\u201cBanning books is one of the most absurd of human pursuits,\u201d poet and Wabash Professor Emeritus Marc Hudson said Monday during a Banned Books Week reading at Indianapolis\u2019s Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like banning sunshine\u2014 like banning chlorophyll.\u201d<\/p>\n
The library honoring a writer who wove together the absurd and the poignant proved a fitting venue for a celebration of the freedom to read and led by Hudson, Wabash President Greg Hess, and poet and DePauw Professor Joe Heithaus.<\/p>\n
The night meant even more if you knew the Wabash professor whose memorial service inspired the founding of the Vonnegut library. (More on that later.)<\/p>\n
Standing next to a wall of once-banned books, DePauw Librarian Rick Provine introduced President Hess, an economist by training who admitted he \u201chad never given a dramatic reading.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Hess proved true Wabash Professor Robert Petty\u2019s liberal arts notion that scholars have much to offer “at the frayed borders between their own understanding and the unique knowledge of others.” He provided some of the evening\u2019s most interesting stories and insight.<\/p>\n
He read from a book that \u201cleft a lasting and powerful impression\u201d on him: Ernest Hemingway\u2019s The Sun Also Rises<\/i>. Banned in Boston in 1930, burned by the Nazis in 1933, outlawed in Ireland in 1953, and banned from schools in San Jose and Riverside, CA, in 1960, it is #18 on the American Library Association\u2019s banned classics list.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we find intolerable can turn 180 degrees,\u201d Hess said, noting that The Sun Also Rise <\/i>was criticized for its use of profanity and the decadence of its characters.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was banned for sex, language, and excessive drinking.\u201d Hess smiled. \u201cAll things that it seems are practically required in a piece of literature today. \u201c<\/p>\n
As the audience laughed, Hess added, \u201cbut they let many things pass that we wouldn\u2019t let through today.\u201d<\/p>\n
He read excerpts highlighting Hemingway\u2019s famous prose, but also passages with anti-Semitic and racist overtones. Hess\u2019 awareness of anti-Semitic language is heightened, he explained, by his own mixed religious heritage.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mother was Jewish, my father was Catholic, so my parents allowed us to choose our religion. My sister chose to be raised Jewish, I chose to be raised Catholic, but anti-Semitism is something I certainly recognize.\u201d<\/p>\n
He recalled conversations he\u2019d had with author Jamaica Kincaid about racism and anti-Semitism in Hemingway\u2019s work: \u201cThere\u2019s not language there that would get the book banned today, but language that brings more heat than light. It would certainly get conversations started.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a timeless piece of intolerance that we find in passages of classic literature,\u201d Hess concluded. \u201cBut there are also passages that people find tolerable in one age, and intolerable the next.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cBanning books is absurd, yes,\u201d said Hudson. \u201cBut it\u2019s also scary. That\u2019s one of the reasons I love this guy Vonnegut. He was fearless. He could put the most tragic things forward with comedy, or the sense of the strange. He generates poetic comedy\u2014the way he brings together the tragic and the comic is truly remarkable. \u201c<\/p>\n
Hudson read from Slaughterhouse Five,<\/i> perhaps Vonnegut\u2019s most influential work,\u00a0set during the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, which the author had witnessed as a POW in World War II. The horror of that attack\u2014which killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed the city\u2014changed the writer\u2019s own view the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can hear the survivor\u2019s guilt,\u201d Hudson said. \u201cHe was there\u2014he survived. He was haunted by this experience, and he wants us to be haunted by it. That\u2019s at the heart of his work: \u2018I survived, I have to speak of this so it doesn\u2019t happen again.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a deathless energy in Vonnegut\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Joe Heithaus recalled reading Vonnegut\u2019s Breakfast of Champions<\/i> when he was in high school and uninterested in poetry or literature.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was not a reader, but that book showed us all kinds of ways to craft language,\u201d the award-winning poet said. \u201cThat book was my entry into reading.\u201d<\/p>\n
The poets took turns reading their own works and poems from others\u2014Hudson from Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Antonio Machado, and Heithaus from Marc Doty, Amiri Baraka, Roque Dalton, and Valzhyna Mortand.<\/p>\n
Hudson\u2019s 2008 poem merging his experience of his son Ian\u2019s death with the tragedy of War in Iraq\u2014\u201cHelen\u2019s Tears\u201d\u2014stunned the room into silence.<\/p>\n
Library President Mark Lakshmanan concluded the event, speaking of how reading Vonnegut swayed his career path from history to healing.
\nIt was the sort of evening of literature and laughter, reflection and remembrance, that Vonnegut Library founder Julia Whitehead had in mind when she envisioned the project in 2008. Her husband, J.T Whitehead \u201987, had been a student of Wabash Professor of Philosophy and Religion Bill Placher \u201970, and the couple attended the memorial service for Bill in Pioneer Chapel December 6, 2008.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were so many kind words about Placher, and he clearly touched so many lives in an extraordinary way. People of all ages loved him,\u201d Julia recalled. \u201cAs I was rocking our youngest child to sleep that night, I thought of who I would want to hold such a memorial service for. And my mind went straight to Vonnegut.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe next day, I Googled his son, Mark, in Massachusetts and said I had an idea for a nonprofit library in honor of his father. There was magic in the air at Wabash College on the night of Placher’s memorial service. I’m grateful I was there to be inspired. It changed the course of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
And created a place to celebrate all the writers who, as Hudson observed, \u201cshift our vision and transform the way we see the world, the wonder of it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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