Profile

I am a poet and teacher now living in Salt Lake City. I am the author of Apocalyptics, a book of poetry from Unlikely books. I write for Hong Kong Review of Books sporadically. I also read theory and history manuscripts and evaluate them for Zero books. I podcast for Inside Zero Books, Symptomatic Redness, Emancipation, and Alternatives.

I have spent most of the last decade abroad: first in South Korea where I met my primary partner and wife, K., and then in North Mexico and Egypt. I have traveled with K. through parts of Europe, most of Mexico, Turkey, and by myself through Germany, Taiwan, Japan, and most of the US and Canada.

I am interested in things spiritual from a scholarly point of view, although I have no real deep seated alliance to a religion at this time in my life. I also study the history of socialism, but I am not sure I have a lot of faith in that now either in the immediate future.

I have relocated to Salt Lake City. I work in my garden most days.

I edit the literary journal: https://formerpeople.wordpress.com/
I write a political blog sometimes: https://symptomaticcommentary.wordpress.com/
I write for Hong Kong Review of Book sometimes: https://hkrbooks.com/
I used to record for this podcast: https://www.mixcloud.com/symptomaticredness/

"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music." -- Vladimir Nabokov

"It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail."-- Vladimir Nabokov

"[Many well-meaning people] think that books can be weapons and that one can fight with words. [But] words used for the purpose of fighting lose their quality of speech; they become cliches.... The result of all such attempts is indoctrination" - Hannah Arendt

"If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are."-Unsourced Zen proverb

"If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion. " - Línjì Yìxuán

"The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor"--Isaiah Berlin

"Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome." - Stephen Jay Gould

"The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner."
-Stephen Jay Gould

"Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. "-Thomas Kuhn

"If you desire ease, forsake learning."-Nagarjuna

"Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity." - Hannah Arendt

"No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been." -Hannah Arendt

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."-Hannah Arendt

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. "-Walter Benjamin

"Books and harlots have their quarrels in public."-Walter Benjamin

"Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. "-Walter Benjamin

"In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. "-Theodor Adorno

"Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction. "
-Theodor Adorno

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. "-Ludwig Wittgenstein

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

"A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams. " -Umberto Eco

"Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame."-Umberto Eco

"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them." - Umberto Eco

"Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful." - A. J. Ayer

"To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction." - A. J. Ayer

"Don't fight forces, use them."-R. Buckminster Fuller

"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun." -R. Buckminster Fuller

"The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. " - Richard Rorty

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." - William James

"The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. "- William James

"Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there."-Henry James

"It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system." -Charles Sanders Peirce