverty is obscene.  Nations ravaged by disease in Africa – like AIDS and malaria – is obscene. That, in the face of these obscenities, the U.S.A. spends more money on defense than most of the world combined is obscene.
Nathan Thomas

Not Here
An obscenity, to me, has the following elements:
Engorgement — also enlargement, tumescence, gluttony
Rage — at the waste caused by outsized selfishness
Regret — if things were not so enlarged, selfish, and wasteful, how less dangerous it would be for the vulnerable in the world
Thus, my play "Not Here"
Michael Bettencourt

My Poetic Brush with
Bad Words
Flipping through the hundred and thirty or so poems I've written in the past twenty years I came up with two likely candidates for a charge of obscenity. One uses a word for excrement that the FCC refuses to allow on the public air waves; the other features a word for the sex act that the FCC also bans.
David Alpaugh

Mr. Keating and Mr Flynt
Charles Keating and Larry Flynt are flip sides of the same coin: they both believe that sex is dirty, that people are meat, and that the world is theirs to despoil. To realize that they are far from unique, and that men like them have held positions of power throughout recorded history, is not exactly comforting.
Miles David Moore

Now That's Obscene
The late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's oft quoted ambiguous remark on obscenity "I know it when I see it", is just as relevant today as when he uttered it.  That quote had to do with a 1964 case (Jacobellis v. Ohio) involving what was deemed a hard core pornographic film.  Of course, those of Stewart's generation wrestled with the appropriateness of sexual deviancy, lewdness, and debauchery in the public square. We still wrestle with those same issues today but less so.
Les Marcott

Grape and the Greasers
Elliot Feldman

The Obscene Critic
Whether it is stones or semen, getting one's rocks off at the expense of someone unknown to the perpetrator is obscene. Let's talk about critics who offend accepted standards of decency or who incite feelings that are repulsive and disgusting.
Karren Alenier

Staring Back
My experience–of being viewed as an object – to be pitied, stared at, feared, ridiculed, (sometimes furtively, occasionally openly, often unconsciously) lusted after – isn't unique.  If it was just me, I'd just ask Woody Allen to make a movie of it, and that would be it. But, for thousands of years, people with disabilities have been objectified, stared at, treated and viewed (in life and in art) with a mixture of pity, prurience, curiosity, voyeurism and fear.
Kathi Wolfe

a Plethora of Noodles
Claudine Jones