Because I feel like pimping out one of my favourite poets...

Now up and down the siding brown
    The great black crows are flyin’,
And down below the spur, I know,
    Another ‘milker’s’ dyin’;
The crops have withered from the ground,
    The tank’s clay bed is glarin’,
But from my heart no tear nor sound,
    For I have gone past carin’—
            Past worryin’ or carin’,
            Past feelin’ aught or carin’;
            But from my heart no tear nor sound,
            For I have gone past carin’.

Through Death and Trouble, turn about,
    Through hopeless desolation,
Through flood and fever, fire and drought,
    And slavery and starvation;
Through childbirth, sickness, hurt, and blight,
    And nervousness an’ scarin’,
Through bein’ left alone at night,
    I’ve got to be past carin’.
            Past botherin’ or carin’,
            Past feelin’ and past carin’;
            Through city cheats and neighbours’ spite,
            I’ve come to be past carin’.

Our first child took, in days like these,
    A cruel week in dyin’,
All day upon her father’s knees,
    Or on my poor breast lyin’;
The tears we shed—the prayers we said
    Were awful, wild—despairin’!
I’ve pulled three through, and buried two
    Since then—and I’m past carin’.
            I’ve grown to be past carin’,
            Past worryin’ and wearin’;
            I’ve pulled three through and buried two
            Since then, and I’m past carin’.

’Twas ten years first, then came the worst,
    All for a dusty clearin’,
I thought, I thought my heart would burst
    When first my man went shearin’;
He’s drovin’ in the great North-west,
    I don’t know how he’s farin’;
For I, the one that loved him best,
    Have grown to be past carin’.
            I’ve grown to be past carin’
            Past lookin’ for or carin’;
            The girl that waited long ago,
            Has lived to be past carin’.

My eyes are dry, I cannot cry,
    I’ve got no heart for breakin’,
But where it was in days gone by,
    A dull and empty achin’.
My last boy ran away from me,
    I know my temper’s wearin’,
But now I only wish to be
    Beyond all signs of carin’.
            Past wearyin’ or carin’,
            Past feelin’ and despairin’;
            And now I only wish to be
            Beyond all signs of carin’.
- Henry Lawson, Past Carin'

( Bio and more poems )

Banned Books Meme: # 1- Bridge to Terabythia, Katherine Patterson

You may or may not remember that around the time of Banned Books Week I got the list of books most frequently banned in the US, 1990-1999 (the links for later data being broken at the time), and determined that I had only read six of them (actually it's seven, somehow I missed Brave New World). Accordingly I selected ten books from the list to read by the end of the year. Well, it's not going to happen before the end of the year, but I will get the ten read before Banned Books Week next year. And I shall post about them, because that is what I do.

Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson

This book is adorable. I'm not sure why I didn't read it as a kid. No one gave it to me, I guess. Which is a pity, because it is adorable, but, while being adorable, it never talks down to children or infantalises the ten year old characters. Basically, Jesse Aarons is a kid with too many responsibilities, a love for art and music which he can only indulge in secret, and a determination to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. Except that Leslie Burke moves into the house next to his and - while doing defiant things like wearing cuttoff shorts and a tomboy haircut, and not owning a television - she decides she'd rather run races with the boys than play hopskotch with the girls, and turns out to beat them all.

Somehow, through the process of Jesse Being Basically A Nice Kid combined with Narrative Imperative, they become fast friends and resolve to build themselves a private kingdom, 'just for us'. They establish themselves as King and Queen of Terabithia, a realm accessible only by swinging over the dry creek-bed on a rope. There they have their castle, and their chapel is the pine grove in the woods behind. Terabithia becomes more than a playhouse: as the plot moves on, Terabithia and their sovreignty there becomes a staging-place fortheir real life adventures, particularly as they take on the indomitable seventh-grade bully Janice Avery.

Bridge to Terabithia is delightfully meta (er. is that even an adjective?): Leslie introduces the concept of their secret kingdom with reference to Narnia, and, as they spend more and more time there, she, the better-educated of the two, retells stories for Jess' entertainment: Moby Dick and Hamlet are the two references which stick in my mind. A big part of Leslie's influence upon Jess comes under the heading of Expanding His Horizons, as she introduces him to literature, gives him a real paint set for Christmas, and introdcues him to her academic father. (Side note: Leslie calls her parents Judy and Bill, and they eat strange food. I don't know whether or not they wear special underpants, but they're an entertaining counterpoint to Harold and Alberta, IMHO.) There's Miss Edmunds the music teacher, Bill's record collection, and an art gallery involved at some point, too. Basically, it is a book wot looks kindly upon a bit of culcha in a kid's life.

The exchange isn't all one-way, however: Jess defends Leslie against bullies, earns Bill and Leslie's respect with his handyman skills while helping them renovate, and takes Leslie to church with his family. The book's low-level theological discussion starts up here, as Leslie, who 'doesn't have to believe it', finds Easter to be a fascinating story, while Jess and his family are bored or scared by the easter story. A short discussion between Leslie, Jess, and Jess' little sister May Belle raises the question of hell, and who if anyone God will send there.

It's not a romance - Paterson, with the aforementioned knack of not talking down to children, doesn't try to go there. But it is a love story. Two kids, best friends and soulmates... yeah. Somehow Peterson manages to express all the depth of the relationship without being corny at all. The King and Queen thing helps a bit, I think.

Two things about the book bugged me slightly: Jess' family seem too much like a caricature: until Leslie's death we never see anything but complaints from his momma, his elder sisters are uniformly greedy and distasteful... you get the idea. It works, because in a way you get the feeling that's just the way Jess percieves them, and we do see a bit of a shift in the family relationships, mostly after Leslie's death. The second thing which bugged me is that Leslie herself has no faults. She helps Jess to overcome his fears, but aside from that one time when she didn't want to help the distressed Janice Avery, we don't see Leslie grow or develop at all. Her father says to Jess 'she loved you, you know', which is true, but I would have liked to see more change in her, as she changes Jess.

To conclude: I'm not sure why anyone would want this book banned. I think K's right, it must be because of the character death. I wonder if it's because Leslie dies in possession of a loose sort of spirituality but no Organised Faith? I wonder if it's because of the theological discussion threaded through the last half: what happens when you die? Does God send people to Hell? That little discussion resolves itself with Jesse's father's input, declaring that 'God don't send no little girls to hell'. I wonder if that conclusion bothered some straight-laced hellfire and brimstone type?

Banned Books #2- Forever, by Judy Blume

This is a book about sex. No two ways about that. It's a book about sex. Two teenagers meet, go on dates, make out, engage in manual sex, engage in some disappointing penetrative sex and then some satisfactory penetrative sex, and then break up. It is certainly educational. Rumour has it that you can learn everything you need to know about being a girl from Judy Blume, but, on the basis of this one book, I think that's taking it a bit too far.

Part of me wishes that I'd read this book as a teenager. I read a lot of books with sex in them, but very few books with plain garden variety teenage fumbling about. Fireworks and mystical connections, weird draconic orgies, yes, but not garden-variety teenage fumbling about. Not thinking about sex and learning to talk about it, not figuring out what goes where or when. From memory, John Marsden was about the best I had in that department. I had a pretty decent book called Every Girl, which covered basic facts of puberty and sex, and in my late teens I discovered Caitlain's Corner, a sane, matter-of-fact and impressively detailed website for teens.

Forever is nowhere near as informative as Caitlan's Corner in the what-goes-where and how department, but it far outstrips Every Girl, which excellent book is more concerned with Growing Up than what kind of positions might get the female partner off during sex. Forever actually has a good description of what is apparently formally known as the Coital Alignment Technique, although you can find better on the intarwub these days. It also covers manual sex, frotting, embarrassingly short penetrative experiences, and the frustrating effects thereof. It doesn't cover oral, or any of the other interesting things you can learn about on the internet in this day and afe. But it was written in 1975, and it's pretty short, and not porn, so you can't expect it to do everything.

What Forever does, that guidebooks or educational websites don't do, is put both mechanical details and abstract concepts like 'communication' into a narrative framework. I don't know about you, but if you give me a website telling me that unless my partner and I communicate about sex, we shouldn't have any, that's all well and good, but I don't really have any idea what that might entail until I have some narrative examples of people working these things out. If I have narrative examples- preferably with characters I actually care about, rather than cheesy textbook blurbs- of  people getting these things right, getting them wrong, and sort of fudging their way along the best they can, that, for me, is like a low-intensity substitute for a bank of good, bad and mediocre experiences of my own.

Having said that, Forever is a dreadful book. Educational, yes. But its characters are two-dimensional, its situations are bland, the subplots are token asides to the Main Plot of Sex, the motivations of secondary characters are never properly explored (why do Katherine's parents think she should spend a summer away from Michael?), Katherine has little to no emotional investment in anyone outside Michael, and quite frankly, little to no emotional investment in Michael either. They're in luurve, but I can't see why. I can't figure out what attracts her to him, or he to her. They have no emotional arc aside from Shall We Have Sex and Why Don't Our Parents Understand. And Katherine bores the pants off me. She has no character, no hobbies or interests aside from tennis, which is a plot device to get her a job away from Michael, and she's just... dull.

Since the narrative serves only as a framework for the Educational Sex Bits, I have some problems with it which I might not have if the characters were properly fleshed out and their interactions didn't read so much like a demonstration script. Firstly, Michael pressures Katherine into sex she's not entirely comfortable with. She consents, and enjoys it, but, particularly at the early fumbling about stages, he's pressuring her. There's no sign that the author is aware of this (as opposed to, say Meg Cabot's Princess Diaries books, in which a similar relationship arc happens: Michael pressures Mia; Mia puts her foot down; they have to negotiate. WHOO. The negotiation in question is hilarious- I think the terms of the agreement are that Michael gets to talk about sex every three months, or something loopy like that. But it's there).

Secondly, although Michael makes his desire clear to Katherine, and thus to the reader, Katherine's desire is left entirely out of the question right up until we find that she's frustrated after disappointingly short sex. At one point, they're engaging in mutual masturbation, and the only indication that she's enjoying it is 'until he came. And then I came too'. Anyone who's read John Marsden's Tomorrow series, or Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small series, or even the Princess Diaries knows that desire and sexual response can be indicated or described with appropriate detail for the audience. I can still flip straight to the two-page-long makeout descriptions in Tomorrow When the War Began; Kel in Squire gets all carried away once with Cleon, and then has Sensible Thoughts about Sex; even no-definitely-not-having-sex Mia, when locked in a cupboard with Michael gets all funny about the smell of his neck and 'wanted to jump on him'. It can be done. It should certainly be done before anyone gets off. If you don't describe your female character's sexual response, while leaving us in no doubt of the male's, that ends up feeling pretty unbalanced to me.

Thirdly, Michael and Katherine refer to Michael's penis as 'Ralph'. W. T. F.