I am a little late to the show this year but on December 21st the infamously fiery Gävlebocken (Gävle Goat) was once again burnt to smithereens. As per tradition I scraped a live webcam of the blaze and set it to some holiday music for your viewing enjoyment/horror.
Another year has gone by and it is Banned Books Week once more. I have been listing the top 10 most challenged books annually on my blog since 2009. I’d be remiss not to do it again. 2012 saw an increase in challenged books. Last year there were 464 challenges reported by the Office for Intellectual Freedom (compared to 326 in 2011 and 348 in 2010). You can see the top 10 list below.
Click these links if you are looking for the top 10 lists for previous years with easy links to Amazon: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001.
Additionally, in 2010, I put together a list of the 100 Most Banned & Challenged Books Of The Decade by aggregating several lists from the American Library Association.
Well it looks like my prediction was wrong. Last night, just before midnight, the Gävle Goat went down in flames. Much like last year’s video, I scraped a live webcam of the blaze and set it to some holiday music for your viewing enjoyment/horror.
NYMag has a great interview with Eje Berglund, the representative and chairman of the committee that oversees the Gävle Goat.
The 2012 Gävle Goat was almost knocked down before it even got up. According to Swedish newspaper The Local, private security guards are keeping an eye on this years Gävle Goat after arsonists nearly burnt it down on Saturday, before it was even inaugurated. The goat’s leg was ignited briefly before being extinguished by a heroic passer-by. “The front hoof smells of petrol,†event organiser Eje Berglund told the crowd that assembled on Sunday for the official inauguration. Last years blaze was a sight to behold.
Four University students have taken it upon themselves to try to stem the tide of arson by creating an “I Love the Goat” campaign. There is a live webcam of the Gävle Goat if you’d like to keep tabs on whether it will continue with its fiery history.
It’s Banned Books Week again. This year is the 30th anniversary. Since 2009 I have listed the top 10 most challenged books of the year on my blog. This year is no different – the books are listed below with links to Amazon for your purchasing pleasure. With over 326 formal challenges, as reported by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, book banning efforts were alive and well in 2011.
I have also posted top 10 lists for the years 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001
Additionally, in 2010, I put together a list of the 100 Most Banned & Challenged Books Of The Decade by aggregating several lists from the American Library Association.
This season’s Gävlebocken or Gävle Goat has already burnt to the ground.
The Gävle Goat is a giant version of a traditional Swedish Yule Goat figure made of straw. It is erected each year over a period of two days by a local association called the Southern Merchants in time for the start of advent. The goats have become the subject of a ‘tradition’ of regularly being torched by vandals.
The 13-meter (42+ feet) tall, straw, Christmas goat was set ablaze by arsonists at 2:54 a.m. this morning in Gävle, Sweden. Despite emergency services arriving on the scene within a few minutes nothing remains of the goat but its scorched frame. Currently the Gävlebocken only has a 39% survival rate.
Below is time-lapse video taken from a webcam of this years goat. The webcam is still live if you are interested in having a look at it’s charred remains.
Banned Books Week again. Last year I put together a list of the 100 Most Banned & Challenged Books Of The Decade by aggregating several lists from the American Library Association. This year I’ll keep it a little more simple and display the top 10 most banned books of 2010 (determined out of the 348 challenges as reported by the Office for Intellectual Freedom).
2010
I have also posted top 10 lists for the years 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001
Here are the heavily edited highlights from the timeline section of the Gävle Goat article on Wikipedia:
1966 The goat stood until midnight of New Year’s Eve, when it went up in flames.
1968 …it is said that one night a couple made love inside the goat.
1969 The goat was burnt down on New Year’s Eve.
1970 The goat burnt down only six hours after it was assembled.
1972 The goat collapsed because of sabotage.
1974 Burnt.
1976 Ran over by a car.
1978 Again, the goat was kicked to pieces.
1979 The goat was burnt even before it was erected.
1980 Burnt down on Christmas Eve.
1982 Burnt down on Lucia (December 13).
1983 The legs were destroyed.
1984 Burnt down on December 12, the night before Lucia.
1985 Even though the goat was enclosed by a 2 metres (6.6 ft) high metal fence, guarded by Securitas and even soldiers from the Gävle I 14 Infantry Regiment, it was burnt down in January.
1986 The big goat burnt down the night before Christmas Eve.[1]
1987 A heavily fireproofed goat was built. It got burnt down a week before Christmas.[17]
1989 Again, the goat burnt down before it was assembled.
1991 On the morning of Christmas Eve the goat was burnt down.
1992 The goat was burnt down eight days after it was built.
1995 Burnt down on the morning of Christmas Day.
1997 Damaged by fireworks.
1998 Burnt down on 11 December, even though there was a major blizzard.
1999 Burnt down only a couple of hours after it was erected.
2000 Burnt down a couple of days before New Year’s Eve.
2001 Goat set on fire on 23 December by Lawrence Jones, a 51-year-old visitor from Cleveland, Ohio, who spent 18 days in jail and was subsequently convicted and ordered to pay 100,000 Swedish kronor in damages.
2002 The goat received only minor damage.
2003 Burnt down on 12 December.
2004 Burnt on December 21.
2005 Burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and a gingerbread man by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat at 21:00 on 3 December.
2008 The goat finally succumbed to the flames ignited by an unknown assailant.
2009 An unsuccessful attempt was made to throw the goat into the river the weekend of December 11. On the night of December 23 before 04:00 the goat was set on fire and was burned to the frame, even though it had a thick layer of snow on its back.The goat had two online webcams which were put out of service by a DoS attack, instigated by computer hackers just before the attack.
2010 Both goats survived this year and were dismantled and returned to storage.
2011 Fire-fighters sprayed the goat with water to create a coating of ice in hopes of protecting it from arson. The goat burned down in the early morning of 2 December.
There is once again a webcam for this year’s goat, if you would like to help keep an eye on it. What does the ill-fated goat’s future hold for 2010?
Yesterday I posted about an article in the Guardian in which author Rick Gekoski expressed grief in the lack of a modern-day literary canon. He said:
Not that young people don’t read, but they don’t read together. They haven’t got, as we had, a common culture: books to devour and discuss and be formed by… I wish that the pleasure of reading, across the whole spectrum of literature, in all its variety, were part of a shared culture amongst young people today. But it isn’t…
I stated that I thought author Rick Gekoski was mistaken. I believe that today we do actually have a modern literary canon that we draw on for conversation, inspiration, education and culture. So I used Gekoski’s “rules” to create my canon: 1) A list of 21 books 2) All published within the last 21 years 3) cross the whole spectrum of literature 4) Are part of a shared culture amongst young people today. Here is my list:
A prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving (1989)
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez (1989)
Maus by Art Spiegelman (1991)
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (1992)
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (1993)
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996)
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (1997 – 2007)
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution by Robert C. Atkins (1997)
God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1998)
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)
Life Of Pi by Yann Martel (2001)
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser (2001)
The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren (2002)
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)
Freakonomics Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (2005)
The Secret by Rhonda Byrn (2006)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (2008)
These books could have made the list but were just a little too old (all less than 5 years too old)
Skinny Legs And All by Tom Robbins (1984)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985)
White Noise by Don Delillo (1985)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco (1988)
So What do you think? What are the books that I’m missing? Which don’t belong? Am I right, do we have a modern literary canon in this day and age? Or does Rick Gekoski have it right, do we not read together anymore?
Below is a list of books that I short listed but that didn’t quite make the 21 book cut.
…
Recently the Guardian ran an article by Rick Gekoski in which he laments the lack of a modern-day literary canon – a list of culturally essential books that one is expected/assumed to have read in order to be considered culturally literate. A list of books that have found their place in today’s common culture; books that people know about, relate to, discuss, and converge around. Referring to his past, Gekoski says,
…within our middle-class, educated world there was a canon, which wasn’t limited to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Scott Fitzgerald. You could assume people had read the hot contemporary books; when they hadn’t, it occasioned not merely puzzlement, but disapproval
Rick Gekoski suggests that, in 1974, if you hadn’t read all of the following list of 21 books (all published in the 21 years preceding 1974, making it a modern canon at the time) then you could have garnered criticism and condemnation from his peer group.
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1953)
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1953)
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse (1955)
Howl by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm (1956)
On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Life Against Death by Norman O Brown (1959)
The Divided Self by RD Laing (1960)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan (1962)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
The Story of O by Pauline Reage (1965)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley (1965)
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris (1967)
Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver (1967)
Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer (1968)
The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov (1970)
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1971)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycling Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig (1974)
I would argue that Rick Gekoski is wrong in suggesting that there is no modern-day literary cannon. Tomorrow I will list 21 books, published in the last twenty years, that I believe represent today’s literary canon.
