I’m a fan of the Field Notes series from the excellent Windsor, Ont. independent publishing house Biblioasis. It’s a series of occasional book-length essays, originally quite short although some instalments have been much longer, on contemporary themes by good writers. Not pointedly or overtly political, but observational and thoughtful about the kind of century we’re all having. My two favourites are On Decline by Andrew Potter, which is hilarious and despondent in the best Potter manner, and On Browsing by Jason Guriel, whom some of you will recall as the epic Newfoundland werewolf poet from my first Christmas show. On Browsing is a wistful meditation on how browsing used to mean spending an afternoon somewhere, not worrying too much about finding anything specific, and how it now means searching and clicking online.
That’s a long opening paragraph that finally gets us to the subject of this week’s podcast episode: On Book Banning, Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy, the latest instalment in the Field Notes series, which arrived in bookstores this week.
It’s by Ira Wells, who’s Academic Programs Director of Victoria College in the University of Toronto and who teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in many prestigious journals that smell of sandalwood — that was him in the Globe over the weekend — and his biography of the film director Norman Jewison was a hit, detailed and judicious in its assessment of Jewison’s work.
Ira’s also my first cousin once removed, because his grandfather Egbert Wells was my father Allen Wells’s older brother in Lethbridge. This usually comes as a surprise to people who’ve read us both, because we’re not that similar. He’s the serious, intelligent one.
His new book is a corker. This online review captures much of its spirit. Wells describes cases where books have been removed from classrooms or libraries in many places at many times, by people whose motivations were often starkly different. But it begins with two episodes that were uncomfortably close to home.
In one, Wells was invited to take part in a “library audit” at his child’s Toronto school, led by a principle who said that if it were up to her, they’d get rid of “all the old books.” In another, all books published before 2008 were removed by the armful from Peel Region school libraries west of Toronto, on the general understanding that justice was invented in 2008 and that before that year, we were mostly just pummeling one another with rocks and other tools of oppression. I paraphrase.
Here’s a paragraph from the manual Peel Region school librarians used to guide them in this work of moral uplift. For my money, the word “therefore” is being asked to carry more than its fair comic weight:
Of course, whether it’s Peel Region striking back against colonial ideologies or Florida parents who are worried about the gays — actually, not even parents in many cases, a practice Governor Ron DeSantis finally reined in — advocates of these restrictive practices often insist they’re not banning anything, because the offending books remain available somewhere, just not where they used to be. Ira’s not buying it. These are attempts to impose morality by expelling books, he argues.
We spend part of the episode simply catching up, because it’s been some time since we talked. We compare thoughts on books. Wells teaches a book by John Williams named Stoner, about a university English professor. I just read it for the first time, a couple of years ago. It does not reflect my lived experience but I love it anyway. I mentioned Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which features a scene in which the central character’s boss explains that, by the time the government started burning books, there was almost no need for it because people had stopped caring about what books say.
This is, in the end, an angry book from a writer who isn’t easily moved to anger. Please share this episode with friends if you think they’d like to hear about it.
Fun innovation: Unusually, I’ve posted video of my interview with Ira on my YouTube channel. Some guests aren’t prepared to appear on video, but Ira didn’t mind. Watching the video will give you a chance to Like, Subscribe, Share and otherwise spread word about the YouTube channel, where I’ll be posting all kinds of interesting content. It’ll also give you an extended opportunity to see where I hang my winter overcoat in the office. Oh well.
You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.
You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page when you view it on your desktop browser.
I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
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