Tohu Bohu

One nice thing about working in a academic library is that however old it might make YHB feel on a regular basis, sometimes something happens that puts that in a bit of perspective. Today I got to handle our Nuremburg Chronicles, which was published five hundred and fifteen years ago this past Saturday. The covers look a little worse for wear, but you can still read it. I mean, if you can read Latin, and that gothic print. So probably not. Beautiful paper, though.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So. Working in an academic library is good for making a person feel old. Usually that’s just the inevitable effect of actually being so much older than the students who work and study here. I mean, just chronologically older. I remember things that happened before they were born. Even the rising seniors were born in—what—1988? When I was in college, anyway. Most of them were born after the Berlin Wall fell, and only have the vaguest recollection of the world before the iMac. So somebody doesn’t know who Dorothy Hamill was, and I feel old.

There’s another kind of feeling old, though, which has less to do with chronology and more to do with—I was about to say maturity, but I think that’s not quite right. Let me give you an example.

Bookends disappear from our library at a rate that surprises me. Who steals bookends? And we’re not, of course, talking about fine fancy bookends, marble horseheads and sparkly geodes. We’re talking industrial library bookends, Ls of metal. Like this or this, only older and cruddier. Right? They cost about a buck a piece, maybe, and we probably buy them by the gross, and they are covered with the grime and book dust of years of use. Who would steal them?

The answer, of course, is that nineteen-year-old college kids would steal them. Of course. When I was a nineteen-year-old college kid, I might well have stolen a bookend or two. I don’t think I would have, you know, taken one off the shelf and left the books to topple over, but if there were an extra one lying about, I might well have thought I could use that and slipped it into my satchel. I wouldn’t have even thought about it much. It wouldn’t have been the cost—even then, a couple of bucks wouldn’t have been prohibitive. It would have just been the self-absorption and arrogance of the nineteen-year-old college kid, who just sees a thing, thinks I could use that, and takes it.

Not that everybody is like that at nineteen. And not that everybody is different at forty. But I was, and I am. Or nearly forty, anyway. And that, you see, is making me feel old in a different way than my recollection of, oh, Peter Frampton.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

So, my place of employment is replacing—look, I don’t really have time to write out the story, but they are throwing away a crapload of Ethernet cable. This crapload (actually about a shopping bag load) is made up of cables of various lengths, not uniform, some quite long, others fairly short, and they all have their ends cut off, so the yellow cable ends in wires rather than little phone-jack-thingies.

Your Humble Blogger has rescued all this Ethernet cable, because it seems like a mistake to throw away that much. But I don’t actually have any use for it, and for all I know, nobody else does, either. What do you say, Gentle Readers? Should I toss it in the dumpster where it was headed? Or should I bring it to the elementary school and tell them it was a bequest from my great-aunt? Or does one of you want it?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger is pleased to present the 07-08 Academic Year award for Sentence That, When Viewed Out Of Context, Seems Like It Must Have Suffered From Some Sort Of Editing Or Typesetting Error, Yet Is Actually The Correct Sentence As Intended By The Scholar.

This is surprisingly few for a genuinely genetic group when one considers the length of the poem.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Just as an observation. If a female college student decides, on a warm spring morning, to dress up a bit and look nice for a nice day, she eschews the jeans and halter top and puts on a sundress, and people say you look nice today. If a male college student decides, on a warm spring morning, to dress up a bit and look nice for a day, he eschews the jeans and t-shirt and puts on—what?—flannel trousers and a shirt and tie? And people say big job interview today?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago, a young woman came into the academic library that employs me and wanted to speak to somebody with some authority. It being a weekend, there was no such person, so she was sent to me. She identified herself as a Christian (unasked, of course), and expressed her concern that our copy of Sex in the Bible: A New Consideration, which was prominently displayed on the New Books Shelf, was not balanced with a more “traditional” interpretation. She was worried, she said, that people who were browsing at that shelf would get an incomplete picture. Your Humble Blogger thanked her for her interest, pointed out the area of the stacks that had books on religion (fairly skimpy by my standards, but containing a few thousand volumes of various interpretations of various scriptures, communities and rituals), and assured her that if there was any particular book that she felt was missing from our collection, we would very much appreciate her bringing it to our attention. She thanked me, politely, and left. As far as I know, she hasn’t returned.

Well.

I was and continue to be mildly concerned. Is there something to be concerned about? Mostly, the concern is for the library and myself. If this woman is an advance scout for some sort of organized protest, it could take up time and energy in an unpleasant way (without, of course, making any actual difference in the end). Also, I am a trifle concerned about the young woman, who is either a pawn in a cynical and vicious movement or an unfortunately blinkered and intentionally dim-witted individual. I suspect the latter, but of course I am as easily fooled as anybody else.

There’s another thing to be concerned about, though: her concern is, or at least might be, reasonable. In the nature of libraries, any book we have, particularly a new consideration of should be balanced. Students (and instructors, and the rest of the community) should have access not just to the flashiest new theories but to the old established ones that they are criticizing, and to the curmudgeonly works of those sticks-in-the-mud who are, well, sticking. In the mud. Rather than being swept along by the current. My metaphor is drawn from creeks.

Do we have plenty and plenty of books that deal with sex in the Christian Scriptures? Well, we have some. I haven’t actually looked through them, but I assume that some of the books published in the 1950s have the “traditional” interpretation that the woman was looking for. Certainly we have more books with feminist, queer-friendly, modern, non-traditional and scientific slants than with fundamentalist slants. If she had examined the shelf (which she clearly had not), she would not have left happy and secure in the knowledge that for every critical work there was an inspirational one. There isn’t.

Also, this particular book had been on the New Books shelf for almost two years, mostly because it wasn’t actually on the New Books shelf for more than a week or two at a time before somebody took it out. When it came back in, our people looked at it and thought well, let’s put that back on the New Books shelf, which they might not have done had it been a work by Joel Osteen. We are deliberately bringing some books to people’s attention; those books are not chosen randomly but reflect the taste and priorities of the library staff and patrons. The young woman who was looking for balance will not actually find it here.

Which is not to say that we endorse or agree with all our books. Part of the taste and priorities of the staff is in favor of a certain balance. But it’s a balance as we see it. We don’t have everything, and we don’t have the same amount on each ‘side’ of each issue.

So, from that angle, we want people to come in and complain that we don’t have x or y book, because of that taste and priority for balance. Because after we have what seems balanced to us, we can’t see the other stuff.

And yet.

Do I believe that this young woman was actually interested in balance? No. I should relate that she was unfailingly polite and nice, that she neither demanded nor requested that any books should be removed, nor did she claim to have been offended in any way by the books that were there. But somehow, in my perception, what she wanted was books that she disagreed with removed from where they would tempt passers-by into error and sin.

Is that fair? Probably not. But it is one of the unfortunate results of a fundamentalist movement that we outside it do not trust anything that smells to us of fundamentalism. It makes us nervous. It’s about the climate, it’s about the fellow travelers, it’s about what happens at other libraries in other states. I’m sorry that I don’t trust this polite young woman, but I don’t.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Just wondering, as a hypothetical, if it suddenly turned out that Americans could keep their cars, their light bulbs, their coal-burning power plants, their gadgetty gadgetty gadgets, and have plenty of energy, air, water and elbow room for our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren, and all we had to do was give up our eight-and-a-half-by-eleven and start using A4, would we do it?

I mean, aside from the inherent elegance of the ISO A sizes, there are five or six billion reasons why switching to the paper that everybody else in the world uses would make money for rich people, which is, after all, the defining purpose of capitalism. And it’s not like switching from miles to meters, which would involve actually moving the cities Boston and Washington until they were the correct metric distance apart. Switching to A4 paper wouldn’t be totally cheap, but we wouldn’t need new printers, copiers, and software. We would need new filing cabinets. On the other hand, we could use our old filing cabinets to store our old typewriter ribbons. Seriously, the library that employs me has a filing cabinet filled with typewriter ribbons. After the heat death of the universe, there will be a librarian, still typing on a typewriter. Which will take A4 paper without an adapter.

Sadly, even if we switched to A4 paper, profs would still photocopy two-up with big black bars on the bottoms of pages. What’s the carbon cost of those big black bars?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Best book title nominee, LC T division: Punches and Dies, by Frank A. Stanley. Mr. Stanley also wrote The Grinding Book and American Screw Machines, and co-wrote the Hill Kink Books (back before Hill met McGraw).

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Because I am working only part-time, I only have one half-hour lunch break a week; my other shifts are short enough to avoid the meal break. For only half an hour a week, YHB does not keep a book at the desk. But I don’t remember to bring in a book I’m in the middle of reading, either. So come my lunch break, I find myself in a library without a book. The result, of course, is that I begin a new book. Sometimes (Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony by Richard Allen or Starbucked by Taylor Clark) the book doesn’t get past that half-hour, and back it goes on the shelf. Sometimes the book comes home with me. That is why my library bookshelf groans under the weight of Too Many Books. Seventeen at present. But I can renew them to myself.

Anyway, one strategy for not bringing home another book is to grab a book I’ve read before, perhaps one I’ve read more than once, figuring I will slip it back onto the shelf after half an hour, either satisfied with my little taste, or prepared to pick it up again next week for another half hour. This does not work. After the lunch break, I set the book on my desk, thinking I will reshelve it when I’m up, but at the end of the day, I’ve checked it out to myself and slipped it into my satchel. This is what happened with Jitterbug Perfume. And having started it, and brought it home, I finished it, leaving the seventeen books on my shelf to sit on my shelf for just a little bit longer. But I brought it back to the library, so that’s all right.

As for the book, well, I am too old and too much of a stick-in-the-mud to read Tom Robbins these days without being aware that it is me that he is mocking. It always was, of course. I was never that free-spirited, never that shamanic, never that joyful. Never that obnoxious or self-centered, either, I hope, although I surely tried. These days, I am plumbing the depths of joy afforded by a happy marriage, lovely children, a mother-in-law, a mortgage, a job (part-time), and various other aspects of being the responsible adult so powerfully mocked by Mr. Robbins.

Very deep, those joys. Still stretching down. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was no bottom at all.

Not to knock those Tom Robbins heroes with feather-light hearts. Neither portion is a mess of pottage; people remain different one to another. And I can enjoy the wild prose and the exhilarating exhortations. But I’m watching through a window, from outside. Or more likely from inside. Which is where I belong.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One nice thing about working in an academic library is hearing one young woman say to another young woman “Now let’s study some physics!”

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger has taken part-time employment at a library. Have I mentioned this before? Is it part of the image now? I don’t want to repeat myself to the extent that I take the patience of Gentle Readers all, but then I do like to repeat myself. I do. It’s a rhythm thing.

Anyway, I was shelving the other day and, as often happens when I shelve books, I was musing on the impermanence of knowledge and the shape of the noetic field. Does this happen to you?

For instance, the Library of Congress classification system. It was set up a hundred years ago or more, and the classes of All World Knowledge have changed somewhat. Oh, it’s still a perfectly serviceable system for a large library, but it seems awkward now that books about History are in the Ds, where books about political science are in the Js. Q is science but technology is T. And R is medicine. So books about, oh, the use of robotics in surgery are under R. Right?

And photography is part of technology, or seemed that way a hundred years ago, so books of Diane Arbus or Cecil Beaton photographs will be in TR. You might have expected such books to be with art in the Ns, but you would be wrong. Still photography, TR. Films are literature, so they are in PN1993 to PN1999. And animation? Of course animation is in NC1766 with cartoons. Right?

It’s not that the categorization is strange. Any system for classifying All World Knowledge will have strange aspects, particularly when the classification is for shelving actual physical books on shelves, so any book can be in only one class. The thing that strikes me as interesting is that at one time it was obvious that photography was not a fine art, that cinema is more like plays than paintings, that animation is more like cartoons than plays or photographs. What classes of things are obvious to us that will, to people a hundred years from now, seem like bizarre idiosyncrasies? What aspects of education will seem like they should be in medicine? What aspects of military science should be in agriculture?

The wonderful thing about LC is that it is infinitely expandable. You can always shove another few subheadings in, when it turns out that algorithms are not an obscure branch of mathematics, but the basis for all commerce. So you go to Q (science), and you go to QA mathematics, and you go to QA76 calculating machines, and you go to QA76.76software for electronic calculating machines, and you go to QA76.76.H94 HTML software for electronic calculating machines, and then you put all the books about HTML there, however many there are, with the extension for the name of the author and the year of the book, etc, etc. And if you have 18 books in the QA76.76.H94 area, and no books at all for UF157 through UF302, artillery tactics, maneuvers and drill organizations, well, that’s just which shelves your books are on.

Another shelving note—I noticed that under RA643-645 (public health and disease) I was shelving books about leprosy on the same shelf with books about AIDS and smallpox. It makes me think about how the moment I’m in is not the only moment; Since they set up the system leprosy has become treatable, and then untreatable, and then treatable again; smallpox has been eradicated and weaponized, and AIDS is AIDS. They’re all on the same shelf here, I assume because there’s no medical school; there are plenty of libraries that will have whole ranges of RA643-645. But here, in this library, there’s just the one shelf, with its lesson on … humility? fear? policy? Well, there are always lots of lessons, right?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So. Your Humble Blogger may have mentioned that he is a member of Temple Beth Bolshoi, the biggest and largest temple he’s ever entered in terms of size, largeness and biggosity. Also how big it is. Just to mention, our library holds sixteen thousand volumes. Which isn’t a huge amount for a library, but seems to me like an enormous library for a synagogue. It’s a great resource, and terrific, and wonderful, and all, but it’s a little intimidating for me.

And what with the membership and the location, it’s possible for Beth Bolshoi to raise large sums of money, and we do. We raised N+K millions for renovating said library and turning it into a Media Resource Center^TM, and it looks absolutely gorgeous. During the renovation, of course, the books had to be stored off site, and a moving company was hired to box them all up and store them and then bring them back and shove them back onto the shelves. They delivered the books on Monday, and our librarian discovered that while the boxes were properly numbered and labeled and presented in the proper order, and that the shelves were unloaded into the boxes in the order represented in the boxes, within each box the books were loaded in a manner maximizing speed, efficient use of space and structural integrity of the box. In other words, Not In Order.

So. Here are the hundreds of boxes, and here are the shelves, and each box has to be unloaded, and the books inside placed in proper order on carts, and then shelved. The movers clearly were not to be entrusted with the middle bit, there. And for all the size and largeness and biggage of Temple Beth Bolshoi, there is just the one librarian (a terrific lady, but just one of her). So. Your Humble Blogger spent three hours shelving as a volunteer Tuesday morning before heading off to my paying job in the library. What fun!

Now, to the point of the story, other than to whinge for sympathy that by rights belongs to the shul’s librarian, not to me. I believe that most Gentle Readers have worked in or volunteered for libraries, and the rest of you can well imagine the librarian’s dilemma: Given the sheer quantity of books that pass through the librarian’s hands, he is bound to find a large number of them interesting or even fascinating or at least intriguing, and want to just take a moment to open a few up to find out if they will make it onto the List, or even onto the Short List. But even a short look into each of those provocative books would soon take up all the available work time, and nothing would get done. Many people think that librarians read more than anyone else, which may be true on average, but what’s really true is that librarians refrain from reading more books than anyone.

So there I was, hip deep in the shul’s book collection, trying not to look at the books as I put them in Dewey Decimal order. Jacob Neusner’s translation of Pirke Avot with commentary. A commentary on the Song of Songs. Leonard Fein’s Reform is a Verb, which I’m aware of as an influential book in the last generation of Reform Judaism, but which I’ve never read. And the prize of all, David Mamet’s Bar Mitvah, which on the whole, it’s probably better that I didn’t open, because the version in my head has got to be better than the one in the book.

Today, I am a fucking Bar Mitvah. Bar Fucking Mitvah. I’m saying. Davening up here. Davening up here like a—fuck, like a—what? Fucking Bar Mitzvah, that’s what.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have at least two notes to write about library shelving, but neither of them will accommodate my glee at this particular bit of news. YHB’s new library—remember YHB’s new library?—not only has shelved Oryx and Crake in the out-of-the-way little neighborhood by the factory where all the speculative fiction books reside, but has actually placed a prominent sticker on the spine of the book that reads Sci-Fi.

You’re skiffy, Margaret Atwood, skiffy! You hear me?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger’s home town library has been renovating the main branch. It’s only been my home town for a couple of years, and in fact the main branch closed a month after we moved here, and remained closed for fourteen months. During that stretch, we all made do with two branch libraries that are both fine, fine, branches, but they are branches. Small. Not large.

The point, though, is that after all this time, our library has reopened. At last. There was a gala reopening celebration, with a band and clowns and drinks and ribbon-cutting and mayoral speeches and general fabulousness, and it was packed. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people. Throngs. Parents and kids, little old ladies, professional types, hipsters, beautiful people, important people, riffraff, wanderers, madmen, saints. The whole town turned out. It was amazing.

That’s all. Just thought you’d like to know: YHB lives in a town which turns out in the hundreds for a library opening. I win.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger is attempting to re-enter the workforce. Well, and there it is. It’s a revenue thing. Anyway, having applied for a position at a nearby public library, I was invited to attend a test for applicants for that position. Not an interview, you understand, a test. Hm, I thought. Perhaps this is one of those government-jargon things, where the municipality requires that anyone employed by it has passed a “test”, and that therefore the interviews are called tests, so as to fulfill a badly-written law.

No, it was a test. There were twenty of us in a room filling in multiple-choice bubbles. This was one of (I believe) three such groups. And all of this was for a part-time job. It seems to me that the municipality in question must have decided that every applicant would be given a standard test for municipal employees, and that only after the test had been taken and graded would the employer be able to choose who to interview. It’s all fair and aboveboard. And, of course, they purchased a test from some company, which presumably charges them for every test they grade. Also, they take four to six weeks to grade the tests.

Evidently there is some sort of “Secure Test” provision in the copyright law, which according to the introduction to the test I took, makes it a copyright infringement for me to repeat any of the questions on the test, even in paraphrase. This seems preposterous to me, but then there are many, many things about copyright law that seem preposterous to me. The paper they made us sign indicated that if we were to leave the test and write down any of the questions, it would be an illegal copyright infringement just as it would be an infringement to listen to a song on the radio and write it down. I’m not sure what they meant by writing it down—the lyrics? the melody? the chord changes? the title?—but I’m absolutely sure that whatever it means it would not by itself constitute an infringement. On the other hand, who knows what a judge will say?

So I would like to make it clear that I did not write down the questions, nor are any of the questions I may use as examples actually on the test. Clear? Yes? Good? Excellent.

We watched a video, where public employees dealt with the public and each other in various capacities. A problem would arise, and we would be given four choices of potential responses, from which to choose the best one. As for instance,

A barefoot patron wants to be served, despite the sign indicating the office’s policy no shirt, no shoes, no service. Would you (A) turn the patron away, telling him that there are no exceptions to the policy, (B) shout “HEY RUBE, were you born in a BARN?” as loud as you can, (C) offer to lend the patron your shoes, or (D) kneecap the fucker.

It turns out, surprisingly that kneecap the fucker is often the preferred alternative. Again:

Your co-worker returns from her lunch break stinking of whiskey. She appears to be fully capable of doing her job, but she is giggling quite a lot. Would you (A) tell your supervisor that your co-worker is off her ass again, falsely claiming that it’s the third time that week, (B) ask your co-worker if she is free for lunch tomorrow, (C) draw your co-worker’s inebriation to the attention of the patrons, for a laugh, or (D) kneecap the fucker?

I suspect that the actual value of the test lies primarily in removing from consideration the bottom half or so of applicants, those who can’t or won’t properly fill out the forms. Certainly the actual answers to the questions would tell you very little about what kind of an employee the applicant would make.

A patron indicates to you that he knows people who could have you killed. Would you (A) expedite his request, (B) secretly tape the conversation and then blackmail the patron into killing your co-worker instead, (C) play dumb, or (D) kneecap the fucker?

Honestly, once kneecap the fucker occurs to you, it’s hard to keep from laughing out loud at the video test.

A co-worker claims that the supervisor gave him a raise of a grand a month on the condition that he kicks half of it back to her. Would you (A) go to the supervisor and demand the same deal, (B) ask your co-worker how much half a grand is, (C) start demanding baksheesh from all the patrons, or (D) kneecap the fucker?

I want you all, Gentle Readers, to keep in mind when next you interact with a municipal employee, that every effort has been made to choose only the best from a large crop of extremely impressive applicants.

Your co-workers say that the new supervisor is a cold, inhuman bitch, but you think she’s kinda hot. Would you (A) pretend that you agree with your co-workers in an attempt to get along, (B) ask your supervisor out, (C) send your supervisor and your co-workers pornographic pictures from a spoofed email, or (D) kneecap the fucker.

Somehow, I don’t think I’m going to be working for these people.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger has had a couple of interesting conversations recently about wordless picture books. The local library is considering putting up a display, or perhaps a permanent section, and so the topic came up, and I thought I would ask my Gentle Readers for their suggestions.

There’s The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs, of course, and some of the David Wiesner books (Sector 7, Tuesday and Free Fall). There are books by John S. Goodall and Peter Sis, none of which I particularly like. Some of the Gabrielle Vincent books about Ernest and Celestine are wordless, and I like those a lot. And there’s David Macaulay—or do all his books have words? I’m wondering about Rome Antics and Shortcut, neither of which I have in front of me. And there’s Eric Rohmann’s Time Flies, which seems like a Wiesner knock-off, frankly, but not too bad at that.

My Perfect Non-Reader really liked Yellow Umbrella by Jae-Soo Liu, with a music CD by Dong Il Sheen that accompanied it. I just saw a very odd but lovely book by Molly Bangs called The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, and Barbara Lehman’s The Red Book, which is a small red book about a small red book about a small red book...

Anyway, Gentle Readers, help me help my local librarian flesh out the list. What are the good ones? And if there’s something particularly good that just has a few words (such as Peggy Rathmann’s Goodnight, Gorilla) go ahead and throw it in, just for luck.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Humble Blogger was in the library yesterday, not the local small-town library but the library at the somewhat-bigger town fifteen miles away, the library with the surprisingly good CD selection (this week: the 2-disc beautifully remastered All Things Must Pass, a four-disc Complete RCA/Victor Louis Armstrong, and a few others), and I happened to see that they were giving away buttons for Banned Book week. They were largish buttons with big clear letters reading “I READ BANNED BOOKS”. I thought to myself, “do I?”

See, I had looked at the ALA list of last year’s most challenged books, and I have read ... well, I’ve read The Chocolate War, and I’ve read one of the Captain Underpants books, and I’ve read and admired In the Night Kitchen. I think that’s it. Yes, I’ve never read Of Mice and Men or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I’ve never read Mr. Bellesiles’s’s dodgy history tome. I’ve never even heard of the others.

I assume this is because most attempts to remove books from libraries occur at middle-school libraries which have already used their discretion to leave out Delta of Venus or Tutored in Lust (both of which I have read). I don’t know if the library that was handing out the buttons stocks those books. I can’t say I would blame them if they didn’t. Are they banned? Are, let’s see, the Turner Diaries banned from school libraries, or should they be? If I walked up to my nice librarian and shoved a copy of My Struggle at her along with her button, would she be all happy and stuff? Those books aren’t challenged, because they aren’t on the shelves to challenge. They will never make the list.

I mean, I read banned books, or at least I read books without worrying about whether they’ve been banned. I don’t have a problem with a certain amount of discretion on the part of the librarians, though. I would prefer that the Turner Diaries not be in the middle-school library. That’s my preference, and I suspect that if the middle-school librarian preferred to have it on the shelf, I would listen to her reasoning and let the matter go. It’s only a book, after all. I do think that we should fund libraries for adults, and perhaps we should make it a condition of removing a book from a children’s library that it must be in the stacks of the adult library, so a child who is denied the opportunity to read a banned book at school may do so with a parent at home. But in fact, the really unpopular books, the real fringe stuff, isn’t at the grown-library library either, and nobody cares.

No, the reason people get worked up over Banned Book Week is that the most frequently challenged books are right plumb spang in the mainstream. Or perhaps just slightly off to one side, like Heather Has Two Mommies, still a long way from shore. When the ALA and all us libs defend the books on that list, we may well think that we are defending them simply because we are against banning books, but really we think it’s stupid and annoying to ban these books. It’s counter-productive to ban the Harry Potter books, it’s dumb to ban the Captain Underpants books, and it’s just crazy to ban In the Night Kitchen. I am against removing books from the library just for “offensive language” or “sexual content” and certainly for “modeling bad behavior” or “homosexuality”, and I just can’t see “occult themes” as being a big problem.

The top reasons for challenges (according to the ALA) are ... well, let’s take ’em one at a time. The most frequent challenge was to ... survey says ... “sexually explicit” material. OK. I would not ban all sexually explicit material, even from a children’s library, depending on what constitutes “explicit”, but then there are some books I would keep out of a school library simply because of their sexually explicit nature. It’s a librarian’s call, with presumably input from teachers and parents.

Second ... “offensive language”. That’s right out. I mean, I don’t know that I would shelve Jesus Fuck, Charlie Brown! in with the board books, but I doubt that any book that I would want in the library otherwise would be ruled out by “offensive language”.

Third ... “Unsuited to age group”. Ding ding ding! I think it’s a good idea to suit books to the readers, and I think that’s an important part of the librarian’s job. A good reason to challenge a book, or in nicer language to bring it to the librarian’s attention.

Fourth: is the silliness about the occult. I would allow these books, and I think any parent who wouldn’t is kidding himself. Or herself. Or being kidded by somebody. Fifth is violence, and I wouldn’t toss out any book just because it was violent. Or how about a rule that says anything more violent than Mother Goose is out; that’ll keep the pile nice and small. Sixth is promoting homosexuality, which I’m for, so that’s out. Seventh is promoting a “religious viewpoint”, which I can understand is a bit of a church/state issue, but seems way down on that list. Then there’s nudity (woo-hoo!), and some others such as anti-family (my family can stand up to that, thanks).

Then there’s racism, which is a tough nut to crack. On the whole, in a middle-school library, I’d feel reasonably comfortable with the exclusion of truly racist texts. On the other hand, I’d want the library to be reluctant to use that exclusion. I wouldn’t want them to feel they had to guarantee that all the books on the shelves were free of taint. Some judgment is called for; I’d rather have a professional make that judgment.

So, what’s my point? Mostly that it’s more complicated than it looks (shock! surprise! alarm!), and that really in defending the “banned books”, we are and should be defending children having a positive attitude toward sex, romance (including homosexual romance), the occult, bad behavior, and a religious viewpoint. I think the ALA is being misleading if not outright dishonest in pretending that it is defending “banned books”. It is defending a positive attitude toward sex, romance (including homosexual romance), the occult, bad behavior, and a religious viewpoint. It is also, as it should be, against certain pressure groups who want to take the filtering job out of the hands of librarians and do it themselves. These groups want to narrow the main stream, and librarians, on the whole, like it as wide as it is. They present themselves as against banning books, and their opponents as in favor of banning books, and you know what? It’s more complicated than that.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)