New table hosts for PEN America

Also in pleasanter news: from the New York Times:

Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel are among the writers who have agreed to be table hosts at next week’s PEN American Center gala after six authors withdrew in protest of an award being given to the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

So, that will do. That’s not too shabby. Alison Bechdel has a hit musical on Broadway at this moment.

The literary and human rights organization told The Associated Press this weekend that the other new hosts are George Packer, Azar Mafisi and Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese-born French author who will present the award to Hebdo’s editor in chief Gerard Biard and critic and essayist Jean-Baptiste Thore. PEN is giving the magazine a Freedom of Expression Courage award, a decision that has been fiercely defended and criticized.

That’s Nafisi, if they mean the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, as I imagine they do. But anyway – cool beans. I would be ecstatic to sit at any one of those tables. [Read more…]

Zainub Priya Dala supports the Charlie Hebdo award

Zainub Priya Dala posted a note on Charlie Hebdo and free expression v intimidation to my Facebook wall, and gave me permission to quote it. I’m sure you remember her experience of violent intimidation.

Regarding the PEN American Center’s decision to present the PEN Free Expression Award to Charlie Hebdo:

In a similarity to my experience, (albeit my assault – on a much smaller scale)… It is not a question of content, but a question of style. Literary satirical style throught the ages has always been met with persecution. It is a style that is poorly understood, where artists attempt to create discourse and debate surrounding an otherwise taboo subject. I support freedom of expression in all its forms, be it admiration of a “banned” writer or a deep dissection of a cartoon in all its complexity. Using violence to silence opinion is tantamount to medieval gagging practices. If we cannot debate sensitive issues without fear of retaliation, we are in no way progressing as a society. The Charlie Hebdo tragedy was disgusting. It was bullying. It was unneccsary loss of lives. An award should be given, a commemoration of sorts…. Otherwise the lost lives will have been in vain. When we venerate people who have been persecuted for their craft, we open the way for courageous people to follow in their wake. I say all this because I knew and still know now the sound of being silenced~zpd

Draw The Line Here

English PEN has a book we can buy.

English PEN is delighted to announce the publication of Draw The Line Here, a collection of cartoons drawn in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015.

The book is a collaboration between the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (PCO), Crowdshed, and English PEN. It features cartoons drawn by British artists in the days immediately after the attacks. The work of 66 cartoonists is featured, including Steve Bell, Dave Brown, Martin Rowson, Peter Brooke and Ralph Steadman.

Books cost UK £15.00 each. Compare that to $250 to attend the “VIP reception” on Dawkins’s June tour…

Not really a reductio

Glenn Greenwald thinks people have been misrepresenting the arguments of Francine Prose and Deborah Eisenberg.

To defend the award to Charlie Hebdo, PEN officials argued that the award did not constitute an endorsement of the content of the cartoonists’ speech, but rather, only a recognition that they were courageous in expressing themselves. The principle articulated by PEN was clear: a person is deserving of this award if they continue to express their views even in the face of credible threats of violence, and especially if they pay for their right to free expression with their lives.

The objecting PEN writers believe this principle to be invalid and contrived. To prove that point, they offered a hypothetical example that was classic reductio ad absurdum: suppose a KKK leader continued to publish white supremacist filth in the face of credible threats of violence, and was killed for doing so: of course PEN would not bestow the KKK with a courage award, and almost nobody would be comfortable if they had.

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Imagine the outcry if any other Party held a meeting with gender separation

It appears that Harriet Harman held a meeting with gender segregation in the audience (or constituency or whatever you call people at a political campaign meeting).

Via LiarMPs:

Liar MPs ‏@LiarMPs 3 hours ago
Imagine the outcry from the left wing if any other Party held a meeting with gender separation. @HarrietHarman pic.twitter.com/1qIXLzbMio

Embedded image permalink

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Bill Cosby is trending again

Meanwhile, in the annals of Bill Cosby, the list keeps lengthening.

In a press conference held by attorney Gloria Allred in New York this Friday, two women, Lili Bernard and Sammie Mays, both accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them.

Mays, a writer, says she met Cosby at a convention in New Orleans in the late ’80s, and that she became unconscious after receiving a drink from Cosby. She woke up half undressed and falling out of her chair.

Bernard, an actress who appeared on the final season of the “Cosby Show” and viewed Cosby as a mentor, claims that the comic drugged and raped her in the early ‘90s. “He praised me,” said Bernard. “He lifted me up. I believed him. After all, he was Bill Cosby. After he had won my complete trust and adoration, he drugged me and raped me.” Bernard added that when she saw Cosby in 1992 he threatened her and said “You’re dead, Bernard. You don’t exist. I never wanna see your face again.”

…

While the statute of limitations has expired for most Cosby accusers, Bernard was allegedly assaulted in New Jersey, which has no statute of limitations for rape. Yesterday, Bernard and Allred reported the crime at a police station in Atlantic city, with hopes that Cosby will finally be prosecuted. “Unlike most other states, New Jersey has no statue of limitations for rape,” said Allred. “Which means that law enforcement is not prevented from prosecuting a case because of an arbitrary time period set by law.”

This brings the total number of accusers to 35.

Cosby’s doing a show tonight in Atlanta. Protests are planned.

Categorically wrongheaded, churlish and morally repugnant

Christiane Amanpour in a public Facebook post. It’s a letter she sent to PEN.

I am sure I was among many people who were puzzled and dismayed by the 6 PEN writers who have pulled out of next week’s Gala because of the award going to Charlie Hebdo. I am very glad to know that American PEN is standing up for what’s right by going ahead with the award, and as such I am glad I am still able to make available my video-taped contribution to the Gala, on behalf of one of our jailed colleagues, Khadija Ismayilova of Azarbaijan. [Read more…]

It lets murderers start and be part of the conversation

If you want to see people saying good, intelligent, reasonable things, you can do worse than check out Salman Rushdie’s Twitter. He’s RTd several such things.

Joel Gordon @JoelGord13 hours ago
Do Charle Hebdo opponents at PEN realize that boycotting their award normalizes murder as opposition to speech?

@JoelGord It lets murderers start and be part of the conversation. This is why none of their analogies to American racists, etc. works.

There’s Azar Nafisi:

Azar Nafisi ‏@azarnafisi
.@PENamerican @SalmanRushdie PEN award to CH is recognition of the writers’ &artists’ rights to “disturb the peace,”regardless of the price

.@SalmanRushdie @PENamerican Satanic Verses didn’t insult true Muslims, it offended their oppressors who treated their own authors same way

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The privilege of being born in 2015

Martin Robbins seizes the occasion of a birth in the Windsor family to point out what luck that baby has to be born with such good odds.

[T]hings are getting better. The small wrinkly proto-Royal that just emerged from the national womb will have thrice the chance of surviving that her father and I did, just through the privilege of being born in 2015. But if that makes you feel all warm and complacent, there are a couple of big problems with this story.

While it’s true that things are getting better, they’re still not good enough. Our babies are considerably more likely to die than those born in countries like Spain, Italy, France or basically any other European nation you can think of. By 2010, we’d just about caught up with Japan… in 1985.

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