A Christmas Card!

Merry Christmas everyone! We've been very busy this holiday season, with a move and graduation. We will have more blog and vlog posts coming down the line soon, but in the meanwhile, enjoy this online Christmas card. We've had such an incredible year and are so thankful for our friends and family who helped make it so good.

Goodbye Ernest

Earlier this month, we said goodbye to a member of our little family. We are moving soon, and decided it would be best if we sold Ernie to a new family. We posted the following on the internet:

Turtle For Sale!

Ernest Hemingway is a delightful little red-eared slider. He has brightened our lives with his planking, swimming, and general joie de vivre. He is a very low-maintenance pet - all he needs is his daily turtle food and his heat lamp (and the occasional tank cleaning), and he's a happy camper. Sadly, after a lot of deliberation, we have decided our future plans do not allow us to responsibly own a turtle. So, lucky you, you have the opportunity of becoming a proud turtle parent!

We weren't expecting much to come of it, but we had two offers by the end of the day! Before we knew it, he was all packed up and gone from our lives. We will miss him, but he will forever be in our hearts.

Little Known Fact . . . Banned Books Week

Little known fact... In Franco's (Fascist) Spain, one of the criteria used in their quite extensive censuring processes was whether or not the text used non-Iberian words and phrases. Any books coming from the former colonies would be very carefully vetted for impure "Spanish" before being published in Spain. Some times these impurities would be redacted; other times they were replaced with the censors' suggestions. Some books were rejected outright because of the impurities.

I am not a fan of linguistic chauvinism. Especially not as an thinly veiled pretext to stop the free flow of ideas.

When Franco's Falangistas took power, they started in Andalusia (in the south of Spain) and worked their way north and east. The Falangistas killed Federico García Lorca on August 19, 1936. The poet, playwright, artist and all around genius's body was buried somewhere near Grand Fuente near Granada. His works were also buried behind the red-tape of censorship until 1953 when a censor-approved version of his Complete Works was released in Spain. Many of Lorca's poems that the censors would not approve could not come to light until after Franco died.

17 years of banning Lorca's work and many more of censorship is a tragedy; Killing Lorca amounts to banning forever the works that Lorca's pen would have gleaned from his truly teeming brain. The moment they shot Lorca, we ceased to be the beneficiaries of his incredible creative ability, his ability to tap into the duende; we ceased to be the beneficiaries of Lorca's social commitment when they took his life. Lorca gave voice to the oppressed and marginalized, minorities and pariahs. When we ban books and assassinate poets, we silence voices.

Federico García Lorca in 1934 (probably)

If you want to read some Lorca but don't know where to start, I have some suggestions:

Sonetos de amor oscuro (Sonnets of Dark Love) - These are haunting and beautiful.
Poeta en Nueva York - This is the poetry written during Lorca's formative trip to New York and Cuba. The Cuban poems are especially lively.
Romancero gitano - This is one of Lorca's early masterworks, in which Lorca writes ballads based in Roma lore.

Bodas de sangre - My personal favorite of his "rural trilogy" (along with Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba). You really can't go wrong with any of these plays.
El Público - By far the most surrealist work of art I have ever experienced (I have only ever read it, but I dream of seeing it live - literally dreams, while I sleep, in which I am super happy because I am finally seeing El Público live). This play really isn't for the faint of heart, but it explores really interesting issues of identity, gender and tradition.

Banned Books Week - The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is an important book to me because it humanizes economic despair in a powerful way. In its time, the book was controversial because it gave voice to a population that had been dehumanized and demonized. In other notes, I don't think I have ever liked or respected a character quite like Preacher Casy.

Bonus! Here are some useful BBW links:

The ALA's list of the Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2014:
http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks

The ALA's list of Banned and Challenged Classics:
http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics

The ALA's list of Most Challenged Books by Decade:
http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top100

Grant Sinder's great BBW comic:
http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2012/10/ban-this-book.html

This letter from Kurt Vonnegut to a book burner:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html?m=1

Banned Books Week - Persepolis

I don't think I had heard of Persepolis until a couple of years ago. Braden owns a copy of the book and the movie, so last year he finally convinced me to read it.

And it was fantastic.

Persepolis is a graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, who tells her story of growing up in Iran in the 80's, which is a very difficult time to be anything in Iran, especially a spunky young girl with an ear for American punk rock. 

The artwork in the book is so great. You feel as though you are part of Marji's world. Some of my favorite parts of the book are when she has her private conversations with God. 

Persepolis has been banned across the country (most notably in Chicago, where school officials ordered a "book recall" when a school official was sent copies of 2 pages of the book.) According to the ALA, it has been banned for gambling, offensive language, and political viewpoint. 

I don't really remember the gambling in the book... I'm sure if I reread it I would be like, "Oh yeah, gambling!" But all I can remember right now is that toward the beginning of the book they play a game of Monopoly. So there you go. 

There is some offensive language in the book, but much of it is used to show the mistreatment of women during the Revolution. Satrapi uses shocking language to help the reader understand how dangerous it was for Marji and her mom in Tehran during that time. I'm not condoning the use of foul language, but... it's reality. I would rather read some swears than read a watered-down version of history. 

And as far as political viewpoints go, I'm a firm believer in live and let live. Marji gets some pretty radical ideas in her late teenage and early twenties, but then she turns her life around, becomes an aerobics instructor, and gets married to a nice guy (sorry, spoilers!) Some radical political viewpoints are represented, but again... it's a memoir! You really can't write a memoir about living in Iran in the 80's and 90's without mentioning some radical political views. 

I really didn't know anything about the Iranian Revolution until I read this book. I still don't know much. However, I think it's important for people to get a unique perspective like this on a major world event. It's a funny, poignant memoir. You should read it! (Or at least watch the movie, which is pretty great as well.)

Banned Books Week - The Things They Carried

As a young man, I read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Excerpts from the book were required reading for a high school literature class. Some time after the assigned reading, my older brother and I were in the bookstore and I convinced him to buy it (mostly so that I could read it! Thanks Tony).

I had to read the rest of the book, because I knew that reading it would make me a better person and a better citizen. Yes, there is language in the book that I would not use in front of my mother, and yes, the book deals with violence and tragedy, but the book gave me a sense of the difficulty of dealing with trauma and helped me see what it meant to be at war. At the time, I was about to become a voting citizen in a country that was engaged in two costly and tragic wars. The book is written with (hold on for the English major cliché of the year) a level of verisimilitude that allows real empathy for the characters, while forcing the reader to acknowledge the true impossibility to know war without experiencing it. The book also deals directly with the difficulties surrounding returning from war and narrating trauma.

The challenges against The Things They Carried center mainly around its language, but for me it was that very language that made the book reliable and true and good.

This book is on my list of books that every young person should read. It will change your life.



P.S. Incidentally, I lived for about nine months in Worthington, Minnesota, where Tim O'Brien grew up . I frequently drove around lake Okabena and thought about the story "Speaking of Courage" almost every time. Driving around town became for me a mediation on death and life and pride and loss.

It's BANNED BOOKS WEEK!!!

It's that time of the year again: Banned Books Week! This is the time of the year were we celebrate those books that were audacious enough to exist! Abby and I will be posting videos and blogs all week dealing with the banned and/or challenged books that have been important to us over the years. We'll also post some links to our friends' blogs/vlogs that are also celebrating Banned Books this week.

Here's a link to The American Library Association's page about Banned Books Week. Check out their lists to see the (often surprising) books that have been banned.

The most important way to participate is to exercise and protect your right to read!

Please let us know if you would like to participate with us!

Meet the Clingers

Team Blogging: n. When two people, sometimes spouses, sometimes lovers, sometimes enemies, mostly writers (or fellows that fancy themselves writers) engage in a dual voiced online web log. See also: crappy introduction using the largely clichéd conceit of fake dictionary entries.

So here's a video of ourselves talking about ourselves. Because we are a couple of narcissists. Wok on!