look ma, first time using rich text!
Welcome to the middle of Banned Books Week! Found this quote from here on the week that I thought was really interesting:
Banned Books Week is really about two different, but related, things. The first of these, the focus of sites like Amnesty’s and the “Books Suppressed or Censored by Legal Authorities” section of my exhibit, deals with attempts to restrict who is allowed to speak about what matters to them. And in a lot of the world, the right to speak out is severely and violently repressed. The other day I added to my online books collection a number of titles from Human Rights Watch, which has many books, press releases, and other publications about grave threats to freedom of the press and freedom to protest in places like Burma, Chile, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Turkey, Venezuela, various Middle Eastern and African countries, former Soviet republics, and many other places around the world.
Americans enjoy a country with a much freer press than the countries above (and indeed, a freer press than we had in my grandparents’ day). We’re not perfect; our legal system does sometimes suppress legitimate expression, for a time at least, in the name of security, copyright, or “the children”. (And sometimes the threat of criminal violence can suppress books when the law does not.) It is worth remembering the important books that can be published thanks to the free press, and not to take them for granted.
Reminds me of watching the Daily Show and reading up on Steve Colbert's 2006 speech before the press and President Bush (there's no way he could have said what he did in other countries. Just. No way). There's a surprising amount of liberty that we do take for granted, especially in regards to what we can say in our shows and publish in our magazines, but the books that people do set out to ban - it's ridiculous. My mom recently told me that the Goosebumps books are banned from the library at her private school. While I certainly agree that they're generally just trashy kids books with little to recommend them - on par with those Spooky Stories 1, 2 and 3 or whatever they were called - banning them because they're "anti-Christian" is a little extreme.
There's also the list of banned/challenged novels listed by the Radcliffe publishing house as the top 100 novels of the 20th century. I knew about some of them, but things like five people dying during riots against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses stuns me. Or this quote about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Challenged at the Placentia-Yorba Linda, California Unified School District (2000) after complaints by parents stated that teachers "can choose the best books, but they keep choosing this garbage over and over again." That was only eight years ago. Or in 1998, how my own state took Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon - I don't even like Morrison's novels and it still saddens me. It's. I just don't know. Mind-boggling, in a way, what people will find offensive to the point that they feel they have to censure it, and it's limiting and almost degrading our collective intelligence. Just because you're threatened by what is written in a book, or angered by it, or scandalized or whatever, doesn't mean you should just shun it or dismiss it. Argh.
I just want to sit down with everyone who makes a challenge or suggests a book should be banned, and talk about why the books bother them so much that they feel they should be censured. I know that's practically an exercise in futility, but still. That a book can elicit such strong reactions from people should be proof enough that we need to talk about why that is, not just ban it because it offends. Is it because of the passages on violence or sex, or is it because of what those scenes mirror in our own history and culture? We have movies, TV shows and yes, books too, full of gratitous violence and sex, so why these?
Or are we so scared of what is different that we have to censure what doesn't fit in our accepted world view? When/If homosexuality is ever accepted into society, will all these challenges based on sex just disappear? Or how Huckleberry Finn is on the top ten list (and probably has been for decades) for "racism". How will banning that book help resolve the issue of racism that is still, unfortunately, rampant in our society? I just. It seems so silly while being so frustrating, especially when there is so much in the real world that we could direct all that energy on, instead of trying to police what should be read.
Out of the top ten frequently challenged books of 2007, eight of them list "sexually explicit" or "homosexuality," which is to be expected, but my favorite reason was "sexual eduction". It's a sex ed book, who would have thought. And I'm highly amused that Fahrenheit 451 is #72 on the list of banned/challenged books (.PDF file) from 2000-2007. Way to miss the point XD
EDIT: TOTALLY UNCONNECTED TO WHAT THIS POST IS ACTUALLY ABOUT, BUT HEY THERE'S SNOW FALLING IN MAR'S ATMOSPHERE. Yet another part of the universe that gets snow, while we get rain.
Banned Books Week is really about two different, but related, things. The first of these, the focus of sites like Amnesty’s and the “Books Suppressed or Censored by Legal Authorities” section of my exhibit, deals with attempts to restrict who is allowed to speak about what matters to them. And in a lot of the world, the right to speak out is severely and violently repressed. The other day I added to my online books collection a number of titles from Human Rights Watch, which has many books, press releases, and other publications about grave threats to freedom of the press and freedom to protest in places like Burma, Chile, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Turkey, Venezuela, various Middle Eastern and African countries, former Soviet republics, and many other places around the world.
Americans enjoy a country with a much freer press than the countries above (and indeed, a freer press than we had in my grandparents’ day). We’re not perfect; our legal system does sometimes suppress legitimate expression, for a time at least, in the name of security, copyright, or “the children”. (And sometimes the threat of criminal violence can suppress books when the law does not.) It is worth remembering the important books that can be published thanks to the free press, and not to take them for granted.
Reminds me of watching the Daily Show and reading up on Steve Colbert's 2006 speech before the press and President Bush (there's no way he could have said what he did in other countries. Just. No way). There's a surprising amount of liberty that we do take for granted, especially in regards to what we can say in our shows and publish in our magazines, but the books that people do set out to ban - it's ridiculous. My mom recently told me that the Goosebumps books are banned from the library at her private school. While I certainly agree that they're generally just trashy kids books with little to recommend them - on par with those Spooky Stories 1, 2 and 3 or whatever they were called - banning them because they're "anti-Christian" is a little extreme.
There's also the list of banned/challenged novels listed by the Radcliffe publishing house as the top 100 novels of the 20th century. I knew about some of them, but things like five people dying during riots against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses stuns me. Or this quote about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Challenged at the Placentia-Yorba Linda, California Unified School District (2000) after complaints by parents stated that teachers "can choose the best books, but they keep choosing this garbage over and over again." That was only eight years ago. Or in 1998, how my own state took Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon - I don't even like Morrison's novels and it still saddens me. It's. I just don't know. Mind-boggling, in a way, what people will find offensive to the point that they feel they have to censure it, and it's limiting and almost degrading our collective intelligence. Just because you're threatened by what is written in a book, or angered by it, or scandalized or whatever, doesn't mean you should just shun it or dismiss it. Argh.
I just want to sit down with everyone who makes a challenge or suggests a book should be banned, and talk about why the books bother them so much that they feel they should be censured. I know that's practically an exercise in futility, but still. That a book can elicit such strong reactions from people should be proof enough that we need to talk about why that is, not just ban it because it offends. Is it because of the passages on violence or sex, or is it because of what those scenes mirror in our own history and culture? We have movies, TV shows and yes, books too, full of gratitous violence and sex, so why these?
Or are we so scared of what is different that we have to censure what doesn't fit in our accepted world view? When/If homosexuality is ever accepted into society, will all these challenges based on sex just disappear? Or how Huckleberry Finn is on the top ten list (and probably has been for decades) for "racism". How will banning that book help resolve the issue of racism that is still, unfortunately, rampant in our society? I just. It seems so silly while being so frustrating, especially when there is so much in the real world that we could direct all that energy on, instead of trying to police what should be read.
Out of the top ten frequently challenged books of 2007, eight of them list "sexually explicit" or "homosexuality," which is to be expected, but my favorite reason was "sexual eduction". It's a sex ed book, who would have thought. And I'm highly amused that Fahrenheit 451 is #72 on the list of banned/challenged books (.PDF file) from 2000-2007. Way to miss the point XD
EDIT: TOTALLY UNCONNECTED TO WHAT THIS POST IS ACTUALLY ABOUT, BUT HEY THERE'S SNOW FALLING IN MAR'S ATMOSPHERE. Yet another part of the universe that gets snow, while we get rain.