Backwardscentur, 41

I'm quiet, laid-back, and an oracular fountain of random trivia. My username should read "backwardscentury", but somehow the "Y" got dropped -- oh well.

At present I'm in upstate New York, getting a graduate degree in library science that will hopefully let me put my dorky collector tendencies to a socially productive use. I'll be here until the end of 2008; I don't know where I'll land after that.

I'm a willful media omnivore, although I'm getting quieter and more picky as I get older. Here's a big list of stuff I like: chana masala, flannel shirts, 8-bit synthesizers, walking in the woods in springtime, early 90s lo-fi (Pavement, Unrest, Sebadoh), V.S. Naipaul, _The American Astronaut_, twentieth-century intellectual history, PAPERRAD, T.S. Eliot, krautrock, _The Baffler_, _Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex_, Mark E. Smith, my secret obsession with mainstream hip-hop, Guided By Voices, fringe philosophy, Hella, Barbara Ehrenreich, the Flying Luttenbachers, 90s nostalgia, _The Abolition of Work_, old-school console RPGs, Belgian beer, Buddhist meditation, Jim Woodring, "bass! how low can you go?", high modernism, mudkips, owning _The Collected Works Of_ just about anybody, _The eXile_, Philip Larkin, Tom Wolfe, Gene Wolfe, _Double Nickels On The Dime_, Gary Snyder, Steeleye Span, faking like I understand James Joyce, collecting hilarious old vinyl records, making connections between seemingly random things, contemplating the vastness of the continental United States, trying to be more eco-friendly, and fat girls.

I'm deceptively mild-mannered, but damn cool once you get to know me.