I Don't Care About American Censorship
It's the end of the Gutenberg Parenthesis as we know it, and I feel fine
If you know anything about modern Azeri literature—and of course you do—you know Akra Aylisli. From the beginning of his career in the Writer's Union of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan to his status as a People's Hero of the independent Azerbaijan, Aylisli's work was always popular and acclaimed, stocked everywhere from classrooms to libraries to bookstores. He even served a term as a member of the National Assembly.
Today, however, Aylisli's books are very difficult to find. Many of them were taken down from shelves and put into deep storage. A few were pulped, and many, especially in Aylisli's hometown, were burned by a frenzied mob. Aylisli himself is even harder to find, having been placed under house arrest since 2017, still awaiting trial today on charges of disorderly conduct.
His crime was to allow, in a moment of pained conscience, for a Russian journal to publish a translation of Stone Dreams. Aylisi had written it years ago, "for the drawer", as Soviet writers used to say of anything too dangerous to share, and he knew that it was dangerous: Stone Dreams is about Nagorno-Karabakh.
Karabakh is too thorny of an issue to untangle on a humble books blog, so we'll keep this short: Armenians and Azeris both have a long history of living there, and both have suffered terribly fighting over it. At the same time, amid all the belligerent, militaristic nationalism, lay a deeper truth: although some Armenians and Azerbaijanis had fought and killed each other in Karabakh for centuries, many more lived side by side as neighbors, classmates, and friends.
So Aylisli wrote a novel about this history, telling the truth as he remembered it from his own childhood and in the stories of his grandparents. When he finally let a Russian translation appear abroad in 2013, retribution was swift: the government stripped him of his titles and pension, while his family lost their jobs. In his hometown, they made a bonfire of his books. Watching footage of the event, he later wrote: "It is real torture for a writer when a people turns into a mob literally before his eyes...just ten days before this 'rally' practically all of them had been proud of me as their famous writer and distinguished deputy; their children knew me from their schoolbooks. And now, having turned into a mob, they'd already forgotten all of that."
In 2016, Aylisli was arrested on made-up charges and placed on indefinite house arrest. Officially, he has been awaiting trial for seven years. Aylisli is a banned writer.
Maia Kobabe is also a banned writer. In 2019, they published Gender Queer, a graphic novel memoir about growing up as a nonbinary person. In many school libraries in the United States, parents objected to keeping the book on shelves, mostly on the basis of a few sexually explicit scenes. In some schools, these parental challenges were successful, and Gender Queer was removed from those shelves. Although Gender Queer has been a consistent best-seller and is widely available to purchase from any major bookseller or checkout from most public libraries, the fact remains that Maia Kobabe is also, technically, a banned writer.
I say all of this having just sat through the American Library Association's annual Banned Books Week. Although the ALA has no shortage of banned writers to pick from who have risked their lives by speaking truth to authoritarian regimes—Azeri novelists, Eritrean journalists, Uyghur poets, North Korean dissidents—all the Banned Books Week material that floated across my transom as an English teacher were books that were simply slightly inconvenient to borrow in a few places, like Gender Queer or perennial best-sellers that had survived similar challenges in the past, like Nineteen Eight-Four and Fahrenheit 451.
And despite the obvious fact that "banned in America" doesn't seem to mean the same thing as "banned in Turkmenistan," the ALA has been working especially hard this year to scare the bejesus out of everyone with alarming graphics like this:
We are living, apparently, in a period of censorship no American has seen in living memory, with cancel-happy conservatives running amok in our schools and libraries policing thought and enforcing conformity. Never mind that becoming the target of homophobic Republican activists and scared conservative parents is now, at this point, one of the few reliable ways to get your book decent media coverage. Book bans are even coming for the Scholastic Book Fair!
But when you look at the numbers, the story practically evaporates. Here's Micah Mattix, doing the math for us on one of the ALA's press releases:
The ALA is pitching the number of challenges (1,269) as an alarming increase—up almost 50% from challenges filed in 2021. It has been tracking these for 20 years, and every year between 300 and 500 challenges are typically filed. So, 1,269 is indeed a big increase. Is it alarming? No.
First, 1,269 challenges across 117,000+ libraries just isn’t that significant. I am guessing that several libraries reported multiple challenges, which means that we are likely talking about less that 1% of libraries across America reporting a request from a patron or parent to remove a book. That would mean 99% of libraries reported no challenges at all.
Second, the ALA is describing these requests as attempts to curtail free speech, but most of them concern material that patrons or parents think is sexually explicit and don’t want their children to read. (The ALA says that “the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color.”) This isn’t about asking the government to shut publishers down. It is (mostly) about determining what is appropriate for children and teens to read.
Essentially, the new American censorship so loudly decried everywhere involves about 1% of American libraries removing a few YA books with LGBT and social justice themes. That's not a good thing, mind you, but it's also important to note that the vast majority of these cases are coming from a handful of kooks (literally a few dozen people across the entire country), egged on by conservative social media. And even more importantly, once again: all of these banned books are abundantly available in stores and libraries. The kids in schools affected by this will, if they set their minds to it, easily find a way to get a copy of a book that they want. As pretty much any parent or teacher can tell you, banning a book pretty much guarantees that teenagers will find ways to read it.
Mostly though, they sound like they just don't care very much. As I've said in this space before, kids these days (shakes fist) aren't bothered by book bans because, well, most of them don't read. Youth leisure reading rates have been in decline since we started measuring it in the 1980s, with especially sudden and severe drops around 2013—right around the time smartphones went from being popular gadgets for adults to public utilities for all age groups. It's not just teens—every generation has been trading page time for screen time since the 1950s—but the changes are more severe for younger groups. Last year, 46% of American teenagers in a poll self-reported that they are online "almost constantly," spending most of that time on entertainment apps like YouTube and TikTok or in online games like Fortnite. Youth culture, like everything else, is just another corner of the internet. Censoring books for young people will ultimately have about as much of an effect as limiting their access to AM radio or VHS tapes.
Whether you think you're saving the children or standing up for free speech, both sides are posturing here, fighting the last century's battles with the last century's tools, grappling over books at the exact moment they are sliding into irrelevancy. Both sides are still trapped in the Gutenberg Parenthesis.
The idea of the Gutenberg Parenthesis is not new, but I've been reading about it lately in Jeff Jarvis's excellent new book of the same name. It's pretty simple: Gutenberg's invention of the printing press led to the formation of a print culture, based on the linearity, repeatability, and authority of printed work. The legal, educational, academic, cultural, and religious institutions of the modern world were all shaped by print. This was supposed to be a permanent change, but the rise of mass media in the 20th century, and especially the internet, has given rise to a post-Gutenberg culture. Computer networks, not printed texts, are now the primary vessel for culture. Networks, unlike texts, don't move in a single, linear direction. In a post-Gutenberg culture, everybody is both creator and audience, and the number of channels and associations that can be made are practically infinite. Forget splintering the Catholic church into a few Protestant denominations: now, everybody can be their own church., livestreaming in 4K UltraHD.
There are plenty of specifics in the theory that we can quibble over, but the general thrust of it is certainly true. If the internet really is as important as the printing press, then we are only standing at the front edge of an unfolding that could take decades and centuries to become clear. Printing was fifty when Aldus Manutius perfected the form of the printed book; seventy when the Reformation was unleashed; a century and a half old when novels and newspapers began to appear. As Jarvis reminds readers, in printing years, we're only in AD 1480, a hybrid age, still rubricating the initial letters and inking in the illustrations. Our own age of Google and Facebook will probably be as quaint, in a century, as broadside ballads are to us: an awkward forerunner, a half-formed compromise between old and new, using the technology of the future to share the media of the past. Who needs text and video when you've got artificial intelligence and alternate reality?
Seen in this light, all this palavering over censorship is about as laughable as the Catholic Church putting another blasphemous title on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a stupid, mean-spirited gesture that only gives credibility and profit to the enemies it's supposed to suppress.
So again, it's worth emphasizing: banning these books will have a vanishingly small effect on a few kids in a few places. There can be room for debate about what kinds of sexual content is appropriate for different age groups in different places, but we should never kid ourselves that this is remotely important to the wider drift of our civilization or the world our children will inherit.
As for Banned Books Week, we should drop this collective delusion that buying another copy of Slaughterhouse Five is more than just a marketing ploy. If the ALA really wants to celebrate the joys and virtues of the free press, then they should do the hard work of promoting writers who really, truly are banned. They don't live in Brooklyn, but in Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, and China, countries that have managed to stymy the passing of the Gutenberg Parenthesis only through violence. They pay the same oblique compliment to print that Osip Mandelstam noticed when he wrote: "Only in Russia is poetry respected—it gets people killed."
If Banned Books Week really wants to matter, then we should be reading The Backstreets, The Accusation, Stone Dreams. We should be reading books that are actually banned. Let’s not confuse an irritating side-effect of free speech with a human rights violation.
From the Archives
I’ve covered this topic a few years ago, too:
Links & Further Reading
This one took longer to put together than expected, due to some interference in life. But here are some good book-related things of late:
Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy: or, the weird relationship between magic & science in the 16th century.
A (non) profile of Benjamín Labatut: When We Cease to Understand the World was a favorite from last year; last week I devoured The MANIAC on a long flight. I think BL is now my favorite living writer?
A Conversation with Lawrence Weschler: OK, Weschler is also one of my favorite living writers, and a tutelary spirit for everything I’m doing here. Good read.
MacArthur “genius” grants for 2023: usually a more interesting bunch than the Nobel laureate (sorry, Dag. I’ll read you someday).
Merriam-Webster’s new words for 2023. Bring back prescriptivism!
Athanasius Kircher’s Musical Ark. Because it’s been too long since I wrote about Athanasius.
And that’s all for this edition. Happy reading!