Banned in Boston indeed.
I suspect for the sake of some of these old timer's hearts and for the more delicate readers I should have included a disclaimer: A fine essay but a bit on the risque side... maybe even downright naughty... and for those who have outgrown some of their primal urges, it may leave you slightly breathless. Keep away from young children. There will be some spatchcocking of chickens. Etc.
A few years ago, well, back during one of my occasional forays into the academies of reading and writing, I had a few semesters where I started students of English 101 off with Kaufman's essay. (I always found the first essay of the semester to really set the tone. Richard Ford's In The Face was another great kickstarter, and begins: "I've punched a lot of people in the face." Yeah! Although my favorite first read turns out to be Louis de Bernieres' absolutely magical piece of writing reflecting on the many suicides of Beachy Head called: Legends of the Fall. For realz. Look it up. If it hasn't been anthologized, it will be. Please do not confuse de Bernieres' essay for Jim Harrison's 1979 novel of the same name, although de Bernieres' title is certainly informed by Harrison. Of course if you don't read Jim Harrison shame on you. And yes, I hate the word novella.) So but anyway, and to make a short story even longer and get even further from the point of some dude cooking a cow in the woods, kids tend to emerge from the high school setting with all kinds of stupid notions about the arrangement of words and the way writing works and then unfortunately carry that stupidity with them throughout their regimented same ole' lives and out into their same ole' careers...
But so you take those assumptions and all that scholastic hoopla and shake it up with a splash of food and some porn and presto (or maybe pesto): the lightbulb blinks on and they run with it, hopefully away from their adolescence but still holding a hint of that magic to then be carried into the real world. But not always. Well, after the entire not uncharming liberal arts college endured a semester of pasty young, sweating freshman boys trying to incorporate porn into everything from the clash of civilizations up through the arguments of Plantiga through the world of mathmatical proofs and out into the universe of planetary movements, I had to admit defeat, with regards to Kaufman's D.D.S. as it relates to college freshman, although with some fantastic chuckles, which by mid-semester were being weekly delivered to and eagerly awaited by the English Department. And while my reputation as a professor of the dark arts of writing certainly grew, punching people in the face seemed far less provocative.
