Ban a Book
In this land of bogus holidays, I hereby assume the authority to declare this day the OFFICIAL BAN A BOOK DAY!
I don't want to sound like a cranky old man, much less live down to my friend Peter Brimelow's description of me as "crankish", but I received a message from something called Good Reads. I must have pressed a button on AMazon at some point, but now people I don't know who are listed as "friends" share with me their opinions on the books they have just read. I looked through a few pages, and I cannot imagine wasting time on a life of Rumer Godden or a Calvinist pastor's interpretation of Samuel or another breathless study of the homosexual conspiracy in the Vatican. Where do people get the time for this? I read/study several hours a day but I'd rather watch soap opera reruns. Small wonder Jordan Peterson has readers.
In a nutshell: Modern literacy, in an age of mass publishing, is among the most overrated social developments. "Without freedom of speech, we might live in the swamp," observed one of the less probable pop gurus of my lifetime. Give me the swamp, any day, if it would shut up the people on bestseller lists.
This is very amusing! I have similar thoughts and have never read Rumer Godden. One of her books, In this House of Brede, is of mild curiosity to me because it relates to Stanbrook Abbey which was a notable English Benedictine convent before the crash. ( Since sold and turned into a luxury hotel) The Best of Friends, a play by Hugh Whitemore about the friendship of George Bernard Shaw with Dame Laurentia McLachlan, Abbess of Stanbrook, is a pretty good hoot for BBC television. Having said all that, I might watch the play again but doubt I will read Rumer Godden as a follow up to all of it. There was a time for sure but now days have lowered my sights and content to just root for characters like the whiskey priest in Graham Green’s “The Power and Glory!”
All New Testament “scholarship” by Americans and Germans between 1940-1990. That’s a start. A lot more to go.
Hell and be damned to the entire genre and section in the bookstore and library (are there still bookstores and do libraries still stock books rather than just host multi-media events?) entitled “teen” fiction.
I’m going in another banned book direction here…much has been made lately by school boards fighting over banned books and subsequently some libraries and teachers’ organizations running around with “We Don’t Ban Books,” statements and freedom of expression sentiments . When I see these I want to show up willing to donate copies of Camp of the Saints and watch how quickly they collapse back into their own hypocrisy.
Facebook, the Tulsa newspaper, the Tulsa schools are full of whining demagogues bemoaning all the “book banning” by the Right. It’s hopeless but satisfying to remark about the banning of any book that departs from the Progressive mindset. Where are the books by Sowell and Williams sitting next to Ta Nahisi Coates’ tomes? Or books by Climate Deniers, anti-vaxxers, anything from Vdare, TJF, etc? Thank you for adding “Camp of the Saints”, Mr. Colin.
I have a hardback copy of Frank Browlow’s “Two Shakespearean Sequences” dumped by the University of the Pacific — that’s another kind of banning!
Here is a simple question. Do the librarians, teachers, politicians, et al who claim to be defenders of free speech and opposed to banning books really believe what they are saying? For decades I have given them the benefit of the doubt and regarded them as cynical liars, but perhaps I was naive. Maybe, probably they are simply that stupid.
Here are two reasons why it is necessary to ban books.
1) Libraries and schools have finite space and money. The mere fact that they exist, own buildings, pay salaries mean they can only buy the smallest fraction of what is available.
2. These institutions simply have to chose what is most important or appropriate for their institution. So when they replace Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and Plato with transsexual kiddie porn, they are stating what they regard as essential.
The question is, as Alice is informed, “Who is to be master?” But my question is more basic: Why must librarians and teachers be illiterate and stupid? Is that something found in the penumbra of the Constitution?
Yup, Tom, a State, a county or other governmental entity could always justify the hiring of illiterate, stupid teachers and librarians under the Constitution by noting that such hirings are allowed, if not now required, under the “general welfare” clause of that document. This gaping hole in the Constitution is the wound thru which almost all poisons pass, as they stream their way to the complete destruction of the Republic.
Has anyone here checked their public library’s and school libraries’ holdings to see whether they don’t have the books proposed as alternatives as well as the ones decried by the evangelical right? My library, St. Paul Public, has The Camp of the Saints, two Walter E. Williams books. and 20 titles by Thomas Sowell. And here I am in the liberal heart of darkness! Moreover, I’ve never heard of left-wing efforts to oust right-wing books from general-interest libraries, here or anywhere.
Tom is right that neither library budgets nor library shelf space are commodious enough to purchase and manage huge collections, let alone “everything”. Before and during the time I worked at it as well as at present, SPPL has practiced de-accessioning or weeding and has had the intention to be a popular library. Items that don’t circulate are withdrawn. That doesn’t mean they are inaccessible. My library card is honored by public libraries in seven (I believe) counties, and I frequently request items by interlibrary loan from other libraries throughout the upper midwest, including college and university libraries. I can even ask for a nationwide search to borrow a book, though I haven’t ever done that.
My colleagues in librarianship certainly are not all up to the standards of literacy and intelligence maintained by contributors to FF discussions, but they are sincere about wanting library collections to contain as broad as possible ranges of literary and intellectual content as are consistent with those collections’ audiences and interests.
Actually, Mr. Olsen, I have checked my local libraries over the past few years, including the only really large one nearby – Youngstown Public Library – and have found that there is a definite ideological preference at work in both acquisition and withdrawal. Even the town libraries in this county – a 70 percent Trump – enclave, seem to share this predilection. While I could certainly be accused of paleoconservative bias, my friend, a recently retired college professor of literature, a card-carrying liberal feminist, agrees with my assessment.
Lest I give the wrong impression, I am not vilifying our local librarians and their staffs; they are uniformly helpful, but I think they are greatly influenced by national or multinational organizations and associations. My friend and I have acquired a great many valuable books at sales of withdrawn books…history, literature, poetry and reference especially…and watch the shelf space taken over DVDs, music CDs and books connected to popular culture.
While your point about accessibility via library loan is well-taken, the ability of someone to wander through the stacks and discover books of interest and value that they would not know about. I lament the loss of bookstores for the same reason- you can’t get from Amazon something you don’t know exists. Not to beat the Camp of the Saints to death, but none of the libraries here, including Youngstown have it, so chances of its discovery are non-existent.
There are two parallel tracks here…one is bias ( I think not deliberate, but absorbed) and the second is the diminution of reading and books overall.
Ray,
I think Burbank, California banned some a few years back. To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
I know Burbank is probably now considered a conservative bastion compared to other parts of the Golden State but the leftists did try it a while back and were successful as I remember.
I don’t have a dog in the ban fight because I know better. In the Olden times ( and probably even the Olsen times) there was usually only one side lying about the other —-Usually the Left telling the biggest whoppers, but not always. But today I know for a fact both sides are lying. I don’t know if Tail-Gunner Joe McCarthy or Joseph Welch either one had any capacity for shame towards the end but I certainly know neither side does today!
Ray. I agree with you to some extent. First, libraries, their communities and their librarians differ widely. Much depends on the library and community.
I am fortunate, as a student of American decline, to live in what is regarded as an average, even normative town, in an average state. It has ben routine for newspapers and magazines to send reporters here to determine the mood of the country. I renewed my library card recently and could not find, either in the stacks or in the catalogue, a single book to check out. This is partly due to the crooks in the asbestos removal business who forced the city to tear down the old library and get rid of books. But even before that happened, the best books in the library were often found in the discard shop. It’s not so much conscious leftism, though most librarians are certainly unconscious leftists, and, Ray, I have never met a librarian, except in colleges, who was a reader or cared about the collection. It’s that they are educated only in the technology of circulation management or some other such nonsense and therefore rely on lists. Of course when their source is Book List, they are well guided.
Years ago, when I began studying all things Italian, I tried to save money by checking books and tapes and films out of the library. As time went, the pickings got slimmer and slimmer, and as the good books disappeared, they were replaced by multiple copies of every book dealing with Edgar Mortara or gay guides to eating out in Italy. At the best there were some serious pop books about the Mafia. They did have a copy of I promessi sposi in the Victorian translation but it was kept with withdrawn materials in the basement.
What was true of Italian was almost as true of the French stuff and even truer of classics. They kept on filling up the place with books on gardening, sports, film stars, cosmetics, food, pets, and sex. I once opined that the exemplary book would be a diet book to help your cats have better sex. Today the biggest business is in films. Now the last I checked, the words library/biblotheke, etc. referred to book collections, and libraries were supposed to be the place where ordinary people could educate themselves. If they wanted entertainment, there were bookstores, drugstores, and movie houses.
We know, certainly, that some libraries have followed a policy of eliminating what they regarded as rightwing books. By the way, Raspail was not especially rightwing, but that is another story. Every time a library decides to put on the shelves some book for children and adolescents that violates the moral and aesthetic traditions that have formed–os used to form–the citizenry, they are engaging in a revolutionary acr. Of course they are not doing this consciously because mentally librarians are on par with public school teachers.
The cruelest thing I can say about America today is that, in fact, librarians and high school teachers and guidance counselors define the norm. “Great god I’d rather be/ a pagan suckled on on an outworn creed.”
Ray and others:
My comment on book bans was intended to be about public schools because that is what the brouhaha is all about. At least in my online experience and letters-to-editor that’s the only banning that seems to be raising the alarm; they equate banning age-inappropriate books in elementary/high schools with the worst kind of totalitarianism. I can’t imagine any public school having books that are denoted “fake” information and/or far-right propaganda. I hope someone can prove me wrong.
Kellen–Of school libraries, I have no direct experience. When I was in school, I preferred using the public library because I wanted to read things like William Beckford’s Vathek and a long Middle English poem that I wasn’t quite able to “crack”. And I quickly became a fan of paperbacks. I still have one of the first books I bought, the Dover edition of The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, acquired for the then-enormous sum of $1.
Then as now, school libraries have narrower scopes based on what is taught in them. Teachers and parents make recommendations/requests, and librarians should add books according to student demographics; it would be perfectly understandable that schools with large populations of minority kids would have collections that reflected that reality. School counselors and nurses might ask for books speaking to smaller minorities, such as gender, uh, variants. My impression from the reporting on contemporary book “banning” is that minority-interest titles and some, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, that rub certain minorities the wrong way, are what the complaints are about. It seems that the librarians involved in these fracases are most offended by being told they shouldn’t respond to minority-interest requests that didn’t originate with them but with teachers, parents, counselors, etc., as well as students. They’re also alarmed at death-threats and harassment, especially outside of the workplace and especially by people they don’t know and who won’t identify themselves.
Anent “balance” in school collections, the mission of the particular school library may make achieving that impossible or irrelevant. From a librarian’s perspective, denoting that books are “fake” or propagandistic, right or left, would be unprofessional in the extreme.