1953-1966 yellow springs ohio
island of avant-garde culture in sea of cornfields
50s hipster household: butterfly chairs
jazz LPs, folk crafts
wheat chex, local art
nyc magazine and newspaper subscriptions:
new yorker, sunday times book review and arts section
later: village voice, new york magazine
also: the reporter, saturday review
esquire, ramparts
i.f. stone's weekly, science newsletter
krokodil (russian language humor magazine)
saw jfk during 1960 campaign stop in dayton
arguable bacon number of 3
having played a squirrel elf
to fred gwynne's 'bottom'
in 1961 midsummer night's dream
stanford-binet iq in 1962 was 185
hypersensitive androgynous quiet
compulsive reader lazy eye
annual unrequited crushes
literally unable to express anger
before age 20
4th grade teacher complained
'no pride in good work'
1st computer was minivac 601
c1964
baseball fan (reds, frank robinson)
beatles fan (john)
heathkit hobbyist, av club
fastest iceskater in class
moved to bemus point ny 1966-1970
anti-vietnam
accelerated math/science
graduated valedictorian a year early
considered physical sciences unchallenging
targeted psychology instead
jamestown (ny) community college
antioch college
new college (sarasota fl)
university of buffalo
read the texts and skipped the tests
rejected experimental paradigm
instead fusing computer simulation
with literary standards of description
real progress hinging
on spiritual self-knowledge
via krishnamurti especially
esquire magazine in 1972:
"a righteous interpreter of our times"
1974 a turningpoint [more]
pynchon nabokov
robert stone
walker percy
g spencer brown
compiling a database on index cards
of 'literary indications'
brief insightful literary descriptions
of human behavior
database gradually took cyclic shape
heaven-fall-hell-
rise-by-conformity
rise-by-experiment
morphing into
an ungainly poem called 'brainfeathers'
that turned out to closely parallel
finnegans wake
food co-op coordinator, tofu maker
six months on the tennessee farm [more]
View Larger Map
1978 was another turningpoint
cybernetic psychology = robot wisdom
scientific theories of snowflake formation
atp mechanics
and atmospheric physics [more]
omni magazine's 'world hardest iq test'
qualifying for the four-sigma society
and attending their convention in san francisco
anti-math story-notation language [more]
and epiphany of 'missile command' arcade game
as programmable platform for anti-math
self-taught apple2 machine language
worked on arcade conversions for apple, c64 and atari
(now in chicago area)
burned out as coder
did telephone sales and customer service
at pc network and elek-tek
relished the chicago dance/theater scene
performing member of excite dance collective
nonperforming member of jellyeye drum theatre
unrequited romance inspired 'solace' [more]
cybernetic/analytic anthology of quotes
about romantic love
(also some original jazz songs
and settings of poems by Stevens, Graves, and Cavafy)
hired as research programmer [more]
at roger schank's ai lab at northwestern university
scored 780 math 790 verbal 800 analytic on GREs
phd program dangled as carrot
(prof birnbaum: "you're unique
in having worked out which
are the important issues of a.i.
on your own")
fractal-thicket indexing discovered and suppressed
(birnbaum: "the problem is
that none of us
are smart enough
to apply it")
(arguable erdos number of 7
for tech report co-authored with schank: cite)
fwake-l mailing list about finnegans wake
led to deep research into joyce manuscripts
publications:
journal of computer game design [etext]
interactive entertainment design [etext]
european joyce studies [etext]
james joyce quarterly [bookreview not online]
usenet enthusiast 1990-2003
(google groups shows 9430 posts
all thoughtful)
lightningrod for a-holes
quoted in Time 1994 [etext]
arguing the Net is
good for prose style
consulted for chris crawford 1997
on erasmatron story-engine [more]
requiring macintosh upgrade
leading to belated discovery of www
and 17 december 1997 coinage of word 'weblog'
(a smallish one
among hundreds of ongoing neologisms: more)
online profile by julian dibbell
twisted facts and quotes
to fit a lazy thesis
gigantic brouhaha about criticising israel in 2000
(incl a contemptible campaign
of intimidation and character assassination
that continues to this day)
led to shift from mostly-blogging to mostly-joyce-studies
rethinking ulysses and the ellmann biography [more]
later mostly-richly-linked-timelines-experiments
covered 'codecon 2005' for the register 1 2
wired magazine published a libelous fiction
by paul boutin
mostly abandoned
punctuation and capitalisation [more]
in late 2005
currently extending graph theory
to accommodate human psychological complexity
via 'worldtree' graphs [more]
and exploring 'discourse patterns' [egs]
.
