Now Playing in New Rochelle, "Book, Interrupted"!
Submitted by Robert Cox on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 09:33.
New Rochelle School District Censors Pages from Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen's harrowing memoir that inspired Academy Award-Winning Film starring Winona Ryder and Angela Jolie.
Students at New Rochelle School High School are going to find it difficult to complete their next assignment: comparing the film adaptation of "Girl, Interrupted" to the best-selling book. In the book, Kaysen recounts her confinement at a Massachussets mental hospital in the 1960's.
Pages from the middle of the book have been torn out by the school district after having been deemed "inappropriate" by school officials due to sexual content and strong language. Removed is a scene where the rebellious Lisa (played by Angela Jolie in the movie) encourages Susanna (played by Winona Ryder)
to circumvent hospital rules against sexual intercourse by engaging in oral sex instead.
(R rated content).
"The material was of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students," said English Department Chariperson Leslie Altschul, "since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing."
Leslie comment: Is this ENGLISH teacher for real? She believes "bowdlerizing" is appropriate?
The puritanical views of the USA never fail to amaze me, and I was born here. How a country can be more offended by nudity and sex than by horrific violence is just baffling to me.
I was born and raised in Europe and it is this weird hypocrisy that I find completely baffling and very insincere, no matter how long I live here.
The so called outrage rings shallow to my ears. I am appalled at any censorship of any kind in books. Whats next, burning of books? Fahrenheit 451 indeed.
We had to read The Tin drum in school. I was maybe 13, if I can remember correctly, maybe even younger. I think just the thought of anyone reading the Tin drum would implode the head of some of those people.
Yeah, it was a difficult read to say the least. We certainly were not sheltered in that way. It was all about the literature.
But I also grew up in a country where I sat in taverns drinking beer legally at 16 and bought crossword puzzles with boobies on the front as a child. Perfectly normal where I grew up.
America, the land where censors are scared of nekkid boobies but have no issues with someone getting their head blown off in slow mo.
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