The Invisible Library

I recieved an e-mail today from Morgan, a Journalist who writes for the French cultural magazine, Chronic’Art. She is a Brautigan fan who read my post about In Watermellon Sugar. She wanted to let me know that her magazine has a three page article on Richard Brautigan in the November Issue. She also has an interesting question:

As a librarian, do you have more informations or precisions about Brautigan Virtual Libraries, based on Brautigan’s ” The Abortion : An Historical Romance “(1966). According to the website ” Ahapoetry.com“.

For those of you unfemiliar with Brautigan’s book, The Abortion, the main character manages an eccentric library that collects one of a kind books made by local San Fransisco residents who deposit the books with him. At the website that Morgan mentioned above, there is aBrautigan Virtual Library, which looks like it is trying to provide a similar service online.

I was not aware of this and it looks interesting. Thanks, Morgan, for bringing it to my attention.

I’ve been fascinated by meta-fiction (fiction about books that are themselves fictitious) for a while now. Shortly after I started this blog, I discovered that there was a website that endevours to catalog these meta-books, called The Invisible Library. I swear it was a coincidence.

J.L. Borges has, to my mind, the most impressive collection of meta-books under his name, even though John Bellairs and Douglas Adams have the most books with the best titles. My favorite Adams’ meta-title has to be Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes by Oolon Colluphid.

Guardian UK:

Mr Darcy is women’s favourite fictional romantic icon. According to a recent poll conducted by the Orange Prize for Fiction, 1,900 women across the generations voted for Mr Darcy as the man they would most like to go on a date with. He was also the fictional character women would most like to invite to a dinner party - which strikes me as odd, as surely Mr Darcy would spend the evening either gazing at the ceiling grunting with boredom or glowering at the guests.

[…]

Here is the rub - Austen leaves us to assume that her heroine’s marriages are happy despite portraying very few idyllic marriages in the rest of her texts. Also, Austen’s deification as a novelist is such that one hardly dares to point out that when it comes to marriage and what goes on behind the bedroom door, she herself had no first-hand experience. But as modern women with our wealth of relationship experience and all the benefits brought about by feminism, we should know better. The fact is that dark, smouldering, moody, charismatic, arrogant Darcy types, whom we hate at first sight and then later find ourselves falling in love with, often - particularly after we have married them - turn out to be rigid, dominating and controlling.

What message is this Darcy fixation sending to men? On the one hand, women say they want men who are emotionally intelligent, sensitive, flexible, who enjoy sharing equally and are fun to be with. But these same women are swooning over a fictional character who is the epitome of the dominant patriarchal male. No wonder men are confused.

I’m perplexed as well. Of course, as a man,I’ve always been a little perplexed by the inner workings of women’s minds. Being married nearly four years has not really shed an more light into the mystery, either.Alas, I know My wife digs Mr. Darcy, especially his Colin Firth incarnations. But hay, she comes home to me at the end of the night, so I must be doing something right, even though I’m not a brooding, hard to deal with patriarch. Damn my modern sensabilities!

I recieved my Absentee Ballot in the mail today. Looking over the ballot, it looks like it’ll be a strait Democratic tickit this year, since I refuse to vote Republican (except for the county coroner, who is running unapposed. Coroner is a good job for a Republican). Though I suppose I could vote Libertarian for the open senate seat. Yeah. That’ll happen. Other than the Presidential race, the other slots are pretty much a toss up, as Georgia Democrats are pretty much identical to Georgia Republicans. You may have heard abot my representative, Zell Miller (D.-Barking Mad)? But it’s either that or apathy.

It’s Saturday…one more day left in Banned Books Week. I made it!

Keith sent me an email a few days ago, informing me of Banned Books Week and asking me if I’d like to contribute something on the subject to the blog. So I checked out the list. It included more than a few of my favorites. Trying to decide which one of these books I wanted to write about was difficult. Which one had the biggest influence on me, and which one would conjure up from within me something substantial to say?

As usual, I couldn’t decide, so I’m going to pick two and just write the things that come to me.

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, by Kurt Vonnegut.
I read this in high school, and it changed the way I thought about literature.
My father is an electrician. My mother works for the government. Neither went to College. The language used in the types of books we were forced to read for school–from Ethan Frome to The Fountainhead–was as alien to me as Chinese. But with Vonnegut it felt like he was talking to me. Reading him felt like having a conversation with my wise (and wise-cracking) grandfather. And still he managed to put me in Billy Pilgrim’s shoes, so vividly, without reams of description or encyclopedic exposition–or language like an overstuffed vase. And then he did something, stylistically, that would violently throw open the doors of fiction for me, breaking the locks and suddenly making everything seem possible: “An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said ‘There they go, there they go.’ He meant his brains. / That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”
That was when I learned that literature could be Punk. You could stretch the formats, break the rules. I have been very difficult to satisfy, lit-wise, ever since.

Catcher in The Rye, by J.D. Salinger.
Everybody loves this book. Everybody worth knowing, anyway. You are either one of the people who get it, right away, or you aren’t, and you don’t.
A sad but elucidating story, by way of example:
When my grandfather was sick with lung cancer, we were visited by my great-uncle, a school teacher from Atlanta. (Despite the ‘Great’, he is only in his mid-fifties.) I had always secretly admired this uncle, because he was the literary jet-setter of the family. He sat on golf courses with millionaires and sipped mint juleps–that kind of thing. But once he self-published his first novel, and I tried to read it, the clouds rolled away and I was able to see the man my uncle was.What he wrote should not have been novelized. It is the kind of story best told at cocktail parties to sycophants. (Would I ban it? I really doubt I’d have to…)
At any rate, he once asked me what my favorite novels were, and Catcher was among the first.
“I never understood that novel,” he said. “People make such a fuss over it, but there’s really nothing to it.”
I was somewhat baffled. I thought he was an English Teacher.
“But, it’s a generational expression of rage. It’s about the disillusionment of reality meeting the dreams of youth. It’s about people just…giving up the fight.”
“What fight?”, he snorted, “It’s more like whining, to me.”
It was the ‘to me’ that spelled it out. He would never understand Holden Caulfield, any more than he would understand Nelson Mandela or would have understood Galileo or Newton or Jesus. He is the archetype of solipsism and intransigence, and that makes him a poor writer and a fool and the exact type of person who would band together with like-minded fools and decide which books are “unsuitable” for the masses.
.
Thank Sophia, he’s retired now, so we can all relax a little.

But not too much. There are always more like him. We have one running the country right now, as a matter of fact. And there is another war, besides the one on terrorism, that people like this are not going to be able to win. There are billions of people out there, and every one harbors at least one thought that, to you, is “rogue” and “dangerous”. You can burn every book ever written but you can’t stop that. You can raze the earth from one end to the other and you can’t kill that. Holden Caulfield’s rage is diffused throughout the entire planet. Promises broken, comeuppance dawning. You think it’s hard to eradicate every ideology you don’t like?

Try every idea.

The first Presidential Debates will be held next week, September 30th, in Miami, and will be moderated by Jim Lehrer. They will be aired on ABC at 9pm Eastern. The parameters have just been revealed, and to anybody who’s tracking the decline of democracy, they hold no surprises. There will be no extemporaneous questions from the audience. Everything will have been submitted beforehand. Candidates are not allowed to ask each other questions, but can pose rhetorical ones. And then some silly business with the size of the podiums (podia?)…

But none of that matters, because Americans will not watch. Because, inevitably, there will be something more “exciting” on another channel. Maybe Baseball. Maybe Survivor. Maybe reruns of Frasier. Whatever it might be, John Q. American is more likely to seek escape than to wallow in this inevitable swamp of circumlocution, however historical it may be this year. And I understand him. I really do. I, myself, can only stand a certain amount of politicking before my central nervous system begins to hum unpleasantly and my attention span begins to carpet-wiggle like a petulant puppy. So I get you, John Q. I am you.

So what can the candidates do to snare my interest?
Well, here are some (very silly) suggestions:

1) FX: If it is logistically impossible for the candidates to arrive at the Debates having crawled out of the wreckage of a spectacularly crashed airplane, to realize they are the only survivors, and for John Kerry to deliver a distressed George W. Bush’s baby, then at least occasionally one of them should look over his shoulder and whisper in a frightened voice: “If you hear anything…run…”

2) Melodrama: George Bush should confront Kerry with the confession that he has been sleeping with his wife, and the two of them have taken out a huge life insurance claim on the New Englander, only to have it lapse when Theresa fell down a well and emerged an amnesiac who only speaks in riddles. Kerry should weep violently and throw the podium at a wall.

3) Game Show: The candidates should be forced to eat horse anus while trying to balance on a Corvette that is suspended ninety feet in the air and covered in French fry grease. The first candidate to get in the car, punch a button which releases the car from suspension, and land in the back of a moving flatbed is the new President.

4) Mature: Kerry should seduce Bush in French, threaten to spank him roughly on the bottom, and make him sit aimlessly for seven minutes while he braids his eyebrows. Bush mutters shyly that he’s “always wanted a Boston Browjob.” Theresa and Laura engage in Sapphic domination on a king-sized bed suspended from the ceiling. Elephant-on-Donkey action only for those with Closed-Caption.

5) Superhero/Action: Bush and Kerry must join forces to defeat a steroid-inflated Jim Lehrer and his army of robot clones. Kerry bores Lehrer into stupefaction while Bush manages to convince him, in simplified and ardent language, that breathing is “for terrorists.”

6) Comedy: Kerry and Bush argue over whose mother-in-law is the most annoying. Kerry makes a shocking and hilarious admission that he is routinely forced to take “ketchup baths”. Kerry wins.

7) Indie: Bush’s cocaine problem is driving he and Kerry apart. They decide to drive to New Mexico so Bush can dry out. Kerry finally comes to grip with Bipolar Disorder and begins a 12-Step program to wean himself off Afrin Nasal Spray. Special appearance by Dick Cheney’s daughter as the token lesbian.
Religious: Seven hours of Bush being slowly and mercilessly tortured by Kerry and specially-assigned interrogators from the Anti-Defamation League who wear black leather executioner masks with the Star of David emblazoned on them. (This will only be aired on Fox.)

9) Fantasy: The Balrog, freshly freed from the Mines of Moria by the black magic of Saru-Cheney, chases Kerry around the stage while Bush mourns in melancholic delirium for his dead son who is not really dead, and, in fact, never existed. George Stephanopoulos must take the One Ring to Mount Doom, and in the process of wrestling with Anne Coulter, loses a finger.

10) Cinema Verite: Cameras follow Bush and Kerry without pause the day leading up to the Debate. Kerry spends most of it playing Battlefield: Vietnam on his X-Box. Bush visits the Elders of Zion and sacrifices thirteen minority children. Just before the convention, the two Bonesmen thumb-wrestle for the Presidency, as is dictated by the tenets of that Secret Society. The debates are a sham, as usual, each candidate’s real goal to push his favorite alcoholic beverage. Kerry: Miller. Bush: Budweiser. Lehrer: Absinthe with laudanum.

In the sad event that nothing this exciting happens, then I will watch anyway, because it is important, is quite possibly the most important election of our lifetimes, and will very likely decide the fate of Democracy in the Middle East.

Unless Junkin’ is on. I love that show.

Demotic regimes demand that we forget, and therefore they brand books as superfluos luxeries; totalitarian regimes demand that we not think, and therefore they ban and threaten and censor; both, by and large, require that we become stupid and that we accept our degradation meekly, and therefore they encourage the consumption of pap. In such circumstances, readers cannot but be subversive.

-Alberto Manguel, A History of reading

Today, I am just a subversive reader. But one day, I hope to be counted among the great dissenters of the age. I want to be an author.

More than that, I hope, one day, to have one or more of my books banned. Any self righteous group will do. It would mean as much to me to be on the torch list of some pea-brained Baptist Ranter as the watch-list of some overheated tyrant. I’m looking at you, Crisco Johnny. (Or is your new name Mr. 5000?)

It’s an odd thing that being banned has become a badge of honor. You really aren’t assured literary greatness until someone puts a fatwa on your head, or at the very least, wants to use your book as kindling (which is far better than the hack’s fate: having their brick of a tome used as a doorstop). That having your work banned is a surefire way to greatness should be a signal to the dunderheads that they’ve failed. “Ban our books all you like, that will just ensure that your children read them,” is the clear message. But they keep at it. Every new Harry Potter book is added to the list, as well as some old favorites that keep getting chowderheads in a twist, or give some Unreconstructed Southern Lady the vapors.

Usually books are banned by Christian or Muslim Fanatics¹ who are simply in a huff over the author’s audacity at publishing a book that doesn’t take the inane fairy tales found in the Bible and the Koran at face value. We all get a good laugh at their ignorance and superstition, mainly because these fools have long since lost their power over our minds. The Enlightenment has worked, in at least this regard: we are slowly but surely becoming less superstitious. At least most of us. And the ones that aren’t are often times merely laughed into a marginal existence, self publishing their little harangues², unless they posses the private fortune gleaned from fleecing other morons. Then we end up with the likes of Pat Roberts, Luis Farrakhan and David Duke, who have, through the power of Capitalist Entitlement, forced their presence and opinions on the media, and thus onto our minds, whether we want them there or not.

In the last century, we saw an increase in politically motivated censorship, but it often had the same fanatical zeal attached to it that was exclusively the domain of religious censorship of previous ages. Before the Nazi book bonfires or the Stalinist library purges, offended Marms of Public Opinion would simply cluck their tongues and demand the offending manuscript be bowdlerized. Unless they were Monarchs, then they imitated the Popes of the day and grew purple with indignation. The result was either to invent ingenious torture devices like the Guillotine or Anal Pear, or to counter the offending ideas by hiring propagandists with silver tongues batshit between their ears to stand up and chant merrily what the powers that Be Want to hear, common sense be dammed. And so the literary ancestors of Anne Coulter and Michelle Malkin go back to France and England, notions that would drive both woman up the wall if they weren’t already over the moon, puttering under their own steam.

This is something that has long baffled me. Why do such degenerate nincompoops like Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader get air time while thoughtful, credible folk with merely unpopular ideas get ignored? Is it simply that Money + Connections = Legitimacy? I don’t have an answer, I just want to ask the question.

And really, that’s all we aspiring authors can hope for, to have our questions heard and the possible answers debated in the public square. If we have to stay up late nights arguing with jackasses who light their mental fires with our books, then so be it. At least someone is still reading us, even if they don’t or won’t understand.

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1. Anyone else ever notice that Jewish groups, even the ultra orthodox ones, don’t ban books? My theory is that this is because of the importance placed on scholarship in Jewish culture. Maybe I’m wrong and there are irate Rabbis, twirling their yamukahs in rage over some poor soul’s Talmudic interpretations, but I get the impression they prefer spirited debate to gasoline and matches.

2. Except when Regnary Publishing picks them up.

The Cornell Daily Sun:

The list of the 100 most frequently challenged books is indeed useful, and I advise all new parents to laminate it and post it on the fridge so that if they catch their kid reading something verboten they can roll the list up, fill it with lead shot and beat him about the ears — but I also find it sorely lacking. Over the past few years, as I’ve labored to raise Melvin and George to be upstanding, coitophobic citizens, I’ve encountered several books so abhorrent that I was shocked to find they hadn’t been banned. As a civic service, I am raising awareness of these dangerous books by providing an annotated list, as follows.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak: lionizes Max, a disturbed young man who will no doubt grow up to be a depraved criminal. After an evening of troublemaking, he goes so far as to threaten his mother by saying he’ll “eat [her] up!” Max’s delinquent behavior is then encouraged when he takes a magical trip to a land of “wild things,” where he leads the beasts in a pagan dance ritual. At the end of the book, Max is forgiven without so much as a single flog.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown: normalizes talking to inanimate objects.

Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt: encourages children to touch things willy-nilly. This is bad enough in a household filled with breakable objects and clean, white walls, but I gravely fear what these grope-happy children will want to touch when they reach adolescence.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle: endorses gluttony.

This is a very useful summary that all concerned citizens should take to heart.

I’m back @ school, doing things archival and loving it - for the most part. This semester is about learning how to appraise, how to preserve, and how to legally manage information. Good, solid classes each.

This semester is also about preparing to study American literature again. If admitted to the program here I’d be signing on for more schooling. The teaching would be great fun, I think. The research just as good if not better. I’m interested in how people tell their stories. I recommend school, I really do. Coming back has been good for me.

My human rights archives series is not forgotton, and should even progress with the pending wireless connection at home. I wanted to see how things went in the news about Columbia taking some related material and looking for an archivist to handle the Human Rights Watch Archive. All in good time, in archives-time.

Keeping perspective in school can be difficult. The long view, the short view, no view. Everything seems to have its time, and everyone seems to have an opinion about when that is. Learning, exploring takes time, and is, in my opinion, one of the highest values of the archival community. Good luck one and all!

“Every burned book enlightens the world.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Following up on yesterday’s post about the Artist Formerly Known as Cat Stevens and Salman Rushdie, here’s a few more details on the banning of The Satanic Verses, from the Forbidden Library:

The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie. Viking. Banned in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, Malaysia, Qatar, Indonesia, South Africa, and India due to its criticism of Islam. Burned in West Yorkshire, England (1989) and temporarily withdrawn from two bookstores on the advice of police. Five people died in riots against the book in Pakistan. Another man died a day later in Kashmir. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, stating, “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses, which is against Islam, the prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, have been sentenced to death.” Challenged at the Wichita, Kans. Public Library (1989) because it is “blasphemous to the prophet Mohammed.”

And just to add a bit of cross-cultural historical perspective:

The Talmud. Soncino Pr. Burned in Cairo, Egypt (1190); Paris, France (1244); and Salamanca, Spain (1490). The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages tried to suppress this work. Pope Gregory IX ordered it burned (1239); Pope Innocent IV ordered King Louis IX of france to burn all copies (1248 and 1254); Pope Benedict XIII ordered the bishops of the Italian dioceses to confiscate all copies (1415); Pope Julius III ordered that Christians reading the Talmud be excommunicated; Pope Clement VIII forbade both “Christians and Jews from owning, reading, buying or circulating Talmudic or Cabbalistic books or other godless writing.” (1592)

The Bible. William Tyndale, who partially completed translating the Bible into English, was captured, strangled, and burned at the stake (1536) by opponents of the movement to translate the bible into the vernacular. Beginning around 1830, “family friendly” bibles, including Noah Webster’s version (1833) began to appear which had excised passages considered to be indelicate.

AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A London-to-Washington flight was diverted to Maine when it was discovered that passenger Yusuf Islam - formerly known as singer Cat Stevens - was on a government watch list and barred from entering the country.

[edit]

One official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Islam, 56, was identified by the Advanced Passenger Information System, which requires airlines to send passenger information to Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center. The Transportation Security Administration then was contacted and requested that the plane land at the nearest airport, that official said.

[edit]

“It’s also a very sad state of affairs when a man best known as a peace loving pop star can be grouped into the same category Osama Bin Laden just because of his chosen faith,” the statement said.

Islam drew some negative attention in the late 1980s when he supported the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence against Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses.” Recently, though, Islam has criticized terrorist acts, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the school seizure in Beslan, Russia, earlier this month that left more than 300 dead, nearly half of them children.

In a statement on his Web site, he wrote, “Crimes against innocent bystanders taken hostage in any circumstance have no foundation whatsoever in the life of Islam and the model example of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Islam issued a statement saying: “No right thinking follower of Islam could possibly condone such an action: The Quran equates the murder of one innocent person with the murder of the whole of humanity.”

He may be a bit of religious kook¹ but he’s no terrrorist. Frankly, this is right up there with harassing Ted Kennedy. It’s frivilous, idiotic and just underscores why we need real, human, highly trained security at our airports rather than some dumb computerized system that identifies every Folkie, Nun and Liberal as a suspected terrorist while the real terrorists sit back and laugh at us while they strap the dynamite to their chests.

Link via Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing.
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1. the whole Rushdie-Satanic Verses thing would have been silly, if there hadn’t been death threats involved. But it was more a rhetorical proclamation, at least on Cat Steven’s end than any real vendetta. Honestly, do you see Cat Stevens trying to Kill Salman Rushdie? At best, he would have sung Moonshadow at him until he went back into hiding. Meanwhile, Pat Robertson is still walking around, blaming hurricanes on Gay people and suggesting someone nuke the State Department.