[Pen-l] Obscene

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Available on home video on February 10th, “Obscene” helps to document a 
point that I have made repeatedly, namely that the old left of the 1930s 
was midwife to both the beat generation and the political radicalization 
and counter-culture of the 1960s.

Focused on the career of Barney Rosset, who founded Grove Press and 
published Evergreen Review, this superb documentary reveals how it was 
completely natural for a member of the Young Communists in 1937 to 
eventually end up publishing not only “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and 
“Tropic of Cancer” in defiance of the Calvinist censorship laws of the 
1950s, but to also print the “Autobiography of Malcolm X” in defiance of 
the racist attitudes that prevailed in American publishing.

When Rosset discovered that Doubleday decided not to publish Malcolm’s 
autobiography, his Grove Press came to the rescue. This was completely 
consistent with values that he had embraced since his high school days 
when he published a student newspaper called “The Sommunist”. The title 
was a playful riff on the earlier titles, “The Communist” and “The 
Socialist”.

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/obscene/
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