He’s a philosophy
professor, and, in
this the age of the
faked memoir, we
need to approach
him with caution.
He has produced, at a young age, a trove of books and articles — essays, monographs, short stories, novels — much of it accomplished, as he describes it, while disablingly, suicidally, drunk. If ever there were an argument in favor of alcoholism as a career-maker, this is it.
His faculty page photograph up there has him as the classic sensitive confused infantile genius: Dressed in black, hair askew, hand in front of his face as if he’s smoking or appalled or weeping. A Kierkegaardian, a Nietzschean, he’s overwhelmed by the anguish of existence.
His just-released novel, autobiographical, displays the – again – classic mix of I’m Sorry for My Past Degeneracy and Admire the Depth of My Past Degeneracy. Apparently there will be a movie.
In a London Review of Books piece about his recent suicide attempt, he describes his thoughts at an AA meeting: “As I looked around the room I thought: yes, I am officially a loser.”
Yet who could believe this? He’s a winner, with the world at his feet, canny enough to time his shocking self-revelations with the release of his latest novel.
A loser? Consider this:
On 200 mg a day of baclofen, in an important meeting with several associate deans of my college and three new department chairs (I was made chair of my philosophy department just a few weeks before I tried to commit suicide), I fell asleep with my head on the conference room table and, for 40 minutes, everyone was too embarrassed to wake me. Somnolence is the most obvious and inconvenient side effect of baclofen. I reduced my dosage to 100 mg a day, and started taking it only at bedtime. A few days later, a colleague asked if I had changed my medicine. ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘Why do you ask?’ She is German, an analytic philosopher, and therefore very direct: ‘You are drooling less than you were.’
There’s quite a bit to be said about this paragraph, even if we don’t comment on the sequence of events by which shortly after you’re made chair of a department you try to kill yourself.
The main thing to be said is Wow. Universities.
Very few places of work feature people who make someone who drools head of their enterprise.
A troubled person, this person, a new department chair, sleeps through his first meeting with the deans.
He sleeps for forty minutes. The deans are embarrassed but polite, and no one disturbs him.
Wow. Universities.
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:09PM
If a professor’s greatest asset is his knowledge, then maybe his superiors don’t mind if he goes into sleep mode? "Just keep being smart. We’ll wake you up when we need you."
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:34PM
LOL, Carolyn.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:37AM
We don’t need no stinkin’ baclofen here–our senior administrators can put us to sleep inside of five minutes.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:43AM
Sounds like a "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" kinda guy…er… GentlePerson.
I bet he gets a decent amount of tail with this routine.
July 3rd, 2009 at 10:47AM
I certainly always fell for it.
July 3rd, 2009 at 2:10PM
It also says he’s an expert in business ethics, especially relating to marketing and selling:
http://cas.umkc.edu/philosophy/Martin.htm
July 3rd, 2009 at 3:15PM
What makes his pensive smoking picture even more awesome is that he’s standing in front of a gigantic shuttlecock. I might be inclined to make fun of this if not for the fact that pictures have been taken of me standing in the exact same place. It’s what we do in Kansas City.
http://www.kansascity.com/238/story/1280891.html
July 3rd, 2009 at 4:01PM
Shuttlecocks! A very important word in Ford Madox Ford’s great novel, The Good Soldier.
July 4th, 2009 at 4:47AM
I ascend to the rank of dept chair in January. I need to spend the fall semester working on my meds with my doctor – I’m not taking ANYTHING exciting enough. Asthma meds just aren’t the ticket.
July 4th, 2009 at 7:22AM
UD, what is it anyway about women falling for this kind of bullshitter? They know it’s BS, right?
July 4th, 2009 at 8:09AM
Congratulations, Michael. From what I’ve heard, propofol’s the ticket, and easy to get.
You’ve asked a BIG question, tp… The Wounded Smoldering Existentialist Thing — even, as in this guy’s case, Post-Existentialist Thing – is a sure-fire winner in my experience, from Camus himself on down…
http://www.paintermagazine.co.uk/users/1220/thm1024/camus2.jpg
I can only speak for myself, but tousled rebellious self-destructive despair with an undercurrent of possibly violent anger pretty much sums up for me the perfect man.
As to reasons… It certainly doesn’t make sense in animal terms. If I’m supposed to be motivated above all by a drive to reproduce at a high level, I shouldn’t be drawn to Stanley Kowalski… Even if Stanley had gone to Tulane and written a thesis on Alexandre Kojève I’d still be better off without him…
Maybe it’s maternal. Women want to heal the pain.
July 5th, 2009 at 11:07AM
The musician Richard Thompson often writes as an unreliable narrator. He dissects the self-flattery of A Curious Character in his "Mingus Eyes" at .
July 6th, 2009 at 9:20PM
I gotta say in response to the Kansas City Star piece, in which Martin traces his problems to having read his older brother’s books when he was too young for ‘em, that I read my older brother’s books as a child and didn’t become an addict to anything. Except books.
As for comment 12 — "Mingus Eyes" seems to be a pretty straightforward description of the style of masculinity we’re talking about here. Dunno what’s "unreliable" about it, except that RT’s narrators describe themselves with more self-awareness than their real-life analogs are likely to have.