Correcting the Landscape by Marjorie Kowalski Cole Read Free Book Online Page A

community. In Anchorage this year, it was breast-feeding in public; their newspaper finally had to putup a stop sign. “We will run no more letters on this subject,” they announced after several months. Who could have guessed such a thing? In Fairbanks, where we make a certain show of self-sufficiency, Christians and hippies alike expected women to breast-feed, and a glimpse of breast in a shopping mall was not the end of the world.
    However, a single frame out of hundreds in this graphic novel did the trick.
    Few people read the novel, but the photocopied page went from hand to hand. Hundreds of petitioners didn’t even see it; they just heard about its existence, and that was enough.
    Felix Heaven interviewed several players in the drama, including librarians, parents, the principal of the Catholic school, and the bishop’s secretary. He guessed correctly when his subjects had plenty to say, kept his accent and his opinions to himself. The young man must have had some experience in keeping most of himself locked away, off-limits, while accepting new information. Except for the bishop’s secretary, who was wild in her rage (“incensed,” Felix wrote; I deleted that) and wanted the book to be burned, most complainants wanted it made “less accessible.”
    That word again.
    Apparently in the old days in Fairbanks, a complaint was always enough to get a dubious or sexy book removed from the shelves and tucked out of harm’s way in the director’s office. People were angry that their disapproval alone wasn’t enough to solve the problem this time. Soft words in a back room got them nothing. The bishop’s letter to the library director, nothing. The subtle mention of the library trust fund, nothing. That was good, I thought, a sign of the library’s maturing; but it was this very neutrality on the library’s part, this refusal to play the old game, that continued to fuel the fire. The word accessible was waved about as if to prove that complainants were not censors so much ashousekeepers, merely trying to keep the poisons on the top shelf of the broom closet. Close to half of the complainants’ letters began, “While I do not believe in censoring what others read…”
    It bothered me. There was something so—unread, about this fear of accessibility.
    It was a lie. And somehow, a lie to which you could subscribe.
    The crowd of conservative parents was subscribing to a lie. They really wanted the book gone, but that wasn’t it, either. In truth, to complain about accessibility was to complain about something that did not exist. Literature isn’t accessible. I mean people no longer read that much, and maybe only one person out of fifty who complained about this book had even looked at it, let alone read it cover to cover and judged it as a whole. It’s not that easy.
    The heart isn’t that accessible. It doesn’t end up naked on the page. The truth in our hearts is well hidden. Maybe it only comes out in the story itself—and story isn’t that accessible, when we can’t even agree on what the story is, or where to focus our attention. We are so easily distracted. That’s the scary part.
    People didn’t read the book, so of course they didn’t allow themselves to be disturbed by its hidden story. They didn’t follow the thread of the action all the way into the puzzle at its very center. The sexy pictures were only a distraction from the story, and the hero paid no attention to the sex around him, not even to the naked blonde sitting on him, once he understood that his friend and mentor was in trouble. He throws the girl off his body and runs to his friend’s aid. The complainants didn’t see that happening. Why? Because it wasn’t so accessible, after all.
    My editorial came together into a reasonably coherent whole. I was proud of it. Tad Suliman came by a week later as he did sometimes when he