Membrerlewisjr

Where do I start?

I am a thirty year old male who happens to be African American. Originally from Lubbock, Texas, in 1997 I went away to the liberal arts college of the University of Texas at Austin where I majored in Anthropology and African-American Studies. After graduation I spent a year touring Austin’s wonderful coffee shops while trying my hand at writing philosophy and fiction and not doing that much reading. After that year I entered the law school of the University of Colorado at Boulder, graduating in 2004. After graduation from law school I developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for fiction, reading almost nothing else. A back-to-back run-through of more than seventy novels, starting with Dame Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and ending with Cormac McCarty’s Border Trilogy only left me longing for more. I decided to take a very short break to read a bit of nonfiction. John Carey‘s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 was a fascinating read as was Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, even though I disagree with him on several points.

I now reside in the Denver area and am really trying to pick up writing again after a somewhat long hiatus and I still read pretty promiscuously. I just completed a very intensive two month odyssey (no pun intended) into ancient Greece and Rome, reading more than a dozen books about the time (mostly cultural history) as well as exploring many of the primary texts by its most enduring writers. I must say, even though many scholars don’t believe him to be all that enduring, that Catullus, born around 87 B.C.E, is so thoroughly delightful and iconoclastic that he has shaken my entire world view of the late Roman Republic, notwithstanding my somewhat intimate knowledge of the time’s preserved graffiti.

Currently I am reading Harold Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Found? , an intellectual biography by Daniel J. Singal entitled William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!