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KENT: The Kent Free Library is celebrating Banned Books Week, which runs from Sept. 30 through Saturday. Banned Books Week is an annual national event sponsored by the American Library Association with the dual purpose of promoting reading and generating attention to the issues surrounding censorship.

"We've been participating for over 5 years now, each year we try to create an interesting display of challenged and banned titles," said Melissa Ziminsky, Adult Services Manager at the library.

The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom receives reports from communities around the country where certain books are being challenged or are in danger of being banned and compiles lists, including "Banned/Challenged Classics," "Frequently Challenged Books of the 21st Century," "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books by Decade" and "Most Frequently Challenged Authors pages of the 21st Century."

The ALA's official position is condemning censorship and advocating for free access to information.

According to the association's website, for every book that is reported as challenged by libraries, schools or community groups nationwide, an estimated four books that are challenged go unreported. The ALA's compiles its lists using two sources: newspapers and reports submitted by individuals.

Decisions on banned books are specific to the organization or entity banning them, such as a school district or local library. When a book is banned, it is then unavailable in the library that banned it or not taught in the school district that made the decision.

To generate awareness for the cause of freedom of information, the ALA hosts Banned Books Week each fall, typically during the last week of September. As part of the event, the association encourages book retailers, librarians, publishers, teachers and readers to get involved in the effort to advocate for freedom of information.

Also, for the second straight year, the ALA is co-sponsoring the Banned Books Virtual Read-Out, which invites readers to upload videos of themselves reading from their favorite banned or challenged books.

Books are banned for any number of reasons, as illustrated by the ALA's list of the most-banned books for 2011. The No. 1 book on the list, "ttyl" by author Lauren Myracle, has been banned in some communities for offensive language, religious viewpoints, sexually explicit content and being deemed inappropriate for its target age group.

Sexually explicit content is a common reason for books being banned, as are religious issues and racism. Not all of the books are recent, as the 1960 Harper Lee classic "To Kill a Mockingbird" was tenth on the list. The list is heavy on fiction, but there are non-fiction entries as well.

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Kent Free Library brings attention to censorship with participation in Banned Books Week

With increasingly complicated issues of censorship and freedom of expression reverberating around the globe - from the suppression of artist Ai Weiwei to the protests against "Innocence of Muslims" in the Arab world - a glance back toward "Degenerate Art," the notorious 1937 Munich exhibition presented by the Nazis, seems as on point as ever.

"A War on Modern Art: The 75th Anniversary of the Degenerate Art Exhibition" at Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University may not include any of the exact pieces displayed at the original show, artworks that were attacked as "un-German," immoral and undesirable by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Instead, it presents a small, focused selection of 19 prints, watercolors and books by modernists included in the 1937 exhibition of 650 works, drawing mainly on the Cantor Center's permanent collection.

"It's kind of strange, I think, to quote, unquote commemorate something as horrible as this exhibition," says curator Hilarie Faberman by phone from Stanford. "But on the other hand, there were very much issues of censorship and degeneracy in art, continuing through the '80s and '90s."

The sensation created by the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe came quickly to mind. "In other words, censorship is very much an issue that's alive in our society."

"A War on Modern Art" includes watercolors by Wassily Kandinsky and Conrad Felixmuller, as well as a 1921 self-portrait by Oskar Kokoschka, two lithographs depicting the poor from Otto Dix's 1924 "Hunger!" portfolio, a linoleum cut of a young woman by Christian Rohlfs and two inward-looking prints by Lovis Corinth. The visually dense "Madhouse," "The Yawners" and "Lovers II" by Max Beckmann are part of the same portfolio of prints, some of which were shown in the 1937 exhibition.

"The ideas the artists are working with here are similar," Faberman says. "I think what offended the Nazis about those were the style of the prints and the way space is condensed. You've got all the mentally ill people in the print, which were considered disgusting and dissolute, like anyone who wasn't a part of this pure Aryan ideal - Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the physically challenged. Hitler used the show as a tool to show what they thought was sickness in society and how the culture needed to be purified."

Abstract art was considered the offensive purview of the elite, while some more-realistic artists, such as Dix and George Grosz, were attacked by the Nazis for their leftist leanings and unidealized, ugly imagery.

Working off the idea for "A War on Modern Art" from one of her assistants, Mariko Chang, and looking into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's noted 1991 restaging of the original exhibition, Faberman never before had a chance to sit down and read about the 1937 show.

"It is astounding to see what was in the original exhibit," she says now. "Almost everything we consider important to understanding modern art was labeled as degenerate."

Through Feb. 24. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; until 8 p.m. Thursday. Free. Marie Stauffer Sigall Gallery, Lomita Drive at Museum Way, Stanford. museum.stanford.edu.

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Cantor revisits 1937 degeneracy, censorship

Some of these authors were censored, but they certainly weren't silenced.

Some of history's most celebrated works of literature have, at various times and in various societies, been bannedfrom Arabian Nights to Ulysses to, even, Anas Nin's diaries, to name but a fraction. To mark Banned Books Week 2012, I'll be featuring excerpts from once-banned books on Literary Jukebox over the coming days. But, today, dive into an omnibus of meditations on and responses to censorship from a selection of literary heroes from the past century.

Kurt Vonnegut writes in his almost-memoir, A Man Without a Country (public library):

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And yet libraries have had a track record for exercising censorship themselves. When Virginia's Hanover County School Board removed all copies the Harper Lee classic To Kill a Mockingbird (public library) in 1966 on the grounds that it was "immoral," Lee wrote the following letter to the editor of The Richmond News Leader, found in Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird:

Editor, The News Leader:

Recently I have received echoes down this way of the Hanover County School Board's activities, and what I've heard makes me wonder if any of its members can read.

Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that "To Kill a Mockingbird" spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is "immoral" has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.

I feel, however, that the problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism. Therefore I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice.

Harper Lee

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Kurt Vonnegut, Harper Lee, and Other Literary Greats on Censorship

01Oct12

This letter appeared in the Financial Times

Sir,Your editorial (Obamas realist foreign policy, September 27) claims that free speech purists were offended by Barack Obamas comments onInnocence of Muslims. As an organisation that defends free expression around the world, Index on Censorship would certainly include itself in the free speech purist camp. Even the president of the US is entitled to say what he likes under the first amendment, as long as he upholds thatvitalpart of the US constitution for all.

In his address this week to world leaders at the UN General Assembly, President Obama defended the right of all people to express their views even views that we disagree with.

However, in reality, the White House is guilty of reaching out toGoogleto look into taking the video off YouTube on the grounds that it breached Googles terms of service, justifying its removal. This intervention by the US government suggests censorship by stealth, whereby governments can claim to protect free speech while putting pressure on middle men such as internet service providers to censor for them. All of which raises the question: Who should control the internet?

Kirsty Hughes, Chief Executive, Index on Censorship, London EC1, UK

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Letter: White House guilty of censorship by stealth in seeking YouTube removal

WTF?

Thats what several bicyclists in Minneapolis were probably thinking recently as they encountered a fully dressed matador squaring off with them on as they rode down one of the citys many bike paths.

Turns out it was an art project from the Carmichael Collective, which over the past 10 months has created a series of similarly wacky and creative stunts.

Its all about creativity for creativitys sake, says Dave Damman, the founder of the collective, which is compromised of employees from Carmichael Lynch, an advertising firm based in that city.

Back in May we covered a project called Bug Memorials which was one of the collectives first projects and ever since theyve been pushing out new ideas as a way to help employees at the firm get their creative juices flowing.

Damman, who is also the chief creative officer for Carmichael Lynch, says that when staffers participate in the collective he doesnt want them worrying about meeting client needs or tailoring projects to reach a specific audience. He just wants them to have fun and think outside the box.

The mantra for the whole thing is What if? he says.

Like many of the collectives projects, the idea for the Bike Matador just popped into an employees head one day. Damman says Thako Harris was riding his bike to work and thought about how he might spruce up the commute.

If he was doing this with cars he probably would have been run over or at least flipped off, Damman says. But none of the bikers had unfavorable responses.

Other recent projects include the Censorship Towel, Piata Anatomy and Urban Plant Tags.

Excerpt from:
Bike Matadors and Censorship Towels Spring From Ad Firm’s Creative Offshoot