Hayley Campbell speaks good F**&@% English... and writes it bloody well too.

I've been thinking about cusswords following this furore;
Westchester HS girls to serve suspension for 'Vagina' reading Newsday.com, March 7."CROSS RIVER, N.Y. -- Since its Off-Broadway opening in 1996, "The Vagina Monologues" has moved beyond theaters to colleges and high schools. But if performances in educational settings are not uncommon, they still occasionally provoke controversy. In the latest debate over the well-known feminist play, three 16-year-old public high school students were to serve suspensions Wednesday for disobeying officials by saying the word "vagina" during a reading from the script."

The lasses got to front up on the telly while the people in authority worked off their embarrassment. March 10 Lower Hudson Journal news: "District officials and concerned parents have spent the week defending themselves against claims of censorship as news spread across the globe..."

Wait a mo... 'vagina' is a cussword?

Upon starting this blog I made a rule that my English would be of the politest standard as I feared that in the wake of The Fate of the Artist there would be many who would think me rather a rather foul mouthed individual. When I offered the book to First Second Books a couple of years ago, editor Mark Siegel loved it but was concerned about all the cusswords and suggested we might supplant them with asterisks and the like. I understood that the publisher was aiming a great deal of its output at 'younger readers,' but since a lot of the text was actually 'about' the cusswords I argued that it was difficult to take them out without rendering the thing meaningless. And besides, in my experience that's the way the young readers talk.


Since Hayley Campbell moved to London, we have the evidence to prove it. At the big legal office where works the wife of my bosom, the emails have not been getting through. Well, they've been getting through but in a much edited form. It's true. In this day and age, our mail is being censored. Here is a sample email from Hayley Campbell to her beloved Mammy.

Now, you can see that what has happened is that the whole message has been seized and edited by the electronic guardian known as the 'MailMarshall'. The recipient receives the edited version, but instead of the bad words being removed , the recipient just receives the bad words. Only. As evidence that the mail was not good for you we have retained it, but here are the bits that were not good for you. Here's another example.

For the past six months wee Hayley Campbell has been communicating with her dear Mammy entirely in cusswords. We believe she's doing well in her flat in London. Very fuckin well.
******

This is for Stephen Frug.
Here's a single panel comic of a man raising his hat. The most comic part of it is that his head is still stuck in the hat.

(apologies to McCloud, who drew the panel©... and I confess I was chucking stones there, but Stephen's "Best Of the Blogosphere' series of posts is something I found useful when I was forming a picture in my head of what a blog can amount to. It gave me the certainty that it is something worth investing time in. Thanks. And on the off-chance you'll stop fretting about comics and write some more good'uns I'm putting you in my sidebar.)

And speaking of blogging, did you catch this last month in New York mag (via Michael Evans): Say Everything
" As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited."