Tag Archives: Book banning

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry

What’s a Bit of Fascism Between Friends?

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Fascism is a 1921 word that came from the Italian name for Mussolini’s anit-communist party, Partito Nazionale Fascista. The word Fascista actually means “political group,” but fascism has come to mean a particularly nasty political group because of its connection to the Mussolini’s policies. They were the Black Shirts, dedicated to what my 1953 Webster’s defines as a “program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition.”

Curious that today the word seems mostly applied to those who rally for beliefs with which we disagree. No forcible suppression, just public argument, and—boom—you’re a fascist. A whole political party is committed to overregulation of industry and commerce, but no, it’s the homeschool moms who are fascists. Climate change is the reason they want to take away your gas stove, but is that fascism? Stop being silly. It’s only fascism with other people do it.

This word like many others is used without meaning, showing our society to be closer to Orwell’s 1984 doublespeak than anyone wants to believe.

Book Banning: Maybe the problem isn’t that someone complains about a book, but that public schools exist at all. Neal McCluskey writes, “The very idea of ‘neutral’ education—education that favors no idea or worldview—is not itself neutral. Elevating ‘neutrality’ over worldviews that believe that some things are inherently good and others inherently bad, and that children should be taught what those are, is a values‐​driven decision, concluding that neutrality more valuable than teaching some things are right and others wrong.”

Banning Books: The American Library Association asks why they have to hide their efforts to indoctrinate our kids.

In the PEN America report, they state, “Hyperbolic and misleading rhetoric about ‘porn in schools’ and ‘sexually explicit,’ ‘harmful,’ and ‘age inappropriate’ materials led to the removal of thousands of books covering a range of topics and themes for young audiences.”

Author: Anti-racistism author Ibram Kendi has used several million dollars on plans that have not materialized. Now, he’s laying off staff.

But enough of that stuff.

Poetry: This is delightful, the poem, the painting, and the recording of the poet’s voice. “My Wife, Sewing at a Window” by Eithne Longstaff

Comic books: Penguin Classics is publishing a Marvel collection of $45 hardback reproductions of the silver age stories of X-Men, The Avengers, and Fantastic Four. But wait, there’s more! They released three such editions last year: Captain America, Black Panther, and The Amazing Spider-Man. Gosh! Who could’ve thought they’d do something like that?

(Photo: The Donut Hole, La Puente, California. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Bookselling, Poetry, Reading

Illinois Tells Readers to Stop Complaining about Library Books

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Illinois will soon have a law designed to put silence readers who might be under a delusion that they have a voice in their community libraries. I wonder if it will matter as much as they think it will.

In his State of the State address, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said, “This afternoon I’ve laid out a budget agenda that does everything possible to invest in the education of our children. Yet it’s all meaningless if we become a nation that bans books from school libraries about racism suffered by Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron, and tells kids they can’t talk about being gay, and signals to Black and Brown people and Asian Americans and Jews and Muslims that our authentic stories can’t be told.”

The bill, that has passed both house and senate, requires libraries to adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights or to create their own policy against removing books in response to community pressure. At least, that’s the intent.

What the House bill actually says is “In order to be eligible for State grants, a library or library system shall adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights that indicates materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system.” Banning is the term used. Removing from circulation would be another thing entirely, wouldn’t it?

The ALA’s policy says, in part, “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.” and “libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.”

But a library can’t hold everything, can it? Who chooses what goes on the shelf or what provides enlightenment? If the state library system has four copies of one book and 16 copies of another, is the latter book understood to be more enlightening?

This seems to be an attempt to silence reading communities, and I have to wonder if it will amount to much. Will some libraries adopt the proper policy and ignore it, going about their business as usual? Will some communities express their complaints quietly? Will some librarians be run out of town?

Book banning, as you and I both know, is not a thing. Wrestling over the moral propriety and age appropriateness of books is what the ALA calls banning, and that’s what we’re arguing over. Now, Illinois will declare that no one knows moral propriety like public librarians, so sit down and read what they give you.

What other waves are undulating the Internet?

O’Connor: “On Our Need to Be Displaced” – “The richest irony in efforts to dismiss O’Connor is that her fiction provides the insight we need right now to help heal our social and political divisions, and to temper our hostile public discourse. Because Flannery O’Connor, with her scorching wit, fingered the exact cause of all of it, including racism: fear.”

Tips for Creatives: Ted Gioia is offering advice to struggling artists who are trying to make music in the world of TikTok (which is a corrupt platform you shouldn’t use). Here’s a bit of it.

“The music itself is the pathway to joy. Getting applause after a performance is lovely, but not as lovely as the song you just played. Reading a favorable review is sweet, but hardly as sweet as the ecstatic moments of creative expression.”

Podcast: At the end of last year, Trevin Wax released a podcast on the current crises in the church and how to tackles them. It’s called Reconstructing Faith, and it’s marvelous.

Family: Roberto Carlos Garcia has a moving poem about the adults in a child’s life, called “The Tempest.” Poetry Foundation has a short passage from it.

My father was a great sailor, a seaman, navigated
Only the darkest waters—the sweetest squalls

Which is to say he was a drunk

Photo by Maxim Lugina on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized, Writing

What Is the Essence of Story?

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The essence of a story is conflict. We may think the essence as theme and remember some stories for a moment of discovery or clarity that moves us, but that moment must come through conflict to carry meaning.

In a 1959 text called Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write, “A story is a movement through complexity to unity, through complication to simplicity, through confusion to order.” Both adventures and mysteries follow this path. You begin with many questions and maybe competing statements of fact. The confusion may be as simple as being lost, and finding the way out takes a lot of problem solving. When order or simplicity is found, when the events finally make some sense, then you have a story.

There are many types of conflict, Brooks and Warren note, but an account of “purely physical conflict” can’t be called fiction. Motives and ideas are necessary. We need characters, not just actors. A writer needs to “investigate motives” and “imply sympathy or antipathy” for the characters involved. Dr. Jones wants to preserve the ark or save Marion and himself. Belloq wants to use the ark to conquer the world. (And there are layers of conflict despite what fan critics have said.)

In another Saturday post, I said games and sports could hit the points of story, and I think motives and character is what I was talking about. The conflict is there, and if you impute evil intent onto the other team, you’ve got something that smells like a story.

What else have we got?

Book Banning: The ALA asks us to believe “2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship” in mostly “school libraries, classroom libraries, or school curricula” in 2022. That’s a 38 percent increase over 2021. Though you may suspect the ALA of cooking the books to raise this number, a glance at the top 13 most challenged books shows “claimed to be sexually explicit” on every title. Why are any of these recommended in schools?

Faithfulness: A new book tells the stories of Lutherans under Stalin.

But the Communist Party sought also to erase Christian ethics. “Love your neighbor” violated the Marxist principle of “class struggle.” Thus, pastors could be charged with “preaching class peace.” Lutherans had an extensive network to help the poor and the disabled, but this was held to compete with the state and to keep the deprived “in thrall to their exploiters.” Consequently, the church was defined as an enemy of the state. One of the Lutheran bishops summed up the goal: “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear from the life of the people and its individual citizens.”

Ukraine: “[Victoria] Amelina is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated young literary figures and a common presence at literary festivals both in Ukraine and abroad.” Now, she researches war crimes, starting with what happened to children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko.

Reader Reviews: A writer gets angry that ARC readers aren’t leaving reviews.

Grassroots Hatred: Will anti-Semitism ever die?

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Conforming to a Hot Topic World

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Many weeks ago, I was in a small group that considered how we might tell we were conforming to the world (Romans 12:2). I suggested one way would be to notice where and how we self-censor, which is a touchy subject for the 21st century social media user.

On one hand, social media encourages us to say outrageous things and to share our opinion on every topic we can articulate into at least a gif. And Christians may recognize this danger and their own ignorance and regularly avoid hosing down the Internet. That’s good.

On the other hand, social media has enabled small groups of people to pose as massive mobs to shout down, dox, and ruin the lives of anyone they target, so we may avoid commenting on select hot button topics to avoid getting caught by such a mob. That’s the self-censoring I’m talking about. It makes me uneasy to talk about it even now.

I’ve argued with myself over whether I should state one of my opinions, well-founded and potentially life-changing as they usually are. I wonder if I shouldn’t stick to posts on books and writing in order to stay in my lane, as it were. But sometimes I just retweet a link or someone else’s opinion because it’s important and I want to amplify the reach. If I hold back because the topic is too hot, is that conforming to the world?

Here’s a troubling video on the censoring publishers are doing to select authors poke the bear by not conforming to unspoken expectations.

Also, a woman with experience in college diversity efforts couldn’t overcome the mindset of her own office. “Orthodoxy superseded all else: collegiality, professionalism, the truth.”

A proper feature: Esquire magazine has published its own feature of author Brandon Sanderson, and with over 5,000 words, it’s what you’d expect from a feature article. It’s good and interesting, pulls in some relevant criticism, and remains positive overall.

More sensitive: New Agatha Christie novels have been submitted to sensitivity readers and thus altered for modern, ahem, sensibilities. The copyright holder, Agatha Christie Limited, has the author’s great grandson at the helm and, I suppose, responsible for this.

Publishing among friends: Publisher Richard Charkin has written about his years in the British book business. “In fact, agent-editor ‘negotiations’ makes it sound more adversarial than it actually was. Editors and agents were usually friends, and had often worked together previously. All too often this led to an unhelpful tendency among some editors to see “management” as the enemy, and they would readily side with their authors and agents against the company that employed them.”

Bookselling, Publishing

Publisher Rewriting Parts of Ronald Dahl’s Books in Response to Sensitivity Readers

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Many people today believe we are not being told the whole truth about current or historical events. Some say our history is whitewashed (using a broad definition for that word), and a recent survey found half of Americans believe the national news media is actually lying to us.

At the same time, the Ronald Dahl estate wants to edit their popular novels to avoid repelling new readers with details like these from an AV Club article on Saturday:

But it hasn’t stopped fans of Dahl’s books from passing around excerpts today of new versions of his work in which Matilda is no longer a fan of Joseph Conrad or Rudyard Kipling, or a version of The Witches that goes to pains to remind you that there are lots of good reasons for a woman to wear a wig that have nothing to do with her being a monster with an insatiable desire to murder children.

As one commenter on that article said, this kind of rewriting will encourage further sanitizing of history. I wonder if this means complaints about the age inappropriateness of some content is no longer book banning. That reminds me I want to buy some good editions of Longfellow before they get erased.

Goofing

Librarians are not against book banning

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Photo by Anastasiia Krutota. Unsplash license.

Periodically we note great outcries in the media about “book banning.” The banning of books is indeed a serious issue, when it actually happens, but what these scares are about is almost never real banning. Banning means a book is declared illegal, and its publication and possession are forbidden by law. The closest thing to that that’s going on these days is when conservative books get cancelled by publishers. Which isn’t real banning, either.

Let me divulge (once again, because people keep forgetting) a secret from the forbidden world of librarians – librarians are not actually against banning (in their own sense of the term) books. They call it banning when parents want books kept out of libraries, or at least out of their children’s hands. But the fact is, librarians keep books off the shelves all the time. Deciding what books to acquisition, and what books to reject, is part of a librarian’s job.

The librarians aren’t against books being “banned” in that (erroneous) sense.

They’re against the peasants doing it.

Librarians believe that they themselves, as the anointed priesthood, have the sole right to “ban” books. They go into a snit when mere parents and concerned citizens violate their turf.

I used to be a librarian, but I’m out of the racket now. If I mysteriously disappear, you can be sure the Enforcers of the ALA have abducted me, and I probably sleep with the discards, for violating the Unwritten Code.