You’ve met them, or will: the drunks and moochers, the losers and dropouts, the profligates and unemployables. They will at best waste your time, at worst drag you down (?) into fucked-uppery. (…)
Are FUPs more creative than average? Not likely. There have been some creative second-rank FUPs—Poe, for example—but I think this is a kind of occasional idiot-savant syndrome. Those in the very first rank of literary, musical, or scientific creativity—Shakespeare, Mozart, Newton—have been bourgeois as all get-out. (…)
Its most intense expressions in English poetry are those by Keats, Tennyson, and Dickinson, none of whom was fucked up. Keats died young, to be sure, but through no fault of his own. Tennyson lived to 81; Dickinson, 55.
I’m rather flattered to see that the commenters are just as nasty to Derb — DERB!! — as they are to me.
