I Write Letters

Politics

Hell no we don’t need to arm teachers. My letter to the Chicago Sun-Times (published online only, unfortunately!).

Don’t arm our educators

It’s disgusting to see Illinois State Rifle Association executive Richard Pearson argue the best response to the Newtown, Conn., murders is to arm teachers, principals and custodians.

Maybe if the gun lobby hadn’t spent years pushing for easy access to military-grade firearms, the rest of us wouldn’t have to live in fear of the mass shootings that seem to happen almost monthly. We should be investing in mental-health treatment and cracking down on guns that can spray 30 bullets in a matter of seconds. If America decides to answer our gun problem by ensuring kindergarten teachers are strapped in the classroom, we might as well throw in the towel now.

New Novel by Larry Gaffney

Books, FLYMF Alums

This one’s overdue, but FLYMF alum Larry Gaffney published his second novel earlier this year: Abaddon! It sounds like a neat piece of apocalyptic fiction. Here’s the description from Amazon:

True-crime writer Ray Shannon has endured a terrible tragedy—the violent death of his wife. So the offer of a teaching job in a peaceful Vermont town sounds ideal for him and his son Mark.

But his arrival coincides with a series of disturbing events that soon unfold into horrors of apocalyptic proportions.

An air-borne flesh-eating plague centered in Boston threatens the entire planet. An Islamic terrorist is poised to unleash nuclear devastation in twenty major cities of the world. And Jared Riggs, a charismatic preacher with a sinister agenda, rises meteorically to national prominence. When shape-shifting monsters begin to appear throughout the land, it is clear that the End Times have arrived.

Against this backdrop, and with the help of a beautiful woman whose interest in New Age healing is balanced by a doctorate in quantum physics, Shannon tries to save himself and his loved ones while coping with the realization that he has unknowingly become one of the primary threads in a cosmic tapestry of evil.

Larry’s work for FLYMF includes Selected E-mails From Cabot Sinclair, Literary Agent And Really Nice Guy, Notes On Contributors, Scene From A Creative Writing Seminar Conducted By David Milch, The Lost Seinfeld Episodes, Things I Wish I Had Never Said, Christian Rock Group Days Of Fire Decides To Cover The Frank Zappa Catalogue, With A Few Changes, Writers Guidelines For The Salt Lick Review, Ill-advised Resume Objectives, A Correspondence, Larry’s Open Proposal

A Look Back at Freaks and Geeks

Humor

JUDD APATOW: I felt like a father to everybody, and I felt like everyone’s world was about to collapse. I felt responsible, like I had to fight to have it survive so that their lives would be O.K., so that their careers could get launched. And so to completely fail was devastating to me. And especially for Paul, because this was Paul’s story.

10 years after the show was canceled, the actors and writers look back at their time working on the show in a Vanity Fair oral history.

A New Normal

Well Worth Reading

Leading psychiatrists, abandoning Freud’s relatively nonjudgmental position, described homosexuals as “sexual psychopaths.” There were experiments in electric and pharmacological shock treatment, hormone injection, castration, and lobotomy. One site of such remedies, Atascadero State Hospital, in California, later became known as “Dachau for queers.”

In the New Yorker, Alex Ross has a moving overview of the gay rights struggle, going from past persecution to the seemingly rapid gains of the past decade. It’s important history to be acquainted with, even for those who don’t directly share it.