Monday, June 26, 2006

Read their lips: No more Spanish novels
Latino leaders protest a Georgia library system's decision to cut back on foreign-language works.
Last week, the library board in this fast-growing county of 700,000 people eliminated the $3,000 that had been set aside to buy Spanish-language fiction in the coming fiscal year. It offered no explanation, but the chairman said such book purchases would lead readers of other foreign languages to demand the same treatment.

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Gutted - slang book is banned
The author of what has been described as the definitive dictionary of slang is gobsmacked, gutted, throwing up bunches, honked, hipped and jacked like a cock-maggot in a sink-hole. A North Carolina school district has banned the dictionary under pressure from one of a growing number of conservative Christian groups using the internet to encourage school book bans across the US.

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ACLU sues Fla. schools over Cuba book ban
The ACLU and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association argued in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday that the school board should add materials with alternate viewpoints rather than remove books that could be offensive.

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Instead of ban, library to put gay books on top shelves
Board Trustee Bruce Skaug offered a motion to remove "The Joy of Gay Sex" from the library but it was not seconded.

"I'd rather my 9-year-old take up smoking than see the pictures in this book," Skaug said.

Friday, June 23, 2006

The chief cause of problems is solutions. -- Eric Sevareid, former CBS commentator

Monday, June 19, 2006

Towards a Definition by Rupert M. Loydell

Prose-poetry is when a person behaves differently from what is considered normal — and realises they have stepped into someone else's arms, someone who is as much in control of the world as they are.

It is a place where language is all compression and angle; tautness; a signpost to a different meaning. It is a key to a house with no doors, to a library full of books you want to read but must use to stoke the fire — for otherwise there is no warmth.



[from Sentence: a journal of prose poetics (No. 3, 2005)]