Last Thursday at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, monologist Mike Daisey told the audience he had a confession to make. Before coming to Austin, Daisey said, he asked his Facebook friends where he should eat in town. He received an onslaught of barbeque suggestions from Austinites passionately defending their favorites.… read more
Exhibitions + Events
In the Galleries: Ogden Nash’s padlocked collection of poetry
“All of these books are worse than opium… I would rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books,” declared Senator Reed Smoot of Utah in March 1930, speaking from behind a desk towering with “smutty” books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Robert Burns’s poetry. In 1929,… read more
In the Galleries: Censorship of "The Sex Side of Life"
In 1919 Mary Ware Dennett (1872–1947) published The Sex Side of Life, a sex-education pamphlet for young people that she originally wrote for her sons. The U.S. Post Office declared the pamphlet obscene in April 1922, and Dennett struggled on her own to get the ruling reversed, all the while… read more