Barry Hannah R.I.P.
By Tom Teicholz at 3 March, 2010, 3:50 pm
Middlebury College in Vermont has a 4-1-4 structure and January was the month when you could spend your time in the pursuit of a solitary subject or a frivolous one or both. Barry Hannah who did a stint as a teacher in the English dept at Middlebury was our advisor for a winter term project focused, as I recall, on the Beat Generation, which culminated with a reading of Ginsberg’s “Howl” in a dorm basement cafe and some poetry made up on the spot to musical accompaniment.
I can no longer recall much of what Hannah did or said, although I have a strong memory of sitting with him in a bar in Middlebury — in those more enlightened times the drinking age was 18.
I do recall him telling us a story that he went to Ole Miss in Oxford, the air was so filled with Faulkner veneration that one night, after imbibing more than a few, he went out and peed on Faulkner’s home.
Barry hannah was something of a legendary crazy man, of a set with Warren Zevon, and Tom McGuane. When I interviewed Tom McGuane for Interview, he told some Hannah stories. One gets the impression that a lot of people did.
Of course no one would have anything to say about Hannah if his stories weren”t so good — alive and weird, yet rooted in the way things happen, go wrong, and keep going.
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