Self-Censorship and Content

A Dirty Little Secret: Self-Censorship

How do we, librarians/readers, balance reading broadly and recommending works broadly and/or including the works into a collection that have content that is potentially difficult/dangerous/challenging? I have little to no problem including Van Til and NT Wright next to Scofield and Ryrie or including fiction by Barthelme, Brautigan, Wallace or O'Brien. I think that students, especially at the college level need access to these works, especially for research purposes. I don't think that having gender-role issue stories or sexual abuse stories are being used for research within school libraries. The argument is made in this article that books need to be included that support the curriculum. There is also the argument that states that are lableled conservative seem to have a marked absence of these perceived works which the author immediatley assumes means self-censorship. I'm not a school librarian and this is one of the reasons why, but frankly it's not your problem. If the school library doesn't want to include a book why should they have to? The ALA is not a ruling body and it is seemingly becoming more and more invasive, especially in realms of kid's lit. About 3/4 of the way through the article the author quotes
"Scales, a First Amendment advocate and former school librarian, offers these words of advice: don’t put restrictions on kids, because they’ll regulate themselves if given the freedom to read. “Children will put down what they can’t handle or what they aren’t ready for,” she explains."
Really? Because if these are the same kids I've had the pleasure of spending 8 consecutive summers with and have as siblings, then this is a body of individuals not particularly well-known for their self-regulation. As a kid, I would read anything. There was a Dracula book in our public library that I would read on the sly and it scared me. I couldn't walk into the bathroom without pulling the shower curtain back to make sure there was nothing there to pounce on me. It is possible that I am not the most prime example of the self-regulating child but I can't believe that children as a whole have matured to this extent and indeed it would a shame if they had. Arguing this from the aspect of the self-regulating child is weak at best and laughable at its worst.

If donated, would I include one of the books above in the librayr's children's lit/YA section? I am not sure and it is an area that I would need to give significantly more thought. We have a unique situation as a fucntioning academic library that married students and their familiies use. I am not required to support a curriculum with the children's lit/YA section but these are important issues being raised that will affect the world the kids will be interacting with.

People, especially parents also react horribly in these types of situations, and in my opinion need to place their hand over their mouth and think about what they are saying. If the school library gets a book you don't agree with and it is of nomical impact, keep your mouth shut. You talk to your kids about how it's not quite ready for them and/or you read it together and move on. Don't cause librarians more pain then they need.
for example I do not think Harry Potter is the devil. I enjoyed/continue to enjoy the series and will share it wholeheartedly with our children when appropriate/of age.(Once children are actually born to us)
We will read around the breakfast/lunch/snack/dinner/dessert table and exegete/discuss/argue around the same about the work to make sure understanding is thoroughly fleshed out. (Hopefully there will be a big whiteboard in our dining room and/or den for comments and diagramming for this purpose.) This wil hoepfully set the tone for family reading in future as well as establish clear methods of reading through our, as yet future, children's lives.

Quote from " A History of Reading"

"As we read a text in our own languge, the text itself becomes a barrier. We can go into it as far as its words allow, embracing all their possible definitions; we can bring other texts to bear upon it and to reflect it, as in a hall of mirrors; we can construct another, critical text that will extend and illuminate the one we are reading; but we cannot escape the fact that its language is the limit of our universe.
Translation proposes a sort of parallel universe, another space and time in which the text reveals other, extraordinary possible meanings.
For these meanings, however, there are no words, since they exist in the intuitive no man's land between the language of the original and the language of the translator."
Alberto Manguel A History of Reading Pg. 276

It's here

KINDLE 2.0 released
There's a whole lot of better info out there than this post. Simply Google "Kindle 2.0" and a whole host of information should be available. For myself, until these readers are much, much cheaper ($50-$75) I'm not going with them.
Kara and I were in Binghamton's local indie bookstore on Saturday and it smelled like ideas (really weird ideas but ideas) coffee and print. It has lovely hardwood floors, big plate glass windows so a lot of natural light comes streaming in. While the bookshop is small, the content is awesome! The very fact that they had Grass and Wallace in the same place endears them to my heart. There was also a decent showing of graphic novels, theology, philosophy and a great kid's section. The tactile experience of the shop, picking out your book, purchasing it, eschewing the plastic bag and stowing it, in my case a man-, purse, and carrying the new cargo home to be enjoyed, annotated and glossed is as of yet an unreplicable experience. I finished Shea's Reading the OED and in it he says "I'm not anti-computer, I am pro-book." That is my stance as well.

I would highly recommend A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. This guy read to Borges as a kid for two years; how is that for a writing apprenticeship. Manguel also wrote The Library at Night which, while I have not yet finished it, is also pretty good. The book itself is interestingly formatted as it is somewhat narrow; I'm not sure if the publisher was trying to push the page count higher so the buyer thought he was getting more for his money. Also Manguel re-uses some material from A History of Reading in The Library at Night. This is fairly forgivable as Postman does the same thing. There are worse thing a writer can do such as resuing materail from someone who is not himself.

*Personal note*
Went for a 2 mile run this evening. Ran the first mile successfully; ran/walked the second mile back. No stomach contents left on anyone's lawn.
Run judged a success.

Good Monday Morning: N. T. Wright on Resurrection

N. T. Wright on Resurrection

The Mystery Revealed or concealed

The library received a self-published work in the mail today entitled The Mystery Revealed: A commentary on the book of Revelation in the Holy Bible by Larry Edwards. The book was self-published via XulonPress.

Larry Edwards was a medical doctor and does not attempt to mislead the reader that he is established as a theologian. In his preface he states his disagreement with much of what he has read on Revelation. This book is his offering of extensive study and thought on Revelation. Unfortunately this book fits and confirms the stereotype of self-published works. Words are misspelled, even on the back cover, wording is awkward, voices change in the middle of paragraphs, incorrect words are used, "than" instead of "then" (pg. 317) and while the formatting/binding of the book is professionally done the content does not match the container.

There is also the issue of a self-published commentary. Of all works, it seems to me that commentaries are some of the most important to be passed through the editorial process especially when dealing with prophesy or future things as Revelation seems to do. Not having the work passed through an extensive editing process results in writing and thinking that is logically and textually weak at best and misleading at its worst. The author attempts to support a reading of Revelation from an OT/NT understanding but Edwards gets in his own way by offering out-of-context citations and then suggesting direct present-day correlations.
While his readings are somewhat dubious they are easier to believe than Edwards' attempts to calculate or draw the reader's attention to present day items. Truthfully, I was immediately skeptical that any commentary on Revelation would proclaim with the title that all mysteries have been addressed but I wanted to give it a fair shot. I read through the preface and sections of each chapter. My favorite part of this book is when the author addresses the number 666. To give some context the author is working through Rev. 13:16-18 and is discussing the mark and the number.
"The number (666) is to be calculated. Since the custom of using letters of the alphabet to represent numbers was prevalent at the time of the writing of Revelation, the calculation may refer to the use of letters in an name to add up to 666 or the substitution of letters for the respective numbers. (My note: This is somewhat believable; in Potok's The Chosen there is one example of the number/letter correlation in the Hebrew langauge.) Many suggestions have been made. One has to decie whether the Greek of Hebrew alphabet should be used for such calculations. If the Lord was dictating (???) to John in Hebrew, that language would make more sense in Hebrew, the sixth letter is waw; the equivalent of 'w' in English. Thus www would be 666; this raises question of control of the international economy by using the world-wide-web." (P. 353-354)
My knowledge of Hebrew is null but even if www does equal 666, it is a enormous leap of logic to suggest that the internet would be used to control the economy. This is not to say that it cannot happen but I think it is dangerous and somewhat fruitless to attempt to assign direct meaning to items that are as ambigious as understanding 666 to be.

This work does nothing to help readers understand Revelation and does not contribute to the scholarship of the book. If anything, it adds to the large number of works that attempt to cram Revelation into a small, manageable package. While I appreciate the author's gesture this is not a book that I will add to the college library or my own library.

Exercise

Personal bit: Tonight I tried something I don't think I've done in about 9 years. I went running. Frankly, it was rather horrible in terms of performance, distance and anything else that makes running a successful venture by anyone's standards. My goal was to run a mile, .5 out and .5 back. I got about .4 out and walked the remaining .1. On the return, I ran .05 and walked the rest. The whole run/walk journey took about 15-18 minutes. The recovery period took about the same amount of time, most of which involved lying flat on my back in the apt. living room breathing deeply and hoping my lungs didn't burn through my chest as they seemed to be threatening to do. Not a proud day especially as I left most of the contents of my stomach on someone's ice-encrusted lawn slightly covered up with a well placed mound of snow. One of the less morbid highlights was that as the temperature was approximately 27 degrees what snow had melted on the sidewalk during the day was starting to freeze which caused footing to be quite exciting at some points.
Hopefully future outings will be much more successful, i.e. I will be able to run the whole time rather than resort to some walrus-like puffing and walking like an escaped geriatric patient.