Giving a short story about masturbation to a classroom full of high-school students seems sort of like traipsing around Newcastle passing out free copies of Coal Mining for Dummies, but that didn't stop Greg Van Voorhis, a young and open-minded English teacher in the Bronx. He recently treated a bunch of developmentally vulnerable teenage brains to "Guts," a story by Chuck Palahniuk that involves autoerotic asphyxiation and the creative erotic use of a carrot. Controversy ensued, of course, and Van Voorhis was suspended—and his eager students have risen up in protest. No doubt it won't be long before Mr. Double-V is back at the blackboard, but in the meantime we here at Details, in an uncharacteristic Dead Poets Society-style moment of Inspirational Teaching, would like to give those Bronx students with a handy study guide. The glories of self-pleasure, after all, have been providing writers with a rich vein of material for a very long time. Here are some highlights of the genre:
- Michel Houellebecq's orgy-packed The Elementary Particles, a favorite of Keanu Reeves'
- The hot-and-bothered poetry of Anne Sexton
- The hot-and-bothered poetry of Olga Broumas
- Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which involves a misuse of calves' liver
- Jonathan Littell's controversial The Kindly Ones, which involves a misuse of sausage
- James Joyce's Ulysses, in which Molly Bloom famously rouses herself to an affirmative climax
- Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, in which the author is supposed to write a scholarly biography of D.H. Lawrence, but can't seem to focus. So he starts writing about writer's block and the ways in which he is procrastinating—but can't tell if he's just wanking around to avoid work, and so . . .
Any other suggestions? Let us know.
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