Hucked :: The Trouble with Twain

Any time I read in a news report that "The blogs are on fire today with opinions on..." I usually zone out.  This is a defensive response since my wife hates it when I yell at the radio, and this isn't that kind of blog anyway... most of the time. 

But this time it was one of my favorite books at the center of the storm.

I grew up in Missouri, immersed in the legendary shadow of Mark Twain.  I spent a lot of time pretending to be Tom Sawyer (I found Tom more relatable than Huck)  so an incredible amount of my parent's and grandparents' twine and twigs were sacrificed to my adolescent experiments with raft building.  One of the reasons I focused on Tom rather than Huck was that I never quite knew what to do with the escaped slave narrative.  I knew what to do with "River Pirates", but not what to do with Jim.

I grew up knowing that the black kids were every bit as human as the white kids, so Huck's slowly-dawning revelation about that fact seemed a bit daft to me.  It's a mindset that I cannot fathom... but I knew people, all too many people, who had no trouble whatsoever thinking of dark-skinned people as less.

I wasn't going to comment on this because, let's be honest with ourselves, this is not the first time Huckleberry Finn has had its language whitewashed.  When was the last time you heard young Huck say "Nigger Jim" on the silver screen?  Why?  Because we don't say that anymore.  And to put those words in a young actor's mouth in our racially-charged culture would be anathema to our sensibilities.

And if you cared to look, there are a dozen "condensed" or "young reader's editions" of the book for sale in which that troubling racial epithet is suspiciously absent.  Why we're arguing about it this time is anyone's guess.  I suspect it's that the imprint putting it out is called "New South" just puts an unfortunate spin on the story with southern states holding events to celebrate their secession from the union.  Timing is everything, I guess.

And while the reasons for the Civil War was more-or-less an argument about state's rights, the "state right" at the center of the fight was undeniably the right to own people because they have a darker skin color than yours.

I'm not a sociologist and I'm not a Twain scholar.  I'll leave the socio-political wrangling over this mess to those as have the academic credentials to back up their arguments.  But my friends in the American Library Association tell me that Huck Finn is at or near the top of every list of books that have been challenged or banned and has been pretty much since it came out.  Maybe we can take some solace in the idea that the reasons for challenging Huck have (we are told) evolved from "This is too accurate about how we are now" to "This is too accurate about how we were."

That is progress of a sort, I suppose...

Unless, we're lying to ourselves.

Unless, as Salon said, this is viewed from the standpoint of America photoshopping the flaws out of its history like a magazine airbrushing the character out of an aging starlet's face. 

Wait... Did I just say that our turbulent racial history is akin to "character lines"?

Yes, and I think that's an apt description.  Every wrinkle on your face is the track of past moments of joy or anger or grief.  Just as every muscle showing in your torso is the record of hard hours at the gym, every blemish or bloat are the remnants of indulgence or negligence or sloth. To wave them away with the stroke of an editor's pen is to lie about who you really are and worst of all, to lie about the past that got you to where you are.

This is less about the excision of a word from a single book (as I've noted, it's not the first time) and indicative of something that's a resurgent trend in our books and classrooms.  When textbooks are being rewritten to make our founding fathers seem more pious than they were, or our forefathers seem more enlightened than they were, it's a lie.  And the most troubling part of that lie isn't the lie itself, but how it hides the progress we've made (or the ways we've regressed) since the incident we are sanitizing to fit a current ideological desire.

History is what it is.  It's what happened, not what we wish had happened.  It's about what our forerunners believed and taught and thought and how it impacted the way that they acted.  It's how we measure our progress from one state to another, from one mindset to the next, from the barbaric to the civilized and all too often, back again.  It is how we learn not to repeat mistakes past and what we point to when we have. And every time we put a coat of paint over the past in the interest of keeping people comfortable, something valuable is lost... the wisdom that comes with the lines on our collective face.  Wisdom that we will soon forget if we bury the lines under layers of airbrushing.

This is what we are doing with Huck Finn.  Lying to ourselves, to our children especially, about how we got from a place where we required a journey through cold, dark waters to arrive at the conclusion that that people with darker skin tones are just as human as we are to a point where we're uncomfortable admitting that we ever thought that they weren't.

And worst of all, it reminds us that we're not as far down that road as we would like to think.

Intellectual Freedom

There's an unwritten contract between writer and reader. The author is here to challenge you, to hold up a mirror and show you what they see, a new viewpoint different from your own. It is in the nature of any reflection that we will not always see what we expect to see. At its worst it is merely titillating, but at its best this is the beginning of a conversation.

The juxtaposition of different viewpoints, one set beside the next, interlocking reflections of life in our times (or past times in some cases) adds depth and understanding because no single image can be the entire picture. In the words of the oft-censored author Douglas Adams: "The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough..."

Without the conversation, without seeing as much of the picture as is available to you, all the reflections available to you, you cannot hope to have a fully-realized picture of our culture. Pull the mirror off the wall and the reflection will go away but it will not change what it showed. Only by taking all the images available -- even those we disagree with -- and overlaying them can we begin to see the whole interconnected collage of overlapping lives and loves and wonder that surrounds us. The whole of creation laid out before us in the stacks of the world library.

Last year, Judith Krug died, leaving behind a tradition of raising up those voices that others would silence. Ms Krug founded "Banned Books Week" from the aptly-named Office of Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.

Art is supposed to be a challenge to your viewpoint. If all we ever read or hear are those voices which already agree with us, then we are stagnant and the conversation dies. And that... that would be truly tragic.

The Hall of Dangerous Ideas includes the likes ofL Geoffery Chaucer, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger, the Christina Bible, the Quran and the US Constitution. These are the dangers when we allow someone else to decide what we can read.  Some of the greatest minds and influential works ever to pass from pen to page have all been censored, blocked, burned and banned.  And through it all, the real literary heroes have been the librarians who stepped in front of the censors and said "Not on my watch".

UPenn offers the following list of banned literature: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html.

Find out more and get your own free unplugged robot bookmark downloads from The American Library Association (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom.

I'm With the Banned

I grew up reading Maurice Sendak and Judy Blume, Doctor Seuss and Robert Louis Stevenson.  I read Mark Twain and John  Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.  I read Vonnegut and Bradbury and Steven King. 

And all along the way, my path was peppered with people telling me to stop, that those books were a danger; they would be a corrupting influence on my growing mind.  If the books didn't do it, then Dungeons & Dragons was sure to have me dressed up in a black cloak and lighting candles around a pentagram in no time and if that didn't do me in, the rock bands were all trying to get me to commit suicide anyway.

It's a wonder any of us survived, really.

Nonetheless, I drank deeply at the font of knowledge, thought for myself, and often found things that changed my mind about one topic or another.  Judy Blume showed me an unblinking look at the world through a girl's eyes.  Vonnegut changed my mind about the glorification of war.  Anne Frank taught me the horrors amongst hope that even Vonnegut couldn't bear to relate.  Twain convinced me that my racist peers were idiots.  Hemingway was a fine role model for how not to relate to the opposite sex... the list is endless.

I grew up on Sesame Street and managed to maintain an attention span sufficient to read (and write) long-form fiction.  I pulled imaginary capers with The Mad Scientist Club without becoming a brainy hooligan and followed Harriet the Spy through the secret lives of her friends without becoming a snoop.  (Though I did major in journalism, so there might be something there...)  I read the Brothers Grimm without once encountering a witch trying to entice me into her oven and the poems of Shel Silverstien without becoming... well, whatever it was that the people who wanted to ban it were afraid I would become.  I honestly can't be bothered to care what they thought would happen.

And the dictionaries!  Oh my, the dictionaries!  Yes, Virginia, the dictionary is an insidious thing, full of pulchritude and words that will "infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war."  I picked up many a dictionary containing all of Carlin's Seven Dirty Words and all I got for my trouble was a first-class vocabulary.

Too often I find myself faced with someone whose world is a frightening place, a Place That Is Out To Get You.  And apparently it was a world without personal responsibility, a world where we were hapless victims floating along, performing horrors at the whims of Muppets, dungeon masters, guitarists, and authors.

At times, it seems like my entire childhood was spent traipsing across a landscape of the banned and the forbidden. Jim Henson was destroying our attention span so that MTV could turn us into zombies or sex maniacs.  (Or worse yet, zombie sex maniacs!) 

Come to think of it, with all the "evil" I was exposed to, it's a wonder I didn't become a super villain.  I guess all those Marvel comics I read and bad 50's B movies I watched really didn't do me a lick of good. [edit: All I got out of it was a book deal].

Somehow my generation survived our exposure to the blandishments of the fiendish cathode ray tube, as well as Judy Blume, Shel Silverstein, Jim Henson, and Talking Heads.  Just as my parent's generation survived JD Salinger and To Kill a Mockingbird, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles.  And just as each generation has persevered in spite of (or because of) those cultural influences their elders and betters were certain would destroy them all the way back into the dawn of time.

And I think that's what the book banner is afraid of most. Not that we'll be destroyed or seduced by what we read, but that we won't. That the fear lives only in their heads. That we'll read this Awful Thing That Should Not Be Tolerated and go on to live perfectly normal lives. We might discover that the bad guys don't always get their poetic comeuppance. And worst of all, we might discover that the ideas that they find foreign and threatening aren't that frightening after all.

- Scott

Banned Books Week Starts Tomorrow

An Odious Little Book

Last week was Banned Books Week and mine was not the only blog taken over by the topic of banned and challenged books. Christine at Stacked posted a book review of one of the most reviled books in history and mounted a compelling defense of keeping it in print and on the shelves.

Of course, I am talking about Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler.

The intellectual courage it took for her to review such a book is astounding. During banned books week, she took on a book that almost everyone agrees is the vile product of a twisted mind, the elucidation of a twisted ideology that literally broke the world and began the march toward the holocaust. I had to read Mein Kampf in college and the thing that struck me most about it is how boring the whole thing was.

Hardly one of Hitler's firebrand moments.

And that is the dangerous face of evil. Hannah Arendt, reporting for the New Yorker on the Trial of Adolph Eichmann, wrote of the realization that evil wasn't a radical force, or a transcendent philosophy, it was the banal and efficient daily application of a horrible ideology. An evil force of bookkeepers backed up by the might of the Wermacht.

I've already posted my defense of keeping both extremes of the political argument in print and readily-available for readers despite the fact that one side or the other makes my blood boil. For better or worse, his is the map of modern political dialogue (or screaming matches as the case may be) and to make it disappear would be to lie about who we are and how we communicate... and how we don't.

But what of Mein Kampf? Surely if any book deserves the "Banned" stamp, it is this one.

This is where it gets sticky. It's easy to rally around a book we love, but how do we argue for a book that we hate? At what point do we cut it off? I don't know. There are some ideas, some philosophies, some books out there in the world that even I think should be suppressed. But where do we draw that line as a society? As I see it, the biggest problem with banning a book like Mein Kampf is that it doesn't make it go away, it drives it underground. It adds a titillating context to reading it that changes the way your mind accepts or rejects its content.  

This is banned, censored, someone doesn't want me to read this... 

Back in my Borders days, we carried Mein Kampf on the shelf in the German history section. At least once every few months, a German citizen visiting our shores would come into my bookstore and for a copy of the book to take home with them. Because it was banned in Germany--it still is for all I know. They were so intensely curious about it, wanted to see it; most of them bought a copy. Between college students slogging through the thing for a class and the German visitors, it's a wonder we ever had it on the shelf.

As my grandparents’ generation dies and then my parents generation follows them, the realities of the world that went to war pass from living memory to the pages of books. There is an erosion when this happens, sharp edges get knocked off and we forget the details. There will one day be no one left to tell us the story with the horror in their voices of having lived through it; no more war crimes trials and extraditions of aging Nazis; no more unremarkable accountants standing before the assembled masses, horrifying us with the blandness of their evil. And there will be no more neighbors, grandparents, or art teachers, as I had growing up, who will show you the numbers tattooed on their arms and witness to you the reality of the camps with hushed voices and tears.

Without the written record, without the evidence on the shelves of every bookstore, we will slowly lose our horror. The names Elie Weisel and Simon Weisenthal and Anne Frank will become dusty and cobwebbed names on the flaking spines of books in an unregarded section of your local library.

6 million killed in the camps. The numbers are too great to grasp, too evil to contain. How long before the greatest atrocity in human history is regarded as an anomaly even by those that aren't among those who deny that it happened. Already it's viewed by too many as something that could only happen once, Hitler was evil, a malign spirit from a medieval morality play, the devil incarnate, somehow separate from the human race. If he wasn't human we don't have to accept that a human being did such a thing... or could do it again.

I'm not the first to say it and hopefully I won't be the last, but it's already begun, the myth of Hitler has overtaken the historical. Hitler has devolved into a caricature, a name thrown around in arguments to vilify your enemy’s position and with overuse any metaphor weakens.

The greatest lie we tell ourselves is “We will never forget” and the second greatest is “It could never happen again”. Which is why I believe that the speech that needs the most protection is so often the speech that scares us the most.

---

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel in progress is The Palimpsest.

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An Incomplete Map

The dawn of this country spawned many pithy quotes and axioms, sayings that embody the spirit of this country, many of which cannot be reliably attributed to an individual. There were just too many erudite people wandering around at that time to be sure. Regardless, the one I quote most often is has to be "I hate what you say, but I will die for your right to say it."

I came on here last Sunday and gave my defense of challenging literature. (Literature is supposed to be challenging.) It is easy to defend something that exists in the nebulous realm of fiction because it is easy for reasonable people to divorce the actions of Holden Caulfield and Kilgore Trout from reality even as we acknowledge their satire and latent messages about our reality.

Yesterday someone reminded me that some of the most challenging books out there aren't sold in the literature section.

Recent years has underlined how truly divisive political speech can be and how quickly it can change the nature of the debate from issues to namecalling. The partisans stand behind barricades constucted of paper and ink with provocative titles like Stupid White Men and Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and/or Liberal Fascism and Arguing with Idiots.

When the aforementioned Stupid White Men came out, I was manager of a large bookstore in the Seattle exurb of Bellevue, WA. At least three times a week, I was hauled downstairs to answer the complaints of someone complaining about the latest political screed. Because Bellevue tends to trend in the conservative direction, the complaints were generally of Michael Moore or Al Franken (though Anne Coulter racked up quite a few because this is still the west coast, after all).

At the end of the day, it was easy to want to just chuck the entire "Politics" section in the bin. It was even easier to convince yourself that removing the grit from the gears would actually improve things... and that's part of the dangerous slope that becomes slipperier the farther you travel along it. Far funnier to re-label the entire section as 'Fiction' and pretend you didn't know who did it. (Not that I would ever do such a thing... ahem.)

To challenge a book -- to ban it or attempt to ban it -- is to try to craft a culture in which only one viewpoint gets to be aired. A one-sided debate is not a debate, and to silence the extreme elements is to stifle those who would speak more reasonably. To chuck Michael Moore in the bin is every bit as dangerous as pitching Glenn Beck, no matter which one you ultimately agree with. Every book is an historical document. From the thrillers of Tom Clancy to the best of Kurt Vonnegut, each book reflects the world in which it was generated. Political books are documentation of the width and breadth of American political and cultural thought. To remove any of them would be to have an incomplete map of our cultural landscape. To draw a map of the middle and scribble in the left and right margins "Here there be dragons."

Stephen King Essay

Someone sent me a link to this great essay written by Stephen King after yet another parent group decided his books didn't belong in their local middle school library. I don't always like King's fiction - often I don't, actually. Horror isn't my cup of tea. But his short fiction is frequently sublime and his essays on writing should be turned into a textbook on writing. Anyway, I like his balanced approach to the subject of censorship, book banning and how it applies to schools...

"Do I think that all books and all ideas should be allowed in school libraries? I do not. Schools are, after all, a "managed" marketplace. Books like "Fanny Hill" and Brett Easton Ellis' gruesome "American Psycho" have a right to be read by people who want to read them, but they don't belong in the libraries of tax-supported American middle schools. Do I think that I have an obligation to fly down to Florida and argue that my books, which are a long way from either "Fanny Hill" or "American Psycho," be replaced on the shelves from which they have been taken? No. My job is writing stories, and if I spent all my time defending the ones I've written already, I'd have no time to write new ones." -Stephen King, 20 March 1992 "The Adventure In Censorship Is Stranger Than Fiction"

Cause and Effect

Do you think that reading something not because it drew you in on its merits, but because you're acting in defiance of authorities intrinsically changes your relationship to the material?

The fact that someone else told me not to read something does not guarantee that I will read it. For one thing, there are a lot of lists of Really Bad Stuff and I don't have that kind of time. But in all honesty if I know that it is on a list it gets more scrutiny in terms of whether or not I will read it than it might otherwise. There are certainly books I've read and books on my to-be-read shelf that wouldn't otherwise draw my attention for one reason or another.

I think any reasonable person would see that seeking to ban something you hate is self-defeating. You're giving free publicity to those you oppose. Right? Or does the effort to ban or constrict access to a book or song so intrinsically change my experience of it that it's worth the effort?

If I read a book that's on some Really Bad List somewhere, the list all but guarantees that I will contemplate it on a level deeper than I would otherwise. Sometimes I find something I deeply loathe. (The key being that I found it, it wasn't kept from me because I might find it.)  And it troubles me slightly that the fact that it's on a List somewhere changes the way I feel about it, may alter on some level deeper than I'm aware of how I respond to it.

I suspect that I'm not alone in this. But is that good or bad? Does finding it on some We Hate This And You Shouldn't Read It list make it seem better than it is? Does it inhibit our critical faculties in some fashion because we, the rebellious readers, deeply WANT it to be good just because some annoying jerk told us they didn't think it was and they 'know better' than we do? So is banning a book a self-fulfilling prophecy or a self-defeating one? Or do the two cancel each other out?

I honestly think that the furor that surrounded A Catcher in the Rye was at least partially responsible for the cache that it's carried for the past fifty-odd years. Does the story of Holden Caulfield's 1950's Upper Westside, white, middle class ennui remain compelling without the history to the books fight to remain in print backing it up? Even after his idle and strangely asexual chitchat with prostitutes about "phonies" has lost its ability to shock us? I think it does, but I cannot be sure where the act of innate defiance that reading such a book entails begins and ends. So I asked my assembled friends on Facebook -- some of the brightest people I know from all parts of the country, all walks of life and every political leaning -- and now I ask you.

Is the prophecy self-fullfilling or is it self-defeating? What is the cumulative impact of challenging (verb form) books? Not to mention the cumulative effect on you, on society and on the writers of the books?

---

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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On Censorship

It's national Banned Book Week. A celebration of reading the things that someone didn't want us to, both historically and currently.

I'm a partisan in this fight, emphatically against any governmental entity telling me what is good or bad for me to read. But what about the other side of the issue? The counter-claim was launched by the Wall Street Journal in an Op/Ed titled "Finding Censorship Where Theyre Is None" which trotted out the usual arguments summed-up by the idea that it is impossible to really ban a book in today's America. With open lines to obtain a copy of anything we want online, censorship is theoretically impossible and citizens challenging the content of their libraries is the constitutionally-protected right to seek redress of grievances.
And they're right... at least to a point.

Christine at the wonderful book blog Stacked posted an excellent commentary in reflection of to the Wall Street Journal's Op/Ed and I encourage you to read it. She rightly points out the difference between books in school libraries and books in public libraries. But she reiterated something for the WSJ that I disagree with... that avenues of getting around a ban negates the ban and thereby negates the ability to censor. (You'll find my comments there as well.)

This is the stickiest of sticky issues. I agree on the marked differences between choosing appropriate materials for a school versus restricting content in a public forum such as a public library. Schools are necessarily controlled environments for pedagogical reasons and that has been repeatedly underlined by the US Supreme Court.

And the WSJ is also correct inasmuch as the application by citizens to have books moved, removed or segregated is the right of a citizen to seek redress of perceived grievance — a right every bit as sacred as the freedom of speech. And sometimes the two will collide, the one becoming restrictive of the other.

Rights are not absolute and definition and boundaries are usually defined as your rights stop where they begin to impinge upon the rights of another. You right to swing your fist stops when your fist impacts my nose. For similar reasons not all speech is protected inasmuch as you can’t shout “Fire” in a theater. The trouble is that outside of the realm of theater-shouting there’s no good way to indicate where your speech has impacted my nose… so to speak.

As a citizen of this country, I have the legally-protected right and ability to obtain a copy of anything online (within the bounds of copyright law which is a whole other issue). But this ability to get it doesn’t negate the ability of a community to censor. A theoretical path around a roadblock doesn’t make the obstacle cease to exist.

The trouble is the inherent conceit that there are people out there who ‘know better’ and deserve a role in choosing for me and for my child what they can or cannot see, hear and read. Within a school curriculum that makes a certain kind of sense, but a public library is a public forum. And any effort by authorities to restrict the contents of the stacks or remove items and place them behind a curtain not for fear that they will be stolen and incur additional costs to replace, but for fear of what reaction they might provoke… that stigmatizes those authors and those books and those who dare to read those books. The act of crossing into the restricted section becomes an open act in defiance of the perceived mores of the community rather than a private act of self-education. This will embolden some, even encourage them to read the banned material as an act of defiance, yes. But doing something in defiance inherently changes our relationship to the material. Even so, it's not for those emboldened that we argue -- it’s for those who will be warned away, their minds and ideas unchallenged by the forbidden volumes behind the curtain, their education and erudition stunted by lack of intellectual oxygen.

I support your right to seek the removal or segregation of books within the public forum because to support my unfettered right to speak is to likewise support yours. But I don't in any way accept that the government has the right to impose your views on me and mine. Your option to seek redress of grievance is sacrosanct and it contributes to our culture not because I think the government can acquiesce to your demands, but because it keeps the debate alive within our society about a range of issues that should never be kept under a basket.

The public library is the central storehouse of ideas within a community. Whether or not we can find other ways to obtain a copy of a given book or magazine in irrelevant. The removal or segregation of written material within a public library is an act of the government to enforce the opinions of some upon the whole. That is what makes it censorship and takes it from a citizen seeking redress of grievances into the realm of the government endorsing an opinion and acting as the arm of that opinion, ideology or person.

And that's a violation of all of our rights.

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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Fahrenheit 451

It is banned books week! Celebrate your intellectual freedom. Go out and read something that someone doesn't want you to read. Find a list of books saved from the pyre here.

Books Aflame

There's an unwritten contract between writer and reader: The author is here to challenge you, to hold up a mirror and show you what they see, a new viewpoint different from your own.

It is in the nature of any reflection that we will not always see what we expect to see. At its worst it is merely titillating, but at its best this is the beginning of a conversation. The juxtaposition of different viewpoints, one set beside the next, interlocking reflections of life in our times (or past times in some cases) adds depth and understanding because no single image can be the entire picture. In the words of the oft-censored author Douglas Adams: "The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough..."

Without the conversation, without seeing as much of the picture as is available to you, all the reflections available to you, you cannot hope to have a fully-realized picture of our culture. Pull the mirror off the wall and the reflection will go away but it will not change what it showed. Only by taking all the images available -- even those we disagree with -- and overlaying them can we begin to see the whole interconnected collage of overlapping lives and loves and wonder that surrounds us.

The whole of creation laid out before us in the stacks of the world library.

 This past year, Judith Krug died, leaving behind a tradition of raising up those voices that others would silence. Ms Krug founded "Banned Books Week" at the American Library Association, which begins on Saturday. Art is supposed to be a challenge to your viewpoint. If all we ever read or hear are those voices which already agree with us, then we are stagnant and the conversation dies. And that... that would be truly tragic.

 ---
Find out more: The American Library Association (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom Geoffery Chaucer, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger... not to mention the Bible, the Quran and the US Constitution. Some of the greatest minds and influential works ever to pass from pen to page have all been censored, blocked, burned and banned. UPenn offers the following list of banned literature: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html And one of my favorite places to keep track of the current trends in banned and challenged books is the blog The Dangerous Pages Review

The scent of burning paper...

I was reminded this morning that banned book week is fast approaching. It will begin September 26th and will feature the books that have been banned and/or challenged this past year.

Geoffery Chaucer, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller and JD Salinger have all been banned at one time or another. Many continue to face challenges from those whose reality cannot encompass the ideas that these writers explore. The desires of a moment or a person are too often allowed to outweigh the long-term good of a culture, and it is this that led all of the authors I just mentioned to face the fire.

Books of religion and history and science have all disappeared from the shelves at one time or another, victims of narrow minds and ideologies that brook no challenge. This is why Charles Darwin sits alongside the authors of the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah on the most-banned lists. Some of the greatest minds and most influential works ever to pass from pen to page have all been censored, blocked, burned and banned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_U.S.

 I challenge you to read something between now and Banned Books Week that someone didn't want you to read. Read anything from 1984 to Huckleberry Finn, to Hamlet or A Wrinkle in Time. Then come back during the week beginning September 26 and tell me about it. If you can, try to read a book you haven't read but only heard about. Then come back and tell us if what you had been told was at all accurate.

I have accumulated a stack next to my chair of books from various banned lists and I will be reading through them as quickly as ever I can and I'll let you know how it goes. Of course, there's no way I can finish them all between now and September 26th, but the reason for having a commemorative week is to remind us that we need to do this every week.

Read.

Read what you want to read. Read what challenges you. Read what people don't want you to read. Read because like muscles and brains, your freedoms will atrophy if they're not exercised. Feel free to recommend great challenging books to your fellow readers in the comments section!

Custos Librarium

By now you know that I'm a big fan of librarians. The are the guardians at the gates of our world culture, they fight for the inclusion of all and the exclusion of none. Librarians will (and have) go to court and even jail to protect the privacy of their patrons. When the USA PATRIOT Act extended the writ of the federal government's surveillance efforts into the nation's libraries, the librarians and the ALA fought (semi-successfully) the legislation in the name of their library patrons. Internet search providers have a long and troubled history when it comes to privacy concerns. This is most notable in China where dissidents have been turned-over or exposed by their internet email providers. They have proven time and again their focus isn't on the privacy of their users, but on the aggregation and sale of their site-views. These are businesses and must pursue profit. Libraries are not businesses, they are a public service where free public access to information is protected. This morning, NPR asked: If Google is allowed to become the world's librarian, how will they match up to the librarians they will be replacing? (listen) (read)

Reflections (In Memoriam)

There's an unwritten contract between writer and reader: The author is there to challenge you, to hold up a mirror and show you what they see, a new viewpoint different from your own.

It is in the nature of any reflection that we will not always see what we expect to see. At its worst it is merely titillating. At its best this is the beginning of a conversation, the juxtaposition of different viewpoints, one set beside the next, interlocking reflections of life in our times (or past times in some cases) because no single image can be the entire picture. In the words of the oft-censored author Douglas Adams: "The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough..."

Without that conversation, without viewing the entire picture, all the reflections available to you, you cannot hope to have a fully-realized picture of our culture. Pull the mirror off the wall and the reflection will go away but it will not change what it showed. Only by taking all the images available -- even those we disagree with -- and overlaying them can we begin to see the whole interconnected collage of overlapping lives and loves and wonder that surrounds us. The whole of creation laid out before us in the stacks of the world library.

While I was touring the east coast, uberLibrarian Judith Krug passed away.  In the tradition of Voltaire's "I may not agree with what you say, but I will die for your right to say it", Ms. Krug founded the notion of a "Banned Books Week" at the American Library Association. She was a fearless fighter against censorship and the expulsion of challenging literature from American libraries. Soon thereafter, the ALA released their annual list of "Challenged Books".

Books are supposed to be challenging, folks. Rest in peace, Ms. Krug. I never had the pleasure of meeting you, but I will never forget you.