Nat’l Spicy Hermit Day Day 319 of 2007 46 days left in this year

 HAWAIIAN WORD OF THE DAY -   ‘Luna’apoli: Censor
HAWAIIAN PROVERB OF THE DAY - “A  waste of effort to care for another’s semen.”

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  November, 1961: The best way to censor anything is to make sure it doesn’t get to the public in the first place, which is what happened this month when Honolulu police, obviously with lots of time on their hands, confiscated copies of Henry Miller’s classic novel “Tropic of Cancer.” Miller first published the novel in Paris, in 1934, but for nearly 30 years, no U.S. publisher had the guts (and enough money for the legal battles) to publish the book, which was thick with lust and sex and the usual ingredients of human interaction.

In 1961, Grove Press became the first American publisher to gather the courage and print this novel. It arrived in Honolulu in the fall of 1961. Distributors were divying up the books for reshipment to Maui and the neighbor islands when police showed up and took every copy they could lay their hands on.Maui - all of Hawaii - was not alone in this censorship. It took a 3-year court case dealing with another “obscene” book, to break the censors’ backs. The case ended up in the U.S. Supreme court, which ruled that no government entity had the power to censor such works. The first “legal” copy of the novel made it to Maui bookshelves for sale in early 1965.It would not be out of the realm of possibility to think that Hawaii’s action was in part rooted in the historical aversion to anything overtly sexual by the Christian churches.In fact, there is no corresponding word for “sexual” or “sex” in the Hawaiian language, although there are plenty of Hawaiian terms for words like lascivious, lecherous, and randy. Go figure.

Yes, it really is National Spicy Hermit Day. Spicy Hermits are southern style cookies. You can find a neat recipe here…