About

I was going to make this a “frequently asked questions” page, but since I only ever get one question, here’s everything you need to know:

I’ve been retired for several years. Before that, I was a history professor at “Flyover State.” Because I was an adjunct — one of the vast pool of scab labor that makes up something like 75% of higher “education” nationwide — I bounced around a lot; “Flyover State” is therefore a composite of a bunch of different schools, ranging from junior colleges to also-ran state Us to wannabe-Ivy Small Private Liberal Arts Colleges.

What did I teach? Pretty much everything. What was my academic specialty? If you’re asking, you don’t know how academia works. Which is fine, it’s pretty recondite, nobody should know this stuff, but for the record: Asking a professional academic to name their specialty, and expecting something like “French History” for an answer, is like asking a normal person “Where are you from?” and expecting an answer like “The Western Hemisphere.” Everything is micro-calibrated, in time, geographically, and of course in race / class / gender etc. I always say my dissertation was on “Paraplegic UNIX programmers in the Ugandan lowlands, 1792-1806.” It’s no more bullshit than 99% of the rest of the stuff professional academics turn out.

Let’s see, what else? My name is Luca, I live on the second floor, with my pet gerbil “Rico Suave.” I’m a genderfluid demisexual who identifies as a 1972 AMC Gremlin. I lettered in baseball in high school, but only because I grew up in the South and so they pretty much had to let anyone who tried out on the team; all the real athletes played football. Put it this way: I couldn’t get any playing time despite being a left handed pitcher, which if you know anything about baseball, is like being a 7’4″ guy who can’t make the basketball team. Or a sticky wicket that can’t make the soccer pitch despite bowling a woobly, for our non-American readers.

Oh yes, my nom de guerre. I don’t read much fiction anymore, and I never did much care for science fiction, and while The Book of the New Sun was interesting, I’m not a big fan. The first volume of the tetralogy just happened to be the first thing I saw when casting around for an Internet handle, way back in the days. I mean way, way back in the days — not quite the “you had to know how to program a modem that you built yourself” days, but the days before the Information Superhighway taught us what some nerd thinks about Star Trek. The days when you could say the words “Information Superhighway” and not have people laugh at you for being a hopeless dork, in other words.

If I’d known back then that I’d be stuck with the goddamn thing for going-on-40 years now, I’d definitely have picked something else.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by. Hope you like the site!