It’s National Library Week, so I’ve been thinking a lot about knowledge and the idea that knowledge should be readily available – for all. An informed populace is crucial to the health of the nation and a bulwark of democracy. The ability to think, to reason, to avoid being fooled, all these notions are tied to reading and easy access to the wisdom of the ages.
And this is exactly why libraries – and their contents – are under siege these days.
HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery recently told readers:
“Librarians are living in constant fear. They have become the targets
of Republican politicians and far-right groups like Moms for Liberty
Liberty that are hellbent on burning books about LGBTQ+ people,
people of color and racism. Some librarians are quitting their jobs
because of constant harassment; others are getting fired for
refusing to clear shelves of books that conservatives don’t like.”
If that’s not bad enough – and it is – Bendery informs us there’s another evil twist in the tale: “The GOP’s censorship campaign has shifted from book bans to legislation threatening librarians with jail time.” Idaho’s tried several times to enact such legislation; this February, West Virginia passed a bill “making librarians criminally liable if a minor comes across content that some might consider obscene.” Idaho, Iowa, Alabama, and Georgia are also considering various means of keeping books they don’t like off the shelves...and they’re not alone.
The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom shared some frightening statistics: “The number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92% over the previous year, accounting for about 46% of all book challenges in 2023; school libraries saw an 11% increase over 2022 numbers.”
Given these ever-more-frequent, ever-more-strident attacks, what can a concerned reader do to stem the tide of book-banning?
PEN America, an organization whose mission “is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible,” offers a number of ways to make one’s voice heard. Whether you’re a student, a parent, an author, or a librarian, PEN America provides advice, assistance, and resources to keep you informed and ready to push back.
The need to support the nation’s libraries is more urgent than ever. In Bendery’s HuffPost piece, American Library Association President Emily Drabinski draws a chilling conclusion: “What gets lost in conversations about book banning is that it’s really about eliminating the institution of the library, period. It’s not about the books. Well, it is about the books, but the books are the way in to gut one of the last public institutions that serves everyone.”
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture,” Ray Bradbury once said. “Just get people to stop reading them.”
Bradbury was one of the 20th century’s finest fabulists, the author of The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the worldwide blockbuster Fahrenheit 451. Published in 1952, the novel Fahrenheit 451 is set in a future where books are illegal and firemen don’t put out fires – they start them. Printed matter is what they burn.
Bradbury was writing in the tense, paranoid early years of the McCarthy era. But he might as well have penned those words last Thursday.
Support your local library. Speak up for the voices the hate-mongers would shut down. Before – as history’s proven again and again – they try to shut down yours.
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Students fight a book ban by giving away free banned bookswww.youtube.com
The New York Public Library has also weighed in on the matter, you can find its suggestions here.
It Wasn't All Velvet...Poet, Pavel Zajíček Crosses The Line
Poet, Pavel Zajíček
“In the dark times will there also be singing?” – Bertolt Brecht, 1939
Czech poet, lyricist, musician, immigrant, refugee, examinee of the State's Secret Police, enemy person, artist Pavel Zajíček died in Prague on March 5, 2024. He was 72. Zajíček was a seminal influence in the Prague Underground, which stood in crazy, colorful opposition to Soviet rule. Critic Ingrid Marie Jensen provides some historical background concerning the world Zajíček grew up in – and the world he helped change:
After the Soviet Union took control of Czechoslovakia
and turned it into a satellite state in 1968, the Czech art
world took a massive hit. Things were especially tough
for musicians. Busking was illegal. Any music broadcast
over the radio was heavily censored. Only the most banal
pop was permitted. Musicians were not allowed to write
songs with English lyrics or to wear their hair long in the
fashion of American hippies.
Not the place, one would think, for some down-n-dirty rock n’ roll.
It turned out that Czechoslovakia was precisely the place rock n’ roll needed to be. Jensen and other writers have described how the flame of rebellion was kept alive by listening to such “decadent” Western groups as the Velvet Underground and The Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa’s iconoclastic conglomeration of freaks and geeks. The dissenters didn’t just listen – many of them started their own bands.
Zajíček provided lyrics for The Plastic People of the Universe and later founded DG 307 – described as Czech underground sound poetry. The Communist authorities did their best to silence him. As Prague Radio International reports:
In one of the most notorious incidents of the political
clampdown of the 1970s, Pavel Zajicek was among
several musicians charged and sentenced for
“breaching the peace.” As a blatant violation of basic
civil liberties, the episode was one of the catalysts for
the most famous initiatives of the dissident movement,
Charter 77.
Like many lyricists, Zajíček wrote poetry that came out in samizdat form – banned literature that's clandestinely printed and distributed often by hand. He's the author of hundreds of song lyrics and twenty poetry collections. In 1976 he and members of the band The Plastic People of the Universe were arrested and Zajíček was sentenced to a year in prison. In 1980 he left Czechoslovakia for Sweden, after which he lived in the United States of America. In the wake of 1989’s “Velvet Revolution” – which ended 41 years of Communist rule – he returned to Prague, where an erstwhile colleague named Václav Havel had been elected President.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelly once observed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Havel and Zajíček and their compatriots helped shape contemporary Czech history and culture. It’s safe to say their achievements have been acknowledged.
In the dark times
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
- Bertolt Brecht, 1939
Poet, Pavel Zajíček Typing - Photo by Minna M. Pyyhkala