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Monday, August 13, 2007

Deresiewicz's List

Any effort to tally the alcoholic, poetry-spewing professors who appear in the novels and plays and films of our time produces a very long list.

In a much-discussed American Scholar essay, William Deresiewicz compiles the most impressive number of these characters that I've seen, so I've named this list in his honor.



I found one more for the list today. It's a New York Times review of a new play called August: Osage County. Readers are welcome to send in their own entries.




'The play’s opening scene is practically the only gentle one, as the paterfamilias Beverly Weston (Dennis Letts, the playwright’s father), a former poet and professor who has retired into full-time alcoholism, interviews a young American Indian woman, Johnna (Kimberly Guerrero), he hopes to hire to take care of himself and his wife. As he puts it with eloquent clarity: “The facts are: My wife takes pills, and I drink. And these facts have over time made burdensome the maintenance of traditional American routine: paying of bills, purchase of goods, cleaning of clothes or carpets.”

By the next scene this genial, mordantly funny, T. S. Eliot- and John Berryman-quoting gentleman has mysteriously disappeared, leaving his new employee to perform the aforesaid duties for an increasingly crowded household.'


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Update. Hm - I'd forgotten about this. First appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. One thing she says resonates with my current post over at my branch campus, Inside Higher Ed:

'Academics can rarely afford expensive addictions or frequent retreats to fashionable detox spas. But like the doctor with access to drugs and the executive with access to an expense account, we have fat caches of time and perks that can be abused. Long periods of isolated writing and research are ripe for binges. We can disappear for days or weeks at a time, during the summer or over semester breaks, ordering library books by e-mail and picking them up at the office late at night. The stretches of isolation are punctuated by carefully orchestrated public appearances (the lecture, the class, the conference presentation) in which style can compensate for content. The more successful we are, the more likely we will be rewarded with our own eccentric hours and class times; our hangovers are manageable by the time we get to the 11 a.m. Introduction to Critical Theory.'