Thursday, April 14, 2005
Photo by Kit Leffler
Professor David Besson, center, practices with members of his band "Galactic Acid".
So as it turns out, professors actually have lives outside of class. Like many students, in the back of my mind I’d always just assumed that when professors weren’t teaching us, they lurked back to their offices to sleep in their khakis and ties while the rest of us went out and had fun. But as I found out, when class is over professors sneak off to their secret lives off campus.
The novelist
A lot of professors write their own textbooks, but how many also write novels about espionage and romance? Bezaleel Benjamin, professor of architecture, is the proud publisher of a handful of novels including his 1988 release Rampaging Lovers.
Dr. B., as he’s known to his students, says he doesn’t write for fame or money. “I enjoy doing it for my own sake,” he says. “If it doesn’t sell, I don’t care.” He typically prints between 50 and 100 copies of each novel he writes, selling or giving them to friends and family. And not only does he write the novels, Dr. B. also prints and binds them. He says he tried to publish them under his wife’s publishing firm, which handles many of his textbooks, but that she stopped printing them after his first novel failed to sell. Not that there’s any animosity about the rejection. “I’m the only writer who goes to bed with his publisher,” he says. Now Dr. B. publishes his novels though his own firm, the A.B. Literary House.
Laura Lafoe, St. Louis junior and one of Dr. B.’s students, says that when she and her classmates heard a rumor that Dr. B. wrote novels, they looked him up on Amazon.com. Although she says it’s interesting that he writes, she says she doesn’t have any desire to read his novels for herself. “Just knowing that they exist is enough information for me,” she says.
Dr. B. has three more novels in the works right now. The 67-year-old professor says he’s running out of energy for this sort of thing but hopes to print The Nature of God: A Simple Explanation for Everyone someday soon.
The rock star
When Dave Besson runs into one of his students while his band is playing at a bar, he says they usually aren’t all that surprised to see him.
“I think they’re amused more than anything,” he says, adding that he doesn’t think he projects the image of the “classic professor-type.” Besson, a professor of physics, has been in various bands for the past 15 years, ever since graduate school. Right now he plays guitar for Galactic Acid, which he describes as a typical college rock band. His two band mates are both students at the University of Kansas, one of them a former student of his.
Besson says that he usually doesn’t talk much about his band to his students, but on occasion, he’ll bring it up. “In my more self-glorifying moments, I do,” he says. “It’s kind of an extension of my misspent youth.”
The card shark
Cliff Phillips doesn’t like to be called a card shark. Although the graduate teaching assistant in philosophy plays Texas Hold ’em at least once a week during the school year — more often during the summer — and estimates that he’s won more than he’s lost, he still says he’s no star.
For the past year, Phillips has been one of 100 or so people in Lawrence who play in the Poker Pub, a poker league that travels from bar to bar holding tournaments. He also plays in casinos at friends’ houses.
Phillips says he likes the game’s combination of luck and skill and that the possibility of making money while playing doesn’t hurt either. He’s won up to $600 in a game and says he usually just puts the money back into playing more poker.
“I don’t have family, don’t have kids, so I don’t spend my money on anything else,” he says.
rperkins@kansan.com
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