When I graduated, I went across town to Wheaton College.
In '75, I had to choose between philosophy (didn't have the
discipline for the intellectual rigor. probably still
don't), literature (I was stupid enough then to think
that nothing interesting had been written before James
Joyce) or art (I painting on castoff sink cut-outs and
photographing people's front yards in ordinary suburban
developments). Art took the fewest credits, so that's
my B.A. I waited tables, played keyboards in a bar band
in North Carolina with Gregg Barker, and took jobs through
temp agencies at Fermilab (quadropole superconducting
magnet prototype design and fab) and Bell Laboratories.
I learned enough UNIX at Bell Labs to score a job at the
Cornell Theory Center for Simulation in Science and Engineering
after I followed my then-new wife Jolanda Vanderwal to
Cornell University, where she finished her Ph.D. (German
literature, minor in Dutch). Jolanda was hired at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison to teach Dutch and German languages and
literature, and I became a faculty spouse. She's really a pretty
wonderful person, and I think that my favorite adjectival
role is "Jolanda's husband Gregory." She got a Fulbright in '89,
so we moved to Utrecht in the Netherlands for a good part of
a year. My Dutch is terrible to nonexistent, hers is native.
We go there pretty much yearly for a couple of weeks. I've worked
for computer firms in Madison as a Technical Writer, and finally
became a Marketing Weasel. I left doing said weaselling in a
teledatacom firm (Artesyn) in '99 to telecommute for Cycling '74,
a SF-based firm that makes software for composers, performers,
artists, and real-time multimedia types where I get to do strange
and wonderful things.
Um, what else? I was active in the cassette-culture movement
of independently produced electronic music in the late 70s/early
80s. I study and play Central Javanese gamelan when I can. I've
hosted a Sunday evening radio program of music of the Present Age
since the mid-late 80s on WORT-FM in Madison. No kids, although
I really love 'em. No pets, although that's more a histamine thang.
No hair.
Authors I buy in hardback, no questions asked: Bruce Chatwin (RIP),
Haruki Murakami, Douglas Coupland, Thomas Pynchon, Richard
Powers, Jonathan Carroll. Serious collector of Brian Eno, Morton
Feldman, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Gavin Bryars, and Tetsu Inoue's musics.