I Love This Blog

No, not this one, that one.  Those of you whose minds are always in the gutter, which is to say probably all of you, will dig it.

This reminds me of one of my favorite dirty-mind stories...when the kids were little they had one of those Winnie-The-Pooh travesty Disney spinoff books with the strip of sound effects down the side, and when you pressed the Tigger button you heard Tigger say, "THAT is what Tiggers do best!"

But at one point we realized it sounded like it was saying "FUCK is what Tiggers do best!"  And after that, it was impossible to un-hear it.  Imagine sitting around with one's parents hearing this phrase over and over, nodding and grinning as though nothing untoward is going on.

About the Scrotum

The newest Newbery Award winning children's book, The Higher Power of Lucky, apparently has the word "scrotum" on the very first page, which, according to the New York Times article about it, has caused an uproar among some school librarians. To quote the Times, quoting the book:

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

Now that is an excellent example of how to use the word "scrotum" in a kid's book. It perfectly describes the way child figures out new, off-limits vocabulary. And heck, "scrotum" isn't even a swear. I can't think of a better place for my kids to learn the names of body parts than a Newbery Award-winning book. It certainly beats my having to teach them.

I don't know how the offended librarians are going to handle this, though. "No, Giselle, we don't have the 2006 winner, because it's very, very naughty." You might as well hang a big READ ME tag on it.

Sometimes I think we should tell kids, "You're not allowed to read until you're twenty-one." Next thing you know, we'll have a nation of binge-readers.

Harriet the Spy

I think my opinions about children and reading are so strong because so many books I read when I was a kid still hold tremendous power over me. I picked up a copy of Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy at the bookstore the other day and skimmed through it and found that I remembered almost every single line. If you haven't read it, it's about an eleven-year-old girl (a tomboy!) who spies on people and keeps a notebook because she wants to be a writer when she grows up. In the end her friends find the notebook and discover all the honest but pretty unkind things she was thinking and writing about them, and she has to figure out how to stay friends with them while staying true to her "art," so to speak. It's a pretty incredible book. It was written in 1964, which blows me away.

Tonight I was discussing the death of Elvis with my nine-year-old son, talking about his (Elvis's!) drug abuse and how hard it was to understand that someone so talented and successful could be so sad. And O. said, Well, when you're that rich and famous it must really hard to know if people like you for yourself, or because you're rich and famous. Which is of course terribly, and even obviously, true, but this is a kid who is obsessed with Tamagotchis and squeezing as much computer time out of me as he can, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. I was actually startled that this was something he'd put some thought into, which of course he had.

And this is all to point out how easy it is to underestimate children. If I were writing a book for O., I doubt I'd write something as smart and complicated and true as Harriet the Spy. I don't think Louise Fitzhugh ever had children, and maybe that's part of it. Maybe there's something about being a parent that makes you focus on the homework, the violin practice, and the fingernails to the exclusion of what's going on behind the scenes.

Anyway, I'm grateful there are some writers out there who can write for children without forgetting what complex and thoughtful people they were too, when they were kids.

Book mystery

This morning I was thinking about the different names for the male organ and remembered when I first encountered the word "prick." I was about twelve, in the children's section of the public library, reading a book about a British boys' school. What stuck in my mind is a vivid scene in which some boys are holding a race in the bathroom, naked, trying to see how far they can carry a slipper on their "prick."

Though now it occurs to me that the setting might not have been Britain at all, and the word might have been "peter."

I associate this memory very strongly with the Newbery awards section of that library, but I've scanned through the lists of Newbery winners and none seems to be this book. In those days, though, I was likely to sneak books from the adult section and take them back to the children's where I could read them out of eyeshot of the vigilant librarians.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?