Why Do They Think Teens Read?

This article from Nashua, NH, about four stories being pulled from the high school curriculum because cocaine use, cannibalism, homosexuality and abortion are not "age-appropriate" subjects for teens. Imagine that. Are these kids allowed to watch the news?

Recently, I was going through some old poetry books, cleaning out my shelf, and I came across an anthology with Anne Sexton's For My Lover Returning to His Wife. I mean, how could poetry not be thrilling for a teenager? All that taboo stuff! I love poetry to this day!

Books -- poetry, novels, stories -- were how I found out about life, and how to think about morals and ethics. Because my parents were tolerant, I was able to read whatever I wanted, including, in college, I think, Hills Like White Elephants, the famous Hemingway story in which abortion, the subject, is never mentioned.

Oeufs Vert au Jambon!!

This made me very happy.

Maybe it's just a rainy day impulse purchase, but I want one and it can be had at Amazon.

Dept. of Heart in Right Place

Ray Bradbury is on the side of libraries.

The Koreatown public library in Los Angeles where Mr. Bradbury spent his teens. After clicking the link, click "street view" in the bubble.

What's in a name: Koogle

The kosher search engine: Koogle.

The silliness of the name made me think it was worth a post. I miss Froogle, which is now the boring Google shopping.

photo from wholefoodsmarket.com

David Carradine and James Baldwin

All the lurid coverage of Carradine's death has me wondering why anyone takes that kind of risk -- not just sexual adventurers, but guys who climb challenging mountains or risk death in other ways. What is going on there, is it self-destruction that falls short of direct suicide attempts, is it arrested development/nothing bad can happen to me because I'm young or rich or famous (pick one)? The thing is, for every man who dies of something risky like this, like Chris McCandless (read Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild), or men who've died on Mt. Everest (Krakauer's Into Thin Air), there are probably thousands who take foolish risks and do not die, who look back and think, Christ, I'm lucky I survived. Is there benefit for the group to having men who are willing to risk their lives without thinking too much about it?

Anyway, at the same time that I've been puzzling this out, I've been reading Another Country, and here is what James Baldwin has to say about his character, Vivaldo, who seeks the thrill of danger by visiting Harlem in the 1950s:

It had been his fancy that danger, there, was more real, more open, than danger was downtown and that he, having chosen to run these dangers, was snatching his manhood from the lukewarm waters of mediocrity and testing it in the fire. He had felt more alive in Harlem, for he had moved in a blaze of rage and self-congratulation and sexual excitement, with danger, like a promise, waiting for him everywhere. And, nevertheless, in spite of all this daring, this running of risks, the misadventures which had actually befallen him had been banal indeed and might have befallen him anywhere. His dangerous, overwhelming lust for life had failed to involve him in anything deeper than perhaps half a dozen extremely casual acquaintanceships in about as many bars. For memories, he had one or two marijuana parties, one or two community debauches, one or two girls whose names he had forgotten, one or two addresses which he had lost....

...He was forced, little by little, against his will, to realize that in running the dangers of Harlem he had not been testing his manhood, or heightening his sense of life. He had merely been taking refuge in the outward adventure in order to avoid the clash and tension of the adventure proceeding inexorably within. Perhaps this was why he sometimes seemed to surprise in the dark faces which watched him a hint of amused and not entirely unkind contempt.... He was just a poor white boy in trouble and it was not in the least original of him to come running to the niggers.

Beautiful Libraries

These photos are gorgeous and make me wonder if all the worry about people losing interest in books can possibly be justified.

Abortion Doctor

CNN, ABC and Yahoo (and no doubt Fox) are all guilty. The NY Times, bless its lonely, print-bound, going-bankrupt soul, is not: Doctor who performed abortions is shot to death.

I think the misuse of language encourages crime, altho it would be hard to argue that CNN is responsible for this murder.

Fiction in Orbit

Our experience of stories is, by and large, a lateral one, in which the writer commands every aspect of the world the reader inhabits as well as the process by which it reveals itself. Fine; it’s worked for centuries. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that gaming – which increasingly promises a narrative space for the player to make his own way, never having the same experience twice – is where at least some of the great writers of tomorrow will make their names.

Eh. I've heard this argument for about the past twenty years. So, when is it going to happen? The author of this article at the Telegraph mentions a lot of books that inspired games, including the forthcoming Dante's Inferno, "an uncannily good fit for the levels of a computer game." I don't know if books are what the video games are replacing -- why not TV, or team sports or even opera? And, if video games do replace books, what will the gamers do when the source materials are all used up? Write new ones?

Judging a book by its cover

Are new sci fi book covers designed to appeal only to genre readers? Did the old ones have more general appeal? Hm. On the Penguin blog. Here is a link to the cover art of some old Penguin titles. You can get bigger images and book descriptions by clicking.

Maybe readers were more open minded in the past. Most of these covers look pretty science-fictiony to me, lover of aliens and worlds ending that I am.

A Sad Story in Here Somewhere?

Chocolate Chip Cookie for One. I'm surprised it doesn't come with a single-cookie-making machine.

Well, it saves a trip to the convenience store in the middle of the night, although you can make the whole batch in the same amount of time, as one reviewer notes. I just like the idea. It's the cookie version of a paperback that fits in your Levis pocket.

People did used to carry books around more often, right? And cookies? Now it's all phones and Blackberries, personal music devices and GPS things. I'd rather get lost with a book and a cookie, myself.

A la carte

pricing for short story collections? Sort of like mp3 files... Is this really what's in store for e-books? Not to mention rewriting to influence search engines.

“perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind.”

*shudder*

And, what happens when we can't tell what other people are reading on the subway, and what they have on their shelves? How can we prejudge them/influence their first impressions of us, if nobody can tell we have great lit on the Kindle?

Obviously, we need a Kindle that displays a slideshow of the titles contained within, and some way of telling that the person actually has the books, and not just the slideshow.

We don't serve your type.

Somehow, I don't think the torture memos (see previous post) were written in Comic Sans. But, apparently, everything else is and some people have a problem with that.

Literature of the Bush Administration

We love to torture.

The resemblance to Dick Cheney is scary.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

What else is there to say? But somehow, Bill Clinton, vampire hunter, would work better for me. Maybe because it seemed the undead really came out after him.