Speak Loudly and Carry a Banned Book

It's Banned Book Week.

I wrote earlier this week about the trending Speak Loudly movement that's growing on Twitter and in the blogosphere. Well, whether accidental or intentional, the trend bleeds nicely into Banned Book Week, which starts today. If you're on Twitter, check out #BannedBookWeek and #SpeakLoudly for lists, quotes, author endorsements and some nifty twitterwit. SpeakLoudly also has its own, brand-spankin' new site, which is very cool.

All of this momentum is the joy of a confluence of current banning news (Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson), and the regularly scheduled Banned Book Week festivities. When you're thinking about banned books and why people get to antsy about them, understand this: Very little pisses writers and readers off more than someone thinking that literature shouldn't be available to people.

But then, if you read blogs, I'm preaching to the converted already...

If you check out the ALA's Top 100 Banned Books list there are some surprising and some not so surprising pieces of literature showcased. I find it hilarious that Harry Potter is considered too dangerous for anyone. And Of mice and Men? Really? (And by "really" what I really mean is, "What the fuck?")

So today, because this whole blog-thing started out with quotes, and because I said pretty much all that I wanted to say about banning books in the aforementioned post, and because I'm pressed for time, I thought I'd just provide a nice list of quotes on the evils of censorship. You know, in honor of my roots...

Here are my favorites:

"Libraries should be open to all except the censor." John F. Kennedy

"If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed." Benjamin Franklin, 1730

"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!" Kurt Vonnegut

"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to." Laurence Peter, professor of education, 1977

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail." Alfred Whitney Griswold

"God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide."
Rebecca West

"Every burned book enlightens the world." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." Oscar Wilde

"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." Oscar Wilde

"In every cry of every man,/ In every infant's cry of fear,/ In every voice, in every ban,/ The mind-forged manacles I hear." William Blake

And finally, because profanity is trending here in thinkingoutloud-land these days, and because he said it like a motherfucker:

"Take away the right to say 'fuck' and you take away the right to say 'fuck the government.'" Lenny Bruce

Me? I've managed to put enough scratch together to go buy Speak, so I know what I'll be reading tonight.

UPDATE:

The response of bookish bloggers everywhere has been truly remarkable. There's even a list of blogs on the subject that continues to grow and grow. Check it out (along with a great post) at Reclusive Bibliophile and take a few minutes to appreciate an amazing video of Laurie Halse Anderson reciting a Speak-inspired poem called Listen.

Speak, and Speak Loudly

I have to keep this short today (rarely an easy thing for me) as I have miles to go editing the novel. Let’s see if I can find ‘short’ in my vocabulary.

First, there will be a post on this article from the SBS in Australia on Wednesday or Thursday. It makes me fume in barely-expressible ways and I’m hoping that more stories on the report mentioned will surface before then so I can, perhaps, gain a little more perspective.

Tomorrow is World Alzheimer’s Day, so I’ll be busy elsewhere. If you get through your blog reading list of stuff, feel free to revisit my post on the subject. Better yet, if you blog and the subject resonates, join the cause and add your voice.

Today though… well, today I’m going to jump on Twitter's #SpeakLoudly bandwagon in light of this week’s controversy regarding Laurie Halse Anderson's YA book Speak, the story of a girl who is raped and must deal with the excruciating aftermath of that event. It’s an important story and, by all accounts, superbly written. When I have a budget for book buying again (there are aspects of poor artist life that I don’t like), it will be one of the very first books on my ‘to buy’ list.

Speak and Ms. Anderson are big literary news this week because Wesley Scroggins, a Business Management Professor in Missouri, has taken it upon himself to mount a campaign to ban the book from high school libraries because he considers it pornographic. Apparently Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five is also unworthy and dangerous. If you’re a fan of Sugar at The Rumpus (and you really, really should be), then you’ll know what I mean when I say that it sounds like Ms. Anderson writes like a motherfucker. This, in turn, seems to offend Mr. Scoggin’s delicate sensibilities.

Rather than see past his own overgrown social myopathy to the simple truth that the real is very often not pretty, and that writing about stuff that isn’t pretty is important, nay, vital to helping people (especially our youth) see the world for what it is, warts and all, Mr. Scoggins thinks that we should protect young people from said truth by banning anything he considers dangerous from the libraries of the world. As if ignorance ever solved anything.

We, of course, know better. We know that the ostrich method of dealing with tough stuff is bullshit. And we hopefully also know that fiction – real, hard, ugly and transforming fiction – can be an agent of expressing truth that is as or more piercing and disarming than any real news story can be.

That’s one of the many things I love about fiction: It can take us to places, put us in situations that we will (hopefully) never have to actually deal with in the really-real world, but that we still need to acknowledge and own. Fiction, good fiction, is an agent of empathy; perhaps one of it’s most powerful ones, and we live in a world that needs more empathy, not less; more knowledge, not ignorance; more truth, not a fucking cowardly commitment to denial and lies.

The response to the proposed ban has been heartwarming and heart breaking at the same time. #SpeakLoudly is trending nicely on Twitter and the lit blogosphere is rallying. For proof of that, check out Ms. Anderson's comments, Pimp My Novel, [Bloggers [[heart]] Books], Lisa and Laura Write, and C.J. Redwine's poignant post at The Last Word, just for a few quick examples.

Book banning just boggles my mind a bit, especially when the reasons are so spurious and the topic is so important. I find myself wondering how those of us who are proponents of banning can live lives so full of fear that ignorance seems like a better choice than reality. I don't get that kind of denial. It just seems pathetically selfish.

And yes, I'm being judgmental, and I'm okay with that right now. I'll feel remorse later. Maybe.

There’s a long way to go yet before we get to rest, so follow the links and join the cause, please. You can get a little ribbon for your Twitter and FB icons at Twibbon if you search for SpeakLoudly, join Laurie's FB page here , follow the Tweets here and here, and you can Tweet your ass off using the #SpeakLoudly hash tag. And buy Speak at a local independent bookstore too.

Okay, my novel beckons, and she's a jealous mistress...

Bloggers Unite -- September 8 -- International Literacy Day

I was three-going-on-four when my father, the high school English teacher, started reading “The Hobbit” to me before I went to bed. I’d apparently already started to show some reading potential and he used Tolkien to help foster it. I was completely hooked in no time at all. To be fair, I don’t remember too much of the boring song and poetry part in the middle, but the dwarves, spiders, elves and dragons sucked me in big time. By the time we’d made it half way through the book my sneaky dad had me swapping reading duties with him.

When we finished “The Hobbit”, we moved on to Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and, at the end of that, he emancipated me with the LOTR trilogy and told me I was on my own. I subsequently missed children’s lit altogether, a gross omission which I rectified in second year university by taking a whole semester on the topic, but that’s beside the point. The point is, I was taught to read at an early age, and then pointed at some really good stories to fuel my growing addiction.

My dad and I have had our differences over the years, but I’ve never been anything but monumentally appreciative for that gift. How could I not be?

Words and language unlock what might be, provide pathways into which we can drag our generation and usher the next, paths that lead to opportunity and revelation, to wisdom and discovery and empathy.

Literacy is the key to all of that. A world that can read and write is a world that can learn. In a world where literacy was ubiquitous everyone could learn. Ignorance could be banished to a minority opinion. Those who use ignorance to manipulate and control would be threatened unto extinction.

Can you imagine that? And to start, all we need to do is make it a priority to teach everyone to read. Compared to world peace, or sending people to the moon, or so may other projects that are important, this one seems relatively easy. We have, as they say, the means to slam dunk this one.

And yet we don’t.

Give a man a fish, they say, and feed him for a day. Teach a man to read, though, and he can find a book to teach him how to fish, and he’ll be fed for life. Hand him a computer and he can Google a helluva lot more than that.

And that’s probably the reason that the governments of the world don’t want us all to be able to read. An ignorant populace is a complacent one.

I will never, ever be able to thank my dad enough for the gift he gave me back when I was too small to appreciate it. He planted a seed and let it grow.

It would be wonderful if we could give that gift to everyone and see what would grow out of it.

September 8 is World Literacy Day. Give the gift, or support someone else who is.

‘It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past, rather that the hope of creating the future, dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.’ Bertrand Russell

I was reading a critique of the US educational system, the focus of the article being on the alarming downward trend that was extant in US achievement standards over the last forty years in spite of the increased attention and funding that the system has received. (This trend, although perhaps not so dramatic, is extant in Canada as well, just so I’m clear that this isn’t some sort of nationalist argument.) The ultimate point of the argument was that the failure of the system to improve the overall educational system was no failure at all; rather, it was the original intent. The crux of the argument was that a government capable of over-seeing NASA and space flight, capable of mounting multi-billion dollar military campaigns, capable of facilitating a multi-billion dollar taxation system, would not be as utterly incompetent in the creation of a better education system unless the greater failure of that system was their intent.

Think about it for a minute: Why is it that our governments can be very successful at accomplishing those things that support their control and political infrastructure, but seem incapable of accomplishing anything that will actually benefit the public? I would suggest that they fail, at best, because our benefit is inconsequential to politicians who, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, are concerned only with their own security and comfort, their own consumption, and their own ability to affect some sense of power. At worst, it could be argued that the general ignorance of the greater population is a crucial aspect of a system designed to increase social and intellectual stratification. A dumb majority is more easily controlled.

We live within a secular system. That’s a simple fact. Our society, the world around us, our cultural values and the influence of all of these dynamics on the system itself are in a constant state of flux, ostensibly evolving in response to the pressures that are created within that system and affected upon it. It could also be argued convincingly that this social evolution has been co-opted in a short-term sense; that our secular system is currently engineered contrary to how it might evolve in the absence of a culture that uses as its primary impulse the generation of revenue, and worships as its primary deity the concept of free-market economy as the savior of the species. Of course, evolution will re-establish pre-eminence sooner or later, either when we smarten up and begin to establish a social construct that seeks a more harmonious state of equilibrium with our environment, and a truly democratic and egalitarian social system, or when we drive the global meta-system to the brink of collapse and drive ourselves to extinction. One of the two will happen, for the free-market commitment to profit at any cost is at odds with our long-term survival as a species. It’s a one-or-the-other dynamic.

To make the right choices as the fourth dimension exerts its influence over us, it is our children (perhaps their children too, depending on which version of climate change and social dynamic theory you adhere to) that will have to stand up, where we have and are not, and reclaim our future. And yet they are the very ones that are being subverted by the educational system to avoid free thought at all costs, to become sheep within the herd and focus on nothing more than accumulating the largest amount of the newest stuff possible – to focus only on the fuzzy butt in front or beside them, and be concerned only with doing as well as or better than that fuzzy butt.

In spite of all the work our governments are doing to undermine the educations system, there ironically seems to be a growing sense of discontent and this says more about the sovereignty of the human spirit than anything else. Young and old alike are standing up in greater numbers to say, “Hey, something isn’t right here!” or, “We know what isn’t right and we’re going to do something about it.” From the script of The Network, many are starting to say, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Our freedom starts where our trust of our current political and social institutions ends. They aren’t looking out for us, but the inclination to stand up for ourselves seems to be increasing. If the systems that educate all of us, from the education system to our daily fix of mass media, aren’t going to foster our potential, I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves, educate ourselves, motivate ourselves, and find a non-passive yet non-violent way to affect change, the change that we desire for the whole of our species and planet.

If those who are paid to serve us feel rather that we are here to serve them, then stop looking to them for inspiration and hope. It’s like looking to a rock for comfort, or maybe like looking to a shark for it. Instead, we should be looking within ourselves and, when we find that spark of hope, we should be passing it forward. It is our responsibility to inspire each other and the next generation; our right to stand and be counted; our dignity that is at stake; our survival that hangs in the balance. If the system won’t be inspired or inspiring, then I guess it’s up to us to look forward with realistic hope and pragmatic idealism to “be the change we want to see in the world.”

Honk if you agree…