Author Bio
I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s and '60s. Anyone who wants to know what the neighborhood was like then should read Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, a book I love for its signature mix of intellectual rumination and amorous and fiscal misadventure. My parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe. They had arrived in this country in the 1940s, my father as a refugee. They passed to me a portion of their awed gratitude for the American promise, not the promise of fast money but the promise of laws and rights that are as binding on the powerful as on the weak. This may be why I am sickened and outraged whenever I see that promise broken. I suspect that my parents also imparted to me a sense of myself as an outsider, someone for whom setting down roots might be, if not impossible, unwise.
I attended a public grade school and private high schools, with some interruptions on account of stupidity and bad behavior. From very early on I read eagerly and indiscriminately. I read the Hardy Boys and Moby Dick, The Bacchae and Naked Lunch, On the Road and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Free-Lance Pallbearers and The High Window. I loved literature and I loved trash and for a long time had only a vague idea of what distinguished one from the other. I earned a BA in English and Theater from Sarah Lawrence College and then a MA in Creative Writing from City College, where I studied with Donald Barthelme, Frederick Tuten, and Francine du Plessix Gray.
For most of my life I lived in New York City, except for seven years in Baltimore and six months in Amsterdam, Holland. For the last nine years my wife and I have lived in the mid-Hudson valley. I've worked as a free-lance journalist, copywriter, and editor; an instructor of creative writing, an arts administrator, receptionist, security guard and a (staggeringly inept) stage carpenter. I have also been an actor and performance artist. Part of the inspiration for The Book of Calamities was being commissioned to write and perform a monologue on the theme of an angry and judging God for an evening at The Kitchen. My subject was the Book of Job.
In the course of researching The Book of Calamities, I interviewed genocide survivors in Rwanda, people in refugee camps in Sri Lanka (where I worked as a volunteer for local NGOs in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami), a survivor of the 900-day blockade of Leningrad, and Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Dallas.
I am presently (as of August 2008) an assistant professor in the Creative Writing Department of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
My favorite blogs are the Huffington Post, Politico.com, BoingBoing, ClusterFuck Nation, Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, and The New York Times's The Caucus. I find AllAfrica.com an invaluable clearing house for news from that underreported continent. Here I add that I've learned to ration my time reading blogs—all my time on-line, for that matter. The Internet is even more addictive than TV or computer solitaire and may be even worse for one's writing. Nobody in his right mind thinks that playing solitaire is the same thing as being productive, but plenty of writers harbor that misapprehension about reading HuffPo.
My favorite authors are Nabokov, Dickens, Kafka, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Melville, Joyce, Simone Weil, Joan Didion, Primo Levi, J.M. Coetzee, Robert Stone, Philip Roth, Philip K. Dick, Mikhail Bulgakov, Denis Johnson, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, and Mary Gaitskill.
The Book of Calamities was written under the influence—direct or indirect—of several books, perhaps the foremost being Simone Weil's Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace. I also include Susan Griffin's luminous and visionary A Chorus of Stones, A. Alvarez's The Savage God, Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved, Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception, Homo Sacer, and Remnants of Auschwitz, Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, Alphonse Daudet's In the Land of Pain, Malise Ruthven's Fundamentalism, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Jean Hatzfeld's Machete Season and Life Laid Bare, Stanley Cohen's States of Denial, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, Dorothy Day's Selected Writings, Spinoza's Ethics, and Jack Miles's God: A Biography. And of course, always, The Book of Job.