…I have somehow gained five pounds. It’s not muscle, so how is that even possible?

I hadn’t either, until about 20 minutes ago. I started at the most recent strip and started going backwards. This is the one at which I decided to start evangelizing.

(I subscribed to its RSS feed at this one.)

Immediate update: I read the strip in the first link above, wrote the above text, then went back to the Daisy Owl tab for more. I discovered that the site had crashed at the exact moment I decided to give it some love. This is not surprising, as the things I like tend to die as soon as I discover them. Here’s hoping this is just a little cosmic prank.

These are teh_awesome. Via Pandagon:

I’m still amazed at how the rebirth of Cracked has transformed a sad Mad wannabe into an actually quite good [more puerile aspects of Spy and Esquire] wannabe.

And who were the two cute guys who ended up making out at the end of the second video? I couldn’t make out their nametags.

There’s an interesting post up at Language Log that deals with viewer reactions to Sarah Palin’s disastrous interview with Katie Couric, specifically the way in which the interview “triggers…sympathetic winces and cringes”.

The post notes that English has no good word for this phenomenon; a commenter offers an older post from the same blog in which the word “igry” was discussed as a means of identifying the phenomenon. Other commenters note how many sitcoms induce igry reactions in their viewers, with I Love Lucy and The Office notable for their high igry content.

I can definitely see where they’re coming from with The Office, both the British and the American versions. As much as I love the show, there’ve been times when I’ve had to look away because the pain of watching a character (usually David Brent/Michael Scott) oblivious to the fact that he should be embarrassing himself is too great.

I am not alone in having immediately thought of igriness as being the opposite of schadenfreude, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think the true opposite of igry is the reaction I had to Borat, and the reason I couldn’t watch more than the first twenty minutes or so.

I thought Borat would be fun, as the character had been sold as a skewer of pretensions, a faux-naif who goaded horrible people into putting their dark souls on display. That’s the sort of thing that happened in the couple of Ali G spots with Borat that I’d seen, and it was the way people I respect in the progressive blogosphere talked about the film.

Instead, though, once the movie left Borat’s fictional home country and hit the US, the character embarked on a crusade of bringing unnecessary social discomfort to unsuspecting, randomly selected innocent bystanders. The actions weren’t at all about acting inappropriately in order to serve some greater good; they existed just to show the “comedy” ensuing from people having an asshole intrude into their everyday lives. It was the cinematic equivalent of those prank phone call tapes that were all the rage when I was in high school. Back then, just the audio made me feel ill; actually seeing the victims’ reactions made me want to curl up and die.

(It didn’t help that an early stop on Borat’s campaign of ridiculousness was the hotel I’d stayed at when I was in New York a few years ago. The staff there are actually very nice and accomodating, and the manager certainly doesn’t deserve to have to deal diplomatically with a person pretending to think that the elevator is a mobile toilet.)

So, yeah. Again, I got no ending.

You’ve really done it. Your comments on the last post have led me to accept that the ALA’s construction of Banned Books Week is just and honest. You’ve provided irrefutable evidence that intelligent, ethical people see curricular and holdings challenges as being closely related; it had been my assumption that people would not hold that position and were therefore being misled. I was wrong, and I am glad to have learned it.

I have not changed my own personal position on whether those things are closely related, however.

First, the easy response. John wrote:

putting all the “challengedâ€? books on the list for Banned Books Week may be an exaggeration, but it probably gets more people to notice it….I think the entire marketing industry is built on this. so, how much of this is just marketing to draw attention?

I’ve not had a serious problem with the conflation of successful and unsuccessful challenges under the Banned Books banner. It does rub me the wrong way, but it doesn’t rub me raw; I give them a pass for exactly the reason you mention. I’m not particularly happy about it, but it’s a fair enough action on the ALA’s part.

Now the semi-hard one. Amy wrote:

In some households, where books aren’t present or appreciated by the parents, removing a book from a mandatory reading list for school is a de facto banning for the child who would have otherwise been assigned to read it.

I think I see where you’re coming from here, and if I’m reading you correctly it’s a reasonable position.

On the other hand, I maintain that it is reasonable for parents to object when their children are forced to engage in material that violates their mores. I do not maintain that these objections should generate action, but it seems to me…well, fascist to tell parents that they have to suck it up and capitulate without complaint to their children being mandatorily subjected to material they find deplorable.

Your argument is why I believe curricular challenges should very rarely be successful. However, it seems to me that valuing pluralism means accepting the existence of dissent. This does not mean the dissent should be accommodated, but it does mean that it should not be condemned as an action; the content of and motive behind the action are, of course, fair game for ridicule.

And the hard one. Pete wrote:

From my perspective, such lists are less about the actual books and more about reminding us that stupid people are still trying to spread their disease, so the fine distinctions you’re pondering here have little practical value.

See, my first problem with this is that I don’t see the distinctions as fine at all. One class of actions contains attempts to eliminate access to a work that can only be consumed voluntarily; the other class contains attempts to eliminate forced consumption of a work. Library challenges are people insisting that other people should not be allowed to bring a work into their own homes; curricular challenges are people insisting that they should not be required to bring a work into their own homes. I honestly don’t see the two sets as being comparable, much less finely distinguished.

Are they “stupid people trying to spread their disease”? I would say we can dismiss library challengers as such without a second thought. Curricular challengers, though, ain’t necessarily so. The largest group of curricular challengers, judging by available materials[1], are upset over foul language; piss on them, I say.

The second largest group are parents upset over strong sexual themes or explicit sex in required reading; I’m unwilling to condemn this group outright because pluralism etc. A large segment of society believes that there are age-related levels of appropriateness for sexual materials; the existence of movie ratings both demonstrates this and suggests that there’s a reasonable expectation that these levels will be respected. When we look at the sex-related challenges, it’s hard to deny that they really do often arise in situations in which R-rated materials are being required of kids under 18. While I do believe these parents’ are in denial about their kids’ knowledge of, thoughts about, and experience with sex, I don’t think their buying into a widespread standard regarding the appropriateness of sexual material represents a sickness. I also don’t think their challenges should be condemned, although I do believe they should usually be dismissed.

(The group of challenges centered around actual ideas present in the challenged texts is surprisingly small, and mostly has to do with first-graders being introduced to gay penguins and princes.)

So there’s the crux of the biscuit: Library challengers are trying to outright censor books, while curricular challengers are trying to do what (they believe) is best for their own personal children. While I accept that I am in a tiny minority with my opinion, and while I certainly respect your opinions on the matter, I simply do not–perhaps cannot–see the two as equally deserving of opprobrium. The one is always bad[2], while the other is often neutral and potentially good[3].

[1] One of the things that makes writing about this difficult is the lack of disclosure and transparency from the ALA. As near as I can tell, there is no comprehensive list of challenges and the reasons behind them available to the public; there is a selective bibliography accompanying each year’s event, and a larger bibliography published every three years, but it looks like the majority of things counted as challenges are hidden away. My estimations of the size of the three groups is challengers is based on the selective bibliographies; as I assume they contain the most noxious examples, I trust that the proportions are about right.

[2] Possible kiddie porn in the collection notwithstanding.

[3] I think we’re all a little bit better off with our classrooms free of the stereotypical caricatures illustrating American editions of Little Black Sambo.

I need to clear up what I’ve been dancing around lest y’all think I’m stringing you along, but I’m way depressed lately and so won’t be able to put together a cogent argument in the foreseeable future. Instead, bullet points.

First, definitions. For these purposes, we will define

• a challenge as someone saying “I don’t think that book should be there”
• a ban as a successful challenge

Every year, in advance of Banned Books Week, the ALA puts together a list of books challenged or banned during the previous year. Note that they are honest in calling this a list of “banned and challenged books”, but also note that this is done to support something called Banned Books Week.

Now, let’s look at the “should be there” bit in the definition of “challenge”. The theres recorded include libraries and bookstores, as you would assume, but they also include K-12 required reading lists. Whenever someone says they don’t think their kids should be forced to read a particular book, a Bannination Angel gets its wings. The tabulation is blunt, so a lone parent’s complaint is given weight equal to an organized effort to remove a book’s required-reading status.

OK, I just erased a good bit of editorializing and instead will ask a question: Does it seem intellectually honest to you to give the same moral weight to an attempt to eliminate access to a book and an attempt to eliminate mandatory reading of that book? (This isn’t even getting into the question of whether it’s intellectually honest to present all the incidents under a title strongly and falsely suggesting they were successful attempts at elimination, although I guess now it is.)

So far I just have a bunch of bullet points that won’t cohere into anything; trying to put them together I end up with a wilted word salad. I’m hoping that if I simmer them a while longer I’ll get something at least coherent.

(Just to clarify, the bullet points referred to above, and the word salad, are mine, not the points made and raised in comments. Y’all have been across-the-board great.)

Here’s something that might be fun.

“Let’s rock”, while possibly not among the most common phrases, is certainly not an uncommon formation. Whenever I hear it, though, I think of The Little Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks/Fire Walk With Me. This is what he wrote in lipstick (blood? nail polish?) on the windshield of Agent Cooper’s car at the trailer park in FWWM, croaking it out on the soundtrack. I can’t hear it but as an ominous challenge, words heralding the imposition of Cosmic Horror into our paltry four dimensions.

(An aside: Nobody ever seems to write about it, but it’s clear to me that David Lynch’s films belong to the same sub-genre as Lovecraft’s stories. Am I completely off base with that?)

So, you merry band of commenters: What common phrases consistently inspire within you a reaction other than what is intended?

…that people can’t read my mind?

Great comments on the banned books post, and I’ll try to get to responding tomorrow.

I was intentionally a little vague in my questions, because I didn’t want to guide or prejudice the responses too strongly. I think I should have been a little more clear, though, because the aspects I was interested in were not addressed. This is my fault, a problem of unclear writing and a failure to recognize my own insider perspective.

So here’s a revised question set:

What, to your mind, constitutes banned-ness? Let’s take the extreme Fahrenheit 451 situation as a given. Does anything less severe than that situation count as a banning? If so, and if we take that as the extreme upper end, what are the characteristics of the fuzzy lower end of bannination?

I’m trying not to give too much away here. ;)

Librarians, please don’t answer until everybody else has had a chance. ;) The rest of you, no fair googling.

So: When you hear the phrase “banned books”, what immediately comes to mind?

Now: Put the immediate response aside and consider the concept. What are the broadest parameters for the condition of banned-ness?

And finally: Consider the phrase “challenged books”. What, if anything, does this mean to you? Do any cases come immediately to mind in which a challenge is not a moral wrong?