Of course the notion that race had nothing to do with Jayson Blair's success at the New York Times was absurd, but so is the more recent notion that alcohol, of all things, is to blame for his downfall. Last week, the ambitious fabricator and plagiarist, attempting to explain to a New York Observer interviewer where he had gone wrong, said, "I was drunk on assignment."

I offer, by way of counterpoint, the names of other writers who have also been, as it were, drunk on assignment. William Faulkner wrote truthful and devastatingly trenchant books with the help of booze; he told an interviewer for the Paris Review, "My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky." That interview is excerpted in the Paris Review's astounding new 50th anniversary anthology, The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication..., whose complete title is too long to reprint in its entirety in this space. The book also includes a Mary McCarthy essay about meeting two friends for drinks after already having a few drinks, and consequently passing out: "As I learned the next day," she writes, "my inert form put them in a quandary." When a Paris Review interviewer says to Hunter S. Thompson, "Almost without exception writers we've interviewed over the years admit they cannot write under the influence of booze or drugs," Thompson replies, "They lie. Or maybe you've been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers.... Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley?" Or, it occurs to me, Parker? Or Stafford? Or Mencken? Or Carver? Or Cheever? Or Roethke?

So Blair was young and drunk. Well. Fitzgerald was 27 when he wrote The Great Gatsby and Hemingway was 27 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises, and both of them loved to get shitfaced. (John Irving says that Fitzgerald and Hemingway "pickled their brains" and their writing eventually suffered, but Tender Is the Night and The Old Man and the Sea suggest otherwise.) Alcohol is not to blame for what Jayson Blair did. I'm quite drunk as I write this, and I haven't invented facts or failed to credit my sources.

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Dept. of Humility: Sherman Alexie, who writes for the New Yorker and also contributes to this newspaper, will not accept an honorary PhD from the University of Washington when he delivers the keynote address this year. It would be an insult to those "who work their asses off" for doctorate degrees, he says. "I don't feel like I've earned it."

frizzelle@thestranger.com