Better at making things than blogging

I feel like such a good citizen today. I went and voted, and then I filed my taxes! And it's not even 7:30 yet! I made delicious Conservative Hegemony Shepherd's Pie for dinner, including a mysterious sauce of my own invention. And zucchini, natch. I'm going to install my new modem, too, but first I'll update this blog in case I break the Internet. Then I'll see if I can get any reception with my TV to watch the results roll in as the polls close.

I guess Thing-A-Day ended with a whimper. I actually did make something almost every day. There were maybe 4 days I missed out of 29. I was better about making things than blogging, apparently. The artificial constraint of having to do things daily did help me to focus my energy, and try things even if I knew I didn't have time to do them as thoroughly/complicatedly as I might like.

It was also Freedom to Read week last week. I feel bad that I didn't get around to any thinking about it this year, yet alone doing anything. However, a book club that I am a pseudo-member of is meeting in a few weeks, and our book (chosen by my lovely friend and fellow librarian Becky) is The Outsiders. Yeah. It's awesome. I was totally the kind of kid who read all these books everyone told her were Important, and The Outsiders was on that list along with The Outsider (heh), Catcher In the Rye, and so on. I wish I had kept a reading journal in those days, because I read so many books, and I remember my reactions to so few of them.

I'm glad The Ousiders is at least interesting, because I've been on a Bad Books and Movies Roll lately. In the past week, To Paint or Make Love, Serendipity, The Other Boleyn Girl and Beyond the Deepwoods have all disappointed me. (I'd seen Serendipity before, but I watched it because my mom and sister rented it. And they were in my apartment. So.) It's time for some things to be GOOD.

Updates on 3 things

It's almost Freedom to Read week again! I just got the results of the Canadian Library Association's 2007 challenges survey in my e-mail inbox. Based on the list of books that were challenged in school and public libraries in 2007, I'm adding a few titles to my to-read list, as usual.

I love making sure that, by challenging a book, a library patron basically ensures that at least a few extra people will read it. I always want to be one of those people. Violence? Nudity? Sexual content? Drug use? Inappropriate language? Sign me up! Those are some of the components of the greatest books.

Also, Thing-A-Day starts today. I'm excited. And yet busy. What Thing will I create? Who knows!

Oh, and:

My paladin hit 65 last night. I wasn't kidding when I said I was done fooling around. I might actually PASS some of the other people in my guild who are leveling their 60-ish characters. Which has never happened for me in the history of Warcraft. OR MANKIND.

That is all. There are PowerPoint issues that require my attention.

Some news that hurts my heart

To follow up on earlier reports about His Dark Materials, it has now been banned indefinitely by the Halton Catholic School Board. This is the first time a book has ever been banned in the board. And--this is my favourite part--"The three titles will not be made available to students upon request and will be 'stored at the central board office for the time being.'" Better pile them up--it's easier to burn them that way.

(Actually, I learned from Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History that books don't burn as well as you might think--they're too dense. So instead of piling them randomly, they should probably be stacked in a kind of house-of-cards structure, with the pages splayed apart for maximum oxygen exposure. Maybe if I have time later I'll build an example out of MY books and post pictures online for reference. Probably not, though, since that would go against pretty much everything I believe about the world.)

To quote the article linked above:

"The trouble is that all too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people's lives in the name of some invisible god (and they're all invisible, because they don't exist) -- and done terrible damage," Pullman writes on his website.

"In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for it."

I'm not claiming to have a monopoly on the interpretation of this book or any other, but I think this is the crux of the issue: Philip Pullman may be an atheist, but I don't think his books are actually about religion at all, they're about the dysfunction that can result from letting religion (or any other social force) drive us to be intolerant or hateful or controlling of other people. His books are about the corruption of power, and I think the fact that it's religious power is almost incidential. I don't think books should ever be banned, but it's worse when a book is banned based on what (I think) is a misinterpretation of its message. I promise not to go on about this endlessly, but I do think we have to remember that we don't live in a world without censorship, and we can't afford to grow complacent about what we are allowed to read.

The end. I'm going to immediately change the subject.

Earlier: And not all Christians do

And not all Christians do

I was wondering how long it would take for the kinds of Christians who like to ban books to set their sights on The Golden Compass. And now it's happened, albeit in a Catholic jurisdiction. (Although it hasn't been banned, just temporarily removed from shelves while it's under review.) (As adamantly anti-book-banning as I am, I have to admit that when you're talking about religious schools, the waters get murkier. Although why they bought the book in the first place is a bit of a mystery. But making kids ask librarians for books--like PORN? Why bother?)

It's so ironic that the movie, which apparently dispenses with a lot of the anti-religious material from the series, is what is raising the books' profile enough for them to get banned.

I understand the sentiment behind wanting not to have a book like The Golden Compass in a Catholic school library. What I will never understand is the notion that people (children?) are so flexible and vulnerable in their beliefs that being exposed to something they don't agree with will--what? convert them? cause them to break down in tears? Destroy their lives? Exposure to what we don't believe in helps us to understand what we do believe in. And if a book can change your mind, then maybe you didn't really believe it in the first place. I firmly believe that reading a book that infuriates you is a helpful and illustrative exercise. In fact, there were things about His Dark Materials that infuriated me, but it would never occur to me that because of that, I should try to prevent others from reading it. I guess that's because I'm at ease in the post-modern world.

[PS. I love the part of the article that goes, "Two other books in the trilogy by British author Philip Pullman have also been removed as a precaution." Good move! I think while you're getting rid of the first book, you should also consider the third one, in which humanity declares war on God. Just as a precaution.]

Freedom to Read Week: Last Gasp

Two tidbits concerning Freedom to Read Week:

1. There has been a recent kerfuffle over the children's book The Higher Power of Lucky, a Newberry medal-winning book which contains the word "scrotum." The public debate over this book has been incredible. I first encountered the story in the New York Times (in an article that, unfortunately, is not available without a subscription). The Times reported that school librarians were pulling the book from their shelves after deciding innocent children should not be exposed to the (perfectly scientific and polite) name of a body part. (Because we all know that children are embarrassed by any discussion of body parts, especially body parts with funny names, and will shy away from discussing them. Right?) Publishers Weekly covered the story quite extensively. Neil Gaiman weighed in, quite articulately, on his blog. The author herself, Susan Patron, defends her writing in an article in the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps the funniest response was this list of other children's books containing "scrotum". Apparently, unbeknownst to us, the silent scrotum threat has actually surrounded us for some time.
   
   Obviously, this is a story that has been reported to death and it hardly seems necessary for me to weigh in. But its timing couldn't be more ironic, as many of the publications co-incided with Freedom to Read Week. What a timely, and yet ridiculous, reminder of the limitations and challenges that still occur in schools and libraries.
   
   What makes me sad about the situation is that the people who have publicly voiced their disapproval of the book have been "librarians," (or in some cases, probably, school media specialists) but in the initial scrimmage we didn't see any librarians' views from the other side of the fence. Librarians all over the world go to the wall about intellectual freedom ALL THE TIME. They are activists who defend the public's right to access information in an unrestricted, dignified, and private way. In the United States they are one of the few groups systematically keeping track of the Patriot Act and its repercussions for freedom, privacy, and democracy. I would just like to see more of that getting reported in the news. The media seem hell-bent on perpetuating the portrayal of librarians as repressed, repressive disciplinarians.
   
   Of course, the real winner in this debate is the book's author, Susan Patron. Her book has now been brought to the attention of millions of people all over the world. At least some of those millions are bound to buy it--whether to burn it in a school parking lot, to give it to their nieces and nephews, or to see what all the fuss is about. At the time of this posting, her book is already #9 on Amazon's children's bestseller list.
   



2. An excerpt from Matthew Battles' excellent Library: An Unquiet History, from the chapter "Knowledge on Fire," about libraries and book-burnings during the Nazi regime:
   

   But if German librarianship barely survived its Faustian bargain with the Nazis, libraries flourished elsewhere, even where Nazi annihilation reigned supreme. As David Shavit writes in Hunger for the Printed Word, libraries were part of survival in the ghettos and camps of the Final Solution. ... In the Vilna ghetto, amid awful degradation and constant threat of transport back to the death camps, Jews built a library. In October 1942, the librarian Herman Kruk prepared a report on the first year of the Vilna ghetto library. An extraordinary document, it now resides in the collection of the YIVO Institute in New York, where it was translated by Zachary M. Baker. It is at once a work of cool library science and a cry of mingled hope and despair. (174)

   
   The most popular circulating book in the Vilna ghetto library was Tolstoy's War and Peace. Another popular title was All Quiet on the Western Front, which had been banned by the Nazi authorities. In 1943, the librarian, Herman Kruk, was deported to Estonia, where he was burned to death in a concentration camp. (179) During the 1930s and 40s, Battles estimates that one hundred million books were burned by the Nazis. (167)

If you are interested in these issues at all, please please check out future librarians for intellectual freedom. That blog is far more thorough than mine. And I sometimes contribute, so you might catch a glimpse of me over there as I fold myself into my glamourous, library science limousine. (Little-known fact: all librarians ride around in limos. As professions go, it's pretty hot.)

This Freedom to Read Week I feel lucky to live in a country where we have so much freedom, when so many others (like the Jews in Nazi Germany) fought to have any access to their own documents and stories. At the same time, we live in a society where we are always having to fight to keep that freedom. We can't be complacent. I don't know about you, but I like a little scrotum in my children's books, thank you.

In fact, I actively enjoy being corrupted.

Me and my compatriots at Future Librarians for Intellectual Freedom (FLiF) are keeping tabs on freedom to read week over at our blog. I sat in HUB today at our table, giving away postcards and pamphlets, answering questions, and reminiscing with strangers about our favourite challenged books.

My books are not used to being locked up.

My Banned/Challenged Top 11...

• Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (challenged for obscenity, particularly in regards to underage sex)
  
• From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. K. Konigsburg
  
• The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling (for endorsing magic and the occult; and also because the main characters do not respect authority and the books glorify rule-breaking)
  
• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (for supposed references to witchcraft and magic)
  
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (for bad language, obscenity, and "anti-white" sentiment, whatever that means)
  
• The Wars by Timothy Findley (challenged for its depiction of homosexual behaviour)
  
• The Anastasia Krupnik books by Lois Lowry (for language, irreverent references, a passing reference to suicide, and the fact that Anastisia wants to name her unborn brother "one-ball Reilly")
  
• The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (for references to the occult)
  
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (challenged many times, usually for objectionable language and references to prostitution)
  
• The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares
  
• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (Challenged in Kanawha County (WV) high schools as pornographic, offensive and vulgar.)
  

If everyone who wants to ban a book got their way, we would all be sitting around reading The Poky Little Puppy. Which, in turn, would make us so bored that we would resort to the following activities: obscene language, drug and alcohol use, sexual behaviour, experimenting with the occult, and coming up with new racist names to call each other.

Freedom to Read Week 2007

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." -Oscar Wilde

"Free societies... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence." -Salman Rushdie

"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion." -Henry Steele Commager

"Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime." -Potter Stewart

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -Alfred Whitney Griswold

"The paper burns, but the words fly away." -Akiba ben Joseph

"Every burned book enlightens the world." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If your library is not 'unsafe', it probably isn't doing its job." -John Berry, Library Journal, October 1999