Banned Books and All We Cannot See

It is a very chilly morning, 40 degrees with a wind chill advisory.  So I'll stay inside this morning, do some writing, watch the lecture videos for my New Testament class, and generally stay cozy.  While we didn't have the same kind of winter weather as much of the rest of the nation this week-end, it was still a blustery day yesterday, the kind of wind that breaks the palm trees.  During my walk yesterday morning, I hauled huge fronds out of the roads, marveling at the weight and heft of them.

Let me record some of the smaller nuggets of the week, so that I'll have them later:

--It's been one of those weeks where there's been lots of news of books being banned--the latest is Art Spiegelman's Maus.  I bought the book when it first was published, back in 1986.  It was one of the early works in a genre that would come to be called the graphic novel, and I remember lots of conversations about whether or not a graphic novel could be a serious work of art, or were we just elevating -- gasp -- comic strips?  I remember following Allison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For; even back then, I realized that a comic strip was an art form that could do far more than older generations had assumed it could.

--Maus is not being banned because it's a graphic novel.  Someone somewhere is concerned about the nudity.  I thought, there's nudity?  Nude cats, nude mice?  Is it about all the dead bodies?

--And now, because it's been banned, a whole new generation will discover this book.  Hurrah!  I used to tell my students that when I had my first book published, they all needed to go to school boards and get my book banned, and voila!  Instant best seller.  I wasn't kidding.

--In my teenage years, Gone with the Wind was a banned book, and I read it.  It wasn't banned because of its troubling approach to slavery.  No, it was rumored to have hot sex.  If hot sex was there, I never found it as a teenage reader.  I was a teenage reader who read garish romance novels, so my definition of hot sex was likely different.

--In addition to seeing outrage about books and efforts to ban them, I'm seeing people talk about Ukraine or not talk about Ukraine.  I do wonder how we will think about these days in years to come.  Will we be surprised that we didn't see the next twist in the pandemic coming?  Will we wonder how we lost our way when it came to Ukraine?  What am I not writing about now that I will look back and shake my head about?

--It was 2 years ago when I first mentioned the strange new virus in China.  This blog post ended this way:  "With this new corona virus, I hope we're not all about to find out how much worse it could be."

Thinking about other aspects of the week:

--On Friday night, we went over to friends who had invited our old neighborhood group to gather to celebrate the sale of our house.  It was delightful. I felt like I was on the set of a TV show that was being filmed in beautiful light, and that if I had watched such a TV show, I'd have been saying, "I wish I could have a life like those characters in that TV show--look at the delicious food they get to eat and the riotous fun they have with that strange card game." The night couldn't have been much more perfect.

--Yesterday I drove to Total Wine, the first time as a non-home owner.  I remembered the week-end before we put our house on the market, when I drove to The Fresh Market to get some fancy potpourri.  It was several weeks after category 4 Hurricane Laura made landfall, and I heard a news story about a small community far from the larger communities, all of them still struggling to recover.  I remember hoping that we could get our house sold before a hurricane ravages our coast--and now we have.

--We had a seminary class discussion about how our theologian of the week, James K. A. Smith, would feel about our streaming services.  I said that I thought he would not approve, because those types of services, where we can watch in our pajamas drinking the coffee that we prefer instead of what's in the percolator, don't require more of us.  I later wondered how many of my fellow students would know what a percolator is.

--It's been a good week, over all, but I do have this feeling that I'm about to get seriously behind in my seminary work.  Let me focus.