Books Archive

Top Ten Reasons Books Are Banned

By Amy Thibodeau, September 28, 2010, 4:40 am in Books, Culture, Past

Banned Book Week

The last week of September is banned books week in Canada and the US. As in, not a week to ban books or celebrate their banning, but rather one to spend time discovering some of the great titles that have found themselves outlawed and to wonder at a culture that justifies the sometimes active attempt to oppress its own artifacts. In honor of this week, the American Library Association has put together a nifty list of the top ten reasons books have been historically banned (source):

The Top Ten Ludicrous Reasons To Ban A Book

  1. “Encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.” (A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstien)
  2. “It caused a wave of rapes.” (Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights)
  3. “If there is a possibility that something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it?” (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown)
  4. “Tarzan was ‘living in sin’ with Jane.” (Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
  5. “It is a real ‘downer.’” (Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank)
  6. “The basket carried by Little Red Riding Hood contained a bottle of wine, which condones the use of alcohol.” (Little Red Riding Hood, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm K. Grimm)
  7. “One bunny is white and the other is black and this ‘brainwashes’ readers into accepting miscegenation.” (The Rabbit’s Wedding, by Garth Williams)
  8. “It is a religious book and public funds should not be used to purchase religious books.” (Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, by Walter A. Elwell, ed.)
  9. “A female dog is called a bitch.” (My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara)
  10. “An unofficial version of the story of Noah’s Ark will confuse children.” (Many Waters, by Madeleine C. L’Engle)

The American Library Association (ALA) also has a great compendium of statistics on the banning of books. Some notable facts include that by far the most common reason for banning a book is because it is considered sexually explicit, and parents are overwhelmingly the initiators of book challenges and bans.

In the last ten years, the top ten banned/challenged books are:

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Myracle, Lauren
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

The top challenged classic books:

1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

The crazy thing is, people still attempt to ban books – regularly. If you live in the US and you know of a book that is being challenged or banned, you can report it on the ALA website. In the meantime, hug a librarian or independent bookseller because without them many of these classic books would no longer be in circulation.

Image Credit: Banned Books Week Banner by DML East Branch

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Dreams and the Origin of Artistic Inspiration

By Amy Thibodeau, September 19, 2010, 4:26 am in Art, Books, Present, Psychology

Dream Image

There are thousands of websites and self-help books dedicated to helping artists (and wanna-be artists) find the inspiration required to become the next great writer, painter, musician …

The Ancient Greeks believed that goddesses (called muses) were the inspiration for most art and went as far as to offer supplication in return for being in their favour. In a recent Ted talk, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling travel memoir Eat, Pray, Love, reintroduced this idea when she suggested that some kind of force outside of the the artist is at least partially responsible for the act of creation. As an example, according to Gilbert, Tom Waits was driving on a freeway when a great melody came into his head. He was unable to write it down but was afraid to loose it so he appealed to the muses: “Excuse me. Can you not see I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment …  otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.” According to Gilbert, at this moment Waits entered into a new relationship with his creativity that was “peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration and conversation between Tom and the strange external genius that was not Tom.” (source)

For those of us who don’t necessarily believe in fairies, muses or an external divinity, a more practical alternative to mystical intervention is that our subconscious minds have the potential to act on our conscious desires and motivations. The New York Times article Who’s Minding the Mind highlights numerous studies that show that “once covertly activated, an unconscious goal persists with the same determination that is evident in our conscious pursuits.” (source)

There are many examples of artists who say that complete or nearly complete masterpieces came to them while they were asleep, including:

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge claims that Kubla Khan came to him in its entirety in an opium induced dream. According to the writer’s own account, when he woke up he began fervently composing line after line of poetry until he was interrupted by a visitor. After returning to the work he struggled to complete the rest of the poem because he could not remember the rest of the lines. Critics on the whole say that Kubla Khan is unlike most of Coleridge’s other work. (source)
  • According to his own account, Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him in a dream: “For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.” (source)
  • The melody for Yesterday, the most covered Beatles song in their entire catalog, came in its entirety to Paul McCartney in a dream. It came to him so completely that for months he was convinced that he’d plagiarized it and would play it for friends and record executives to try to determine its origins before finally accepting it as his own. (source)
  • In her introduction to the 1931 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley “revealed that she got the story from a dream, in which she saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with a uneasy, half vital motion.” (source)

Image Credit: An Angel in the Deluge by Ici et Ailleurs

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Imaginary Places: Neil Young’s Greendale

By Amy Thibodeau, June 16, 2010, 8:59 pm in Books, Film, Music, Present

A few months ago, we wrote about John Hughes and the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois, which crops up in almost all of his films. This ongoing fictional relationship an artist has with an imaginary place or set of people is uncommon but, apart from Hughes there are some other great examples: Salinger and the Glass family, the Brontes and fictional world of Angria and Neil Young’s Greendale, has recently been turned into a graphic novel.

Greendale is the name of the last album Young released with Crazy Horse. The ten tracks tell the story of the small California town and some of the people who live there. There is also an accompanying short film about the place, which Young made using an old super eight camera, and a spoken word audio recording about the various characters:

This is a story about a little town called Greendale and a family that lives there – actually, they live outside of town. The Green family lives at the Double E Rancho about two miles outside of Greendale. The Double E is the home of Sun Green, an 18-year-old girl who goes to school in Greendale, and she’s a cheerleader. And she’s a good student. And her mom and dad, Earl Green and Edith Green. Earl Green is a Vietnam vet. (Voice in audience: Why?) I don’t know why, actually. It’s a question that’s been haunting everybody for ages. There wouldn’t be any vets without war, so I guess we have to go back to war. Like most vets, he wanders around trying to forget what he knows. And he’s a painter. He paints psychedelic paintings and he tries to sell them at the galleries around town and in the area, without much luck. He hardly ever sells a painting. (source)

This week Vertigo, a division of DC Comics, released a graphic novel called Neil Young’s Greendale, which “focuses on Sun Green, the great-granddaughter of Jay Green, the man who founded Greendale. Through Sun, the artists tell a story about personal responsibility, war and the environment.” (source) Young, who was a collaborator on the graphic novel doesn’t think this will be last fans see of Greendale, “There are all kinds of things that we talked about doing that aren’t in this book, that have to do with her next episode and her story. These characters have been designed to last a long time.” (source)

Image Credit: Neil Young’s Greendale Graphic Novel Cover, Young Family Trust and DC Comics

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Eccentric Torments – The Glass Delusion

By Amy Thibodeau, May 11, 2010, 2:43 am in Books, Medicine, Past

I am in the thick of reading Brian Dillon’s excellent book Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives. There is an interesting passage on an imagined affliction I’ve never heard of before:

In the history of such eccentric torments, none is stranger or more instructive than the so-called ‘glass delusion’. From the late Middle Ages onwards, this remarkably specific and consistent notion appears time and again in the literature on melancholia and hypochondria. The patient, as the reader will have surmised, fantacies that he or she is made of glass, either in part or in whole. (In a series of related delusions, patients may imagine that they have lost limbs, that they have been turned into animals, that they are dead, that they do no exist or, as in the case of an unforuntae baker who was afraid to go near his oven, that they are made of butter.) This has predicatable consequences: the ‘glass man’ fears for his physical safety, avoiding not only hard knocks but in some cases any touch at all from another person, as well as such delicate operations as sitting or lying down. The broad outlines of the delusion – imagining that one is made of a brittle substance – were not unknown to antiquity: classical accounts of earthenware men abound, but the spread of glass in the Early Modern period brought with it the possibility of thinking oneself made of less sturdy stuff …

The book features famous hypochondriacs including Darwin, Florence Nightengale, Charlotte Bronte and Andy Warhol, with a particular focus on the specific kind of craziness so completely epitomized by the Victorians. It’s a very interesting read.

Image: Broken Glass by Davetoaster

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