April 7, 2026

When I awoke from my medically-induced coma following my complete cardiac arrest in 2017, one of the x-ray technicians, coming into my room at all sorts of weird times day and night, told me, "I've never worked on a famous writer before." My face was probably covered too much by breathing tube to reveal my puzzlement. As I wrote in "Ventilator Blues," this confusion that I was a celebrity came from my wife leaving a copy of It’s All Academic in my room for good luck. I don't remember, even with the inevitable return of my voice and/or the removal of the breathing tube, ever correcting her: "You know, that book is self-published. It probably ended up in the hands of 300 people. I am hardly famous."

I just wish at the time I might have processed the juxtaposition of being temporarily famous with my (nearly) life-long fascination by celebrity.

The first "poem" I ever wrote, "Limelight," was composed while I walked around London in 1978. I say "poem," even though "song lyric" is more befitting. It had a catchy chorus:

Can't you see the limelight?

Can't you see the sun's bright?

Can't you tell the sound's right?

You're living in the limelight.

However, the verses were hackneyed descriptions of musicians on stage, audiences in a frenzy, and policemen in anxiety, finishing with the pithy

You're back in your hotel room

Ready to hit the sack.

Then it hits you,

Tomorrow you go right back.

Maybe I had been inspired by Bob Seger's "Turn The Page," although, since at that time I only had a passing knowledge of it, that seems unlikely. Perhaps I was inspired by Queen's "Sleeping On The Sidewalk," a more typical tune on my turntable for six months prior to my London wanderings. More reasonably, I had simply tapped into a well-worn trope (not that I even knew the word "trope" at sixteen) captured in dozens of songs by world-weary rock stars.

Let's set aside any mimicry I sought at the time. What the hell did I know about limelight? I wish I could assert that somewhere along the way of my London wanderings, I had been informed about theatrical limelights, fixating on the word (that habit, in itself, a well-worn Fleming trope). However, to say that with any certainty would be a false memory. I wasn't in either theater or band, but somehow these limitations hadn't prevented me from seeing myself on a stage . . . or a hotel bed dreading to go back on stage.

In fact, it's debatable as to whether I had any talent at all to justify any light -- lime, neon, or flood. As Morrissey sings, "any fool can think of words that rhyme." How delusional was I? 

The uncomfortable truth is that somehow I sought unjustified fame, which was perhaps a typical ridiculous 16-year-old boy dream, but I also was conscious of what I might have to sacrifice for it, which sounds way too nuanced for that (any?) 16-year-old boy. This theme shows up frequently in my writing . . . and in my life. When I taught, I dreaded the lead-up to a class, loved my time in the classroom (if it went well) as the sage on the stage, then savored, even more, the moments after it (teaching back-to-back classes absolutely wore me out). After forgoing teaching to do administration, especially in the highly visible role of Provost, I again dreaded the moments prior to "leading" something, generally reveled in the "doing," and then always desired to rush away when done. Perhaps faculty and staff noticed my discomfort after a meeting or an event; probably my administrative assistant only really understood the necessary escape to my office. 

Was I craving fame through my career? If I was, I should have had my head examined; after all, who goes into academia for fame? E. Gordon Gee? I doubt the rest of us do. No, I don't think I ever really coveted fame. However, and this is not easy to admit, I desire the contradiction to be adored yet left alone.

In retrospect, then, no one should be surprised that my writing uses (and later re-uses) this theme of fame, especially since on many nights in my working life, "it hit me; tomorrow I go right back." However, I might have been well-served by some examinations into the lifestyles of the rich and famous (no, I never watched that show). Or, even the not so rich and famous. For example, note how badly I mess up the part I should know well in 1981's "Middle-Class Suburbia," where my rock star protagonist dreams of having a stable life among the middle-class:

I wanna have a 15-room house with a deck on the back.

I wanna have three kids, a dog and a cat.

Fifteen freaking rooms, David? That sounds more like a mansion than a lovely little ranch style home with a white picket fence. The dog and the cat must each deserve a room.

I don't get much better with setting the middle-class scene in the last stanza:

I wanna own two cars and an outboard motor boat.

I wanna eat chicken and feel the Schlitz roll down my throat.

Uh, sure. Schlitz -- the beer of America's middle-class. What do we expect when a nineteen-year old has no sense how absurd it is for a non-rock star to write about a rock star dreaming about being a non-rock star?

At some point in my undergraduate years, I explored this theme of fame/non-fame in a short story I wrote for a WVU creative writing class. That story, "A Drop Into Non-Existence," long ago lost, involved an egotistical rock star whose plane crashes in West Virginia where he ends up having to live with a mountain family for a little while. The family (and the town) have no idea who he is. When he is finally rescued, he is a changed man (read that with appropriate dramatic tone). I don't doubt it was pretty awful, which is probably why I never saved a copy. And in my true conflicted way, I embedded my lyrics, some of the old ones, and a few new ones, into the story as my rocker's songs. As I remember it, it's not like the protagonist abandoned his musical career. He just proceeded with a "purer" view of the world. Pretty lame (or tame, you pick it) resolution, if you ask me.

Hey, give me credit, at least I had Mark Carter walk away from the conflicts that being a provost brought him in It's All Academic. At least someone in my fictional worlds has the guts to say "enough is enough." And in real life, I eventually found the guts to say "enough is enough" (although with a lot less risk than Mark Carter). But I am getting ahead of myself.

Once I hit graduate school, I seemed to have acquired a healthier view of fame. In fact, as my literary heroes became Emily Dickinson and Hart Crane, poets whose renown much came long after their deaths, it made sense that I saw prestige as something more eternal. When I turned to the celebrity culture in my poetry, it was with tongue in cheek, as in "It Is Not As Fun Being Famous Anymore":

No, Miss Earhart, it is not as fun being famous anymore.

There is nowhere in the world where I can disappear.

And with that, disappearing acts did begin, first in the poetry, as no more tackle this theme, and then by the late 1980s, for close to a decade, me as writer, as I create almost nothing (o.k., maybe that thing called a dissertation should count), seemingly willing to settle onto my own path to middle-class suburbia.

However, then, in 2010, with time on my hands and lots of anecdotes to share, I decide to write It’s All Academic. Whatever favorable estimation might be gained by the novel, I hoped, would be in the accuracy of the satire, not in anything specifically David Fleming. By going the self-publishing route (mostly for expediency, as I didn’t have that much time on my hands before I needed to find another job), I wrote the novel not expecting to end up on book tours. I was smart enough to know that financial sustainability still came from me getting an academic position. In the meantime, however, could I confirm that what I found satirically funny (and thus insipidly annoying) about higher education was the same for others in higher education? However, to prove that hypothesis, I did need to get the novel into the hands of people outside of my academic circles. My academic friends and colleagues knew the antics at the fictional Boan University exposed familiar territory. Would outsiders confirm I had hit upon some universal truths about higher education?

It wasn't complete lack of effort on my part that failed to get the answers to my question (although the desire to land a full-time position did cause me to pass on many of the activities a self-published author is encouraged to do, such as attend or have your book featured at regional book fairs). Given the niche audience for a book about higher ed administration, I stuck with sending copies to Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education, using the lower-level contacts I had with either publication. Alas, such limited fame was not to come, not even fleeting. The novel did get a brief mention in a Chronicle of Higher Education editorial from 2017 or 2018, as part of an analysis of why so many deans die in academic novels. I was also fortunate to have the book reviewed in a couple of regional academic newsletters. That was the closest I came to the limelight.

That didn't mean I wasn't a little irritated by seeing the limelight shine on two self-publishing academics with highly charged sexual-centered novels about higher education. This occurred in a February 2014 Inside Higher Ed review of these two recently released books, leading me to wonder if my moment of fame passed because my story wasn't racy enough. I suppose sometimes one needs to embrace the clichés of one's world, in this case the sexual escapades of college faculty and staff. Still, "Scholars Shill Sex For Salacious Story Sells" gave me space to rant, and to wonder where I could have inserted some sex into boring old Mark Carter's life (I do love the last line of that blog; sometimes the best dirty joke is the one not said).

Besides, I am a writer. All writers are to be supported. I must rise above petty jealousies . . . which was impossible when I read in the Inside Higher Ed article that one of the novelists, the retired President, of course, admitted "I had never read fiction . . . but I liked to write." 

So I never got my fifteen minutes of fame. Big deal. Fame isn't all that it is made out to be, Mr. Warhol. You of all people should know about that ugly underside to fame. Warhol himself is one of the key players in my last (as of April 2026) observations about celebrity, a December 2013 blog, "Of Longhorns, Long Hair, and Short Bursts of Fame." As I wrote then:

It's a sad story of three hulking figures of their industry -- [Farrah] Fawcett, the hottest actress in the world for several years, Warhol, the world's most famous artist of his time, and U of T, Austin, one of the five largest campuses in the country-- and one easily forgotten actor [Ryan O'Neal]. Did she leave the painting as with all her art collection to the University she never graduated from, or was the painting never hers to give, instead given by the dead artist to her ex-husband?

Is this fame? The battle over a dead star (more Morrissey/Smiths' reference), their name, image and likeness? As I said at the time, I was mostly disgusted by University of Texas, Austin, even getting caught up in the controversy, the soiling of their longhorn, so to speak (with a wonderful, coincidental, allusion to the U of T memorial longhorn that kills my fictional dean in It’s All Academic). What I failed to acknowledge was how fame was a commodity, something Warhol, and I think Fawcett, understood. O'Neal, I'm not so sure. U of T, Austin? Oh, yeah, they've understood that for a long time.

No, Ms. Fawcett, I think it is safe to say it not as fun being famous anymore.

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If interested, fuller readings of the sources mentioned here are linked below (and available at the ever-expanding "The Blog Under The Bed").

Ventilator Blues

"Limelight"

"Middle-Class Suburbia"

"It's Not As Fun Being Famous Anymore"

Scholars Shill Sex For Salacious Story Sells

Of Longhorns, Long Hair, and Short Bursts of Fame

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