The Great Ganesha

Since it is a tradition on The Great Ganesha to comment on newsworthy items well after they happened and completely passed from the public mind, I’m going to blog about this article I read in the NYT.

The story starts off quite innocently, talking about what is arguably one of the most sensitive and emotionally delicate personalities that exist – that of the children’s author. You know the type: something like Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, or Ren?e Zellweger in Jerry Maguire. And this children’s author is good. Very good. She is the recipient of the Newberry Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. You can almost picture it. The woman is typing away in some faraway land, almost mythical in its beauty. The sun is shining on a green garden with plenty of trees and birds chirping in the background. The canon of Innocence, as it were. And then she types: ’scrotum’. [Insert sound of record needle being ripped from baroque music here]. Whaaa-?

Well, it’s true – Susan Patron, a popular children’s author, happened to include the word ’scrotum’ in her latest children’s book The Higher Power of Lucky. The protagonist Lucky, a ten year-old girl, overhears two people talking about a rattlesnake that bit a dog on his scrotum. And the consequence? The book was banned by some librarians all across the country. Says, the NYT:

?This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn?t have the children in mind,? Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. ?How very sad.?

The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well follow suit. Indeed, the topic has dominated the discussion among librarians since the book was shipped to schools. [link]

It’s funny to see all this uproar over what is, essentially, nothing. My nose protrudes out of my body and smells. Does that make it a taboo discussion topic? No. The scrotum is just another body part. Deal with it. Kids will have to learn about it at some point in their lives and now is as good a time as any.

Incidentally, Librarian.net is not a mailing list (as stated in the NYT article), but a blog by Jessamyn West, a “rural librarian”. And she’s taken a rather level-headed approach to the whole thing.

I?ve been reading a lot of the commentary and I still can?t tell whether this is a real issue with two strong sides, or if it?s a few librarians who decided not to purchase the book for whatever reason that got blown totally out of proportion. We may never know. What we do know is that people love to flip out about librarians banning books [both in ?how dare they!? and ?we would never do that!? ways depending which side of the fence you?re on] and the tricky issue of censorship vs selection has no easy answers. [link]

So not all librarians are going nuts over this. At least that’s good to know…

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