Henry Miller Memorial Library announces “Speech is Not Free! 50th Anniversary: Tropic of Cancer Obscenity Trial”
Friday, November 7th at Coagula Curatorial Gallery in Los Angeles
Henry Miller is responsible for — to quote scholar James Decker — “the free speech that we now take for granted in literature.” It began fifty years ago when Miller’s novel “Tropic of Cancer” was deemed not obscene by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur and its literary magazine Ping-Pong, will be throwing a party at the Coagula Curatorial Gallery in Los Angeles to honor this landmark event while ruefully acknowledging that free speech is once again under siege.
“Speech is Not Free! 50th Anniversary of the Tropic of Cancer Obscenity Trial” will celebrate this historic win for free speech by bringing together writers, poets, and authors who will read or display a piece of art/prose/poem/song that was banned and that effected them in a transformative way. Participants will also read or sing an original piece.
The event also doubles as an opening party for the latest installment of Ping Pong, the Henry Miller Memorial Library’s literary magazine. The newest edition builds upon this theme of pervasive and seemingly universal censorship by featuring banned Russian writers and poets both past and present. Poets such as Anna Akhmatova, whose work was banned from 1925-1953 as a threat to the social order. Akhmatova was labeled “alien to the Soviet people” for her “eroticism, mysticism, and political impartiality.”
In fact, a recurring theme of this event and of the newest Ping-Pong installment is that for all our advancements, speech is still not free, as contemporary Russian poet Ilya Kaminsky reminds us of this in his poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” featured in the current issue of Ping-Pong.
Complacency is the enemy and vigilance is key.
Our world is again in a period of censorship. From perhaps the most absurd act being a push to do a kind of color coding of college books in an effort to be ‘sensitive,’ to the more pervasive evil of state censorship. I say, fuck all that.
Toni Morrison says it is the job of the free to free others. We can do this by supporting other artists and those others working for change. We need to do this now more than ever, we need to do it today.
Reader Bios (in order of appearance)
Artist Tim Youd has undertakien the task of retyping one hundred classic novels, staging his durational performances at locations relevant to the author’s life and/or the plot of the novel.
Maria Garcia Teutsch–I don’t think I have to put my own bio on my own blog, do you??? But I will be reading my poetic response to Jean Genet’s, The Balcony.
Mark Lamoureux lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of thee full-length collections of poetry: Spectre (Black Radish Books 2010), Astrometry Orgonon (BlazeVOX Books 2008), and 29 Cheeseburgers / 39 Years (Pressed Wafer, 2013). His work has been published in print and online in Fence, miPoesias, Jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, Jacket, Fourteen Hills and many others.
Claire Cottrell works as a film director / creative director/ editor/ and photographer. She is the founder of Book Stand. She is the Los Angeles editor of Berlin-based Freunde von Freunden. She has contributed to The Atlantic, the Paris Review, VICE and Wilder Quarterly on the subjects of art, fashion, design and plant life. Her work has been featured in Vogue, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and purple FASHION, to name a few.
Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, the University of California, Santa Cruz and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook. Atomik Aztex won a 2006 Believer Magazine Annual Book Prize and World Ball Notebook won the 2009 Asian American Writers Workshop Poetry Prize.
Melissa Broder is the author of three poetry collections, Scarecrone, Meat Heart, and When you Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother. By day, she is Director of Media and Special Projects at NewHive. Broder received her BA from Tufts University and her MFA from City College of New York.
Henry Miller playing Ping-Pong. photo credit: Robert Snyder
For more information visit:
- Henry Miller Memorial Library at henrymiller.org
- Mike Scutari at mike@henrymiller.org for press inquiries
“A momentous event in the history of modern writing.”
Samuel Beckett on the Tropic of Cancer
