Gobsmacked

Much has been made lately of Sarah Palin’s attempt to ban books when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, though I think more should be made of the fact that the local librarian was having none of it. (Speaking of acts of individual courage. Time says “The librarian was aghast.”) The currently-circulating list of books Palin supposedly banned is erroneous because the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons Baker, stopped her in her tracks.

(Side note: You can read the much-circulated e-mail from Anne Kilkenny about Sarah Palin here at Washington Note, where Steve Clemons has also pasted this interesting photo of the Wasilla Public Library circa 1950.)

(Second side note: I’ve seen Wasila, Wasilla, Wassila, all from good sources. Google goes with Wasilla.)

I must say that I have developed a great deal of admiration for librarians over the last eight years. I remember how they resisted the Bush administrations attempts to secretly pry into citizens’ library records by using National Security Letters.

Anyhoo, from my husband’s favorite newspaper, The Guardian, apparently the U.S. is not the only nation given to censorship, Poet’s rhyming riposte leaves Mrs Schofield ‘gobsmacked’:

“Today I am going to kill something,” says the unnamed protagonist of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure. “Anything. / I have had enough of being ignored and today / I am going to play God.”

Duffy, one of Britain’s most admired poets, might have been tempted this week to feel the same way, following the news that the exam board AQA had ordered schools to remove from its GCSE curriculum an anthology containing the poem because it supposedly glorified knife crime.

Happily, in a move that may suggest she did not intend her work to be taken literally, Duffy has chosen the more measured response of penning a poem in reply. The verse, entitled Mrs Schofield’s GCSE and published here for the first time, makes reference to acts of violence in Shakespeare’s plays: Othello killing Desdemona, Macbeth’s dagger delusions, Tybalt’s stabbing in Romeo and Juliet.

“What it seems to me to be saying is that Shakespeare – the greatest writer – some of his stuff is a bit dangerous [too],” Duffy’s literary agent Peter Strauss said yesterday. “It’s saying, look at what’s been written previously before you criticise this.”

He described the decision to remove Education for Leisure from the syllabus as “absolutely ridiculous. It’s an anti-violence poem. It is a plea for education rather than violence.”

…

The Mrs Schofield of the poem refers to Pat Schofield, an external examiner at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire, who complained about the poem and who welcomed the decision to ban a poem she described as “absolutely horrendous”.

…

Contacted by the Guardian last night, Schofield said she felt “a bit gobsmacked” to have a verse named after her. She described the poem as “a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that’s me”.

You can read the riposting poem at the link.

Addendum: More on the subject of libraries via Lambert at Corrente, this McClatchy article on libary use as an economic indicator:

Check it out.

That’s what users of public libraries are doing these days. In an effort to stay entertained and informed without breaking the family budget, people across the country increasingly are taking advantage of the best deal in town: everything � books, CDs, DVDs � is free.

“That’s pretty typical,” Stanislaus County Librarian Vanessa Czopek said. “When the economy goes in a slump, libraries see more usage.”

The American Library Association says use nationwide was 10 percent higher in the past year than during the 2001 economic downturn, when it tracked a similar spike in visits and circulation. Libraries recorded 1.3 billion visits and patrons checked out more than 2 billion items from April 2007 to April 2008

Addendum the Second: Via Heraclitean Fire, Scottish poet Rob MacKenzie says it is high time the authorities clamped down on gangs of poetry-reading teens:

It�s good to see the authorities finally getting to the root of the problem of street violence. For years it�s been obvious that studious poetry-reading youths have been terrorising our streets, and how it�s taken so long for the authorities to make the connection between poetry readers and knife crime is beyond me. In almost every knife-related murder in London this year, a copy of Carol Ann Duffy�s poem has been framed on the offender�s bedroom wall. In one case, a recording of the poem being recited backwards was found, with the words, �Kill for Satan� clearly audible around 1.12min. One knife-wielding teenager told me, �It�s all Duffy�s fault. Before I read that poem, I liked to play Risk every evening with my friends. And look at me now! I�m out on the street every night with my bread knife and a copy of Mean Time in my jacket pocket. My best friend, who�s just sawed a goldfish in half, he�s into Wallace Stevens, and he just can�t stop reading Harmonium when he�s not beating up innocent passers-by.�

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