It is Tuesday, September 23rd, 10.40 a.m. as we are recording this, what are we going to be talking about today?

All right, Roman, today let's start with the opening lines of a novel. So here goes.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened. We are among the ruins. We start to build up new

little habits to have new little hopes. So, Roman, are you familiar with the novel Lady Chatterley's Lever?

No. Okay. Well, if you've never read it, Lady Chatterley's Lever is a novel written by the British author David Herbert Lawrence in 1928.

D.H. Lawrence. Right. And the plot revolves around an affair between an upper-class woman, Lady Chatterley, and a working-class man, Oliver Miller's, her gamekeeper. So despite the abstract nature of the beginning of the novel,

it's a very sexually explicit novel. Of the things I know, that's what I know.

You're right. And it's controversial for that explicitness. Lady Chatterley's Lever was subjected to

bans in different countries for being indecent or obscene. And in fact, British readers

could not actually buy the novel legally until 1960, at which point it became a bestseller

and remains an influential work of literature. And it also became the subject of heated debate

on the floor of the U.S. Senate in March of 1930.

The question was, how obscene was this book? And in the eyes of some senators, very.

In fact, one senator stood on the Senate floor and stated that Lady Chatterley's lover was

so disgusting, so dirty, and vile, that the reading of

one page was enough for me. And the debate wasn't just about D.H. Lawrence's novel. The senator

targeted all so-called obscene books. He said, I want them all kept out. I want to say to the

senators now that a father of a child would never

want the child to see this obscene matter. They are disgusting. They are beastly. Beasley.

You see, the Senate was debating a proposed change to existing law, and federal law at the time

allowed customs officials to ban literature they considered

indecent or obscene from entering the country. Senator Bronson Cutting from New Mexico

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