Oh, Professor!

I don't know if you've been keeping up with the Robert Olen Butler scandal, but it's hilarious and sad all at once.

It's getting a lot of play on Gawker here, here, and here.

The upshot is that his wife is leaving him for Ted Turner, and he wrote a crazy email to some grad students which (of course) got passed around the internet. And of course it didn't stop there. Once Butler saw it on the web, he continued to write notes to Gawker chastising them for posting an email, insisting that it was private.

But come on. Okay, I get it if this was some anonymous Joe caught in the wheels of our modern-day-internets having his pain and embarrasment exploited. But Robert Olen Butler is a famous author, and he wrote a letter, albeit via email. There are massive sections of libraries devoted to even the most mundane correspondence of famous authors. Books of letters to and from famous authors come out all the time. When I was at college, I took a class on T.S. Eliot, and he had had an ongoing dalliance with a woman who taught at the women's college in our consortium while his wife was in the crazy-hatch. The letters didn't contain any lost poems or anything...they were just relics of his messy personal life, but they were treated like the crown jewels.

So when Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler is shocked that his letter is of interest to anyone else, well, I'm not buying it.

Also, I wrote this fake letter from a cuckolded professor to his class last November:
McSweeney's