Green Eggs and Glam

In its celebration of imagination, Dr. Seuss’s first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, from 1937, was more important to my development as a writer than my parents. So the recent news flash that it had been cancelled — pulled out of print by its own publisher — spun my mind back to the time the government of Canada cancelled me.

In April 1993, my first book with Beacon Press, the Unitarian Universalist non-profit that had published James Baldwin and the Pentagon Papers, was seized by Canada Customs as being in violation of federal obscenity laws. The obscenity in question appeared in “Knights, Young Men, Boys,” a chapter that I titled after the supernumeraries of Wagner’s Parsifal. Roughly halfway through the book, the chapter is illustrated with thirty-six images of knights, young men, and boys. There are two photos from the 1951 Bayreuth staging of...