About Me

Key things to know about my teaching philosophy:

Boredom: To say that you are “bored” is to really say that you don’t know how to find whatever is in front of you interesting. To say “I’m bored” is really to say “I don’t know enough to find this interesting.” Statements about boredom are really statements about agency, and usually it indicates a lack of willingness on the part of the speaker to be curious.

Fairness: The claim that something isn’t “fair” usually means that whatever is happening is not going the speaker’s way. To invoke “fairness” is really a power move to try to gain a sense of control. As such then, it is really an empty concept.

“In the mind of the beginner there are many possibilities. In the mind of the expert there are few. ” – Shunryu Suzuki

A Zen Teaching: “The Master is the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.”

Things you may want to know:

schooling: BA in English and Speech Communication – USF; MAT in English – Duke; theology dropout – Dallas Theological Seminary

favorite authors: William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, Don DeLillo

favorite poets: John Donne, Billy Collins, ee cummings, TS Eliot

favorite movies: The 400 Blows, Apocalypse Now!, 2001: A Space Odyssey,

favorite sounds: I prefer music that creates noises to be inhabited, typically labelled by any of these monikers: drone, repetitive, minimal, field recordings, and especially if it goes on for a while. I refer to this as “aural architecture” and its practitioners include: Sunn O))), Elaine Radigue, Phil Niblock, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, LaMonte Young, Morton Feldman, James Brown, Basic Channel, the Chain Reaction label, My Bloody Valentine, etc…

Other people I also like include: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Spiritualized, The Velvet Underground, Laurie Anderson

And then there are my own experiments. Find these at: SoundCloud files