Reviews & Critical Essays
Articles published in The Independent, The Washington College Review, and Other Critical Works
"The World Wild Web"
This is a review of Hillman Curtis on Creating Short Films for the Web that appeared in the November 2005 issue of The Independent, the magazine of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.
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"Consciousness, Freedom, and Morality: Jupiter Tonans"
As a freshman at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, I was lucky enough to discover Professor Robert Anderson, a die-hard Platonist and author of one of the most radical interpretations of Plato's Theaetetus ever written. The first challenging paper I had to write in college was for Anderson's Intro to Philosophy class: an analysis of various sections of Sartre's Being and Nothingness.
I spent ages thinking about how to approach the subject, and then I wrote my paper in a shot the night before it was due, staying up all night to finish it. At the time, I was very much under the influence of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and my paper "Consciousness, Freedom, and Morality: Jupiter Tonans," which was published in The Washington College Review in 1994, owes a debt of gratitude to Hofstadter's work.
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"The God of Love"
In the last semester of my senior year, I took a course on Modern British Writers with Thomas Cousineau. For my final paper, I decided rather last minute to write about D. H. Lawrence's The Man Who Died and its connection to Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough.
Afflicted with a severe case of senioritis, I did not begin the paper until the night before it was due (old habits die hard). But once I scratched the surface of my subject, I realized that I would need at least another week to do my research and write the paper. I went to class the following morning--we had been told that lateness would be harshly penalized--and told Professor Cousineau that I was writing a paper so good that, once he read it, he would be glad for having given me an extra week to research it.
It was a ballsy move, but it paid off. He actually was glad, and he gave me an A+. The paper was published in The Washington College Review in 1998.
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"The Priest of the Eternal Imagination: Joyce, Dedalus, and Epiphany"
Oh, sure. You didn't ask for it, but here it is: my Master's thesis on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero.
I spent at least six months researching, writing, and refining this piece during my year in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. I don't think I've read it once since turning it in--but I invite you to.
Think of it less as my last attempt to be an academic, and more as my first attempt to make an artistic statement about writing within the strictures of academia. I no longer harbor any fantasies of being an academic, but I am still proud that Wayne Booth liked it.
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"Essayism and Crisis" | "And We Was All on the Cover of Newsweek"
Last but not least are two papers I wrote at the University of Chicago.
The first was written for a class on Robert Musil, which was easily my favorite class I took there. Reading Musil in German was a tremendous challenge, and so I wrote the paper in English to let my brain cool off.
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The second is a paper I wrote on The Royal Tenenbaums for a media course taught by W.J.T. Mitchell. I went into the class expecting it to be as fascinating and wonderful as Mitchell's books, and I was disappointed to find that he is one of the worst lecturers I've ever heard. The class was terrible, but I did have fun writing the paper.
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