I have been at home for the second day now, with my sick boy. Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm actually catching his virus too or if I'm just feeling the empathy just a little too deeply. It usually becomes evident if I do have it. You know, my nose runs and I sneeze all over the place.
Nick sounds like he's barking. It's time for him to go to the doctor. I hate feeling as if we're at the beginning of one of those nasty runs, the ones for which my adrenaline rises just talking about it too long, the ones that are about my job of keeping him breathing at 4am after three or four days of not sleeping. Have I ever told you how hard that is? Well, yeah. I guess I have.
You'd think that after two days of just being home, I'd be caught up on things like housework. You'd think. Nope, when Nickie is sick, I sit on the couch with him, sleeping when I can and watching reruns of iCarly and Spongebob. Nick is into a whole new kind of animation these days. Did I already complain about that? You know, the shows with the intentionally ugly animation? I did? Sorry. I really hate those shows because they aren't just visually ugly. They're psychologically ugly too. Maybe it's a boy thing, that he likes them. Maybe it satisfies some budding need to turn me away from him. Nick doesn't mind that I grab my book during those shows and phase out, but he wants me to stay close.
I'm cruising through the list of banned books that I'd gotten from the library. A lot of them are young adult books, but I've enjoyed them anyway. I appreciated the courage of the main character in 'The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things' by Carolyn Mackler. If I had a girl, I'd have her read it. I don't hold any hope that Nick might read it, but I wish he would since it has some good lessons about sizeism. You know, I hate that word, sizeism. It's just so awkward, but we have to have a word for the awful thing that people do to each other and themselves in the name of hating body fat.
I also read 'The Chocolate War' by Robert Gorimer. This was an intense book about about hazing at a Catholic school. It didn't follow the classic fairy tale arc, so it was hard to accept the emotions that came with reading it, but it was so compelling, I couldn't put it down. What a story! This fiction reads like nonfiction and Gorimer has an amazing grasp of the psychology of dialog. Whew! I'll have to get another book or two of his from the library.
I could see how these books became challenged, probably in a high school curriculum. Parents didn't want their high school kids reading about sexual feelings. Holy cow, don't these people know that kids are out there doing all that and need to read about it because it's real life? I'm not talking about pornography here. These are stories about how uncomfortable a kid can be the first time she kisses a boy with wandering hands or how a boy feels when he calls another boy a homosexual. So much of what I read has sensuality erased as if it doesn't exist. When was the last time you read a cheap detective novel and the main character just woke up with a woodie? You haven't, have you? Neither have I, but I tell you, it would have been a relief, as a teenager, to learn about these things in a book before I had to experience them in real life. So, I applaud these young adult books from my banned books list.
I'm not sure if it was on the banned book list, but 'Burned' by Ellen Hopkins was also of that ilk. What an amazing tale about a girl raised in an abusive, yet religious home. I like when my fiction reads as if the author knows in her bones what she's writing about. The old adage is: write what you know. If Ellen Hopkins didn't experience this, she is brilliant at research. To be honest, I don't want to know if she experienced it or not. Too many people out there are writing revenge memoirs, the ones in which they punish their fathers or their mothers for their bad behavior. This kind of fiction is the way to go. It sings its agony and its joy.
I'm proud to be reading from my list of banned books. I'm moving more slowly, or more honestly, I'm completely stopped, at the Koran and the Bible. They're not my usual kind of literature, though I almost took a comparative religions class once until I heard that the professor was an atheist and taught it all with sarcasm. I'm not a big fan of sarcasm. Oh, I'll get through them some day, but I'm not sure I'll be a font of information when it comes to comparing them. When I was a kid, I read the Bible enough to know popular passages, though I never read it from cover to cover. I recall that I tried once, but got lost in all the names of Genesis. Reading the Koran feels the same. In light of their common background, it doesn't surprise me. I should try harder with the Koran since I have so little experience with it. Does it count to read it at night when I can't sleep?
Sometimes, I try to read the classics that I missed as a result of studying engineering instead of liberal arts. Occasionally, I love the books, or parts of them. It was fascinating to learn how a whaling ship actually rendered the fat of the whale before coming into port. But, I'll tell you that I checked out 'Moby Dick' three times before I got through all of those disks. With other classics, I figure I'd appreciate the book more if I were in a class where relevant connections or changes in language could be pointed out. I'm trying anyway.
Right now, I'm listening to Thomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice.' What a crazy wonderful book! It's only slow going because I can't leave it on when Nick and Adrian get home from school. It isn't actually worse than what they've seen on television, but drugs are thrown around in a funny way in the book. I can appreciate the humor of an LSD trip in text without ever wanting to experience it in real life. I doubt eleven-year-olds are ready for that kind of discrimination. I'm also moving through it slowly because the language is so rich that I'm backing up to repeat good parts more than I usually do when listening to a book.
So, read on! Banned books week may be over, but if you read more banned books, you ensure that you retain some of your freedoms the other 51 weeks of the year. There are banned books for every reader, from serious to Maruice Sendak. I'm not kidding. Maurice Sendak has a banned book. Isn't that sad?
Maybe there are a few good things to be said about ugly animations on television. I definitely get more reading done when they're on.
Thank you for listening, jb
Nick sounds like he's barking. It's time for him to go to the doctor. I hate feeling as if we're at the beginning of one of those nasty runs, the ones for which my adrenaline rises just talking about it too long, the ones that are about my job of keeping him breathing at 4am after three or four days of not sleeping. Have I ever told you how hard that is? Well, yeah. I guess I have.
You'd think that after two days of just being home, I'd be caught up on things like housework. You'd think. Nope, when Nickie is sick, I sit on the couch with him, sleeping when I can and watching reruns of iCarly and Spongebob. Nick is into a whole new kind of animation these days. Did I already complain about that? You know, the shows with the intentionally ugly animation? I did? Sorry. I really hate those shows because they aren't just visually ugly. They're psychologically ugly too. Maybe it's a boy thing, that he likes them. Maybe it satisfies some budding need to turn me away from him. Nick doesn't mind that I grab my book during those shows and phase out, but he wants me to stay close.
I'm cruising through the list of banned books that I'd gotten from the library. A lot of them are young adult books, but I've enjoyed them anyway. I appreciated the courage of the main character in 'The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things' by Carolyn Mackler. If I had a girl, I'd have her read it. I don't hold any hope that Nick might read it, but I wish he would since it has some good lessons about sizeism. You know, I hate that word, sizeism. It's just so awkward, but we have to have a word for the awful thing that people do to each other and themselves in the name of hating body fat.
I also read 'The Chocolate War' by Robert Gorimer. This was an intense book about about hazing at a Catholic school. It didn't follow the classic fairy tale arc, so it was hard to accept the emotions that came with reading it, but it was so compelling, I couldn't put it down. What a story! This fiction reads like nonfiction and Gorimer has an amazing grasp of the psychology of dialog. Whew! I'll have to get another book or two of his from the library.
I could see how these books became challenged, probably in a high school curriculum. Parents didn't want their high school kids reading about sexual feelings. Holy cow, don't these people know that kids are out there doing all that and need to read about it because it's real life? I'm not talking about pornography here. These are stories about how uncomfortable a kid can be the first time she kisses a boy with wandering hands or how a boy feels when he calls another boy a homosexual. So much of what I read has sensuality erased as if it doesn't exist. When was the last time you read a cheap detective novel and the main character just woke up with a woodie? You haven't, have you? Neither have I, but I tell you, it would have been a relief, as a teenager, to learn about these things in a book before I had to experience them in real life. So, I applaud these young adult books from my banned books list.
I'm not sure if it was on the banned book list, but 'Burned' by Ellen Hopkins was also of that ilk. What an amazing tale about a girl raised in an abusive, yet religious home. I like when my fiction reads as if the author knows in her bones what she's writing about. The old adage is: write what you know. If Ellen Hopkins didn't experience this, she is brilliant at research. To be honest, I don't want to know if she experienced it or not. Too many people out there are writing revenge memoirs, the ones in which they punish their fathers or their mothers for their bad behavior. This kind of fiction is the way to go. It sings its agony and its joy.
I'm proud to be reading from my list of banned books. I'm moving more slowly, or more honestly, I'm completely stopped, at the Koran and the Bible. They're not my usual kind of literature, though I almost took a comparative religions class once until I heard that the professor was an atheist and taught it all with sarcasm. I'm not a big fan of sarcasm. Oh, I'll get through them some day, but I'm not sure I'll be a font of information when it comes to comparing them. When I was a kid, I read the Bible enough to know popular passages, though I never read it from cover to cover. I recall that I tried once, but got lost in all the names of Genesis. Reading the Koran feels the same. In light of their common background, it doesn't surprise me. I should try harder with the Koran since I have so little experience with it. Does it count to read it at night when I can't sleep?
Sometimes, I try to read the classics that I missed as a result of studying engineering instead of liberal arts. Occasionally, I love the books, or parts of them. It was fascinating to learn how a whaling ship actually rendered the fat of the whale before coming into port. But, I'll tell you that I checked out 'Moby Dick' three times before I got through all of those disks. With other classics, I figure I'd appreciate the book more if I were in a class where relevant connections or changes in language could be pointed out. I'm trying anyway.
Right now, I'm listening to Thomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice.' What a crazy wonderful book! It's only slow going because I can't leave it on when Nick and Adrian get home from school. It isn't actually worse than what they've seen on television, but drugs are thrown around in a funny way in the book. I can appreciate the humor of an LSD trip in text without ever wanting to experience it in real life. I doubt eleven-year-olds are ready for that kind of discrimination. I'm also moving through it slowly because the language is so rich that I'm backing up to repeat good parts more than I usually do when listening to a book.
So, read on! Banned books week may be over, but if you read more banned books, you ensure that you retain some of your freedoms the other 51 weeks of the year. There are banned books for every reader, from serious to Maruice Sendak. I'm not kidding. Maurice Sendak has a banned book. Isn't that sad?
Maybe there are a few good things to be said about ugly animations on television. I definitely get more reading done when they're on.
Thank you for listening, jb
No comments:
Post a Comment