We have nutters on the other side of the pond as well. One of the regulars at an open-mic I helped run in the late '80s and early '90s was a defrocked literature professor named Bobby Long. Bobby had been sacked from one too many teaching jobs for showing up drunk in class one too many times, so he'd decided to become a "real poet" and drink himself to death. Bobby's friend Everett Capps (father of folksinger Grayson Capps) used him as the principle character in his book On Magazine Street which was adapted into the movie "A_Love_Song_for_Bobby_Long", in which John Travolta played Bobby.