Baned Books Week - Last Day!

Here's the last random post from the Banned Books Week map:

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It's been interesting posting these: more because of the memories that they've brought up for me, since most of these cases involve books in schools, where people have the impression they should be able to control what other people read. Parents that don't want their children reading books with dragons in them think that they have the right to tell all the other kids in the class that they shouldn't read books with dragons in them. And there are whole committees and procedures that school boards set up in order to validate those parents and "give it due consideration." There is a complaints process, and therefore there are complaints. Chicken and egg? Who knows?

I'd like it if the ALA's map covered other cases outside the schools and libraries - like what about books stopped at the border between Canada and the USA because of content (as happened to Little Sister's bookstore in Vancouver, which had a shipment of books held at the border, because of charges that the books were pornography)? I think that counts. 

As a parting note - look for an article coming out in a couple of weeks by Cory Doctorow about sex in teen novels. (Google it, I don't remember the title or where it's being printed.) He mentioned it at one of the schools we visited this week, when someone asked if he'd ever had complaints about his book Little Brother. He told them that yes, he had - a parent had complained because the main character loses his virginity (and "nothing bad happens as a result.") 

Oh, yeah, that's what you want to be teaching kids: that sex inevitably ends in suffering. That'll arm them for their future lives and relationships. Personally, I think Marcus and Ange (the kids in Cory's book) are a great model of a healthy, functional, equal, respectful, mature partnership.

Banned Books Week: Day Six

jwcurry

Basically, because he said it better, I'm going to quote rob mclennan's quoting of Roland Prevost's plea: and add my own. In a universe far far away, where things make sense, teachers are paid six figures and the army holds bake sales to buy bombers, and patrons take on people whose contributions to art are as important, and as hard to explain to the general population or god help us our current government, as jwcurry's, and they feed and house them, and let them continue to chronicle the development of our collective souls and generally exist for the expansion of our minds and the continued forward trajectory of thought.

So, think about it. Buy something from jwcurry. Or donate. Or subscribe. Or something. The government won't support him. Joe Six-Pack wouldn't understand him. Lots of people would shrug and tell him to get a job. But he's GOT one. It's just not one that our society's set up to support him for, and he needs the help of the artist community every so often. 

 

An urgent note from Roland Prevost: save jwcurry & Room 302 Books! 

john curry, certainly a world class poet living in our community, is presently facing almost certain eviction.

Stephen Brockwell alerted me of this precarious situation, by phone, and asked if I would get the word out, most recently at the TREE Reading Series on September 22, where we were able to scare up enough to cover one of his 5 months’ owed rent & save his telephone service.

curry’s been in constant production of his own and hundreds of others’ work since 1979. he’s mainly ineligible for grants. His bookstore is mainly an unused resource. His archive documenting the growth of avant-garde writing in Canada is one of the key collections in the country. Nicky Drumbolis has said: “curry and his work are the best-kept secret in Canada.”

Since time is of the essence, if curry’s to avoid eviction, there are a few ways you can help:

Start to use his goddamn store!

Room 302 Books is the only bookstore in Canada ever to focus specifically on the avant-garde and “overlooked outsiders,” specializing in concrete/visual/sound poetries (mainly Canadian) with a stock of over 20,000 mainly rare titles, including “elusive ephemera,” and probably the only source of most of jwcurry’s various imprints and titles (which number in the thousands). curry’s current lists finally focus on his own work as artist & publisher, virtually the first time everything that’s (still) available has been made commonly available. You can purchase bookstore IOUs (or set up an account) today in any amount for those who’d like to do that.

Subscribe to Curvd H&z, curry’s serial imprint. “donor” subscriptions (please indicate) of $100 or more get ½ the stash in a sampling of available titles from various of his imprints immediately, the remaining ½ put on account for forthcoming titles.

Donate outright.

I would like to encourage you to donate something so as to keep this excellent bookstore, publisher, archive and artist alive, and at the same time help prevent curry’s eviction from his apartment. For those who’d like to purchase bookstore IOU’s, I’d ask you to write (#302-880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Canada K1R 6R7) or call him at (613) 233 0417. Please contribute as you can.

Roland Prevost (with collusions with curry)

Banned Books Week: Day Five
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Banned Books Week - Day Four

I spent the day today bombing around talking copyright law, internet privacy, RSS and CMS and many other nifty things with Cory Doctorow, in the service of getting him to two high schools and a couple of media interviews. Fascinating guy to talk to, and I really had a lot of fun. It was also really fun to watch him asking groups of high school students, "So, how many of you have tried to look at something on the Internet that was blocked by your school's sensors?" (Hands go up across the room.) "And, how many of you know how to get around those sensors?" (Pretty much the same number of hands go up.) "Okay, those of you who don't know, ask someone who does." And this in front of the teachers... who are nodding in emphatic agreement. One teacher was asking how to get around the blocks that keep her from using YouTube with her class, and a boy in the fourth row who was probably about 15 put his hand up and told her. She blinked a bit, and said, "Okay, you, we'll talk after. Show me."

AWESOME. 

Keep an ear out, too, for interviews with Cory on Nigel Beale's The Biblo File, (on CKCU and also on podcast at his blog) and on CHUO's Audio Visual tomorrow at 1:00 (to be podcasted later at Apt613.)

And here's your random case, today from Arizona:

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(Yes, but what were the objections to Carlin and Williams? That they're funny?) 

Banned Books Week - Day Three

Interestingly, I'm going to be spending most of my day tomorrow with Cory Doctorow, whose YA book Little Brother has been challenged by a parent recently - not because it incites kids to use countersurveillance, clone RFID chips, and defy the Department of Homeland Security, or because it acts as a handbook for organized dissent. Not even because of the graphic depictions of torture (like the harrowing waterboarding scene at the end...) Nope. Because of the (off camera, consenting and loving) teen sex.

Little Brother also won a White Pine Award (judged by librarians and young readers) and a Sunburst Award for YA Fiction. And was shortlisted for a Hugo Award (arguably the highest SF award in the English speaking world.) Hm.

And, here's your random mouse-jiggled case for the day:

Banned Books Week - Day two
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Your happy story for the day

My brother found this short video and sent it to me. Luis Soriano Boroquez is a teacher in La Gloria, Columbia who runs a "Biblioburro" - a traveling library from the back of a donkey. I remember the Bookmobile when I was a kid: my mom used to walk me and my sister up the hill to where the converted bus full of bookshelves was parked in the neighbour's driveway. It's one of my earliest memories, and I remember being completely excited by all the books lined up along the sides of the bus. (Yes, it was probably a formative experience.) I lived about half an hour away from Fredericton, and it was hard to get in to the main library. My mom had two small kids to worry about, and a pair of teenagers. Going all the way in to town was an epic journey, in my mind at the time. 

But it wasn't any eight-hour round trip journey on the back of a burro, carting 120 books and a foldable plastic picnic table, by any stretch. And what Luis says about it is just beautiful:

"With the Biblioburro, we are fighting what we call the "farmer's ignorance." In a book we can find cities, cultures, rights, duties. A child we can educate today with the Biblioburro is a child we are teaching rights, duties, and commitments to. And a child who is aware of their rights, duties, and commitments, is a child informed to say 'no' to war."

He's also built a library along with his wife, so that someday he'll have somewhere to keep all his books and an actual central location for the children.

Somebody give this guy a medal or something. Better yet, give him a hand.

 

Banned Books Week - Day One

Banned Books Week: Sept 26-Oct 3

Banned Books Week starts tomorrow. It's an American initiative, so their website deals with American challenges and cases, but I think we ought to be marking the week in Canada too.

I just spent way too long clicking through their interactive map of book bans and challenges. Wow. Not surprising, I suppose, that so many of the bans arise from people not caring what the book is saying, just the language in which it's said. Also not surprising that there's just as many, or more, coming from a sort of blind terror that reading about a thing will cause you somehow to do it, be it, experience it. By this logic reading the newspaper will cause you to rob banks, drink and drive, commit fraud, run for President, become a rock star, pass laws, design a Mars lander, grow the world's biggest zucchini and marry a millionaire. And much much more.

Check out the map, pick one of the books and read it if you haven't. Or, go to their top ten challenged books list, and read em all. Not surprisingly, it'll be a short read, because most of them are children's books. #1 on the list? And Tango Makes Three, a children's picture book about the penguin chick adopted by two male penguins in Central Park Zoo. On the top of the banned list, three years running. 

"We wrote the book to help parents teach children about same-sex parent families. It's no more an argument in favor of human gay relationships than it is a call for children to swallow their fish whole or sleep on rocks." - co-author Justin Richardson