(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

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.

Comments

[theophile.livejournal.com]

But so many questions kept pooping up in her head.

please let this not be a typo

[kowboy.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you didn't include Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, Kenneth Grahame, and Frances Hodgson Burnett in your list. I know Frog and Toad are Friends doesn't have the same snap as other books but that series I attribute to my awareness of gay culture and acceptance of same.

And as to your comment about reading through Judy Blume for the good parts, that's how I was introduced to Vladimir Nabakov, Henry Miller, Walt Whitman, Anais Nin, and Simone de Beauvoir.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I thought I included Carroll, but I think I accidentally deleted that line when I was typing "The Dark Is Rising." But my list was by no means exhaustive. It was just the first things that came to mind as I was typing this entry up on the fly.

There is plenty of excellent literature that has "the good parts." It's a wonderful synesthetic process, reading it and finding sexy parts in fabulous books. This is what kids today are deprived of, thanks to Rainbow Party and Doing It and whatever else.

[kowboy.livejournal.com]

That's the thing I discovered about "good parts" when reading Navakov. There aren't any. At no point in the novel Lolita does he descend into pornopgraphy by allowing the reader an easy out. As a young boy full of hormones with no perceivable outlet (I was just getting over the punching in the arm phase), all I wanted was "good parts." That's why I agree with you about your statements regarding modern fiction. I got the same feeling reading Less Than Zero back in the day as you have reading stories about rainbow parties. It's all porn. A lot of fluff with no real substance.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I had that (disappointing) experience with Henry Miller

[mycrust.livejournal.com]

But when 39 members of the sophomore class are diagnosed with gonorrhea, Gin gets the blame.

What??

This book sounds like equal parts pedophilia and an abstinence-only educator's fever dream.

[pdanielson.livejournal.com]

There was actually a Chlamydia epidemic at my high school among the class two years below me due to excessive and promiscuous oral sex. Or at least that was the rumor. It's hard to take things seriously at your school when the wall is adorned with posters proclaiming "All the homies keep it tight without the dank and the drank."

[fengi.livejournal.com]

Wow. I mean, wow. This is nothing more than the modern equivalent of the soft core porn films peddled to communities as cautionary education. It's a bizarre echo chamber - rumors and fantasies amongst early teens are amplified by questionable data into a panic about teen blow jobs which then leads to a novel which feeds imaginations. This book sounds like a sewer I'd never let near my 15 year olds. It's books like this which are the kindling of a banning firestorm; one would almost think it was designed to go off like fragmentation bomb of controversey and take out Judy Blume's Forever. That it was written by a man indicates that it is completely pervy. I wouldn't be surprised if Paul Ruditis has a shelf full of Jock Sturgis books he reads a little too often, if ya know what I mean. It's little more than a series of penthouse letters combined with a Law&Order:SVU episode aimed squarely at the tween set (because that's who will grab this book first).

It makes me sad, not for the debased teens who inspired this tripe - but for all the sexually inactive teens, fretting parents and curious adults who might fear or believe this grotesquerie is common outside their boundaries of experience, spawning a mix of disgust, inadequacy and anxiety. It's like that girls transform into feral beasts 13 movie, possibly true in some cases, but not at the level of drama or depravity depicted.

I want to punch the author.

that should be

[fengi.livejournal.com]

It makes me sad, not for the debased teens who SUPPOSEDLY inspired this tripe

[pdanielson.livejournal.com]

What I really want to know is why nobody is organizing rainbow parties for us adults. This is an outrage!

[brooklyn-jak.livejournal.com]

You might be getting old. The book sounds hilariously bad, but everybody calm down! Did you read the reader reviews on Amazon? All these teens saying the book is crap. See, the kids are alright. When I was twelve I read the Thorn Birds for the dirty parts and civilization didn't collapse. I also read a lot on your list, but some that I didn't because I wasn't really into science/fiction fantasy. But you know what is a great kid's series of books? --The Great Brain. About a rational family in the midst of mormon country at the turn of the century. Loved those!

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

From your quotation, the book sounds like the document of a wannabe, someone turned on by the idea of ninth-graders having rainbow party oral sex, thinking that these days they're all doing it, and wanting to show them that he's that kind of guy too, but with the sad mature knowledge of adulthood that some of this is bad for you. Still, it's all about how experienced a ninth-grader Ruditis is. Which in that regard makes him sound like a ninth grader.

Hey, does Tuesday still work for lunch?

[cos]

I heard of this book just a few weeks ago, reading a recent issue of The Atlantic. Just found the article online: Are You There, God? It's Me, Monica - it's a bit rambly and I wasn't entirely sure what the author's thesis is, but some of the points she makes are thoughtful in a good way (others, I just found confused or frustrating). And the writing is good.

[jactitation.livejournal.com]

But Go Ask Alice was so fuckin' hilarious when I read it, it didn't matter at all when I found out later it wasn't "real." It made me want to do speed and put mayonaise in my hair to straighten it (all of which I did)!

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

As someone who makes a living ghostwriting this crap, I feel like I have to chime in. Obviously, I spend a lot of time thinking about teen books and what is "acceptable" and what isn't, and I've finally come to the conclusion that if you write a book for any reason other than wanting to write a good book that is somehow meaningful to you as the author, it's crap and any teenager worth her salt is going to see that.

I can write perfectly innocuous drivel about some rich chick in L.A. going to a premiere in an ugly dress because some moron who thinks she understands what teenagers want to read is supposedly paying me to do it, and it will be offensive because it's not a novel, it's marketing. On the other hand, someday I'll write a teen novel about intraveneous drug use and anal rape that won't be offensive (at least not to me) because it has some meaning and took some effort and talent to write.

And now back to the third draft of Rich Cute Girls Ogling Boys Under the California Sun #47.

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

It'd be a great great shame if the art of thumbing through books in search of 'dirty bits' was lost. After all, the incentive of raunchy bits has gotten a lot of teenagers (my young and horny self included) to read books like Lady Chatterly, and graduate from them to other books by the same author. But all that aside, the idea that there are kids learning about safe sex from this kind of repulsive caricature is pretty disturbing.

I agree when you say this breaks down the superiority of books over TV, and worse. This is using another medium to perpetrate one-dimensional, masturbatory bilge that parents wouldn't let their teenagers watch on TV. If it's in a book, though, it must be alright...

Anyway...all hail Moomintroll! And innocence!