Syllabus #189

"What a week!" - me and every person over 30, literally every Friday

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The backlash over basically Bowdlerizing the Roald Dahl books is totally justified.  Yes, his stories were deliberately nasty.  No, you cannot make less nasty by using a slightly gentler adjective here and there, and more importantly, the comical, over-the-top nastiness is the very point of the books!  I'm not a Roald Dahl Stan by any means, but I am very anti-censorship and very pro-spending time explaining context to children and giving them space to form their own opinions or to ask questions.

"You can choose not to read these books to your children, should you wish, and you would have fair reasons. Or you can do a bit of course-correction while reading them. And it’s a course-correction that has to be done with children all the time, anyway. Recently, I was having a drawing contest with a 6-year-old. She picked the theme: princesses, because it’s almost always princesses. She started to draw hers, and when she drew the body, it came out round. “She looks a bit fat,” she said, wrinkling her nose. I said that was OK—the princess can be fat. And she thought about it, shrugged, and we carried on drawing. I don’t say this to go: hark at me, great woke savior and influencer of young minds. I just mean that it’s pretty easy to do, and would be just as easy to do while reading."

I would say the same thing to anyone attempting to ban a book from a library or from a school's curriculum.  Aside from the fact that it's your purview to to influence only what media your own personal child is consuming, if you're so worried about what they might be reading, maybe try spending a little time with your children and using the content as an opportunity to have a conversation about your values and the context in which the book was written!  Don't expect legislation to sanitize the world so you no longer have to actively parent your own children!

So I guess you can be a literal exercise junkie.    

Jamelle Bouie's takedown of the myriad anti-trans legislation that seems to be the cause celebre of the far right at the moment.  He makes so many great points.

"The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender."

They might as well come right out and admit, "This is a thing I don't understand so I feel both threatened and devoid of empathy for it, and will abuse my position of power to maintain my position of power."

Analog Reading:

Finished Rabbit is Rich.  It was poignant and hilarious, and now I'm beginning Rabbit at Rest, knowing full well that, spoiler alert, he dies at the end.

Read Emma Straub's This Time Tomorrow.  I kept seeing the book mentioned on must-read lists and I've never read any of her work.  It was a fun read, and in terms of books about having the ability to re-do a portion of your life and see the various ramifications of a few small changes, I think she did a fine, self-aware job of dealing with some potentially very corny metaphysical presuppositions.  I have a lot more respect for this book than for say, The Midnight Library, which I finished only begrudgingly for a book club discussion.