From Where You Dream

Some of you might know Robert Olen Butler: Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and the how-to writing book, From Where You Dream. Others might as a distinguished professor at the University of Florida MFA in Fiction program. And now, reaching the widest audience of his career, Robert Olen Butler (of all people) is a Lohan-esque gossip column superstar.

Yes, I know this probably the first time Mr. Olen Butler has been described as "Lohan-esque," and, one hopes, the last.

For the details, you can look here:

http://gawker.com/news/robert-olen-butler/

But the basic run is: wait, what? Who left who for whom? Huh? Butler's wife left him for Ted Turner, he's fine with that. She did it because Ted reminds her of her abusive grandfather, and he's fine with that, too. Ted unabashedly keeps a stable of women on the ready at all times; Butler says groovy. Her real reason for leaving is that she (as a writer herself) can't get out of the shadow of Butler's Pulitzer, and he's downright eager to tell the world about that. Somehow he's turned a breakup into an ego massage with a happy ending.

I consider myself an open-minded person. People are entitled to live their lives as they see fit, as long as they're not hurting anyone else. (Unless that's part of a pre-arranged bargain, of course.) Reading Butler's email is a fun challenge to that sort of relativism. Is this kind of thing really all right? Is it healthy? Add in the Russian Doll situation of voyeurism -- the masses getting off on the gossip rags getting off on an egotistical writer getting off on an ex-wife getting off on the founder of CNN who, through his wealth and media power, gets off on all the rest of us, bringing everything full circle -- and I think I just had a mental freakout.

In a more bookish-related item, if you want a strange, funky look at a similar type thing, take a look at Donald Barthelme's Paradise. For those of you not familiar Barthelme, he writes hyper-intelligent, incredibly witty and funny stories and novels that, not to sound too academic, really launched post-modern fiction as we know it now. He wrote a retelling of Snow White that is hilarious and his stories, most well-know being The School (which you can check out over at NPR: http://www.npr.org/programs/death/readings/stories/bart.html), are fantastic.

Dalkey Archive Press reprinted some of his lesser-embraced novels. I read The Dead Father and wasn't too impressed. The King was a riotous retelling of the Morte D'Artur story. I'm only half-way through Paradise but already it has some energy the other didn't. The story's center is on a man whose wife leaves him. He happens to meet three models in need of a place to stay, they all move in and suddenly it's the Three's Company episode you always wished they'd made: he's in Pleasure Town. But he's not happy. That's the kicker. He's living the non-monogamous fantasy life and it's not satisfying.

I haven't figured out why yet. Any ideas?

-Patrick