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Student runs guerilla banned-book locker library
May 25, 2009 | 7:50 pm
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By Chris Meadows
Found via BoingBoing: a kid asks if it’s illegal to run a guerilla library of banned-by-his-school books out of the empty school locker next to his.
Anyway, I now operate a little mini-library that no one has access to but myself. Practically a real library, because I keep an inventory log and give people due dates and everything. I would be in so much trouble if I got caught, but I think it’s the right thing to do because before I started, almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading! Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I’m doing a good thing, right?
The kid wonders whether what he is doing is illegal. The consensus of the answers he gets is that it is probably not, but is against school rules and could probably get him suspended if he gets caught.
If this story is true—it’s always possible it could be a hoax—I agree with Cory Doctorow: someone should give this kid a medal. That he is getting more students to read, not just banned books but books in general, is totally brilliant. In this age of declining reading, the very idea of banning any books needs rethinking. (Or, maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps the very allure of “forbidden fruit” is responsible for getting those kids reading in the first place.) Even if it isn’t true, at least it gets people thinking about school censorship, and that’s no bad thing either.
It is interesting to note that at least six or seven of the books he lists are in the public domain, and hence available as free e-books from Project Gutenberg and the sites that reformat Gutenberg books. If there were an e-book reader cheap enough to be in the hands of high school students (and that wouldn’t get taken away from them by high school authorities), they could reach out and read at least some of these forbidden titles themselves. Who knows, maybe those days aren’t far away.
In the mean time, I wish this guerilla librarian the best of luck. May he pass through the entire rest of his school career without ever being caught.
Technorati Tags: censorship,banned books,librarian,library,guerilla,underground,secret,Catcher in the Rye,Catch-22
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Comments:
The student in question is writing in first person, but given that the username zie chose is “Kat Atreides” and the user icon is a pink rose, I’m guessing zie is a she.
I agree that she deserves a medal. I think she doesn’t need to worry too much about detention or expulsion–if she mentions the cause in her essay any college or university worth her attention will be *more*, not less, interested in having her as a student.
Fair enough.
But for what it’s worth, “he” has been for hundreds of years and still is the official gender-neutral pronoun in the English language. I think tortured neologistic constructions like “zie” just end up looking silly.
That is so incredibly awesome. The said thing is that if I were still in high school, I’d probably make of the kid.
Of course, as I said, there is the possibility that this is a hoax. It does sound almost too good to be true.
Actually, what Kat is doing probably IS illegal, not because the books are banned, but because lending probably violates the copyright agreements of those books (because he is not an “authorized” lending library).
But in a case such as this, his situation would earn him brownie points in most jurisdictions in the country (with the exception, I presume, of the state that banned those books… shame, shame).
Do I believe the story? Well… I’ve heard far weirder.
I was under the impression that lending was covered under “First Sale,” whether you’re a “real” library or not. (And who exactly “authorizes” libraries, for that matter?)
In the US, lending is not illegal. In other countries, there are restrictions and authors receive royalties on lending. Different countries, different rules.
Rob Preece
Publisher
But for what it’s worth, “he” has been for hundreds of years and still is the official gender-neutral pronoun in the English language.
Oh? If “he” is gender neutral, what is the third person singular pronoun for males?
“Dude.”
“Dude.”
[eyeroll]
Seriously, “he” is emphatically not gender neutral. Here, let me demonstrate:
“I met my old friend Chris yesterday. He was hungry, so we went to his favorite nearby restaurant. He and I were working our way through the crab salad (not bad!) and his new baby started crying. One of the things I really admire about Chris is his matter-of-fact approach to these kinds of problems. He just spread a baby blanket over his front, unbuttoned his shirt and bra and started nursing. Worked a treat; the baby quieted right down and we finished catching up over a couple of the best cups of coffee I’ve had in a while.”
Now, are you seriously trying to tell me you weren’t surprised when Chris started nursing, because you really, honestly, assume “he” is gender neutral and so you remembered all along that in the absence of gender cues (given the gender neutral pronouns), there was a 51% chance that Chris was female?
Or are you just buying into the language’s archaic assumption that anyone worth talking about is male, except for certain special cases marked for the audience with a special pronoun?
If you’re ready to join the 21st century, a new pronoun like “zie” is actually much better than “he” for a gender neutral situation; at least your audience is alerted to the fact that they don’t actually know the gender of the person referred to. So they won’t be weirded out when zie starts nursing.
If you come out in hives at the thought of a new pronoun, you can simply reset “they” to be number neutral as well as gender neutral. Whatever floats your boat.
Except we don’t use gender-neutral pronouns when we know a gender, as you do with Chris. We use epicene pronouns in cases where gender is unknown: “If the reader thought that, xe is mistaken” or “Each student must turn in xer phone before the test; it will be returned to xim afterward.”
In practice, neutral pronouns won’t become standard in English, and though they can be used in select (primarily written) groups, most people usually reconstruct sentences to use plural forms, or use singular-they as many well-known authors before them have.