The Good Parts: Reading it may cause parental unrest. Please, proceed with caution.

Student: Valeria Niell

Read “The Good Parts”, by Les Daniels, at your own risk.

It is important to bring a variety of books to the classroom not only to engage the interest of each young adult student but also to expand the school library. But having “The Good Parts” to be read in class may be matter of controversy and clash among parents and teachers.

Young Adult Literature (YAL) is the umbrella term for stories, books and novels meant for adolescents that include the features proposed by Robert Small Jr., (cited in S. Herz & D. Gallo, 1996):

• The main character must be a teenager
• The events and problems must be related to teenagers
• That main character must be the centre of the plot
• The dialogues and points of view must reflect adolescents’ way of speaking and thinking
• The main character must be sensitive, mature, intelligent and independent
• The story is short and simple
• The main character’s actions must affect the outcome of the story.

Also, the topics dealt with in the story must be attractive to adolescents. “The Good Parts” is about zombies, cannibalism, violence, sex and single parenting. It narrates the story of a zombie who enjoys pornography and eating living human’s genitalia. The knowledge he got from porn magazines and movies led him to impregnate a female zombie. They both end up being parents of a non zombie baby girl and the main character has to take care of her.

Even though the narrator of the story does not mention this male zombie’s age, “The Good Parts” seems to have a teenager as the main character because he spent most of his time watching porn movies and reading porn magazines and he was still a virgin when he “undied” (when he became a zombie). While he enjoyed such a repertoire of pornographic elements, he ate and ate. His obesity did not allow him to move when he was alive but it did not seem to be a problem when he turned into a zombie because he hunts by crawling.

Adolescents see zombies in movies, television series, videogames and comics. They are used to the gore, flesh eating and violent massacres that zombies and the humans that fight them display. “The Good Parts” is not an exception in the zombies’ universe. This story is filled with iniquity and butchery. The nameless main character seems to be the typical undead, always craving and searching for food. But this zombie is not like the others. He maintains the vice he had when he was alive:  he was a consumer of pornography.

He hunts not only to quench his hunger for food but also to slake his hunger for porn. He continues getting pornographic magazines and admires them as he did when he was alive. In fact, when he eats a living human, he takes care to eat the “good parts”, i.e. the body parts he sees in his magazines and movies. The story is not explicit in the sense of stating clearly the words “pornographic videos and magazines” or “vaginas”. The author provides innuendos that lead the reader to “see” those words. For instance, for “Romancing the Bone” or “Ballin'” the reader has to infer that those words or phrases refer to pornography. When the narrator says “good parts”, he describes:

 “(...) His favourite food tasted like a fish and cheese casseroles basted with piss (...) His yellow teeth were matted with pubic hair and mucous membrane; he never brushed.” 

The reader can guess what that refers to.

Teens are not unaware of sex and pornography. They discover them on their own, thanks to the Internet or to their peers, when they can’t find answers from adults. Sexuality takes a new role in their life. Their curiosity turns into instinct and they react to what their bodies feel. Like the main character of “The Good Parts”. When a female follows him to his shelter, he just obeys his instincts and they have sex. Of course, the reader has to infer this because the author never wrote it explicitly. After the sexual encounter, the female zombie gets pregnant and disintegrates sometime after the childbirth, leaving the zombie as a single father. At first he wants to eat the baby, who was a girl, but he realized that her “good parts” were not ripe. He decided to raise her in order to eat her later on. He fed the baby with canned food and protected her from other zombies. When the child grew, he was too weak to take care of her, so she had to feed him and read his magazines with him. This shows some kind of growth or maturation in the zombie’s life because he lets his baby live just to eat her later, but, eventually, he became a good and responsible father.

Many adolescents end up in the same situation as the main character of “The Good Parts” (single parents) and it can be enlightening to the teenagers who read this story to know that even a zombie can be a father... and a good one.

Going back to what R. Small defined as Young Adult Literature, for a story to be labelled as such, it has to include as the main character an adolescent and the events in the story should be related to them or be of their interest. Having stated this, it can be said that “The Good Parts”, by Les Daniels, is an example of YAL because the main character is a teen zombie, interested in porn and food and his instincts led him to be a single parent.

However, belonging to the field of YAL does not mean that a story or book is appropriate to be read in class. As stated before, “The Good Parts” can cause controversy among parents and teachers. The themes that this short story deals with may be regarded as taboo: violence, pornographic articles, sex and single parenthood.  Some school authorities even designed lists of banned topics that should not be dealt in class and tested in order to prevent conflicts. The Department of Education of New York composed the following list:

Banned words and topics:

• Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological)
• Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs
• Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
• Bodily functions
• Cancer (and other diseases)
• Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
• Celebrities
• Children dealing with serious issues
• Cigarettes (and other smoking paraphernalia)
• Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or library setting)
• Crime
• Death and disease
• Divorce
• Evolution
• Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
• Gambling involving money
• Halloween
• Homelessness
• Homes with swimming pools
• Hunting
• Junk food
• In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
• Loss of employment
• Nuclear weapons
• Occult topics (i.e. fortune-telling)
• Parapsychology
• Politics
• Pornography
• Poverty
• Rap Music
• Religion
• Religious holidays and festivals (including but not limited to Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan)
• Rock-and-Roll music
• Running away
• Sex
• Slavery
• Terrorism
• Television and video games (excessive use)
• Traumatic material (including material that may be particularly upsetting such as animal shelters)
• Vermin (rats and roaches)
• Violence
• War and bloodshed
• Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
• Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.

As it can be seen, “The Good Parts” treats some of the topics that are included in that list. Therefore, this story will be regarded as polemic by New York’s Department of Education.

However, some teachers, like Timothy Dalby, encourage the use of taboo topics in the classroom to

“Allow the practice of skills such as debating, critical thinking, negotiation, agreeing, disagreeing, explaining opinions and justifying. It also opens up language areas such as euphemisms, slang, formal and informal language, double meanings, body language and politically correct terminology.” 

But parents cannot be forgotten. They also have a say. Some of them share their concerns about what their children study at school. The following is a letter to the headmaster of a Catholic School sent by a mother who is disturbed about contraception to be taught. The letter was found in Concerned Catholic Parents of Ottawa:

“Dear Mr. Hanlon,
I am writing to express my disappointment with your responses to my concerns. Since my first contact with you on October 20th I have yet to receive an explanation that addresses the questions raised about Free the Children's family planning advocacy.
As mentioned before, the following statements can be found in their community reports,
"The women's groups also learned the importance of family planning and how to best prevent sexually transmitted infections." (Free the Children's Enelerai Community Report)
"Mamas in the community also bring their families to the clinic to receive immunizations and for weekly family planning sessions." (Free the Children's Pimbiniet Community Report)
"They also learned about family planning and how to prevent HIV/ AIDS." (Free the Children's Motony Community Report)
"the provision of health workshops and family planning" (Free the Children's India Fact Sheet)
As a Catholic parent and ratepayer I wanted to know what family planning methods were being promoted by Free the Children. In your responses to me you acknowledged that you did not know. Rather than leveraging the partnership our board has with this charity and pushing for answers, you instead provided me with a contact at Free the Children if I wanted to learn more. I definitely did want to learn more, but was surprised to learn that you also didn't want more information given your duty to preserve the school board's Catholic identity.
The contact you referred me, Scott Baker (Executive Director), also said he didn't know and was too busy to find out. I then asked him if Free the Children had any policies in place that prohibited the promotion of contraception as a legitimate method of family planning. As of the date of this letter, he has not replied to this question.
In your letter to me on November 22nd, you asserted that Free the Children does not promote contraception. Given that both yourself and Mr. Baker have both admitted to not knowing which methods are being promoted in the communities mentioned in the excerpts above, it is difficult to understand how you could have come to this conclusion.
The concerns being raised about Free the Children and contraception are new. The excerpts from the Free the Children community reports I have provided were not made available to other school boards in the past and were definitely not available when the decision was made to feature this charity in the Fully Alive program. As a result, it is not acceptable for you to abdicate your responsibility in this matter by simply saying that Free the Children must be 'ok' because other school boards also partner with them and they are featured in the Fully Alive program.
I am asking you to require Free the Children to provide detailed information with regards to the family planning methods they promote as a condition for the continuation of the existing partnership with our school board. Transparency should be a cornerstone of all partnerships the board engages in, whether charitable or not, and in particular when the questions being raised relate directly to Catholic morality.
To decide to do otherwise would seriously undermine any claims the OCSB makes about the importance it places on preserving the Catholic identity of our schools.
Sincerely,
AP
I encourage all readers to contact your trustee or the Director of Education and ask them to do their job and find out what kind of family planning work Free the Children engages in.
In the end, what's the point of having a Catholic School Board if the ones in charge of ensuring its Catholicity don't really care about what the Catholic Church teaches.”

And those concerned and disturbed parents can even force authorities to remove certain themes or material from the schools. The following extract was found in a homophobic parent’s blog, “El Científico Juan”. (The original article can be found at Diario El Siglo Web Argentina)

“La Red de Padres de Tucumán denunció que el Ministerio de Educación de la Nación distribuyó en todas las escuelas y colegios del país seis millones de ejemplares de una revista de educación sexual destinada a las familias cuyos contenidos eran altamente cuestionables. Al mismo tiempo se invitó a que sea rechazada.”

Therefore, if a teacher brings “The Good Parts” to his classroom with the idea of creating a debate about contraception for example, there is a chance that some Christian students, or even their parents or school authorities, may feel offended because the Church bans contraception. As the following article found in the BBC Religions states:

“Since these churches (Less liberal churches) regard sex outside marriage as morally wrong (or if not wrong, as less than good), they believe that abstaining from sex would be morally better than having sex and using birth control.” 

A discussion about sexuality in the classroom can cause unrest in the students. A teacher narrates her experience when dealing with Shakespeare and how her students reacted to homosexuality in “Teaching Tolerance. Controversial Subjects in the Classroom”:

“Three students in a college Shakespeare course I taught accused me of trying to make them say two female characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream were lesbians. Since my lesson plan involved Shakespearean diction and close reading, I didn't take them seriously.
I laughed.
My response made the students even angrier, and they stormed out of the room, one gliding defiantly out on roller blades.”

Therefore, belonging to Young Adult Literature does not necessarily imply that a story can be appropriate to be read in class. It is necessary to weigh up its pros and cons in order to be sure whether to read it or not. It is important to take into account the context in which the story is going to be read so as to know if it contains any taboo topic that may cause controversy or problems within the classroom. “The Good Parts” is a good example of this. The topics it deals with are cannibalism, pornography, sex and single parenthood, all of which may cause a storm of angry parents... especially  if the teacher is open minded and attempts to explains to his class what “romancing the bone” means. The decision of reading “The Good Parts” or any other story that may include polemic themes, thus, should not rest on the teachers’ shoulders only. It would be necessary to count with the opinions of the students, their parents and the school authorities to prevent an outbreak of tension and altercations within the classroom.

REFERENCES:

• Concerned Catholic Parents of Ottawa (2012) http://concernedparentsottawa.blogspot.com.ar/ (Accessed 07/12/12)
• Contraception: Christian teachings on contraception and birth control - a contentious subject particularly in the Catholic Church and in countries with high incidence of HIV. (2009) http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/christianethics/contraception_1.shtml#top (Accessed 07/12/12)
• Dalby, T. (2007) Using Taboos to Bring Cultural Issues into the Classroom https://sites.google.com/site/timoteacher/usingtaboostobringculturalissuesintothec (accessed 07/09/12)
• Dwyer, L. (2012) Testing Taboos: The 50 Topics Banned From Standardized Exams
 http://www.good.is/post/testing-taboos-the-50-topics-banned-from-standardized-exams/(Accessed 07/09/12)
• “El científico Juan” (A concerned and homophobe parent) (2012) http://elcientificojuan.blogspot.com.ar/2012/04/doctores-defienden-ante-el-parlamento.html (Accessed 07/07/12)
• Herz, S & D. Gallo (1996) From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges between Young Adult Literature and the Classics. Westport, CT, Greenwood Press.
• La educación sexual impartida a los niños genera polémica en la provincia (2011)
• http://www.elsigloweb.com/nota.php?id=80714 (Accessed 07/12/12)
• Teaching tolerance.  http://www.tolerance.org/activity/controversial-subjects-classroom (Accessed 07/11/12)
• Una revista del Gobierno nacional que promueve las relaciones homosexuales y la masturbación. (2011)  http://www.contexto.com.ar/nota/56299/una-revista-del-gobierno-nacional-que-promomueve-las-relaciones-homosexuales-y-la-masturbacion.html (Accessed 07/10/12)