ACTIVISM; or, ON WHAT NOT TO READ

it's banned books week. the powers that be in publishing and bookselling could surely have come up with an even more pointedly foolish term for what is, in fact, a celebration, but "freedom to read" et al. were probably already taken by military campaigns.

this week -- and you HAVE to do this by sunday or else the curse won't stick -- get out to your local library and request something that's been reviewed for removal, if not from your local library's collection then from a library somewhere ostensibly more concerned with the right upbringing of children. or at least get out there and launch a campaign to have a book banned. stephanie meyer is an easy and arguably deserving target, but i'd also suggest working to ban something like spoken from the heart, because there are other creatures of the night more nefarious than in meyer's castrated vampire fantasies. (i'd also ban salinger across the board just so that all the kids around town carrying incredibly conspicuous copies of nine stories can regain some of their credibility. if they had any. but you do just feel sorry sometimes.)

this blog is particularly familiar with certain recent banning efforts since we're also the central nervous system for the so called "homosexual agenda," stopping the spread of which is apparently central to most opponents' objections to good young adult fiction. the animosity of the book banners is though, in fact, pure vendetta -- the result of a crazy party that "h(omosexual)a(genda)!" had in fayetteville, arkansas during one of our organizational conferences. as such (or maybe in spite of it), i'm happy to have made a kind of penance for (or a proud admission of) my part in that debacle by gifting my niece the absolutely true diary of a part time indian last christmas. that book was removed from ninth grade english classes in crook county, oregon in 2008 for a passage discussing masturbation, but was reinstated after review by the crook county school board and its superintendent of schools. the stockton school district in missouri banned the book in april of this year.

if kids don't read about things like masturbation (we're a long way from actually teaching it), how are we going to properly equip them to spend their free time not asking and not telling during operation freedom to read?

ha.