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Start the debate.
The Sioux Falls School District has removed a graphic novel from student access at two middle school libraries. The book, Stuck in the Middle: 17 Comics from an Unpleasant Age, now is available only for school staff to check out and use in class. Although I blog frequently about banned books, I don’t think it appropriate for me to engage in any public debate on this decision because the law firm I’m with does legal work for the School District (although I do not know if if we were consulted or aware of this particular matter). Still, it provides a chance to at least look at the decision-making process and what issues arise in these debates.
 As I noted a month ago, the School District has a specific policy for dealing with complaints about library materials. A parent who believes an item “is not appropriate for any student’s use” can file a “reconsideration request.” The request is reviewed by an appointed “instructional review committee,” which must include a minimum of two teachers, the building principal and two parents/guardians. (The committee can include two students “if deemed appropriate” but none were appointed in this case.) The committee must weigh the “values and faults” of the material, “viewing [it] as a whole and not individual passages or images.” After considering specified factors, it must deliver a written “final decision” that includes “answers to specific objections” to the material.
The written report is what the School Board acted on Monday evening. It addresses the specific complaints made by the parent of a sixth grader, which were that the book “contained repeated foul language, sexual references, and pictures of teenagers smoking.” The committee’s unanimous recommendation that the book be moved to the libraries’ “professional section” was based in part on the “emotional maturity” of middle school students and a belief “the book would be more effective if a teacher chose specific selections and guided student discussion of those vignettes.”
The decision deals with and presents a variety of issues, such as:
- How significant is the fact this is a library for grades 6-8? It did seem to play a role in the committee’s decision. In addition to noting the “emotional maturity” of middle schoolers, it also examined four reviews of the book from reputable sources, including what the reviews indicated were appropriate grade levels for the book.
- What impact, if any, does the style or format of graphic novels have? Recall that historically state and local governments — and even the federal government — sought to restrict or ban comic books. And the art work certainly makes them more visibly graphic than a standard novel. Still, the committee itself recognized that research indicates “middle school students will read graphic novels when they will not read anything else.”
- Is this a matter only for the particular school or does the public as a whole have an interest? In this type of case, the parent/guardian filing the complaint can appeal the committee’s decision. Otherwise, the policy requires only that the decision be submitted to the school board for action. In this case, ratification of the report was one of more than a dozen items on the board’s “consent agenda.” In contrast, if the challenge is to curricular material, the school board is required to “conduct a public hearing for interested persons.”
- Does essentially saying this work — or any other library item — “is not appropriate for any student’s use” constitute “book banning”? The book was not removed from the middle school libraries. Yet no student will be able to have access to it there. This stands in contrast to, for example, access being allowed only with parental consent. At the same time, the work can be used in classes, students can get it from the public library (where a reserve list was building for the two copies it has) or students or parents can buy the book.
Undoubtedly, opinions on this decision will cover the waterfront. Yet regardless of one’s view, there are lessons to be learned as the community and schools contemplate and debate the issues raised by such events.
The school library serves as a point of voluntary access to information and ideas and as a learning laboratory for students as they acquire critical thinking and problem solving skills.
Sioux Falls School District Policy KEC
How pervasive is the power of politics? About as pervasive as you can get, as evidenced by word that Sarah Palin is going to be at the local B&N for a book-signing on December 6.
Palin is unquestionably the highest profile “author” to hit the local B&N. At least in my memory (which admittedly gets worse every day), the only other “names” to sign there in the recent past are Mike Farrell in June 2008, George McGovern (who I believe has appeared there a couple times) and Tom Daschle. I think the native son status of the latter two, though, might disqualify them to some extent.
So it takes a quasi-political promotion trip for B&N to get a bestselling author to the city for a signing. I wonder how many people who present books for her to sign will be clutching a receipt for their $8.98 copy from Walmart online?
Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful and famous more authority than they deserve.
Maureen Dowd, NYT, Sept. 10, 1995
Book blurbs often seem the equivalent of movie blurbs. Skepticism seems justified when a publisher puts a blurb smack on the front cover just below the title — especially when it says, “May be the best book ever written about jazz.” Is this honest commentary or gratuitous puffery? With Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, it’s the former.
 The concept behind But Beautiful is not unique in and of itself. First published in 1991 and out in a new trade paper edition, it consists of essays about jazz greats Lester “Pres” Young, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charlie Mingus, Chet Baker and Art Pepper, with an overarching piece on Duke Ellington traveling between gigs and his songwriting. In execution, though, it is “about jazz” unlike any other book.
The combination of technical and artistic aspects makes any genre of music hard to write about and leaves little doubt that the variously attributed statement that it’s like “dancing about architecture” is absolutely true. And it’s hard to find a genre with a more complex architecture than jazz, thereby increasing the difficulty of describing it. Dyer, however, does so with sentences that are often strikingly simple yet go right to the heart of the music. For example:
- Monk “played each note as though astonished by the previous one,” often leaving the feeling that “the song seemed to have turned inside out.”
- Mingus’s “bass marched everyone along like a bayonet in a prisoner’s back.”
- “Every time [Baker] played a note he waved it goodbye. Sometimes he didn’t even wave.”
These phrases exquisitely describe an aspect of each musician’s style. Yet the descriptions leave the initiated nodding their head while still giving the uninitiated a sense of the nature of the music. And Dyer also provides longer expositions, such as this passage describing Pepper playing his alto sax while sitting in a prison cell:
For a few moments he falters, oblivious to what he is playing, clutching the eight and ninth rungs of the count. Then, summoning everything, he searches for the highest note, reaches it — just — and soars clear. At the height of this leap, before gravity reasserts itself, there is a moment of absolute weightlessness — bright, clear, serene — before he is falling again, gliding in a gorgeous arc, subsiding into the deep moan of the blues. And the convicts realize that’s what it’s been about all along — a dream of falling.
In a paragraph, Dyer has taken us inside a few seconds of improvisation and both the emotions that helped create it and those it itself created. This is far from the only example in But Beautiful, named after a jazz standard. Over the course of roughly a page, Dyer describes Baker’s style in a way that is nearly as transcendent as its subject.
Yet this alone isn’t what makes the book superb. But Beautiful is a form of literary jazz.
Jazz artists borrow, build upon and expand idioms or concepts of their predecessors and contemporaries. There’s a heavy element of creativity and improvisation as they often go inside a melody to explore, deconstruct or transform it. That is what Dyer does on paper. He seeks the heart of the musicians and their music, blending anecdotes, apocrypha, books and, to a great extent, even photos although only one appears in this edition). Dyer synthesizes these elements into impressionistic essays, something he calls “imaginative criticism.”
Each essay is an extended solo on one artist, at times heavily blues-based. There’s Young awakening to grab a silent phone he thinks is ringing, “expecting to hear someone break the news to him that he had died in his sleep.” There’s Bud Powell, who was “always potentially out of control but now that potential had been unleashed.” But Beautiful explores the toll of genuis and the highs, lows and decimations of people like Powell, Pepper and Baker in ways normal storytelling cannot. But it is not all the ravages of booze, heroin and incarceration. There’s Monk’s inimitable style and him calling his wife Ellie in the middle of a song, leaving the phone off the hook so she can hear what he was playing for her. There’s the creativity and volatility of “Minus, Mingus, Mingus — not a name but a verb, even thought was a form of action, of internalized momentum.” There’s Ellington in a car Harry Carney, a 45-year member of Ellington’s band. As Carney drives, Ellington ponders music and writes songs.
These are just a few of “a whole bunch of guys whose stories and thoughts are not like anyone else’s who wouldn’t have had a chance to express all the ideas and shit they had inside them without jazz.” Dyer’s evocative perceptions of them and their music make But Beautiful “about jazz” in a way that transcends those two words.
Jazz can see things, draw things out of people that painting or writing don’t see.
Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz
Does your house have a communal bookshelf? If not, is your bookshelf centrally located so everyone has access to it?
Our house is a divided country when it comes to bookshelves. Actually, it’s more akin to bordering states than a civil war but we aren’t into communal shelving.
I have bookshelves in my office. Virtually all the books are ones I’ve purchased or received, although there’s a number that might be considered “joint property.” My wife and I each have our own bookshelf next to our side of the bed, both of which are independent islands. My wife also has bookshelves in what is somewhat her “work room,’ although it also holds a number of the books we bought for the kids as they were growing up. Each of my three daughters has their own set of bookshelves in their own room. Finally, there is a bookshelf in our front room that is a bit more communal but only in the sense it tends to collect books people have finished and either have yet to move to their own bookshelves or to the latest designated receptacle for books heading to the used bookstore.
Generally, anyone is free to peruse anyone else’s bookshelf. I’m not sure of the borrowing rules among my daughters but they — and my wife — are free to borrow any of my books as long as the book ends up back where it belongs. That, though, is a “rule” that tends to arise more in breach than in practice.
The only issue that occasionally arises is the desire to have even more bookshelves in our home, something none of us see as a bad thing.
No possession can surpass, or even equal, a good library, to the lover of books.
John A. Langford, The Praise of Books
With the Cold War being waged for more than half my life, I was among the many millions fascinated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty years ago today, the East German government — intentionally or not — opened up its borders. For most, it is also perhaps the most substantive symbol of the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
I recall actually thinking at some point in the next year or two that the world really had changed. I thought that perhaps my kids actually would live in an entirely different world, one without the threat of nuclear holocaust and World War III. I was wrong — but I was far from alone.
One of the supposed benefits of the end of the Cold War was the “peace dividend.” Money previously devoted to defense expenditures could instead be used to reduce the national deficit, improve education and health care, remedy infrastructure problems, etc., etc., etc. Government leaders in the West even made it a political slogan, seeking to add more bloom on the rose of ending the Cold War.
Here we are 20 years later and I think that even though a peace dividend was declared, it never really got paid out. True, defense spending did decline in the 1990s, we saw tax cuts and we enjoyed budget surpluses. But since 2001, our military budgets have more than doubled. We’ve moved — both fiscally and politically — from fighting a Cold War to fighting the so-called War on Terror. The national deficit soared during that same time. And here we sit 20 years later with education and infrastructure funding still problematic and still fighting about health care. You can’t lay the blame at the feet of one political party or one ideology, whether it’s in the sense of having failed to take advantage of an opportunity or in not foreseeing that the dividend and what it represented could be short-lived. What if that money had been spent on domestic problems or, God forbid, foreign measures that generated support for the United States?
We probably did have a peace dividend. Sadly, though, I think it got spent in ways again demonstrating we humans tend to wear blinders and can’t — or refuse to — set aside political differences to accomplish meaningful change. The peace dividend was a nice concept. Too bad we didn’t spend it more wisely.
We know how to organize warfare, but do we know how to act when confronted with peace?
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Calypso Log, 1993
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