Well, another week, another appearance that I am unqualified for. Tomorrow (Weds) night at 7pm, the library and the ACLU will be hosting a celebration in honor of banned book week:

Celebrate Your Freedom to Read!

Banned Books Week, September 27-October 4, 2008

Each year libraries, schools, and book lovers come together for Banned Books Week, a celebration of our freedom to read without censorship. The American Library Association receives hundreds of reports every year about books and other materials that have been threatened with removal from public libraries and schools. For each known incident, four or five others go unreported. The children’s book “And Tango Makes Three” topped the 2007 list of most challenged books. Get involved in the fight against censorship. Attend one of these two Banned Books events featuring local celebrities reading from their favorite banned or challenged book:

October 1, 7:30 p.m.
Philadelphia Free Library
1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia

Readers include:
Gene Shay, host of XPN’s The Folk Show
Larry Robin, owner of Robin’s Bookstore
Annette John-Hall, columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer
Tom Cronin, AFSME
Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, Young Philly Politics blog
Ursula Rucker, poet-hip-hop artist

Censorship and threat to speech comes in all forms. Just this week in fact, a Philadelphia politician to be named later screamed at me for about 15 minutes because I wrote something he didn't like. When I didn't back down, he started threatening me, and said that if I wrote something he didn't like "ONE MORE TIME..." But before he could finish I cut him off, so I never found out what the threat was exactly. From our conversation, he implied it was either going after me personally, or going after programs for poor people.

I tell that story because in thinking about what I am going to read, I decided to be funny, and go with things like Shel Silverstein. Our librarians are a pretty progressive bunch, so we don't exactly ban a lot of books in Philly. But, just as we have explicit threats to speech in Wasilla, Alaska, and we have absurd attempts to ban children's poems in far away places, we have other threats to speech right here in our hometown.