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Banned Book Week, Banned Books, Book Review, Catalyst University, censorship, Education, Fahrenheit 451, ignorance, Jammer Talks About, Joshua Jammer Smith, Libraries, literary education, Novel, Politics, Ray Bradbury, science fiction, The Illustrated Man, Video lecture, YouTube
It was recently Banned Books Week and so I thought I would do my part to cover a novel which I’m rather partial to. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel I was exposed to because one of the best teachers I’ve ever had assigned the book The Illustrated Man for class. Ray Bradbury, along with Stephen King, became an author I adored and so I picked up Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451 on her recommendation.
This novel is a science fiction masterpiece, but also one of the most misunderstood books in my opinion because everyone likes to focus on the book burning aspect of the plot rather than the deeper theme of combatting ignorance. Bradbury isn’t just writing about censorship in order to say censorship is bad. The problem with censoring books is not just that it stops people from reading a book, the problem with censorship is that it stops people from reading a book and then thinking about it and the questions it asks.
Banned Books week is more than just an opportunity to read naughty books in order to feel rebellious, it’s far more personal and political. Reading Banned Books is a chance to counter ignorance because the only way to become smarter is to admit to ignorance so that someone can help you learn more.
I’ll leave it at that and let my reader see the video for themselves and come up with their own opinion. Because, after all, that’s the point of reading in the first place.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for watching.
TO WATCH THE VIDEO FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acXZx5gzHeU
interviewed a s apparent concerned over whether his children should read Harry Potter. Spare you the details, he wasn’t comfortable. It’s no surprise to discover this given the numbers that state that Harry Potter was the most banned book in the years of 2000-2009. But this article is not about Harry Potter, though that essay shall and will be written at some glorious point. Instead I would like to turn my attention to the novel that contains this important and wonderful passage:
named because Bradbury believed that was the temperature at which paper bursts into flame, is one of the most essential texts on battling censorship and tyranny, but also of the important value of knowledge to our society.
nothing but mass produced pulp that would leave a child brain dead. While the man was entitled to these opinions, as is the reader, I might recommend you keep that last opinion to yourself when next you visit a Comic Con. The central argument of Fahrenheit 451 is dystopia, a pattern of literature that has assumed pressing concern to much of the young adult fiction that floods the market place. And while there are some good books such as the Hunger Games Series that adequately set the tone of totalitarian willpower that dominates the genre, very few have gotten to the realistic portrayal. As much as Katniss (I hope I spelled that correctly or else the Tween hordes shall come in droves) is a rebel that stands up to system that seeks to dominate her people, her very presence as a hero seeks to disrupt the very notion of dystopia. The idea of the genre is that it serves as the antithesis of Utopia, the vision of the world in which mankind has attained perfect peace in the world. This entails that every aspect of society serve as a means of crushing the individual spirit of those that exist in the society, both through psychological and physical intimidation or indoctrination. If such is the case The Hunger Games cannot be properly called a dystopian works, though if you disagree by all means please let me know.
help.” 
“Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more `literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. 
all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth? But when he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn’t something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane. Well, there we have the first thing I said we needed. Quality, texture of information.” 
grow our intellects, there are bastions of true intellectual beauty where the soul can breathe deeply, and the mind is afforded the agency to stop to ask, is everything in my reality as it should be. Some might suggest that this notion is too romantic, and that in the age of e-books and online pdfs, what is the point of finding merit in hardbound books anymore.
bachelor’s degree in English, working on a masters and I cannot for the life of me find a better quote for this new age. Or one that seems so pertinent. I’ll recite again for you:
the first person of the week to read book, as per my pre-meditation. I sat before the camera and once I was given the signal began to read. After two minutes I received the signal to wrap up and so I finished. I’ve included a link below to YouTube in case you would care to watch. I’m not sure why you would, but if you feel so inclined here it is. I’ve also added a clip from two years ago when I was able to read the book God’s Little Acre.
to the punch of actually reading first. Struggling already with three different books in mind I recognized a cart of readily prepared “offensive material” and discovered a forgotten tome. Resting in the stack was a copy of The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey. At once I had a conflict of interest. It may surprise some, but when I was younger I had some problems with actually reading. I enjoyed films such as the Pagemaster and television programs like Wishbone that encouraged reading, but Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda had a way of sneaking into my day and stealing most of my attention(though in my defense I was an avid reader of Calvin 
and Hobbes and remain so to this day). However, about the time I reached the fourth grade I discovered a book that instilled, devotion is too pale a word so intense passion for reading will have to suffice. Captain Underpants became my entire reading life. It began with the first tome followed by the attack of The Talking Toilets, The Alien Lunch Ladies, the threat of Professor Poopy Pants, and the books continued to collect until I had a respectable library. Picking the book up the morning of my reading I read the first two chapters in a heartbeat and at once I was conflicted. I chose Ulysses in the end because it seemed unlikely anyone would bring their own copy of the book, and the novel is just too important not to be read.
Captain Underpants, much like Leopold Bloom when his own book was first published, has in recent times become a figure of controversy. In fact, the slim tome that constitutes the first volume of the multi-part series is the most banned book in America as of this writing. Consider that statement for a moment. A book designed for children about a superhero who runs around in underwear has been banned more than Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man, Fahrenheit 451, and the list goes on and on.
pepper, and finally in an almost orgasmic dénouement they fill the football with helium sending it miles into the air after it is kicked. Of course Krupp manages to catch them in the act and blackmails them until George and Harold decide enough is enough and they hypnotize him with the 3-D Hypno Ring (a call back to parents who remember such ads in the back of magazines and comic books that promised opportunities of X-ray glasses and Superman Muscle kits). Taking back the power from Krupp they decide to have a little fun and convince the man that he is really Captain Underpants. Krupp bounds heroically from the school however and the boy, fearing for the man but mostly fearing for their own skins (they are kids after all, or perhaps human beings is more fair) they pursue him until they find themselves caught up in the plot of the nefarious Dr. Diaper, a dwarfish man with razor sharp teeth who plans with to blow up the moon with his Laser Matic 2000 and take over the world.
Harold’s age. As was stated before despite my near obsession with reading I was actually not much of a reader as a child. I enjoyed Calvin and Hobbes, but beyond that I found reading to be a chore. The text books I was required to pick up for school promised only cold facts and reinforcement of the idea that I was JUST a child. The Adventures of Captain Underpants appears into the narrative of my life rather mysteriously. I believe it was at the school book fair that I discovered the first volume, or perhaps it was Barnes & Noble? I can’t remember. What I do remember was the impact that it made. While I did not manage to hypnotize my teacher, I did manage to collect the second, third, fourth, and fifth books as they were published and bought by my parents who were thrilled that I was reading anything and not simply trying to beat the sixth castle on Super Mario World (for the record I have beat it, but I still cannot get past the eighth castle). In hindsight however I understand why the book at first appears to be so threatening to the established quo.
and Harold, throw parties upon their suspensions, and generally delight in punishing children. They are Roald Dahl’s evil adults, but even more broadly-drawn; like Dahl, Pilkey does not sugarcoat the unfairness of childhood or the petty tyrannies of adults on power trips. At Jerome Horwitz Elementary, drawn from Pilkey’s own childhood experience, teachers punish creativity and praise blind obedience. They force the students to obey soul-crushing rules, oppose independent thought, and feed them poisonous cafeteria food and aggressively mind-numbing lessons.
genuine terrors. Pilkey, though, is defiant in his refusal to judge the boys as anything other than good, rowdy kids ill-served by an authoritarian education system intent on medicating them into submission. Pilkey was just such a kid, and on his 
Bloom, as I have stated in a previous essay, is a carnal being and bracingly frank. Describing the “smell of his wife” while eying the young woman on the beach that he will soon enough rub-one-out to he says:
Ah! […] He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell.
down furder—it’s down deeper. It lays in de way Sollermun was raised. You take a man dat’s got on’y one or two chillen; is dat man gwyne to be waseful o’ chillen? No, he ain’t; hecan’t ‘ford it. He know how to value ‘em. But you take a man dat’s
landholders would be able to afford great quantities of slaves, they could afford the apathy toward the sadism and injustice that could occur on their plantation. Here begins a fascinating conversation about the travesty that is the slavery institution (and before anyone suggests that slavery is over and done with the World Cup of 2022 will be held in Qatar, which is a modern day slave state).