Robust, Riveting Biographical Data

Astrological Sign

Saturnus, the Time-Dragon.

Humor

Melancholy.

Favorite Cat

Russian Blue.

Night or Day?

Night. Oh, for sure night.

Admired Literati

Ben Marcus, Rikki Ducornet, César Aira, Anne Carson, Steven Millhauser, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Smokin Joe Campbell, Marcus Aurelius, Alan Moore, Abe Kōbō/Kōbō Abe.

Born

Atlanta, the Past.

Inhabits

Brooklyn, the Present.

Careening Toward

Mars, the Future.

Technically, according to Barthes, the author is dead, and so this Author must deem himself a ghost (ala Mr. Lif). Images—as they come back from the Laboratory Aetherium, where the web-gnomes are hard at work pulling auto-level levers and smacking down contrast-augmenting buttons—will materialize below:

The Author’s Moustaches & Jackets
The Author Drinks Deli Coffee Some Mornings

Can be found here.

I have passionately loved the English language since I was child. I admit, of course, that I sometimes cheat on English with Japanese and even fantasize about Latin and Arabic, but English generally forgives me. (We’re tight like hallways.)

Stories, novels, comics, movies, and data haiku all move me. I like my words keen, surprising. To me—to borrow the words of three historians writing about the Doctrine of the Four Humors in medieval thought—literature (the good stuff, “prose romance,” what we aspire to) tends “essentially to observe and to represent man’s sensibility as having value in itself” (Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy). Word up.

I am terrible, however, at puzzles and riddles. I do not write these.

No one should drink poisons. And yet I have fallen in love with one. She goes by the name of Cynar, and she is manufactured by Campari, and she is made from artichokes. Yes, I know liquor is traditionally distilled from wheat, barley, corn, and other dreadfully common plants. But my baby is better than that. She is spiky and bitter, and she inspires me to write on the Crusades, urban exploration, injustice, and other bitterly spiky themes.

Another fine writer’s beverage or “wrivage” is strong coffee (see above), preferably espresso, preferably with peppered with cardamom.