The Power Behind the Reading Chair

Librarians, contrary to their traditional image, are powerful social agents. Whether in public or university and college libraries, the collections they build to serve readers and researchers also curate today's readers and their research.

Librarians hold significant power because what they include or exclude from library collections shapes minds, which is why diversity of subject matter is vital. We are currently in the middle of Freedom To Read Week, and how freely people choose what to read depends largely on what they find on library shelves. Librarians must use their power to get beyond merely promoting what's already popular -- the ideological flavour of the moment which the fashionable influencers chatter about on social media.

Bookstores are in the business of providing what sells (a best seller is a book that sells because it sells best). Stores promote fashionable authors with large displays, and libraries do this too with "Fast Read" options (short borrowing periods that create fast turnaround) and face-out display on the Hot Releases shelves.

These books become hot because they're displayed and promoted, a self-fulfilling process which shapes public opinion about "good books".

It's up to the individual reader to go deeper into both the collection catalogue and the stacks behind the display shelves. If all the books on a particular topic, especially from earlier periods, seem suddenly to have gone missing, readers need to query the librarians about it.

Libraries cull book and periodical collections as well as build them, just like opinion-makers "cull" attitudes which the cancel-culturati deem inappropriate. There are plenty of library patrons (and non-patrons) who object to particular authors and subjects in these days of raging identity-bias. It's up to broad-minded readers and librarians together to resist these incursions on our shared freedom to read.

(Of further interest: https://cfe.torontomu.ca/page/cfla-and-cfe-work-together-library-challenges-database )

See also: https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/11/on-scroll.html

and:  https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/trigger-warning.html

Insensitivity Editors

The Lords of Sensitivity -- editors lording it over writers from Bowdlerizing keyboards -- have insensitively made life harder for satirists. How can satire parody something that insists on comprehensibly parodying itself? 

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/oompa-loompas-no-longer-tiny-sensitivity-readers-take-the-gnarl-out-of-dahl

The latest victim of "sensitivation" is kids-lit author Roald Dahl. His writing is certainly not to everyone's taste, but that doesn't give anyone the right to vandalize and steal it -- only the right to not read it. Would it be legal to seize your neighbour's car, give it a new coat of paint, and say -- here, this looks better, so get over it? Why is it legal thus to vandalize a writer's property and legacy? Whatever happened to copyright? 

Of course, a corporation like Netflix can (as they did) buy an author's legacy (in this case creating the Roald Dahl Story Company). So that gets around silly issues like respecting an author's ... authorship. The Roald Dahl Story Company is a branch of the international corporate chain of Cancel-Culture Inc.

Dahl, like Dr. Seuss and others, has been worked over by the "sensitivity" gang, part of a woke army which is nothing but insensitive to literature and the intelligence of readers. Aiming to be "progressive", this army is in fact regressive -- regressing back to the time of censorious Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825).

Bowdler, a British doctor, took it upon himself (with his sister) to re-write Shakespeare in a fashion "suitable for women and children to listen to when read aloud". Women! They need things well-sanitized of course -- but we get over the sexism of that today by doing it to all genders, including the non-binary ones or those in which men are women simply because they say they are ... And if that nonsense is protected from being criticized for scientific ridiculousness, why isn't Dahl protected? (At least his books won't suddenly pop up un-invited in women-only change rooms.)

If people want to enjoy role playing, gender-blending and cross-dressing, they should go for it. But why should those who enjoy reading freely what authors freely write, be forbidden from doing that?

(See best-selling word-craftsman Anthony Horowitz, British novelist, discussing the matter here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-clash-with-sensitivity-readers/)

Bowdler had his own reasons for re-writing Shakespeare; here's how the current sensitivity-censors do it:

https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2021/11/shakespeare-for-modern-audience.html

The Ghost Reader

Ghost Reader is the reader unknown, the one who reads a book anonymously, who invisibly borrows it from a friend or communal library or maybe finds it in a charity box, who neither recommends nor denounces it to others. The Ghost Reader is the one whose name isn't on a library card the book was borrowed under, or an Amazon order it was purchased through, the one who doesn't send a note to the author or follow him/her on social media, the one whose thoughts about a book leave no trace.

To the writer, Ghost Reader is a phantom, a fleeting figure imagined like all those familiar literary characters that do and do not exist. Ghost Reader may have attended a book's launch, sitting at the back during the reading and saying nothing, before slipping away with the author's words forever scooped into her neural circuitry .. but s/he might on the other hand never have existed. 

Some readers send messages to authors, ask questions, write reviews, reveal their identities. Any author's glad to hear from them of course, but the best true follower, the one who really "gets" her themes and characters is the Ideal Reader who looms large in her writerly mind. Ghost Reader is the mirror image of Ghost Writer, and like that participant in the publishing world might well remain Anonymous forever.  

Libraries abandon Freedom To Read, embrace Freedom To Ban

The Little Madhouse on the Prairie

How ironic that, as Freedom To Read Week winds up in Canada, and Read Across America Day is being celebrated in the U.S., libraries are celebrating by censoring children's literature. Even old favourites like Laura Ingalls Wilder aren't immune: because some groups didn't like her “portrayals of Native Americans” the American Library Association removed her name in 2018 from its lifetime achievement award list.

Meanwhile, there have been calls to “Burn Babar” (that terrible racist white-supremacist elephant), and six Dr. Seuss titles have just been de-published by their own publisher, Dr. Seuss Enterprises. The six books in question “align with Orientalism”, says the company. Whatever Orientalism may be, we know censorship when we see it, and see it selectively applied: “... because the majority of characters in Dr. Seuss books are White, his works ... center Whiteness and White supremacy”, says the publisher, without clarifying whether books with black characters center Black supremacy, and align with Occidentalism. 

Dr. Seuss books are language-teaching, literacy-inducing open-hearted comic rhymes of tolerance and universalism, presenting these things decades before the present “equity” movement of social justice warriors had even got started. 

Now, Horton Hears a “Who on Earth is running the libraries these days?” Certainly not anyone who values freedom of speech. Once banned, Will the Cat In the Hat Ever Come Back?