July 2016 – Sean Carswell

I’ve often wondered where fictional English professors get their awful clothes. Donald Sutherland gives me the name of his tailor above.

I’m a little obsessed with English professors in movies. I don’t care how bad a movie is, if there’s an English professor in it, I watch it. Even if that movie is Some Kind of Beautiful, which takes bad film-making to the point where it’s almost so bad it’s good, but not quite. It’s just so bad it’s bad.

Most films with English professors are lousy. I watch them because I have this sick fascination with the cliche professor in movies. He’s almost always a white man, slovenly, flighty, and sleeping with a student. At the end of every movie, I daydream about writing a book about these slanderous portrayals and calling it Bumbling Sexual Predators.

I was talking about this with a buddy of mine, Mike Plante, a few months ago. Mike published the long-running film magazine Cinemad. He still does a Cinemad podcast. A couple of weeks ago, Mike interviewed me about being an English professor and films about professors for his podcast. You can listen to it here.

While you’re at it, spend a little time on the Cinemad site. There’s a lot of good stuff there.

And, for what it’s worth, my award for the best (and most realistic) English professor in a film goes to Regina Hall’s character in People Places Things.

Candelas Front 2

Steph Cha recently interviewed me for the Los Angeles Review of Books. It was refreshing to work with Steph. Almost everyone else wanted to talk about the ukulele aspect of my books, which makes sense. The work “ukulele” is in the title. I talk about ukuleles a lot. I even have a picture of a uke on this post. Still, the books isn’t really about ukuleles. It’s about writers. Steph picked up on that and wanted to talk about the writers and the stories behind the stories. I think it came out really well.

You can read the interview here.

While I’m at it, I’ll point out that Steph Cha is a pretty badass noir writer herself. Check out her Juniper Song series, starting with Follow Her Home.