{"id":1510,"date":"2005-04-18T08:54:21","date_gmt":"2005-04-18T12:54:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1510"},"modified":"2005-04-18T08:54:21","modified_gmt":"2005-04-18T12:54:21","slug":"paedophilia-and-lit-crit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1510","title":{"rendered":"Paedophilia and Lit Crit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know whether Rowan Williams got into any trouble for praising the works of William Mayne, a children&#8217;s author convicted last year of sexual offences against young female fans. I hope not. Since it was the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/article\/0,,2087-1572631,00.html\">Sunday Times<\/a> that got the story, a lot of other papers are going to discount the possibility that it might be true. What struck me, however, was the comment from &#8220;Michelle Elliott, director of <em>Kidscape,<\/em> a child safety group who is herself a children&#8217;s author&#8221; [sic, including the absent comma].<\/p>\n\n<p><span class=\"loony\">&#8220;I wouldn&#8217;t touch his (Mayne&#8217;s) books with a barge pole. Books are the sum of you as a person. To divorce the writings of an author from the author himself is impossible.&#8221;<\/span> But the whole point of books is that that they allow us to <em>subtract<\/em> from ourselves as people. They let us leave out all the vain dull and inadequate bits. They let us backspace till we have got it right.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know whether Rowan Williams got into any trouble for praising the works of William Mayne, a children&#8217;s author convicted last year of sexual offences against young female fans. I hope not. Since it was the Sunday Times that &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1510\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1510\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}