Whenever anyone tells me that my story Guts goes too far, I point their way to Herman M. Yes, the legendary author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville. Here’s his monstrous tale of building dread, and dark comedy. Fantastic cruelty and absurd pretentiousness. It’s from the novel White-Jacket by Melville, a book banned in the U.S. Navy until 1982. This excerpt is often printed as a stand-alone short story called The Operation.
Know someone with a strong stomach…?
If you can stomach the full audio book, it’s in two parts. They can be found here and here. And the book’s detailed depiction of flogging got flogging outlawed in the military.
My own story collection Make Something Up is among the books recently banned1 by schools, libraries and prisons.2 Wherever dead writers go, I hope I can lift a drink with Herman M.
On lists of banned books, it’s the only book intended for adults. All its fellow banned books are written for children. To me this feels pervy and weird, like when you go to Toys R Us and have to use the bathroom. Those toilets are tiny.
Yes, prisons. A recently retired head of the Texas prison library system once brought me her own collection of my books, for signatures. But while she enjoyed them, the system she’d overseen had banned them for being too subversive.
Well we wouldn’t want to corrupt those prisoners..! 🤷♂️
It going to snow today so, I’m down for a good corrupting.