The Invisible Library

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.