everyone loves to shit on shoebills like omg this bird is SO SCARY its TERRIFYING which like first of all shut up youre annoying second they are literally just standing there what the hell is your problem
why would you hate him. what did he ever do to you
looked him up on Google and he was swallowing a whole monkey
in primary school we had a creative writing assignment where we had to ‘write about a character in a new, strange situation!’ and i wrote about a squid that was somehow teleported from the ocean to the forest floor and slowly choked to death for two pages and i’ll never quite forget my teacher’s face because it turns out she wanted ‘this new school is scary, i hope i make friends!’ and not a graphic description of a squid dying
well that’s just the risk you take if you decide to teach creative writing
Thats a potion whose effect is “teleport straight to hospital”
when I was a kid I went camping and the adults at the big campsite went around and gave all the kids glowsticks and necklaces to wear at night (kids loved it, and adults knew where the kids were because none of them wanted to lose their prettyshiny)
Mine went straight in my mouth because it had a delightful plasticy feeling with a slight crunch if you really went for it. I chewed on that thing for ages. Until at some point I accidentally actually bit into it and it popper and I got glowstick all up in my mouth and down my shirt and it was horrible. One of (but not the worst) things I have ever had the misfortune of tasting. And I knew it had to be poison because it was probably radioactive goo or something and I was gonna die and my parents and everyone would know I died because I ate a glowstick and did something stupid
So I spat it out and washed my mouth really good with water and then wandered into the woods crying to die alone after everyone was asleep because I was clearly going to die from the poison and at least this way they might think I died getting eaten by animals or taken by ghosts or maybe they’d be happy because they never found my tiny child corpse and would assume I’d gone on to live a cool life amongst the trees.
Except at some point my parents woke up and everyone freaked out about a missing child in the woods and me being smart stuck to the trails so I was easy to find with my stupid glowing shirt and my glowing face and my bucket hat 2 or 3 miles down the path.
I told my parents I was worried people might think I was a stupid kid who died doing something stupid by eating a glow stick so instead I decided to run away into the woods forever or die and then nobody would think I was stupid. My folks listened carefully and then told me that was stupid.
Delighted to inform you that most glow sticks are made with non-toxic ingredients because children do children things like give in to their complete lack of learned inhibitions and bite through glow sticks to get to the glowy center. And adults do things like toss 20 of them in a blender and hit go.
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
“you are functionally a conservative” is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women’s bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as “objectively terrible” and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn’t like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn’t like a light “unpopular opinion!” conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone’s mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can’t find any adults who don’t hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, “well except for book X…”
Functionally conservative. It’s so important to have the language to express that.
Thank you for this addition!
I did a report on book banning once.
Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what’s your opinion on banning books, etc.
But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: “Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?”
Here’s the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It’s a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I’m sure most of you reading this can guess which one I’m talking about (I won’t name it or go into specifics because I don’t want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the “I read banned books” badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding “no” from the forums, and that I’d maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.
I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either “not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children” or “yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ”, but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it’s been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the “why do you think it should be banned” question, they only said, “No. I’m not explaining it. It’s too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book.”
I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my “favorite” official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was “a real downer”, the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was “pornographic”, the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it “might be hurtful to children without parents”, and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying “I don’t like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn’t have to explain why.” I also pointed out that if you can’t give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted “Smut” by Tom Lehrer:
All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I’m glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE’S a dirty old man…
Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don’t recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don’t think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.
But I still won’t advocate for banning them.
It’s so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being “pornographic”. One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with “Did they read the same play I did?” At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying “it’s pornographic” was enough. Obviously you’re not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That’s pornography! And they’re teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!
A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn’t study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she’s just received a very large insurance payment from her husband’s death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house…in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner’s association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn’t officially a thing and they can’t legally stop them from moving in, but they don’t want them there. There’s a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who’s Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she’s already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she’s pregnant, she’s planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.
It’s not pornographic. But someone didn’t want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.
It’s so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don’t want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!
You don’t have to like the book, or the author, or the topic. But if you’re advocating for banning them entirely, you’re functionally a conservative.
ALT
ALT
