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Banning Books Only Makes Them More Lovable

Happy Banned Book Week!

When I was reminded at Roxanne’s last night (during yet another bout of insomnia) I took a look at the list of most challenged books of 2004 and laughed aloud.

Dav Pilkey is a household staple around here, especially for the Captain Underpants series. If it gets the little one reading I have absolutely zero complaints, especially since it also inspires him to write and draw. Maya Angelou’s book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” is taught as regular high school curriculum right around the block. For many of the young women I know who attended that school, that book choice was one of the only ones that stuck with them over the years. You just don’t ban brilliance like Maya Angelou. And for what it’s worth, I eked through high school by doing a bad report on “Of Mice and Men” in lieu of attending class.

Even in my education classes, one suggestion for teaching reluctant readers is to teach the controversy, so to speak. Let them know the books are “banned,” read them anyway, and discuss the literary themes and the social themes surrounding their challenged status. Reports by those who have tried this method have been nothing but complimentary.

Banned books be damned. And thus, wholly lovable.

UPDATE: Heretik writes an ode to Toni Morrison, one of my all-time favorite authors.

Reviews

Of things I love:

The Rolling Stones (favorite song: Paint it Black).

Zadie Smith, as reviewed by Frank Rich. Awesome. The Voice has an interview. (I’m obsessed with White Teeth, and I can’t wait to read On Beauty… another thing to do after I graduate law school).

Female Chauvinist Pigs: A book I want to read.

Rushdie’s latest gets mixed reviews (but hot damn I love Michi Kakutani). I’m in the middle of The Satanic Verses right now, and it’s inspiring me to re-read Midnight’s Children.

My favorite writer Tom Robbins lands at #15 this week on the NYT non-fiction list, and is featured inside the list in today’s paper. I have not yet bought Wild Ducks Flying Backward, because I am poor, and because I have no time to read. If you’re looking for a good Robbins book to pick up, my favorite is Skinny Legs and All, but there are a great many other fabulous ones: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume, etc. His style is engaging, funny and borderline insane. For example, Robbins on Debra Winger: “She’s walked a tightrope between fire and honey, between sulfur and roses, between sarcasm and succor, between monolith and disco ball.” Beautiful.

Anyone else read anything good lately?

Mailer v. Kakutani

Sounds like somebody’s scurred.

And he deals with it by launching ridiculous insults at Michiko Kakutani, one of the New York Times’ best book reviewers. Long-time misogynist Norman Mailer tells a Rolling Stone interviewer:

Kakutani is a one-woman kamikaze. She disdains white male authors, and I’m her number-one favorite target. One of her cheap tricks is to bring out your review two weeks in advance of publication. She trashes it just to hurt sales and embarrass the author…But the Times editors can’t fire her. They’re terrified of her. With discrimination rules and such, well, she’s a threefer…. Asiatic, feminist, and, ah, what’s the third? Well… let’s just call her a twofer. They get two for one. She is a token. And deep down, she probably knows it.

How about, she got (and has kept) her job because she’s damn good at it? I read Kakutani’s reviews regularly, and she’s fantastic — she doesn’t kiss ass, and she doesn’t fawn over a writer’s work just because they’re well-established or because they’re some hot new thing. And aren’t Asiatic women supposed to be quiet and submissive, according to all the played-out sexist and racist stereotypes that Mailer peddles? He should go back to complaining about angry black women and ball-busting femi-nazis, territory he’s more familiar with.

via Mike

The 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries

Because book burning isn’t a bad thing, is it? The list is topped by The Communist Manifesto — which, apparently, is even worse than Mein Kamf. Huh. Forget that, even if you disagree with the Communist Manifesto, it’s still a pretty impressive work. Also on the list: The Feminine Mystique (because it let the ladies out of the kitchen), The Course of Positive Philosophy (because it brought about sociology), Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Nazis liked it), and the economist John Maynard Keynes’ brilliant General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Honorable mentions include On Liberty by John Stuart Mills (!), Origin of the Species and Decent of Man by Charles Darwin, Foucalt’s Madness and Civilization, de Beauvior’s Second Sex, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Of the 15 “scholars” who created this list, there was only one female — Phyllis Schlafly.

NPM: Yellow Rage

You wanna butter me up like you butter your rice and tie me down to your bed of stereotypes.

Via Shannon, this slam poetry duo of two Philly-based, Asian-American women kicks some serious ass. They are sarcastic, righteous, defiant, funny, and rude to boot, touching on fetishes and cultural appropriation among other dialogues involving gender, race, and lack of American understanding of all the various Asian cultures that get lumped under umbrella terms or appropriated to the Chinese or Japanese (apparently the only countries in Asia that America knows of).

Go to their website, Yellow Rage, and download “Woman, Not a Flava” immediately.

My tongue is split and it’s forked and steel-tipped. And if you don’t know, now you know. Asshole.

If this doesn’t incite some feminist, revolutionary poetry loving, you don’t have a pulse.

NPM: Carolyn Kizer

For those who don’t know, a pantoum is a poem composed in quatrains in which the second and fourth lines are repeated as the first and third lines of the following quatrain. For other confusing forms, see the villanelle and the terzanelle.

This isn’t a perfect example of a pantoum, but it is a lovely poem about the wonderment parents feel about their children when the children who once adored their parents grow up to patronize them.

Parent’s Pantoum

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group–why don’t they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we’ll capture their attention
Then we won’t try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we’ll capture their attention.
Don’t they know that we’re supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children–second-childish?

Perhaps we’re too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we’ve chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we’ve chosen to ignore,
We’d rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don’t believe our stories have an end.
They don’t ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don’t see that we’ve become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.

Read it again and again. This one is amazing.

I need National Poetry Month to end soon. Very soon. I am far too excited about it and I have a million other things to do than locate my favorite poems.

Stupid Book Thingie

I was really hoping that no one would pass me this game, but since someone (who shall remain nameless) did, I feel an obligation to complete it. This would be so much easier with music, I must say. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book I didn’t like.

In the interest of killing this little game, I’m morphing it.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
I’m on fire; I’m burning; I don’t care what book I am. What’s most important is what we’re listening to: Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, of course.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
I had a huge crush on King Alobar from Jitterbug Perfume, but that probably has everything to do with the psychadelic sex scenes in Tom Robbins’ books.

When I was younger I had a mad crush on Chris Cornell. And Jim Morrison. To my parents’ dismay, I plastered my walls with pictures of them (and Courtney Love, pre-plastic surgery).

The last book you bought is?
I can’t remember the last book I bought since I’ve been given so many. However, the last CDs I bought were Madvillain’s Madvillainy and the newest Reverend Horton Heat, Revival (not so good). Again, I have far more CDs given to me than I buy.

What are you currently reading?
A little bit of everything. On my nightstand sits Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Will in the World. Both were given to me by others. In my Skully bag, the bag I fill up when I go a-walkin’, is The Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez, and How the Dead Live by Will Self.

However, the most important item in my walking bag is the mp3 player. What am I listening to? Biz Markie, Peaches, Das EFX (“They Want EFX” also doubles as my cell phone ringer), Sister Nancy, Slick Rick, Belle and Sebastian, and Donovan. You have to have a good variety depending on your walkin’ mood, whether you’re getting whooped at by college boys, splashed by passing cars, or doing what I generally do, scoping out other people’s flowers (and perhaps picking them).

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie;
Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Cafe, an anthology of contemporary slam poetry;
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, introduced to me by Dr. B. in a gender lit course;
Derrick Jensen’s Culture of Make Believe, because even though I ripped on him, he is still a wonderful writer;
and a blank journal I could keep with the pen I snuck onto the island.

Music that would make it onto a desert island with me would be a slew of homemade CDs and my solar powered, shoulder-sittin’ jambox. I have no loyalties, only songs I love shamelessly.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Dr. B., whose answers will be about knitting books, Queen Kim of Twins and Procrastination, and Mr. Capanzzi, who I haven’t heard from in awhile.

NPM: Lucille Clifton

It’s a late night here working on the final touches of my you-will-love-poetry-dammit unit designed for tenth graders. The oolong tea isn’t holding me up any longer. And my back hurts.

Ms. Clifton, however, may be my saving grace.

wishes for sons

i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
I wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn’t believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

Amen.

Clifton’s mean sense of humor (or is it justice?) always brings me back from the dead.