Welcome to Freedom to Read Week, February 18-24. If you live anywhere in Canada, you may be able to find an event you'd enjoy here:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/events/?syclid=cn9rscj7v77s739m300g&utm_campaign=emailmarketing_129722318918&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email

If you're in Ontario, it's Family Day and all public libraries and schools are closed. If you're in the Ottawa area, it's the final day of Winterlude and the Rideau Canal is actually open, as is the community rink around the corner from us.

Over the past year, I've been reasonably content with the (lack of) decisions to ban books. The Ottawa Public Library received 7 "requests for reconsideration" of books on their shelves and acceded to none of them:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-public-library-book-challenges-tintin-stegosaure-1.7109676?cmp=rss

In Alberta, some public library materials relating to LGBTQ+ issues were returned damaged or vandalized, but I guess the good news is that the libraries did have those items available for loan in the first place, and police were called in.

The policies in school libraries (at least the ones I've heard about) are a little less progressive. But I was cheered by this article in a Brandon, Manitoba paper in which candidates in the fall 2023 provincial election were asked about their position on censorship:

https://www.brandonsun.com/local/2023/10/19/candidates-speak-against-book-bans-at-bsd-forum

The election resulted in a change of government, a shift to the left.

I'll conclude this entry with a link to an article on recently challenged books in Canadian libraries:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/articles/rising-tide-of-censorship-recent-challenges-in-canadian-libraries/
Happy Freedom to Read Week, everyone! And just a reminder: most libraries and bookstores in Ontario are closed today. Indigo's site is not available for online shopping. You may be able to buy the odd paperback novel, the kind that the drugstore sells.

I recently bought the following two books that the American Library Association (ALA) produced in 2022:

1. Read These Banned Books: A Journal and 52-Week Reading Challenge

2. 52 Diverse Titles Every Book Lover Should Read: A One-Year Journal and Recommended Reading List

For each title, there's a brief summary of what the book's about, followed by a question to stimulate personal reflection and then some blank pages for the reader to review the item and record a star-rating and the date they finished the book.

Of the titles listed in book #1, I've already read quite a number; I've only read one or two of the 52 Diverse Titles. While I don't plan to embark on the Reading Challenge in quite the way the ALA may have intended, I do intend to use both books as a kind of reader advisory tool for myself and my friends. A title that particularly caught my eye was Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie. Here's the first sentence of the blurb:

In this homage to the revered satire Don Quixote, a mediocre Indian American crime writer using the pen name Sam DuChamp believes that his spy novels have put him in actual danger.

Most of the titles listed in these two books are contentious for all the usual twentieth-century reasons: sex, violence, coarse or otherwise offensive language, religion, politics, racial tension, being antithetical to "family values"... I'm sure you get the picture. But this century has ushered in a whole host of new and different reasons for restricting access to books. Consider, for example, the following:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/roald-dahl-censorship-allegations-1.6753828?cmp=rss

So: Is editing or censorship, if done for reasons of cultural sensitivity, avoidance of hate speech and alt-right polemic and promotion of politically correct values, somehow more justifiable than editing or censorship based on real or perceived racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and all the other -isms and -phobiae that are generally offensive to most segments of modern-day society?

Or maybe context is everything?

This is rather timely for me, as I recently attended a performance of "Is God Is" at the National Arts Centre (NAC). Most of the actors in this play are black. A majority of the audience members (myself included) were not. February is of course Black History Month, which I have always assumed is meant both for black folks to learn about and celebrate their heritage and for lighter-skinned people to gain a better understanding of what Black people have endured and accomplished over the course of the centuries, while being largely erased from our history books.

Originally, the NAC planned to hold a couple of performances open only to black people although they later walked that back, stating all people were welcome:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/national-arts-centre-ottawa-play-black-audience-theatre-1.6735929?cmp=rss

I'm personally a little conflicted on the matter of whether or not this kind of Apartheid for All the Right Reasons is reasonable. Certainly I understand and applaud the rationale behind women's centres and women's shelters, given the appalling stories we hear of intimate partner violence, usually perpetrated by men.

In conclusion, however, I want to re-emphasize that Freedom to Read is not just freedom from censorship. Above all, it's a question of accessibility.

In the early days of the pandemic, libraries were closed. Schools were closed. So what about people without extensive personal book collections, people who could ill afford to buy their own books, people in rural or remote areas where internet access was spotty and unreliable, people without computers who relied on public libraries for what little online time they could get?

That's the kind of information-poverty and literature-poverty that even now continues to fly under the radar.
As many of us are aware, February is Black History Month. I suspect somewhat fewer of us are aware that February 20-26 is Freedom to Read Week in Canada:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/

So I'd like to devote this entry to some of the relevant reading I've been doing lately.

First up, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, by Randall Kennedy. Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard Law School, himself black, and he provides a far more thorough, well-documented and nuanced study of the use of the N-word, in various contexts, than anything I had read up to now. It was written in 2002, with an introduction and afterword added for the paperback edition in 2003. So before the Black Lives Matter movement or the killing of George Floyd but still, to me, a modern-day perspective. Unfortunately, Kennedy's study is limited to the U.S. context although of course much of it is applicable elsewhere.

Next up, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which features the word "nigger" every few pages. It's hard to imagine how one could eliminate that word from the book, or substitute another word deemed less offensive, without eviscerating the whole story! But is the book racist? I'd say no. Jim, the escaping former slave, comes across as far more humane and fully fleshed-out than many of the other, more "sivilized" characters. And Twain's sardonic humour shines forth throughout.

Speaking of eviscerating a book, the edition I read, a cheap Bantam classic, fell apart while I was reading it and is now held together with an elastic. So while semantically and morphologically speaking it's an integrated, unexpurgated edition, in the purely physical sense it is anything but! That's mainly because it was assembled with "perfect binding", a technique falling far short of perfection in which paste is slapped along the edges of a stack of unsignatured pages and a flimsy cover folded around them with the spine aligned with the paste (if you're lucky). The pages were printed with decidedly niggardly margins so as I gently spread the book open a little farther so as to be able to read it properly, I inadvertently inflicted cracked spine syndrome on Samuel Clemens' masterpiece. If he were alive today, I somehow think he might have appreciated the irony of the situation.

All of which brings me to Century Press, an Ottawa-based venture dedicated to reprinting classic works of literature in the style to which they ought to be accustomed:

https://www.centurypress.ca/

In its first publication, The Great Gatsby, the man behind Century Press took it upon himself to substitute his own word for an offensive epithet in the original. In effect, he was putting words (or a word, anyway) in the mouth of one of Fitzgerald's characters. This naturally caused considerable outrage on the part of many loyal supporters of Century Press. As a result, he has promised not to do this in future, beginning with the second work in production, The Sun Also Rises.

Which brings me to another huge can of worms: how far is it reasonable to go (or not) in terms of translations, abridgements and adaptations?

While I can't do that question justice here, I will say that what prompts it is the PBS adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days, concluding this evening. It's very different from the Jules Verne original. Phileas Fogg does still go around the world in 80 days and does stop in roughly the same places as in the book. But the characters who accompany him and the things they do in each place and the reasons they do them are COMPLETELY different! Fixx has undergone both a career change and a gender reassignment and Passe-Partout is black in the PBS series. I will say that the acting and the cinematography are excellent and it's a likeable enough story. I just think it should have come with a bit more of a disclaimer. Will kids watching it in 2022 think that that's the way Jules Verne wrote it? Will they bother to find out? And does the adaptation really speak any better to what matters to people today? I recently ordered a Bande Dessinée of Around the World in 80 Days which looks to be closer to the original, in spite of being more obviously geared to a modern young audience. I'll let you know what I think once I've read it and looked at the pictures!
Isn't it interesting how we talk about "burning" a disc when the intent is to preserve something - information, stories, images, music or any kind of creative or intellectual content - for posterity. But when we talk about burning books, it's another story!

The story that sparked today's entry has to do with a project entitled "Redonnons a la Terre" in which the Conseil scolaire catholique Providence in 2019 removed about 30 books deemed offensive to indigenous folk from the shelves of their school libraries and burned for "educational" purposes, apparently in some misguided attempt at a gesture of reconciliation. But this was only the beginning. In the end, close to 5000 books were removed and destroyed as part of the initiative:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario-francophone-schools-as-gesture-of-reconciliation-denounced/wcm/479bc35d-856a-42f3-9df3-44ff7b392a8a/

I first read about the book burning in the National Post article but Radio Canada gets the credit for first reporting it. Here's one of their articles, complete with examples and illustrations:

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1817537/livres-autochtones-bibliotheques-ecoles-tintin-asterix-ontario-canada

Nor has outrage been confined to Canada's borders. Here is some reaction from the U.K.:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/534350-burning-books-canada-ontario/

All I can say is "Gracious Providence!" In effect, they burned the truth in hopes of achieving reconciliation. Moreover, it seems a little ironic that this was a Catholic school board when the Catholic church is the only major church which has not issued any apology for the horrors wrought by Canada's residential schools system.

Book burning is nothing new, of course, and neither is censorship of other kinds. In Fahrenheit 451, all books are ordered burned while dissenters "become" books, reciting themselves to other bibliophiles. In Widowland, an alternate history type of novel by C.J. Carey, censorship is taken to a whole new level. The heroine's job is to rewrite some of the great works of literature in order to remove or "correct" any references to strong female characters. It has elements of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and the Testaments but there's more humour in it and a more upbeat ending.

In recent times, many libraries and other organizations have recognized that not all life stories or life experiences can be easily learned about from a book. So we have the "Human Library" concept, where you can "borrow" a person for a scheduled chat about their story. Again, people become books, in a way. Perhaps they've lived in a war zone, coped with a life-changing accident or illness,or travelled the world. Perhaps they've faced significant racism, homophobia or some other form of discrimination. Perhaps they have gone up in space, done some interesting research or made a significant discovery. Often the human "books" are interesting because they can tell us about something that many or most of us don't know about but would like to understand more about. That, I think, is a very positive development.

But I digress. Censorship is increasingly giving way to a depressingly homogenized political correctness. We musn't offend anyone. We mustn't do anything that might constitute cultural appropriation. So we just don't talk about it at all. We sweep it under the rug or toss it into the flames and pretend that it doesn't exist - that it NEVER existed. Have we ever solved any of our problems that way?

I'd say no. And the good news is that it seems I'm not alone.
If you want your children to have a complete set of Dr. Seuss books in their home library, you'll have to act fast. Six of them will henceforth no longer be published, as they apparently contain racist images:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/dr-seuss-books-publication-racist-images-1.5933033

I find it all quite interesting really. In my young day, the censors railed on about children's literature that lacked literary merit. Chief among them were series books like Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, Cherry Ames, Trixie Belden, Donna Parker... plus many more that I've either forgotten about or never encountered. Mind you, if literary merit were the prime consideration, it's difficult to understand how Dick and Jane gained such a foothold in the educational system. But I digress.

Fast forward to the next generation. With the GenX and Millennial sets, it seemed the censors were more worried about promoting "family values", a phrase they interpreted in a very limited way. Books were if anything censored for being TOO progressive. Families with gay or transgendered parents or youngsters were definite no-nos and even incidental mention of monogamous heterosexuality could be cause for concern. Nudity was suspect, although allowed in some circumstances - I'm remembering the furore over the Show Me books in the 70s. And believe it or not, even a seemingly innocuous Beatrix Potter classic once landed us in hot water with Children's Aid.

Maybe that's part of the reason that many 21st century parents are so quick to censor any works that involve stereotypes, regardless of their literary merit or their capacity to inform or entertain. In fact, it's not only children's books that we are taking this approach with (abolition of the "N-word", anyone?) Would it not be better to use those stereotyped depictions and descriptions as a springboard for thoughtful discussion, reflection and planning for the society we want moving forward?

It's said that we must know our history if we are to avoid repeating it. It's also been postulated that the myths, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, songs and other elements of the republic of childhood reflect certain universal aspects of our human psyche. Without question, they are an important aspect of our shared cultural heritage. But are they realistic? Certainly not, if we mean the question in a literal sense. We don't mingle with dragons and unicorns on a day-to-day basis. Stepmothers are not necessarily wicked and godmothers are not necessarily fairies.

But whoever said literature had to be realistic?
Gabriel Wortman. Brenton Tarrant. Marc Lépine. Voldemort.

For some, the mere utterance of these names is an act of unspeakable violence. For me, that attitude is a load of superstitious and even dangerous nonsense. Magical thinking at its worst.

Justin Trudeau is the latest leader to urge media restraint in publishing the name or photograph of a mass killer, but he's certainly not the only one. Here is a Global News analysis of the issue:

https://globalnews.ca/news/6841959/nova-scotia-shooting-naming-shooter-trudeau/

What happened in Portapique Nova Scotia this past weekend was literally a tragedy of pandemic proportions. It deserves to be reported with an appropriate degree of accuracy and solemnity, while respecting the privacy and the needs of the victims' families, friends and community to grieve in their own ways and celebrate the lives of those they have lost. During a pandemic lockdown, that's challenging but I would hope, not impossible.

Sensitive editorial policy is important but so is freedom of the press. There's often a fine line between restraint and censorship.

To suggest that those who go on killing rampages be relegated to the ranks of them-who-must-not-be-named is quite simply to deny reality. It's kind of like taking the "strong" form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and perverting it to the point of absurdity. If we don't name someone or mention a specific event, then clearly they have never even existed or happened!

Gosh, wouldn't it be great if we just stopped talking about Covid-19? Or naming ANY viruses or diseases? That way, we could wipe them right off the face of the planet!!

I'm quite uncomfortable with the whole "no notoriety" movement, although I'm sure proponents of it would not go as far as I may have implied. See for yourself:

https://nonotoriety.com

To be fair, I think we all have superstitious moments and moments when we have to fight the temptation to live in a state of denial. You know the sort of thing: I won't get that lump looked at, because what if it's cancer? Or even when there may be a happy result: I won't admit that I think I did well on that exam because supposing I jinx myself? We humans are indeed a bewildering mixture of the rational and the irrational. But once we've taken a few minutes to wallow in our irrational and often uncharitable impulses, we need to be able to take a step back and look at things from a levelheaded perspective before we boldly go where angels fear to tread!

Talk about 2020 hindsight. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two. I look outside and there are tulips in the front garden.

Lest we forget?

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