Staying Three

About The Author

I started out as a language junkie. I studied three of them in high school and three more in college, and then I went on to receive my Ph.D. in an obscure field called comparative literature that requires you to read novels and poetry and plays in the languages in which they wre originally written if you are going to presume to comment on them. Being a lover of drama in all forms–theatre, film, television, pantomime, dance, puppet show and sports, I have spent over fifty years thinking about how drama mirrors life on the one hand and provides an aspirational model on the other. Since drama is constructed entirely from language, verbal and nonverbal, it was easy for me to keep myself busy studying how dramatists turn words into behavior and behavior into art. Before retiring from the University of Baltimore in 2026, I taught literature, linguistics, rhetoric, philosophy and art history. I created this site to see if I could get everything I said for all those years all written down because, when I die, my children are going to make a huge bonfire with all my books and notepads and every envelope on which I have written down a critical thought while driving.