I thought hard about what to feature for the end of Banned Books week. So far we’ve had drug use, bohemian lifestyles, witchcraft, obscenity, pornography, anti-church and anti-establishment stories. And that made me think I’d roll them all into one and add some lesbianism, dialects, and sewing to round it all out: The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. I’ve read this book maybe five times. Sometimes I think it’s banned and challenged merely because it’s powerful. It affects everyone differently, but you don’t read it and not come away changed. You can’t. It’s challenged because it proves, demonstrably, that words have power.

I stop the little trembling that started when I saw her coming. I’m so shame of myself, I say. And the Lord he done whip me little bit too.

The Lord don’t like ugly, she say.

And he ain’t stuck on pretty.

This open the way for our talk to turn another way.

I say, You feels sorry for me, don’t you?

She think a minute. Yes ma’am, she say slow, I do.

I think I know how come, but I ast her anyhow.

…

What you do when you get mad? she ast.

I htink. I can’t even remember the last time I felt mad, I say. I used to git mad at my mammy cuase she put a lot of work on me. Then I see how sick she is. Couldn’t stay mad at her. Couldn’t be mad at my daddy cause he my daddy. Bible say, Honor father and mother no matter what. Then after while every time I got mad, or start to feel mad, I got sick. Felt like throwing up. Terrible feeling. Then I start to feel nothing at all.

Sofia frown. Nothing at all?

Well, sometime Mr. _______ git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. The life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.

You ought to bash Mr. _______ head open, she say. Think about heaven later.

Not much funny to me. That funny. I laugh. She laugh. Then us both laugh so hard us flop down on the step.

Let’s make quilt pieces out of these messed up curtains, she say. And I run git my pattern book.

I sleeps like a baby now.

Remember: if you walk by a field and don’t notice the color purple, it pisses God off.

How did Banned Books week work for you?

Stay tuned for Free for All Saturday!

Back to “kids” books today. The Amber Spyglass is the final book of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Marcie mentioned this series in her post on Banned Books, talking about how easy a target it is: anti-church, anti-establishment, anti-dogma. It hits the high points, certainly.

The subtle knife was responsible for the small-scale, low-level leakage. It was damaging, and the universe was suffering because of it, and she must talk to Will and Lyra and find a way to stop it.

But the vast flood in the sky was another matter entirely. That was new, and it was catastrophic. And if it wasn’t stopped, all conscious life would come to an end. As the mulefa had shown her, Dust came into being when living things became conscious of themselves; but it needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe, as the muelfa had their wheels and the oil from the trees. Without something like that, it would all vanish. Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.

Mary felt the burden of it keenly. It felt like age. She felt eighty years old, worn out and weary and longing to die.

She climbed heavily out of the branches of the great fallen tree and with the wind still wild in the leaves and the grass and her hair, set off back to the village.

At the summit of the slope she looked for the last time at the Dust stream, with the clouds and the wind blowing across it and the moon standing in the middle.

And then she saw what they were doing, at last: she saw what that great and urgent purpose was.

They were trying to hold back the Dust flood. They were striving to put some barriers up against the terrible stream: wind, moon, clouds, leaves, grass, all those lovely things were crying out and hurling themselves intot he struggle to keep the shadow particles in this universe, which they so enriched.

Matter loved Dust. It didn’t want to see it go. That was the meaning of this night, and it was Mary’s meaning, too.

Had she thought there was no meaning in life, no purpose, when God had gone? Yes, she had thought that.

“Well there is now,” she said aloud, and again, louder: “There is now!”

It’s about time we sauced it up around here, don’t you think? Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is ranked the 4th greatest novel in English of the 20th century. It was, and still is, in many countries, banned for obscenity. So here’s a little bit of that. Which might be NSFW. Maybe.

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless limbs. It was no easy matter to divert the little maiden’s attention while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for the success of the trick. Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter– and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. Having, in the course of my patter, hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular–O my Carmen, my little Carmen, something, something, those something nights, and the stars, and the cars, and the bars, adn the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic stuff and holding her under its special spell (spell because of the garbling), and all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of God might interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of which all my being seemed concentrated, and this anxiety forced me to work, for the first minute or so, more hastily than was consensual with deliberately modulated enjoyment. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her; her voice stole and corrected the tun I had been mutilating. She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of the old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa– and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty– between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
…
Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety of physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in the arts) I kept repeating chance words after her– barmen, alarmin’, my charmin’, my carmen, ahmen, ahahamen– as one talking and laughing in his sleep while my happy hand crept up her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed. The day before she had collided with the heavy chest in the hall and– “Look, look!”– I gasped–”look what you’ve done, what you’ve done to yourself, ah, look”; for there was, I swear, a yellowish-violet bruise on her lovely nymphet thigh which my huge hairy hand massaged and slowly enveloped– and because of her very perfunctory underthings, there seemed to be nothing to prevent my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin– just as you might tickle and caress a giggling child– just that– and: “Oh it’s nothing at all,” she cried with a sudden shrill note in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury, almost reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.

This scene was deleted from the 1997 version of the film. It is extraordinarily well adapted. You’ll need to log in and confirm your birthdate to be able to watch.

What’s your favorite Harry Potter scene or passage?

When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Mr. Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work, and Mrs. Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrestled a screaming Dudley into his high chair.

None of them noticed a large, tawny owl flutter past the window.

At half past eight, Mr. Dursley picked up his briefcase, pecked Mrs. Dursley on the cheek, and tried to kiss Dudley good-bye but missed, because Dudley was now having a tantrum and throwing his cereal at the walls. “Little tyke,” chortled Mr. Dursley as he left the house. He got into his car and backed out of number four’s drive.

It was on the corner of the street that he noticed the first sign of something peculiar– a cat reading a map. For a second, Mr. Dursley didn’t realize what he’d seen– then he jerked his head around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Privet Drive, but there wasn’t a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. Mr. Dursley blinked and stared at the cat. It stared back. As Mr. Dursley drove around the corner and up the road, he watched the cat in his mirror. It was now reading the sign that said Privet Drive– no, looking at the sign; cats couldn’t read maps or signs. Mr. Dursley gave himself a little shake and put the cat out of his mind. As he drove toward town he thought of nothing except a large order of drills he was hoping to get that day.

And we know who that cat is. And that she was reading. And that she spent the next 8 or 12 or 16 hours sitting on the wall near the Dursley’s house, waiting.

Related: lookit this nifty post on redesigning the HP covers in the Penguin Classics style. I think they’re very cool!

This week, we’re celebrating Banned Books Week (9/26 – 10/3). Every day I’ll post something off one of my shelves. I encourage you to add to it, if you have the same book, or a similar one, or anything at all. If you know of a Read Out! anywhere near you, attend it! I’ll be reading aloud for a Read Out! tomorrow, probably from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

But today we start with my favorite book of all time, one that’s been challenged over and over again: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.

In the fall I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night just over Laredo border in Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, “Go moan for man,” and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America? I struggled and hurried to New York, and one night I was standing in a dark street in Manhattan and called up to the window of a loft where I thought my friends were having a party. But a pretty girl stuck her head out the window and said, “Yes? Who is it?”

“Sal Paradise,” I said, and heard my name resound in the sad and empty street.

“Come on up,” she called. “I’m making hot chocolate.” So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly. In the winter we planned to migrate to San Francisco, bringing all our beat furniture and broken belongings with us in a jalopy panel truck. I wrote to Dean and told him. He wrote back a huge letter eighteen thousand words long, all about his young years in Denver, and said he was coming to get me and personally select the old truck himself and drive us home. We had six weeks to save up the money for the truck and began working and counting every cent. And suddenly Dean arrived anyway, five and a half weeks in advance, and nobody had any money to go through with the plan.

I was taking a walk in the middle of the night and came back to my girl to tell her what I thought about during my walk. She stood in the dark little pad with a strange smile. I told her a number of things and suddenly I noticed the hush in the room and looked around and saw a battered book on the radio. I knew it was Dean’s high-eternity-in-the-afternoon Proust.