High schools and colleges are an interesting position, from a constitutional standpoint. Although the Supreme Court has affirmed on numerous occasions that students are entitled to the same rights as the rest of us, many colleges stifle civil rights, especially the right to free speech, in the name of safety and order. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in school newspapers, where students have been expelled or penalized for writing relevant commentaries, teachers have been punished for printing controversial articles, and staffers have been pushed to remove articles from school newspapers.

Under the terms of SB 1370, schools will no longer be able to punish staffers who support student rights to free speech. This is huge. It means that journalism teachers, English instructors, and other student advocates no longer need to be afraid about sticking up for their students, and it enforces the idea that free speech is an important value in America, and that free speech matters, hugely.

Our high school newspaper was never really censored (to my knowledge), although one article I wrote garnered me an assortment of threatening phone calls and one assault (all from people outside the school community, incidentally). But I know a lot of people who have been affected by restrictions of their free speech while working on student newspapers, and that makes me angry, because school is supposed to be a place for learning, and learning to be a citizen is an important part of growing up.

School administrators get nervous (understandably) when controversial topics come up. Much of the abridgement of press freedoms in California schools has less to do with controversy, though, than it has to do with dissent. Students who publish editorials about school policy have been penalized, and instructors who have refused to withdraw critical or educational editorials informing students about their rights under the law have been retaliated against by administrators.

I think that student journalists need to be held to the same accountability in terms of sourcing, avoiding libelous statements, and so forth that conventional journalists are. And I also think that they are entitled to free speech, even if administrators and other students don’t like what they have to say, because that’s what this country is supposedly all about: educated and informed dissent.

Needless to say, I am pleased as punch that SB 1370 passed, and that California has made a small step in the right direction for youth rights, by affirming a right which should have already existed.

Teen dating abuse is becoming more widely recognized as a serious problem.

Queer Eye Candy is an excellent photography site (safe for work).

I’m all about youth representation in city government.

Third-hand smoke is the new smoking-related health menace, evidently. Personally, I’d like to see a comparison of the contents of “third-hand smoke” with motor vehicle emissions.

Gah.

Female cardiac patients are less likely to receive the care they need, especially if they are young.

The high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault committed by returning servicemembers are, once again, in the spotlight.

My neighbor looked startled, and my father cleared his throat and said: “Ah, yes, well, we don’t really use that word. Jap.”

“But why not? They used it in the movie,” I said.

“Well,” my father replied, clearing his throat and rocking back on his feet like he does when he has something of import to say, “that was part of the movie. The main character was racist, so he called the Japanese auto workers Japs.”

“But those Japs showed him,” I said, enthusiastically, as the neighbor cringed. “He thought they couldn’t build the cars in time, and they did!”

“That’s right,” my father said. “The Japanese men showed the man that he was wrong to be racist. And remember how at the end of the movie, he yelled at his assistant for calling the men at the auto company ‘Japs’? That’s because that word is offensive, and it’s wrong to say.”

“Oh,” I said.

“In the Second World War, Americans called the Japanese ‘Japs’ because we were at war with them,” my father explained. “They used that word in propaganda, because they wanted Americans to hate the Japanese. But it’s an insult. An epithet. Racists use that word. So you shouldn’t use it. Always say ‘Japanese’ when you are talking about someone from Japan.”

Fortunately, my father and I did not have to go through this conversation with every imaginable racial epithet, but it stuck with me, and when I was reading a discussion recently about whether or not we should restrict children’s access to literature, I was reminded of that conversation.

The discussion revolved around whether or not children should be allowed to read literature which is sexist/racist/otherwise offensive in some way, the argument being that children would internalize that message and innocently repeat it, as I did after we watched a silly movie as a child. The counter argument, of course, was that hiding offensive material from children doesn’t mean that it no longer exists, and that such material is going to be all the more shocking when children finally do see it.

My father never restricted my reading habits, but he did encourage me to talk with him about them. When I read the Dr. Dolittle books as a child, I remember being surprised by the gross caricatures of African characters in the books, and my father and I had a long discussion about how in Hugh Lofting’s era, colonialist stereotypes were still very much alive, so Lofting didn’t see anything wrong with those images. Comparing the sanitized and regular Dr. Dolittles, I see a difference, but I also see a loss of a learning opportunity.

I think that children should be allowed to read anything they can get their hands on, because every reading experience is a great chance to learn something, as long as parents talk to children about what they are reading. As I grew up, I naturally drifted into books with strong female characters, and away from books with negative stereotypes, because I found those books kind of boring and bad. And I suspect that a lot of children do the same.

Children have an immense capacity for understanding and learning which I think is sometimes underestimated. I was very young when my father and I had the above conversation, but I still remember it, and I clearly internalized it. I never used the word “Jap” again, and I abstracted the lesson to other racial and cultural epithets. Mere weeks later, I was telling a schoolfriend that she shouldn’t say “Jewed” when she meant “cheated,” even though I didn’t fully understand why “Jewed” was offensive, I just got the sense that it was.

Reading the Twilight books really raised this issue for me (and in fact the discussion I mentioned started with a criticism of the serious flaws in this series). Do I think that young women should be reading trashy literature? Actually, yeah, because it gives them a chance to critique it and think about it, and I think that’s a good thing. Meyer has unwittingly done the feminist community a great service by creating a starting point to talk about a lot of important issues, and so have a lot of other authors, who unintentionally gave parents and advocates and teachers some great material to work with.

Sanitizing the reading habits of children will only make the real world more jarring and unpleasant for them, as they learn that things like racism and sexism exist. Why try to pretend when you can teach?

At first, I was afraid of the old men. They were blustery and weathered, with heavy brows and layers of faded clothing covered in heavy coats. They spat emphatically and nodded to indicate a negative, or threw their heads back with a loud “tsk” when an opponent did something particularly foolish. They gestured broadly, and every new arrival was greeted with a chorus of mockery and lewd suggestions until he settled down at a table to eat olives and wait for a seat at a board to open up.

Yannis, the owner of the kafenia, started giving me small sweets and mezze while I waited, and eventually I took up residence at a corner table, watching the old men and sometimes coloring or practicing my painstaking lettering, or puzzling through the front page of the newspaper. The old men ignored me, as day by day I inched closer, froghopping from table to table to watch until finally, one day, a third chair was pulled up for me by the oldest of the old men so that I could watch their game, and every afternoon, I was greeted with a cry of “ai, koritsimou,” and one of the old men began to teach me the rules of the game, the rolling of the dice and the moving of the pieces and the rules of the doubling cube.

Hesitantly at first, I began to chime into the commentary, and, finally, one day, I was handed the dice and a stack of black stones and I was allowed to set up the board and play with Stefanos, who refrained from trouncing me for three or four games until I gained confidence with the doubling cube and lost most of my allowance and cried “ai gamitsou!” And the old men laughed, and laughed.

When we left Greece, the old men ceremonially presented me with a small portable backgammon set, with points painstakingly burned into a piece of tanned goatskin, smooth black stones from the harbor, and carved bone dice. I don’t know what happened to it; it may have been left in New York, or perhaps it was lost in the Pakistani International Airlines luggage fiasco, but in the ensuing years, I found backgammon opponents here and there, although the game isn’t nearly as popular here as it is in Greece.

Last year, I acquired a new backgammon set of my own, a gift from a friend, and every time I set up the heavy diecast metal markers, I hear the click of stones and the rattle of dice, smell salt and tobacco smoke and feel the old men in the kafenia around me again. Sense memory can be a powerful thing.

Edit: Evidently, this post was chosen as a Best of Holidailies. Thanks to the readers panel.

Local readers may have noticed a disturbance in the force, or possibly an increased police presence North of Oak Street. Shockingly, this week’s Advocate didn’t report on this piece of breaking news, but the rumour mill is at work (now that the real mill is closed, residents need something to do, you know). And it is, in fact, official: I’m driving again, in very own, shiny, new (to me) Volkswagon Beetle. The awesomeness that is having a car again is actually a bit difficult to articulate, but let me assure you, I’m excited. Trips to museums, performances, and possibly even musical concerts (did you know that they have these things where a bunch of people gather in a large room and music is played?!!) are in my very near future. I’m willing to give up some self-righteous hippie points to be able to see some damn art. Oh, and eat glorious, glorious foods of international origin.

At any rate, here are the statistics:

The all time high in terms of sheer pages read was October, with 15,352 pages. That worked out to almost 500 a day! In January, I read a pitiful 6,261 pages, around 201 a day. I’m not quite sure why I read so little in January, given that it was cold and rainy and dark. Mysterious.

July narrowly edged out October in terms of the most books read, with 46 books in July as opposed to 44 in October. Woeful January clocked 21 books.

Over the course of the year, I read 400 books (this includes books which I put down because they were so bad), which works out to a little over a book a day. 133,458 pages were read, around 365 each day (man, if I got a dollar for every page I read…). I find it interesting that I spiked in March, July, and October, with troughs in January, April, and August. I kind of assumed that the high points of reading would be in the winter, when it’s dark, and the low points in the summer, when I would presumably be out and about doing things. I think that the answer to the riddle may lie in the fact that in the winter, I just sleep most of the time, so there’s not actually that much time for reading.

And, of course, no discussion of the Book Project in review would be complete without a listing of my favourite books: The Sparrow, This Is the Way the World Ends, Dracula, Everything Conceivable, Nation of Rebels, Lady Lazarus, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Sacred Hunger, White Oleander, The Cure for Death By Lightning, The Book of Lost Things, and A Very Long Engagement. I think it’s interesting that over half of these books are recommendations which I probably would not have read otherwise, three were re-reads, and two were simply randomly pulled off the library shelf because I thought that they looked interesting. It’s tough to pick a book of the year from all of the books I read last year, but I think I’m going to go with The Book of Lost Things, because it captured a mood and a spirit so brilliantly and darkly. This Is the Way the World Ends definitely follows as a close second.

All of the recommendations can be found here; you will note that a few of them did not get read, because they didn’t arrive in time for inclusion in the Book Project. I will definitely go ahead and read them when they get here, but I probably won’t review them. There is also a complete archive of Book Project entries, for people who feel like plowing through it all in one go.

This project was definitely interesting. I read a lot of things I would not have otherwise, which is great, and it certainly gave me an opportunity to reflect on my reading habits. For example, I read a lot more trash than I realized, and I also read a lot more than I realized. I also think it’s interesting that I tend to read things in waves. I get interested, for example, in mysteries, and read a whole glut of them, or I decide to read a bunch of reference material about a particular thing.

I also learned this year that it is perfectly appropriate and sometimes necessary to set a bad book down, rather than tormenting myself with something I am not enjoying. That’s a pretty radical step for me, because I used to read all the way through every book I picked up, even if it felt like pulling teeth. I haven’t abandoned my habit of only reading one book at a time, though, and I doubt that this is going to change, because I like to appreciate books on their own, rather than bouncing around between characters and subjects.

I hope that people had fun reading along, and I want to thank everyone who recommended and sent/loaned books (even the ones I hated) for their contributions. The Book Project would not have been nearly so enjoyable without reader participation! Although the Book Project is over, I continue to welcome book recommendations, because I am pretty much always looking for something to read.

Even rich people are subject to the vagaries of climate change.

General surgeons are thin on the ground in rural areas. (I’m sure that has nothing to do with rates of compensation and malpractice premiums, though.)

Bow hunting is on the rise in American suburbs. As are “deer management consultants,” evidently.

A compilation of particularly shameful events in the 2008 media, for your edification.

I don’t know about you, but I think I am pretty much over 2008 at this point, even though I will undoubtedly date my February rent check with “2008,” just out of habit. 2008 was a pretty exciting year, what with the groundbreaking election, economic collapse, and all. Hopefully this year will be equally exciting, perhaps with a little bit less of the “getting collectively screwed” going on.

I suppose I could throw out a few predictions for the coming year, so I that I can go back and laugh at my foolishness in December. I’m definitely betting on a further decline of the real estate market, along with a dramatic Obama backpedal on several issues (odds on for LGBQT and women’s rights), and possibly some juicy food security scandals. I also suspect that the City of Fort Bragg will do at least one thing which is so mindblowingly stupid that I will feel obliged to rant about it.

I’m looking forward to sharing more adventures (and incoherent rants) with y’all in the coming months. I haven’t selected a blog project for 2009, although I did think about writing about all of the visual  media I see, or possibly organizing an epic candy exchange, and I suppose there are a few days yet to choose something, but after the exhaustion of the Book Project, I think I might leave this year up the fates. Unless everyone clamors for a blog project. What’s that, you say? *crickets*

I am glad that more of you seem to be coming out of your shells in the comments. Hopefully this year will be more lively in the comments section. As always, though, people who feel shy but really want to talk to me can email me: meloukhia at gmail dot com.

Best wishes to all of you in the coming year.

I really liked A Very Long Engagement, and might even call it the book of the month. I also enjoyed Proust and the Squid, and would really recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the science of reading. Likewise, Cheer! was generally awesome, if you are into cheerleading. Or the cultural aspects of cheerleading.

Suzy, I’m sorry to inform you that The Glass Castle was the turkey of the month. However, I enjoyed ranting about it, so I have to thank you for recommending it just so that I could shred it. (Was that secretly your intent all along? Hrm, I wonder.)

I was definitely looking forward to the end of the Book Project by the end of the month, and while I have enjoyed sharing all of the books that I read with you, I fully intend to read some embarrassing trash this month, now that I don’t have to tell y’all about it. That was the most interesting thing about the Book Project, for me, was my tendency to set certain books aside because I was kind of embarrassed to be reading them. That said, I think that this year has been a pretty accurate depiction of my reading habits: I haven’t kept a single thing back, even if I haven’t always had a lot to say about it.

Tomorrow, I’m going to post a longer discussion about the project as a whole, along with delicious delicious statistics, for the nerds among us.

In January, I talked about being compared to bacon: “‘She looks just like a big slab of bacon,’ one of them was saying as I took out the garbage on my way into town to pay the rent, and a gale of deep throated male laughter arose, the kind of laughter that makes me nervous.”

In February, fixing the carousel in Molybos: “This was in fact such a frequent occurrence that Alexandros at the hardware store kept little carousel repair kits ready to go in paper bags. You only had to go up to the counter and ask, and he would vanish into the back room and reappear a few moments later, ceremonially carrying a plastic bag filled with bolts and nuts. If he thought you didn’t have a wrench, he would offer to lend you the hardware store’s wrench, shaking his finger at you as he reminded you of the consequences for not returning it.”

In March, I delighted in the return of spring:

In April, I read Everything Conceivable, and it sparked some thoughts: “She also talked about the way that fertility treatments are reshaping the structure of the family, and that was interesting to read about. Thanks to advances in infertility treatment, for example, gay and lesbian couples can have kids, which I think is awesome (my one exception to generalized loathing of fertility treatments). And more complicated situations are arising, like a kid with two parents in addition to a birth mother (surrogate) and a donor mother and/or father.”

In May, I thought about veterans: “Every day this week, I’ve passed them at the Post Office. The chipper woman at a folding table scattered with poppies, with an aging representative of the Greatest Generation propped up beside her, staring blankly at the Chapel by the Sea announcements pinned to the noticeboard.”

In June, there was a freak thunderstorm (which later led to epic fires): “So there I was, minding my own business, chatting with Baxt, when she said that she got epic hail at her house. And I was all like ‘Dude!’ and she was all like ‘it was weird.’ And suddenly, there was a huge-ass mother of all thunderclaps basically right over my house which caused Mr Bell to rocket into the air, followed by a wicked lightning strike, and I looked outside…”

In July, I remembered getting electricity: “My father had planned the inaugural use of our electricity with care. He thought about simply flicking the lights on at dusk, but he decided that it lacked flair. Instead, he trundled into town and returned with a top of the line record player and a formidable set of speakers, and when the party started to flag, Maria Callas singing La Traviata rang out through the trees, creating at first a sudden hush and then an excited chatter as my father turned all of our four lights on, one by one.”

In August, I expressed discontent with the fact that the media sticks feminist issues into the style section: “When you publish the results of a survey which shows that girls are every bit as talented at math as boys, it should go in the sciences, or perhaps the news section, depending on whether or not you think that the fact that girls and boys are equally good at math is ‘news.’”

In September, I criticized the depiction of polyamory on Bones: “Polyamory is all about communication and open discussion, and what Brennan was doing was pretty much the opposite of that. How much more interesting it would have been if Brennan had been modeling a healthy polyamorous relationship, discussing issues with her partners and working them out, instead of just sneaking around and stringing two men along.”

In October, I talked about my subscription to the National Review: “I even brought in a National Review article for class discussion about a controversial ballot initiative (I ended up getting in hot water, and being rescued by my father, who pointed out that the National Review was a respected publication, whether or not the teacher agreed with it, and I was therefore entitled to bring in articles from it). After said show and tell, ‘bring in an item of news to share’ was disbanded in favor of ‘craft like the Egyptians,’ and I was permanently disinvited from several of my classmates’ homes by their parents.”

In November, I talked about how the personal is political: “I’m queer. And not in a ‘of a questionable nature or character,’ ‘mentally unbalanced or deranged,’ ‘bad, worthless, or counterfeit,’ or ‘not feeling physically right or well’ kind of way. You probably already know that, if you’ve been reading this site for any amount of time, but I think that this is the time to explicitly state it.”

In December, upskirting aroused my ire: “One of the interesting things about this type of pornography is that it is heavily rooted in lack of consent, which differentiates it in my eyes from pornography in general. Posed upskirting photographs with a consenting model are not popular. What people want are ‘illicit’ photographs in which a woman’s private parts are photographed while she is unaware.”