Beware Those Eeeevil Librarians!

[Posted by reader_iam]

Librarians have come a long way, baby. How do I know? Apparently they've been cast as the evil villains in an upcoming fantasy series.

Sanderson recently received a six-figure advance from Scholastic, the "Harry Potter"-series publisher, for a children's fantasy series about a boy named Alcatraz who does battle with a cult of evil librarians.
...
The first of the Alcatraz series, "Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians," will come out Oct. 1 and other books are planned for May 2008 and early 2009.
...
...The entire "Alcatraz" series, for example, resulted from a line that just popped into his mind one day.

"And that line was: 'So there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias about to be sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil librarians,"' Sanderson said.
...
The series, Sanderson's first attempt at children's fiction, tells the story of a boy who discovers he's part of a secret group of freedom fighters who battle librarians, an evil cult that controls the world by restricting information. Each of the freedom fighters has an unusual but surprisingly powerful magical skill, such as the ability to arrive late to appointments.

Lateness cast as a magical skill? Librarians suddenly hip enough to be imagined as evil cultists, requiring a special caste of freedom fighters to combat them? Wow. I'm intrigued.

Hat tip: bookshelves of doom.

Auto-da-Fidel

[posted by Callimachus]

Bravo to Nat Hentoff for keeping up the pressure on this story of the American Library Association's shameful refusal to say a word against its beloved Fidel Castro -- even as he throws Cuban librarians in cages.

The American Library Association —the largest organization of librarians in the world — continually declares that it fights for everyone's "Freedom to Read!" and its Library Bill of Rights requires its members to "challenge censorship." Yet the leadership of the ALA — not the rank and file — insistently refuses to call for the immediate release of the independent librarians in Cuba — designated as "prisoners of conscience" by Amnesty International. They are serving very long prison terms because they do believe in the freedom to read — especially in a dictatorship.

Among the many organizations demanding that Fidel Castro and his successors release these courageous Cubans — who have opened their homes and libraries to offer books censored in the Cuban state libraries — are such groups as the library associations of the Czech Republic, Latvia, Estonia and Poland. All these librarians, finally freed from Communism, agree with their colleagues in the Polish Library Association, who say in their declaration, "The actions of the Cuban authorities relate to the worst traditions of repressing the freedom of thought and expression."

... However, the top officials of the American Library Association —as well as the majority of its Governing Council —speak derisively of these "so-called librarians" in Castro's gulags.

As far as I can tell, Hentoff is a lonely voice in working this story. Not that he'd care. I first caught his column on it months ago, when he wrote about the tiny Vermillion, S.D., public library that bucked the big national organization and made the independent Dulce Maria Loynaz Library in Havana a sister library, sending it books, including a collection of Mark Twain.

The ALA appears to be intransigent on the issue. It's not that they're unaware of it. It's that they'd rather trust Fidel.

It's true that these prisoners, many brutalized and in failing health, in their cells, don't have master's degrees in Library Science; but as poet-novelist-educator Andrei Codrescu told last year's ALA Midwinter Conference: "These people have been imprisoned for BEING librarians!" Why dismiss them "as 'so-called librarians' when clearly there is no one (in that dictatorship) to certify them."

... A key ALA official, Judith Krug, heads its office of Intellectual Freedom. In my many years of reporting on the ALA's sterling record of protecting American librarians from censorship, I often quoted her in admiration. But now, she said at an ALA meeting about supporters of the caged librarians, "I've dug in my heels ... I refuse to be governed by people with an agenda." The Cuba issue, she continued, "wouldn't die," though she'd like to "drown it."

The agenda, Ms. Krug, is freedom.

The Clown has No Clothes

[posted by Callimachus]

Check out this extensive review of Jesse Larner's "Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left," which is that rarest of beasts, an attempt to distance the American Left from its Clown Prince.

Melding biography with political history and cultural critique, Larner sets out to determine the significance of Michael Moore 'in a reactionary age' (p. 7), when 'the American news media have been increasingly dominated … by the views of the extreme right' (p. 5). Invoking 'the democratic left's glory days of Partisan Review and Dissent' (p. 6) and brandishing book-jacket endorsements from Mattson and George Monbiot, Larner contends that 'Moore is a disturbing public leader for many liberals'. He admits from the outset that Moore 'has brought important issues of social justice to the attention of people who would otherwise not know of them' (p. 7). But in Larner's view, the Moore franchise – the instant, universal association of Moore with progressive causes – does the left more harm than good.

People I know online who want to talk seriously about their anti-Bush stances often urge me to ignore Moore, to pretend he doesn't exist, to see him as a less-than-marginal figure in their camp. That doesn't jibe with reality. I know an awful lot of people who don't blog, but who have seen Moore's movies, read his books, and been deeply swayed by them. And they vote his way and mouth his anecdotes in justification of it. I work with such people. I'm related by blood to such people. In the liberal world around me he's the galvanizing force.

Furthermore, he represents something bigger than left and right; he's figured out how to jam a deeply biased political razor blade into the Halloween candy of pop culture media. Larner's trenchant summation: Moore "exhibits both a solid show-business instinct and a cold, hard core of relentless ideology, an attitude that, as with Leninists of yore, will always put the cause of increasing human well-being before the well-being of any particular human, and will put the meta-truth before the actual, immediate truth of any situation."

So here's hoping this book will reach enough of the right readers. It seems, based on the review, Larner does a fine job of applying pinpricks to the bloated egoism and hypocrisy of its subject. For instance, even a veteran Moore-basher like me didn't know this story; that is, I knew the two parts of it (I believe I was one of the first bloggers to link to the Hentoff piece), but I didn't realize it was the same librarian:

Moore is the first to decry censorship when it happens to him. In the introduction to "Dude, Where's My Country?" he recalls how Regan Books withheld his previous title, "Stupid White Men," in the aftermath of 9/11, and even insisted on a substantial rewrite. Moore takes pains to laud one lone librarian, Ann Sparanese, who created a firestorm of bad publicity for Regan, pressuring them to release the book as is. This is the same Ann Sparanese who received a drubbing from Nat Hentoff in the pages of The Village Voice in January 2004. The topic was Cuba – specifically, a wave of repression that swept the island in the spring of 2003. Even Chomsky and Zinn denounced these abuses, but not Sparanese. She went to bat for the Castro regime, stooping so low as to put the word 'crackdown' in quotes. Moore, of course, isn't responsible for Sparanese's conduct, which occurred after his book was written. But clearly the indulgence of left authoritarianism typified by the Mother Jones affair persists in some quarters. Moore's flyleaf dedication to Sparanese – which reads, 'one simple act, a voice was saved/are there a million more of her/to save us all' – is simply embarrassing.

Or this one:

Moore's worst infraction, however, was also the most intimate. There's a scene that depicts a "Great Gatsby" party, ostensibly an arrogant display of wealth in the face of Flint's misery. It was actually an annual fundraiser for a battered women's shelter, something Moore had supported in his "Flint Voice" editorials. One guest, a middle-aged man, speaks about Flint's many virtues and comes across as a heartless, privileged ass. Moore does not disclose that this man, Larry Stecco, is an acquaintance of his, a lawyer who had given money to the "Flint Voice" and performed pro bono civil rights work in the area. Stecco is now a judge, and Larner met with him. We learn that Moore asked Stecco a misleading question to elicit the desired quote. Stecco sued Moore and won; he tells Larner that the black actors paid to pose as "human statues" at the Gatsby event sued as well (Moore chose not to film the white actors). In a commentary for the "Roger & Me" DVD recorded in 2003, Moore not only fails to mention any of this – he continues to badmouth Stecco as part of "the other side." If Moore is this dishonest toward a friend at a tiny local event, he can scarcely be trusted on matters of world-historical scope.

Emphasis added.

Book Report

Nat Hentoff finds a library in South Dakota that is shipping books to an independent Cuban library, one of more than a dozens that Fidel Castro's thugs raided in 2003, confiscating all the books that the dictator didn't want people to read, and burning them.

Yes, burning them. The government still burns books in the Cuba Che Guevara made, while we make movies apotheosizing Che as a liberator. At least, in this one case, they didn't throw the librarian in jail for 20 years, too.

On Nov. 18, the Vermillion Public Library Board of Trustees voted to sponsor the Dulce Maria Loynaz Library in Havana, Cuba, which, like other imperiled independent libraries in that country, offers public access to books not obtainable in Cuba's censored "public" library system.

They sent down Spanish-language editions of Harry Potter and Mark Twain; not a bad place to start over. What's so remarkable, though is that Vermillion, S.D., is "the first, and only, American public library to stand up to Fidel Castro."

In January 2003, the governing council of the American Library Association, the largest such organization in the world, expressed rhetorical concern for the 75 imprisoned Cuban dissidents, but shamefully rejected a motion calling for the immediate release of the librarians who are among the 75, all of whom Amnesty International has rightly called "prisoners of conscience."

This decision by the American Library Association's governing council to not overly displease the Cuban dictator was due to Castro admirers on the council who laud him, for instance, for providing health care for his subjects, but who also ignore his contempt for Cubans who think for themselves.

And in Castro's prisons -- as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights representative Christine Chanet has reported -- at least 20 of the prisoners of conscience have been suffering from hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and other ailments with little or no medical attentions (since 1989, Castro has barred the International Red Cross from his prisons).

I don't understand why not one other American library has joined Vermillion in sponsoring a sister independent library in Cuba. This country's librarians have been among the most publicized dissenters to the Patriot Act provision that allows the FBI -- on the authorization of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, without probable cause -- to find out which library patrons are reading which books.

Yet, librarians here will be in no danger of being imprisoned by showing solidarity with beleaguered courageous Cuban librarians. And it's not as if the Vermillion library's action is little-known. Steve Marquardt, dean of libraries at South Dakota State University, has informed every U.S. state library association newsletter about it.

The librarians of America, of course, can be bothered to go to bat for the real victims of repression, such as Michael Moore:

BUZZFLASH: Now specifically, a little bit about your book [Stupid White Men]. You've written in your columns that after September 11th, your publisher was going to deep-six the book unless you took out critical comments on Bush. You held firm. Is it true that the librarians of America came to your defense and saved the day?

MICHAEL MOORE: That's what it looks like. I mean, I didn't know who any of these people were. They -- this one librarian found out about it, and she got in a, I don't know, library chat room. Or she sent a letter out to a list of librarians, and they sent it out to a bunch of people, and the thing kind of mushroomed from there. So, I'd say it's a combination of these librarians and the Internet, because they started sending letters to Harper-Collins, and Harper-Collins saw that it wasn't gonna be a good thing to ban the book. But I'm really happy about it. I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group.