Howdy Doody It's Banned Books Week!

Romance author Terry Odell has been keeping this event at the top of her blog this week, and since I am involved with a company that produces an adult-rated product, erotic romance, it seems apropos to mention this.

United States libraries and bookstores are all featuring displays of such 'objectionable' titles as A Wrinkle in Time, Huckleberry Finn, the Harry Potter books, Lysistrata, Rabelais, Gulliver's Travels, and so on, and shouting READ A BANNED BOOK!  Amazing the things narrow minds can find to protect their fellow minds against. 

It's a slippery slope in our so-called free country, with its so-called free press. First they censor the things you can do in public, then they burn your books and bleep your broadcasts, and before you know it they're burning your neighbors instead of their books.   

But Helga, weren't you in favor of Burning Man (and burning other things) just last August?-- you might ask.  And I might answer, Yes, my children, there is a positive side to discrimination, when it is used synonymously with discernment.  One must learn to tell red from green, and white from black, and warm from cold, and edible from recyclable.  But we do not eliminate any color from our spectrum without distoring the entire color scheme and making it hide things best seen!  Just because I know the difference between having sex with love and having sex without it, which is no better than rape, does not mean there should be no sex!

Burning is for cook-fires and sweat-lodges, and I am not in favor of burning people unless you are meaning to eat them yourself. If you are just doing it to frighten others, you are despotic. I don't like burnt witch. I like steamed witch, fresh from sauna and cooled by a swift dip in the lake and then moistened with a nice beer and snacks table in the kitchen before serving under the covers, at this season. And surely at a well-managed homestead you have enough cordwood ready for the coming snows that you don't need to burn books or other furniture.

So, let's read as many banned books as we can, just to annoy the banners and see what they are being so silly over!

Here are some links to Terry's postings,

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog....

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog....

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&...

and some nice stealable quotes.

Banned Books Week
Category: Writing and Poetry

We're in the middled of Banned Books Week, as evidenced by my quotes of the day.

"The trouble with censorship is that once it starts it is hard to stop. Just about every book contains something that someone objects to."

~Studs Terkel

"A Texas town has banned the Harry Potter books because they glorify magic, and learning to read."
~Craig Kilborn

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~Joseph Brodsky

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
-- Mark Twain

"Adam was but human - this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent."
-- Mark Twain

"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
-- Kurt Vonnegut, author

"The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book."
-- Walt Whitman

"There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." -- Oscar Wilde
Continuing with the Banned Books Week theme, some more banned titles: