I am 41 years old, a gentle, happily married New York Jew with a high forehead and a square jaw. People have told me I resemble Pushkin, Rob Morrow, Marc Bolan, and the violinist Paganini. When I was twelve, I spent six months reading Tolkien on the cot in the basement, listening to Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. When I came back up the stairs, I saw my shadow, Spring came early, and I found I had sprouted leather elbow patches. “By us,” goes the saying, “the fetus is considered fully human when it enters graduate school.” In 1989, at 21, I became fully human at Brandeis University where I studied Romantic and Modern poetry with Allen  Grossman, John Burt, and Mary Campbell. In December of 1994 I completed my PhD with a doctoral defense of The Construction of the Transcendental Term in Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, with chapters on John Keats and Walt Whitman.

My devotion to the humanities was almost fanatical, or as I prefer to think, almost religious. Obsession with the sacred texts and literary canons of the world; explication de texte every five minutes; compulsion to consume and produce close readings of poetry… one need not be a great ethno-cultural sleuth to deduce that I would have been a Rabbi had we not come to America at the beginning of the 20th Century. In the Summer of 1992 I learned Ancient Greek in the 10-week intensive Latin-Greek Institute of the CUNY Graduate Center so that I could teach Homer and Plato with knowledge of the originals. Here’s a poem I wrote in April 2008, called “GROSSMAN’S TOOTH,”  published in TIKKUN in March 2009. You can see from this poem exactly how it was.

I love to learn and to create, and I never get intellectually intimidated: if it isn’t boring, disgusting, dangerous, or evil, I’ll try it. At this point I have still not learned the calculus; adequately exploited my modest talent for languages; written a novel; been to Asia; knelt at the Tomb of Shelley in Rome; fully understood Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, nor  consciousness, nor the origin of language, nor how DNA-encoded instructions actually get an organism built; nor have I done much to prompt a genuinely national conversation about 11-22-63. “As you enter the age 40 transition,” wrote Daniel Levinson in The Seasons of a Man’s Life, “it begins to occur to you that if there is anything you really want to do, you had better do it.”

What I have gotten around to, this website is intended to share. I hope you enjoy it.