{"id":7695,"date":"2010-09-29T17:34:21","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T01:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/?p=7695"},"modified":"2010-09-29T17:34:21","modified_gmt":"2010-09-30T01:34:21","slug":"are-you-still-there-god-its-me-blubber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/?p=7695","title":{"rendered":"Are You Still There, God? It’s Me, Blubber."},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/span><\/span>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s\u00c2\u00a0Banned Books Week<\/a> again and\u00c2\u00a0across the country, libraries, bookstores, teachers and readers are celebrating that which our founding fathers labored over quills and parchment for and our father and forefathers fought and died for, the very freedoms that we alone – as Americans – enjoy and that the terrorists hate us for, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the freedom to read.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

You may be surprised to know that one of the country’s most challenged and banned American authors is not Bradbury, Ginsberg or VC Andrews. It’s Judy Blume, renowned American chronicler of all things adolescent. Ms. Blume has seemingly been in a 40+ year battle against censorship by the religious right, ever since such dangerously provocative titles as “Deenie”, “Superfudge”,”Freckle Juice,” “Blubber” and “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” polluted the libraries and bookshelves of America. Seminal teen-bibles chronicling the rites ofadolescence, her books have been loved by girls the world over – and loathed by America’s religious right. The appeal of Blume’s books lies in her forthright storytelling, matter-of-factly relating life’s most mortifying moments, deciphering those vague, complex feelings and then pointing them out in a frank and unapologetic manner, exposing their relatability \u00c2\u00a0and demystifying them. In her mould-breaking novels, Judy Blume was the one adult who seemed to get it. I still remember the punched-in-the-stomach feeling when the mean girls turn on Jill in “Blubber”. Stupid, shortsighted Jill. Crossing Wendy like that.<\/p>\n

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Judy Blume understood that it’s possible to feel surrounded and exposed, yet completely alone in your humiliation. There is not a female between ten and 50 who doesn’t regard reading one of Blume’s novels as a seminal moment in her adolescence. For me it was “Are You There God? It’s me, Margaret”. My hippie counselor at Apple Farm, – a sleep away camp in Elmer, NJ – read chapters from the book to me and my bunkmates long past light’s out each night. As a reminder to Gen X ladies, this is the classic story of a thoughtful 11 year old girl, in the midst of a family move to a new town, contemplating whether to be Jewish or Christian, and struggling with the onset of …. womanhood: periods, pimples, the wearing of bras. Anti-Christian behavior? Don’t see it. By today’s Christ loving teen’s standards – Bristol Palin, Jamie Lynn Spears \u00c2\u00a0– Margaret and her friends are positively puritanical.<\/p>\n

The great American tradition of the banning of teen fiction continues unabated today. Young-adult author, Laurie Halse Anderson, is this banned book year’s cause c\u00c3\u00a9l\u00c3\u00a8bre. People have been rallying around her and her best-selling novel, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Speak,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which is at the center of a heated censorship debate. Apparently a “professor of management” at Missouri State wanted \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Speak\u00e2\u20ac\u009d removed from the high school curriculum in his district. “Professor” Wesley Scroggins (ahaha) wrote an\u00c2\u00a0opinion article<\/a> suggesting \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Speak\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and Kurt Vonnegut\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Slaughterhouse-Five\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d should be classified as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153soft pornography.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Speak\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the story of a young girl who is raped, gossiped about and ostracized and traumatized. It won various awards). On her\u00c2\u00a0Twitter feed<\/a>, Anderson expressed her deep dismay at the characterization of a book about rape as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153soft pornography.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0Judy Blume jumped in, calling the debate \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Outrageous!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in a Twitter message<\/a> to Anderson and promised to bring the debate to the National Coalition Against Censorship on which she serves on the board of directors. Last month, another young adult writer, \u00c2\u00a0Ellen Hopkins, the author of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Crank,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Glass\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fallout\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a trilogy written in verse about the devastating effects of drug abuse on a family \u00e2\u20ac\u201d was disinvited from the “Teen Lit Fest” in Humble, Texas, after parents flipped out over the heavy content. Other writers withdrew from the festival in solidarity, and the Texas Teen Lit Fest was canceled.<\/p>\n

Judy Blume kicked her righteous critics in the shins when she jumped from pre-teen training bra trauma to actual high school sex in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Forever\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, published in swingin’ 1975. Librarians around the country were soon yanking it from bookshelves left and right.\u00c2\u00a0The alarming fact is that\u00c2\u00a0Forever<\/em> was the second most challenged book of 2005. In 2005, like five years ago. <\/em>The year YouTube <\/em>launched, the iPod nano was introduced, and Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And <\/span><\/em>inexplicably, grade school bully novella \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Blubber,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (tagline:\u00c2\u00a0“They wanted to see how far they could go”<\/em>) \u00c2\u00a0is one of the American Library Association’s most challenged books<\/em>. “Blubber”, for those of you who don’t know, is the story of a gaggle of pre-teen mean girls in a Radnor, PA 5th grade classroom who tease a chubby and inarguably annoying classmate named Linda Fischer (aka “Blubber”). They bully Blubber both physically (attempting to strip her in the girls’ bathroom, convincing her she has eaten an ant, causing her to vomit, etc. ) and psychologically (heckling her on the school bus, forcing her to say things like “I am Blubber, the Smelly Whale of Class 206”, etc).<\/p>\n

Dangerous stuff.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Buy your banned books here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s\u00c2\u00a0Banned Books Week again and\u00c2\u00a0across the country, libraries, bookstores, teachers and readers are celebrating that which our founding fathers labored over quills and parchment for and our father and forefathers fought and died for, the very freedoms that we alone … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[86,99,100,101,102,136,263,320,429],"class_list":["post-7695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banned-books","tag-are-you-there-god-its-me-margaret","tag-banned-book-week","tag-banned-books-blubber","tag-banned-books-blume","tag-banned-books-judy-blume","tag-blubber","tag-deenie","tag-forever-judy-blume","tag-judy-blume"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7695\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}