Asimov’s somehow emerged as a magazine choice in a school fundraising drive. But one mother flipped through the magazine and was “shocked” to read about “young girls with no panties, young girls in white socks, young girls looking at his wank-mags with him, young girls doing it with one another while he watched.” What pisses me off about this is not only does Ms. Suburban Mom miss the point about what spec-fic is about, but that this perpetuates the impression that spec-fic is nothing less than stories about bug-eyed monsters and gender domination. A quick glance through the collected works of Urusula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler or Margaret Atwood (the latter having escaped the “science fiction” ghettoization) shows that it’s a lot more than this. And if Ms. Suburban Mom can rally against the “naughty” qualities of spec-fic, how dare she remain silent about the sexuality expressed on magazine covers, television commercials, album covers, advertisements that eroticize children, and the like. Fuck the yokels in Grandville, MI. And fuck ’em hard.
The New York Times interviews Anne Tyler by e-mail. Amazingly, she characterizes her work as “truthful.” Hey, Anne, I’ve got your truthful right here. It’s called five figures a year. Apparently, Tyler’s based in Baltimore these days. If that’s the case, please, Hag, beat some sense into her.
Following up on the Jacqueline Wilson news, the Guardian has the top 100 borrowed books in the UK up. It’s not inspiring.
Well, fuck me, the Globe has tried to examine “fuck” without mentioning it.
You should be in bed.
I love this part:
“The magazine has now been pulled from the list, but 24 Hour News 8 wanted to warn other school districts in case their students had already ordered it.”
It’s WORDS. Not only that, but literature and editorially chosen quality fiction. Does the mother think her teen daughter doesn’t know about sex? I’d much rather have my kid reading some decent science fiction than watching most of the crap the WB is showing on TV. Why is sex so taboo in the U.S.? And people wonder why we have the highest teen pregnancy and STD rate in the world. It’ because people like this try and make sex forbidden instead of something to know about.
Anne Tyler does live in Baltimore – she’s a neighbour of my parents. I’ve never read her books, though.