At Providence College:

Banned Books Discussion and Reading

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
7:30 PM
In Lower Davis Hall on the
Providence College Campus

In recognition of the American Library Association’s Banned Books week (September 27th – October 4th) members of the Providence College community will be holding a presentation on the critical issue of literary censorship. Scheduled to speak are Shannon Berndtson and Chris Landry of the Phillips Memorial Library and Dr. John Scanlan of the English Department. The presentation will be followed by a reading of Shel Silverstein’s “A Light in the Attic“ and a discussion of the topic at hand. We encourage everyone to join us for this event.

Although it’s so disgustingly humid that I want to die right now (and, this just in, now it’s pouring, too!), I’m heading over to the former Benny’s on Broad Street today at five for the press conference/rally that the Library Reform Group is organizing about the Washington Park library.

<soapbox>Not to repeat myself too much, but the Washington Park Library (which was located in a city-owned building) was closed in January 2005 with just two days’ notice because the (privately-owned) Providence Public Library administration didn’t do anything about a roof leak in the building that they had been aware of since the late nineties.  Alan Shawn Feinstein offered lots of money to fix the roof, and the Library turned it down.  Then, this winter, the city put a new roof on the building.  They also fixed the damage that comes from a decade-old roof leak, removing all the mold and dead pigeons that the building had filled up with.

Service in Washington Park, in the meantime, moved over to the old Benny’s down the street, but there was nothing about that building that ever approached what one might call a library.  It was only open four hours a day, for one thing, and adults weren’t allowed inside.  Really.  Adults Were Not Allowed Inside.   Not to check out books, not to use the computers, and not to ask the librarians for help.

Now, it seems, the Benny’s building is also under foreclosure.

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From Pulp Addict, a weekly documentation of cool stuff that comes through my bookstore. This week; Thompson, Anthony Bourdain, James Frey, and Bob Woodward.

Generation Of Swine: The Gonzo Papers Vol. 2, Hunter S. Thompson (Summit 1988) Just one of the seemingly endless collection of Thompson’s 80’s-era essays shares its most telling HST passage in the almost throwaway introduction, which begins with a line from Revelation of all places: “And I will give him the morning star.”, after which Hunter takes over: “I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language–and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.” From there on HST is in typical form; relentlessly skewering Reagan era cold war paranoia, the ‘86 Senate elections, James Bakker’s epic fall from grace and the art (or act) of journalism itself: “I have spent my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it–a low trade and a habit worse than heroin–a strange world full of misfits and drunks and failures.”

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Stephin Merritt, musical genius and renowned slow-talker, reads Ethan Frome every year on his birthday, which festively falls in the middle of bleak January. Merritt recently described the book to SFWeekly as “perfect for birthday reading,” and goes on to say that it “expresses everything about how horrible New England is.”

Back when I scheduled the winter-ending Frome-In at the Firehouse, I had no idea that it was going to be in the forties today, or that daylight savings was happening like a whole damn month early this year. Also, this is my second post in two days that I think reads something like: “Me. Me me me. Me me, me me me! Me me me me me.” more »

So, indie comics. They’re hard to find out about, harder to follow, and have only eensiest fanbase because comics fans are loyal to properties, not creators. With all the big properties belonging to the big two (DC and Marvel) and the big two having a better [funded] publicity system set up, it’s hard for the little guy to compete.

However, this week fans of Kingdom Come’s Alex Ross were given a unique opportunity to break into a new indie comic on the ground-level. This week brought to stands surprisingly large piles of Dynamite Entertainment’s Project Superpowers #0 (above) at the special introductory low price of $1.00. The creative team headed by DC Comics superstars Jim Kreuger and Alex Ross and the fact that large distributors like New York’s Midtown Comics purchased many more copies than they would of most indie books gives the series a distinct possibility of a prominent future. more »

Thanks to Bookslut (and a total inability to focus on work today), I just found Musicthatmakesyoudumb and Booksthatmakeyoudumb, conceived by a CalTech student named Virgil Griffith. The two lists compare what kids say they like on Facebook with the average SAT scores of the schools they go to.

The book list is interesting though ultimately depressing. (Hint: If kids on your campus like books by black women, your school’s probably not ranked that high.) The music list isthe same–Lil Wayne and TI fans probably don’t go to very prestigious schools either, it turns out, and the only black people in the whole top 20 are animated.

Also, aside from the whole race issue, it turns out the co-eds all listen to the same music. Griffith says in the faq that “There were 3,164 distinct favorite books, but only 1,455 distinct favorite musics. College students have far more diverse tastes in books than they do in music.” Which is, you know, kind of a letdown. That’s 1,455 favorite “musics”–bands, genres, and answers like “I like anything but country”–coming from top 10 lists at 1,352 different schools across the whole country. The list data isn’t perfect–Facebook lists the top music at SAT-challenged Dallas school Paul Quinn as “I Dont Have A Particular Genre Of Music…i Listen To Wateva!” That can’t be the #1 answer at a school that has 280 people in its network. A little breakdown after the jump: more »

Read a good book, I recommend Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: “E pluribus unum.”

The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong plant, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.

Vonnegut has a knack for writing biting satire that reveals society in all its sloppy and misshapen glory, he gets the reader to step back and reflect on the nature of progress and promises. His observations can be alarming and frightful but there is always a silver lining of hope and potential that all will turn out all right in the end.

“The Creator of the Universe would now like to apologize not only for the capricious, jostling, companionship he provided during the test, but for the trashy, stinking condition of the planet itself. The Creator programmed robots to abuse it for millions of years, so it would be a poisonous, festering cheese when you got here. Also, He made sure it would be desperately crowded by programming robots, regardless of their living conditions, to crave sexual intercourse and adore infants more than almost anything.”

When he hath tried me,
I shall come forth as gold.
-Job