but, but, but…there’s also the riverwalk, great german restaurants, locally brewed beer (well, maybe not so many any of those anymore), the delta queen, the big red machine, five-ways, mount adams, the krohn conservatory, the symphony, mount adams, the zoo…and my old childhood pal tyrone yates, rabble-rousing city councilman. you could do worse.

I was working for the naughty professor at the time—Jack Hafferkamp, formerly of Medill, publisher of Libido: The Journal of Sex and Sensibility. Pretty tame stuff next to Mapplethorpe, even, but the Citizens for Decency in Cincy had him in their sites. A guy took his toddler daughter to a Borders and had her hand a copy of Libido to the cashier and pay for it, and then they tried to sue, but the case got thrown out for being such a transparent ploy.

Sounds like Ashcroft was hell-bent on making obscenity his pet project until he got distracted by 9/11, and now the right’s demanding he get back on track. And here’s a guy who thinks the tits on statuary in courthouses is obscene, so brace yourselves for the possibility of separate beds and euphemisms like “bun in the oven” on TV again if Bush gets another term.

Editor James Barbieri tortures phrases masterfully and mercilessly, finding a way to impart passivity to every statement. Reporting on a city council meeting, he’d write something like, “It was stated by Councilman Joe Schmoe …”

He’d report a power outage something like this: “Indicated was that the power line was fallen upon by a tree after the tree was struck by a passing truck, which was lost control of by its driver. Stated by the driver was that he became distracted while trying to retrieve a lit cigarette that was dropped by a passenger. The driver was taken to Bluffton Regional Medical center by Wells County EMS, where it was stated by medical staff that his condition is thought to be serious. Indicated by power company officials was that customers affected were twenty-seven homes in the Poneto area.”

OMG! I scared myself!

One Saturday morning I was listening to commentary on the uproar, on public radio. I thought, “Hell Fire, Cinci ain’t all that fur away!” Got in my Chevy pickup and went to see what all the fuss was about.

I found a line extending a block down the street from the exhibit space, and two burly cops backing up the person who was checking IDs. A sixteen-year-old could have gotten into one of the dives across the river in Covington and lost his virginity to a VD-infected hooker more easily than he could have become irredemably corrupted by the Mapplethorpe exhibit.

I was impressed by the art in Mapplethorpe’s photos. The sexually explicit ones were in a small room off to one side, and most of them were small prints. Had I been looking for sexual arousal, I could have gotten a bigger thrill going to any of the porn shops nearer home and paying $5 or so for a magazine, without having my ID checked while a Greenbay-Packer-sized cop looked on.

I don’t remember anybody breaking down into tears when I was at Iowa. One guy threatened to punch me after class because he didn’t like something I said, but nobody cried. Story went around, though, about Stanley Elkin coming to visit the year before I arrived and giving a chosen handful of grad students one on one critiques of their work. During one of these meetings the girl who was discussing her story with him burst out of the office, sobbing and wailing, and ran from the building. Elkin popped out of the office with a baffled and apologetic look on his face. He said to the secretary:

“I don’t think she understood. I *liked* her story.”