Books That Saved My Life

God you have to love Philip Pullman.  Although if you were God apparently you might not like him so much.  Today the Guardian reports that upon hearing that he had come in at #4 on the ALA’s list of banned books, Pullman was full of “glee.” It reminds me again of Douglas Lain’s comment about the joy of purposefully reading books that are considered subversive.  It is a clear testament to a book’s power to move people, whether to anger or joy, and if you can remember reading Farenheit 451 you’ll also remember its that very quality of being moved to passion that keeps us alive.  -MW

Philip Pullman asks, can literature change the world?

Voluntary Service

By Philip Pullman

The Guardian, Saturday December 28 2002

What is the relationship between art and society? Can art do anything to make the world better, or is it quite useless? This is an old puzzle, and no one has solved it yet. At one end of the range of possible answers lies the Soviet idea that the writer is the engineer of human souls, that art has a social function and should produce what the state needs, and at the other end is the declaration of Oscar Wilde, in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book; books are well written or badly written, that is all. However, he wasn’t consistent about this: elsewhere, in “The Critic as Artist”, he wrote “All art is immoral”; and it’s notable that The Picture of Dorian Gray itself is one of the most firmly moral stories ever written.

(Read the article here, at The Guardian online)

Fan Letters to Judy Blume

By CJ Evans

Dear Judy:
It’s creepy for a grown man to read a pre-teen girl’s coming of age story. Which is exactly what the saleswoman at Barnes & Noble said to me when I bought Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret a few years back.  I don’t think it helped that I had it tucked, pornography-style, between the two books I thought least suspect in my pile of purchases- Mann’s Magic Mountain and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.  Apparently, the presence of Germans doesn’t reassure people that you aren’t a weirdo.
xoxo, CJ

*

Dear Judy:
I was ten when I first read your book and only months removed from my first game of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with Sarah, the older and slightly developed girl next door.  I must admit the game raised more questions than it answered. I was confounded, but intrigued.  This was a situation that required research.
xoxo, CJ

*

Dear Judy:
As I sat in a hipster coffee shop in Portland reading your book for the first time since childhood I couldn’t but steal glances at the women around me.  I’m a bit on the shy side, and pretty girls with too much eyeshadow (a bit of an aesthetic of mine) tend to scare me.  It really helped me to think of these women as pre-teen girls, like the girls in the book, flapping their arms and chanting “I must, I must, I must increase my bust.”  I like to think I’m a little less awkward because of you.
xoxo, CJ

*

Dear Judy:
It was shortly before my first reading of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret that my mother bought me the sex education book with the line drawings of things that looked remarkably like the slides my teacher showed during our “Life Under the Ocean” week in school.  It clarified nothing. My research skills were failing me.
xoxo, CJ

*

Dear Judy:
Then I read your book.  You taught me some people bleed for no reason from their crotches, and, inexplicably, can’t wait for it to happen.
xoxo, CJ

*

Dear Judy:
I still don’t claim to understand anything about women (and, honestly, I’m still not sure where the pee comes out).  You laid the groundwork for my acceptance of this fact.  Somewhere since 1988, when I was ten, and now, you removed the part of the book about the belt to hold sanitary napkins.  Rereading it, I must say I miss those belts.  For a book that does so little to actually inform curious young boys about the actual goings-on of the female body, you took out the one thing I thought was coolest.  Clasps and hooks and mesh!  I thought women were like Robocop under their clothes.
xoxo, CJ

*

Dear Judy:
Sarah and Margaret were my first brush with how numinous the world could be. I realized through them that the world is filled with things I will never understand.
xoxo, CJ

*

Dear Judy:
I remain ignorant to this day.  Ignorant enough to walk into Barnes & Noble and conspicuously stand in the pre-teen section, leafing through your books.  Ignorant enough to write poems even though I have it on good authority that poetry is dead.  Ignorant enough to smile at the girl behind the counter (she was quite pretty) instead of apologizing I learned from you that she and I just wouldn’t get each other, and I could either explain my whole internal world or picture her doing the chicken-wing-boob-growing dance.  I think you know which option I chose.
xoxo, CJ
PS: Please, oh please put the part about the sanitary belt back into Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret.  It makes the world just a little more fascinating.

//

CJ Evans’s poetry has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in journals such as AGNI Online, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, LIT, and Virginia Quarterly Review.  His chapbook, The Category of Outcast, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2008 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship

This essay was originally published in Tin House Magazine, Issue 26.

(Pick up a copy of Blume’s Are You There God… here or subscribe to Tin House here)

Conservative Christians at the Movies

by Brook Wilensky-Lanford

Early on in the new movie The Golden Compass, based on the 1995 novel by British writer Philip Pullman, the heroine Lyra Belacqua is entrusted with the safekeeping of the titular compass, a truth-telling device that shows things “as they are.” This particular compass, called an alethiometer, is the last one to survive destruction by the Magisterium, a shadowy and all-powerful organization that wants to wipe out knowledge, reason, and free will. Later Lyra, stowed away on a ship on the run from the Magisterium, practices reading the alethiometer’s three-handed clockwork and mysterious symbols.  When you ask a question of the alethiometer, a wise elder tells her, you must be sure not to “grasp” for answers. Hold your question in your mind, “but lightly, like it was something alive.”

An evil church and a separate standard for truth other than the Bible?  No wonder both Catholics and evangelical Christians are boycotting this movie.

In the decades between the 1925 Scopes trial and the emergence of the religious right as a political force in the 1980s, argues Susan Harding in The Book of Jerry Falwell, the exiled fundamentalists lived in a tacit agreement with modern America.  “We’ll retreat from culture, if you’ll stop putting evolution in textbooks.”  And this was done; textbook publishers, to preserve fragile profit margins in California and Texas, voluntarily minimized mentions of evolution.  And fundamentalists absented themselves from all forms of American popular culture.

Movies, along with smoking and drinking and long hair, were banned in fundamentalist communities.  Television was suspect, though eventually accepted.  The 1960 film Inherit the Wind, according to Harding, is a perfect example of the lack of cultural interaction between the two groups.  The story, an obvious retelling of the Scopes trial which portrayed William Jennings Bryan and his followers as naïve yokels, used the Scopes trial not for its own historical importance-that battle had already been fought, and won-but as an allegory for the growing threat of McCarthyism. On the other side, the movie received, according to Harding, no response at all from fundamentalists. They simply did not exist as an opposition.  And they didn’t see the movie. (more…)

Hi and welcome to the first edition of Books That Saved My Life,  launching today in honor of the start of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week.  (A bit belatedly, let’s hope the book burners also sleep late.)  Banned Books Week was started back in 1982 as a response to a sudden spike in challenges to books in schools, bookstores, and libraries.

Lately I’ve been ranting and raving about Sarah Palin’s attempt to ban books in Wasilla, AK. There’s been some debate as to whether what Palin did constitutes “banning” books. Let’s be clear her actions consisted simply of asking the local librarian whether she could take a few books off the shelves.  Is this “banning” a book?  According to the ALA, challenges along the lines of Palin’s “rhetorical” inquiry are considered the first step toward getting a book banned completely.

The most challenged books of 2007*

1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
(Click here to see why these books were challenged.)

*From ala.org

In honor of Phillip Pullman, number four on today’s countdown, we give you Boycotting Another World: Christian Conservatives at the Movies by Brook Wilensky-Lanford.

And for Judy Blume, number 13 with a bullet for most banned author of the decade we’re bringing you The Education of a Man: Fan Letters to Judy Bloom by CJ Evans, originally published in the Lost and Found section of Tin House Magazine.

For my favorite (ex-stripper) librarian: My Morning Jacket singing Librarian

Books That Saved My Life is an online journal created to celebrate books that are not only subversive, entertaining, educational, but actually life-saving.  The official launch of the site will be September 27th, the first day of Banned Books Week–a series of festivals, readings and barn-raisings sponsored by the American Library Association.

Along the theme of book-banning  I’m re-posting a piece I wrote many years back, originally published in Anvil:

 Curious George: 

Your library and the Patriot Acts

by Montana Wojczuk

I have a secret to tell. I once owed $90 in late fees to the Multnomah County Public Library. I wish I could say that this is an anomaly, but my felonious borrowing began early in childhood. Somewhere buried deep in the backyard of my parents’ house is the crayon-smeared copy of Curious George goes to School that I borrowed with my first library card. I tore one of the pages and was too embarrassed to return it. Now, however, such secrets may rise out of the dust of my past to haunt me.

As far back as the library of Alexandria, large caches of information about our history and cultures have been tragically destroyed in the scrimmage for political power. The old adage that knowledge is power holds true, but in today’s Information Age, the true power lies in knowledge about what knowledge others are seeking. On October 26, 2002 the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, signed into effect a bill that allowed for freer information gathering on immigrants and resident aliens of the US.

In and of itself, the Patriot Act I (the 1 has been added in retrospect) gave obscene freedoms to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security to detain individuals without a warrant and without allowing them to contact their family. The justification behind this is that under Material Witness laws, a person could be detained for pending legal cases if they were essential to the case and possibly in danger were it known that they had been subpoenaed. The result, however, is that for the first time in American history secret arrests are supported by law. More immediately, Patriot Act I paves the way for Patriot Act II.

Smuggled in through the smoke of our most recent war, Patriot Act II allocates even greater freedoms to both the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. Under that Act not only can they access the library records of naturalized and native-born, they can also judge this information anti-American under a far looser definition.

Prior to Patriot Act I, the FBI was still allowed to access library records, but they had to prove extensive probable cause in a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court and obtain a warrant. If Patriot Act II passes, however, FISA warrants would become completely unnecessary, and agents would only have to express “suspicion that someone is engaged in an action that could potentially support terrorism”, while “terrorism” already includes as broad a spectrum as donating money to an organization that is later found to have vague ties to the Middle-East (American Civil Liberties Union Legislative Update). This applies to resident aliens and American citizens alike. What is even more frightening is that the draft for Patriot Act II was leaked to the press and John Ashcroft, who drafted the bill, still denies its existence.

(more…)