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.

Details are a little hard to piece together right now, but there's a protest happening tonight over an art show at the Art Institute. Art Students decided to put together a show featuring six artists on the theme of gun violence. Apparently, the President of the school decided to shroud one of the pieces, an installation by Steven Earl Weber, with a black curtain.

In an email I just received from David Kessler, another artist in the show, apparently the rest of the artists will shroud their work in the same way, to express their opposition to censorship.

I haven't found any photos of Weber's piece on-line, but you can see other examples of his work at the link above. Dealing with gun-violence is nothing new in his work.

Here's David Kessler's letter to the University president:

Dear Dr. Larkin,

I am one of the artists in the current Art Institute student curated exhibition ‘Killing Time’. I am writing to you to address your decision to censor fellow artist, Steven Earl Weber’s work from the show.

Sir, censorship of any sort is offensive and abhorrent and at an art school it is doubly so. The fact that artwork should be censored in an institution of higher learning in a major US city is disgusting and backwards.