James Joyce gets his comeuppance today, nine decades or so after the fact: he's subjected to a writers' workshop of "Ulysses." A few young writers miss the point entirely; others make trivial points that suggest a certain hostility to experimentalism ("Typo: last word capitalized." I'm reminded of a classmate who once suggested that Virginia Woolf could have used a run through the grammar check in Microsoft Word.)
One interlocutor is an incurable enthusiast: "'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' So true." Another critic -- isn't there always one of these? -- says it's "way too long." (She might be right about that.) In essence it's a typical workshop.
Now that the Democrats are soon to have control of both branches of Congress, it is time to reassess ideas for what the Democrats have been calling "a new direction" for the country that were not likely to get off the ground under Republican dominance. In the case of Iraq, the Democrats have further cause for ambitious planning now that President Bush has seen to the political demise of his longtime Defense Secretary and, in so doing, called for a "fresh perspective" while acknowledging that Iraq "is not working well enough, or fast enough."
One plan that has been floated for several years but never taken seriously, as far as we know, by those in power, is the tripartite division of Iraq. Might it decrease the level of sectarian violence if each ethnic group -- Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds -- had its own nation and didn't feel a compulsion to dominate an entire traumatized country the size of California? Such a plan is particularly likely to be aired again because Joe Biden will in January become the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Biden, along with Leslie Gelb, has co-authored a plan for Iraq that proposes this very solution.
One blog, American Footprints, has called for reconsideration of the idea. Peter W. Galbraith, a highly perceptive Iraq observer who has spent a great deal of time there, discussed the idea [$] in the New York Review of Books in May 2004 and mentioned it again [$] there in his (optimistic) dissection of the Iraqi Constitution:
The outcome of the Iraqi constitutional process will therefore very likely be the three-state solution that I described in these pages in May 2004. Iraq is well on the way to becoming a loose union of three separate and radically different states (or more, if the Shiites choose to divide themselves into two regions).
Many abortion supporters have argued against the personhood and moral significance of the fetus, claiming that a fetus is clearly not a child. An acorn isn't an oak tree; a blueprint is not a building, etc. (Moral philosopher Thomas Nagel: "It cannot be said that not to be born is a misfortune.") A critical, almost fatal problem with this approach is that it begs the question in the abortion debate, because pro-lifers just argue or assume the exact opposite -- that a fetus is just like a child, morally speaking. And one is hardly likely to convince a devout member of the Catholic Church that life doesn't begin till after birth (or late in pregnancy) just by saying so loudly. (Similarly, the contention that gays are not sinners is a nonstarter in an argument with a hard-line Catholic.)
But Thomson's brilliant move was this: let's just assume the fetus does have a right to life. Couldn't it be, she asks, that abortion is still permissible? What about the competing claims of the mother -- her rights to certain freedoms, including the risk of harm, etc. In fact, Thomson goes a step further. Her argument reconceives the fetus as a famous violinist -- i.e., you might think, a particularly socially valuable human being. And yet she questions whether a person should be required, at great personal cost, to nurse a violinist to health over a period of nine months, just because she happens to find herself in a position to do so. Sure, if she agreed to do it she'd be praiseworthy, but isn't that supererogatory, as philosophers say -- in other words, above and beyond the call of duty?
Evan, after you mentionedJ.J. Thomson's classic 1971 essay on abortion -- rather prosaically titled "A Defense of Abortion" -- I pulled a copy of a legal-philosophy anthology off my shelf, to refresh my memory of it.
She raises the self-defense issue this way:
Suppose you find yourself in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a rapidly growing child -- you are already up against the wall of the house and in a few minutes you'll be crushed to death. The child, on the other hand, won't be crushed to death ...
The discussion involving waking up and finding you've been kidnapped and attached to a dying, renowned violinist who needs your organs (kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers, no less!), arises in a context slightly different from self-defense. Thomson says that while it would be nice if you agreed to stay bedridden for nine months, or longer, so the virtuoso might live, you are under no obligation to do so. For her, bringing an unwanted fetus to term is like being a Good Samaritan.
Whatever you think of the essay's conclusions, it's clearly brilliant as rhetoric: Once you read about those thought experiments, you can't get them out of your head. (The whole essay assumes that a fetus has the full rights of a human, and Thomson memorably ends by saying: "A very early abortion is surely not the killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have said here.")
In my anthology, Thomson is paired with a reply by the legal philosopher John Finnis, which is formidable and contains some memorable lines, too. I'd quote one involving Henry Fonda, and how aspects of his personality were evident in his genes "at the moment of his conception" -- but it requires too much context.
I wanted to point out a really great post on The Valve from a few days ago devoted to the need for -- and proposal of -- new terms to be used in criticism. The pomo high/low humor here is that the occasion for the post is the author's completion of Lost: Season Two on DVD.
In poster John Holbo's view -- hey, his blog's URL rips off Josh Glenn! -- "Lost is one of the great exercises in sustained infoclench in the history of World Literature." What is infoclench? "A large (often wieldy and digestible) amount of information that is not provided at any time, by some characters to the others, lest the background become too clear, or the narrative advance too sensibly." Holbo seems frustrated, here, judging by tone.
But of course, what he is observing is the very essence of the beauty and mass appeal of Lost, to wit: we don't know what in darnation is going on. This season, finally, we have met The Others, and they do not appear to be extraterrestrial or otherwise superfreaks. They have a weird little mini-society, apparently riven by internecine tensions, that is ruled by a deeply creepy guy with the deceptively gentle and prosaic name Ben. An astute friend points out part of his creepiness, besides the bug-eyes: he's always utterly still.
But the narrative withholding -- wow. It's something to behold. It's whodunit where what's being dun is also withheld from view.
In a series of inter-related posts on medical ethics, Eugene Volokh has written a thought-provoking essay, or actually an essay excerpt, arguing that the denial of experimental drug therapies to dying patients is unconstitutional.
In a way this is an intuitive argument. Many AIDS patients of the 1980s and '90s, and cancer patients across the decades, have found themselves in pitched battles with the Food and Drug Administration over the availability of cutting-edge drugs still awaiting approval by the (in)famously careful agency. And it is hard indeed to side with the government in these cases. Why not let the fatally ill decide what risks to take, even if death could thereby be hastened?
Volokh's tack is an interesting one. He grounds his claims in the right to self-defense, which is difficult to actually point to in the Constitution but has been held up in crucial court cases of the last century:
This is not a general autonomy argument, premised on the theory that all people should be free to ingest whatever they choose into their body. Rather, it’s an argument specifically focused on the right to self-defense, a right supported both by the Court’s caselaw (Roe and Casey) and by the longstanding acceptance of the right to lethal self-defense.
I thought the Roe decision was founded on what the Supreme Court called the right to privacy (a strange way to look at it, I've always thought), but perhaps they referred to a right to self-defense in the context of cases where the woman's health is at risk? I know that in a famous paper on abortion, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson posed abortion rights as a byproduct of a right to a kind of self-protection. Her thought experiment was to imagine that you wake up one day and find that you have been hooked up to another being, like a Siamese twin, who depends on your body for survival. Are you therefore bound to provide that help, for nine months, at increasing discomfort and risk? She thought not, even if health were not an issue.
I've come across an underreported story via a post on Metafilter. It seems that a man killed himself in Chicago by self-immolation in protest over the Iraq war. Shades of the monk who was famously captured in the act by an American photographer on the streets of Saigon. This would seem to be an example of the kind of public, direct protest that Drake Bennett hasn't seen much of this time around.
We know the man killed himself over the war because he left a long suicide note, at least according to the transcript posted here. On this evidence the man is clearly troubled; he regrets not slashing the throat of outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he passed by him on Delaware Avenue in 2002. His beef is with more than the war; it's with the state of the nation as a whole. But his focus is on politics and on the killing of innocent civilians.
The Metafilter writer sarcastically notes that this story hasn't exactly been all over the media. What if there were a picture, one wonders?
Superman isn't the only one to have his reputation slandered.
I'm pilfering the link from Arts & Letters Daily, but this article is worth it for the first few paragraphs alone. Robert Fulford, of the Canadian newspaper the National Post, defends the honor of the hapless Onan.
Let's just say there's no evidence that the biblical Onan, from whose name onanism derives, did what he's famous for. Now that's a bad rap.
Yesterday, Evan directed our attention to a blog post, by Seattle-area comics buff David Campbell, speculating on the politics of various superheroes. It's amusing stuff, but I was distracted by what seems like a glaring error in the very first example. Campbell claims that Superman is a moderate Republican, despite the fact that Clark Kent works for the liberal MSM, on the strength of this argument:
He’s moderate on most social issues like gay rights (Jimmy Olsen is his best pal) but is pro-capital punishment. Hey, Superman, it doesn’t matter if you cry after executing some Kryptonian criminals -- you’re still pro-death penalty.
But Superman doesn't kill Kryptonian criminals, he banishes them -- to the Phantom Zone. Remember? Here's evidence:
PZ inmates plan recidivist activities
And here's more evidence, from a different medium:
Jor-El sends criminals to the PZ
I demand a recount. Superman is one of those fire-breathing, Kansas-bred populists whose passing Tom Frank laments!
I mentioned in a recent post that local -- but internationally renowned -- art photographer (and radical curator) Rosamond Purcell has a new book out, "Bookworm." The Arlington-based essayist and lit-mag editor Sven Birkerts contributes an essay offering us ways to think about Purcell's gorgeous photos of decaying and insect/rodent-worried books (among other things), not to mention her "associative intelligence." I'm reading it this week, slowly, taking my time with each photo.
I bring up Purcell again because, earlier this week, my children and I were delighted to discover her photos of natural-history museum specimens illustrating a sharp essay on evolution in the latest issue of National Geographic.
Orthoporus ornatus, photographed by Purcell
Her three books with Stephen Jay Gould, for which she went spelunking in Harvard's natural history collections, among other places, were ahead of their time. Now that evolution has been challenged, as "just a theory," by the president himself, we're going to see many defenses of Darwin's theory. The illustrations are ready to go: Purcell has spent years figuring out how to photograph natural-history specimens in a new way, one that eschews the natural and makes you think.
UPDATE: I just noticed that, some time this morning, Slate published a slideshow-style review of Purcell's new book. Like me, the reviewer, Amanda Schaffer, argues that Purcell is both supremely un-contemporary and right up to date:
Purcell treats old objects with a sense of wonder. Her aesthetic has sometimes been described as pre-Enlightenment. Yet the work is far more contemporary than it first appears. The obsessive focus on selecting, classifying, and repurposing -- the culling of favorites from other peoples' favorites -- makes it like some ultracool group projects on the Web.
What she said!
ANOTHER UPDATE: It turns out that David Pescovitz at Boing Boing is another Purcell fan.
A contributor to the Guardian blog working in the field of "neuroeconomics" (?), Paul J. Zak, has an interesting post about the moral dimensions of capitalism. Not a contradiction in terms, he argues.
Zak points out that a market economy relies on a certain web of trust:
[The] decentralized delivery of goods relies on employees working for two weeks before receiving a pay cheque, companies offering each other lines of credit, and banks offering bridge loans.
Furthermore, Zak says, there are biochemical reasons, or at least incentives, that kick in an a capitalist transaction: "We have found that trust causes a spike in oxytocin and begets reciprocation -- the sharing of money. We are 'wired' to cooperate, and we find it rewarding in the same way that our brains identify eating a good meal or sex as rewarding."
Occasionally, about 2% of the time, you run across someone who doesn't provide trust in return for trust, a freeloader. "The technical term in my lab for these people is 'bastards.'"
Jacob T. Levy has a perceptive post over at The New Republic's Open University about yesterday's landslide. Can we say landslide? Perhaps only if the Senate tips to the Democrats, which is starting to seem possible, though it may take weeks to know.
Levy notes that with the losses of Nancy Johnson and Lincoln Chafee and Deval Patrick's overwhelming win, not to mention dramatic local results in Levy's own famously independent New Hampshire, the Democrats have firmly consolidated control of New England. It's a level of domination Levy compares to the GOP's in the South.
Of course, the story of the Republicans in the South is much more significant, both politically and historically. That was once Democratic territory, the roots that gave rise to Bill Clinton in Hope, Arkansas. The right-wing takeover there was part of what Thomas Frank puzzled over in his highly influential 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Frank wondered why the relatively poor rural heartland was and is being won by the Republicans, who favor taxation that gives such voters less help and fewer guarantees should things turn worse in the family. The leftward lean of New England yesterday was less momentous, though the Democratic takeover of the Mass. statehouse is still a nationwide story.
A former test pilot and current galactic police officer, Green Lantern has always been a running dog for The Man. Dude carries a WMD on his ring finger and flies around reshaping reality according to his idea of The Way Things Should Be. Total neocon.
And a quick take on Ghost Rider, who he thinks is politically unaffiliated: "The Spirit of Vengeance, Ghost Rider is the ultimate protest voter. He always votes against the incumbent and anyone who endorses helmet laws."
Taking a break from all things electoral... The Valve offers up a refreshingly untimely post on cult-novelist-turned-mainstream-success Haruki Murakami, and the art of the Generation X novel. Under examination is Murakami's "Norwegian Wood," which was published in Japan in 1987, and in the West about a decade later. There was and remains a hunger for Murakami's work, particularly among college kids and young adults, most of all in Japan.
The author of the post, U. Cal grad student Joseph Kugelmass, has something interesting to say about the talk in the novel (and in Murakami generally):
First, the characters indulge in a hyperreal sort of dialogue, unusual enough to warrant a closer look. Second, the main character’s friendships and love affairs are based on a strangely passive aestheticism that may, finally, be of concern to Murakami.
I happen to think that "Norwegian Wood" is utter trash -- highbrow, poseur trash, yet still definitely trash. But I agree exactly with Kugelmass's description, which intends praise. There is a kind of mannered, elliptical speech that Murakami indulges in that actually more closely echoes cheap films like "Reality Bites" than Murakami would like to admit. Young women and men sit around passively talking in vague, faux artistic rhetorical test flights. Things sound nice, and philosophical, but actual depth is merely faked rather than achieved.
Today will see the latest chapter in the intriguing story of election days conducted during the Information Age -- i.e., roughly since the birth of CNN. Part of what is interesting is just how poorly the rapid and wide dissemination of election day information has actually predicted or otherwise captured the reality of what is happening on that day.
Today, inevitably, exit poll information will pour forth onto the Internet at a certain late-afternoon hour. When is a matter of question. News articles today report that the tabulation of exit polls and actual results will occur, until 5 p.m. Eastern, in a kind of quarantined area where only those without electronic communication devices can tread. Could this actually work? And why 5 p.m., when all the polls are still open? (Indiana polls, which host several close House races, close at 6 p.m., so those will be the first hard numbers we get.)
We'll all be trying to keep a lid on any afternoon bouts of pessimism and flights of euphoria. But most likely we'll fail, or at least thosecommentators who live for this day will fail for us.
Can this be real? There are plenty of YouTube hoaxes circling around -- remember lonelygirl15? -- so we would do well to be wary. But today there are reports online and on MSNBC that the FBI is investigating allegations of voter intimidation and suppression in Virginia. It appears that telephone calls are being made to heavily Democratic areas giving inaccurate or misleading information about polling sites. The video below purports to be a recording of one such call.
Universities have what are called Institutional Review Boards, to ensure that all research on humans involves informed consent, and no undue risks. They're essential, given the outrages that have been committed in the past against unwitting subjects (as in the infamous Tuskegee studies conducted on African Americans).
Trouble -- or at least potential confusion -- arises, though, when these IRB's, conceived mostly with medical research in mind, assert authority over research in the social sciences, including history. I wrote about this six years ago, in the late, lamented magazine Lingua Franca. Sociologists doing field work have been told they need to carry consent forms out onto the streets, which makes chatting up a drug dealer tricky, to say the least. A demographer at Berkeley who befriended a 112-year old man in a nursing home was hauled before an IRB for failing to get permission beforehand. Oral historians were told that they couldn't depart from scripted questions approved by an IRB. And the IRB could veto questions.
This week, in a substantial piece of reporting, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that these problems persist. Among the scholarly horror stories: An IRB tells a student he's not allowed to write about an interview he conducted with his father, because the interview had not been approved by an IRB.
It's clear some IRB's are being heavy handed, but it's hard to tell how pervasive these problems are. If you're a social scientist, and an IRB has demanded changes in a research project you think was reasonable, I'd love to hear the details. Click on my name, on the left rail of this page, to get my email address.
For a taste of the view of our strange politics from other shores, one could do worse than to read the marvelous critic John Lanchester's "Diary" in the new London Review of Books.
Lanchester, previewing tomorrow's D-Day, looks back with a mixture of wistfulness and anger at the final days of the 2004 US election season. Wistfulness for what seemed possible for the Democrats, anger at the bloggers and other non-mainstream media that made it seem possible. (At one point he singles out electoral-vote.com, which I've just highlighted, for blame.)
But along the way he gives political blogs their apportionment of credit. He says the blogs are a very powerful force within the Democratic party, citing MoveOn.org, and the surprising candidacy of Connecticut's Ned Lamont. He also adds, with a witty and very English keyboard touch:
The blogs point out that the MSM [mainstream media] ignored Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House, or treated it as an embarrassment, when it was in fact the most powerful piece of political comedy (and political theatre) since the Cheney administration came to power.
In Thursday's Dallas Morning News, Kristie Ramirez claimed she'd heard some heavy-duty discourse at Dallas's Inwood Lounge, a martini bar located inside a cool old movie theater:
Scene: St. Mark's alums, and media and art intellects who argue the finer points of Kierkegaard and bagel dogs. Heard: "Kierkegaard would totally approve of the Inwood's reluctance to conform and sell mainstream hot dogs. It's all about keeping it real."
Now, it's possible that someone at the Inwood tried to explain Kierkegaard's notion of authenticity to someone else in this fashion... which might or might not be ridiculous and lame. But Ramirez seems to believe that doing so is automatically lame. Why?
The Inwood
On Saturday, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tirdad Derakhshani piled on the pop culture, literary, and philosophical in-jokes:
It was Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake's night Thursday at the MTV Europe Awards in Copenhagen - hometown of former MTV VJ Hans Christian Andersen and Head Bangers Ball head case Søren Kierkegaard. Justin, who sizzled as MC, also won for best male and best pop act!
"Head Bangers Ball head case": Ha!
Justin
Also writing on Saturday, the Scotsman's Tom Lappin opened a soccer (aka football) story like so:
Football's continuing status as the planet's most popular diversion has something to do with its ability to conjure up neat 90-minute portions of most human forms of expression. If Tuesday's Barcelona v Chelsea encounter was vindictiveness in its most entertaining form ... Wednesday's match at the Emirates Stadium was surrealism crossed with existentialism, the unlikely tinged with a sense of human futility. Arsenal's inability to score could have been scripted by Albert Camus, who as a goalkeeper, would have a appreciated the blank beauty of that 0-0 scoreline. All it lacked was a Cure song as the soundtrack.
*GROAN*. Speaking of Camus, on Sunday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Texas) trotted out a familiar quotation:
Bagwell neighborhood residents are not alone in their fondness for fall color. On the subject, French playwright Albert Camus said, "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
As I've said before, I'm not sure this is really a Camus quote. I'd like to ask all journalists to stop using it till I've found out for sure. Please don't ignore this piece of advice...
Finally, in today's issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose "Babel" just opened, is asked: What compels you to look at people and tell their stories? He answers in an extremely philosophical fashion, which I'll quote at length:
I am interested in humanity. I feel a lot of compassion when I develop these projects. Compassion is a key word for me. Babel is about compassion and that's something we have lost, the ability to judge or see things with compassion. The more contradictory the character, the more attracted I am to him. Western cultures deny the fact that we will die.
As different as animals are, they're immortal because they don't know they will die. I remember my kids' eyes -- I remember seeing the change when they found out their father could disappear forever. But we run away from it, we try not to get old, we get surgery, use Viagra -- use everything. We cover the sun with a finger and it's ridiculous.
Doing that, we lose the opportunity to live a life full of intensity and we do the opposite of what we are really trying to achieve. When I watch TV, I get so depressed. The news, all the wars as entertainment have commercials selling medicine. These guys are selling fear and depression really. (Philosopher Jean-Paul) Sartre and (author James Joyce) were kids compared to the existentialism you see on TV (laughs).
My films have been called a trilogy of death, but I think they're about life; life with shadows and light and accepting the fact that death is part of the process. What will happen to the flower that doesn't have the opportunity to be born again?
Inarritu
He makes some good points! And on that note, I bid you adieu -- till next Monday.
Way back in 2002, shortly after the Ideas section was launched, I interviewed Brookline native Jody Rosen -- now firmly entrenched in Brooklyn, he's a music critic for The Nation and for Slate -- about his then-new book, White Christmas, a fascinating account of how a Jewish songwriter composed what quickly became America's most popular Christmas song. And last year, in another Ideas item, I quoted Rosen's blistering response to an offhand remark that NYT columnist David Brooks made about French rap. I also followed his blog, The Anachronist, which was dedicated to early-early pop music, until he stopped updating it.
Now Rosen is back on my radar with the release of Jewface, a compilation of vaudeville-era Jewish novelty songs (songs largely written by Jewish composers, including Irving Berlin, published by Jewish-owned Tin Pan Alley music firms, and performed by Jewish vaudevillians before cheering Jewish audiences) -- from 1905-1922 that he has collected over the years on wax cylinders and 78s. (The label is Reboot Stereophonic.) This is minstrelsy, Jewish-style: or "coarse ethnic lampoon as ethnic in-group entertainment," as Rosen has put it.
In the preceding paragraph, I purposely left out the adjective between "a" and "compilation" because any adjective used here would have to be a thoroughly dialectical one. Like "Borat," this collection is creepy-yet-hilarious, fascinating-yet-depressing, great-yet-terrible. "Perhaps the Most Offensive Album Ever Made," trumpets the CD cover -- and a couple of the song titles alone -- "When Mose With His Nose Leads The Band," "Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars" -- make one tend to agree. But like many cultural phenomena that attract and repel simultaneously, I find "Jewface" enchanting; I'm obsessed with it.
Decide for yourself: Take a listen to Ada Jones's 1908 tune "Under the Matzos Tree," here.
I've been writing a lot on Ezra Klein and his various Internet finds, but he has an interesting post today pointing to a more interesting bit from the right-leaning Ross Douthat, who is a staffer at the increasingly right-leaning Atlantic.
Douthat argues that the Bush administration's bungling in the Middle East is in a way a greater betrayal than we tend to think now, five years after 9/11 launched their frenzy. At the time, whatever we felt about the hawks' politics, we thought of Rumsfeld, Powell et al. as highly experienced and trustworthy when it came to foreign military policy:
If you had asked me, circa 1999, to pick out a group of senior GOPers who I would have wanted at the table in a national-security crisis - well, I'm not sure I could have done better than Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, with (in theory, though of course it didn't turn out that way) Brent Scowcroft whispering in Condi's ear, and George H.W. whispering in his son's.
But now, as Douthat says, instead we have this, if we're inclined to listen to Bob Woodward.
We at Brainiac have resisted taking part in tracking the daily charges and stumbles of the political horse race this year. Plenty of blogs do it, usually with a partisan slant.
But at one point I did mention Votemaster, where an American computer science professor living in the Netherlands compiles all the available polls, weights them somehow according to methodology and sample size, and attempts to predict the election outcome. (He did the same thing, anonymously but to a lot of press attention, in 2004.)
Just thought I would check in with him with one day more. He has the Senate at 50-49-1, in favor of the Democrats, and has a whopping Democrat advantage in the House of 239-196! It's also worth noting (bottom of the Votemaster home page) that he lists the predictions of several other vote gurus. Every one has the Democrats taking the House. Three have the Democrats gaining a tiny edge in the Senate, with two predicting a tie ballgame. (By the way, tie goes to the GOP, because of Cheney. They would still be the majority party.)
Food porn, apartment porn, investment porn: "As a kind of nominative suffix, porn is in," writes William Safire in today's "On Language" column. "In is not a dirty word," he adds. "Neither is porn."
He's right about that: Porn, the word, is not itself taboo, whether you're talking dessert porn, house porn, or sex videos. But not everyone gets the distinction. In January, for instance, cartoonist Scott Adams told his blog readers that his editor had made him substitute "smut" for "porn" in a "Dilbert" strip.
And last month, Ireland's internet registrar banned the word porn in the country's domain names. (The Dublin man who owns Sex.ie was surprised to hear that his next venture, Porn.ie, had been rejected as a danger to public morality.)
More important, though: What the heck does "nominative suffix" have to do with anything? Last time I looked, a nominative suffix was a word ending that marked grammatical case, like the –us on domus in Latin. Unless I'm missing something, the porn in "apartment porn" is a plain old noun (with an attributive modifier) -- not a suffix, not necessarily nominative, and not at all in need of a fancy new name.
