Get your bonfires ready, everybody — it’s Banned Books Week!

Sponsored in part by the American Library Association (www.ala.org), Banned Books Week “celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those … viewpoints to all who wish to read them.” Apparently, there are people out there who think that banning books because they contain undesirable material does more harm than good, breeding ignorance and suppressing free speech.

Oh, please. Next thing you know, they’ll be saying that abstinence-only education is bad, too. Let me tell you, I was given a good, healthy, abstinence-only education, and I know everything I need to know — like how if I don’t want to get pregnant I shouldn’t let a boy pee on me. Gross!

Needless to say, I don’t want my kids (Melvin is five and George is three) reading any of those dirty Judy Blume books — numbers 8, 32, 46, 62 and 78 on the list of the 100 most frequently challenged books from 1990 to 2000 — and learning about heavy petting and menstruation. If they read about those things, they might want to start doing them. Ditto for the What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys (#61) and Asking About Sex and Growing Up (#54); I believe masturbation should always be followed up by hours of paralyzing guilt and fear. And I certainly don’t want my boys reading Lord of the Flies (#70) and getting marooned on an island and establishing a tyrannical dictatorship.
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“I don’t see what the appeal is,” my Vassarite best friend remarked a week ago, shortly after I sent her an instant message rife with exclamation points notifying her that, in the recent flurry of new features and colleges for The Facebook, Vassar had finally been added. For the past eight months I’d been talking to her about The Facebook, updating her on elementary and high school classmates and passing on the latest computer-mediated gossip. But she seemed slightly less than enthralled with the whole thing.

A few hours later, I received an excited message from her saying that she had received a friend request. The next day, she joyfully confided that she had been poked for the first time. By the end of the week, she was hooked. I didn’t even need to say “I told you so.” But I did anyway, because I’m never one to pass up the opportunity to gloat.

I’ve been fascinated by The Facebook ever since its inception, partially due to the ease with which you can find out if someone is single, but mostly due to the anthropological appeal of being able to eavesdrop on and interact with a social community from the comfort of my own desk chair. The Facebook is of particular interest to me because I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with technology, condemning it for fostering impatience and short attention spans while simultaneously becoming ever more reliant on it.
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Last Thursday, I went to see neurologist, author, and Cornell professor-at-large Oliver Sacks give a talk entitled “Creativity and the Brain” at the Statler. Having read and reread The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat annually since the age of eight, I had been looking forward to the talk with breath so bated that I may have been clinically dead. I wasn’t disappointed: Sacks was brilliant, he was funny, he was British. He even said “fuck” at one point, and few things bring me as much joy as hearing distinguished lecturers curse. With a British accent.

Yet I left slightly unsatisfied. You see, although Sacks spent over an hour discussing creativity, he never actually defined it. And ever since I stepped out of the Statler auditorium into the brisk night, I’ve been trying to figure out what creativity really is.

What Sacks did do was contrast creativity with virtuosity — an inflection of “virtuoso,” not “virtuous.” The difference between virtuosity and creativity is the difference between being really good at something and being innovative with it; between drawing incredibly lifelike portraits from models and painting something that doesn’t exist; between playing a difficult chaconne flawlessly and composing one’s own music.
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Imagine this: you’re strolling through the Commons, politely avoiding the street musicians, when a couple — tourists, apparently — approach you and ask if you can take a photograph of them. Not being in any particular hurry, you oblige. They hand you their snazzy new camera-cum-phone, you snap a picture, and they thank you. “Cool, huh?” they remark as you hand back the electronic device. You nod in agreement, and they begin singing their camera-phone’s praises, enumerating its various features. Clearly they just can’t resist showing off their new toy.

Oh, and their spiel is subsidized by Sony Ericcson.

This is the new wave of advertising — “stealth advertising,” it’s called. The idea is to promote products in such a way that consumers don’t know they’re being targeted. Actors hawk their wares to unsuspecting passersby, who emerge thinking that they just had an innocent interaction with a friendly stranger, the kind of serendipitous connection that renews one’s faith in mankind. They don’t know that it’s scripted, and they never will.

It’s a disturbing thought, and one that makes you reevaluate the intentions of everyone who approaches you. Was that guy who gave you a light clandestinely marketing for Zippo? Was that girl who lent you a pencil in your econ class one of Bic’s cronies? Was that panhandler who asked you for money really part of an underground campaign for Calvin Klein’s new fragrance, Destitution?
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