To the Max

Karson -- who'll host a public reading of The Yeti at 6 p.m. on November 29 at CU's Cristol Chemistry building, room 142 -- is an inveterate self-promoter with a taste for hyperbole. Yet some of his claims don't stand up to scrutiny. For instance, he maintained that a petition demanding his expulsion was being circulated by individuals associated with the Women's Resource Center at CU. But after hearing that Hilliard had investigated this assertion and found no evidence of its truth, he said he'd heard about the petition secondhand and admitted it might be nothing more than "a rumor." Nevertheless, there's enough of a paper trail to suggest that many of the entertaining tales he spins are grounded in reality.

An Amherst, Massachusetts, native, Karson started writing horror stories as a youngster, and his tradition of provocative prose continued at Amherst Regional High School, where he created and personally distributed a newsletter he called The Crux. The publication, whose entire run can be accessed online at www.greentara-redlayla.com/CruxIntro.html, hit its stride with a salvo inspired by the January 2002 resignation of principal Stephen Myers, who was alleged to have made sexually provocative comments to a male student. (By coincidence, Myers previously served as principal at P.S.1 charter school in Denver, and after he stepped down in Amherst, two former P.S.1 teachers interviewed in Westword accused him of inappropriate behavior here, too.) Karson's take on the incident was predictably off-kilter. "My response to Mr. Myers' controversial hobby of molesting children?" he asked in print. "I'm going to break up with him, and had I known he was a child molester, I never would have gone out with him in the first place."

Myers's administrative successors didn't get the joke, suspending Karson for a week. But this sentence was stricken from his permanent record thanks to lawyers affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union of Western Massachusetts, who, according to Karson, learned about the matter from a friend of his. Karson says he was threatened with suspension three more times for subsequent Cruxes -- one in which he insisted he was "gayer than Big Bird" for his friend Matt, another that sang the praises of masturbation, and a third whose concluding phrase was "Fuck you, Mom." But with the ACLU's help, he escaped all but one day's worth of further punishment, and in October 2002, the Amherst Regional School Committee made its student free-expression policy less restrictive in direct response to the Crux affair.

Upon graduation, Karson moved to Colorado, where his father lives, and enrolled at Colorado State University. He lasted just a semester before heading back east again. Two years later, he returned to the state to attend CU, starting classes and The Yeti at roughly the same time. He handed out several hundred copies of each edition at the University Memorial Center, and he provides a slew of laudatory e-mails as evidence that more people liked his purposefully impolite offerings than didn't. "It's about 80 percent positive," he swears.

Even so, the remaining 20 percent of folks were mighty unhappy -- especially with issue three. Karson says he was trying to needle insensitive men who care only about their pleasure and want women to be nothing more than mute, submissive sex objects. Problem was, he took the chauvinism to ham-handed extremes, writing in the first person that the clitoris is functionless ("like an appendix"), breasts have no nerves and can therefore be squeezed as hard as possible, and the sex act should proceed without lubrication, "so they can really feel it."