Events
Very Important Dates in the World of the Nerd
Two of my favorite banned books.
Today, friends, we celebrate the seventh annual National Punctuation Day. The organizers of this illustrious holiday are holding a haiku contest to commemorate the occasion. Apparently, you can win a plethora of punctuation chotchkes! What does that mean! Last year while visiting a friend in D.C., I saw a man in a question mark suit. I feel like that might be the only legitimate way to celebrate National Punctuation Day. Or you could correction-graffiti a mis-punctuated billboard on the highway. Maybe one of those abortion billboards that reads YOU’RE BABYS HEART BEETS NOW. ITS ALIVE! ITS ALIVE!
In other important news, tomorrow marks the beginning of Banned Books Week. I learned yesterday that Where’s Waldo has been banned because there’s a topless lady in the beach scene. I found her yesterday, and she is, in fact, topless. Also, the dictionary has been banned. No words for you. This I took from the Banned Books Week website:
According to the American Library Association, out of 460 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2009.
The 10 most challenged titles were:
ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: nudity, sexually explicit, offensive language, drugs, and unsuited to age group
And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: homosexuality
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: drugs, homosexuality, nudity, offensive language, sexually
explicit, suicide, and unsuited to age group
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Reasons: racism, offensive language, unsuited to age group
Twilight (series), by Stephanie Meyer
Reasons: sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group
Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Reasons: sexaully explicit, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group
My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult
Reasons: sexism, homosexuality, sexually explicit, offensive language, unsuited to age group, drugs, suicide, violence
The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler
Reasons: sexually explicit, offensive language, unsuited to age group
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Reasons: sexually explicit, offensive language, unsuited to age group
The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
Reasons: nudity, sexually explicit, offensive language, unsuited to age group
Boy, do I love book-banners. Language equals violence. Knowledge equals danger. I grew up in a church in which too much education made you too worldly, and therefore less worthy of the kingdom of God. What effing morons.
Oh, there’s a nice book censorship map here.
Tags: Banned Books Week, national punctuation day
Also, still with To Kill a Mockingbird? Don’t you think we could simmer down with that one by now?
ban every book so we can feel even more special all the time
i will frequently think things like ‘clandestine’ and ‘cover of night’ if we ban every book, which will make my whole life seem more literary somehow
burn copies of fahrenheit 451, use the alanis morisette definition of irony
You’re both unbearably arrogant and humble! Sincerity break! Everybody be pretentious … NOW!
It’s true, John, that we have, and generally take for granted, a tremendous luxury of dissent and expressive permissiveness – though, of course, many political dissenters on the left will insist that dissent and transgression are tolerated because no real power is threatened by them.
So the anti-bookburners might be magnifying some crisis of dishonesty in YA books and, generally, of the silencing of alternative voices.
But it’s still worth having a Morons Burn Books week, isn’t it – even if a squabble over Huck Finn at the middle school isn’t equivalent to the fates of Gramsci, Schulz, Tsvetaeva.
You’re swimming in the river of de Nile.
I’m keeding.
Don’t use this opportunity to be an asshole!
Well, it is a cruelly ‘racist’ book.
hahaha
every one of the top 10 are “unsuited to age group” except And Tango Makes Three, as if to say homosexuality is never suitable for any age group. dang.
Alexis, I thought this was a great post, and always enjoy your posts here–so I don’t mean to pick on it or you–but your title is a perfect example of what Justin was talking about yesterday, with the whole humility thing. As if to suggest that the only people who would care about books, or banned books, are nerds. Why would it be nerdy to care about books and freedom of speech? Why the apologetic tone of the title? It clearly implies, “these dates will only be important to someone with no social life who cares way too much about marginalia, and I’m such a dork for even bringing it up.” You’re not a nerd to care about books and free speech! Be proud to bring up these important topics! You’re helping promote saving books! That’s awesome and you don’t have to feel like a nerd about it.
Okay, rant done. I apologize for using your title and your comments as a forum for my venting. :)
But I am a nerd, and I’m fine with that?! Why does being a nerd imply negativity or humility to you? I’m also a smart, pretty woman who loves dogs and eats Twizzlers and drinks lots of coffee and writes fucking good poetry. But I am a nerd, and I’m not apologetic about it.
I’m also a dork and an asshole on occasion.
And one last thing, Amber. If I wrote the post in an apologetic way, we might have something to talk about. But I didn’t.
You’re both unbearably arrogant and humble! Sincerity break! Everybody be pretentious … NOW!
This list of titles is kind of hard to get excited about. These writers can only further benefit from the banning of their books. Their lives are not affected. The kids kept from them really aren’t missing all that much.
On principle, censorship sounds shocking. But the reality? These are “challenges,” so I’m assuming whoever banned the book, was taken to court. Someone noticed and someone fought it.
There are still places in the world where not just the book but the writer is banned (detained, dissappeared, executed) for speaking truth to power. What would our books be like if we wrote them under fear of imprisonment, torture, death? Would we be so compelled and have to write them anyway? I don’t have that kind of courage. Don’t really think any of the writers on this list does. Don’t think any of us here does.
Since when is being a homosexual “offensive”? I find that upsetting.
okay, okay! ;) To me, nerd is a negative thing. Someone with low self-esteem, no or few friends, something really weird about them that causes a social stigma. Maybe that’s ’cause I grew up during the ’80s when it was jocks versus nerds and all that. Now I guess nerd is cool, and so the definition has changed. I guess now it means more like, into intellectual pursuits, niche interests, that kind of thing. So I surrender! and will accept this as the societal definition of nerd today. Sorry again to hijack your thread. I didn’t mean anything personal by it.
It’s true, John, that we have, and generally take for granted, a tremendous luxury of dissent and expressive permissiveness – though, of course, many political dissenters on the left will insist that dissent and transgression are tolerated because no real power is threatened by them.
So the anti-bookburners might be magnifying some crisis of dishonesty in YA books and, generally, of the silencing of alternative voices.
But it’s still worth having a Morons Burn Books week, isn’t it – even if a squabble over Huck Finn at the middle school isn’t equivalent to the fates of Gramsci, Schulz, Tsvetaeva.
You’re swimming in the river of de Nile.
I’m keeding.
Don’t use this opportunity to be an asshole!
Amber: I know you weren’t getting personal. But since I wrote the post, I had to respond personally, of course. I get your drift, and I think it’s important to be cognizant of the way we use words. Your post actually made me think about my use of a word, and for that I thank you!
so is the fucking bible.
any bible
the haiku is the most misunderstood form of all western thought.
those aren’t haiku
hahaha
when hasn’t nerd held a negative connotation?
Yes, the right isn’t exactly unified on this, and I agree, we have a different problem in the West. Corporate power doesn’t feel the need to silence dissent, because it is drowned out by the multitude of (mostly vacuous) voices.
With YA there’s that legal loophole, though. Parents do have the right to control what their kids read, and so parents may complain about a book out of expediency. The school may simply be protecting themselves from possible lawsuit. If a parent sues a school, the school loses even when they are in the right, even if they have a 100% chance of winning the suit. It costs them resources and it also creates bad publicity among those easily swayed and overprotective of what the children watch, read, think.
I think Kundera, in Unbearable Lightness of Being, reduces political kitsch to “kissing babies.” Communists do it and so do politicians in the West, left and right, anyone interested in a political future. The desire to “protect” any group is like “kissing babies” to me. It’s kitsch. It’s manipulative. And at it’s worst is damaging / dangerous.
The next battle will probably be digital. If there are few providers delivering digital books: Apple, Amazon, Sony.
Apple wants my 12 year old to have a phone. They also want to sell books. They also want control over what’s in the i-store. Amazon, same story. Do they have the same kind of fear of lawsuits as a local school district? Will they censor works deemed inappropriate for young audiences? The answer already seems to be yes. Peter Cole had the Keyhole app removed from the i-store over a disputed story. Amazon had gay titles “accidentally” disappear. This is happening, I assume, in the name of protecting the children. More “kissing babies.”
I seem to remember hearing it was going to be Frank Zappa day in Baltimore. Anybody go to that? Long live Frank!
John, I’d go farther than that “dissent […] is drowned out by the multitude”. I think dissenters themselves – ourselves – are fatally compromised.
When Reagan was allowed to pretend to be president, one of my memes – one I haven’t tired of spamming conversations with since – is that ‘most people who vote right, live left’.
Well, by the same token, most people who think left, support the political economy of corporations and DOD apparatuses by how they survive political-economically. (Prime example: Chomsky, who works for . . .?) Unless you can live like the Unabomber – and very few people are tough enough to do this – , you can do some good by ‘thinking globally’ in your actions (recycle, energy efficiency, targeted consumption, mass transpo, vote, and so on), but, realistically, your dissent is diluted to that of an impotent irritant by the material fact of your working, buying, consuming within the corporate organism.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be loudmouths, and push in granular and incremental ways in the direction of a juster, more rational world, but rather to limit the fantasy of ‘taking on The Man’ to a self-aware standard of perception.
You’re exactly right about schools, PBS, and so on needing to manage their public profiles defensively. It’s the point of Morons Burn Books events to make the push-back against social ‘conservatism’ (read: Big lifestyle Government) a communal, even mass-conscious, event – that’s what I was defending in response to you (as I guess you get).
I think you are on to something. For a long while the left has complained about the right voting against their own interests, but we don’t hear the reverse often enough, that no matter how the left lives thinks (writes), they (we) serve the same animal.
I like the idea of Morons Burn Books, not sure about the name. Nazis, for example, couldn’t be characterized as morons by any stretch of the imagination. So maybe the name doesn’t capture the full spirit?
Well, “moron” can refer to ‘moral imbecility’ as well as ‘intellectual’, can’t it?
I guess I’m with the Platonic-Aristotelian example/idea (respectively) of ‘goodness’ in that the former cripples any claim of the latter. That is, the instrumental cleverness of someone like Hanky Pank Kissinger is far less compellingly “clever” in the light of his wickedness, which I’d not hesitate to call a kind of ‘idiocy’.
And looking at a person like Kissinger, is it so clear that he’s really such a whiz kid? I’ve never heard his analyses on tv – I’ve also read one book: Diplomacy – and didn’t think that, analytically, they were pretty stupid in their self-contrariety and counterfactuality.
Which leading Nazis – of those who were not simply nationalists humiliated by the Great War, but the real race-theorists – do you think were as intelligent as Roosevelt and Churchill? Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Bormann – those guys lost a militarily ‘won’ position.
We might be equivocating on the difficult ‘moron/whiz kid’ distinction. – but Book Burners? Who cares what their SATs are, you know? – to me, they’re “morons”.