May 10 marks the 75th anniversary of the most infamous book burning in history – on that date in 1933, over 20,000 books banned by Germany’s Nazi regime, including works by Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, and H.G. Wells, were set aflame in Berlin’s public square by Nazi youth groups.

To mark the anniversary, Abebooks.com has an overview of the various authors and books banned at the time, and has posted feature interviews with three experts on book-burning, including Australian author Matt Fishburn, whose debut non-fiction work Burning Books is due to be published this month. In the Q&A, Fishburn discusses why books are burned so often throughout history:

“People love a celebratory bonfire, especially when it can symbolize a letting go of the past: burning old photos, marking a graduation by burning a hated textbook, or the like. […] Tellingly, in the US (and no doubt in other countries) many universities had an impromptu tradition of turning a blind eye to their graduating class burning their textbooks at the end of semester in a great bonfire. Indeed, when the Nazi fires were first reported in 1933, this was one of the most common comparisons made - the fires in Germany were, after all, organized by students and took place relatively early in the new regime. Nor is it idle to point out that such burnings are always a great spectacle. In Berlin there were marching bands, torchlight processions, group singing and college songs, parades, movie cameras, and members of the cultural elite.

“This is not meant to trivialize the impact of any such bonfire. Most officially sanctioned fires are designed to control, and to announce what they stand for and what will be accepted under their rule. Burnings like those of the Nazis have something in common with the early modern burning of books in Europe. They announced what would be acceptable in future, and in the process shaped the new public sphere. The book burnings are the symbol; the repressive legislation that came in its wake was what enforced it.”

Ha’aretz reports that a children’s book published in Germany has been facing criticism for its alleged anti-Semitic content and anti-religious approach.Germany’s federal ministry for family affairs wants to ban How Do I Get to God? Asked the Piglet, which features a cover illustration of a hedgehog and a piglet. The German government and media have argued that the book depicts Christianity, Islam, and particularly Judaism in a degrading manner.

The book, which came out in October, describes what happens to the hedgehog and piglet, who one day discover a poster at the entrance to their house stating, “If you don’t know God, you’re missing something.” The two animals, who until then had not felt that anything was missing in their lives, begin searching for God. Along the way, they meet a rabbi, a priest and a mufti, who are depicted as violent and frightening figures.

The rabbi, who looks similar to the way Jews were portrayed in Nazi propaganda, threatens the two animals and tells them that God destroyed the world during the flood. The mufti turns out to be a hate-filled preacher, and the fat priest might seem to some like a potential child abuser.

“I think that God doesn’t exist at all,” the hedgehog concludes at the end of the book. “And if he does, then he certainly doesn’t live in a synagogue, a church or a mosque.”

The book’s publisher is protesting the German government’s move to potentially blacklist the book, which would make it illegal to sell or advertise the book to children. The federal department that reviews youth literature will meet in March to decide whether the book should be considered “dangerous” for children.

How-to books on the subject of suicide don’t seem to be welcome in New Zealand. The Australian author and assisted-suicide advocate Philip Nitschke was detained by authorities in a New Zealand airport earlier this week, and several copies of his book – The Peaceful Pill Handbook – were confiscated from him. According to TV New Zealand:

Nitschke arrived in Auckland ahead of a meeting on Monday with New Zealand’s Chief Censor Bill Hastings, when he planned to resubmit the Peaceful Pill Handbook for classification.

Nitschke, who also plans to conduct a series of workshops while in NZ, said he had been “taken aback” by the incident. “I have occasionally been detained … but this is by far the most detailed and thorough and heavy encounter I have ever had with any authority,” he said from his hotel in Auckland.

[…]

The handbook was originally submitted last year but was banned in June when New Zealand’s Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the handbook an “objectionable” rating. The two copies taken from him were amended versions he hoped would be approved for sale by authorities.

Coincidentally, the Times Online has just compiled a list of “ten extraordinary literary suicides,” and reading it, you kind of have to wonder if some of those people couldn’t have used a few tips from Nitschke’s book.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s life has been threatened – not for the first time – by “an ultra-nationalist gang,” reports The Guardian.

According to reports in the Turkish press, the author of international bestsellers including My Name is Red was targeted as part of a campaign to sow chaos in preparation for a military coup, scheduled for 2009.

The suspects have now been remanded in custody, among them retired military officers and the lawyer Kemal Kerincisz. The latter has been instrumental in the pursuit of a series of writers and intellectuals through the courts, filing cases against Pamuk himself as well as the novelists Elif Shafak and Perihan Magden and the murdered journalist Hrant Dink.

A year ago, Pamuk cancelled a planned German book tour after he was publicly threatened by Yasin Hayal, the murderer of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink. However, the report fails to mention whether Hayal is among – or connected to – the 13 men being prosecuted. In fact, not a whole lot is known about the case.

The charges brought against the suspects are not yet known. The investigation is being carried out under the terms of a law restricting media coverage.

“This could be a big development,” continued [Istanbul’s Free Expression Initiative spokesperson Sanar] Yurdatapan, suggesting that because figures very high in the military establishment have been connected with such groups it remains to be seen whether the cases will be brought to trial. “We are afraid to have hope.”

From The Guardian:

A Burmese author known for his love poetry has been arrested after penning a Valentine’s Day verse carrying a hidden message about the leader of the country’s military junta, Senior General Than Shwe.

The poet, Saw Wai, was arrested on Tuesday, a day after his poem “February 14″ was published in the popular weekly entertainment magazine A Chit, according to friends and colleagues who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The eight-line poem in Burmese is about a man broken-hearted after falling for a fashion model, whom he thanks for having taught him the meaning of love. But if read vertically, the first word of each line forms the phrase: “Power crazy Senior General Than Shwe.” Than Shwe, 74, who has headed the junta since 1992, has little tolerance for criticism. He keeps himself sequestered in his remote, newly built capital, Naypyitaw, deep in the country’s interior.

We sincerely hope that Saw Wai is freed soon.

(We must note, however, that this is yet more proof that Oulipian constraints are nothing but trouble with a capital T+7.)

From the Calgary Herald:

After a hiatus from library shelves, a controversial novel is being welcomed back into Calgary Catholic School District schools.

The Golden Compass, a decade-old novel by Philip Pullman, was pulled from local Catholic schools two months ago as a film adaptation of the story was released in theatres.

Following a review of the book – the first installment in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy – school board officials have decided to use the novel’s counter-religious themes as a teaching opportunity for Catholic students.

“There is no doubt that the text is harsh in terms of its language about organized religion and that it presents a consistently negative view of church, clergy and faith-based institutions; however, there are glimpses of light with opportunities for positive reflection,” the review stated.

Interesting that the ban is reversed only after everyone has pretty much decided the movie version’s a dud.

A Vancouver bookstore with a long history of pricey court battles is seeking a buyer. According to Xtra West, Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium owners Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth are looking to move on after 25 years of fighting the good fight. The store is probably best known for pursuing a case against Canada Customs (now Canada Border Services Agency) – which had seized erotic literature bound for the store on the grounds of obscenity – all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Here’s Deva on the kind of candidate they’re looking for:

The challenge now, says Deva, is finding someone who’s going to “proceed and continue with what we’re doing.” There’s no one on a short list just yet, he notes.

“I just want somebody that will carry on, not with everything that we’re doing, but certainly [who can] appeal to a broad section of our community….”

Apart from that, he says, the only other condition of sale is keeping Janine Fuller on as manager — a position she’s held for 12 of the 18 years she’s been at the store.

For more on Little Sister’s previous legal woes (or triumphs, depending on how you look at it), see here (or here or here).

From EarthTimes.org:

A German children’s book can be published in the United States after a publisher there dropped its demand for the genitals on a picture of a statue in it be air-brushed out, it was revealed Thursday. The German illustrator of the book had angrily complained of censorship and withdrew it from the US market last summer after being told that shoppers might object to the nudity.

[…]

The offending male organ is a tiny squiggle in the picture: the male statue itself is only 7.5 millimetres high on the page.

[Emphasis added]

All we can say is, whoever got upset about this in the first place is a bit of a tool.

From The Baltimore Sun:

Days after its publication, a largely positive review of the film version of The Golden Compass that appeared in Catholic newspapers across the country was retracted this week by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The bishops, who could not be reached for comment, offered no explanation for the decision. But Catholic groups, including the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, have urged moviegoers to boycott the film, saying the film and the book on which it is based are anti-Catholic.

“Certainly, there was all kinds of speculation from the day it went up [on the Web site] as to whether or not something like this would happen,” said Jim Lackey, general news editor for the Catholic News Service, a wire service run by the bishops’ conference. He was told Monday to remove the review from the service’s Web site.

However, it would appear that the USCCB – or “uscub” (we just made that up) – has as shaky an understanding of how the web works as they do of art. You see, nothing really disappears from the web, so if you’d like to read the Catholic News Service’s review, go here. You can also go to the main page here and watch the review appear and then disappear a few seconds later. Talk about a tease!

Ironically enough, it’s probably one of the few positive reviews the movie got anywhere.

Here is the money quote from the review:

To the extent, moreover, that Lyra and her allies are taking a stand on behalf of free will in opposition to the coercive force of the Magisterium, they are of course acting entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching. The heroism and self-sacrifice that they demonstrate provide appropriate moral lessons for viewers.

And on it goes: another school board has pulled Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass from its shelves following a parental complaint – this despite the fact that the book was published more than 10 years ago, and thus has been quietly corrupting youth ever since.

From The Globe and Mail:

The Roman Catholic school board in Calgary has followed the lead of a Catholic school board in Burlington, Ont., in pulling the children’s fantasy book The Golden Compass off school shelves.

Board officials said their decision followed concern voiced by parents and recent publicity surrounding the release of a movie version of the book, starring Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman.

“Our children are exposed to a wide range of information,” said board spokeswoman Judy Mackay. “One of our responsibilities is to help them understand how that fits with their belief system and to equip them with the skills so that they understand how they can fit that into their own belief system.”

It should be noted that, though these Catholic school boards seem to have the intestinal fortitude of a wounded llama, most Catholics are not quite so easily spooked. From the same article: “Calgary Bishop Fred Henry said there are more pressing issues facing Catholics than debating a children’s fantasy novel.”

In a similar vein, Toronto Star Books editor Dan Smith wrote a brief piece about the book in this past weekend’s edition (not online), stating that: “in our practising Catholic household, The Golden Compass remains a treasured read. It spurs kids to think and question. Good. That’s what great books are for.”

Philip Pullman keeps running afoul of Ontario school boards.

In what is looking like the most effective publicity campaign ignorance can buy, Pullman’s The Golden Compass has been pulled from the shelves of school libraries in two Catholic School Boards in Peterborough, Ontario.* According to the Peterborough Examiner, “all three books in the trilogy were taken from school libraries this month after two parents complained.”

This follows hard on the heels of similar action by the Halton Catholic School board. (More details here.) A boycott of the movie version of the book is being urged by the Catholic League in the U.S.

What’s the author’s take on all this? In an interview with CBC Radio’s Writers & Company this weekend, Pullman said that “the thing they should do if they don’t want people to read the book is to say nothing about it…. If you want people to read a book, then make a fuss about it, make it controversial. Tell your children they are not to read this book under any circumstances. What is more likely to make them go to the shelf and take it down and read it from there?”

Here we go again. From the Toronto Star:

Halton’s Catholic board has pulled The Golden Compass fantasy book – soon to be a Hollywood blockbuster starring Nicole Kidman – off school library shelves because of a complaint.

Two other books in the trilogy by British author Philip Pullman have also been removed as a precaution, and principals have been ordered not to distribute December Scholastic book flyers because The Golden Compass is available to order.

“(The complaint) came out of interviews that Philip Pullman had done, where he stated that he is an atheist and that he supports that,” said Scott Millard, the board’s manager of library services.

It’s not like there’s never a valid reason to keep a particular book out of a school library – no one blinks at the fact that middle-school kids can’t sign out The Story of O, for example – but haven’t school boards been burned enough by this kind of thing to know not to do something so drastic and negative-publicity-generating without a little sober second thought?

Oh well, we’ll let you know when the book is – inevitably – allowed back on the shelves by some red-faced administrators. I’m sure their phone lines are already feeling the burn.

According to a release from Sono Nis Press, author Nikki Tate was relieved to learn that Elizabeth School in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, which had previously banned her children’s book Trouble on Tarragon Island, has reversed its decision and “un-banned” it after a new school principal re-evaluated the content.

Sono Nis told Q&Q Omni this summer that the book had been deemed a problem because it contains a scene of bullying and because the bullying includes words that may be offensive to women.

Tate’s book, the third in her Tarragon Island series about protagonist Heather Blake, depicts a battle in Blake’s B.C. community over clear-cut logging. Blake’s grandmother joins an anti-logging activist group, and poses naked with them for a calendar, embarrassing her granddaughter. At the beginning of the book’s first chapter, several boys in Blake’s school taunt her about her grandmother’s breasts, calling them “bazoongas” and cupping melon-shaped areas around their chests.

The scene, Tate told Q&Q Omni, “sets up the central conflict of the book, which is asking the question, ‘when you step outside the rules of society … what is the impact on your community and on your family?’” Tate said the description shows the pain experienced by Heather as a result of the bullying. “It’s pretty obvious these kids aren’t being held up as an example of fine behaviour,” she said.

Elizabeth School administrators now seem to have come around to seeing it that way too.

Trouble on Tarragon Island has been nominated for a Diamond Willow Award in Saskatchewan, and Tate is participating in a TD Canadian Children’s Book Week tour in the province this month. As a part of the tour, she had planned to give away copies of her book to elementary students in Kindersley, and she says she will still go ahead with the give-away now that the ban has been reversed. She will sign copies of the book and chat with students at an informal event at the Kindersley Mall on Nov. 19.

New York magazine’s culture blog points out how Phillip Pullman is distancing himself from his image as a God-despising, atheism-peddling iconoclast in the run-up to the release of Hollywood’s mega-budget adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first title in Pullman’s His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy.

On the Today show on Friday, Pullman denied to Al Roker that his books are anti-religious. “As for the atheism,” he adds, “it doesn’t matter to me whether people believe in God or not, so I’m not promoting anything of that sort,” he wrote…. But what did the author have to say on the issue six years ago, when asked by the Washington Post what famously Christian author C.S. Lewis would think of his books?

“I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,” says Pullman. “Mr. Lewis would think I was doing the Devil’s work.”

And what did he tell the Sydney Morning Herald in 2003?

“I’m a great fan of J.K. Rowling, but the people – mainly from America’s Bible Belt – who complain that Harry Potter promotes Satanism or witchcraft obviously haven’t got enough in their lives. Meanwhile, I’ve been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God.”

Yes, well clearly a movie about God-killing (particularly, Christian God-killing) is not going to appeal to Bible Belt America. But what New York fails to point out is that the maverick author’s hell-raising generated plenty of positive press before Hollywood came a-knocking – for example, see this New Yorker profile that casts Pullman as the real deal in children’s lit (his “ideal reader is a precocious fifteen-year-old who long ago came to find the Harry Potter books intellectually thin,” writes Laura Miller) or Michael Chabon’s omnibus review of the His Dark Materials trilogy in The New York Review of Books – in which it was precisely Pulllman’s “secularism” that endeared him to literary critics.

The question, then, is when did Pullman strike a deal with the devil?: During the creative genesis of His Dark Materials, which some critics have dubbed “atheism for kids”?; Or when a promised Hollwood payoff led Pullman to temper his tongue?

Just in time for Banned Books Week, which runs until Oct. 6, The New York Times reports how a loophole in English law, combined with the globalized booktrade, may have a deleterious effect on freedom of speech outside of U.K. borders.

At the centre of the controversy is Saudi banker and businessman Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz, who wrangled an apology and undisclosed damages from Cambridge University Press for publishing Alms for Jihad, which alleges that bin Mahfouz is an Al Qaeda financier. Bin Mahfouz also recently won damages from U.K. publisher Pluto Press, U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld, and the newspaper The Mail on Sunday for making similar allegations.

The concern is that stringent libel laws in the U.K., where the burden of proof falls on the defendant, will affect foreign publishers, since, as the article points out, English libel law technically applies not just to U.K. titles, but to all books on sale in the U.K.:

Today, any book bought online in England, even one published exclusively in another country, can ostensibly be subject to English libel law. As a result, publishers and booksellers are increasingly concerned about “libel tourism”: foreigners suing other foreigners in England or elsewhere, and using those judgments to intimidate authors in other countries…

Incidently, the article points out that one of the original “libel tourists” may be Roman Polanski, who in 2005 used the English courts to sue Vanity Fair, which published allegedly slanderous comments by former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham.

Entertainment Weekly has some tragic news for all you Eagles fans out there: a completed memoir by one of the band’s former guitarists, Don Felder, has been scuttled at the last minute by publisher Hyperion. The book – entitled Heaven and Hell – was originally scheduled to hit bookstores in the U.S. and Canada on Oct. 1, but has now been permanently cancelled for “legal reasons.”

The precise nature of those ”issues” is unclear, but certainly, the advance copy of the book distributed to reviewers by Hyperion does not stint on depictions of ’70s-era debauchery. Indeed, from the very opening paragraph we find Felder, who joined the band in 1974 and actually co-wrote ”Hotel California,” reminiscing about hitting the stage for a show with ”white powder rings around my nostrils.” Later, he recalls witnessing ”the barrage of p—y” that was offered up to the band.

But c’mon, how could Felder’s book possibly be any more scandalous than a million other coke-and-p—y rock biographies? Going by the rest of the EW article, it sounds as if the problem was not with the tales of partying, but with Felder’s whinging about finances . (Apparently, Felder spends a lot of the book slamming his former bandmates for allegedly cheating him out of a large chunk of the band’s profits.) EW also points out that the band has a new studio album – their first in 28 years – due out on Oct. 30, and that “the band may not have relished having to discuss Felder’s book during interviews.”

German journalist and author Gunter Wallraff has been trying to get permission to read from Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel The Satanic Verses in a mosque in Cologne, but has so far been denied permission.

From DW-World:

The request posed a dilemma for the Turkish-Islamic union DITIB, an Ankara-funded religious foundation: If the group members denied Wallraff’s request, they would be seen as not being liberal, but granting permission would anger a large number of their members.

DITIB officials said they had discussed the proposed reading with Wallraff until two weeks ago, but negotiations failed after he refused to compromise.

“He lacks understanding for the feelings and needs of members of our Muslim community,” said a spokesman, without specifying what DITIB had proposed to Wallraff.

Any sentence with the words “Muslim” and “Rushdie” in it tends to raise temperatures on all sides of an issue, and to be fair, it’s unlikely that one would easily get permission to read, say, The Da Vinci Code in a cathedral. Maybe, like so many of us, the DITIB officials just don’t care for literary readings?

Either way, Wallraff has vowed to keep trying.

(hat tip: The Literary Saloon)

If you’re like us, you’re probably getting real sick of hearing about O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional If I Did It, but attention must be paid when the queen herself, Oprah, thrusts it back into the limelight. Yesterday, she invited the Goldman family onto her show to discuss the book and their decision to publish it, a choice for which they have been criticized. According to MSNBC, which has posted a good summation of the show’s highlights, Oprah said it was a “moral, ethical dilemma” for her to give more publicity to the book:

Winfrey acknowledged that her program often promotes books and authors, yet, she said, “I don’t want to be in the position to promote this book, because I, too, think it’s despicable.”

The MSNBC piece ends by stating that, as of yesterday, If I Did It was No. 8 in sales at Barnes and Noble and No. 52 on Amazon.com. According to a more recently updated piece on The Book Standard website, however, the book has subsequently shot up to No. 1 at Barnes and Noble and No. 2 on Amazon.com. Way to go Oprah…

Author Dave Zirin recently began a correspondence with Texas death row inmate Kenneth Foster, whose case has become a symbol of that state’s noose-happy ways. After Foster told Zirin how much he liked one of the author’s books, Zirin tried to send him a copy of an earlier book, What’s My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the U.S. According to Zirin’s account in the Houston Chronicle, he got back a letter from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice saying that the book “contains material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots.”

As far as book reviews go, that’s one of the harshest we’ve ever read. Let’s see a publicist pull a blurb out of that….

The New York Times has posted an article about a new book being published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this September: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. It seems that early excerpts from the book, which argues that the pro-Israel lobby wields too much influence in U.S. political circles, are setting off accusations of anti-Semitism. That’s not really all that surprising, of course, but what is surprising – or shameful, at any rate – is that several cultural and political institutions are canceling planned events with the authors.

The subject will certainly prompt furious debate, though not at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington, and three organizations in Chicago. They have all turned down or canceled events with the authors, mentioning unease with the controversy or the format.

The authors were particularly disturbed by the Chicago council’s decision, since plans for that event were complete and both authors have frequently spoken there before. The two sent a four-page letter to 94 members of the council’s board detailing what happened. “On July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was canceling the event,” and that his decision “was based on the need ‘to protect the institution.’ He said that he had a serious ‘political problem,’ because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the council. ‘This one is so hot,’ Marshall maintained.”

In Canada, the default distributor for Farrar, Straus & Giroux is Douglas & McIntyre, but D&M marketing manager Emiko Morita told us that they will not be selling the book here because it has not been made available to them by FSG. As she explained to us, this suggests that FSG is still looking to sell Canadian rights separately.

UPDATE: Q&Q has been informed that Penguin Canada holds Canadian rights and will be publishing the book on Sept. 4.

Bangladeshi writer Talisma Nasrin, who had to be protected from physical attacks at her book launch in Hyderabad in south India last week, is now facing charges of inciting religious tensions, The Guardian reports.

Nasrin, whose writings have been accused of insulting Islam and have led to threats and fatwas against her in the past, could face two years in prison if convicted.

Charges have also been been laid against local politicians alleged to have attacked her at the launch.

The police are also investigating remarks made by the MIM leader, Akbaruddin Owaisi, widely reported to have threatened the author with death, as well as the leader of the MIM’s local rivals, the Majlis Bachao Tehreek (MBT) party, who is reported to have claimed that the attack was an attempt by the MIM to foil a plan to kill the writer outside the press club.

Writs are also to be filed against the MLAs involved in the attack by local citizens’ groups who had condemned the attack and criticised the police response.

But with local elections due early next year, the issue is fast becoming a political flash-point, with the MIM widely expected to use a fatwa against Nasrin as a tool to mobilise the Muslim vote.

According to The Guardian, the Borders bookstore chain in Great Britain has decided to move copies of Tintin in the Congo from the children’s section of its stores to the adult graphic novels section, after being pressured to do so by a human rights group.

The Commission for Racial Equality said yesterday it was unacceptable for any shop to stock or sell the 1930s cartoon adventure of the Belgian boy journalist because of its crude racial stereotypes.

The book, which includes a scene where Tintin is made chief of an African village because he is a “good white man” and a black woman bowing to Tintin saying: “White man very great … white mister is big juju man!” was highly offensive, a spokeswoman from the commission said.

She added that the only place the book was acceptable was in a museum - with a sign accompanying it saying “old-fashioned, racist claptrap”.

As The Guardian explains, however, the book already includes a foreward acknowledging the colonial stereotypes, which you would think would mitigate the problem. In any case, this spokesperson from the Commission for Racial Equality might come off a little more reasonable if she didn’t shrilly pronounce the entire book “claptrap.” How about Moby Dick? How about The Birth of a Nation? How about the entire endless litany of artworks that contain outdated values and beliefs? Let’s put ‘em all in museums and never engage with them again! That’ll make the world a better place…

Kudos, however, to Borders for not buckling to the Thought Police and banning it altogether.

Authors: do you sometimes worry about employing excessively salty language? Do you fret about offending readers with your otherwise innocent descriptors? Don’t you wish there was a way of determining once and for all the words that amuse and the words that affront?

Well now there is! The friendly people at Random House Reference have devised a revolutionary – and handy! – chart for just such a purpose, called the O.Q., or the Offensiveness Quotient. As they state on their website:

When we label sensitive terms for Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, there are a lot of factors to consider. The way we decide has to do with how offensive a word is (the degree to which a word offends the person it is used to describe) and how disparaging a word is (the degree to which the person who uses the word intends for it to be hurtful).

To decide how to label a word, we go through a process that is something like the chart we give below. We call it the O.Q., or “offensiveness quotient” – modeled after the more familiar I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient). […] Basically, the O.Q. is the average of a term’s rank on the scales of Disparagement and Offensiveness.

Thanks to the O.Q. chart, we here at Q&Q now know that while it is not particularly desirable to refer to someone of the feminine persuasion as “the little woman,” it is still preferable to referring to her as “baby.” Similarly, calling someone of European descent a “honky” is worse than calling them “whitey,” but not nearly as bad as calling them “cracker.” We’re not exactly sure how “spaz” can be considered more slanderous than “harelip,” but then, who are we to question such a finely honed system?

The Globe and Mail reports that Derek Finkle, author of a 1998 non-fiction tome about the Robert Baltovich murder case entitled No Claim to Mercy, will not have to relinquish any of his files to police or to prosecutors.

“Fishing season is over; the subpoenas are quashed,” said Mr. Justice David Watt of the Superior Court of Ontario.

Judge Watt said police and prosecutors in the Robert Baltovich murder case - which will be retried commencing in September - failed to furnish nearly enough specific information to support their request for two separate subpoenas.

He said authorities were also wrong to believe they could sit back and obtain “a breathtaking sweep” of material from Mr. Finkle, and then sift through it for anything that struck them as useful.

The Superior Court validation presumably came as a great relief to Finkle, who has been fighting the Crown subpoena for months. You can read Q&Q’s coverage of his efforts here.

From The Guardian:

Pakistani MPs today demanded that Britain withdraw the knighthood bestowed on author Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses caused outrage around the world for allegedly insulting Islam.

A government-backed resolution condemning the author’s knighthood was passed unanimously by the lower house of the Pakistani parliament amid angry protests across the country.

Iran don’t like it either:

Iran accused Britain yesterday of insulting Islam by awarding a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses prompted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his assassination.

Mohammad Ali Hosseini, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, portrayed the decision to honour the novelist as an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies, describing Rushdie as “one of the most hated figures” in the Islamic world.

Aside from the self-evident notion of death sentences against authors being a bad thing, this continuing outrage against The Satanic Verses seems just a little out of date. Fury, the 2001 Rushdie novel that “exhausts all negative superlatives,” according to critic James Wood – that’s the one to get angry at.

Valerie Plame, the former counter-terrorism CIA agent who was famously outed by someone/everyone in the Bush administration as political retaliation, is suing her ex-bosses for allegedly blocking the publication of Fair Game, her account of the whole sordid affair. At issue are the dates of Plame’s federal service, which had already been published (with the agency’s approval) in an unclassified document, but which it now claims are still classified.

A press release from Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, states:

“The CIA’s effort to classify public domain information is an unreasonable attempt at prior restraint of publication, and a violation of our First Amendment rights. We have filed our suit in the belief that the CIA’s actions have implications that are much broader than this particular case, and that could have a chilling effect on the nature of public discourse in a free society.”

More at ThinkProgress.

You’d think a book fair held in the capital of Iran would be a model of intellectual openness and the free exchange of ideas, wouldn’t you?

According to the Index of Censorship, that is just not the case, as the Iranian government has done everything it can to stifle the fair (which begins tomorrow), even separating the foreign publishers from the domestic Iranian ones.

Formerly one of the most significant international book fairs in Asia and the Middle East, the 20th Tehran Fair’s self-stated main goal is ‘to make the latest quality books available to the educated and professional communities in the country.’

But many of these people are regarded as political threats to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His efforts to separate them from the outside world are stretching the organisation of the […] fair to the breaking point.

The plan is to separate Iranian publishers from international ones into two events at different ends of the city. The current suggestion is to relocate the Iranian publishers to Mosala, a huge public prayer site north of the city. The international publishers would stay at last year’s venue, Tehran’s International Exhibition Centre.

Even more ominous are unconfirmed reports that the Iranian equivalent of Quill & Quire has been prevented from distributing copies of its Show Daily on the grounds of the fair. (We could just be totally making that part up, however.)

There are still a couple of days left in Freedom to Read Week, which we should probably mark now more than ever, what with an Ontario school getting worked up about Snow Falling on Cedars and librarians in the U.S. fretting about a single appearance of the word “scrotum” in a kids’ book. (In a related story, they’re also looking closely at the books of this “Balzac” character.)

Upcoming events include a series of discussions at the Saskatoon Public Library, a marathon reading from banned books in Calgary, and a lecture on censorship at the University of Toronto. You can see all the details here.

* Yup, Quillblog likes that headline too much to stop now.

The Toronto Star reports today that a 10-year-old Burlington girl named Evie Freedman has won The Writers’ Union of Canada’s Freedom to Read Award.

Evie is being honoured for her spirited defence last year of the controversial book Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak by Simcoe author Deborah Ellis.

The book was pulled out of circulation in some Ontario school libraries, including those in the Toronto and York public boards, after the Canadian Jewish Congress complained it was an inappropriate selection for the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch reading awards program.

This week, Evie could hardly contain her delight at receiving the award, to be presented at a small party at her parents’ home tomorrow, a timely honour during Freedom to Read Week. “I forgot about Three Wishes for awhile, but I knew it was too important not to come up again,” she said Monday.

“I still have very strong opinions about kids’ rights.”

As far as Quillblog could make out, the award was given to little Evie largely for being “widely quoted in the press objecting to the censorship of Three Wishes.” Later in the Star piece, however, there is an incidental reference to Evie’s father, Steve Jordan, a Canadian music industry insider and executive director of the Polaris Music Prize, and to her stepfather, novelist Lawrence Hill, who was a major player in the fight to reinstate Three Wishes to school libraries. Could it be that the little moppet’s family connections might have had something to do with her award win?

In any case, can anyone honestly say that Evie’s efforts on the part of free speech were as noteworthy as those of the 2003 winner, Little Sister’s Bookstore? Maybe we’re just curmudgeons, but we at Quillblog believe that giving major awards to children is misguided at best, and at worst potentially an insult to those who really deserve them.

The latest news in book banning is courtesy of some U.S. school librarians who are refusing to carry the Newbery award-winning The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. The librarians are in a tizzy about Patron’s use of the word “scrotum” on the first page of the book, which is for 9- to 12-year-olds.

In The New York Times article, one librarian seems more concerned about teachers’ embarrassment if they have to provide an anatomy lesson … because who wants a teacher to impart knowledge? But how likely is it to come up anyway–at that age, won’t most kids ask their friends before turning to an adult?

Gelf Magazine, in an amusing rebuttal, has posted a list of other children’s books that contain “the word.” (Thanks for the tip, Bookslut.)

For further discussion of naughtiness in children’s and YA books, be sure to check out the January/February issue of Q&Q, on stands until Feb. 25, which has articles addressing swearing and teenage sex, though no scrotums.

Entertainment Weekly’s books editor, Tina Jordan, has been writing about the conundrum she faced when she discovered that her bright, bookish daughter was reading a trashy Gossip Girl novel. Discounting taking the book away as a form of censorship, Jordan asked her readers: “What do you do when you hate what your daughter is reading?”

The responses from her colleagues and readers were instructive, less for any advice on how to redirect her daughter back into reading literature than for reminding Jordan why teens read trash. And to the surprise of no one who has ever been a teen…

Everyone pretty much agreed: This kind of surreptitious reading is a traditional rite of passage. But what surprised me was how many of my colleagues — separated not just by geography but by generation — turned to the same books for their, uh, information: The Godfather (page 27 was specifically mentioned by two people), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Jaws, The Diary of Anais Nin, The Other Side of Midnight, and anything by Judy Blume or John Jakes (though, as senior editor Thom Geier said, ”But Jakes tended to write his sex scenes in language so obscure that you’d have to go rushing to the dictionary to figure out what in the world he was trying to say. And even then, you didn’t really learn very much”).

The list is long and varied, and it makes the Peel Region’s Catholic School Board’s attempt to take David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars out of school libraries in Ontario look utterly futile.

David Guterson’s immensely popular 1995 novel Snow Falling on Cedars has been taken off high school library shelves in Ontario’s Peel region for its “explicit sexual content,” according to an article in today’s Toronto Star. The book has apparently not been banned outright by Peel’s Catholic board, it has just been removed until its appropriateness can be reviewed.

Snow Falling on Cedars was part of a Grade 11 English course at Father Michael Goetz Secondary School in Mississauga when a parent complained about it just prior to Christmas, said Bruce Campbell, spokesperson for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

The board committee has not yet been struck, but the review could be complete in two weeks, Campbell said. “It’s definitely not a fait accompli,” he said of the process.

Not surprisingly, the move has drawn a lot of criticism from freedom of expression watchdogs. One of the more notable comments in The Star piece is from Shari Graydon, the author of two children’s books on media literacy:

“Removing thoughtful fiction from the school library is like taking mashed potatoes out of the cafeteria when the problem is french fries at McDonald’s,” said Graydon.

The irony here, of course, is that likening Snow Falling on Cedars to mashed potatoes is all too apt. Yeah, the tale of interracial romance and murder in 1950s America was a big success, but it was also a cliched, groan-inducing, made-for-Oprah bore, and the idea that anything in it could possibly offend or scar anyone is totally absurd. Kids should be free to go ahead and read it if they want, but parents should make sure that they read some more worthwhile titles, too. Like Valley of the Dolls, say…

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the federal government should not be required to provide advance funding to Vancouver’s Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium for its legal battle against Canada Customs, The Globe and Mail reports.

Little Sister’s fight with Canada Customs began 12 years ago after the agency blocked the import of four books. In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that while Customs has the right to censor material, its practices at the time were unfair. The bookstore’s current allegation is that the agency has not obeyed that ruling an is still banning material in an arbitrary and discriminatory way.

But today’s 7-2 decision said that the challenge was too “narrow and insignificant to the broad public interest to justify such an unusual move,” writes Globe reporter Kirk Makin. “Public interest advance costs orders must be granted with caution, as a last resort, in circumstances where their necessity is clearly established,” according to reasons supplied by five of the majority judges.

(more…)

GalleyCat points out that even though last week was the 25th annual Banned Books Week in the U.S. (put on by the American Library Association to celebrate the right of free people to read freely), the actual banning of books is more or less a fact of life. To illustrate this, they provide a list of the most recent book-banning crusaders to hit the news.

One particularly notable complainer is a concerned mother in Georgia who first got noticed back in April. She thinks Harry Potter lures children to the dark side (witchcraft, sorcery, and the usual dark arts), and has now enlisted brochures for witchcraft camp to prove her point.

Also on the banning block: a collection of nursery rhymes that features the line, “teacher, teacher don’t be dumb, give me back my bubble gum.”

(And no, we’re not kidding.)

Related links:
Check out GalleyCat’s list here

Quillblog linked last month to the Guardian’s coverage of the Brick Lane brouhaha, which consisted of east London borough Tower Hamlets residents putting up a stink about the production of a film based on Monica Ali’s Booker-nominated novel, which community groups blasted as “reinforcing ‘pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes’ and of containing ‘a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community.’”

After a recent march organized by the Campaign Against Monica Ali’s Film Brick Lane, the residents got their wish — sort of. A Guardian story reports that “Ruby Films decided to move shooting … out of London’s Tower Hamlets area last week,” although filming will continue elsewhere. Now the company, along with the police and the media, are being tsk-tsked by such lit luminaries as Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru and Lisa Appignanesi over their bending to the protestors’ will.

Rushdie “called for ‘all those who over-reacted in this matter,’ including the police, the film company … [and] the news media and to ‘admit their mistakes, so that the film can be completed, and we can move on,’” while Appignanesi thundered, “We cannot allow small numbers of ‘offended’ traditionalists the power of censorship.”

But it’s Kunzru who comes down the hardest, calling it a “’sad story,’ saying it ‘does credit to nobody involved,’ neither the protesters who ‘are foolishly confirming the prejudices they fear others hold about them, nor the media, whose sensationalist and sloppy reporting have made a big issue out of a little one, not the film company whose failure to defend the work in any meaningful way has given an easy victory to the self-appointed censors.’”

PEN England puts in their two cents, too, urging the government to “honour the commitment to freedom of expression embodied in amendments to the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act designed, saying ‘community censorship unopposed by the state is effectively state censorship by proxy.’”

Related links:
Read the whole Guardian story here
Read Natasha Walter’s anti-protestor Guardian opinion piece

Miami schoolchildren can get their dose of Cuba after all, the L.A. Times reported today, as “a federal judge Monday ordered the Miami-Dade County School District to restore a children’s book about Cuba to school library shelves, delivering a blow to fiercely anti-Communist Cuban exiles who complained the book sugar-coats contemporary life in their homeland.”

The cheerily titled Let’s Go to Cuba was yanked off elementary school library shelves due to cries from Cuban-born parents and politicians that “its depiction of life in the island nation ruled by Fidel Castro as misleading, propagandistic and a waste of taxpayers’ money.” The L.A. Times article says that the book inspired “months of heated debate and all-night meetings,” the outcome of which was a county school board vote last month to ban the book – along with 23 other titles in a series on life in foreign countries.

This resulted in an outcry from human rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Miami-Dade’s Student Government Association, and both of them suing the district for free-speech violations. “Two review committees and the county schools superintendent had advised the board that removing the book might be seen as political censorship,” according to the story. “After hearing testimony from both sides Friday, U.S. District Judge Alan S. Gold on Monday issued a preliminary injunction requiring the school district to keep the books available at its 30-odd elementary school libraries until a court hears and rules on the lawsuit … By banning the books, [the judge] added, the school board was infringing on students’ rights to consider them for leisure reading, which ‘goes to the heart of the 1st Amendment issue.’”

Related links:
Read the L.A. Times story here