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I forgot to add this to the review post, so here's a separate one.

I'm giving away my ARC of So Shelly by Ty Roth.

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I very much believe that every book has its reader, and while I liked this novel, it didn't wow me. I want someone to have this who will love it. It's got historical elements, poetry and drama. This is a YA novel with some very adult topics--sex and violence--so please, if you're young and impressionable, don't enter the giveaway :/ I don't want to be in trouble with your parents!

Read the review and if you think you would like to win this book, comment below (not on the review post) and tell me why you'd like to read this book. Make sure your email is in there somewhere--so I can contact you if you win.

I'll choose a winner at Midnight on May 1, using the random number generator. I'll mail to the US or Canada.

Tweet the link to this page for an extra entry (leave the link in the comments!)

Good luck!

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So Shelly by Ty Roth
Publication date: 8 February, 2011 from Delacorte Books for Young Readers
ISBN 10/13: 0385739583 / 9780385739580

Category: Young Adult Realistic
Format: Hardcover
Keywords: Contemporary, historical fiction, sex, death



From goodreads.com:

Until now, high school junior John Keats has only tiptoed near the edges of the vortex that is schoolmate and literary prodigy, Gordon Byron. That is, until their mutual friend, Shelly, drowns in a sailing accident.

After stealing Shelly's ashes from her wake at Trinity Catholic High School, the boys set a course for the small Lake Erie island where Shelly's body had washed ashore and to where she wished to be returned. It would be one last "so Shelly" romantic quest. At least that's what they think.

As they navigate around the obstacles and resist temptations during their odyssey, Keats and Gordon glue together the shattered pieces of Shelly's and their own pasts while attempting to make sense of her tragic and premature end.

How I found out about this book: Alethea picked up the ARC at ALA Midwinter in San Diego, having lusted after the cover.

Alethea's review: I don't know what I was expecting from a novel that's essentially a present-day retelling of the lives of three (or rather, four--Shelly is a composite of two Shelleys--Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe) of the most talented but messed-up people to ever grace the pages of literature. There are a ton of things in the novel that most mainstream YA readers won't like. It's chock-full of sex (specifically incest, rape, and molestation), obsession, and grief. There is, at one point, a murder in which one of the three main characters figures prominently, yet doesn't seem to undergo any emotional change, other than to remove himself from the situation. The thing is, they're in the book because they reportedly happened to their real-life counterparts, not just to titillate.

I'm not saying the novel is without merit. The characters are engaging, though they skew more towards cautionary-tale rather than model-citizen. Keats is a sympathetic narrator and the most relatable of the three. Shelly and Gordon have the tendency to go off the deep end--in massive ways, especially since they are spectacularly privileged (Shelly having been born rich; Gordon having the pedigree but restoring family fortune by writing an Eragon-type novel at a very young age). Never before has the lack of parental supervision been so blatantly exploited as in the love-polygon of Shelly chasing Gordon, and Gordon chasing every other woman who isn't her, including various of his relatives, caretakers, and best-friend's-stepsisters.

While the novel does a great job of capturing the spirit of Romanticism and retelling, piece by sordid piece, the lives of three great writers, So Shelly would best be enjoyed by those who can appreciate--or maybe tolerate--erotica and shameless depravity. Ultimately the themes of friendship, loyalty, and forgiveness

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By Michelle Rafferty

As most of you probably know by now, there’s a new stage in life – emerging adulthood, or for the purposes of this post, the unmarried young adult. Marriage is getting pushed off (26 is now the average age for women, 28 for men) which means…more premarital sex than ever!

According to sociologists, emerging adults are all part of a sexual market in which the “cost” of sex for men and women in heterosexual relationships is pretty different. Out of this disparity has risen the theory of “sexual economics,” which I recently read up on in Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying. At first glance women appeared to be the clear losers in this market. See this passage:

Sexual economics theory would argue that sex is about acquiring valued “resources” at least as much as it is about seeking pleasure. When most people think of women trading sex for resources, they think of prostitution and money as the terms of exchange. But this theory encourages us to think far more broadly about the resources that the average woman values and attempts to acquire in return for sex – things like love, attention, status, self-esteem, affection, commitment, and feelings of emotional union. Within many emerging adults’ relationships, orgasms are not often traded equally.

Basically, the sexual economics theory says that while women and men are doing the same thing during sex, socially they are doing two different things. Women can and do enjoy sex, but they also have an agenda, while men…just want to have sex. Which to me just seemed, well, sad. Hadn’t women all finally agreed that a man can’t ever make you happy, only you can? But the more I read up on the theory of sexual economics, the less cut-and-dry it became. Women might use sex to get commitment, but they’re also getting things like advanced degrees and independent financial stability  - which also play a role in this new sexual economy. This led me to ask: are men really the clear winners in this game? I scoured the countless studies and interviews in Premartial Sex in America and came up with the following chart to sort all the data out.

Wins in the Emerging Adult Sexual Market by Gender

Tally:
Women &

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A rough sketch for the next Brain Yard picture, coming soon.
Pen and ink with watercolour 30cm x 17cm. Click to enlarge.

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The second illustration from In The Brain Yard.
Click to enlarge.

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Card 23 in the ongoing cartomancy series is now ready.
Woodcut 30cm x 20cm. Click to enlarge.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Last week I mentioned the idiom to be (dead) nuts on ‘to be in love with’ and the verb spoon ‘to make love’ and promised to say something about both.  After such a promise our readers must have spent the middle of January in awful suspense.  So here goes.  The semantic range of many slang words is often broad, but the multitude of senses attested for Engl. nut (see the OED) is amazing.  I will reproduce some of them, both obsolete and current: “a source of pleasure or delight” (“To see me here would be simply nuts to her”), nuts in the phrases to be (dead) nuts on “to be in love of, fond of, or delighted with,” to be nuts about, as in “I was still nuts about Rex,” and to be nuts “go mad” (hence nutjob ~ nut job ~ nut-job “madman; idiot” and nutsy “crazy”).  The exclamation nuts! means “nonsense,” while, contrary to expectation, the nuts signifies an excellent person.  It will be seen that the senses can be positive, as in “a source a delight” (here are two more examples from my reading: “An English country gentleman might express himself concerning an agreeable incident: ‘It was nuts’” and “To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call ‘nuts’ to Scrooge”), and negative (“madness; stupidity”).  Consequently, tracing nuts to German von Nutzen “of use” would be a false move (this origin of nuts has been proposed by a good German scholar).   In etymological works, it is common to preface a hypothesis by a disclaimer to the effect that someone may have offered the same hypothesis, but the author is ignorant of it.  I am obliged to do the same: my idea is so obvious, even trivial, that it must have occurred to anyone who wondered what nuts (as in hazelnuts or peanuts) have to do with either extreme pleasure or derangement.

The slang word nut in the singular is also frequent, but we note that in all the examples given above the plural nuts occurs.  I suspect that the story begins with nuts “testicles,” even though the earliest recorded examples of this sense are late (however, it must have been so well-known in the United States more than a hundred years ago that The Century Dictionary included it).  Nuts and genitalia have been compared for centuries.  Thus, nut occurred with the sense of “the glans penis,” and the Germans call this part of the male organ of procreation Eichel “acorn” (in older writings on the history of words the glosses in such situations were always given in Latin; those who are embarrassed by plain English are welcome to use membrum virile).  I suggest that nuts emerged as a loose word for expressing a strong feeling: nuts! “nonsense,” nuts! “wonderful,” nuts! “crazy,” and so forth.  Such an exclamation can express any emotion.  Nut “head” is probably an independent coinage (the head has been likened to all kinds of oblong and round objects in many languages); hence off one’s nut, though nuts “mad” may have reinforced that phrase.  (The Russian verb o—et’, whose middle contains the most vulgar and formerly unprintable name for “penis,” means “to become mad”—another instance of genitalia and madness being connected; compare the metaphorical sense of Engl. prick).

Naturally, since nuts existed, the singula

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Is there Anything Good About Men? It seems that women’s magazines ask this question almost every month, along with advice about reconciling sexual preferences between men and women. In the excerpt below, Roy F. Baumeister reveals the “reality of the male sex drive.”

The problem of recognizing the reality of the male sex drive was brought home to me in a rather amusing experience I had some years ago. I was writing a paper weighing the relative influence of cultural and social factors on sexual behavior, and the influence consistently turned out to be stronger on women than on men. In any scientific field, observing a significant difference raises the question of why it happens. We had to consider several possible explanations, and one was that the sex drive is milder in women than in men. Women might be more willing to adapt their sexuality to local norms and contexts and different situations, because they aren’t quite so driven by strong urges and cravings as men are.

When I brought this up in the paper as one possible theory, reviewers reacted rather negatively. They thought the idea that men have a stronger sex drive than women was probably some obsolete, wrong, and possibly offensive stereotype. I wasn’t permitted to make such a statement without proof, which they doubted could be found. And when I consulted the leading textbooks on sexuality, none of them said that women had a generally milder desire for sex than men. Some textbooks explicitly said that idea was wrong. One, by Janet Hyde and Richard DeLamater, openly speculated that women actually had a stronger sex drive than men, contrary to what I thought.

Two colleagues and I decided to see what information could be gleaned from all the published research studies we could find. This meant a long process of slogging through hundreds of scientific journal articles reporting scientific studies of sexual behavior. One colleague, Kathleen Catanese (now a professor of psychology at a Midwestern college) started out as a strong feminist with the party-line belief that there was no difference in sex drive. The other, Kathleen Vohs (now a professor of marketing), was undecided. My hunch was that men had the stronger sex drive. Thus, at the outset, we held an assortment of views, but we all decided we would just follow the data and revise our opinions as the evidence came in.

The task was considerable, and I at least was nagged by the fear that this point was so obvious that no one would want to publish our research. One colleague heard we were reviewing the literature to see whether men wanted sex more than women, and she commented acidly, “Of course they do. Everybody who’s ever had sex knows that!” Well, everybody, apparently, except the expert researchers on sexuality and authors of textbooks.

There is no single, clear measure of sex drive. So we approached the problem like this. Imagine two women (or two men for that matter), such that one of them has truly a stronger sex drive than the other. What differences in preferences and behavior would you expect to see between the two of them? For example, the one with the stronger sex drive would presumably think about sex more often; have more fantasies

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Two of my puppets got engaged today, I'm so excited.
Pencil, brushpen and watercolour. 16cm x 14cm. Click to enlarge.

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Today's Ypulse Author Spotlight is on Nikol Hasler and her comprehensive new sex ed guide Sex – A Book for Teens: An Uncensored Guide to Your Body, Sex, and Safety. As regular Ypulse readers know, we here at Ypulse are longtime fans of Nikol and... Read the rest of this post

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Slurls are slurred URLs...unintentionally funny web site names which are caused by the removal of spaces from the site name. Now a book by Andy Geldman.
My sketches are inspired by the Pen Island site. What were they thinking?
The book also mentions the Speed of Art site, but that name was a deliberate prank by my friend Nigel.
Pen and ink with watercolour. Top A6 size. Bottom 10cm x 8cm. Click to enlarge.

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On a pleasant autumn day, Mitch Reynolds stepped out of the Department of Agriculture, his briefcase packed with papers. He attempted to take a deep breath of fresh air, search his jacket for his bicycle clip, descend the stairs, all at the same time. He heard the door open behind him, a voice call his name. He turned, backed into a young woman coming up the stairs.
Suddenly, Mitch was stumbling, falling. The girl retained her balance but scattered her files, all over the steps.
“Oh...oh...sorry...” Mitch crawled around, helped her pick up the files. The woman stuck her silent nose in the air, resumed her climb.
Bob Fagan joined him at the bottom of the stairs, laughing at Mitch’s misfortune. They turned to watch the young woman’s behind.
“Ooh, look at that. Hey nice move, buddy. I’m tellin you Mitch, never get married”
They turned to walk toward the parking lot.
“Hey, how come you’re out early?”
“New job. I finally got an outside assignment. How about you?” Mitch had found his bicycle clip again. Bob watched as Mitch gathered his trousers to apply the clip.
“Beth’s preggers again, I’ve got to take three of the kids to the dentist while she’s at the doctor’s” Bob waited for Mitch to unlock his bike. They walked through the parking lot.
Bob was a big man with five children. Beth was very fertile. Their brood seemed ever expanding.
They parted at Bob’s van, Mitch mounted his bicycle. He took his time pedalling on the bike path, admiring the green fields in the autumn sunlight, giant trees blowing in the breeze. The path led him through the Experimental farm to the barn of The Beef Cattle Exposition.
The barn was surrounded by pens of cattle of different breeds, the office inside it. The walls of the small room were covered with posters about cattle. There was a rack on one wall which contained pamphlets, brochures and magazines about cattle. A small desk, covered with more cattle information, stood, with two chairs, at one end of the room. There was no one around. Mitch saw a door behind the desk which led further into the barn. He stepped through it. A stronger smell of cattle hit him.
Mitch looked down the length of the barn. He saw that most of the stalls were occupied by cattle, one, halfway down, also contained a person. Mitch made his way to it.
The sign on the open stall door read, VENUS. Walter James, the facility manager, stood leaning on one wall of the stall, beside a cow. He was a pleasant looking, balding man, much larger than Mitch, dressed in jeans and a work shirt, holding a brown, paper bag in one hand. He smiled, held out his hand.
“Mr. James?” Mitch, extending his hand. “Walter. You must be Mitch Reynolds. Good to finally see who I’ve been talking about for the past few months” Walter James shook Mitch’s hand with his empty one. He was referring to the many conversations he he’d had with Mitch’s superiors concerning this new project.
“This here’s the star of your show” Walter indicated the cow. “Venus”
Mitch stared at the rear end of the cow. He followed Walter toward the front of her, jumping into a cow pie, when she turned her head toward him.
Walter laughed. Mitch shook his foot in the air.
“Ha. You’ll have to watch out for that. Just scrape your shoe on some straw. Pistachio?” Walter smiled at Mitch, offered the bag.

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