(no subject)

mycrust, after you parted ways with us twotoedsloth and I went to the Porter Square bookstore and the Rainbow Party book most certainly exists:

Here is the synopsis from the School Library Journal:

Grade 9 Up -When Ginger arranges for an oral sex party to be held at her home, most of the teens she invites-some in relationships, some not-say that they will attend, and then figure out ways to avoid it. Egomaniac Hunter talks his friend Perry into going, although Perry regularly gives him plenty of oral sex. Surprise-having left work early, Gin's father shows up. Even though Hunter arrives with a bunch of condom balloons, Dad doesn't notice anything out of the ordinary. But when 39 members of the sophomore class are diagnosed with gonorrhea, Gin gets the blame. The story is told in sometimes crude or suggestive language, the writing is stilted, and there is little character development. The inclusion of a health teacher who happens to be covering the issue of STDs, along with opposition to the party by the teen founder of the Celibacy Club, seems forced. Actually, with its too-obvious agenda, much of the novel seems forced, but particularly curious readers will plow through to the end. Melvin Burgess's Doing It (Holt, 2004) is far more graphic in its depiction of teen sexuality, but it is a much better crafted book.

here is a writing sample:

"The rainbow party seemed like a good idea when Gin first heard of it. Well, actually it sounded like a gay political group, but once she found out what it really was, her interest level shot up a thousand percet. But now, with only two hours until party time, she was actually starting to get nervous too [sic]. Normally, Gin didn't "do" nervous. It was such a waste of emotion.

But so many questions kept pooping up in her head.

What if no one comes?

Will I really be able to keep it a secret until it's over?

If the girl/boy ratio is uneven, how will I balance out the equation?

That last question had come to her during algebra. Instead of wondering what would happen when two trains travelling at different speeds met (most likely death and destruction, if on the same track), all Gin could think about was what happened if six boys showed up, but she and Sandy were the only girls. Aside from the damage it would do to her reputation, it would wreak havoc with all the devious plans she had for the party.

I felt like such a fuddy-duddy, sort of, when I was appalled after reading the Naomi Wolf article and telling theophile, "what happened to kids reading, like, Dumas and Tolkien? What happened to kids reading good literature? It's all capitalism's fault!" Seriously, capitalism stole my rainbow party virginity or something. I mean, these books collapse the preexisting opposition between TV vs. reading, and of course there always was pulp literature and romance novels in the past, but there wasn't quite SO much SHITTY TV, you know? But also I realized something when mycrust asked me today why I had such a problem with these books. It's that they are sexually explicit in a way that is commodified and de-tantalized. It takes all the deliciousness out of that adolescent process of stumbling onto an old copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover and flipping through it for the "sexy" parts and feeling like you have this Big Secret that you share with your giggling friends, or even secretly thumbing through Judy Blume paperbacks and slowly gaining the awareness of sex as this exciting secret that makes you bubble and tingle and informs all kinds of teenage rituals, both social and private. The idea of all of it being explictly and UNSEXILY written in the most crude language possible (in ENGLISH, which is one of the worst languages for sexual terminology) and then marketed at targed audiences for consumption (and probably ushering in a fad of life-imitating-pulp mimesis, giving this urban legend a Foucault's Pendulum-style actualization by making it into a real-life "meme"), completely circumnavigating the pleasures-of-uncovering, is as depressing as Molly Jong-Fast's "novel"-by-(dis)grace-of-being-Erica-Jong's-offspring, entitled with irony so linear that it sort of disqualifies itself from irony, "Normal Girl."

When I have kids, this is what they are going to read:

His Dark Materials
The Wrinkle in Time series
The Dark Is Rising series
The Moomintrolls/Moominvalley series (see icon)
Anne of Green Gables

Also Dumas, Tolkien, Jules Verne, R.L. Stevenson, H.C. Anderson, Mark Twain andHoffman and G.G. Kay and everything by de Sainte-Exupery and Ernest Thompson Seton and Harry Potter and The Earthsea Trilogy and stuff on this list. Because I have a button that says "everything I needed to know in life I learned from reading banned books" and I totally bonded with some old hippie over it at Someday Cafe today. So yeah, everything on that list except for "Go Ask Alice" b/c it was written by some right-wing housewife and with none of the pomo cache of the J.T. Leroy hoax, neither.