Word: content
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Stiff Rule. The big news was the new obscenity standard laid down in the Ginzburg decision-which was based not so much on the content of his publications as on the way he peddled them. Speaking for the court in all three cases, Justice William J. Brennan said that Ginzburg's "titillating" advertising was so permeated with "the leer of the sensualist" that he was guilty of "the sordid business of pandering." Brennan took dead aim at "those who would make a business of pandering to the widespread weakness for titillation by pornography." The result: a stiff new rule...
...that the Court could use a publisher's manner of advertising to determine whether the material itself is obscene. A publication with some kind of "redeeming social value" may escape the obscenity charge. But Brennan seemed to be saying that titillating publicity establishes the obscenity of a book's content. When the material's status is uncertain by other tests, the advertising criterion may tip the scale in favor of labelling the publication obscene...
...which a publication is advertised does not affect its content. The other tests for obscenity, that the work appeals to "prurient interests," that it is "patently offensive," and that it is "without redeeming social value," all refer directly to the substance of the material. But the advertising criterion is a tacit admission by the Court that it cannot draw a clear distinction between a work that is obscene and one that is not on the strength of the material itself. If a book is not "patently offensive," how can the way in which it is publicized make...
...loves to discover things--anything; he collects new skills the way some people collect matchbook covers. He is the Ballantine Ale Man, a man whose smile is an expression of self-content and yet an acknowledgement of just how much there is left to do. He is the Man from the Marlboro Country--in black loafers instead of boots and straddling a seat in Widener, not a pinto on the lone prairie...
Lithgow has been content to make a mere fairy tale out of what may have been meant with more seriousness. But if it has none of the pretensions of Trouble in Tahiti, Histoire du Soldat is warm, charming theatre...