Censorship
Just the other night a British e-friend was expressing concern about the silly reasons why the American Library Association report having books "challenged." But most of those books have been "challenged" only for schoolroom use--many of them for presenting more detailed information about sex than some parents and teachers know some children are ready to read, or have read to them. You can go into a bookstore and order any of the ones on the ALA list. Several are bestsellers; you can find them in secondhand stores. Several are classics that someone thought we could do without--I'm surprised not to see Milton, Dante, and Shakespeare's Macbeth on the list; they certainly have been questioned.
What children and teenagers will welcome, what they'll be traumatized by, and what they'll blithely ignore, varies widely. Only parents--if even parents!--are likely to have a clue. Anne Frank's Diary was on the list for going into more detail about puberty than some students...at my school the class read it in grade eight...are ready to read. I read it in grade four and, because I wasn't so oversupplied with hormones as to be interested in the details of puberty, I don't remember even noticing them. They would have been boring bits I skipped--I skipped a lot of things in primary school. But I can imagine some junior high school students, who are likely to be interested in the details of puberty, tormenting each other. "Why are YOU so far behind or ahead of Anne Frank? It says here, when she was fourteen, she..." I think I'd save this book for classroom use in grade eleven or twelve. Though I actually liked reading about how Anne learned mental discipline in her Achterhuis, in grade four.
Several books on the ALA list (it's at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_United_States ) are available at my Bookshop; I recommend them to all adults and college students but, because they'd be likely to traumatize some person in a public school class, I would recommend that high school students who enjoy them not take these books to school. You may, at fifteen, be a sophisticate who shrieks with laughter at the image of a prescribed ritual for three-way sex intended to minimize pleasure for all three participants in The Handmaid's Tale, and it would be funny if it weren't so sad, but you have to think about that 80-pound, 13-year-old overachiever in your class, and share your appreciation of The Handmaid's Tale only in groups where everyone else is as sophisticated as you are.
I'm not sure how Chris Crutcher's Chinese Handcuffs managed not to be on the list. So many of his other books are. Maybe librarians didn't put Chinese Handcuffs on the shelves because they knew it would be "challenged" by parents. It's a novel about a boy whose best friend is a girl. That's controversial enough. She's also his running buddy. That's pushing things with some parents. Then we learn that she's being sexually abused, and how he knows she feels, and how he feels about not being able to do what he'd like to do about her situation. My adoptive sister found it in a library and recommended it to me as being a good book about that kind of situation; she would, unfortunately, know. My natural sister, at the same age and size, thought it was disgusting. That's usually true for books that present information about sensitive matters--sex, or prejudice, bullying, human meanness of any kind, the scandals in the biographies of people they admire. For one teenager it may be liberating or vindicating or validating to read someone else's description of something similar to what has been the teenager's secret that nobody else would understand. For another one it's so disgusting that any enlightement the book may offer to other people will be lost in the teenager's nausea.
I think a person who has not been sexually abused can probably get through life quite well without reading Chinese Handcuffs but I think books like The Handmaid's Tale and The Color Purple and Catch-22 are worth saving until a person has become desensitized to the existence of the unpleasant material they document. Teenaged girls are impregnated, against their wills, by men they believe to be their fathers (and a few of them may actually be their fathers). Our heroic soldiers, even if they did heroically save something (collectively) or someone (individually), spent a lot of time cheating one another and "the system" and thus by extension us. Ideas that seem neat, like a "cashless economy," are certain to lead to horribly messy consequences. People need to know these things and they don't get to know the important things if their minds are full of "Eww, ick, her own father..." just as they miss the spiritual enlightenment in Huckleberry Finn if their minds are full of little sirens blaring, "He said a hateful word! He said a profane word!"
No. Let the public school classes study "The Nun's Priest's Tale" and David Copperfield and Helen Keller's Story of My Life. Let teenagers imagine that adults don't want them to read Flowers for Algernon or 1984 or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. We know what effect that is likely to have in college literature courses. "You're all probably still too young to appreciate it but has anyone already read Brave New World?"--they all have, and they've probably read it in the spirit it ought to be read, too. "Oryx and Crake? Well, it's new, trendy science fiction with a porn star in it. Now, to get back to Shakespeare..." Old Will wrote the bestsellers of his time, and had some insights into issues that are, trendy today, too. But why preach about Shakespeare to students when we can let them discover for themselves, "You know, actually, there's a lot of genderfluidity in Twelfth Night, and having Othello be jealous and insecure because he's a 'Moor' showed some consciousness about Black people, too. Othello was well off but he'd been distrusted and disfavored because of his color, not unlike some Black Americans today...."
Anyway my point here was that when anybody's free to "ban" a book for a specific situation for reasons of per own, the author may make more money from a "banned" book than from an uncontroversial book. While D.H. Lawrence was so controversial people read his books in order to participate in the debate about whether public libraries should have them even in a locked box; after deciding that Lawrence was intelligent for a coal miner and belonged on reading lists as a token Member of the Working Class, everyone lost interest, because frankly, assuming you already know what the Formerly Unprintable Words mean, the books aren't all that good. Langston Hughes represented the Working Class much better. But being banned made Lawrence rich.
But now we consider the state of censorship in the UK...Presumably these incidents occurred in a context in which they made more sense than they do to the US reader.
Music
An e-friend wanted to see this one shared everywhere. I can see why. The vocals are really worthy of the original recording being parodied, and the all-things-Californian graphics are gorgeous, no matter how unrealistic and unappealing the AI of Trump playing flute...Real Men do play flutes. Some of them. James Galway, e.g. But not Trump. You have to ignore the AI and focus on the iconic background images, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Hollywood sign to Alcatraz Island...
For musical send-ups of our President, though, this one's a winner. They neither look nor behave like any President and First Lady, ever. They dance well enough to convince me that they're expressing admiration for the Trumps.
And, while we're considering political satire through rock music...the person who shared this one on the Mirror warned that it's an UNAUTHORIZED parody of a RECENT song, therefore the link may break at any moment, but it's a good song.
Then of course there's the one that makes me want to adopt a burro so I can stand next to it and sing this song without violating the Rules of Aunthood.
Politics
Click to enlarge; it's worth it. Found at the Mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment