Biographical notes

I was born in 1960, which will make me 45 this year. I am thus only a few months away from losing even the last thin pretense of youth offered by the phrase, "my early forties."

I'm also as old as Paul Westerberg, my first real indie rock hero. My current indie rock hero is Westerberg's spiritual heir, Jeff Tweedy. In the early '90s, I saw Tweedy's band, Uncle Tupelo, which at the time I'd never heard of, front for the Replacements at Toad's Place in New Haven. This is one of the very few tangible evidences of cool in my personal history.

I'm a product of St. Louis, MO—the godforsaken northern suburbs, actually, but all us suburbanites just say "St. Louis" when asked where we hail from. There are two kinds of St. Louisans: the kind who live there all their lives (which includes those who leave for a time, in the certain knowledge they'll return), and the kind who itch to get the hell out from the moment they become aware there's an "out" to get to. I live in Chicago now, a magnet for expatriate St. Louisans of the latter type.

I have three cats, Samson, Nadine and Ant'ny. They're all rescues, Nadine from a shelter, the two boys from parking lots. They came to me thanks to some odd karmic upwelling all in the span of about eighteen months a decade ago. Samson, my first, was found blind and ringworm-infested at two weeks old in the deserted oyster-shell lot of the Silver Moon Cafe, a great Baton Rouge soul-food dive. He looked awful, his eyes caked over with dried pus, and some big old toms were about to turn him into cat food, and when we parked he set up a yowling as if he knew somehow that we were his last chance at life. My friend Lisa made me take him, because she had an instinct that my caring for this sorry little creature would help me with the depression I was trying to get a handle on. She was right, too. (He regained sight in his one good eye after a few weeks, just when I was teaching Samson Agnoistes in a Milton seminar. At that point it was obvious what I should name him.)

In spite of the cats, and my having never been married, and my writing poetry, I'm straight. If you forced them to, I think my gay friends would say they're in continual expectation of my one day coming out to them, but it ain't gonna happen. (Don't get me started complaining about the way heterosexist stereotypes are enforced on straight men.)

I was raised Catholic, and hail from pretty devout parents. I stopped being a believer not long after I started high school. (I went to a Jesuit high school in the city; an hour and a half by bus from my home, it represented my first effort to exit suburban hell. It's a measure of the Jesuits' reputation in the Catholic world that my Mom once told me she blamed the order, and its intellectual approach toward religion, for my loss of faith.) I now practice Zen Buddhism—have for the last two years—which I make a point of insisting is not a religion, not by my lights anyway. Talk of God and the power of prayer and all that really just creeps me out, so you can imagine how much I enjoy life in the United States of Jesus.

When I was twelve, I made a speech to my seventh-grade class endorsing Nixon for President, because that's who my parents were voting for. Within a year, I was setting up my dinky little cassette recorder in front of the TV, full of the sense of history, to tape the proceedings of the Ervin Committee, and rooting for impeachment. Watergate was the best civics lesson I ever had, and maybe the only one I ever really needed.

In my sophomore year of high school I read the Communist Manifesto for a Western Civ assignment, mostly as a provocation. (Our history classes were all taught by baseball and soccer coaches.) It had an effect, though: I've been a Marxist of one sort or another pretty much ever since.

I've voted for a Republican once (and only once) in my life: Lowell Weicker, running for the Senate against Joe Lieberman. Kind of figures that even then I'd turn up a loser.

I earned a Ph.D. in English Lit from Yale University in 1993, where I wrote a too-clever-by-half dissertation on poetic prophecy in premodern England. For five and a half years I was an Assistant Professor at LSU, the junior Romanticist in the English Department. I loved grad school, not for the institution (which I spent a fair amount of time tilting at, as a labor organizer for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization) but for my peers and all the reading and talking we did together. Going to LSU—in many ways a profoundly anti-intellectual place—was like being shoved out the airlock door without a helmet. My academic career never really recovered from it.

When I left teaching, I became a software developer (mostly Web), which is what I do now, at least when there's work. It's a difficult transition to explain in a couple of sentences, so I won't.

My three all-time favorite movies are The Godfather, La regle du jeu, and The Lady Eve.

I once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.