A popular high school English teacher has been suspended after assigning his 11th-grade students a short story about masturbation by "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk. Greg Van Voorhis, 30, issued copies of "Guts" — which details three increasingly catastrophic masturbation attempts by teenagers with props including a carrot, a candle, and the water intake at the bottom of a swimming pool — to about about 100 students gearing up for the English Regents exam.

Many of the comments surrounding this news story seem to take it on faith that "Guts" is about masturbation and that of course kids masturbate, so what's the big deal? This is how you can tell who has read the story and who has not!

Of course, Guts is a story about masturbation in the same way American Psycho is about investment banking or Hogg is about the trucking industry. Yeah, the stuff's in there, but...

All that said, "Guts" is free online (see link), has been reprinted in a Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and a number of other places, so it's not like the story is otherwise locked away.

Plus, it's better than "A&P."

How to sous vide your iPhone

really

and it doesn't look like that bad an idea

We have a result: mildly allergic to shrimp...which is weird 'cause we were testing because of a suspicious reaction to lobster. It turns out she's fine with lobster, her hands were itching because of dry skin, and we just happened to find the shrimp allergy from the test. Oh well. She's fine with it just being shrimp, losing all shellfish would have been sad making. Also, the shrimp allergy is really mild.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011861.html

It's evening now, here in Europe, so we're really two decades from that night. I can't watch even the announcement without crying. I never have, not since the first time I saw it live, and I don't know if I ever will. I'm not sure I want to; when I can watch sundered families be reunited with dry eyes I think I've lost some part of my humanity.

The nuances of the fall of the Berlin Wall are being debated all over. Anniversaries are good times for awkward questions and complex analyses. Were the East Germans fairly treated in reunification? Has the victory of free-market capitalism been everything it promised, all things considered? How many half-truths and simplifications have buried the ambiguous complexity of that time?

I have nothing useful to add to the discussion, except that I live in a Europe that could not have existed with the Wall intact, and I think it's a good place. I call it a night's work well done.

I think I'll have a drink. It's a suitable matter for a toast. Anyone with me?

The Amazon page for my forthcoming collection shows an actual ranking. Which means someone preordered the book. Which means I'm going to be obsessing even worse than usual. (Even though I know better than to keep refreshing the page. Really I do. I can stop anytime I want. Um, maybe.)

2222 words on Grail today, finished chapter one and started chapter two, and in a minute here I have to eat something and then go swim and then go over to a friend's house and have tea and borrow the fax machine. The days are just packed, I tell you.

Last night, I got about 1600 words on Shadow Unit related material, which I logged for today because I had already posted.

Yep. I am mighty. I have no idea what's happening in this book, except people are sitting around eating and worrying about each other, but I have faith, It'll all come right in the end.

Mean things today: kids grow up, and Tristen never gets to be anybody's daddy for long.

Also, giant freshwater space salmon.

6022 / 100000 words. 6% done!

Clarkesworld Magazine will be closed to short story submissions from December 1st through January 15th. The holidays are crazy enough without having to keep up with a slush pile. :)

I shouldn't need to say this, but....

This does not mean that we're shutting down the magazine. It is simply a vacation for the slush readers. Through this period and for the foreseeable future, new issues will be published monthly, as scheduled.

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about.html

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Returning now to work on the aforementioned J.M. Coetzee essay, which is once again insisting on going in unexpected directions requiring more reading. (Paul de Man's "Autobiography as De-Facement" this morning. I know you're jealous.) No more blogging till it's done. Bad me.

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2009/11/review-of-wilde-stories-2009.html

In which very nice things are said about me own contribution to Steve Berman's Best of Gay Speculative Fiction:... if you were to read down my annotated contents page you'd see a range of numbers between one and five, and then a heart and exclamation point against this title. There's a lot of strong writing in this collection, but Hal Duncan is my discovery of the volume ~ the author whose works

Your Monday moment of zen.



Maureen McHugh with bram111's baby, at Rio Hondo. © 2006, 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Foob on writers — And our "temper mental" selves.

Lucy Knisley on memories of childhood sexuality — Oi. Quite something.

Another fabulous WPA poster on Vintagraph

Dieselpunk Bomber — Mmm.

Martian Landscapes — Boston.com's "The Big Picture" with a roundup of some of the recent, stunning Mars photography. (Via Bad Astronomy.)

A Tiny Revolution on Reagan and the Pakistani bomb — Yep, those Republicans, always looking out for national security. And principled, too! Nothing to see here, citizen, move along.

Unclear on the concept of separation of church and state — Several Democrats, including Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pennsylvania, said they are in touch with their Catholic bishops back home. Altmire said he must have the approval of his bishop in Pittsburgh before he can vote yes. Nice to know that there are some Democrats who hold Constitutional principles in as high regard as their GOP colleagues.

Paranoia Strikes Deep — Paul Krugman on the American Right. He says something I've been saying for years, albeit far more elegantly, in the money shot: ...the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

?otD: How many writers does it take to change a light bulb?

---

11/9/2009
Body movement: 15 minutes of stretching and meditation, 30 minutes on stationary bike
Hours slept: 5.25
This morning's weigh-in: 233.0
Currently reading: The Jade Man's Skin by Daniel Fox

• 16:39 In Charlotte airport awaiting flight home. Utterly fried and exhausted, which is exactly how one should feel after a seminar like this. #
• 20:28 Landed in Boston, awaiting bag. One foot swelled up on plane. Can't wait to see my cats! Going to get in bed with laptop and some soup. #
• 20:51 So we've been waiting over 20 minutes and the baggage belt finally started moving! Three bags came out and now... Nothing. WTF? #
• 20:53 Get this. Those three bags are still going around and around, unclaimed. But at least more are finally starting to come out now. #

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It only occurs to me now after reading Jeremy Clarkson's latest rant and a review of P. J. O'Rourke's latest car book that it's a bit of a shame the two of them never got to do a car program together before P. J.'s cancer took so much out of him.

I'm trying to get my desk organized (again), a thing I do every month or so when I start to go crazy.

Putting together pitches for:
Boys Life, Cosmos, Ad Astra, Astronomy, Air & Space, and Popular Science.

Short science pieces, now that I'm mostly done cleaning up the back issues of Nature that have been accumulating for the past couple of months.

We got our first issue of The Economist last Thursday, too. We're dumping US News, since it's gone monthly and pretty much jettisoned any efforts toward providing actual news in favor of random blogs and "special" issues that rate things I'm not much interested in. (And The Economist offered me a really great starter deal; we'll see if I can afford to continue when the rate goes up in February.....)

Cold is still hanging on. I can't tell how far through it I am, only that I feel like crap when the drugs run out every 4 hrs or so.

No geocaching this weekend. I'm planning to sneak out for a couple tomorrow at lunch, if I can manage the time around somehow getting to the Y as well. There are a few caches in that vicinity. We'll see.

And as far as getting fiction written....well, it doesn't pay any bills so for now it's pretty much on the back burner. Again. I know, I'm pathetic. I should just set an hr a day when nothing else is allowed to interrupt. Nothing.

I can do this.

Sure, I can.

So, Leah, what did you do this afternoon?

I'm glad you asked, Little Timmy! I went with cszego to the Hockey Hall of Fame Legends Classic!

Pics or it didn't happen.

You drive a hard bargain, Imaginary Interlocutor...



It's the warmup skate! We spent this mostly going: "OMG IT'S MARK MESSIER--NO WAIT! OMG! IT'S WENDEL CLARK!"




Some Stanley Cups, hung from the rafters.




Of course, we can't have a hockey post without snapping a nice one of Bill. Hello, m'dear.*

*For those who don't know already, I am the only girl in all creation with a #5 Leafs Heritage jersey.




Carpet Man trains six days a week to roll out that carpet on cue. Here he is, crouched like a tiger in readiness. It's a hard job, but he does it for the privilege of serving his country.



The ceremony where they gave out the blazers to the 2009 Hockey Hall of Fame inductees (Brett Hull, Brian Leetch, Luc Robitaille, Steve Yzerman, and some team owner dude who is not a hockey player and thus not important to this post) featured things like fireworks and Mounties. Really, this is the perfect confluence of all the things that make my heart happy.

(Note Carpet Man executed his duty duly and well.)



Vague and blurry shot of the Skydiggers playing between the two 30-minute periods. This lacked a crucial ingredient: Gord Downie.

There are no actual pictures of the hockey game. Pfft. You think I'd be taking pictures? I was watching hockey.

But as to the game itself, this was pretty much the world's fanciest casual game of pickup. It was pretty obviously rigged, in a sense that they weren't going to let the Canadian Legends lose no matter what went down (and really, they were winning by three goals anyway) and they didn't call any offsides, penalties, or anything else. The clock maybe stopped once. The linesman was more an emcee than anything else.

It was hella fun though. Wendel Clark played in a little ballcap, and you could practically see him thinking must...not...check...old men! Lanny MacDonald still has a totally fearsome moustache, and his moustache was playing this game before you were born, whippersnapper, so get out of the way! Robitaille and Leetch actually suited up and played a few shifts, and that was cool. Glenn Anderson has that whooshy Pantene hair when he skates; you get the feeling he doesn't wear a helmet not due to any safety thing, but because he's humming shampoo commercials to himself as he skates by. And we will still dork out and holler for Borje Salming even when he's on the wrong team.

In sum?



ME LIKE HOCKEY. ME WATCH HOCKEY. OM NOM NOM.

So, after years of looking, I finally scored a bottle of Dogfish Head Chateau Jiahu, yet another Dogfish Head triumph of experimental, molecular, and forensic archaeology and spectrographic analysis. 

If you don't know, Dogfish Head makes several beverages that are attempts to reconstruct the alcoholic drinks of ages past--Midas Touch, a 2700-year-old Egyptian barleywine recipe which is one of my favorite beers; Theobroma, an attempt to reconstruct a 3200-year-old Aztec chocolate brew; and of course Chateau Jiahu.

Midas Touch is available constantly, but the other two are something the guys at the brewery make and release when they feel like it, and I haven't been able to find any previously. But last week I was wandering through a Whole Paycheck, and what did I find?

...I bought a bottle of each (they are wine-bottle sized). And since I am having dinner company tonight, I decided to open the Chateau Jiahu to share.

TBRE and I split a little out into cordial glasses in advance of company. It's interesting. Sweet, as you would expect, malty, not as floral as I would have thought but the note is there. Also, traces of bitterness--I know not whence they come.

It's maybe not quite as well-balanced as it could be, but that's kind of balanced out by the coolness of drinking, dude, Neolithic ale.

http://shocklinesforum.yuku.com/topic/13372

RaceFail comes to horror as someone (a troll himself, most often) noted that a black person told him that horror seemed like a "white genre."

Some tidbits, as stuff there gets locked/deleted fairly often:

The Horror Drunx are female friendly because all HORROR DRUNX are created equal. I guess what I am trying to say is, things are changing for the better in horror nowadys compared to like ten years ago.


...

I say down with that anime genre too. It's just such an Asian game, an Asian genre.

Also, if that person exists and that conversation really took place, I think you should be ashamed regardless of posing such an ignorant question designed to once again get an argument going here (what was one of your last posts? Oh that's right pedophilia).

...


You claim to love this genre so much, why didn't you defend it when/if he said that? You posted here asking that question as if you yourself were unsure about it, so can you at least tell me if you think one country and one group should qualify to deem the entire genre racist were that true? Did YOU even think it over and how ignorant that statement is and to call him out on it?

That's like saying there aren't a lot of black chefs in Italian restaurants, then Italian food must be gay.

...

Know what's unrealistic about black people in horror?

Them being in horror.

They have the common sense to get the fuck out of there when shit gets weird.

True story: Our barracks was haunted. Badly haunted. One night, during the Christmas season, the shit started again. The noises, the fog in the hallways, condensation on the walls, lights buzzing and flickering, weird noses coming from the ventilation, shit like that.

...

Out of curiousity, what is the racial-equality genre?

...

To be honest, I think your friend is a racist.

I can't see an editor picking up a manuscript and by reading it say this was written by a non white author. As to stories, personally I have had as protagonists; African Bushmen, Wakamba bowmen, Masai, and a New York Zombie master - just to name a few. I think it is not a difficult thing to find other races in our fiction.

It does get a bit tiring to here people are still getting so nitpicky on the subject of our differences.

...

Well, first off, I don't think 10% of the population is gay. I'm gay, so I do have a horse in the race, so to speak. If you ask people to self-identify their sexual orientation, about 2% say they are homosexual. Of course, that is a bit underrepresented, so let's go with 5%. Now, I don't know the sexual orientation of most horror writers, but I do know the following are gay men:

...

With that in mind, I say the following: I find it very hard to believe that a white publisher would read a story from either A) a black writer or B) a story/novel featuring a predominately black cast of characters, and say to themselves, "This shit will never sell. PASS."

...

[BONUS LOL from the guy who wrote about Bushman and zombie masters!]:

Y'know I am reading all this and the question comes to mind, "Do we have to have equal statistics on Everything?" Think about it. There are cultural differences that may or may not affect the partisipation of a group in a particular activity. Because they don't, doesn't mean the activity is Racist; or that we should strive to artificially balance things.

Last night I attended a Belly Dancing event. Surprise! there were no male dancers. More than half the audience was female. Should we invite a troop of cross-dressers to every event to even things up?

PC can hit the point of ridiculous.

...


Regarding some of what Wrath was saying, I've had some publishers who don't want to publish my stuff with gay main characters because they feel it limits their ability to sell to audiences that are uncomfortable with this. I don't consider this homophobic, it is just business.

...

Does it really matter if characters are black white or whatever? You can't *see* them anyway, so they can be whatever friggin' color you want; just adjust the knobs in your head.


...

2,285 words on Grail, for a total of 3800 words total.

Writer goal for this book: release the ego and just write the book. It will be the best book I can make it, and killing myself worrying will just make it an book that's not good for me.

Today, I got Perceval out of a nice swim in a radioactive river and ruined Benedick's breakfast. Life is good.

Look, it's the return of the progress bar!

3800 / 100000 words. 4% done!

And I guess I'll wander over to novel_in_90 and chart my progress there.

Courtesy of ckd pointing it out Friday night, another entry in Signage: An Occasional Series:




And, I just gotta say: global climate change doubters? New England. Strawberries. In November.



That was my back yard this morning. I'm still getting salad out of it.

0.o

And now, back to Grail.

I've been a bit distracted lately, oddly enough by healthcare, or I'd have had more to say about the HCR process in the House. There's lots to say now, much of it complaint. What the hell ever did happen to single payer, given that the Dems negotiated that away all by themselves? Why was the dreadful, pathetic Stupak-Pitts amendment even allowed to enter the process? Is the Senate serious about the six-month waiting period for the Public Option, which protects insurance companies while (sometimes fatally) victimizing voters?

But you know what? A few years ago we were debating whether to privatize Social Security. Now we're complaining that the proposed Public Option is flawed.

Guess which argument I'd rather have. Victory in politics is ever transient, but I think, for now at least, that sanity, goodwill and reason have prevailed. A hell of a change after all those years of Republican governance.

Your Sunday moment of zen.



Jeff VanderMeer, photographed at the Portland Japanese garden. © 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Mitchell Hooks’ Fabulous 50’s Paperback Covers — Very nice stuff linked through from this post on Drawn!

Little but fierce — Ah, Criggo, thy clippings make me laugh until my bladder threatens.

A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families — An interesting article about how children name things. (Via Language Log.)

You Sir, Have Offended My Honor — Ta-Nehisi Coates on bigotry, with sourcing from Brian Chase.

64 Democrats on the Wrong Side of Stupak-Pitts — I expect Republicans to vote in favor of forced pregnancy and government intrusion in private life. Those are among the most cherished conservative principles. But Democrats? I'm sure you guys are proud of yourselves, and that just makes me even more ashamed.

?otD: Who will stop the rain?

---

11/8/2009
Body movement: 2 hour, 30 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 6.0
This morning's weigh-in: 232.4
Currently reading: The Jade Man's Skin by Daniel Fox

• 17:56 Just finished another long day of healing arts classes. My brain is completely full now... Soon, banquet dinner! #
• 22:40 To Rep. Michael E. Capuano: We need affordable coverage for every American. Please vote for reform. bit.ly/1xhcYF #hc09 #MA #02138 #

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