Banned Book Week . . . At 30

abffe.org

Banned Books Week and I are the same age.  That means that as long as I've been alive someone has been fighting censorship and the promoting the right to spread ideas through tax-funded venues.  Censorship, we can agree, is probably bad in a democratic environment.  It's inimical to the idea that the best will win out.  It's based on the assumption that most people in a democracy are free-thinking, reasonable human beings just looking out for their own well-being.  It's the same kind of assumption that most economists made (and largely still make). 


While I disagree with the assumption, I do agree with Banned Books Week that censorship is (mostly) bad.  Ideas have a way  of getting out regardless, and it doesn't matter how hard you try to stop them.  To paraphrase Princess Leia: The more you tighten your grip, the more ideas will slip through your fingers. 

But libraries (especially school libraries whose primary target are children) are tax-funded venues.  And tax-payers have the right to restrict what they feel might be offensive or dangerous materials from their shelves.  They are, after all, the community for which the library is intended.  What Banned Books Week is trying to avoid, however, is the tyranny of an individual dictating which books ought and ought not to be read.  In a democratic forum, anything is up for grabs, and if a committee of community leaders get together to decide they don't want The Anarchist's Cookbook floating around, that's all well and good.

So, go support books.  Head on over to the library and check out Brave New World, Catcher in the Rye, or To Kill a Mockingbird. 

J.K. Rowling . . . A Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling's new book A Casual Vacancy, billed as her first novel for adults, is out this week.  I was caught a little off-guard when I saw it at the local bookstore, as I hadn't heard anything about it in the last couple weeks.  Usually I keep my ear to the ground but this one just sort of snuck up on me.  Maybe the marketing department over at Little Brown figured she was big enough to pull in sales all by her lonesome. 

With legions of fans just about now hitting early adulthood, this seems like a perfect opportunity for Rowling to make her foray into the world of adult literature.  But without Harry and the gang driving the story, and a depressing unfun story at that, I wonder how quickly those fans will jump on this new book. 

From the bookflap, it sounds like a depressing story.  Set in the small English town of Pagford, it paints an idyllic scene of English country life.  But there's tension lurking under the surface; it seems like everyone hates just about everyone else, and with a recent vacancy on the Pagford Parish council, passions are revved up over who's going to fill it.  It sounds like the kind of grueling fare we'd expect from literary works, and Rowling has demonstrated a remarkable facility for bettering herself as an author.  This is the obvious direction for her to go, and I wish her well, but I'm not terribly interested in reading about small-town English machinations. 

You can find the full review here. 

The Daily Barometer Wants Your Kid to Drink? . . . And Satire

Satire is the first defense of the inept.  I don't mean that satirists are themselves inept; instead, I propose that whenever someone says or writes something that they didn't quite mean--which might have been intended as sarcastic, rhetorical or ironic and is instead taken literally--they retreat behind the defense that they were simply being satirical.  Indeed, many of their defenders will quickly leap on the satire bandwagon.

Satire has long held a privileged place in political discourse.  Its ability to mock without pointing fingers or directly insisting upon illegal or unpopular courses offers satirists protection from prosecution, or worse.  The refrain, "But it was only satire," is a shield that has effectively protected political protestors throughout history.  Yet that privileged position, the shield of satire, is like the proverbial skirt behind which one can hide when chased by schoolyard bullies.  It indeed has the power to protect, but used too often, or ineptly, it opens the would-be "satirist" up to contempt.

Last week, the editors of the Daily Barometer, a university newspaper published at Oregon State University, published what they called "A freshman's guide to college."  Much of the advice in the newspaper insert was pointed toward popular follies of the university experience--how to socialize, how to pass your classes with the least amount of effort, how to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on books which might never be opened.  What drew the ire of the public, and of this writer, was the photograph on the front of the guide--depicting simulated acts of underage, binge drinking (as well as a young woman playing video games, and a young man perusing a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition)--and the promotion of underage, binge drinking in the "advice" section.  

Offered in bullet-pointed lists, their section on drinking included the admonition "Liquor before beer;" advised freshmen to chase cheap vodka with Tampico or Sunny D; and suggested freshman try locally brewed beers instead of the cheap beer they normally shot-gunned.  Let's be clear about this, the first piece of advice was not to make responsible decisions about drinking, but if one chose otherwise, one should at least try to be safe.  Instead, the editors blatantly promoted an illegal and dangerous activity.  

Some have defended this section by pointing out that some freshman are of legal drinking age.  Perhaps.  But the overall majority of incoming freshman are straight out of high school and  by targeting minors specifically for their insert--remember that it is a freshman's guide to college--the editors chose to address their advice to members of the community who cannot legally consume, purchase, or possess alcohol.

By far, however, apologists for the article have complained that it is satire--both the editors themselves, and students in letters to the editor.  Satire is itself a strict literary genre comprised of specific elements with the intent to be perceived as satire.  What's more, to be satire, a perceived vice or folly must be held to ridicule with the intent to shame an individual or group into change.  Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" is satire because it exposed deeply-held class prejudices through a reasoned approach to cannibalism.  No one regarded his proposal as an honest attempt to cure hunger by eating children.

If the editors of the Daily Barometer intended their guide as satire, it should have held underage, binge drinking (itself a problem on campuses across the nation) to ridicule by shaming university administration, students, or society in general.  It did none of those things.  Instead, by offering advice on how best to avoid arrest for underage drinking, on which fruity beverages made the best chasers, and how to get drunk quickly (the carbonation in beer releases alcohol already present in the stomach to the bloodstream so that a person's metabolism is quickly overrun), the editors have crossed both the line of decency and journalistic integrity.

Sensationalism for its own sake, the last defense offered by the editors (though perhaps not in those words), is the opposite of journalism.  Stirring up controversy to promote dialogue about underage drinking on campus is shameful to journalism and detrimental to the conversation, as emotion quickly eclipses the substance of the argument.

The editors of the Daily Barometer have failed the test of satire, and its protection cannot be afforded them as they attempt to defend their actions.  They've done a disservice both to the university and to themselves and instead of offering a legitimate examination of a dangerous excess on campus they have distracted attention.  By advising people to engage in illegal activity, they've exceeded the protection of free speech and should tender their immediate resignation.

If you agree with anything I've said, let your voice be heard.  Share this with friends, link it to your own website.  You can write to the editors expressing your disapproval, or address your concerns to the University.  Let President Ray know that this is an issue you care about.  If you're an Alumnus, get in touch with the Alumni Association.  If you're the parent of a current student, or thinking about putting your kid (and a lot of your money) here, consider how this article affects the campus environment, and what it says about the University as a whole.  But the best thing to do is get in contact with the advertisers whose ad money supports the newspaper.  By expressing your disapproval to them, perhaps we can leverage a positive change in the discussion.



Daily Barometer:

• Editor-in-Chief
• Don Iler
• (541) 737-3191
  editor@dailybarometer.com

The Daily Barometer
c/o Letter to the editor
Memorial Union East 106
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331-1617
or e-mail: editor@dailybarometer.com

President Edward J. Ray
Mailing Address:
President
600 Kerr Administration Building
Corvallis, OR 97331-2128
541-737-4133 (phone)
541-737-3033 (fax)


Oregon State University
Alumni Association
204 CH2M HILL Alumni Center
Corvallis, Oregon 97331
541-737-2351
877-OSTATER (877-678-2837)
OSUalum@oregonstate.edu

Alif the Unseen Review

Salon.com

I expected more from this book.  Maybe that was its downfall.  Written by G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen treads a fine line between magical realism, and the fantasy genre.  It's the story of Alif, a hacker tag for a young man living in an unnamed city somewhere on the Arabian peninsula.  He provides data security against aggressive State security; born out of the Arab Spring, this is a trenchant subject, and despite helping to protect agitators and revolutionaries, Alif is strictly a gun-for-hire.  Or, perhaps he's something else.  Instead of actually fighting the battles of his peers, he simply provides them anonymity.

Anonymity is a resounding theme throughout the novel.  People are rarely referred to by their names--Alif, as I've already stated, is not his real name, and though we're offered hints about his true identity, he remains essentially nameless.  Characters throughout the book are disguised by their aliases, as an erstwhile Saudi prince is referred to as often as not by his own hacker tag.  A young American woman studying in the city is known only as "the convert," and the slew of magical beings (including one pretty nifty jinni) are compromised by the fact that few people even believe in their existence.  A young woman in a niqab exists only as glimpses of skin and kohl-lined eyes.

With this pervasive theme resounding through the book, I expected a subtle reflection on state security, the need for privacy in a democracy, and indeed, the book touches on each.  Clearly, a book about a hacker who provides secrecy-services is going to involve those layers of secrecy undone, and Wilson obliges.  When Alif comes into possession of a book reputed to have been written by jinn, he is suddenly the object of the man in charge of hunting down all those people Alif has been hired to protect.  With the very real threat of the State looming behind the hunt, Alif knows that to be captured is to risk torture and death.  Yet the book seems to indeed possess a kind of magic.  Not magic in the fantasy sense, but magic in the coding sense, since it offers insights into building the most powerful computers on the planet.

Wilson's technical naivety shines through here.  Though she manages to get some of the technobabble correct, it lacks of the feel of a truly knowledgeable writer--something that Neal Stephenson and William Gibson have been perfecting over the last two decades.  But I forgave her the shallowness of her technical prowess--this is, after all, a fantasy (or very nearly).  With the hint of jinni in the wings, and set in Arabia, it seems far too easy to populate this world with a sideways world of jinn, effrit and other magical creatures out of The Arabian Nights.  This might have been handled poorly, but by acknowledging her sources, Wilson allows the reader to maintain the sense of disbelief necessary to plod through the abusively ponderous second act into the third.

Which is about where the story falls apart.  What began as something subtle and nuanced becomes a diatribe about modern belief--about the lack of belief inherent in modern society.  Constantly preaching, Wilson's aforementioned "convert" seems to be a poorly veiled (sorry about the pun) version of herself, experiencing the inconsistencies of all modern religions, and the necessary faith one requires to follow them.  This feels both sudden and inconsistent with the tone and pacing of the book prior, and hardly matches the themes she so carefully crafted at the outset.  Indeed, one is forced to wonder if she experienced a crisis of faith while writing this books, as I experienced while reading it.

Real life rarely intrudes, or at least informs, books.  Certainly, the events of the real world might alter the way in which I perceive a particular book, but as I was reading Alif, extremists in Libya set fire to the American embassy in Benghazi and killed the American ambassador.  Meanwhile, protests had been sparked in Egypt over a controversial film depicting Mohammed as a philanderer and a pedophile.  Subsequent protests have since been staged throughout the world, including Australia.

The anger I felt at the death of our ambassador no doubt colored my perception of this book.  And I can't help read into it the way in which the Arab Spring has metamorphosed into a wild grasping for power, as all revolutions must eventually go.  I doubt my sense of disappointment with the novel would have been alleviated if the assassination has not occurred, yet I can't help wonder if some of my own residual anger tempered this review.  I like to think that I am more impartial than that, but I have to admit that it may have.  So, take this with a bit of salt; overall, I thought the book was flawed, with great potential that Wilson was unable to exploit.

I would not recommend this book to a friend.

YA Books . . . And The Grownups Who Love Them

Publisher's Weekly just posted an article that describes a recently reported phenomenon in the Young Adult market.  Namely, that kids aren't the ones reading them.  Adults comprise 55% of buyers of YA titles, and when asked, a resounding majority admitted they were the intended reader.  While this isn't inherently surprising--the staggering success of Harry Potter, the Twilight series, and The Hunger Games was driven in large part by adults participating in them--the variety of involvement in this literary crossing of the aisles is.

Certainly, the YA distinction has only recently been invented.  A market niche intended strictly for people in their early teens and not much older was filled by authors whose primary target was adults.  Ender's Game, perhaps one of the most well-loved science-fiction novels was intended by Orson Scott Card for adults.  But the subjects of the novel--children--have since convinced marketers and publishers that it belongs in both the YA and Middle Grade niches.  As far as I'm aware, it indeed sells well there.

Readers willing to cross the artificial line doesn't strike me as odd.  Many of the books are as morally nuanced as their "adult" counterparts, without relying on the conventions of more grownup fare--sex and violence, namely.  The popularity of books like The Hunger Games, which itself is a deeply nuanced approach toward the examination of violence--and its glorification--in our society, does not rely heavily on depictions of violence that many readers would find offensive.  Twilight, purportedly inspired by Shakespeare's tale of star-crossed lovers, suggests love without resorting to lurid sex scenes--though Fifty Shades of Grey, a fan-fic spin-off, suggests that the soccer moms indulging in Bella and Edward were rife for something a bit more steamy.

Perhaps what this report really suggests is that the artificial demarcation of YA and adult literature is even more ephemeral than we'd suspected, and that good storytelling crosses all boundaries.

Lawless Review

Violence rarely announces itself.  Matt Cave, as writer, and John Hillcoat, the director seemed to have taken that as a maxim as a truism.  "Lawless" is an examination in which violence both insinuates itself into the lives of people who, more-or-less, are just trying to get by, and the heartbreak it inevitably causes.  But its also a portrayal of the slippery slope of feuds and tragedy that masquerades as honor. 

On the surface, "Lawless" is the story of the three Bondurant boys of Georgia at the tail-end of Prohibition.  It's a story about bootlegging.  But only on the surface.  Because at its heart, "Lawless" is about legends and the ways in which we perpetuate and propagate our myths.  Juxtaposed within the story is the Bondurant patriarch, Forest (played moodily by Tom Hardy), whose legend is one of invincibility.  From the outset, we're told that he survived his troop ship sinking on the way to France, his platoon gassed around him, and throughout the movie, his deathlessness is put on display.  Set against him is the moonshine kingpin, Floyd Banner, played admirably by Gary Oldman.  The legend of Banner, styled along Capone-esque lines, is followed through newspaper clippings collected by Jack Bondurant (Shia LaBeouf). 

Violence arrives on their doorstep, in a drive-by shooting in which Floyd Banner screams into town and pumps a drum of lead into (we suppose) a rival, or perhaps a fed.  The ambiguity of the violence leaves the audience guessing about the purpose and the motivation of the killing, and much of the violence in the movie follows the same motif.  Only later, when the new Special Deputy (Guy Pierce) arrives, do we see a more personal kind of violence, as spates turn into murder and the Bondurant legend is tested. 

With rising tolls come the added lure of money, as Jack is seduced to run whiskey across the county line, something Forest has, if not forbidden, then actively discouraged.  But as Jack rubs his growing success under the nose of the Special Deputy (think an oilier version of The Untouchables) the tension rises as the town is forced to take sides against the Bondurant boys.

As I said, a quick and dirty summary of the movie boils down to the rise and fall of the Bondurant bootlegging empire.  As a piece of film, as well as a vehicle for story, it excels.  The acting is superb, especially Tom Hardy as Forest, the war-weary patriarch who can do more with a few grumbled invectives and a cardigan than most actors will do throughout their entire career.  Shia LaBeouf is a perennial favorite.  Guy Pierce makes for a slickly detestable villain, and Gary Oldman, though under-utilized, still captures the screen. 

E-Book Price Wars!

Remember when you could buy a brand new book on your Kindle for less than $10?  If you don't that's because selling books for cheap costs publishers money.  In response, they turned to Apple and signed contracts which introduced so-called "most favored nations" clauses, which prohibited e-book distributors from pricing e-books lower than what iBooks had listed them for.  But, according to The Atlantic Wire, a federal judge last Thursday struck those contracts.  Now, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins and Apple are forcibly separated, and cannot enter into contracts for another two years.  In the meantime, get ready for a price war which will undoubtedly drive prices down, hopefully back to or below $10.