Philip Gets His Groove Back

After his unusual demureness in face of the star-making machinery, I'm pleased to see Philip Pullman recovering his characteristic pugnacity to defend his dark materials from the interference of the interfering Faithful: "Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good."

Well, that's one way around it.

Jezebel has a post up about the recent challenge to Of Mice and Men at a Kansas City high school for use of the word nigger. I liked this comment from "Miss Scarlet in the hall with a . . .":

In middle school I knew a girl who "objected" to Huckleberry Finn because of the racism and her mother said something and she read something else. In private she told me she tried to read it and it was so boring she just told her mother she had a problem with it so she could read something else. I was 12 and knew that was wrong (and slightly jealous because it was boring).

Urban legend alert

If one more person sends me that list of books Sarah Palin tried to ban from the library I'm gonna vote for Nader.

The Invigilator Strikes

A complaint from an "exams invigilator" has caused Carol Ann Duffy's poem "Education for Leisure" to be removed from the U.K.'s GCSE curriculum. Children's Laureate Michael Rosen is quoted being sensible ("Of course we want children to be talking about knife crime and poems like these are a terrific way of helping that happen. Blanket condemnation and censorship of something never works") while an unnamed spokeswoman for the AQA--the organization which oversees the GCSE exams--makes me think she flunked Plain Speaking: "We believe the decision underlines the often difficult balance that exists between encouraging and facilitating young people to think critically about difficult but important topics and the need to do this in a way which is sensitive to social issues and public concern."

The poem is a good one and can be found at the link.

There's a thousand library trustees just like her.

I wouldn't elect Sarah Palin to anything, but this old censorship charge is really reaching. As far as we know, as mayor of Wasilla she asked the public library director three times about the possibility of removing "objectionable" books from the collection. Three times the director said no. (Positively biblical!) Then Palin tried to fire the director but changed her mind. Unless that former director (who is not talking) tells us otherwise, we have no reason to believe that Palin's request went beyond the hypothetical.

This is actually pretty typical of people who get power--and three-year-olds, come to think of it. They want to see how far they can push it. Mayors, school superintendents and library trustees alike are often surprised to discover that they don't get to personally decide on library purchases or discards. It's the librarian's job to explain to them why this is a bad idea and arguably illegal.

I'm reminded of the time when Chicago aldermen removed--at gunpoint--a satiric portrait of the late Harold Washington from an exhibition at the School of the Art Institute. THAT was censorship. But just asking? Nope.

Yikes

Liz B. pointed me toward this PW essay on the thin line between reader's advisory work and putting limitations on library access for kids. It gives me the willies.

Is it right for me to discourage a kid’s reading choice? No. But is it right for me to give a kid a book that I think is probably not appropriate? At the risk of sounding censorship alarms, or being seen as an “uncool” librarian, my answer is again, No. I just don’t feel comfortable giving a sixth-grader one of these books—all popular titles that, in my library, are shelved “over there” in the teen area, through the door and around the corner from the children’s room.

I don't see how these positions (not discouraging a reading choice and not giving a kid an inappropriate book) are reconcilable. I recognize that the author recognizes that the question is a difficult one, and I agree that some books are too mature for some kids. But I think she errs on the side of caution where I would rather give the kid what she asks for (an eleven-year-old wanting Twilight is an example she cites), hold my breath, and hope for the best. What we don't know from the essay is how easily kids are allowed to dodge the librarian's best intentions entirely and simply go to the YA or adult books by themselves. That would have been my own strategy as a sixth-grader, particularly if I had had a previous encounter with a librarian that made me feel snooped upon or deflected. While I hate librarians who don't move out from behind the desk, there's a little too much leading patrons by the hand going on here.

What the essay does not take up--and what so few arguments for restricting access do--is what she thinks is going to happen if a child reads a book he or she "is not ready for." Really, what? Sexual thoughts, anxiety, nightmares? Maybe, but by no means necessarily--and, while I hate to quote Dick Cheney, so what? Kids have sexual thoughts, anxieties and nightmares anyway. Normal, healthy kids. And as Liz points out, what's more likely is that a kid simply will breeze past what she doesn't understand: "Deenie had masturbation? As a kid, I had no idea."

It's not a word to throw around lightly

Poets are supposed to choose their words very carefully. This one doesn't.

But a poet standing up to a bookstore does demonstrate chutzpah, I'll give her that. Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the link.

At least they didn't give it to Mittens

Here's the SLJ article asking if Orson Scott Card's beliefs about homosexuality should have been taken into account when YALSA awarded him the Margaret Edwards Award. I dunno if this is a real controversy; has anyone heard it brought up elsewhere?

Second thoughts?

Alerted by an anonymous commenter, I see that the Catholic News Service has withdrawn its review of The Golden Compass. Without comment. Maybe the Magisterium is at work.

But enough about you

This idea of the internet as a solipsistic wonderland--oh wow! You're reading my blog!--really gained ground this weekend with two of our leading internet magazines--Salon and Slate--each using the premier of The Golden Compass as a springboard for people to talk about themselves while pretending to do otherwise.

I have a lot of respect for Donna Freitas's work on His Dark Materials, but on Salon she unconscionably sets up Catholic Leaguer Bill Donahue as the Grand Inquisitor and herself as Galileo: "Allow me to plead my case, for I think I am innocent. (Though I fear I might be on trial, or even be found guilty without a trial.)" Stop, Donna, we need the wood.

And I would really like to see some documentation for "Catholic principals, librarians and teachers all across the United States and Canada are being told by their diocese to remove "His Dark Materials" from their shelves and classroom curricula." I can find three instances of The Golden Compass being removed from Catholic schools (two in Canada and in Oshkosh, Wisconsin), and in none of them was the diocese involved: trustees, principals and one benighted librarian pulled the book without orders from above. Of course there are probably other, quieter instances of the book being removed (as that's how it's usually done, in public and parochial libraries alike) but the point is that the Catholic Church is engaged in no war with Philip Pullman and no one is being threatened with excommunication. It's just weenie Bill Donahue calling attention to himself via his self-administered interviews, and Freitas falling right into his trap by making him seem more important than he is.

But Freitas, at least, does have a point to make, and it's an eloquent and important one, about the feast of religious inquiry in Pullman's trilogy. Emily Bazelon writing for Slate, on the other hand, explains that she's not going to encourage her sons to read Pullman's trilogy because she really dug Flowers in the Attic even though her mother said it was dreck. (Thanks to Kelly Herold for the link.) Did I mention that I'm going to see The Golden Compass tonight and Nobody Listens to Andrew used to be my favorite book?

Another Phone Call from the Past

I realized a forty-year-old dream last night when we went to see a community theater production of Hair. The Rent of its day--although far more transgressive--Hair was the Big Thing for little show-tune freaks, given even more appeal by the fact that we had to listen to the record (which was all we knew of the show, since we certainly wouldn't be allowed to see it. Nudes!) out of earshot of our parents. I remember clandestinely (I thought) listening to my older sister's recording and my mother overhearing "Happy Birthday Abie Baby" ("emanci-motherfuckin'-pator of the slaves") and pitching a fit. Has High School Musical ever occasioned such perfect drama?

Growing up in Boston added allure, too, as, when the show came to town in 1970, it was promptly shut down and banned for a month until the Supreme Court allowed it to reopen. I remember faking illness to stay home from school one day because the cast was going to perform on some local TV talk show. How ironic that "America's oldest community theater" (the Footlight Club opened in 1877) would be presenting it thirty-some years later without fuss, obscenities and (discreetly lit) nudity intact.

I didn't get half of the sex jokes back then, and certainly didn't recognize just how druggie it was--my exposure to illegal substances was then limited to the "awareness tablets" that a cop had brought into our junior high and lit in front of the classroom to demonstrate what marijuana smelled like so we would know when to blow the whistle on a party, I guess. Last night, at fifty-one, I had little patience with the show's loosey-goosey free-range dialogue that was supposed to convey the inspiration of drugs and wondered how anyone could have ever heard it as meaningful or even sincere.

But to think of drugs as "mind-expanding" is even more taboo today than in 1968, as is the show's gleeful employment of racial epithets. Forget getting banned in Boston; can it play in L.A.?

What I mostly thought last night, sentimentally and dolefully, is that now I'm the parents and, really, so is the show. I'm betting the sweet kids on stage were as bemused by the LBJ jokes they were spouting as I had been by "Sodomy."

Hitting Them over the Head

Child_Lit has been unusually lively the last couple of weeks, with discussions of The Dark is Rising, Love You Forever (again), gypsies, and gay-seeming children all perking along nicely, but what has intrigued me most is a thread inspired by a post from GraceAnne DeCandido, who has given me permission to reproduce it here:

Dear colleagues,
it is one of those teaching days that make one want to scream and
throw things (the Yankees loss last night did not help, but I
digress).

Several of my students (graduate students all) think that if they
buy a book or give a booktalk or promote a book to a teacher or a
class it means somehow that they condone and approve everything
that takes place in a book. They cannot, for example, buy or
promote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist because that means
they approve of the language (which is salty and true to life). One
student objected to the grammar and usage in Walter Dean
Myers' books because she felt it didn't model good and
appropriate speech.

This is of course all connected to the teaching book/didacticism
thread we have had. I am teaching a literature course to adult
people studying for the MLIS degree. I need to find ways of
addressing this issue, although I am puzzled so much by their
attitudes that I scarce know where to begin.

Well my dear GA, I think three things are going on here. First, either these students aren't readers or they've forgotten that kids read the same way grownups do: just as reading a Donna Leon mystery does not overwhelm me with the urge to push someone into the Grand Canal, reading Nick and Norah . . . isn't going to introduce the word fuck into a spoken vocabulary from which it was previously absent. So, I think we're talking about library school students who don't love reading, which makes me want to jump into the Grand Canal.

But here's the second thing, which is worse: humans over time have demonstrated an inordinate fondness for the ability to push around those of their kind who are smaller and weaker. And some people, especially people who don't like to read, use books as weapons in service to this objective. This goes for books that are either suppressed or required when the point of either action is to control what another person thinks or does.

The third thing, though, can give us all hope; namely, that these grad students are laughably deluded if they think any child really cares what the librarian thinks.

But I wonder if these students really are the grammatically correct Polly Puremouths they're presenting themselves as. Are they truly worried about modeling bad behavior, or are they just afraid to get in trouble with other adults? That fondness for picking on the vulnerable doesn't look so good when the vulnerable is you.

Yes, I do want fries with that.

Galleycat links to a thoughtfully cranky piece about booksellers who pat themselves on the back for selling "banned" books such as Huckleberry Finn while simultaneously refusing to sell Tintin in the Congo:

Providing unencumbered access to the literary works created under the auspices of free speech (all of 'em -- not just the ones we agree with or approve of) is our business. Bookstores shouldn't have to rally around themselves once a year to proclaim that they hate censorship and the banning of books.

While I agree with the scorn directed at the sometimes unseemly preening that accompanies Banned Books Week, I've never thought that booksellers should have to stock anything they didn't want to. What I would really, really, like to know is how many of the 546 challenges recorded by the OIF in 2006 resulted in restrictions or banning, a hardly-irrelevant statistic that seems absent from ALA's press materials. "Banned Books Week" is certainly a catchy slogan, but are they selling sizzle or steak?

Throw the book at her?

Librarian Kristin Peto of Maine sent me the story about the woman, JoAnn Karkos, who checked out two copies of It's Perfectly Normal (a 1995 Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor awardee, so you know where we stand) from Maine libraries and is declining to return them, sending checks for $20.95 (I'm guessing the price on the jacket) to the libraries instead.

This instance of civil disobedience doesn't seem to have been all that well thought out. Both libraries involved have already ordered replacement copies (one bought two, citing the demand engendered by the theft), so access to the book has been at most temporarily impeded. Neither library will accept her check (which would make them parties to the crime), so some other books will now go unbought at the same time It's Perfectly Normal sells three more copies.

Here's the most eccentric detail: the woman who says It's Perfectly Normal is "a predator's dream" now has two copies. Mind your children . . . .

Why we 'see' movies and 'watch' TV

Watching the Emmys last night (and was Sally Field cut off because she spoke out against the war or because she said "goddamn"?) I idly queried why the Oscars have more prestige and glamor when more people watch more TV than they do movies. Richard had a ready, comprehensive answer: in an impulse hearkening back even unto the Greeks, film is public ceremony that demands respectful attention, and it's bigger than we are. While we may eat during a movie (Twizzlers for me, thanks) we may not talk and the film cannot be paused by the audience or the sponsors. We watch it in the dark, all eyes on the screen.

The way we read is practically the opposite: we do it alone, in the light, and hold a book in our hands. But the status of the act of reading is greater than either seeing movies or watching TV, both despite and because of the fact that books have the smallest audience of the three. This may explain why censors go after books: they're both bigger than us and easier to bully.

It's Her Party

Anne Fine offers a personal take on the Tintin in the Congo controversy, citing examples from her own work where she has revised lines to better speak to contemporary sensibilities and her own raised consciousness. P.L. Travers, you will recall, did the same with Mary Poppins, replacing the racial representatives of the "Bad Tuesday" chapter with friendly animals instead.

It's interesting that Fine doesn't do the same with her adult books: "I have six adult novels on the shelves, and wouldn't dream of going at those with a red pen just because times have changed." Her reasoning seems to be that children read both more intensely and in greater ignorance, that they don't have a concept of books becoming "dated." (Thus the pressure on Judy Blume to update Forever to include condoms.) But isn't it the natural way of things that old books give way to new books? Not that people won't continue to read a mix of new and old, but what Fine is advocating is a kind of artificial life support for books that might otherwise fall out of fashion or favor. Let 'em.

It was an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny . . .

Galleycat reports on the news that Boyds Mills Press has backed out of negotiations to publish a picture book series by German artist Rotraut Susanne Berner after the author refused to change two pictures that displayed nudity, both small representations of artwork displayed in a museum. Oh, the horror, oh, the censorship, oh these self-righteous blog posts that write themselves.

But if I were running Boyds Mills Press, I would have made the exact same call, although I might have spared myself the embarrassment of expressing interest in the first place. Selling picture books is difficult, selling foreign-born picture books is almost impossible, add some boobs and a little dick to the mix and you might as well just climb up to the roof and throw your money over the side. It's not censorship, as there is no private obligation to publish. It's stupid parents. Again.

"Mad Bitches Against Gay People"

Here's an interesting story about censorship and the upcoming publication of And Tango Makes Three in the U.K. I'm refreshed by Mel Burgess's suggestion that censorship furor is often more a fact of media exploitation than it is a reflection of the actual fortunes of a book. For the record, here's what the Horn Book Guide said about the book:

Two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo court, build a nest, and raise their (adopted) daughter Tango. Highly anthropomorphized to maximize the sentimental but noteworthy lesson on family diversity, the story gains depth from the biological reality of same-sex penguin partnering. Gentle illustrations of the smiling penguin family add appeal, if not scientific accuracy, to this book based on a true story.

Tango is, for me, an example of a book that is didactic but On My Side, that is, a book that says something I think all children should hear. While you might think reviewers would go easy on a so-so book that speaks to their own values, I wonder if the opposite is true--that in order to combat even the suggestion of boosterism, we give them a harder time. But, as I recall, I couldn't take the smiles.

Maybe this is what Susan Patron was thinking.

In his powerful new picture book memoir The Wall (Frances Foster/FSG, forthcoming in September), Peter Śís quotes from his journals about the darkness following the Prague Spring of 1968:

There is a whole science to learn about dealing with censors. You have to give them something to change. For instance, if you're making a film or a painting, or writing a book or a song, you put in a big church. You can be sure the censors will tell you to take it out, and perhaps they won't notice the smaller, important things. Theater people have the "little white dog" theory. If you let a little white dog parade across the front of the stage, the censors won't notice what is happening in the background.

When the Isms Really Need to Sit Down and Talk

The blog Prometheus 6 led me to this story in the LA Times about two teachers fired for supporting students who wanted to read from Marilyn Nelson's A Wreath for Emmett Till at an assembly honoring Black History Month:

Teachers and students said the administration suggested that the Till case — in which the teenager was beaten to death in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman — was not fitting for a program intended to be celebratory, and that Till's actions could be viewed as sexual harassment.

So I guess he was asking for it. But, wait, what was she wearing?

Second verse, same as the first

A commenter asked yesterday on the blog about the news that the Hamas government has banned a book of Palestinian folktales, Speak, Bird, Speak Again, from West Bank schools because of sexual references. And this is different from U.S. schools banning It's Perfectly Normal or The Higher Power of Lucky because . . . ?

From the Man Who Did This Already, Already

Did anyone catch the shoutout to Maurice Sendak on The L Word this week? He didn't, but allowed to me this morning that Jennifer Beals nekkid would definitely be worth drawing (I'm not being gratuitous; see the recap).

In any event, he was far more worked up about Susan Patron's problems with a few librarians, having been there himself, and wanted me to tell you all how disgusted he was by the whole controversy. "This is such a putdown to those of us who spend our lives creating art for children. It's acutely embarrassing to adults, and shows a complete lack of respect for children and their books, especially when you know children's fascination with and candor about the body. Bravo for the lady who put it on the first page."

Bagging our principles

Fuse 8 led me to Susan Patron's defense of The Higher Power of Lucky's Scrotum at PW online, and while it is admirably articulate and refreshingly undefensive, I am bothered by one line: "If I were a parent of a middle-grade child, I would want to make decisions about my child's reading myself."

So would I, because the world would run far more pleasantly if everyone just did things my way. I do dislike it when librarians and ALA place the censorship debate into the hands of parents like it's a gift: "we encourage you to come to the library with your child and select books that both of you blah blah blah." We don't really mean it--at least I hope we don't. Libraries should be a place where children can run happily afoul of their parents fears, aspirations, protection and authority. What better place to learn to think for yourself? I was pleased as punch when the Conservative Christian Resource Center years ago lifted from one of my editorials for their "Quote of the Week," labelling it a really scary viewpoint: "Just because parents have the legal right to control their children’s reading does not mean that we should encourage them to do so."