Molly Bloom Might Have Said Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes, But Steve Jobs & The NY Times Said No
[*] comes this tale of the bowdlerization of a cartoon version of a classic novel that is apparently every bit as naughty as it is generally unreadable:
James Joyce must be laughing now—as if he ever stopped. Steve Jobs has found a graphic version of Joyce's Ulysses too hot for iPad, the New York Times reports. The Times doesn't say so, but it turns out that Ulysses is also too hot for the Gray Lady, because the comics page provided by the Times features the bowdlerized version.
Well, we at Literature R Us feel our readers are ready for tits, even with their morning coffee. So enjoy, and if you want more, go to Ulysses "Seen", which will give you all the Joyce you can handle, without Steve Jobs to tell you what to look at.
The illustrator of the graphic novel, Robert Berry, tells the Times he was disappointed by the movement of a word balloon to cover the offending breastuses, but he doesn't feel "remotely censored."
"It's their rules," he said. "We're coming to their dinner party at their house."
True, true, very true, but still many kinds of sad as the endings of, well, all the stories in Dubliners. At right is the offending appendage. At left is the cleaned up, iPad-approved version.
I am genuinely surprised by how many tech-geek friends say they are finally getting fed up with various procedural and content-based hassles being imposed by Apple regarding the iPhone and iPad. They threaten regularly to move from Apple to Droid phones (none has so far said they're quitting the Mac platform), which may be mostly bluster, but is still interesting (and it's not like Google doesn't present its own issues regarding terrible, terrible freedom).
[*]: Corrected the link to Vanneman's always interesting site.
Tim Cavanaugh, the Darby O'Gill of the County Reason, wrote about how fan boys and girls were keeping Joyce alive more than his academic crypt-keepers and his jackass descendants. Read about it here.
And as long as we're talking about Joyce and restrictions on speech (including Ulysses, which has suffered from a range of copyright cases and obscenity charges throughout the decades), let's check out this video about whether obscenity should be illegal. Warning: Adults only, sez the YouTube, and yes certainly yes it's their brunch buffet, even though the segment is spectacularly free of genitals and arousement, except of the legal and libertarian outrage kind. So you'll have to sign in, to prove that you are indeed old enough to question whether a man should be given an effective life sentence for producing porn vids featuring consenting adults that are immensely popular and feature more milk than a million moo-cows (figuratively):
