Re: Reading – Read. Then, reread; and read what others say about what you’re reading, especially, read what the censors, book-banners, corporations, and governments don’t want you to read

One hundred years ago, in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris. However, because the U.S. Government considered it obscene, it was not allowed in the States for twelve years, not until 1933, when the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, overturned the ban. In his decision the Honorable John M. Woolsey explained that he had “read ‘Ulysses’ once in its entirety and… those passages of which the Government particularly complains several times.” In the end, he found it “an amazing tour de force,” both “brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns,” and concluded that it is not obscene since it “did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts.”

More importantly, and most relevant to Texas, the state currently leading the nation in book bans in schools — 801 bans in 22 districts, according to PEN America’s Banned in the USA (235 more than Florida, the state with the second most bans) — is Judge Woolsey’s conclusion about books that some people consider offensive:

If one does not wish to associate with such folk as Joyce describes, that is one’s own choice…. [and] one may not wish to read “Ulysses”; that is quite understandable. But when such a real artist in words… seeks to draw a true picture…, ought it to be impossible for the American public legally to see that picture?

This likely raises the hackles of Texas’ morality police — those who wail that their narrow-minded view of what is offensive, “dirty,” disturbing, or anti-American should and must be inflicted on all of us. But it seems to me that ninety years ago Judge Woolsey reached a fair, reasonable, and still-relevant conclusion.

After rereading his ruling and a bit more of Joyce’s Ulysses this morning, I also read Brian Dillon’s chapter on Annie Dillard in Suppose a Sentence, several more pages in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and letters exchanged between Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan and previously incarcerated American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts in The New York Review of Books. And though relatives and friends think I must be bored spending day after day at home alone, they seem unable to understand that I’m neither bored nor alone. These writers and those whose books I’ve read and reread over the last several decades inhabit these rooms, animate the past and present world around me, and populate my memory, my imagination, and my life in ways that even a lifetime of travel cannot make possible.

This is what I began to realize years ago through winter evenings when Dad, after drinking the afternoon away at the bar, snored at the kitchen table and made silence the safest option.

When Mrs. McClellan, my eleventh-grade English teacher, helped us discover what lay between the lines of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

When Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” showed me why we should question Nixon’s denials, accusations that young men who burned their draft cards or fled to Canada were traitors or cowards, and the unthinking promises we all made each morning when we recited “The Pledge of Allegiance.”

And when in the late 1970s Robert Pirsig’s book about Zen and motorcycles led me to a 550 Honda and ten summers of solo trips: south to the Gulf coast of Texas, across the plains of three Canadian provinces, into the Black Hills, to Carlsbad Caverns and the Guadalupe Mountains, and one July night down a dark county road south of Wabasso, MN, where a skunk waddled out of the ditch and directly into the path of my front wheel.

Back then books showed me what others’ lives were like or what mine could be beyond the cornfields and clouds of dust rising from gravel roads, the torturous uniformity of landscape and complexions, the mind-numbing repetition of church services and sermonizing, the stench of the rendering truck and gutters filled with cow shit, and the incomprehensible ignorance of too many locals. Back then, I suspected something was wrong, something was missing, but I still didn’t know what questions to ask or of whom to ask them. Thankfully, I discovered both in books.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Iran; Brittney Griner’s arrest in Russia and transfer to a penal colony; the awful predictability of shootings in U.S. schools; the prosecution and convictions of January 6 rioters, and the recklessness of too many Americans’ zealous defense of guns and equally fanatical attacks on writers, librarians, educators, historical truth, and books. And in each of these cases and many others, I can’t help seeing that they are either caused by people’s failure to read or the consequence of someone’s desire to discourage us from reading in order to keep us ignorant, more pliable, more easily controlled, and more willing to accept their lies or propaganda or absurd theories or, as in the case of Ulysses, baseless accusations of obscenity.

Read. Then, reread. And read what others say about what you’re reading. And, especially, read what the censors, book-banners, corporations, and governments don’t want you to read. You will not agree with or like all of it. But at least then you can decide for yourself what’s true and what’s not, what speaks to you honestly and thoughtfully, or what reeks like a late-night skunk or the cow shit you remember from your youth.