Miss Smith and the Haunted Library - by Michael Garland

Busting all sorts of stereotypes, librarian Virginia Creeper has blue hair and purple nail polish, and a "high-pitched squeaky voice." She also can truly make books come alive! When Miss Smith brings her class to the library they end up partying with a host of literary monsters including Sleepy Hollow's Headless Horseman, Count Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and the Wicked Witch of the West. In a scene reminiscent of Jumanji, as Ms. Creeper reads from the Incredible Storybook each of the characters appears in the library.

A not-so-scary book with bright illustrations, plus a cool teacher and a cool librarian.

The book includes a key as to which story each of the spooky characters comes from, in case anyone does want to read a spooky book for Halloween!

Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia - by Jeanette Winter

From author Jeanette Winter, who brought us The Librarian of Basra,is another true story of a librarian who goes beyond the unexpected.

I've blogged about the Biblioburro before (here and here). I did not realize that there was a book about the Biblioburro though (although, really, I should have!). This book relates the story of Luis Soriano; his wife, Diana; and his two trusty burros Alpha, and Beto. Luis' own love of reading and his work as a teacher prompted him to share books with people in remote parts of Colombia, many of whom had no books of their own. This is a wonderful story that demonstrates how librarians are called to their work through a passion not only for books, but for sharing information.

This book's brightly-colored illustrations also give it an authentic Latin flair.

1984 - by George Orwell

The first time I read Orwell's book was at the start of its titular year, as a requirement for a course I was taking that year in college - Literature and Social Change. The class was team taught by a Psychology professor and a Spanish professor who did an excellent job of getting me to think critically about the book and to see how Orwell was not so far off the mark. It was during the Reagan administration and I remember clearly how the media reported that his administration was going to change the way it counted the unemployed so that people who had been out of work longer than six months would no longer be considered, even if they were still looking. Then the country rejoiced when the government was able to report that the unemployment rate went down for the first time in many months. It was stunning. Reading 1984 twenty-nine years later of course I only see more parallels to what Orwell predicted and what is happening.

I wasn't surprised when news broke over the summer that the NSA was spying on citizens through the collection of metadata on cell phones. I didn't even understand how anyone could be. That the government was keeping these kind of tabs on us was all made perfectly clear when the USA PATRIOT Act was first passed in 2001. I cannot tell you how many times I heard people say things like 'if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about' or 'as long as we are all safer, what does it matter.' I wonder what those folks are saying now?

While cleaning up my e-mail recently I found a link to this video  which I had sent to myself over the summer and forgot about. It was just chance that I ended up watching it while I was reading Orwell's book. The connections between what the video shows us about the level of surveillance on citizens and what Orwell wrote about are uncanny. There isn't really anything subtle about the spying of citizens in London, or the U.S. The video is about 32 minutes long. At about 16:30 we see a U.S. official being asked questions about NSA collecting data on citizens: each one he answers with an uncatergoric "No". Early on in the video we also find out how smart cameras are used to track "unusual movement" and "mark" people. One of the developers of these cameras is the aptly named James ORWELL of Kingston University. I had to listen twice to the name to be sure, and then I Googled him. Yep. Orwell.

George Orwell also predicted the kind of scrutiny James Orwell conducts:

A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is  indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behavior toward his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanor, but any eccentricity, however small, any change in habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle is certain to be detected. 

In one passage our protagonist, Winston, gets his hopes up that the proles are creating an uprising against the Party, only to discover it is instead women fighting over cooking pots at the market

a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls...with faces as tragic as though they had been doomed passengers on a sinking ship...It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking pots of any kind are always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamored round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper of favoritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off.

I can almost believe that Orwell had some sort of supernatural power to see into the future when I compare this passage with the infamous Walmart Waffle Iron Riot of 2011.

It is not just the parallel of the riot over cheap kitchen gadgets that strikes me here, but that the people in the video are indeed falling in line with expectations. Lining up to get in to a store in Black Friday is just what the "Party" wants from its proletariat. Very shortly, as the holiday season cranks up, we will start hearing stories (from our "liberal" media) about how consumers (a.k.a. U.S. citizens) are disappointing the "Party" (a.k.a retailers) by not spending enough money. After all, it is our duty to consume for the good of the economy.

There really aren't libraries or librarians in this work, per se, as it is a work about information loss. What we do see is a lot of irony in naming of the various Party ministries and departments. For instance "reference clerks" were those who were tasked with "draw[ing] up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast respositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed."

The Records Department, a branch of the Ministry of Truth, provided all information, and entertainment everyone on every level. There was no free press, the government controlled all information. This is eerily familiar for those of us who, in past weeks, tried to get onto government websites. Virtually all federal government websites were inaccessible during the recent government shut down. I found this aspect of the shut down particularly egregious as the websites were already up, someone had to go to the trouble of taking them down.

Books are produced by the Party for the "proles." Winston's girlfriend Julia, who works for the Fiction Department, explains how they are produced - her particular specialty is pornography

It (Pornosec) was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls' School to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal...'ghastly rubbish. They're boring really. They only have six plots, but they swap them around a bit'.

Julia also is a (phony) member of the Junior Anti-Sex League. The description of the sash tied around the waist of her overalls that identifies her as such caused me to wonder if the "True Love Waits" chastity program (with its telltale "purity rings") used 1984 as a "How To" book.

I close my post with this thought from Winston's illicit diary:

"If there is hope it lies in the proles"

Come and get me Big Brother.

Dreaming in Cuban - Cristina Garcia

Last Monday, when I wrote about Banned Books Week I provided a link to a recent news story about García's book being removed from the High School Curriculum in Sierra Vista, Arizona. The removal was spurred by the complaint of one parent, who objected to one page in the book that describes a graphic sex scene. Since the story broke just in time for Banned Books Week, and at the same time my elementary Spanish class happened to have a short reading about CristinaGarcía&nbsp in our textbook it seemed the time was ripe to finally read the book myself. Taken out of context the scene in question may seem like pornography, but I read the whole work (something many censors do not do) and found the passage to be an essential part of the story, rather than simply a gratuitous sex scene. The passage in question can be read in this story from the Huffington Post.

One review I read of this work compared it to Gabriel García Márquez's  One Hundred Years of Solitude which I read many years ago, back in my college days. Something I remembered about One Hundred Years was that there was a family tree at the beginning of the book, which I constantly had to turn back to in order to keep the characters straight. Dreaming also had such a chart, but since I was reading this on my iPad, I was never able to find it again once I started in reading the book. This left me to rely on my memory to keep the three generations of characters sorted. Each time I put the book down I would have to re-create what I remembered about the relationships between the characters. Score one for old-fashioned print books.

This work tells the story of Pilar, a young woman who came to the United States from Cuba with her parents as a young child. As a young woman she returns to Cuba for the first time in order to explore her roots. Set in the 1960s and 1970s the tumultuous politics of both countries at this time in history creates a backdrop to the story that illustrates generation gaps on a variety of levels.

Libraries are mentioned a few times in this book. Pilar, while tripping on some sort of herbal bath says

In the library nothing made sense. The flourescent lights transmit conversations from passing cars on Broadway. Someone's ordering a bucket of chicken wings on 103rd Street. The chairman of the linguistics department is fucking a graduate student named Betsy. Ghandi was a carnivore. He came of age in Samoa. He traversed a subcontinent in blue suede shoes. Maybe this is the truth.

Pilar, who attends Barnard College does specifically say she used the library there on at least one occasion. She also mentions someone playing music on the steps of Columbia University's Low Library. As we know from my Fear of Flying post, Low Library no longer functions as the library.

Well, a funny thing just happened. Since I borrowed this e-book from a library my access to it "expired" right in the middle of my blogging, so that I cannot easily find the other two pages I marked. I did discover that I can go through the book page by page and find the markers, a bit more inconvenient, but worth it of course. I would have gladly paid the 10 cent fine in order to have kept this book one more day. In fact, if I had borrowed an old-fashioned print book I would have been able to keep it all day today, returned it this evening, finished my blog post, and still not have had to pay the dime. Score two for old-fashioned print books.

So, back to the libraries...
We learn that Pilar's mother Lourdes uses her college library to check out books for other members of her family, and my final bookmark did not concern libraries at all, but rather a mark of my realization the bezoar was not something simply made up by J.K. Rowling for the "Harry Potter" books, but rather a real thing, which was at one time was believed to be an antidote to poison. Well who knew?

Update Oct. 10, 2013
The Sierra Vista School Committee has reconsidered. Dreaming in Cuban will remain in the library and classrooms.

Banned Books Week - Why I "let" my daughter read Twilight books

...or maybe not...

Stephenie Meyer's series of books about a teenage vampire falling in love with a human are immensely popular, and also rank among the most banned or challenged books in the country. Why are these books that are sometimes referred to as "mind candy" and that really do have so much not to like about them, still so popular? Even among feminists like me.

 I took my first women's studies course (Women and the Media)  in the early 1980s at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. One of my classmates talked about her 13-year old daughter reading Young Miss and Seventeen magazines and said these magazines made clear the messages about body image and gender stereotypes that we'd been discussing in class. "I can't believe you let your daughter read that stuff" retorted another (childless) classmate, immediately putting the first woman on the defensive (way to go, Sisters!). That was the first time I heard the "why would you let your daughter read that crap?" question, but it certainly wasn't the last. I have heard it many times in the 30 years since the incident took place, and thought about it quite a bit, especially in the last 16 years, since I became the parent of a daughter myself. I have never been asked the question directly, but I have heard it asked about the Twilight books. So without getting too defensive, here is my response.

When my daughter was first learning to read, she noticed a sign in our local public library that said that all library records were private regardless of the patron's age (I'm paraphrasing). My first grader could read the words, but did not understand their meaning and asked me about it. I explained to her it meant that she could check out whatever book she wanted whenever she wanted, and neither I, nor her father, nor anyone else could find out.  The sign, of course, was there for me, not for her. It was there to let me know that if I wanted to know what my child was reading I should accompany her to the library. Of course, my six-year old wasn't likely to be going to the library by herself anyway. But, as a pre-teen she did start going by herself, and I was happy we lived in a place that had a library my daughter could walk or bike to on her own. She is a voracious reader, and I have always told her that she could read whatever she wanted, whenever she felt ready to read it. Because here's the thing I knew: children want to read things that interest them. She didn't read novels about teenagers having sex, or sucking blood, or taking drugs, or skipping school when she was in elementary school because those things were not part of her reality at the time, and books with those themes generally aren't written for young children anyway. She wanted books about animals, and babies, and friends playing together and sharing. When she was old enough to read Young Adult novels I was glad for her to be able to explore difficult or disturbing subjects through the safe venue of books. I sometimes asked her about books she was reading, but I didn't pry. Sometimes I suggested books she might like, which she sometimes actually read. One of my suggestions, in fact, was the Twilight series. Our whole family has traveled to Transylvania and we are fascinated with vampire lore. My daughter and I both read the entire series, and the whole family has seen all the movies (the books are way better, btw). Here's my dirty little secret: I like them. No, I didn't find them to be exceptionally well written, or to have especially deep or complex story lines. I do like the way Meyers built up the sexual tension (and was completely let down when Mr. and Mrs. Edward Cullen finally consummated their relationship). And I like the fact that the Twilight books are a mindless read in an otherwise complicated world; I like that I had something I could talk to my daughter and her friends about. My daughter does not share much about her life with me, much to my chagrin, so when I find something we can bond over, I take it, even a sucky (pun intended) novel. It turns out something we have in common is we both read and enjoyed the Twilight series when it was all the rage to do so. We got caught up in a movement, and it was fun. Here's an even nastier little secret about me: I'm on "Team Edward" and I think people on "Team Jacob" should have their heads examined.

Earlier this year, I told my daughter she might like to read Beautiful Creatures (see yesterday's blog post), as it would probably be of interest to those who also like stories about sparkly vampires. "I think I'm done with sparkly vampires" she answered. Later that week I found her Twilight poster in the garbage. She is maturing. There are other things she wants to read. Things that are more sophisticated, and more interesting to a sixteen-year old.

So just what kind of a feminist do I think I am, anyway, extolling the virtues of a trashy novel that is rather dis-empowering to women, and "letting" my daughter read them, to boot. I am a feminist who knows that young women are smart enough to make their own decisions about what to read, and then to distinguish fantasy from reality. A feminist who knows that girls are completely competent to read something and then contextualize it, and critique it, and discuss issues such as stalking; and whether girls need a boyfriend to protect them, or make them complete. A feminist who is not afraid to discuss dating and sex with my daughter, much to her chagrin! I did not "let" my daughter read Twilight. She is an incredibly intelligent young woman who can make choices for herself. I also know that if I tried to tell her she wasn't allowed to read it, that she would have found a way to read it. Parents who think they can forbid their teenagers from reading something are completely fooling themselves.

I've talked to her about fantasized aspects of this book, especially regarding sex. For instance a girl who asks a boy for sex is not going to receive this response: "after we're married" (snort - don't watch this scene while drinking milk!)  Another, unlikely scenario: two virgins having sex together for the first time - a magical experience in which the young woman can surely expect to climax - not bloody likely! (again, pun intended). I must admit that it was a nice touch for Edward to make Bella an omelet the next morning, though.

Of real concern, though, is the way libraries are dissed, at least in the first book (which I re-read in order to write this post-I don't like the series enough to have re-read them all, though). The lovely Bella mentions the Forks public library three times. Twice to say how woefully inadequate it is, and once uses as a convenient lie to her hapless father so she can sneak out with her vampire boyfriend.

I wrote this post months ago, and waited until Banned Books Week to publish it. In the meantime I happened upon this other feminist perspective of the book written by a young adult librarian who likewise points out that we don't give young women enough credit to think for themselves.

Banned Books Week: The Complete Persepolis - by Marjane Satrapi

This graphic memoir that tells the author's story of growing up during Iran's Islamic Revolution got a lot of coverage in March and April of this year when it was banned in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) for its graphic images of torture. While denying it banned the books CPS did say it ordered the book removed from seventh grade curriculum and classrooms. Hmmm...let's take a look at the American Library Association definition of  banning

A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group.  A banning is the removal of those materials.  Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum (emphasis mine) or library, thereby restricting the access of others.  Due to the commitment of librarians, teachers, parents, students and other concerned citizens, most challenges are unsuccessful and most materials are retained in the school curriculum or library collection.

Like Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 there is true irony in the challenge of this work in that part of it treats the issues of loss of information as well as the censorship of ideas. As a young schoolgirl Marjane is confused when she is told to tear all the pictures of the Shah from her schoolbooks; and finds her dreams of visiting the United States and going to University dashed when the US Embassy is occupied and hostages are taken. All the Universities were closed for two years while books at "all levels" were revised so as not to lead young people "astray from the true path of Islam".

The book also specifically tells of Marjane getting information from a library on at least two occasions. In one her father goes to the library and brings back three books that she reads in a matter of ten days: The Secrets of the CIA; Freemasonry in Iran; and The Memoirs of Mossagegh. In the other, she and her husband spend the summer in museums and libraries researching mythological heroes in order to design a theme park in Tehran, a plan which never is implemented.

Find out more about this controversy

Chicago Public Schools denies it banned the book "Persepolis"

Persepolis Stays in Chicago Public Schools but out of Classrooms

Watch March 18, 2013 - Controversy Over "Persepolis" on PBS. See more from Chicago Tonight.

Banned Books Week - Banned Websites Awareness Day

In yesterday's post about The Handmaid's Tale I mentioned that a government will have better control over electronic sources than it does over books. Banned Websites Awareness Day recognizes this truth. The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which has now been in place for ten years, is largely misunderstood and overused. While CIPA does require web-filtering technology for schools and libraries receiving e-rate discounts, it does not apply to any entity that does not receive these discounts. Furthermore for those libraries that do receive the funding, the rules only require the blocking of pictures that are "obscene; child pornography; or harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors). Before adopting this Internet safety policy, schools and libraries must provide reasonable notice and hold at least one public hearing or meeting to address the proposal." Moreover, CIPA does not require blocking of any text-only content, including unorthodox or unpopular ideas (more information here). Nor does it require blocking any kind of religious content, as the Salem, Missouri library discovered when it censored web content on the Wiccan religion (yes, a town called Salem was blocking information about witches). Likewise, neither schools nor libraries can filter pro-lgbt content out, especially when they allow web content that provides information that condemns homosexuality, as the Mifflin, Pennsylvania school district discovered.

According to this article from eSchool news CIPA needs a serious overhaul - "even the best filter is only 83 percent effective for factors such as link analysis and IP addresses, and only 50 percent accurate for images or videos." Of course tech savvy children can easily get around a block that is only 20-50 percent effective. The guise of "protection" is part of the rhetoric of censorship, whether it is book banning, blocked web content, or any other limitation of free speech. These "protections" are almost always a veneer.