What if we call them "shoes"? Will they stop being offensive then? Or how about "jugs"?

New post version. With update way below. The crumb trail. From the blogroll of Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams to Have Coffee Will Write to Sherry Candler on how “The Writer’s Almanac” radio program was canceled by the University of Kentucky’s WUKY for offensive content.

Offensive content…

(beware, I don’t want to embarrass or offend anyone but there’s naughty content below)

…like breasts!!!

Breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts, breasts.

Odious, terrible, offensive things., breasts.

WUKY cancels radio program over offensive content

By Jamie Gumbrecht

HERALD-LEADER CULTURE WRITER

A few weeks after The Boston Globe called The Writer’s Almanac radio program “a confection of poetry and history wrapped in the down comforter voice of producer and host Garrison Keillor,” WUKY-91.3 FM canceled the daily featurette for offensive content.

The five-minute segments aired on the University of Kentucky’s public radio station at 11 a.m. until Aug. 1. It opened with soft piano music and the voice of A Prairie Home Companion’s Keillor remembering major moments in writing history. It was a break for history between news broadcasts and pop music, each day ending with a poem and the wish to “be well, do good work and keep in touch.”

But in a time of Federal Communications Commission crackdowns on radio content, WUKY officials say, the poems Keillor read were too risky for airplay.

“I don’t question the artistic merit, but I have to question the language,” WUKY General Manager Tom Godell said. “It’s not that he’s behaving like Howard Stern, but the FCC has been so inconsistent, we don’t know where we stand. We could no longer risk a fine.”

Reaction to the cancellation has been minimal so far, Godell said. WUKY managers decided to stop carrying the Almanac after a recent spate of language advisories, although they were tracking the content for about a year, Godell said.

The warnings, issued by the program’s production company, came about Curse of the Cat Woman by Edward Field, which contained violent themes and the word “breast”; Thinking About the Past by Donald Justice, which also used the word “breast”; and Reunion by Amber Coverdale, which contained the phrase “get high.” The poems were scheduled for broadcast between July 23 and Aug. 12.

WUKY never heard complaints about The Writer’s Almanac because the station always edited potentially offensive language, Godell said. Prairie Home Productions and American Public Media, the segment’s producer and distributor, do not edit or select the content.

“It’s not a terrible burden to edit, but my concern is that something slips through,” Godell said. “We have certain standards of decency, and I expect our national producers to do the same thing.”

The station vigilantly checks song lyrics for offensive content, Godell said, and broadcasts with language advisories are carefully considered. If offensive language clarifies a story, it will be broadcast, especially when listeners can be warned first. But an FCC sanction would be an embarrassment to the station and the university, Godell said.

Keillor, who will perform Feb. 21 at Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts, said in an e-mail that stations are within their rights to cancel the Almanac but he’s proud of the poems he reads.

“There isn’t one of them I would hesitate to offer to any high school English class,” Keillor wrote. “The fact that someone is troubled by hearing the word ‘breast’ is interesting, but what are we supposed to do with A Visit From St. Nicholas and the ‘breast of the new fallen snow’? Should it become a shoulder or an elbow? I don’t think so.”

Public broadcasters have long had to edit gratuitous language, but meaningful language is worth a fight, said O. Leonard Press, the retired founding director of Kentucky Educational Television. If stations censor themselves, they might as well become jukeboxes, he said.

“The purpose of public broadcasting is not to be safe, but to be useful, good, to give people something to think about, something to grow on,” Press said. “Survival is not more important than being useful.”

Press, an ardent fan of Keillor’s writing and performing, called the cancellation an overreaction.

“If Garrison Keillor is less desirable on the airwaves than Desperate Housewives,” he said, “we’ve gone a far piece.”

Reach Jamie Gumbrecht at (859) 231-3238 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3238, or jgumbrecht@herald-leader.com.

[clear]

Oooooo, violent themes. Let’s look at Edward Field’s “Curse of the Cat Woman”, shall we? Dare we? Read it?

Curse of the Cat Woman
by Donald Field, 1967

It sometimes happens
that the woman you meet and fall in love with
is of that strange Transylvanian people
with an affinity for cats.

You take her to a restuarant, say, or a show,
on an ordinary date, being attracted
by the glitter in her slitty eyes and her catlike walk,
and afterwards of course you take her in your arms
and she turns into a black panther
and bites you to death.

Or perhaps you are saved in the nick of time
and she is tormented by the knowledge of her tendency:
That she daren’t hug a man
unless she wants to risk clawing him up.

This puts you both in a difficult position–
panting lovers who are prevented from touching
not by bars but by circumstance:
You have terrible fights and say cruel things
for having the hots does not give you a sweet temper.

One night you are walking down a dark street
And hear the pad-pad of a panther following you,
but when you turn around there are only shadows,
or perhaps one shadow too many.

You approach, calling, “Who’s there?”
and it leaps on you.
Luckily you have brought along your sword
and you stab it to death.

And before your eyes it turns into the woman you love,
her breast impaled on your sword,
her mouth dribbling blood saying she loved you
but couldn’t help her tendency.

So death released her from the curse at last,
and you knew from the angelic smile on her dead face
that in spite of a life the devil owned,
love had won, and heaven pardoned her.

[clear]

Remember, this poem was judged offensive because of violent themes, and the use of the word…breast!

Just a pile of words to the censors. Stab, blood, death and….and breast! Nothing to it but words. We are going to trust the schools overseen by this nation’s pathological nitwits cracked on Christ to teach children about writing and reading and literature?

Or maybe it’s not just a pile of words to them. Which makes it even worse.

Thinking about the Past
by Donald Justice

Certain moments will never change nor stop being –
My mother’s face all smiles, all wrinkles soon;
The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen;
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune –
All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.
That red-haired girl with wide mouth – Eleanor –
Forgotten thirty years – her freckled shoulders, hands.
The breast of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit,
Damp, sandy, warm; or Margery’s, a small caught bird –
Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward.
O marvellous early cigarettes! O bitter smoke, Benton!
And Kenny in wartime whites, crisp, cocky,
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
Dusks, dawns; waves; the end of songs. . .

— Donald Justice

[clear]

The above poem had no words of violence. It was just Mary Something and her breast. Poor Mary Something. One of those certain moments that dare not be named, it seems.

Go to the Writer’s Almanac to hear the poem “Reunion” by Amber Coverdale, in which the forbidden phrase “getting high” is mentioned. Note that next to the audio link it has another link that reads “how to listen”. The link leads to “audio help”. Seems it should lead to a different kind of primer on “how to listen”.

Sherry Candler has contact information for WUKY so you can bitch. Please do. My note to them was very short. I wrote…

As you are so worried about censor nazis and lack of consistency, I expect that you will be consistent for them and that we won’t be hearing any recipes for chicken jugs and public service announcements about Jugs Cancer Awareness.

[clear]

How Chandler Arizona feels about the word “breasts” I don’t know, but they don’t like being able to see ’em. Which is why they’ve made breastfeeding illegal in public. Hathor the Cow Goddess has several cartoons on the subject.

Breastfeeding was once an honorable institution.

The name of the above image is “Charity”. Which to me, with the banishment of breast as a naughty, naughty word, says something about this diseased nation.

Later (the update). Tom Godell of WUKY responds that they are restoring the program, though it will be censored.

Our goal at WUKY is community service. We’ve heard from many of our listeners today about the value and importance of Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.” In response, we are restoring the program to WUKY’s schedule at a new–and we hope better–time. It will air Monday through Friday at 7:01 p.m. during NPR’s “Fresh Air”, which is consistently one of our more popular programs. At the same time, the concerns we have are real about the use of language that the FCC has fined stations for recently. As a result, we have put in place an editing process that will allow us to delete such language from the broadcast without disrupting the program. I want to thank you for contacting us about this issue. Rest assured that your opinion–and the opinions of our other listeners–really do matter.

[clear]

OK, good they’re restoring it. But a bad call on censoring it. I still wonder if they will be consistent in this or consistently inconsistent, i.e. chicken jugs and jugs cancer awareness.

I don’t get it.

Seriously, I don’t get it at all.