Stranger Things @ PSC Library

In a small Indiana town, a boy, Will Byers, vanishes. The search for Will pulls together his friends and family and the town sheriff. They find themselves up against a secret corporation, sinister government scientists, and a girl with other-worldly powers. This is Stranger Things, Netflix’s newest original series.

Rooted in nostalgia for the 1980s, Stranger Things also finds kinship with government conspiracies and a truth that may be hard to believe. (Very minor spoilers ahead.) Our series heroes find themselves up against a government scientist, who was principle investigator in Project MKULTRA before working at Hawkins National Laboratory (the secret corporation). This is where fiction fades into reality. Launched in 1953, during the early stages of Cold War, Project MKULTRA was a CIA-led investigation into mind control. The intelligence agency concern was on the ability to manipulate and extract information from subjects through the use of drug and physical influences. The CIA wanted control and tap into the minds of Soviet agents and were worried about the Russians doing the same. Over the course of MKULTRA, the CIA gave LSD to college students without consent, attempted to hypnosis subjects, and experimented with electro-shock therapy. Ultimately, Project MKULTRA provided no conclusive medical advancement and continues to be a black mark for the US government.

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a federal law “establishing the right of access to government information and agency records as essential to a free and open society,” the wrong doings of the government agency were made public. In 2001, all remaining MKULTRA records were made public. These can be freely accessed through archive.org.

What are the stranger things you can find at the Prairie State Library?

Check This Book Out! Words in Your Face by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Many are familiar with the concept of a poetry slam, even if they have never attended one. Poets perform their works aloud before a live audience. Randomly selected judges rate the performers, who advance through rounds until one is crowned the champion. The poetry slam movement is relatively young, but in Words in Your Face, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz relates the history of this cultural phenomenon in great detail—from its beginnings in Chicago and New York clubs in the late 1980s, to the creation of the National Poetry Slam, to its popularization by MTV, Lollapalooza, and HBO’s Def Poetry, and beyond. The book is divided into four parts, each covering a major wave of the poetry slam movement. Each part contains multiple short chapters, which alternate between historical narratives, interviews with major figures, and “sidebar” chapters on slam rules, lingo, stereotypes, etc. The book captures the diversity of the poetry slam movement which has, from the outset, involved all ethnic groups, ages, and sexual orientations. While the poetry slam movement is associated with hip-hop, they are not synonymous, and the author lays out the nuances of the relationship between them. Avid poetry jam fans may want to read this book cover-to-cover, but the concise chapters interspersed with plenty of photographs make this an easy book for a casual reader to “read at” as well.

Words in Your Face and the books shown below can all be found on the NEW BOOKS DISPLAY at the Prairie State College Library.