Hail and welcome!

About Me

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I am a work in progress.

Interests

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Foregoing any attempt to be exhaustive, I love all of the following things.

Music

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Some of my favorite musicians/composers/bands include: Radiohead, the Decemberists, R.E.M., Pink Floyd, Phish, Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, John McCutcheon, Tori Amos, Skunk Anansie, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mumford and Sons, the Dresden Dolls...this list could be infinitely long, truthfully.

Literature

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My favorite wordsmiths, living and past, include William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, J. R. R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman, John Green, and William Gibson.

Among these, the greatest works to me are Le Guin's Always Coming Home and its "archaeology of the future," and Eliot's Four Quartets which has supplied me the underlying philosophy for my life and actions, that "We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."

Science and Scientists

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I consider science just as vital an art as any other, and its great figures are equal to poets and artists in my view. Those who most inspire me (lately) are: Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Patricia Hill Collins, Erving Goffman, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Brian Greene, Jill Bolte Taylor, Temple Grandin, Don Pettit, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Hawking.