Red Emma Reports: UCI Banned Books Read-Out (Red Emma)

If a tree falls on somebody’s head and they don’t hear it,
does it still make a sound?

LAST YEAR AT THIS TIME, Red Emma found himself blogging for Freedom Communications, at no cost to Freedom (thank you), a corporation now approaching bankruptcy. This year a nice reporter for the Freedom’s (sinking) flagship OC Register wrote up my third annual effort to get other civil liberties-loving anteaters to read dirty books in public. Ace photographer Miguel stuck around for nearly the whole 90 minutes, shooting flattering photographs and seeming to dig the event in, of course, a professionally objective journalistic kind of way.

The Read-Out should be huge. It’s a celebration of intellectual freedom and civic literacy and it’s just fun. Of course, I like it because it’s an opportunity to sort of rub our rights in the faces of all the fundies and no-nothings and busybodies and so-called conservatives and fussy parents and ministers who imagine that they are gonna stop people from thinking. But you knew that already, and probably figured out that Red’s modus fuckaroundi generally includes exercising some modest aggression in the direction of authority.

Speaking of authority: As usual, no UCI Senate faculty showed, no administrators either. A handful of brave librarians, a few students and a community member (Hi, Felicity—No on Prop 8!) took the stage, just, finally, cuz we could. A good time was had by, well, us anyway. Mitchell Brown, UCI librarian, filmed the deal. It’s pretty boring, unless you go in for this kind of thing, and he’s promised to putting it up on YouTube.

I certainly do go in for this sort of thing. And, once again, it was that variety of unlikely event which offers Red an opportunity to consider the place of civic participation in a place without much, unless you count every kind of church group, fraternity and sorority, goofy political outfit. And who doesn’t jump at that opportunity? As it happens, earlier in the day I pledged a Korean Christian sorority and joined the Ayn Rand club. I’m now “Li’l Sister” to an upperclasswoman named Roark. We’re gonna go to a prayer meeting together I think.


By the way, a nice visiting scholar from Canada (see her photo above, from the Register slide show) told me that she was quite shocked by all the Greeks. “You know,” she said, very Canadianly (they are quite lovely, sincere people, those kanucks) “in Canada they aren’t allowed on our college and university campuses.” I got excited, but then she explained that they in fact had ‘em there, but that the little gangsters just had to live off campus. Oh, Canada!

Looking for Love in Allah Wrong Places

Somewhere on Mitchell’s video there’ll be me quoting from Matthew, that bit about where two or more are gathered, there in the midst am I. J.C. of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Beyond said that. I like him. I have a cool cartoon sticker on my bathroom medicine chest, with him smiling as he passes a safety razor across his foamed–up beard. Instead of the old, familiar “Jesus Saves” it reads “Jesus Shaves.” I swear to his dad I laugh at this nearly every single morning.

So the “Read-Out” was, once again, kinda like that, spiritually or existentially. There were a dozen of us. The university ignored it, only a few people stopped to pay attention, but we had fun.

And then, yes, the Register covered it, turning our modest event into the journalistic hook for a much bigger story, which allowed this writing instructor to use the whole thing in his beginning composition class as an example of a “rhetorical situation,” and talk about appeal to audience, language, politics, the rhetorical triangle. You gotta love irony in this biz that we call Ed.

There was more irony to be observed, plenty more, but I’ll spin just one perfect anecdote to illustrate it. After offering the gratuitous-seeming bit from the New Testament I made a point of mentioning that various goofs had tried to ban, censor or challenge all kinds of books, including, said I, the Bible and the Koran. Which is true.

All right, so I am shameless. I was trying to appeal to the audience, such as it was, mostly eating their lunches at the tables across the way and talking and ignoring the middle-aged people up there reading Orwell and Steinbeck and J.K. Rowling and William Burroughs. (Wow, cool reading list!)

And within minutes, appearing out of nowhere arrives a group of five or six big, handsome Southeast Asian-seeming young men, a couple of them wearing traditional-seeming garb, all eager, it seems, to read. They gather around the library cart full, I mean really full, of novels and nonfiction, poetry and plays, sorting through the stacks and I am thinking, neat-o, suddenly the size of our read-out crew has nearly doubled and I am one happy pedagog and isn’t the collective effort to celebrate our Constitutionally-protected freedoms just the cat’s pajamas?

But things are not as they seem. Just as suddenly as they appeared, they all disappeared, didn’t read out or read in, no, did not read at all. They vanished. It was almost a miracle the way they disappeared like that, and fast. Except that it wasn’t and I am sure, dear Dissent reader, you have figured out, as did I, that they weren’t looking for just any banned book which, in its reading in public by a free citizen might communicate the message of the value of free thought and inquiry and resistance, or illustrate the moral courage required of free people and the strength of the human spirit beyond the often narrow limits of one’s often narrow self-interest.

No, they were looking, it seems, for just one particular book. Hmmm. Not finding that one special text, they lost interest and found disappointment and, it seems, missed what I think it is safe to say is the whole point of our big little event.

Maybe I’m actually kind of relieved that they went away. I had perhaps been too eager to imagine, to dream, to trick myself into that happy liberal political vision where what seemed to me to be a group of religionists might actually hear the trees talking to them in the woods. Typically, those folks are too busy with the work of chopping them down.


Noam Chomsky is smarter than me, and a better person, too. “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise,” Chomsky reminds us, “we don’t believe in it at all.” So it’s a two-way street, right, at least if you bother to read the traffic signs? And, friends, you don’t just show up at a party for freedom to celebrate only your own. That would seem to be the very easiest of all the easy and of course impossibly challenging messages of Banned Books Week. It’s one that maybe Red needs to himself remember when he’s feeling ungenerous and pissy. But I sure hope somebody clues those fellows in too.

(photos by the fab Register photographer Miguel Vasconcellos!)