Comments Lounge
Disgusting.....Apparently there is no Freedom of Speech or rights to privacy in Kentucky either....His grandparents snooped though his stuff and then went to the police??? Niiiice. The kid did not go public with his work, so there was no actual 'threat' made even IF a fictional sory could be considered one.
Loved the story about the Creepy Christer teacher! I went to Catholic school and no one would ever have pulled that kind of thing here in MA. I did have a Lit. teacher in college though who was considered to be quite a joke because she thought every poem ever written was about sex. Seriously: if a bunch of COLLEGE students come to the consensus that this woman had way too much s-e-x on the brain, there must really be a problem. If you turned in a paper that did not boil down each and every poem we studied into being primarily about sex, the best one could hope for would be a 'C'.
Hope that you feel better!
Wow, you're really pissed... You posted this twice.
I had no idea that people took practicioners of Voodoo seriously. Please. *bangs head*
Sorry. Blogger was not my friend today.
I hope he makes it out in time, too. That's the real tragedy; imagining this kid may give up before he's even had a chance to start. I won't add anything more to what you've already said, I'll just thank you for saying it so well.
Wow. That is one seriously depressing news story.
But I have to say, I really liked hearing about your high school class. It's amazing the amount of self-education that people do for pure enjoyment. Also, it reminded me pleasantly of my English major 
From a friend's blog, I got some of the other side's story. It appears this isn't as cut and dried as it first seems. http://g-blog.net/user/Zhaneel/e.../
23650#comments
Perhaps this kid is trying to hide behind 'my school district is run amok by fundies, save me' when he had really bad intentions all along. I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Just my 2 cents.
I clicked over on the above link, and still don't see much to make me think that this isn't craziness. And it's hard to get around the fact that the story is about zombies. Zombies.
But as Kathie noted, the whole grandparents turning the kid in thing adds a whole new aspect of nastiness to the episode. It does seem that the adults responsible for kids have become incredibly hypersensitive to charges that they are closing their eyes to their kids' bad behavior. Any thoughts on this aspect of the story?
Thanks for that link, frostedlexicharm. I don't think, from reading that excerpt your friend posted, that his credibility is all that damaged.
One of my peers could have easily said about me that I was an atheist and a rumored lesbian who was argumentative in class and hung around with freshman girls, so my protestations that I wasn't a pedophile weren't credible. Except for that pesky lack of actual evidence, I'd be damned for sure.
Bottom line is, this kid didn't get arrested for fighting, or for being in vocational school, or for paying attention to the cameras in the school, or for lying about why he wrote the story (some kids think they *have* to have a reason for fiction writing, especially if they feel like "I wanted to" won't cut it). He got arrested for writing a story about ZOMBIES. And that's just fucking nuts.
in tenth grade english, while studying poetry, i had to write a humorous poem. so i wrote the wittiest, smartest, funniest poem i could. about the teacher. and honestly, it was freaking good. imagine my surprise at the F i got.
i guess in retrospect an F isn't that bad.
When I was in 8th grade, I had this horrible woman math teacher (sounds amazingly like your English teacher, Flea). One day, instead of my usual reading-a-book-under-the-desk during math, I started writing a poem, about the teacher, and her resemblance to a feline predator. Active imagination, you bet. She found it, didn't like it, and tried to get me expelled one month before graduation. She only relented when she got me to *beg* her not to. I detested her, but I was scared to death of what my parents would do to me if I were expelled, no matter what the reason was. From a previous bad experience at this school, I knew my parents would not back me up if I had a problem with a teacher -- the whole point of sending us to Catholic school was apparently to instill the "proper respect" for authority. So luckily they never found out about this incident.
definitely when it comes to fucking zombies taking over a town, nothing to get your panties in a twist over. but i definitely know of a case or two where i wouldn't mind a person getting arrested or at least getting beat up for their stories. haven't we all heard of the kid that wrote rape/murder stories about a girl in school and everyone blew it off as "oh he's just being creative, it's fiction, the fact that he's using her name and his name and familiar events and landmarks in the town is just him using what he knows" and then he ended up raping and murdering her? the aclu took that case to defend him and his stories.
oh, and the worst that happened to me and my stories/poems is that i was sent to the school counselor.
I see this as just another example of how our culture is losing its capacity for metaphorical thought. Is it that much of a wonder, really, when so many people have so much invested in a literal reading of the Bible? But, yes, it is very dangerous to us all, not just creative kids.
I had to laugh, by the way, because my (very secular) AP English teacher had us read the Bible and Stranger in a Strange Land (and some other stuff that I can't remember) in order to teach us about the literary legacy of the Good Book. I find it inspiring that you and your friends managed to serve as your own teachers.
If it turns out there is MUCH more we don't know yet, and this kid was actually a threat, then I'm glad his grandparents didn't look the other way. But so far, the crime seems to be that he's been arrested. Especially when I read the quote from the police detective. I have relatives in states neighboring Kentucky. "Anytime you ... possess matter involving a school... it's a felony.." !!! WOW!! I need to get on the phone. My Mom reads Stephen King, too, and although we often disagree, I don't ever want to see her charged with a felony for carrying to the wrong material on a car trip. I mean, Damn! Please tell me this kid really did something wrong and we haven't started the thought police.
NJ - can you post a link with more information? I'd like to know more.
I don't care if a story does detail a planned crime, writing the story should not be a crime. Seeing the counselor about a story detailing a crime seems reasonable. We can hope that the counselor would be able to tell if the intention were serious or not and maybe even steer the student away from crime.
In any case, a story should at most get the writer attention, not arrested. The actual attempts to commit a crime should be prosecuted, not fiction.
Part of the problem is the suspicion is conviction attitude. We can't seem to just look into these potential problems, anything that hints at trouble has to be prosecuted. Even if the story is turned over to police, they should not arrest him, as writing a story is not a crime.
Now, if the student writes a threatening story and then tells the victim that it is not just a story, then that is a threat, and possibly a crime. Big difference between that and just writing to be writing.
That anonymous was me.
OK...if he'd written a story about gun-weilding terrorists taking over the school, I can see some sort of action. Not necessarily JAIL TIME, but counseling or...something.
BUT ZOMBIES??? ZOMBIES? Oh, for the love of little green monkeys.
It's a cunning plan, actually. They have metal detectors at the entrance, they have drug-sniffing dogs, they have surprise inspections of lockers, but do any of the schools have zombie detectors? Or supplies of zombie repellent?
I think not.
This student had clearly discovered a chink in their defenses, and they were quite right to quash it quickly.
1) We are a nation of idiots
2) I learned more about religion, christianity, and spirituality reading Stranger in a Strange Land than from any bible class (and find that my faith is stronger because of it)
3) I have high school teachers who I revere to this day, and there are others who I would throw a punch at if I saw them today. The bad ones are thugs.
4) Your comments regarding frame of refererence were wonderfully true.
Hope you are feeling better.
No, it wouldn't matter if he'd written a story about gun-wielding terrorists hooting up the school, because it would still be A STORY. If we write fiction about anything other than flowers and bunnies, that makes us insane and/or criminal now? That's fucking ridiculous.
This was a great post, Flea.
Octavia: You're quite right. I did a piece for this for the newspaper I write for almost 10 years ago. One of the unappreciated ironies of the case is that metaphor and other nonliteral forms of speech first came under attack during the Enlightenment, with the rise of science. Now it's coming under attack again as science is being degraded into just more fodder for political argument.
And need I point out to the Kentucky authorities that arresting one high-school kid is most certainly NOT going to arrest the current trend of things feeding on the brains of the living?
All I can say is, stay away from my daughter. Er... son.
And thank god... er, God, that we're safe from the zombies. Uh, Zombies.
I had someone write murder stories about me when I was in high school. Alex wanted to be more than the friend he was, and the moment he finally admitted that that story he had told everyone about his girlfriend dying tragically in a car accident was a ploy to get my pity and thus my love was about the same time I started dating his next-door neighbor.
The next-door neighbor was later hired by Alex's parents to watch Alex's house while they were all out of town on vacation, and it was then that he and I discovered the book of plays Alex had written about how I had rejected him and he was forced to kill me because I had broken up with him. (There was never even a hint of a relationship to break up.)
I didn't know enough about stalkers at the time to be fully aware of how creepy, how wrong, and how significant of possible danger this was.
But Alex have plans to kill me, or was he effecting a petty, sick revenge, knowing I would see it?
Pretty big difference, isn't the
Pretty big difference, isn't there, between those two.
And since stories are thoughts without context, there is no way to tell.
What was wrong was that Alex had thought, fantasized, about killing me, not that he had written it down. There is nothing wrong with writing a story--not a story about killing your friend, not a story about killing the President. The wrongness, if any exists, exists in the thoughts that created the written work, not the written work itself.
And thoughts should not, and cannot, ever be policed. Ever. Under any circumstances.
I live in Louisville, Kentucky. I spend a lot of my time telling friends out of state that yes, we do wear shoes; yes, we prohibit marrying first cousns; yes, our colleges teach subjects other than Appalacian crafts and blindfolded gun reassembly. Then something like this happens and I'm busy telling people that no, girls here aren't forcibly married off at 14.
It's a personal tragedy for the boy involved and a national embarassment for the state of Kentucky. I had the great luck to attend a magnet school for gifted and talented students (now taboo, lest we educate our best and brightest.) The worst reaction I would've had to a zombie story was a harsh critique on the overuse of media imagery.
I am appalled.
I hear you about Kentucky, Chris. I've heard enough incest "jokes" about my Dad and I to last a lifetime, due to being a South Carolina native. There are stupid, racist, ignorant people everywhere. For instance, in Illinois we have Alan Keyes, Lyndon LaRouche, and Matthew Hale, just to cover the entire spectrum of loony. The South in no way has a lock on crazy.
Oh my Lawd, I don't know what the world's coming to. You reminded me of a few things:
1. The Lesbian Reorientation Camp threat -- did you ever see "But I'm A Cheerleader?" Hysterical.
2. I would like to see the Kentucky prosecutors who find concrete evidence of the kid's zombie-wrangling with harmful intention.
3. I once was downgraded on a play I wrote (college theater) because the prof said that "women don't swear like that in real life." I'm fucking serious.
Homeschooling: Looking better every day. Though I could never teach my kid highschool level math, dangit.
I once wrote a short fairy tale for a highschool assigment right after reading a lot of Just So Stories. I Ended up Capitalizing every other Word just Like Kipling. My teacher was cool about it though, once she figured out I was doing it on purpose, but I still got a lower grade than I expected.
I also once got a D on a book report because the teacher thought there was no way I wrote that well--I must have copied it. But I had been reading book reviews in grown up magazines, and had only copied the style, not the report itself.
I was also chastized many many times for reading ahead of the rest of the class--God forbid I learn *too fast*! Horrors!
stupid school.
Stories like this can cause so much conflict both in ourselves and in our discussions. That's why nothing can be taken at face value: the individual and the circumstances need to be weighed in accordingly. For example, an explicit story about stalking someone close to you vs. the zombies killing us all. The state of Kentucky putting one blanket statement of "nothing ever can be threatening to no one" is frightening to me, and I feel a tragic example of the way politics are nationwide at the moment.
Of course, maybe the kid knows something about zombies that we don't????
Yep, the possibility of home schooling my 16 month old daughter someday is looking pretty damn good right now.
Thanks flea, keep up the good work.
Sometimes I feel like this country is losing its mind.
Molly Ivins' column today was about the Republican attack on the AARP, saying that the AARP is anti-military and pro gay marriage. (I don't have the link) I read about it yesterday on the Democratic Underground:
http://www.democraticunderground...p10/05/
188.html
The AARP is, of course, against changes to social security. So they must be smeared in the worst possible way.
If you're not with us, you're an enemy. It makes me paranoid. Nixon had his enemies list but Bush has the Patriot Act and can jail anyone for being an enemy non-combatant. I wonder how many political prisoners we have.
Zombies? School?
All I can say is, Dav Pilkey better stay out of Kentucky if he doesn't want to get thrown in jail.
Sad. Just... sad. And the authoritative creativity-stiflers are everywhere; it's far from a regional problem. With me (NJ, near NYC) it was the Jr. year English teacher who was on the 'necessary subservience of women' kick. Everything we read that year got picked apart in terms of how the female characters related to their expected societal roles (and the disasters that followed when they did not). Then in college I found out that "The Awakening" is considered a feminist book... Couldn't have proved it by my class -- Edna was a bad, selfish woman, and that's all there is to it!
Why are we so afraid of thinking? Once we prided ourselves on having some of the best minds in the world...
Well, it will be an interesting precedent no matter how the cake gets sliced. I was aware that it is considered some level of criminality to vocalize specific kinds of threats (yelling bomb in an airport, for example), but writing a story? About ZOMBIES?
So all that slash fanfic out there is illegal in some states? What if I write about buying a sex toy in Kentucky (is it Kentucky where that is illegal)? Or write about having a late-term abortion just about anywhere south of the 49th paralell?
I shouldn't be that surprised... even Degrassi is censored south of the Canadian border. Along with "Postcards from Buster" :-P
I am installing the zombie detectors in my classroom immediately!
Wait.,..bad idea. It will go off every day when my teemage zombies walk in at 7:25,
Or when I haven't had my coffee yet.
Wow that is just so sad. I feel bad for the kid, I only hope he can turn this into so money.... I mean like I hope that his story writing skills are good enough that now that he is getting the publicty he can profit from it. Because otherwise this is just gonna suck for him big time for a long long time.
BTW I love your blog. You're way cool.
oh..and flea?
I'm currently recovering from the double whammy of the flu and pneumonia
and I'm 36.
getting old sucks
So the zombies took over the cops before they went after the school?
Coach Trenks - Oh no! I'm sorry! I totally feel your pain. Did you miss any work? I can't imagine that you didn't.
Hmmm. I'm going to write a story about cracker zombies with sex toys roaming Kentucky.
Getting pretty damn weird out there.
New to your site...now I'm hooked.
Quick, someone tell Joss Whedon to skip the country before he makes it to the FBI's ten most wanted list.
I've heard of similar scenarios before. That some prig of a teacher would do such does not surprise me at all. But what really gets me is that this kid's grandparents turned him in. WTF!?
"Grandpa, please read this cool story I just wrote for my creative writing course."
"Hello, 911? I'd like to report a crime."
It's not human.
Somehow I suspect post Columbine cum 9/11 hysteria. These people are stark raving mad.
We have seen the zombies and they are us.
I just found you today; loved this post.
Hearing about your D made me so angry! That shit wouldn't fly in my high school. Did you have to accept the D? Was there no recourse? I wanted to hear about how you marched into the principal's office to explain the situation and got your grade reversed, but I'm imagining perhaps your principal would not have had much sympathy either.
aw:
We have seen the zombies and they are us.
George Romero's point exactly.
This kid's grandparents totally suck.
The high school kids should move out when the storm is over, because his grandparents are the same kind parents that would cook their child in the oven because they think the child is possed by the devil.
It's the scary grandparents that should be jail before the burn the boy at the stake.
(1) Me Too!
When I was in Junior High, I was *king* of Team AllThingsNerd. (I call it "King of the Dipshits.")
And I was picked on, a bit, by a few people. FrankM, DarrinT, like that. Once I wrote a short story in which I detailed exactly how a character eeerily like me in a lot of respects, but named Jonathan Talgh (Jon Talgh -- it's an anagram. I'd been reading Ayn Rand) is diagnosed with inoperable and terminal unnamed disease, probably cancer, and once so diagnosed proceeds to kill by stealth and cleverness and in horrible ways the people who had been tormenting him.
I not saying I'm particularly proud of the innovative plot or the scintillating writing.
Point is, I was sent to counseling for the next three years, apparently because I was planning to kill a bunch of people in my school.
(2) Grrrrr.
The real point is that if the police or the grandparents had reason to believe that the journal entries were actual plans for an actual act, then they were corr
Great post
Loved the post. Thanks for the bloglink, interesting site, that.
I too have noticed that ostentatiously-devout Christians (i.e., literalists) tend to be butt-ignorant about their scripture. Under the Know Thy Enemy principle, I, a Jew, have read more New Testament than they generally have, let alone Tanakh (Old Testament, if you're a Christian). It leads to amusing conversations.
Just to provide a balance note, my wife had a class in college with an equally bigoted teacher from the other side of the aisle. This particular goofball taught the African history survey class, and her worldview was that Africa was Good and Whites were Evil. White students were provisionally human, until they disagreed with her about any worldview factoid. (My wife eventually wrote a final paper about African participation in the slave trade, buttressed with about 10 footnotes per page, and when she got the expected F grade, took it to the head of the department and got the young woman ousted. I beli
whoops
that last sentence shoulda ended "eve she ended up having to go back to Gambia.)"
ZOMbies? Good Grief!!
Happens at the college level too. There was a guy at NYU in 2000 whose roomates snooped on his e-mails and found things he had wrote to friends back home about aliens, guns, etc, definitely of the fantastic rather than terroristic. NYU had him taken out of class and committed to Bellevue. A few days later they decided maybe they overreacted. He wanted to sue but their army of lawyers made that too daunting of a task. There was an article of it in the Boston Globe with a picture of him on the front page.
Did I mention he was my brother?
The article is in the Boston Globe archives, which aren't free to read, but if you're interested search under "words that haunt".
Wow. Hell of a post. As a 10th grade history teacher, I gotta tell ya, I would give my right arm and part of my left foot if more of my kids could be half as creative as you were as a Senior. The teacher of yours was an ass! My condolences. Please be aware, though, that there are still teachers who prize creativity over conformity and imagination over insipidness!
They need to get that kid on Ritalin, fast.
Fantastic post-- I linked to it on my blog since it all sounded soooo familiar to my experiences in high school-- also in the Reagan era.
The story makes me ill. It's straight out of Orwell, but with the ages reversed.
The worst I ever had it was in 9th grade when the teacher handed back our stories and had written at the end of mine that he had deducted a letter grade because I was making up words without explaining them. Words like 'orc.' I was super scifi/fantasy/dungeons and dragons geek. I made the big mistake of protesting during class. I was forced to expain to the whole class what an orc was and where the word came from. He didn't change the grade either. What an asshole.
Steve M - I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago (an ode, if you will!) to my son's teacher - she's absolutely wonderful.
Frum Dad, and Kid Charlemagne, wow. I thought the zombie incident was rather isolated. I can't believe two people who read this post have had similar experiences to William Poole. That's freaky.
That grade stood. I ended up getting a C in that class. It was the only C I ever got in an English class - I got A's otherwise, even in college. It never occured to me to take it higher than complaining to her directly, I don't know why.
Here's a story from FL where a teacher took out some sort of knife and stabbed it into a stack of papers on a student's desk. The teacher has been "reassigned out of the classroom," but not fired or arrested. What would have happened to a student who a) showed up with any kind of knife and b) made a move like she did with it? JAIL, do not pass GO, that's what.
This is utterly atrocious. I've never seen or read ofsuch a blatant abuse of students trust in all my life. It's ironic that she prides herself so much in her faith, when in fact she has already mired herself in a decidedly morally bankrupt situation.
I wrote a story not unlike the zombie one that's being so frequently talked about...it preceeded the events of Columbine by a few weeks but the actual plot and setting were eerily close. I presented it in my own senior high school english class and instead of criticism, it was met with heartfelt appreciation from my teacher for my honesty, and shortly after we had a deep personal discussion on death and dying. I wish that all students could have such an experience, and it's so sorrowful that you had to go through that hell.
Anyway. I'd like to apologize on behalf of all Christians for idiots like your teacher. Those kinds of people are insults to the religion that they so proudly pervert.
Unbelievable. I never thought that such shit fell in highschool. I suppose I was lucky going to a multicultural, multifaith lefty highschool in Toronto. Looking back at some of the stuff I wrote, I could have been condemned as a communist. The world has gone mad. Completely fucking mad. People should use dictionaries and figure out what the word "fiction" means.
Flea - been lurking for ages. Thank the GODDESS (damn it, women bring forth all life...) that your idiot teacher didn't squelch the life out of your writing. You are a fantastic read - and vitally interesting person. Keep churning it out.
Don't know if you have word limit, but here's the Boston Globe article that Kid Charlemange mentioned:
NEW YORK - John Paul Denning, a sophomore at New York University, was in an unusually cheerful mood as he strolled to class one bright morning last fall. Just back from a road trip to visit his girlfriend at Smith College, he was looking forward to hunkering down to his studies and getting together with some new friends later on.
And then, suddenly, this: He was surrounded by police officers, who put him in an ambulance, which drove him to Bellevue Hospital, where the doctors took away his shoelaces as a precaution against suicide and committed him to the ward for the mentally disturbed. Inside the ambulance, confused, Denning had asked what was going on. A paramedic showed him printouts of some e-mail, with certain passages highlighted:
"I want to go out and shoot as many people as I can and then shoot myself to even the number. . .
"Most things these days make me w
Hmm... you do... Its going to take a lot of posts. The story's basically as Kid Charlemagne claims. Scary stuff. They put him in friggin Bellevue for 3 days!
...And people wonder why 'todays' children act the way they do?.....Poor kid...in high school all I had to keep me sane was my writings...and they weren't pretty!
Wow. Incredible. Both your teacher and the people who are getting a kid in trouble for writing a short story. People are so paranoid these days.
Last semester I had to take an Essay Writing class to fulfill some requirement in the university I go to. I enjoy writing so I thought I'd enjoy the class. That is, until the teacher told us on the first day that she had to warn us that this would be a very boring class because she personally found writing to be a very boring exercise. And then she said she would only accept handwritten work, not typed work for reasons that weren't clear. She stressed writing neatly so that she could read it. At that moment I decided I would only hand in rough drafts, because a writing teacher who didn't like writing wasn't worth my time. I ended up getting a 5 (the highest grade) in the course.
One of the essays had to be about public health care, comparing our country to another and arguing whether it is better to have state funded health care for
all like we do or is it better to have private health care and no state funding. Since I'd already decided to make the teacher regret having me in her class, I wrote a sarcastic essay explaining that it didn't matter either way, because the Bible says that a man's life is about 60-70 years long, and if all the advancements we've had in medicine in the past 2000 years haven't extended our lifespan, healthcare mustn't be all that important. Her only comments were that she didn't understand my argument and that it would behove me to use wider margins. The fact that I couldn't possibly be serious went way over her head.
I had a very similar English teacher. In high school in South Carolina, during the Reagan years.
Despite my unChristian point of view and obvious anti-patriotic sentiment, she managed to encourage me. Other kids were not so lucky.
-g, now a happy expatriate, currently in Singapore
I just wanted to say that, regardless of what really happened with the xombie story, I thought that was a great entry/essay. It gave me shivers. Kudos.
I think the line that stumped the senator was: "At long last, have you no decency?" (Not sense of.)
That was a very well thought out piece. I definately can see that those hours of writing paid off. The road you travel is much more meaningful then the destination, right?
The same is true in Colleges today. Only the professors in all courses are liberal. They are anti-American and anti-Christian. They give A's to students that agree with them and F's to students that don't share their views. You should be happy in college
Commenting by HaloScan
