Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

September 27-October 4, 2008 marks the 27th annual Banned Books Week. According to the American Library Association, which organizes the week, “BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.”

Since 1990, the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded more than 7,800 book challenges or attempted bans. The most challenged and/or restricted reading materials have been books for children. Since its beginning in 1982, Banned Books Week has served as a reminder that while not every book is intended for every reader, everyone has the right to decide for him or herself what to read, listen to, or view.

So celebrate Banned Books Week by picking up a banned book, whether it’s a classic like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or one from the ALA’s list of the top 10 banned books of 2007. Celebrate your freedom to read!

New Reference Librarian

Stefanie Bluemle joins the Tredway Library this fall as the new reference librarian and liaison to the departments of History, Philosophy and Religion.

Stefanie graduated from Augustana in 2002, with majors in English and Geology and a minor in German. She went on to earn the M.A. in English from Indiana University Bloomington (IUB), where she focused on nineteenth-century American literature. She also spent four years at IUB teaching various composition classes and nearly two years conducting research on the teaching of environmental studies in the composition classroom. In January 2007 Stefanie entered the School of Library and Information Science, also at IUB, where she completed the M.L.S. in June of 2008. Stefanie hopes that her prior experience, particularly in the classroom and in the Reference Department at IUB’s main library, will contribute to her new job at Augustana. She is excited to be back!

The Voter Dogs want you to register to vote.

T-Dog and Buddy are all dressed up for election season. Can’t you tell how excited they are? All they yap about is voting, voting, voting. So, to shut them up, keep them happy, you should register to vote, too, by October 7. T-Dog and Buddy say that you should bring two forms of I.D. to the Office of Financial Assistance on campus and Lisa Gray will get the job done for you. Now if only we could extend the franchise to dogs!

Ackermann’s Microcosm of London

I posted a few months ago about color-plate books in Special Collections, and just recently I discovered that we have one of the most famous of all color plate books. The Microcosm of  London, or, London in Miniature, was published in 1808-1810 by Rudolph Ackermann, one of the most important publishers of color-plate books.  The illustrations are by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin, two major artists of the period; Pugin did much of the architectural detail and Rowlandson contributed the figures. The Microcosm is a three volume work which measures 11″x14″.  Each section of the book contains a description of a location, such as St. Luke’s Hospital, the Stamp Office, Covent Garden, Westminster Abbey, etc. as well as at least one illustration for each location. Some of these illustrations and descriptions are of great historical interest, as the buildings no longer exist. The Microcosm presents an unrivalled picture of early 19th century London full of fascinating detail.

River Readings at Augustana

the RIVER READINGS at Augustana

 

inaugurates its new name and its first reading of the year

 

with Farah Marklevits reading from her poetry.

 

Thursday, September 18, 7:00 p.m.

Wallenberg Hall

Reception to follow in Denkmann foyer

 

Augustana alumna Farah Marklevits (’99) received an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University in 2001, and is now instructor of English at Augustana as well as Assistant Director of the Reading/Writing Center.

Her work has been collected in the book, Three New Poets: Sarah C. Harwell, Farah Marklevits, Courtney Queeney (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).

 

(see Moodle site (library/The River Readings for a sample of Farah’s poems.)

 

Farah on her work: “I often circle around and around some subject in order to express its tensions. If I write about marriage, I don’t just write about joy but also doubt. I don’t just write about my own experience but also other possible experiences, hoping I have cast a larger net than just me.”

 

Mary Karr on Farah’s work: “Farah Marklevits’s treatises on marriage take that revered and dreaded institution not only to heart, but to head, to the races and the cleaners, to hell and back. It’s knelt to and burned in effigy, inhabited, breathed into the writer’s lungs. It’s fled to and from.”

 

The River Readings 2008-2009 series:

Rick Moody, October 23

Li-Young Lee, January 29

Aryn Kyle, March 26

Marvin Bell, May 7

 

 

 

Fall term display: New Anthropology Major and Minor

 

The Fall Term display in the Tredway Library celebrates the college’s new major and minor in anthropology. On view throughout the term, the display includes examples of field notes, recordings, and photographs generated by professors Adam Kaul and Carolyn Hough in the course of their research and fieldwork in Ireland and The Gambia, as well as artifacts they collected. The display also includes descriptions of the field of anthropology, why one would want to major in anthropology, and what led Dr. Kaul and Dr. Hough to become anthropologists themselves.

 

A special feature of the display is a recording (5 tracks) of  pub sessions of traditional Irish music made by Adam Kaul in County Clare, Ireland between 2002 and 2003.