Istvan Bio FAQ
Let's workshop this FAQ section for the Istvan Bio Page of my website michaelistvan.com / safespacepress.com
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Poughkeepsie but warped like a diabolic bonsai in the Newburgh-Beacon underbelly of New York’s Hudson Valley, a region that has seen drastic gentrification over the last two decades. Brooklyn’s hipster exodus transformed vagrant-squatting factories—their windows shattered like hometown dreams—into million-dollar lofts and craft breweries leaning on the charm of exposed brick. The change, healthy overall (no more grubby kids nourished on quarter waters and honeybuns chucking rocks at drunken whores from a sniper height), breeds resentment in me. Stockholm Syndrome bubbling in the witches’ cauldron with a dash of Peter Pan, I still fantasize violence toward these artisanal-tattoo interlopers who destroyed my city’s familiar squalor (just like I did the foster-home judge for his decision to save me at five).
Home, a label that clings despite distance, was a battleground of contrasts: schizoid-screaming decay, colored by the nocturnal chorus of crickets and katydids and crackheads, hemmed in on the one side by ancient mountains (predating the Himalayas by 400 million years) and on the other side by the glacier-carved Hudson (still my very own Ganges, as toxic as it is majestic). I came of age here in the Wu-Tang-Gameboy-commercial era when so many close to me had something special going for them that could stoke endorphins of gratitude and healing even in the toughest times, a trump card—constantly leaned upon, constantly providing succor, constantly manifested in their swagger, constantly verbalized: the fact that, to cite the paraded slogan so often used in moments grave and gay, “At least I’m not white.” I have a distant sense that this slice of biographical happenstance is more than just trivia, that it has relevance especially to my writing (just as the slogan, in its inverted form, did in James Baldwin’s case).
My earliest surroundings—drugs and crime to my direct west and the base of Mount Beacon looming right over me to the east; a cocktail of concrete grit, natural grandeur, and cultural friction—shaped my perspectives on life, existence, and the human condition. I have long said that, unlike what we get in an open-horizon sprawl of flat topography (like LA and its sun-soaked delusions), the mountains—coupled with the hoodies and the chronic hunching in a self-huddle against the low-vitamin-D bite of muffling winter (and I will not even mention the rage-and-dementia inducements of Borrelia burgdorferi and babesia and bartonella on every branch awaiting warm blood)—have forged a more inward and reflective people prone to existential melancholy.
What might someone really perceptive, or who really knows you, say about you?
A perceptive soul would recognize my pursuit of truth, my disdain for mediocrity, and my unwavering commitment to questioning everything (even at great personal cost). They might say that I am a sensitive contrarian, a dramatic artist, with a strong sense of justice and a hair-trigger bullshit detector. They might say that I am hellbent on breaking free from the gilded cages of mass culture. They might add, somewhat critically, that I overcompensate for my crippling shyness ironically—but, in the end, it is so typical American push-and-pull drama—with brazen exhibitionism: wild writings of physical and emotional and historical nudity daring the world to take a swing.
A person just meeting me for the first time would be struck, even alarmed, by my intensity. People might point out, as they have, that I am a little earthquake: manic eyes that dance and dart; hands that jazz brush the air with frenzied strokes; sweat-stained pits that manifest the hot-blood pumping beneath it all. They might note that, in my quickness to get fiery, I cannot seem to let even trivial topics go. Perhaps with euphemism, they might sum me up as “excitable.” I have had it put to me that way by the late American Philosopher John McDermott.
My intensity is my trademark—a blessing no doubt, but also a curse. I will give just one example of its negative dimension. Once I was talking one-on-one with a colleague during the coffee break after I gave a talk at a conference. In what proved a seamless continuation of the fact that my stares from the podium had many nervously looking to others for corroboration that (to put it euphemistically) something strange was going on, the man (whom I had met only just that day) backed up along the wall and then down the wall as I argued whatever point I had been arguing. I went on and on until we almost made a complete circle of the room! I had turned a casual chat into “escape the madman.” I am the type of person, to put it a bit more lightly, that after an hour of driving down a dark highway in deep conversation will not realize—until the furious blaze of lights honk past us from behind—that we had been crawling at 20 mph bound to make him miss the morning flight.
A person who knows me well knows where, in particular, my intensity tentacles: intensity in routine and self-care and hypochondria-teetering awareness of my body; intensity in curiosity (always foraging for literary gold in every domain with a megawattage lamp, amazed seemingly by everything and so easily distractable); intensity in seeing the principles behind what people say (and, relatedly, in seeing the hypocrisies in people who are less principled, people who are less able to see how their stance or judgment on one particular matter butts heads with their stance or judgment on other matters).
What is unique about you?
One thing that comes to mind is that, however much I have changed from who I once was (physically, spiritually, ideologically), I have empathy for the old me. I am not the one, despite a world obsessed with before-and-after stories, to make that cliché move we see so often from “reformed” people: namely, affecting this attitude—a holier-than-thou attitude—of contempt for who one once was. It seems to me that the reformed-sinner move, this performative trampling of one’s past self (as if it were a mortifying yearbook photo), often boils down to a sophistry meant to manipulate both the speaker himself and his audience into thinking that he is a trustworthy judge. The logic of the strategy should be clear. How could he not be a beacon of reliability, a wise man who tells it like it is when he threw his own self under the bus—as a cautionary tale—with such definitive cruelty? That is the idea anyway, used by many traveling preachers and salesmen.
What is something many people do not know about you?
Beneath my critical (and some might say pessimistic) exterior beats the heart of an optimistic romantic, deeply in love with the idea of human potential and greatness. As Chomsky and so many others have said by analogy: just because I rail against my country does not mean I am not a patriot—indeed, quite the contrary! Many are unaware how deep my modest, almost ascetic lifestyle, goes. I sense my days are too simple and regimented, too devoted to describing and learning and practicing, for most people to handle. Their skin would crawl in the repeating groundhog days of a Dickinson or Spinoza.
I want to take this in a more lighthearted direction. For a long time, I did not wear any fragrances (aside from the smell of laundry detergent on my clothes and whatever underarm deodorant I happened to use). But in the process of helping—perhaps begrudgingly—my girlfriend choose her favorites from a perfume sampler she received for Christmas, my nose met Tom Ford's Ombre Leather. This scent slammed me. It made me confront something I knew theoretically—and knew definitely when it came to pussy—but never gave much conscious thought to: namely, that olfactory art is an art, just as much as visual, musical, and literary art.
I had ignored perfumery for so long, associating it with mass-man consumerist fluff. I gave no thought to the idea that, and this is true with everything else (from food to architecture to music), there were perfume creations beyond the designer yawns that I could not but associate with sheeple and Swifties at some Ulta BeyHive. How wrong I was. That first sniff of Ombre Leather—damn. Suddenly, I was Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole of olfaction—a chasing of the dragon you can read about here.
After purchasing various decants of the most artistic releases from various niche houses (especially in the leather and tobacco realm), I have come to hold several close to my heart. While Ombre Leather started my journey and remains high on my list, my current top choices are: Amouage's Royal Tobacco (a licorice and frankincense concoction that takes you through the whole experience of smelling a good cigar in a humidor to then smoking it all the way through); Amouage's Journey Man (a bright tobacco scent with a fiery spiciness of Sichuan berries and cardamom); Xerjoff's Naxos (a widely-appealing vanilla-honey tobacco); Ormonde Jayne's Montabaco (an addictive iso-e-super mountain air blast of fresh tobacco and leather base); Amouage's Jubilation 25 (an opulent masterpiece of sour blackberry Middle-Eastern resin). Second to these I would perhaps include: Gucci's Guilty Absolute, Tom Ford's Ombre Leather, Tom Ford's Tobacco Oud, Nishane's Fan Your Flames, Nishane's Suede et Safran, Rasasi's La Yuqawam Pour Homme, Rasasi's Tobacco Blaze, Sospiro's Erba Leather, and Akro's Smoke. (My nose is still developing, though. For example, I might at this point knock Naxos down to the second tier and place Tom Ford’s Tobacco Oud to the first tier.)
Just as with high-level art in other domains, niche scents are often an acquired taste. For example, I hated Tom Ford’s Tobacco Oud at first. Now I love it, and it makes me feel like a powerhouse. Several I still cannot get behind (even after trying hard)—yes, even well-regarded ones like Nishane's Ani and Nishane's Hacivat, or Mancera's Red Tobacco (which I cannot stand). A tremendously difficult thing is to educate the audience, to raise their level of appreciation for the olfactory art: challenging the nose like a sommelier challenges the palate. It is easy to lower their appreciation and sensitivity. Just as pop pablum does to their capacity to appreciate and even tolerate masterpieces of music, department-store dreck has diminished their capacity to appreciate and even tolerate masterpieces of niche perfumery. (Do not think I am being unempathetic. I was once a child who, only used to the inoffensive black olive from the can, felt the shock—"How could anyone actually like this?”—when I had my first taste of a pimento-stuffed green olive.”
For those who have yet to open up to fragrances, I urge you to dabble. Please visit my perfume page for descriptions of various scents. You can purchase decants there as well.
What is most special about your new fragrance hobby? Any downsides?
My dive into the world of fragrances is a Foucauldian quest for intensive sensory experiences that transcend the ordinary. Each scent is a portal to different facets of the world and myself. Waking others up to the fact that smells can provide aesthetic pleasures just like arts catered to the other senses—that is really special. Perhaps the main thing is that this is a highly personal pleasure. And this is especially the case when it comes to niche perfumery, which is often so artistic that it will not be mass-appealing: the difference between Ice Spice vapidity and a Coltrane solo. I understand that there is a time for brain rot mindless bah bah and a time for having your soul rearranged by Ronnie Cuber on the baritone sax. But too many seem to want their art never to challenge them. They wallow in autotune drivel about sex sex sex (and drugs and violence). It is scary to open up to other dimensions of reality. So yes, the personal aspect of the olfactory hobby is most important to me. Several scents make me feel special. They can help get me in a zone. They can boost confidence. Humans are visceral animals rather than disembodied spirits. We respond to earthly things like that. As I write this, I am wearing Cécile Zarokian’s masterpiece: Opus XIV Royal Tobacco. This fragrance just lifts me the hell up.
The hobby, which serves as a poignant reminder of the impermanence that characterizes our existence, does have some downsides too, like anything. Royal Tobacco, for example, makes me want to start smoking cigars! The expense is a big negative. And there is, to give a more exotic answer, the dangers of aroma chemicals. Many of them have gotten banned over the years (which is why many older formulations with ingredients like genuine oakmoss are a prized commodity, like perhaps someday gasoline-powered cars might become). In this regard, I worry about hormonal effects. I train my body so much. I would hate to be undermining myself by some sort of estrogen-increasing practice. I avoid drinking and staying out late for that very reason. It would be ironic, then, if my new hobby was undoing my efforts. Reaching even further, though, another negative is that it further alienates me from others. I am already niche everywhere else—music, writing, philosophical views. This only seems to shut me away from others even more. (I guess I have a native instinct against crowds, like an autistic kid does a loud motorcycle right next to him.)
Political views?
It is hard to pinpoint my political views because things shift, concepts reverse. Although it has admittedly become harder for me to stay this way (after I became a target of the left-wing’s version of cancel culture), I am independent and nuanced. You are not going to get all my stances on important political issues just by knowing one.
Given my scathing mockeries of campus SJWs (well-to-do white kids with their Portlandia scarves and staches and their insisting on making black people see how oppressed they are), one might think that I am anti-progressive. No no, absolutely not! The truth is that I am theoretically at least the most progressive person I know. Although my progressiveness has been curbed by newfound consideration of the consequences to children, I have long advocated for identifying as any race or gender that you would like, for the abolition of retributive-based justice, for the moral permissibility of bestiality and cannibalism and incest, for the legalization of prostitution, and other issues that would make even the most liberal minds squirm. At the end of the day, I champion diversity. The leftwing campus progressives who targeted me were pushing a safe-space ideology clearly against diversity: silencing, shaming, censoring whatever ideas or people or facts or even words deemed unsettling to so-called “vulnerable populations,” especially if those words came from someone with the wrong optics and leanings and identifications: cis white male who might even dare to have an Amerikkklan flag on his porch on July 4th. If that were not bad enough, they pushed that dissent-silencing agenda in the opposite-day name of “diversity,” twisting the concept into a parody of itself. No, I am a real progressive. I know the importance of heterodoxy, of contagion, for our hygiene. Immigrants, in the wide sense of that term, keep us fresh and on our toes. Too much intrusion, to be sure, might kill us. But we all have seen the retardation effects of too much inbreeding, the autoimmune and allergy issues of not allowing kids to eat dirt at the park on playdates.
I am increasingly drawn to noocracy/epistocracy, the rule of the wise. I might not go so far as giving more voting weight to those who have memorized all the facts of US history and contemporary affairs and geography and all that. That is the sort of approach someone who thinks Jeopardy is a measure of intelligence. I am in favor at least of a more inclusive, culturally-unbiased, and wiser approach: giving more voting weight to those who can demonstrate mastery of basic logic. Imagine a world where logical acumen carries more weight at the ballot box than blind party loyalty. To use an old Socratic analogy, surely we want the masters of navigation to steer the ship, not the oarsman only there to row.
My growing orientation against unrestrained democracy and more toward the Platonic rule by philosopher-kings potentially bumps heads with my advocacy—which will be readily apparent on this site and in my writings—for free speech and artistic expression. However, for several reasons, I think wisdom would dictate protecting the marketplace of ideas. For one, the philosopher-kings are not infallible gods. If they really have the requisite orientation for the position, they will understand the importance of having accessible competing viewpoints—especially ones from the margins, outside their own framework. Second, they will also understand Psychology 101. People are going to get pissed off if you restrict their freedom to express themselves. Silencing invites rebellion. As far as regular people, “bronze souls” in Plato’s terminology, getting their hands on topics and truths that might prove dangerous or unhygienic for them, I imagine the philosopher-kings more likely to gatekeep than ban treatises of philosophy or works of art. Parents (at least the good ones) do not ban a movie because it has violence. Rather they block their children from accessing that movie until the children have proven themselves able to handle it. The philosopher-kings, and I make this point in my essay “An Olive Branch to the Cancelers”, will operate in a similar fashion: protecting while not stifling, and all while laying out milestones and challenges and experiences to nurture maturity.
Were there any positive impacts to your being affected by cancel culture?
This modern-day inquisition lit a bigtime fuse. It resulted in a phoenix flourish of creativity, of rage-fueled poetry and open letters. Two meaty books of satire came out of it: "An Unopinionated Introduction to Philosophy" (a textbook set in a dystopian future where the agenda to protect college students from anything unsettling has been honored consistently and thereby taken to its radical extreme) and "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed" (a lyrical jeremiad arguing that the greatest evidence for the lie of white supremacy being at its heyday again, a lie paralleling the Satanic panic of the 80s and the red scare of the 50s, is the various things done in the name of antiracism to “dismantle” it). Given that I place literary output as my central mission, that positive impact—that manna—cannot be underestimated. My run-in with the cancel sheeple in their tartan scarves was also the spur for Safe Space Press. So that was good. When life gives you lemons ferment those fuckers into a kombucha of defiance!
The crucible of cancelation arguably had an even deeper positive effect on me. It hammered home the importance of resilience, of forging one’s path, of standing tall on principles when the condemning world wants you to kneel. Facing ostracism for my beliefs reaffirmed my battle-cry commitment to intellectual freedom. If any part of me had once regarded the pursuit of truth as mere academic exercise, that part was cremated.
Cancel culture also had a specific effect on my art. Before the storm of firings and legal battles, I was a bit tipsy—corny as it is to admit, although Hume’s admission of the same makes it a bit more respectable—on dreams of literary glory. The hardship sobered me up, self-indulgent ambition crumbling under the gravity of a cultural mission. It made me much more concerned about social well-being. It yanked me from the slumber of excessive self-concern, forcing my eyes open to a broader social wellbeing. (That said, I do think that I have dipped too low into the ephemeral muck of the rabble over the last few years. I do want to recalibrate my orientation to my aboriginal North Star: to grappling with the deepest questions of human nature and reality—only now with more of a sense of myself as a worker for humanity.
What sorts of things do you daydream about?
As always, we can go deep. I often daydream about the ancient Greek polis, a place where philosophy was integral to daily life, and about how such a community might be revived in our modern world. I assume it would be sexier and, in a sense, more human to stick more at the surface.
Aside from scenarios of violence (me being “forced” into mortal confrontation despite my attempts at defusing with niceness and empathy), I often daydream about breaking through the barriers of shyness and social awkwardness to create bonds through helpful service to others: rescuing a kid who got hit by a car with CPR or approaching a wayward kid who seems to have no orientation or plan and recruiting him to do some yard work for me for money (and we get to learn about each other along the way).
The most intense of these dreams, which do seem to indicate a smidge of savior complex now that I write them down, showcase my more controversial orientations. These dreams, as a result, take on a feel-good Disney vibe like the others, only the Disney company concocting them has been warped by mind-expanding drugs and has overcome its obsession with reflecting populist attitudes for the sake of its bottom line. Let me put aside the one where I rescue a young teen girl from some situation and then—reflecting a disciplined restraint that few hetero males could muster—refuse her sexual advances (which grow in intensity until I demand that, while I feel a sexual relationship would be appropriate given her level of maturity, we must go to her parents since their approval and oversight serves as a check against the power differential). Instead, I will share one that recurs much more often, like a damn corporate jingle from youth. I stop some neighborhood kids from fighting, jumping in as a concerned father (think: Furious Styles). I do not only because I am worried about serious injuries that could result in bare-fisted brawls in uncontrolled environments full of curbs and fire hydrants, but especially because I sense it will devolve into a non-one-on-one gang stomp. I then bring them into my backyard and, after providing them gloves (which do sit in my basement on the ready in real life), I referee fair fights between them. Afterwards, when all the masculine energy of youth has been discharged, I cook up some burgers for everyone to eat around my firepit in their newfound friendship. We talk about embracing one’s true potential, even if it means pushing against the constraints of conventional morality and societal expectations.
How do you describe your personal philosophy or approach to life?
I can summarize it by saying that I am a Spinozist. What does this mean? Many things. But there are some fundamental aspects. First, nothing can happen that is not natural. In regard to humans, this means we are not exceptions cut off from the organic flow—the flow of everything exerting, in more or less obvious ways, to exert its power. We are not governed by different principles than those that govern electrons and fungus. Second, nothing can happen that was not guaranteed to happen by the past, if there is a past, and ultimately by a base reality that I argue in my professional capacity exists by the necessity of its own nature alone (and so deserves, if anything does, the title “God”). Insofar as we are considering ourselves as effects of this base reality, nothing is ultimately up to any of us. To highlight the ramification of this fact in a broad stroke: no one of us deserves praise or blame for our thoughts or actions any more than a black hole deserves blame for devouring a planetary system. While I do think that praising and blaming have a practical role when it comes to incentivizing and disincentivizing, no one ever technically deserves—independent of any practical considerations—praise or blame.
I do not want to convey the impression, given what I have just said, that I deny human agency. Like Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Goethe, I put primacy on human agency even as I accept that everything we do is ultimately a function of what is in place—temporally or ontologically—before us. My philosophy is centered on the pursuit of individual greatness, the constant questioning of accepted truths, and the embrace of life's challenges as opportunities for growth and self-discovery.
Let me put it this way. Just because everything is determined by what is prior (such that my creating this website was guaranteed to happen before the earth was even formed), that does not mean that there is no point in trying to change things. There is a point in trying to change things even in this deterministic situation. After all, your influence can be one of the factors in bringing about the change. Determinism does not imply that I cannot influence what happens to me or that others cannot influence what happens to me. If someone cuts my finger off, that is an influence on me. If determinism is true, that does not mean that I would have lost a finger no matter what. It simply means that it was guaranteed by the past that I would lose a finger because it was guaranteed that the guy who cut my finger off would cut my finger off. Being a Spinozist does not mean that no matter what goes on—no matter what we do or think, no matter what influences enter into our lives—our futures are fixed. Our futures are instead fixed precisely by what goes on, in which case it does still make sense for us to plan for the future. Even if Spinoza is right that everything that goes on has been set in stone for eternity, that does not mean that you cannot thwart your drive to eat ice cream, that you cannot oppose all the thoughts and cravings pushing you to eat ice cream. It is just that whatever makes the difference to you not eating it—a resolution not to, say, when picturing your diabetic foot getting chopped off—was as much determined as the rest of the factors were. The power to free yourself from being dominated by certain instincts—agency—is compatible with Spinozism. Your resistance to eating the ice cream does not, despite what so many of my students found so difficult to grasp, refute Spinozism.
Who are some of your major influences or inspirations?
Nietzsche, Spinoza, Goethe. Their ideas and works have significantly shaped my thinking and approach to philosophy.
What milestones or achievements are you most proud of?
Getting a PhD, and doing it the tough way of writing a sustained dissertation that rectifies a misunderstanding common among Spinoza scholars, was pretty big. I came from a city and family situation rife with malnutrition and illiteracy. Also, various of my literary projects, especially my magnum opus: "Made for You and Me."
What books do you want to read?
Too many to name. But oddly enough, I just added to my list C. S. Lewis’s epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters. And finally, after putting it off for close to two decades, I have just started reading Dave Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I am drawn to works that challenge conventional wisdom and offer new insights into the human condition. Ancient texts, radical philosophical treatises, and groundbreaking scientific works are of particular interest.
How do you balance your personal, academic, and creative pursuits?
Because of how my mind works, I need to put on blinders. I am one of those types that will grind away at whatever crosses my path. That is why I have long said that to wrench the most out of me, the most ideal situation would have been a wise master directing me to some of the most important problems to grapple with. If I had that, I believe I had the capability—if only because of my head-ramming discipline (rather than native gifts of IQ)—to solve various problems in a wide variety of areas: from engineering to metaphysics, from math to film theory. If there was ever anyone who would have benefited from and appreciated serving as an apprentice to a great master, it would have been me. Since I lack such a master (aside from the dead writers whose spirits whisper on my shoulder), I have to be on guard against casting my eyes too widely. Once I set my sights on something, even if beneath me (so to say), I will grind away at it. I am like a machine. My discipline—perhaps my chief asset—can easily turn into a hindrance. It has me stay in unfavorable or time-wasting situations that others with less discipline to stick with something would have abandoned much sooner.
What are your main goals for the next five years?
I need to start sending writings out for journal publication again. I have been slacking on that over the last few years. The urge to write takes up so much of my time it is hard to find time for self-promotion. Self-promotion does have some importance, however. Who would find my work otherwise. I would write even if alone forever on a desert island, yes. But I do feel it is important for me to have readers. (If we stripped the desert-island me of any hope that someone would find my writings, I might at least be less inclined to write—although I do think it is such a compulsion now that I would regardless, at least until other task gradually shouldered it out.)
This website has been my attempt to devote a bit more time to self-promotion. Emily Dickinson is someone whose life I largely mirror. Like her live a secluded (outwardly uninteresting) life. Routine is important for me, as it was with her. It serves as the steady drumbeat against which I can create a jazz—a difficult but accessible poetry—much more avant-garde than one would think just looking at my life.
What motivates and inspires you?
Caffeine is one, at an extremely local level. Desire to prove myself, especially to my home city (abstractly) and my son (concretely), in the face of my upbringing seems a good candidate too. I like to say that the realization that all my actions shape the very look of an all-perfect base reality (a position that I defend in both creative and academic writing) is a big one. However, the biggest motivating force is likely much more mundane and stereotypical: to distract myself from the reality of my mortality. My pursuit of truth, the potential for human greatness, and the beauty of intellectual discovery motivate and inspire me—all that might very well be explained by that if people like Ernest Becker are right.
What are some of the most important questions?
Well, many are going to be domain specific, questions that help push the advance of knowledge in that field. As for some general human questions, that are as profound as they are simple (and potentially banal seeming): (1) What do you live for? (2) What do you believe in? (3) What do you want? Truth, monism, and the key to the zone (the key to flow states)—those would be my respective answers off the top of my head, by the way.
What are some of the most important truths?
Challenge and discomfort are keys to happiness. Avoidance of all suffering is the path of depression. Great feats are going to involve tremendous sacrifices. That might mean to reputation or family or health. Although I might not agree with what they were doing it for, in that way I admire some of the Christian and Hindu aesthetics.
We are composed of the nothing more than the same elements that compose skyscrapers and hyenas, and we are governed by the same principles. All things are united, that is to say, under a single rational order. Achieving our highest happiness as humans involves embracing that we are finite and necessitude in this single order and yet that that we are all in this together on team cosmos—indeed, that despite our finitude we are not absolutely divorced from the self-necessary fount of everything, God, but rather are its very shapes or modes of being.
We all know now that Quora is great for answers to such a question, though. Like a lot of things now given the advent of AI, it amounts to reinventing the wheel to repeat them. So for now I will just quote this lapidary stanza from my magnum opus Made for You and Me—something important to remember: “it is fine in the end because it will be over.”
What thing saddens you or bothers you?
Let me start with a more light-hearted answer. Parfums de Marly’s masterpiece, Herod, has in the latest formulations become a weak son of a bitch. I mean, this is one of the most gorgeous scents out there. But it becomes a skin scent in twenty minutes. It is such a shame. At least the same cannot be said (yet) for Xerjoff’s Naxos, another gorgeous tobacco scent in a similar appealing vein (and maybe, just maybe, the better of the two even apart from the Herod performance issue). The same could be said, although here the issue could be that its strong dose of iso-e-super fosters anosmia, of Amouage’s Jubilation 25.
As for a deeper but still personal answer: No one is going to tell me not to write about sexual topics when they listen to the hypersexual music they do. I am a mirror. When people hate on my sexual material (and oddly what draws most ire is when I am satirizing or mocking the hypersexual cultural) they are hating on their own selves. I have much more respect for someone who is consistent: who is disgusted by the hypersexual mass culture and also by my sexual work. I cannot stand the contradiction. Megan the Stallion plays the most amoral whorish money hungry sexual angle and the people eating this up are so often saying I'm a monster for having such graphic literary content—much of which amounts to graphic content that is mocking the pollution of graphic content around us. The problem is they attach me explicitly because I am graphic. I would respect them much more if they attacked me because I am attacking their hypersexual teat on which they are addicted to suckling.
As for a deeper and more impersonal answer: what bothers me is the mediocrity and complacency of the masses, the lack of intellectual rigor, and the uncritical acceptance of societal norms and taboos—especially when one’s hypocritically violates principles undergirding those norms and taboos elsewhere in one's own life. It saddens me to see people living in ignorance and superstition, caught up in the distractions of modern consumer culture while also unable or unwilling either to embrace the liberating power of reason or to engage with the deeper questions of their existence.
What is one thing that annoys you about yourself?
I sometimes cannot control my party pooper vibe. I went to a bar recently that was playing "underground oldies" and various people my age, including the friends of my fiance, were really going crazy for Murder Inc and Ashanti. As I was when I was younger I could not fake it. It was a horror back then constantly playing, spoiling so much of my life and my headspace and I'm supposed to sing along with it now—and the audacity to call this “underground” and to everyone getting me hyped up “Oh like their gonna be playing underground rap like you like". It took everything out of me not to articulate my frustrations, which I did in a quick mumbled burst. But for the rest of the time it showed on my face. I’m a party pooper. The sheep synchronicity and cheering at football games and all that—that always was to me like super loud noises for an autistic kid. The problem is it is weeks later and I'm cringing thinking back at how my lack of excitement--my look of disgust even—read to everyone sing "I'm not always there when you call but I'm always on time". I call myself such an asshole out loud instinctually when these intrusive memories come up. I really wish I could suck it up. I have always been like that. I felt like a party pooper since the beginning. My dad would be drunk all the time taking me places and I would nag like a wife. Things just mean so much to me. It meant so much to me, going back to the earlier point, that this is not really underground, I couldn’t let it go (autistic vibe). And it also means so much to me the torment that things meaning so much to me brings. It makes me so fragile, vulnerable.
What are some interesting things you believe?
I already mentioned perhaps the most foundational: I hold that everything that exists is a part of a single all-encompassing reality (which I call the hive Being) and that true happiness comes from accepting that one is necessitated by the foundation of this reality. Let me throw out there a more worldly and perhaps more titillating one. On the one hand, I hold that sexual relationships with minors can be morally permissible in certain circumstances. On the other hand, I hold that it is pretty much practically impossible for those circumstances to be realized, especially in our time of extended childhood. On that point, in fact, I'm only quarter unserious when I say the age of consent should be raised to 30.
Any handicaps?
Aside from anger—tang. It’s my kryptonite. Low self esteem is up there too. Not only did I grow up poor and ate junk until I was shamefully fat and embarrassed (something that doesn't leave you), I stayed away from group sports and activities that would have socialized me better. I was on an agoraphobic path, the path of my father, since earliest development—and now it is quite obvious that I have gone a long way on that path. Related to this, performance anxiety builds in me to crippling extremes when the thing I am doing is important to my identity. Especially when I show a lot of promise in it, there is this extra pressure that comes on me that I feel).
My controversial views and topics and art, along with my having a psychology that pushes back harder (at the expense of my own safety) when I feel targeted by forces of repression and persecution, has led to social and professional isolation. This can be seen as a handicap too. However, it has also given me the freedom to pursue my art and philosophical inquiries with less pressure—pressure I would not have caved to anyway—to compromise.
Any serious weaknesses?
I will say that one has showed itself often. Especially because I always have projects (writing, music, something), and because I need a stable nest for those productions to happen, I am extremely unwilling to cut ties with toxic people or end a relationship that is not working out. Even if doing so is better in the long run, the disruption it might have on my immediate grind deters me from taking the needed step. I also have extreme disciple, one of my star traits. Because of that, and because art gives me so much opportunity to vent, I am susceptible to keeping on through a suffering situation where others less disciplined and with less outlets would have not had the stamina to go on and so would have to initiate the major disruption simply to survive.
I might also add to this list that my intense passion for calling out inconvenient hypocrisy and my uncompromising nature often isolates me from others and leads to misunderstandings. My intense focus on intellectual pursuits sometimes leads me to neglect practical matters, which can be seen as a weakness. My doing this website is a major step in trying to be a tad more balanced in this regard.
How would you describe your personality and values?
I am driven, passionate, philosophical, introspective. My values center around the pursuit of truth, individual greatness, and the rejection of mediocrity.
What are some of your favorite hobbies/interests outside of work?
Pickleball recently. I like athletic things. Being in the water is important to me. I have never gone scuba diving. That is something I want to do. I have a natural comfort in the water that I notice many others do not have. I used to swim in the creeks of the northeast even in the winter (way before Wim Hoff was even a thing). I would snorkel in these creeks for hours, never coming up as a personal challenge to myself. As a teen I have held my breath underwater for over three minutes, which is very good for an untrained amateur. For the years I lived in Austin TX I would love going to Barton Springs where I would hold some of the big stones, which would keep me negatively buoyant, and walk around or lie down right at the head spring Parthenia Spring. That is something I deeply miss. I could stay down there for a long time. Since I would often do this alone, I would come up well before my oxygen ran out merely because I am anxious enough to worry about the possibility of losing consciousness very quickly, which could spell trouble when you are 15 feet down.
What's a funny/interesting story or anecdote about your life?
Here is the funny story. During my time as a professor, I once gave a lecture to an empty room. The more typical story would be me going on after hours with many students, but—for the first and last time—no one showed up on this morning. I went on for close to two hours, perhaps in part because I hoped someone might come but mainly because I wanted to remind myself that true understanding does not require an audience.
Here is an interesting story. After my cancellation, I won my due process case and was reinstated to my university. However, I never participated again and just slunk gradually beyond the bounds of the radar sweep. In this period I was also offered a permanent position at another college. I refused it. I was hooked on the freedom and time I had to do my whole thing. If Cus D’Amato is correct that what we end up doing is what we intended to do all along, perhaps I set up everything to land me in the position of freedom to write that I enjoy today—where I have nothing from which one could cancel me if they tried!
sick fuck. that's the bio