I confess: I have not seen The Big Lebowski. It’s always been one of those things I say I’ll get around to one of these days: I like the other Coen Brothers movies I’ve seen, I know a lot of Coen fans hold Lebowski in high esteem, that it has cult following. I think I’ll probably be watching it tonight, though; one of the review books that came in the mail yesterday was The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies (Indiana University Press), and it’s just fantastic. Some of the essay titles: “The Really Big Sleep: Jeffrey Lebowski as the Second Coming of Rip Van Winkle”; “Dudespeak: Or, How to Bowl like a Pornstar”; “Metonymic Hats and Metaphoric Tumbleweeds: Noir Literary Aesthetics in Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski”; “The Big Lebowski and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism”; “Holding Out Hope for the Creedence: Music and the Search for the Real Thing in The Big Lebowski”, which is the first essay I read (Creedence? sign me up)… and the list goes on, 21 essays in all, ranging from stridently academic to …well, less stridently academic.

What they all share is a serious appreciation for the movie, while avoiding “arid analysis” – in other words, it’s not just a book to be passed around among film studies majors. It manages to be deeply smart and serious about its ideas without become stuffy and impenetrable. It’s also not one of those hokey knock-off, cash-in books that you see trying to jump on the coattails. If you’re holiday shopping, this should definitely make the cut.

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.

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

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.]

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.

… 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.

• 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.