Librarian's Rant

In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.
The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States.

"It strikes me as very odd," said Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University and former legal counsel to former Presidents Reagan and Bush. "I think the government has an uphill struggle to justify this constitutionally."

Several groups, led by the PEN American Center and including Arcade Publishing, filed suit in U.S. District Court in New York to overturn the regulations, which cover writers in Iran, Sudan, Cuba, North Korea and, until recently, Iraq.

Violations carry severe reprisals - publishing houses can be fined $1 million and individual violators face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

"Historically, the United States has served as a megaphone for dissidents from other countries," said Ed Davis of New York, a lawyer leading the PEN challenge. "Now we're not able to hear from dissidents." [emphasis mine]

What kind of person signs up for an experiment in epidermal literature? Curiosity seekers and members of ''body modification'' communities have been early adopters. But many enlistees have been surprisingly mainstream. Mothers and daughters are requesting consecutive words. So are couples, perhaps hoping to form the syntactic equivalent of a civil union. For others, the motives are social: Jackson is encouraging her far-flung words to get to know each other via e-mail, telephone, even in person. (Imagine the possibilities. A sentence getting together for dinner. A paragraph having a party.) In addition, Jackson has heard from several dyslexics, who have struggled with mastery of writing and reading. And librarians are signing up in droves. ''A lot of librarians are probably a lot hipper than we think,'' Jackson says.