Dr. Frank's What's-it

Burned Books Week

Michele has a good post on Banned Books Week and the perversity of trying to mess with Captain Underpants. Of course, I agree with not banning stuff. Totally.

But there are still weird ironies and contradictions in the American Library Association's framing of the issue. I don't have anything to add to what I wrote about it last year, here and here. But I am wondering about the ALA's current position on the imprisoned "independent librarians" in Cuba - I've googled my fingers to the bone, and I haven't been able to find anything very recent on the ALA and the independent librarians. According to Nat Hentoff and Ray Bradbury, they're still in cages and their books are still smoldering:

"As to the disposition of the photographic negatives, the audio cassette, medicines, books, magazines, pamphlets and the rest of the documents, they are to be destroyed by means of incineration because they lack usefulness..."

That "challenged" enough for you?

UPDATE: I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but when you go to the ALA's web page on Book Burning, and click on Book Burning in the 21st Century, you get the following message: "Service Unavailable." Evidently...

UPDATE II: wow, that was quick! Service is now available. No mention of Castro's Fahrenheit 451 parties, though.

UPDATE III: Reason's Julian Sanchez has more thoughts on the ALA's arguably problematic notion of what constitutes a "challenged" book. It's not that the word "challenged" doesn't accurately describe the books in question (it does) but rather that there are several kinds of "challenges," some more egregious than others, and that they are all lumped together under the "banned and challenged" rubric regardless of the reasons for the challenges.

I'd also add that there appears to be no distinction drawn between successful and unsuccessful challenges - they are all lumped together as "challenges." Yet surely an unsuccessful challenge (e.g. where the desire to suppress a book is ignored or rebuffed) is an indicator of a healthy state of affairs with regard to freedom of expression rather than the reverse. Or am I wrong?

As Sanchez points out, Michael Bellesiles's notoriously factually erroneous The Arming of America is number three on the list. Yeah, it was a political hot potato, and people often had ulterior motives for attacking it that were every bit as suspect as the ulterior motives he had for writing it. But criticizing a scholarly work for containing fabrications and slovenly scholarship is quite a different thing than trying to prevent kids from reading The Catcher in the Rye because it contains the word "fuck." Or so it seems to me.

Posted by Dr. Frank at September 27, 2005 04:34 PM | TrackBack