People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
Banned Books Week
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“When someone is burning a book,” Lemony Snicket famously wrote, “they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author.”
Grant Snyder is back with Ban This Book, a special comic for Banned Books Week showing “one author’s experience with a challenge to intellectual freedom.”
For more literary comics, see Graphic Canon.
There is an attempt, fueled by corporations that sell meat, drugs, religion and other life choices, to control the population’s way of eating, worshipping, and expressing the desire to create something different. There are gate-keepers in academia and in literary societies and establishments whose job is to spot the work that could mean fewer hamburgers being sold, fewer drugs purchased, and much less organized religion consumed etc., and to discredit it.
Alice Walker, one of America’s most censored authors, on censorship – a fine addition to some of literary history’s most pointed remarks on the subject.
Great Literature is help for humans. It is medicine of the highest order. In a more aware culture, writers would be considered priests.
Alice Walker, joining other literary greats on censorship, in a fantastic Guernica interview for Banned Books Week.
For Banned Books Week, Open Road Media asked famous contemporary writers about their experience being banned. Also see authors of yore on the subject.
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him
Anaïs Nin, and other greats, on censorship
It was not oppressive government policies, but decisions of the people, under the influence of technologies that sped up human experience too much, that undermined humanistic values and intellectual curiosity in the first place. Not state censorship, but a more general failure to value the mind, the imagination, nature, and a civilization’s hard-won insights, is the main target of criticism in that novel.
Lauren Weiner, reflecting on once-banned Fahrenheit 451, on the real issues at the heart of Ray Bradbury’s twist on the dystopian novel. Bradbury, indeed, was a tireless champion of the imagination as a prerequisite for democracy.
More Banned Books Week meditations on censorship.
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw, and other cultural icons, on censorship for Banned Books Week 2012.
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.
Charles Bukowski and other literary icons on censorship
Celebrating the freedom to read with a virtual read-out of iconic banned books for Banned Books Week 2012, September 30 - October 6.
Among the selections once banned: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
(↬ Page Turner)
