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.
In Their Time - A Book We Love
Poems can help us muck our way through this COVIDIUM twilight zone
Full disclosure: As a general rule I hate poetry for reasons I tell myself are valid.
Why? Most of it seems solipsistic and fortune cookie filler. Haiku goofballs. Impossible to discern the good from the bad. Poets are no longer widely read, even the 'greats' (Yeats, Plath, Whitman, Angelou.)
There's no market for their words, and those words typically don't have a narrative that clicks with the literal-minded sockets of my imagination. That said, once in a long whiie, I come across a seamróg, a work by a poet that feels like light in a tunnel, a portal of reckoning. Then I realize that this craft of poetry should never die, never drown under the rising tide of our gnatish attention spans and cultural decay.
Well, I recently found one such shamrock:In Their Time, by Bill Buege. This isn't the first book by this poet but I consider it his best. Although Buege hasn't made his living as a poet - is that even possible anymore? - he is a modern-day Renaissance man, a scholar, a poet, an artist, an inventor, and an accomplished businessman.
During a stint in his career when he worked at Edward Jones Investments, he fused his art and science and invented, out of whole cloth, an algorithmic model that is, to this day, the underpinning of wealth management firms worldwide.
Buege, who turns 80 in November, is a shamrock himself. His life is one fully lived, but he's not done yet. He creates an innovative framework in this book: 52 speakers, half male, half female, looking back on pre-industrial Europe, season by season. His wayback machine on these characters creates narrative force and truth that shows that we still need poets to tell us what actually counts.
Bill Buege's poetry collection - In Their Time
In Their Time contains characters who could be you or me, mucking our way through this COVIDIUM twilight zone. In poem 45, Norman keeps a sloth bear in a pit. In another, Paulette loses her husband but gains a tavern and a horse.
In poem 21, Hildy survives the pox:
"The doctor diagnosed I'd got the pox / and then the brilliant man administered / his tincture of mercury / gave me some patches and white powder / advised I make love in the dark."
There's humanity in these pages, sex and greed, suffering and beauty, and survival.
In Their Time is a book we need right now.
You can buy the collection here.
W.M. Jones is a professional musician and a social commentator who loves words that shed light on the zeitgeist.