Oh My God — “Cryin’ Bob Butler” is Still Sending “My Wife Left Me” E-mails! Cannot somebody at his “institution” find a straight jacket to keep his fingers away from the keyboard? Won’t somebody please buy this Pulitzer-Prize-Winning author a copy of the instructive book “Send”, which is a guide to email etiquette:
“Can you please give voice to this at your site?” reads the subject line of a new e-mail from Pulitzer-winning author Robert Olen Butler to the Internet blog “Gawker.com.” OH BOY … can we ever, replies Gawker.
You see, my primary concern, was to protect dear Elizabeth Dewberry of course, and that is why I sent the e-mail to the community that “she and I lived in. If I had said nothing, the naked facts of the events would have meant that Elizabeth would be savaged by the rumor mill.” See … I’m not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, I am a saint to boot!
“And the email was never a mass email. I chose five trusted grad students who know us both the best. I chose half a dozen faculty members who know us both the best. And they were asked, when the rumors reached them, to tell the appropriately nuanced story. Or to tell the fuller story on their own initiative–because everyone would soon know anyway. Yes, I sanctioned the use of the email I sent them in order to explain the circumstances to the people in our community who were hearing about this. Why should I avoid vagueness myself and then force them to be vague? Without that sanction to use the email, the explanation vacuum would have continued to form and be filled with lies. And this process worked exactly as I had hoped. That email went out six weeks ago. And faculty members and students alike have told me that all of the talk around campus and around town has been sympathetic and generous about both of us.”
Not a Mass Email? It is now!
“And I tell you absolutely that Elizabeth did not do this for money and Ted did not do it lightly as conquest. They love each other deeply. And given what they’ve both been through in their lives, I expect them to be very good for each other. I love Elizabeth and her remarkable writing talent. I admire the wide-ranging good works Ted does to preserve the earth and prevent nuclear war. These are admirable people doing important work in the culture and in the world. I sincerely hope they have the rich happiness they deserve.
“In spite of my previous chiding of you and your readers, I wish that happiness for all of you, as well. It’s dangerous to live too deeply in a world of glib judgmentalism. And man, there is some truly legitimate short-burst writing talent among you all.”
I am taking this well, aren’t I? My therapist gave me the above thoughts and I penned them in my Pulitzer-Prize-Winning manner. The following prose is from one of my novellas written in 1995, coincidentally around the same time that I married the most fortunate Elizabeth Dewberry. Already, I was having premonitions about that Georgia cracker Ted Turner:
And then the cracker [as the parrot has dubbed the lover, who is also described as having “a thick Georgia truck-stop accent” ] comes around the corner. He wears only his rattlesnake boots. I take one look at his miserable, featherless body and shake my head. We keep our sexual parts hidden, we parrots, and this man is a pitiful sight. “Peanut,” I say. (”JEALOUS HUSBAND RETURNS IN FORM OF PARROT” by Robert Olen Butler)
WaPo ‘understands’ in “The Affair Of an E-mail Gone Wild”: “We understand that writers are notorious gossips. We understand the bitterness of divorce. … But the main thing we understand is that rarely has being one of Ted Turner’s girlfriends looked so good.” Bob Butler is not only sending mass e-mails, he’s podcasting to the world via NPR. Listen to the Pulitzer Prize-Winning-Email Author as he ’splains his E-Mail Chronicles of the Butler-Dewberry Love Triangle with Ted Turner.
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