Scholastic flips on censorship of “gay-friendly” books.
Did you hear about the kerfuffle? Here’s the short version:
Scholastic, one of the largest education publishers in the world with broad influence over the reading materials of children everywhere, just dipped its toe into the anti-gay movement.
The publisher is censoring a book that depicts a girl character with two moms because they consider it offensive and inappropriate for children, preventing it from appearing in its Scholastic Book Fairs. These are the same book fairs that have reach to millions of schoolchildren nationwide. By censoring the book, Scholastic is sending the discriminatory and harmful message to children everywhere that same-sex relationships and gay/lesbian parents are wrong and should be hidden from sight.
The book in question is Lauren Myracle’s new book “Luv Ya Bunches”, which features one character that has two moms. One of Scholastic’s justifications for censoring the book is that they wanted to avoid letters of complaint from anti-gay parents.
This is offensive, wrong, and exactly the opposite of the message of tolerance we should be sending to children.
Indeed. Well, Scholastic heard from angry people, including yours truly. This just arrived in my e-mail:
Dear Mr. ___________,
Scholastic has been helping kids learn to love to read for almost 90 years. Scholastic does not censor books. The selection of books we carry in our book clubs and book fairs is the result of a careful review of thousands of titles each year, and we are committed to a review process thatconsiders all books equally regardless of their inclusion of LGBT characters and same sex parents.
Scholastic is already supporting Luv Ya Bunches by Lauren Myracle. This book is featured prominently on both the student and teacher covers of our December 2009 Arrow Scholastic Book Clubs catalogs which are already printed and are in schools right now. On October 16 we also recorded a Book Talk Editors’ Choice Video which features Luv Ya Bunches.
Scholastic editors recognize Milla’s two moms as a positive and realistic aspect of the story. We offer other books with same sex couples and gay and lesbian characters in Book Clubs and Book Fairs including The Name of This Book is Secret and The Misfits, as well as the upcoming After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson, and others. Scholastic provides books that will appeal to the wide range of interests and reading abilities of children in the many diverse cultures and communities we serve. Luv Ya Bunches helps us fulfill our mission to do that.
In an interview with School Library Journal, Scholastic stated that we are currently carrying Luv Ya Bunches by Lauren Myracle in our school book clubs. We also said we were still reviewing the book for possible inclusion in our book fairs. Having completed our review of Luv Ya Bunches, Scholastic Book Fairs will carry the title in our spring fairs for middle schools.
Thank you for taking the time to express your opinion. Scholastic is very proud of its long history of helping children learn to love to read. We look forward to continuing to bring the best in children’s literature to communities across the country and around the world as Scholastic has done for nearly 90 years.
Sincerely,
Kyle Good
Vice President, Scholastic Inc.
Now if they could only offer actual books in the school book orders, and stop selling toys and other non-book crap.
Philip Roth and the importance of reading.
You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there’s been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it’s a way of life for them. It doesn’t mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in te culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book – if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it’s not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading.
– Philip Roth, from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume IV
The past future of reading.
In schools and colleges, in these audio-visual days, doubt has been raised as to the future of reading — whether the printed word is on its last legs. One college president has remarked that in fifty years “only five per cent of the people will be reading.” For this, of course, one must be prepared. But how prepare? To us it would seem that even if only one person out of a hundred and fifty million should continue as a reader, he would be the one worth saving, the nucleus around which to found a university. We think this not impossible person, this Last Reader, might very well stand in the same relation to the community as the queen bee to the colony of bees, and that the others would quite properly dedicate themselves wholly to his welfare, serving special food and building special accomodations. From his nuptial, or intellectual, flight would come the new race of men, linked perfectly with the long past by the unbroken chain of the intellect, to carry on the community. But it is more likely that our modern hive of bees, substituting a coaxial cable for spinal fluid, will try to perpetuate the rave through audio-visual devices, which ask no discipline of the mind and which are already giving the room the langour of an opium parlor.
Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading — the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the respondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication. It would be just as well, we think, if educators clung to this great phenomenon and did not get sidetracked, for although books and reading may at times have played too large a part in the educational process, that is not what is happening today. Indeed, there is very little true reading, and not nearly as much writing as one would suppose from the towering piles of pulpwood in the dooryards of our paper mills. Readers and writers are scarce, as are publishers and reporters. The reports we get nowadays are those of men who have not gone to the scene of the accident, which is always farther inside one’s own head than it is convenient to penetrate without galoshes.
[Taken without permission from "The Future of Reading", from the book The Second Tree from the Corner, (c) 1935-1954 by E.B. White / Harper & Row.]
Book infusion.
After going to the office today for a bit, then the bank, I stopped at the annual book sale of a local library. Here’s what I picked up:
- The Second Tree from the Corner, E.B. White. Why The Library of America hasn’t collected all of his work yet is baffling and disappointing.
- Mythologies, Roland Barthes. I’ll probably start with this one.
- Grimms Fairy Tales – I picked this up chiefly because there’s no publisher information, date, anything – except that it says BOOKS INC. on the side. Mysterious! Hopefully not the sign of a bad book.
- Four Souls, Louise Erdrich. I hadn’t read anything of hers before last night, when I took the forthcoming Not Normal, Illinois collection to bed and read Erdrich’s story “Fuck with Kayla and You Die” which is so incredibly great that I’m going to have to hunt down all the Erdrich I can find. (The collection itself is also great.)
- Hush Little Baby – the Chronicle Books version.
- Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
- Still Life, A.S. Byatt
- Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
- The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks
- The Castle of Llyr, Lloyd Alexander. I couldn’t remember which of the five Prydain books I was missing, so what the heck.
- Descriptive Stories, Burnham
- Light in August, William Faulkner. Faulk yeah!
- Bulfinch’s Mythology
- … and a handful of books for the office.
Then I get home, and in the mail: Ben Ratliff’s The Jazz Ear, and The Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV. And in case that isn’t enough, I’m a click away from winning a $1,500 shopping spree at Powell’s Books, at which point I’m buying ALL OF YOU your own copies of Cloud Atlas and Remainder.
Paul Auster’s INVISIBLE…
… which is a real PITA for his publicist.
Blogs: where terrible jokes get their chance to shine.
Word from home is that Auster’s new book INVISIBLE, forthcoming from Henry Holt, arrived in today’s mail. I greet the occasion of new Auster with excitement, but it’s a Doug Flutie sort of excitement – it’s awesome until you realize that one Hail Mary pass (The New York Trilogy) was as good as it got. Which I say without having read all of his books. (Though I’m pretty sure Timbuktu wouldn’t change my mind.) Leviathan was good but ultimately unmemorable; ditto for The Book of Illusions; Oracle Night was, for my money, a very good book, but everything since then – The Brooklyn Follies, Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark – has been a series of contrived forays into a sort of “Dungeons & Dragons” of his better work – characters obsessed with their overwrought emotions and dramatic statements, in ways that never quite seem to align with their situations. I’m hoping this new one will be a return to form – or, if not another Hail Mary, at least a few completed passes.
Roundup.
- Laird Hunt’s excellent Ray of the Star gets a review at Bookforum. My review from The Quarterly Conversation was picked for the Powell’s Books Review-A-Day by the NBCC.
- Open Letters is serializing great big swaths of excerpt from Jan Kjaerstad’s The Discoverer, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. I’ve been dipping into it this week, and now I want to read all three of the books.
- Darby recommends you put some TED.com in your pipe and smoke it.
- Logicomix has been keeping me up late at night.
Obligations of book reviewers.
Earlier this week the FTC released new guidelines on how bloggers must disclose their relationships with commercial entities. I haven’t spent much time thinking about this—unlike smart people who have—mainly because I suspect any battle between the gummint and bloggers will attack women and children first. Relatively speaking, me and my modest stack of advance reader’s copies aren’t worth anybody’s attention and trouble. I’ve always considered ARCs as a tool to do my job, not some great prize; I receive them, but, like editors at newspaper book reviews, I feel no particular obligation to review them, acknowledge their existence, or announce their provenance if I do get around to mentioning them.
I received a review copy – the finished book, not an ARC – the other day that the publisher paid over $20 to have shipped to me. I feel no obligation whatsoever to name it, or to attempt to review it (as it’s likely way over my head, and I would not do the book the justice it may well deserve) despite the outlandish expense incurred to send it to me. It’s one of many, and there are only so many hours in the day. It will likely get passed on to a reviewer at Identity Theory.
You know Mark is on the straight and narrow, because if he was making any profit whatsoever from ARCs, he wouldn’t be drinking Folgers. No way
FTC imposing new regulations on book bloggers.
The FTC is drawing up plans for a dam to slow down the raging river of Advanced Review Copies being sent for free to bloggers, who apparently are turning around and selling them for big payola. My fellow bloggers, big lifestyle changes are in the works.
For Sale, one ARC-sale-funded $780,000,000 yacht with “Condalmo Hammock” written on the back:
This morning, the Federal Trade Commission announced that its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials would be revised in relation to bloggers. The new guidelines (PDF) specified that bloggers making any representation of a product must disclose the material connections they (the presumed endorsers) share with the advertisers. What this means is that, under the new guidelines, a blogger’s positive review of a product may qualify as an “endorsement” and that keeping a product after a review may qualify as “compensation.”
That excerpt from a post at Ed’s site; the post goes on to examine the implications, the discrepancies, and the bollocks. If you’re in the business, it’s worth a read. Here’s more on the matter from today’s New York Times. Ron Hogan is appropriately disgruntled at GalleyCat. I’m not sure why the FTC thinks that publishers expect positive reviews from bloggers, or that bloggers feel compelled to say positive things at the expense of their credibility. It seems counterintuitive.
Westlake Stark Tucker Coe Holt Clark, on pennames.
From an interview with Donald Westlake, author of the Parker series of crime novels:
Question: Other than Richard Stark, you have also published books under the names Samuel Holt, Tucker Coe, and Curt Clark, as well as under your given name of Donald Westlake. Why all the pennames?
Westlake: When you’re first in love, you want to do it all the time. I loved
writing, and I was just pushing out too much stuff for a rational marketplace to contend with. I first started putting pen names on short stories because magazines wouldn’t publish the same byline twice in the same magazine.
With the novels, Westlake had a contract to do a book a year for Random House, so if I added a second publisher I would need a second name. By the time Tucker Coe came along, both Westlake and Stark had some reputation of their own, and an emotionally-grieving disgraced ex-cop, an open wound, didn’t belong to either of them.
Some years later, I had reached that point known by a lot of writers: What if I were starting now? In this changed market, would I succeed? So I tested the waters the same way Stephen King did with his Richard Bachman novels: throw it out there under cover of darkness, and see what happens. That’s where Samuel Holt came from. (King told me once that, when his agent said they absolutely needed the pen name now because they were printing the cover, he was reading a Richard Stark and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive. It really is all incestuous.)
We’re compostable.
I am interested in this book; at the same time, I am alarmed and on guard. And wondering where did it all go wrong.
This is the definitive source on composting crappers, from why to how, and yes, the scatological humor abounds. Yet this is a serious issue. Biosolids are recycled and used in the U.S. and around the world by governments and municipalities, and not always in the most responsible ways. Jenkins gives you the knowledge to do it yourself, and do it responsibly.
A stack of quality books waiting to be read, and suddenly I’m interested in reading about a project I’m 100% sure my wife would veto immediately? Probably doesn’t help that I spent a “good” portion of the day watching my septic tank back up into my basement. All that waste!
More chair/book fun.
Never mind that last post. Here’s the goods, via Jimmy Chen at HTMLGIANT, on “A Book Lover’s Guide to IKEA Seating“. I’m stealing excerpting my personal favorite:
Franzen Chair
This chair comes with Jonathan Franzen. Some important notes while assembling this chair: make sure you do it correctly the first time, no mistakes. If you screw up, Johathan Franzen will publish an article in The New Yorker about how people in America are dumb, using you as an example…
Wish list: Penguin deck chairs.
Not yet available in the U.S.A. Check out the other “titles” here. (via @andevers)
“It’s the “Mirror, Mirror” version of when a beloved book is turned into a crappy movie. It’s “Wild Things” with a goatee.”
Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, has been turned into a Spike Jonze movie. I’m not sure when it’s coming out. Can you sense my lack of enthusiasm? I’m skeptical.
More intriguing is the forthcoming novelization – of the original book, not the movie – by Dave Eggers. An excerpt of the book is now available at the New Yorker’s website. I commented, elsewhere: ”Eggers fans will go berserk with delight, haters will reach new heights of apoplectic fury.” If nothing else, it’s bound to stir some interesting discussions, and maybe a few enjoyable other reverse-novelizations (I’d be interested in reading the novel for Curious George Gets a Medal). From the New Yorker excerpt:
Max knew that a bunk bed was the perfect structure to use when building an indoor fort. First of all, bunk beds have a roof, and a roof is essential if you’re going to have an observation tower. And you need an observation tower if you’re going to spot invading armies before they breach your walls and overtake your kingdom. Anyone without a bunk bed would have a much harder time maintaining a security perimeter, and if you can’t do that you don’t stand a chance.
Max had just done a quick survey of the area surrounding his bunk kingdom and was now down on the lower bunk, where he could be unseen and unknown. For a while, he thought about what his science teacher had been talking about earlier that day—that someday the sun would die. Mr. Malhotra had sensed that the mood in the class was darkening, that he’d scared his third graders, and had tried to brighten things: “What am I talking about? I’m being such a downer. Don’t worry about the sun dying! You and everyone you know will be long gone by then!”
It was a very strange time in Max’s life. The day before, his sister had tried, by proxy, to kill him. Her tobacco-chewing friends had chased him into his snow fort, and at the moment when he felt safest, in the cool white hollow, they had jumped on the roof, burying him. His sister had done nothing to help, and then had driven off with them, and to punish her, because she was no longer his sister, he’d doused her room with water. Buckets and buckets he’d emptied everywhere, in a furious, joyous process. It had been great, and felt so right, until his mother came home and found what he’d done. She was mad, Claire was mad, and so, tonight, the only person in the house who seemed to like him was his mom’s chinless boyfriend, Gary, and even thinking that sent a shudder through him.
Collagist.
Dzanc Books has launched their new monthly journal, The Collagist. In addition to a healthy serving of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and book reviews, issue one has an excerpt from Laird Hunt’s forthcoming novel Ray of the Star.
Prescription for libraries.
This article in CSM is a must-read for those of us interested in books and libraries. I’d like to build on Mr. Wisner’s thoughts with a few off-the-cuff ideas.
- Throw out the computers. When was the last time you saw someone at a library using a computer for anything library-related? At my local libraries, it’s chat, e-mail, gaming. I understand and value the service provided here for people who cannot afford a computer, DSL line, and printer in there own home; and yet, who are these people? They belong to a rapidly shrinking demographic. I’m typing this on a netbook that cost under $300. When I was working as a case manager, I spent a lot of time in the homes of people who would be considered “low-income”, and without an exception they had large-screen televisions and stereo systems. Take the public access computers out of libraries. Trust me; they’ll get access at school.
- Limit the wi-fi hours. I like the wi-fi at the library; I use it. I’m also willing to accept limitations placed on that free service – I should need to be a patron of the library, a card-carrying, dues-paying member. Weed out the riff-raff! But seriously: can you find nowhere else to mooch the free wi-fi? Set certain hours for the wi-fi access to be available. Have it be during the school day; designate space in a reading room for laptops and netbooks.
- Shhhhhhhh. I don’t care if it’s old fashioned, shut the F up. Take your cell phone out to your car. Leave your mp3 player out there as well. My two-year old understands what a “whisper voice” is; I’m sure she’d conduct some instructional seminars for a small fee. Librarians should not be swayed by the forces pushing them to “lighten up,” “adapt,” “change with the times.” That’s doublespeak for turn the library into a free-for-all hoo-hah. Or something like that.
- Audiobook storytimes. Not to supplant the librarian-facilitated storyhours for children, but to broaden the concept. The idea that Mr. Wisner’s library had a video playing in the childrens’ area gives me a splitting headache. Why not set an audiobook playing instead? An audiobook, with a few paper copies of the book if people want to follow along, would provide the best parts of the video concept (assuming for the moment that there are some) in the library. Parents uncomfortable with reading aloud, or that feel like they can’t do it in an entertaining enough manner to compete with other entertainments, would no doubt pick up some tricks from the professional narrators. And it would provide a daily destination for parents and children looking for low-cost, air-conditioned summer entertainments.
- Partner up with local universities and colleges. I’m sure this already happens in some places, but not around here: make it a requirement of senior year to have students from all majors provide free seminars at the libraries. Sharing knowledge should be one of the primary goals of libraries, and what better way to prepare students to use the knowledge they’ve gained than have them find interesting ways to share it with other adults and children?
They won’t let you keep what you bought.
If you bought a book from your favorite bookseller (let’s say, for the sake of a point, “Barnes & Noble”) – one you wanted to keep, a classic, let’s say “1984″ – and woke up one morning to find that the cashier had come into your house, taken back the book, and left you a check to cover the book – how would you feel about that? Would you shop at that bookseller again?
Closed for the summer.
I started Condalmo in 2006 to scratch an itch. Lately, that itch seems to be all cleared up. So, I’m suspending operations here until Fall to go and scratch at some other, newer itches.
Enjoy the summer, and go buy some good books at independent bookstores.
