Greg Van Voorhis is totally the Cool English Teacher: Young dude, beard, long hair, calls himself "GvDubs" on Twitter. He gave his students the Chuck Palahniuk short story "Guts" to read and next thing you know all the uncool school people are complaining like some episode of Leave it to Beaver, In the Beaver's Butt. Now the Cool English Teacher's been suspended and the tabloids got ahold of the story and a 16 year-old high school girl is telling the New York Post "He didn't mean it to be anything other than something we could learn from," and everybody is laughing about that quote, because the story is all like,

At home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing happens except it hurts.

Go back to Ohio if you don't want your kids learning masturbation things! The only danger here is the possibility the kids will turn into dreary Palahniuk groupies.
[Pic via]

The New Yorker's Book Bench blog discovered these sad, young, hard literary men, all of whom say they work in "law, publishing and high technology." When these hard guys meet up, they just don't talk about books, they also do hard things like playing paintball and gambling and shooting guns and engaging in contests involving feats of strength. The group's founder, who goes by the hard name of Tanaka, had this to say about why he started a book club exclusively for Boston's rock hard swinging dicks:

I started this club as an anti-establishment book club that spits in the faces of the traditional girlie clubs where people don't discuss the book, and just drink wine and talk about relationships. I have a good number of smart, successful friends who are very well read, and want to kick ass like I do. Throw in beer, competition, and seedy locations, and we had the perfect recipe to have fun while motivating us to continue to read and kick ass collectively.

According to their website, these hard boys love books by hard authors like Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway, but hated C. D. Payne's Youth in Revolt because it just wasn't hard enough for their tastes. Shockingly, there are no Chuck Palahniuk books on their list of past selections, but just give it some time — after reading Chuck they'll probably all spontaneously drop their pants and start masturbating in front of each other, because that's the type of shit hard guys do when they're totally intellectually stimulated, and there wouldn't be nothing gay about that at all because it's all about being hard baby!

Long live the Scorpions! If there's one thing this world needs more of, it's "anti-establishment" book clubs.

But it's a sturdy fit for the adventuresome Rockwell, whom we cornered for a few minutes of his busy '08 (also including Frost/Nixon later this fall) and another round of Defamer's ongoing Five Questions:

DEFAMER: Look — Fox Searchlight gave us souvenir anal beads! Aren't they great?
SAM ROCKWELL: Those are great. This is a classy movie.

DEFAMER: No doubt. Victor has enough compulsions to require about a dozen different levels of research — sex addiction, choking, mother issues, etcetera. What did you prioritize here?
SAM ROCKWELL: Obviously we read the book a lot. [Director] Clark Gregg and I rehearsed a lot; he was very well prepared; he's an actor, which is great. He's sensitive to this. I went to seven or eight sex addiction meetings. I met a sex therapist; we talked a lot, and he showed me a documentary. I try to do a little bit of research on everything, some more than others. But sexual addiction is more like a food disorder in that you're really filling a void; it's different than any kind of alcohol or narcotic abuse.

DEFAMER: With that in mind, did you ever play devil's advocate with this — that sex addiction is more in the mind of the beholder?
SAM ROCKWELL: I've been working with an acting coach for a long time; he and I go to therapy, and we talk about that in our work. It's kind of like Alfie or Tom Jones, but we're psychoanalyzing this Casanova in a comedic way. A real Casanova is not a guy that looks like Brad Pitt or George Clooney; they're normal-looking guys in this very depraved world. It's not as glamorous as people think. Sex addiction can go from compulsive masturbation to prostitutes to people who've been sexually molested. It's a serious condition; it's nothing to be laughed about. But I think we respect the condition and are able to joke about it at the same time.

DEFAMER: We've been following you since In the Soup, in which you portrayed Steve Buscemi's mentally disabled neighbor. Sixteen years later, the "full retard" backlash is on from all sides. As someone who skillfully portrayed disability before it was Oscar bait, what's your take?
SAM ROCKWELL: Well, look, they're totallly missing the joke. It's about actors and awards shows. I thought Leonardo DiCaprio did it really well, but at some point you have to let the research go and intuitively daydream and just let your imagination go. It's a matter of taste really. Do you respond to Forrest Gump? I do. I respond to what Dustin Hoffman does in Rain Man. Hoffman tells a story about Midnight Cowboy where he found the limp for Ratzo Rizzo. He put his foot in like this, and he got all these letters from handicapped people afterward saying, "That's the most ridiculous limp I've ever seen — you're making fun of us." So you try to be as responsible as you can be, but it's just an artist's interpretation. [Tropic Thunder] makes fun of the actor's process and the hype that goes around it.

DEFAMER: When you take on Palahniuk, you're inevitably taking on Fight Club. Were you apprehensive about having to follow a classic?
SAM ROCKWELL: Absolutely. But the advantage we had is that this is the anti-Fight Club. This is a low-budget film. We don't have special effects or bells and whistles. This is a different kind of movie. It's an independent movie in every sense of the word. It's like Harold and Maude or The Fisher King and think of it as a different tone; Fight Club is darker. We've got a heavy subject, but we've also got anal beads.

I guess I've been bumped up the publicity ladder...20th Century Fox is gearing up to publicize "Choke," so they have all these Chinese factory anal beads. It was all of these things coming together.

UPDATE: A photo of the actual Choke anal beads swag after the jump!

While such giveaways are always good for sparking conversation, we'd warn producers that the tactic can also sometimes backfire. We're reminding of a recent Lionsgate promotion in which entertainment journalists across the country were gifted with Hostel 2-branded urethral sounding rods—a fringe S&M practice most of them were entirely unfamiliar with, resulting in the majority of the nonplussed recipients either tossing the stainless steel devices, or using them as makeshift letter openers.

UPDATE: A reader tipped us off to this photo of the actual Choke anal beads on a Flickr account. Anus sold separately. [Flickr]

• WEB EXCLUSIVE: Chuck Palahniuk up to Snuff [dailytexanonline.com via Reverse Cowgirl]

Now, weirdly—this does not make me want to read the book. It's jokey, which is funny, but I think undermines the actual book and makes me think—although I have no idea yet if this is true—that the author doesn't take his character seriously. I sort of want to like Cassie Wright, the aging porn queen. But these book trailers don't tell me anything about her.

OK, so bearing in mind the fact that I have spent a pretty-considerable amount of time in what I consider "good" behavior (although by "good" I'm assuming you already have a pretty good handle on most of the ethical philosophies of like all post-19th C. philosophers— although Hume probably isn't so pertinent; I'll leave this up to you) (By the way, this is probably also a good time to mention that my sinistral phalangeal joint is a little askew due to an unfortunate playground-slide mishap — any dodgy penmanship or unavoidable typos sic), that is to say, not punching my sister or politely asking for more juice instead of just promoting it under stealthy cover of night-time pajama-raid, &c. &c. you may be wondering just what exactly it is I'm up to, like do I have an ulterior motive or whatever.

The rest of Wallace, with footnotes, is here. Other good ones: Terry Pratchett, Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Austen.

We read it with great curiosity. Because, really, we wanted to know: what kind of reader does it take to see anti-Semitism in a book warmly lauded in both the Jewish Forward and the New York Sun?

In his WSJ review, Smith proclaims that "Mr. Palahniuk's gleeful anarchism attracts Goths, skateboarders and others who fancy themselves desperadoes of the fringe." What Smith doesn't say, though, is that he knows a thing or two about fringe himself. Indeed, as we discovered by way of a little research, Smith represents a very specific kind of fringe-dweller: the sort that quotes the Onion, thinks in terms of band references, and gets compared by his publisher to Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer while existing, more accurately, as an echo of Nick Hornby.

According to an official bio, Kyle graduated Summa Cum Laude as an English major from Yale. After that—curveball!—he joined the army, and led a platoon into combat during the Gulf War while sending dispatches to the Dallas Times-Herald. Upon returning home, he did some time in the New York bureau of the AP, then three years at the New York Post. From 1996 to 2005 he edited book and music reviews for People. Since then, he's been doing this movies thing for the Post.

Hate to rag on a veteran, but if anything, that part of the portrait only makes the rest more confusing. Exhibit one is the Palahniuk review itself. Never mind what he thought of the book—our eyebrows are up for the contextualization. Namely: "To the keep-it-real generation, Mr. Palahniuk makes Eminem look like a spoiled preppy." And to close: "Mr. Palahniuk may justly fear the same fate as the gruesome 1990s rocker Marilyn Manson, who, as a mock headline in the Onion once put it, is 'Now Going Door to Door Trying to Shock People.'"

Exhibit two is Smith's career in fiction writing. That's right, folks, our man is also a novelist. His latest book is A Christmas Caroline—it's about a self-centered, size-zero redhead from a fashion mag who learns all about the meaning of Christmas when she is visited by three spirits from her past. More interesting, though, is the book Smith wrote before that: Love Monkey, which by all descriptions seems to have been a sort of proto-lad-lit knockoff of High Fidelity (it was also made into a TV show involving Jason Priestley). At the center of the book is 32-year-old Tom Farrell, a man-boy rewrite guy at a paper called The New York Tabloid. Maybe it's unfair to judge Mr. Smith based on his fictional characters, but the evidence should nevertheless be considered.

Based on what we've gathered from reviews and the couple pages available for view on Google Books, dude likes to chill out and watch sports, and he loves, loves the weekend pussy hunt. He prides himself on not reading the New Yorker or Ernest Hemingway, and on Saturday mornings he watches cartoons and eats cereal out of a Star Wars bowl. "Stacks of CDs" are strewn about his apartment, and he has some opinions about the song "Yellow" by Coldplay. He makes jokes involving puns like "Banana Republican." An excerpt: "I own forty-three T-shirts. I watch The Simpsons 3.7 times a week, and I floss 3.7 times a year. When the house lights go down before a rock concert, I am often the first to shout, 'Freebird!'"

Look, we're not judging the guy. He is probably a pretty nice person and a good doggie to run with. And while some of his work does seem to be pretty middling, there's nothing criminal about it. What we're confused about is this anti-Semitism thing he pulled on Michael Chabon in Page Six. All the evidence suggests that Smith—the author of fucking Love Monkey, the guy who thinks Chuck Palahniuk attracts desperadoes of the fringe—read his new book, thought about it, and found it offensive. Or thought that other people might. Jews, specifically. Not trying to defend Chabon here, really, but WHY DID KYLE SMITH SAY THAT ABOUT HIM? THIS IS A CULTURAL MYSTERY.—LEON