Tag: commentary
Dear readers, there are things I have not told you. Between summer reading, preparing for our first-ever high school lock-in at my library, and then the 31 Days of Authors feature at The Hub in October, I’ve been very busy–and being busy has kept me from sharing things with you.
The most exciting of those things is that back at the beginning of September, one of our children’s librarians and I were on the radio! In honor of the release of the fifth movie, Jane Williams invited us to talk about Harry Potter and its effect on kids and their reading for her Bloomberg EDU program. It was really exciting and a lot of fun and I’m so glad we were given the chance to do this. (Also exciting: that same day I visited the feather store that supplies Big Bird’s plumage!) You can listen to the segment online [mp3]; our part starts at the 14-minute mark. I know this was two months ago, but I’d still love to hear what you think!
And less exciting but still worth telling you: earlier this month I wrote about my love for MT Anderson at The Hub. I’ve met him more times than any other author–from longer-than-expected conversations at conferences to seeing him speak at our local high school–and I’m so taken with his intelligence and thoughtfulness.
I also wrote about I Am Number Four and Pittacus Lore for The Hub, since the book was #4 on this year’s Teens’ Top Ten list. Mr. Lore (is that the correct way to address an alien? Can I call him Pittacus? Do I need to always use his full name?) also agreed to answer some questions for our readers.
This month is November, which means it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)! We’re going to be hosting a meet-up and a write-in at my library, so I spent part of my day at work today preparing a list of resources for teen writers. While we were preparing all of our press materials and web content for NaNoWriMo, I learned that there are a good number of published novels that started out as NaNo projects–and a good portion of them are for teens, so today for The Hub, I wrote about books written during NaNoWriMo that have teen appeal (including Water for Elephants!). Are you doing NaNoWriMo yourself or hosting WriMos at your library this year?
Do you have any of your own exciting news to share?
November 1, 2011
by flickr user Mai Le
All of this is written from a public library (and youth services) perspective. Academic librarians, special librarians, archivists, and other library folk may see things differently.
A couple weeks ago Ashley Barrineau posted on yalsa-bk about a new website called Story Snoops, which “offers children’s book reviews from a parent’s perspective” (although in their FAQ, they clarify that they do not advocate censorship: “Our website is a resource for parents to seek out or avoid specific content in a book, and to facilitate valuable discussions with their children.”). They also offer book lists and readalikes.
I’m happy to have a new tool to use in helping young readers and their parents find books (and another tool to teach them how to find books), but I have to admit that I’m really bummed that Story Snoops wasn’t created by librarians. This is what we do–so why aren’t we doing it? (I suppose the KDL What’s Next Database comes close, but it isn’t as user-friendly as Story Snoops is.)
I’m not trying to say that non-librarians shouldn’t be allowed to talk about books, write reviews, create book lists, or suggest books to one another. And, of course, it’s not just librarians who organize information. But I do think we need to be librarians more obviously as a way of keeping libraries on people’s minds and reinforcing our image as specialists.
I want to see librarians creating user-friendly tools that help people fulfill their information needs generally (and in this case, provide readers’ advisory specifically). Tools like this (and BookLamp) not being created by librarians is fodder for the “why do we still need libraries” people–not that I think these tools actually threaten libraries, just that we need to keep ourselves in people’s mind as experts. We need to be librarians outside our libraries, and librarians to everyone, not just to our patrons. Libraries are local, but the Internet is worldwide. We need to be visible online because it provides us with an opportunity to be library advocates to nonusers.
I don’t have firsthand, lived experience with with what libraries were like before the Internet (or before computers, even), but I get the sense that we were specialists. We were the ones who understood the more-complicated-than-you’d-think principles of categorizing and classifying information. We were the ones who understood how to find difficult-to-find information. We were the ones who were experts in literature and in finding the right book for a reader.
But now there is tagging and crowdsourcing and Google and “everything” being online and other sources for finding books. And none of that is bad because it puts people in touch with the information that they want and empowers information seekers who know how to use those tools. But does it erode our claim at being specialists (and professionals)? If Google can put “everything” at your fingertips and keyword searches make finding what you’re looking for so simple and a team of dedicated, book-loving moms create a tool that helps you find your new book, what are librarians still around for?
I guess I’d argue that we’re still specialists because we have an eye for information that automated tools don’t. We are the ones who help you sort through the dross Google turns up when you search for something. We are the ones who show you how to go beyond keyword searching when you can’t find what you’re looking for. We are the ones who can say, “Yes, this is a great resource, but look, this tool recommends Because I am Furniture for tweens, and maybe that’s not the best suggestion.”
But are we doing these things in a noticeable way? We are for individual patrons when we help them, and we are when we talk to each other about these issues, but what are we doing to show non-library goers that librarians are worth having?
We need to take this specialized expertise, this domain knowledge, outside of the library. We need to harness what we know to create tools that non-library goers will use. By being specialists publicly, we prove the worth of libraries and librarians.
Why aren’t Story Snoops and BookLamp created by librarians? Do librarians lack the technical knowledge to build tools like this? Or is the intersection of “literature specialists” and “tech specialists” too small? Are we unwilling to do library-related things when we’re not on the clock at work? What’s keeping us from putting librarians and libraries in people’s faces?
We need to identify and overcome whatever hurdles there are so we can prove our worth and defend ourselves as specialists. We need to be librarians–and specialists–more obviously, more publicly.
September 7, 2011
Over the last two months, I’ve been working on a guest post for In the Library with the Lead Pipe about YA lit. It’s been a great experience (I’ve never had an editor before!), and I’m really proud of the final version of the article, “Are You Reading YA Lit? You Should Be.” Here’s the intro:
I’m a young adult librarian, but I didn’t read young adult lit when I was a teen myself. I was a precocious reader and desperate to be treated like a grown-up, so I read books for grown-ups because anything else was just too puerile for someone as obviously mature and sophisticated as I. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties, working on my MLS and realizing that I wanted to work with teens, that I discovered there was a huge, glorious world of excellent YA lit that I had completely missed. Now it’s almost all I read.
Outside of YA circles, I sometimes find myself having to justify my tastes to others. Yes, a lot of why I read YA lit is because I work with teens. But even if I were to switch careers, I would continue reading YA lit because it’s good. That’s not to say adult lit isn’t, of course, but YA lit has a freshness that I really enjoy, and it rarely gets bogged down in its own self-importance. YA lit is also mostly free of the melancholy, nostalgia, and yearning for the innocent days of childhood that I find so tedious in adult literary fiction.
I think the reason some grown-ups look down their noses at YA lit is because they haven’t read any of it recently, so they don’t know how good it’s gotten—or how different it is from what they might imagine it to be. While there are still books that deal with Big Issues, the “problem novel” of the ’70s and ’80s has been eclipsed by more slice-of-life contemporary fiction, romances, fantasies, mysteries, sci-fi stories, and genre-blending tales that defy categorization. For as much attention as the Twilight series has gotten, it’s certainly not all that’s out there.
I talk about what YA lit is and isn’t, how YA lit is similar to and different from adult lit, recent trends in YA lit, and grown-ups reading YA lit (plus some suggestions for adults who want to give YA lit a try). It’s kind of long, but I hope you’ll read it!
I want to say again how awesome it was to work with Lead Piper Brett Bonfield and my guest editors Candice Mack and Nancy Hinkel. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to write this piece with their insightful input and to be an ambassador for YA lit to a wider audience.
July 27, 2011
As part of its Privacy Revolution efforts, ALA declared last week Choose Privacy Week, with this year’s efforts focusing on youth and privacy. If you dig into the websites and publicity around the event, you’ll find that this initiative is about creating dialogue about privacy in our society today, but I didn’t see a lot of talk on blogs or Twitter this week about privacy–at least, not more than I usually do. That’s especially disappointing because I think that in a lot of cases, you can’t choose privacy, as ALA exhorts us to do. (more…)
May 9, 2011
Answer: books they want to read.
Now here’s the longer version.
A couple of days ago I had a really frustrating interaction with someone. Part of the frustration came from me not being in a position to debate the merit of this person’s statement, but part of it also comes from her opinion being a widely held one among people who don’t actually work with kids and books that I suspect other librarians fight on a regular basis as well.
Let me give you some context. Our local middle school has a Battle of the Books in which each English class competes against each other. Students are given a list of about 100 “recommended reading” books and are encouraged to read books from the list throughout the year. Then, as the school year is winding down, each class picks who will be on their official team, and those teams compete against one another in a trivia contest that draws facts from the books on the list. Whichever team answers the most questions correctly wins.
So I was having a conversation with this woman about middle schoolers in our community, and she said that she just loves the Battle of the Books because it gets kids reading “good books instead of that Clique stuff1,” and at that point it was hard for me to not start a fight, because–and I think she’d find this shocking and appalling, and might think I’m a Bad Librarian because of it–I’d much rather see a middle school kid reading a Clique book or Twilight or a graphic novel for fun than see the same student struggling through a Classic Novel of Great Merit, hating every minute of it.
Allow me a few parameters and caveats. This isn’t really about what books get assigned in English classes. I’d really like to see more contemporary titles with similar themes or literary devices as the “classics,” but I understand that fitting things into the curriculum (or changing the curriculum) and developing lesson plans from scratch can be hard, and schools are under a lot more pressure to provide books that strengthen kids’ moral fiber or introduce them to our “universal” culture or indoctrinate students into the “right” kind of thinking (or at least don’t lead them astray with the “wrong” kind of thinking) or whatever.
Furthermore, I don’t have a problem with the Battle of the Books program itself. I mean, libraries all around the country do something similar, and it can be a cool way to get kids excited about reading and about books. That’s great! We need to find more ways of doing that. An essential component of lifelong reading is getting kids to like reading. (I suppose you could argue that more is not always better, as British authors are doing right now around the whole “kids should be reading 50 books a year” thing, but again, there’s a difference between what schools do and what public libraries do.) And the Battle of the Books book list isn’t just classics: the lists also include Newbery winners, other award winners, bestsellers, and even actually popular books (like The Lightning Thief and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). But it is definitely a list that is intended to highlight Good Literature and exclude “trashy” reads.
So really, it’s not the Battle of the Books or the books themselves, and you can, of course, make an argument for having classics in the YA section. It’s not the classics that I have a problem with–it’s giving kids choice. What’s really killing me here is this woman’s assumption that classics = good and popular books = bad, regardless of any other circumstances surrounding the situation. Later in the conversation, the recent smallish expansion of our teen area came up, and this woman responded, “Oh, good! They really need so much room to study,” completely missing the point that the books in our teen area are mostly fiction and that the teen area has also been evolving to become more of a space for hanging out than a space for tutoring. It was just really clear to me that she sees libraries as books + studying and that kids should only be reading Books of Great Merit.
Kids will have assigned reading in school, and that’s fine. But they also need to have choice in what they read, and those choice needs to not be policed for literary merit. That kids’ recreational reading choices are scrutinized by adults who think they know better is infuriating. No one lectures adults on how they should stop reading Dan Brown or put down the latest John Grisham book and instead pick up War and Peace or Ulysses or something. No one’s going to look at an adult who comes home from a long day at work and plops down to watch American Idol and say, “Are you really watching that trash again? You should be watching a documentary,” but man, kids go to class for seven or eight hours a day, have sports practice or clubs or music lessons or part-time jobs after that, go home and do their homework–and then are expected to read books that will make them better people instead of books that they want to read? You’ve got to be kidding me.
LizB–once again–has it right: the 50 books every child should read starts with #1: a book of their choice, continues with #2: a book of their choice, and keeps going that way. That’s how you build lifelong readers, how you get people to for fun–you let them read things that interest them. And as the British authors who stood up for kids and their reading pointed out, requiring kids to read 50 books a year while simultaneously cutting library funding and closing libraries is also crap. Kids need choice in their reading materials, and they need libraries to have that choice.
1 The Clique books seem to be the go-to “these books are bad” books in my community–I’m not really sure why it’s The Clique in particular and not Gossip Girl or Pretty Little Liars or The A-List or any other of the many series like that in my library that are very popular.
March 24, 2011
The Enfield (CT) Public Library
You may have heard that the Enfield (CT) Public Library was ordered on the 19th by the mayor to cancel their screening of Michael Moore’s documentary “Sicko” planned for the 21st after residents complained about the subject matter. Other residents and representatives cried censorship, and the Connecticut Library Association responded that it “deplore[d] the cancellation of the showing of the film.”
As libraries and librarians around Connecticut suggested “solidarity screenings” of the film, gaining some supporters within a few days (which also brought up an interesting point on securing movie licensing rights), word also broke that the entire film series program had been halted and the director at Enfield commanded not to speak to the media.
But then yesterday, Enfield town officials backed down and will allow “Sicko” to be screened (although they want the library to wait for a while to let the controversy die down). The gag order on the director has also been lifted. Library Journal has more, and the CLA has been collecting links to news stories throughout.
The library had previously shown “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 9/11″ without any trouble; it was apparently because the House of Representatives had recently voted to repeal President Obama’s health care plan that “Sicko” was considered somehow inappropriate or unbalanced. But I think that while requiring balance sounds good on the surface, that can be hard at times:
Finding balance is not always easy, [Enfield Library Director Henry Dutcher] said. Sometimes, there are no obvious counterpoints to offer. For example, he said the library once hosted a presentation about deep-sea fishing, and he said he didn’t know what would constitute balance in that case.
He said he has considered several films to provide balance to “Sicko.” One of the titles is called “Sick and Sicker” and is a documentary critical of the health care reform law promoted last year by Obama. Although both films focus on health care, Dutcher said it isn’t clear whether they represent a balanced look at the same issue. (source)
I know that lots of libraries have collection development policies stating that the library seeks to collect materials representing all viewpoints, but with what might as well be an infinite number of issues, topics, viewpoints, and sides to a discussion and only a limited number of dollars to spend on materials, how close to that vision for a balanced collection can we really get? And how do you balance topics like deep-sea fishing?
While I don’t have firsthand knowledge of what happened in Enfield, I don’t think that actually wanting to see balance was at the heart of the original complaint. From the resident who originally objected to the screening of “Sicko”:
“If we do want to see differing points of view, I would suggest films like ‘The Passion of the Christ’ and other controversial movies would also be filmed or shown and advertised for viewing in a public venue like that on the tax dollar,” Fealy said.
It’s not that this resident has a problem with the library somehow trampling on his views on healthcare; he wants an ultraviolent Christian propaganda film to somehow “balance” a Michael Moore documentary on health care. Moore definitely has an agenda with his movies, but “balancing” it with “The Passion of the Christ” doesn’t seem like any kind of real balance to me.
No one ever sees these explosions of community discord and media coverage coming, and I wonder what the library administration and staff at Enfield will be doing differently from here on out to achieve “balance.” I’m just really glad that freedom of information and expression won out over censorship this time.
January 26, 2011
The New York Times recently ran an article about a private company being contracted to run public libraries. The company is LSSI (Library Systems and Services), and they’re now running 14 library systems with 63 different locations in California, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas–which, if you measure library system size by branches, now makes them the fifth-largest library system in the country. The idea is that a private company is better suited to cutting costs and increasing efficiency, but I think ceding control of our public libraries to private companies will destroy exactly what is good about public libraries.
Alicia of The LibrariYAn does a great job of identifying a lot of the problems with the rationale behind letting a private company take control of a public library and the effects of doing so (especially her arguments about how “cutting costs” often means cutting salaries and benefits and excluding union workers or turning to volunteers instead of trained professionals), but I wanted to contribute some more thoughts.
I think what makes me angriest is what Frank A. Pezzanite, the CEO of LSSI, thinks about libraries and librarians:
“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
[...]
“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”
You know what, Mr. Pezzanite, screw you. I’m sure that there are librarians who have been coasting throughout their careers, but especially now in a time of budget cuts and there being more MLS grads than there are new positions, the librarians I know are not doing nothing. It’s true that because of the high cost of firing someone and replacing them, it can be difficult to get rid of less productive employees at a non-profit organization, but that’s still no reason to insult an entire profession. And New York Times, you’re really not helping dispel the notion that libraries are full of old people who are resistant to change by showing a picture of an elderly librarian who “is opposed to the outsourcing plan.”
Furthermore, Mr. Pezzanite’s snide dismissal of public libraries as “this American flag, apple pie thing” makes me very angry. The library isn’t a sacred organization, but in many communities, it’s the only place the least fortunate have to go to be put in touch with resources they desperately need. As more and more government services are moved exclusively online (especially things like filing for unemployment) and employers begin accepting applications online only, it’s even more important that public libraries are able to offer free computer and Internet access to those who can’t get online anywhere else. (Remember that 67% of public libraries are the only place in the community that offer free computer and Internet access and that 90% of public libraries offer technology training.)
Libraries are also where parents can take their children for storytimes that improve their literacy skills, where families can borrow DVDs for free, where people can attend classes that teach them new skills or help them develop their hobbies, where anyone can get book recommendations or have their questions answered, where works of fiction and non-fiction representing what humanity has created and discovered are kept, and where resources are shared. None of this is done because it turns a profit, and in fact, the people who most need libraries are the ones who are least able to afford those services elsewhere. A for-profit company is going to be much less concerned with meeting the needs of the community that supports it and much more concerned with operating as cheaply as possible, regardless of what services they have to cut or the quality of those services and materials. In some ways, this echoes the preference for “male” values (competition, success, profit) over “female” values (helping others, sharing, building community) that I’ve talked about before.
I also think that one of the greatest strengths of the public library is that it is local. The management tree never goes past the city or county or maybe state that funds the library, so libraries are able to reflect their communities. They develop digital collections of photographs reflecting their communities over the years, they connect people to local agencies, they plan programs that make use of local people’s expertise, and the really good ones buy locally (even when it’s more expensive than getting materials from huge corporate vendors) and invest the tax dollars they receive back into their communities. I have a hard time believing that a for-profit company based in a state all the way across the country would be as interested in knowing, serving, and supporting the local community.
We need to consider who wins and who loses when we turn control of our public libraries over to private, for-profit companies. Staff members suffer in reduced wages and a limit on their ability to form unions. Patrons suffer because cutting costs means cutting services or materials or requiring payment for things that were formerly free. The entire local community suffers because the library is less likely to serve local interests or invest money back in the community. The only party who wins is the for-profit company. Rather than turning public libraries over to for-profit companies, libraries should find ways to cut costs and increase efficiency themselves or, if they need outside help, hire consultants while still maintaining their autonomy. And in fact, that’d be an even better outcome in terms of costs vs. expenditures because however much the local government spends on the contract with LSSI, LSSI is going to be spending less than that to run the library so they can turn a profit. Keeping the library public means keeping that would-be profit to a private company invested in the community.
This isn’t some sort of American flag apple pie garbage–it’s preserving our local culture, our identity as citizens instead of consumers, and our cultural repositories from the dehumanizing crush of a capitalism that favors profits over people and efficiency over assistance. Public libraries need to remain publicly funded and publicly managed if they’re going to continue to do the good they do in our communities.
September 29, 2010
A few weeks ago there was some discussion around “The Kids’ Books Are All Right”, a New York Times article by Pamela Paul about adults reading youth lit. I’ve been thinking about the article a lot, especially as I’ve been explaining my excitement about Mockingjay to my grownup friends, and today I noticed the woman next to me at the gym was reading a Harry Potter book.
In the article, Paul writes that it’s not just twenty-somethings who grew up with Harry Potter and are continuing to read YA as they move into adulthood; she interviews and discusses middle aged readers who were just as eager to get their hands on a copy of Mockingjay as teens were and notes that
[a]ccording to surveys by the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-old women and 24 percent of same-aged men say most of the books they buy are classified as young adult. The percentage of female Y.A. fans between the ages of 25 and 44 has nearly doubled in the past four years. Today, nearly one in five 35- to 44-year-olds say they most frequently buy Y.A. books. For themselves.
I think that this adult interest in YA books is largely just because of the increasing quality of YA books. The problem novels of the 70s certainly had their place, but YA lit has grown and gotten so much more complex and interesting in the last few decades. It’s honestly just good literature now, not just good… for kids.
But since YA lit isn’t written for adults, it’s going to seem different to grownups giving it a try. I think a few quotations from people Paul interviewed really illustrate this:
“A lot of adult literature is all art and no heart,” Foreman, who is currently working on a book about British involvement in the American Civil War, said. “But good Y.A. is like good television. There’s a freshness there; it’s engaging. Y.A. authors aren’t writing about middle-aged anomie or disappointed people.”
[. . .]
Y.A. may also pierce the jadedness and cynicism of our adult selves. “When you talk to people about the books that have meant a lot to them, it’s usually books they read when they were younger because the books have this wonder in everyday things that isn’t bogged down by excessively grown-up concerns or the need to be subtle or coy,” explained Jesse Sheidlower, an editor at large at the Oxford English Dictionary and member of Kidlit. “When you read these books as an adult, it tends to bring back the sense of newness and discovery that I tend not to get from adult fiction.”
“There’s an immediacy in the prose,” said Darcey Steinke, a novelist who says she reads about one Y.A. book a month (recent favorites: “Elsewhere,” by Gabrielle Zevin — “better than ‘The Lovely Bones’ — and anything by Francesca Lia Block of “Weetzie Bat” fame). “I like the way adolescent emotions are rawer, less canned.”
When we’re recommending YA books to grownups, we can highlight that freshness, that engaging immediacy. We can also mention that a lot of YA novels aren’t too long and so might be good beach reads or vacation reads (I recommended the Luxe series to my hair stylist, who was leaving on vacation and had read The Host wanted something with romance and intrigue that wasn’t too trashy, and she loved them). There are lengthy, complex YA novels to be sure, but quicker stuff might be just the gateway drug some adult needs. Of course, grownups who are looking for deep, character-driven tales of midlife misery and regret might not be able to find much in YA, but the lure of a high-action story or an intriguing fantasy world or a dystopian sci-fi tale that critiques society might convince other adult readers to give YA a shot.
And while YA lit often has a different flavor than a lot of adult lit, in some ways recommending YA books to adults is just like recommending adult books to adults–we still need to find out what they’re looking for and then pair them with a book that delivers that. My husband picked up The Hunger Games when I couldn’t stop talking about it and then read Catching Fire when I brought it home and has my copy of Mockingjay right now. But as much as I’ve gone on about how much I was surprised to enjoy the Luxe series, he’s just not interested. I asked him about what would make him pick up a YA book I was reading, and he said that he needs to be interested in the genre or the setting. He also mentioned format: he’s planning to read The Invention of Hugo Cabret because he’s intrigued by the automaton, but also because he’s a graphic novel enthusiast and is interested in the way the illustrations and text work together in Selznick’s book. (He’s also been more interested in reading it since he found out Scorsese’s directing the film adaptation.) While Casey might appreciate that he can finish a YA book more quickly than an adult book, the content of the story still needs to be interesting to him. In general I think this might make realistic fiction a little harder to sell and fantasy and sci-fi a little easier to get adult readers to try.
What really surprised me in our conversation, though, was that Casey said he doesn’t expect to be able to identify with the protagonist and often actually expects to feel frustrated with him or her. I thought this was especially interesting because it seems like identifying strongly with a character is what drives teen’s love or hate for a book. But since YA lit isn’t written for grownups, while they’re going to appreciate and love some of the same things that teen readers do, they’re also not going to like other parts as much or in the same way.
Since there are still tons of adults who still don’t read YA lit (adult services librarians included!), it seems like there needs to be someone acting as an ambassador from the world of YA lit to introduce an adult to it. It might be a relative or spouse or friend who’s a YA librarian, a friend who’s already discovered YA lit, or even a grownup’s own teenage child who recommends something she particularly likes. For those of us who are YA librarians or booksellers or high school English teachers, we can be those ambassadors. We can be the ones who talk up the great new book we read and pass it on not just to teen readers but to the grownups in our lives as well. Because YA lit really is legitimately good lit, not just kiddie lit. We know that, and it’s about time everyone else does, too.
September 6, 2010
This post has been edited to correct the ages of the characters in the first Harry Potter book. They were 11 when the books began, not 12.
A couple of weeks ago Miley Cyrus was named as the lead in the movie adaptation of Lisa McMann’s thriller WAKE. Discussion on the listservs was mixed: it sounds like there are plenty of people who aren’t Miley fans, but a few people pointed out that getting someone with that kind of star power would get more people to see the movie, which is great.
But what I really like about this casting decision is that Miley is 17, just like Janie, the protagonist of WAKE. It seems like a lot of the time teens in movies and television are played by twentysomethings, or 12-year-old characters become 16 year olds when a book gets adapted for television. Using movie release dates and actors’ birth years from IMDb to find some examples:
- In the first Percy Jackson book, Percy is 12. In the movie, he’s 15, and he’s played by an 18-year-old actor, Logan Lerman.
- In YOUTH IN REVOLT, Nick Twisp is 14. In the movie, he’s 16, and he’s played by 21-year-old Michael Cera.
- In Glee, the characters are in high school, but the actors playing those characters range in age from 19 (Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt) to 27 (Cory Monteith and Mark Salling, who play Finn and Puck respectively)–just four years younger than Matthew Morrison, who plays their teacher and coach.
And those are just a few examples. A movie adaptation of Ally Carter’s HEIST SOCIETY is in development now with a scheduled 2012 release date. In April, Carter wrote a blog post about the characters being aged up from their teens to their early twenties for the movie adaptation. Specifically, she wrote about why she was okay with that change. Her reasons ranged from simple ones (money, a bigger audience) to more complex ones (Kat will have been gone longer and will be rustier, an older character being seen as a little girl hurts her more), but Angie Manfredi disagreed on Twitter. In a short conversation (1 2 3 4 5) we touched on how this is disrespectful to teens because it tells them that they, as teens, aren’t interesting, and it means that movies teens watch that are supposedly directed at them don’t portray characters who are like them. Just as teens deserve literature that reflects their lives, the movie adaptations of that literature should reflect teens and their stories and abilities and fears and triumphs.
There are some movies that get it right. Weirdly enough, the Twilight actors are pretty close in age to their characters (Kristen Stewart was 18 when the first movie came out and Taylor Lautner was 17 when New Moon was released; Robert Pattinson was 22 in the first movie instead of 17, but I guess you can argue you want an older actor to play a character who’s actually a few hundred years old?).
But I think the Harry Potter franchise is the best example: Harry and Ron and Hermione were all 11 in the first book; Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson were all 12 when the first movie was released (so they were probably 11 when the movie was filmed). They’ve gotten a little older now (Radcliffe will be 22 when the final movie with an 18-year-old Harry comes out), but that’s just because you can’t crank out eight movies of that magnitude in seven years. Through that series (both the seven books and the eight movies) we get to see Harry mature from a kid to an adult, something that we wouldn’t have seen in a movie that started out with an older character or an older actor. Teens deserve depictions of teen characters that show that kind of reflection of who they are and who they’re becoming–both in literature and movies based on that literature.
July 2, 2010
The theme for the second hour of today’s Diane Rehm Show was “the changing role of public libraries.” Diane’s guests included John Hill, the president of the DC Public Libraries Board of Trustees and the CEO of the Federal City Council; Sari Feldman, the executive director of the Cuyahoga (OH) County Public Library and the president of PLA; and Camila Alire, the president of ALA. I was so glad that public libraries were getting some national PR and was really looking forward to hearing about what the leaders of our associations think about where public libraries should be going–but I was a little bit disappointed.
The discussion centered a lot around the financial troubles public libraries are facing and the employment-related services public libraries are providing like resume reviews, career counseling, and online application assistance. There were also questions from listeners about using more volunteers, what the Kindle is doing to libraries, and why the library provides DVDs, but most of the callers were vocally pro-library and it was only at the end that we heard from a few more people who had challenges they wanted the panel to answer (like the guy asking about the library providing DVDs as entertainment).
While I’m happy that listeners of the show are now thinking about public libraries, I don’t think the panelists did a very good job of describing what libraries are like now and how that’s changed recently, why libraries should continue to exist, and what library lovers can do to support their libraries.
From what Diane said, it seemed like she supported public libraries in principle but hadn’t actually been to one in ages. And I’m guessing plenty of listeners are unfamiliar with how libraries have changed since they used their school or university libraries, though they may have residual positive feelings from those times. But things have changed substantially in the last ten to twenty years with the advent of computers and the Internet. Gone are the days when you called the reference desk of your local public library when you couldn’t remember who played the supporting role in a movie and needed to settle an argument with your friend–now we have Wikipedia and IMDb. Gone are the days when the librarian was the only one who could really use the card catalog to find the specific book you wanted–now we have keyword searching and the ability to order books from other branches through the online catalog. Gone are the days when if you were moving to a new city you went to the library to research school districts–now we have Google and school corporation websites.
But so many people who used the library for those things and now see the Internet as filling those information needs instead think that means that libraries are now completely irrelevant. They don’t see that libraries have changed with the times and are meeting new information needs (like teaching tech literacy) and meeting the same information needs for different people (like those who don’t have Internet connections or computers at home and are now shut out of things like job applications, unemployment benefit applications, even gun permit renewals).
One of the major evolutions in how libraries see themselves is the movement toward being community centers, as a “third place.” Libraries are also places where teens receive support in developing their 40 Developmental Assets, where very young children gain pre-literacy skills, where young people and older people can work together in intergenerational activities and learn from each other. And as computers become more pervasive and more necessary in day-to-day life, it falls to libraries to help people learn to use emerging technology, especially among older people or underprivileged people. The library is so much more than books and services that have been supplanted by the Internet, but not everyone knows that–especially the people who no longer use their libraries or who receive crummy library service from individual libraries that aren’t changing with the times.
The panelists on the show mentioned some of these things briefly, but there was no time at which they addressed the big changes that libraries have gone through in how they see themselves and what they provide. There was no unified message, no vision of the past and the present and a hope for the future. I don’t think they made a good case (outside of their listing of job search assistance libraries provide) for why the library is relevant today.
And really, I think that’s a problem that a lot of librarians have. I think we get really wrapped up in our own vision of the library, our own values, our own knowledge of our changing circ stats and gate counts that we don’t do a good job of seeing what it is that other people want or value and using that framework to explain why the library matters.
This was most evident when the caller asked why the government-funded library was providing DVDs and entertainment and not just informational books. The panelists talked about how their circulation statistics include lots of print materials still and how it’s so great that you don’t have to pay to rend DVDs when you can just get them for free at your library! That’s not what that guy wanted to hear. He wanted to know why entertainment needs are important enough for the government to support them, why the library is about more than just books. And no one answered that, and there’s no way he became a convert and a library supporter from that conversation.
That’s not to say that it’s not awesome that you can borrow movies for free–it is–it’s just that it’s not what that guy needed to hear right then for him to understand libraries as relevant or worth his tax dollars. Business men want to hear about the research services libraries can provide that are relevant to them. Parents want to hear about what the library can offer them and their children. People who aren’t big on reading but are huge knitters want to hear that the library offers knitting classes or at the very least meeting rooms where knitting clubs can meet. When we’re trying to make a case for the library, we need to understand the values of the person or people we’re trying to convince and show them why the library’s mission and work in the community fits within those values.
The other thing about the program that I found most disappointing was that while there were many times the panelists asked listeners who loved their libraries to be library advocates, there was very little concrete instruction on how to do that. It’s true that people need to do more than just love the library if the library is facing budget cuts or branch closings, and I’m glad the panelists were encouraging action–they just didn’t actually provide any examples of action.
If you love libraries, you can write letters to your legislators to let them know what the library has done for you to improve your life. If you love libraries, you can attend rallies to show your support for them. If you love libraries, you can make a donation of your time, your books, or your money to your library. If you love libraries and you have some social standing in your community, you can talk to people in power or raise money for the library. And within specific communities, there are more specialized needs that libraries have that they should publicize to their supporters. People within the library world need to be specific in telling supporters within the community what they can do to help, because those supporters don’t know the system the way we do and don’t necessarily see where they can help.
I was really happy that public libraries got national attention on this show and that the panelists did such a good job of talking about how the job search services that libraries provide make libraries relevant. But I really would have liked to see a more comprehensive message about how libraries have changed in the last few decades, why libraries are still relevant today, and what library lovers can do for their libraries. I suppose it’s up to individual librarians and libraries to become better advocates for themselves and to spread the word and cultivate support.
June 28, 2010
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