We’re leading up the the loudly lauded Bland Books Week, often abbreviated to BBW, which I assume is some sort of fat joke aimed at female librarians. It’s the time when American librarians celebrate their willingness to break absolutely no laws and very few common mores to supply books in libraries. Librarians in America don’t have to do much to defend intellectual freedom, but they like to practice it, and that’s what counts. Other places in the world aren’t so fortunate, and maybe we should look at them. After all, if the ALA includes books that were banned in Ireland 50 years ago as a plot to ban books, we can certainly look abroad to places without much intellectual freedom. For example, we might look at the list of countries that have banned or tried to ban that ridiculous anti-Muslim YouTube video. Some of the bans are for practical purposes, I suppose. If you have a large population of violent people ready to kill other people for their beliefs, ...
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Sometimes all the ALA propaganda about Band Books inspires passionate if misguided people to believe books are censored in America. You have to make a lot of unjustified mental leaps to believe that books are censored, but believing in nonexistent censorship doesn’t really inspire action, unless posting a supportive comment on Facebook counts as action. [Homeschooling.] But some people are inspired to action, and sometimes that action is a little weird. An example of that comes via LISNews in this article: Underground library stands up for books. As titles go, that ones pretty bad. It uses a tired metaphor without even slipping in a bad library pun. The article applauds someone who: wants to build a library in our great city. But not just any ol' library. She wants Milwaukee to have an underground library of books banned in Tucson, Ariz. If she succeeds, and I hope she does, the library will be one of many popping up across the nation. From Texas to California ...
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A kind reader sent me a link to an opinion article in the USA Today that has some implications for librarians’ allegedly central value of intellectual freedom, but first let’s consider a new memoir by Salman Rushdie about his time underground evading a death sentence, also written about in the USA Today. As many of you probably recall, in 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa - still in effect - that Muslims should murder Rushdie because of his allegedly offensive book The Satanic Verses. I don’t remember where I was when I read about the fatwa, but I remember reading The Satanic Verses and thinking to myself that someone would have to be pretty darn sensitive to get offended by that book, if they could even understand it. Those who remembered the Iran Hostage crisis of a decade before were used to anti-western violence coming out of Iran. Then again, the U.S. government had helped oust the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadeq regime in the ...
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On to a new topic today, although I’ve now figured out how to get the general population to rant in the comments. I’ve always been capable of pressing librarians’ buttons; it’s a blessing and a curse. Now I know I can always throw homeschooling into the mix, because some people really have a bee in their bonnet about that topic. Or maybe I can just scatter random words throughout the post to see who gets riled up. [Teacher's unions.] It might be fun for a while. [Welfare.] Then again it might get old after a while. [Affirmative action.] Or maybe not. [Designated hitter rule.] And now for something completely different, the latest development in the ebook world. The news from Infodocket is that Hachette - one of the “big six” publishers - will now start selling ebooks to libraries, and at only 220% on average of the normal ebook price. This is the model Penguin adopted when they got back into the library ebook game. Apparently that big meeting in ...
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My last post certainly brought out some passionate if occasionally odd responses. Usually I don’t respond to comments in depth. Other commenters are often more than willing to call people on the odd responses, but I’d like to try to figure out just where we all stand. We’re librarians. We’re supposed to be able to read and evaluate information. First, there’s the "theory" of young earth creationism, which is the belief that the earth is 6,000 years old. I don’t think any of the commenters were defending this belief as such, but it was hard to tell. But let’s be clear. Young earth creationism is baloney, and if you actually believe the earth is 6,000 years old you’re hopelessly ignorant. Don’t bother commenting. Get ye to a library as soon as possible and read up on geology. Even though no one was defending young earth creationism as a belief, one misguided commenter claimed that I didn’t know the “difference between a scientific law and a ...
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I’ve always had a distrust of school textbooks. Textbooks seem the worst way to learn about anything you might want to learn about. Plus the way they necessarily dumb down whatever subject they’re addressing is always a problem. Keep in mind I’m not talking about college textbooks, although I don’t like them either. A college-level chemistry textbook might pass on the general consensus about chemistry, and an economics textbook might pass on whatever hoodoo currently passes for economics, but they’re going to be boring. School textbooks take that boring to a whole new level. The author of a fake science textbook wrote me with the story of how his book was banned from use in the Houston school system because it might “reflect poorly on the district” and appear to be “mocking the quality of education” in the district, as reported by the Huffington Post, which must be a reputable news source because it also includes such hard-hitting stories as ...
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