The University of Racing Thoughts ('22)
Our hero is a retired academic who begins an idiosyncratic, highly personal project upon his wife’s death: An exhaustive collection of strange, paradoxical thoughts and formulations, something he calls his “bestiary of unstable ideas.” He meets a woman online with a seemingly similar personal project.
As we discover, his younger self had a similar project of his own, "The University of Racing Thoughts," — one that led the poor lad down a frightful rabbit hole. The protagonist is torn between the vertiginous pole of his late teen thought-world and the libidinal promise of newfound love. Note: This is the original "non-AI version" on which The University off Artificial Thoughts is based.
As we discover, his younger self had a similar project of his own, "The University of Racing Thoughts," — one that led the poor lad down a frightful rabbit hole. The protagonist is torn between the vertiginous pole of his late teen thought-world and the libidinal promise of newfound love. Note: This is the original "non-AI version" on which The University off Artificial Thoughts is based.
Quarrels with My Amanuensis ('26)
Concerns the life of Benvenuto Cellini, the famous Renaissance goldsmith, as he composes his renowned autobiography, La Vita di Benvenuto Cellini. Explores the tempestuous quarrels between Cellini and his precocious scribe over the renderings, recapitulations, amplifications, and embellishments of the artist’s colorful and often violent life to be captured in La Vita.
Our fictional Cellini complains that his scribe was taking too many liberties with the text; he resents his other interventions in his ongoing activities, which included numerous romantic affairs and the acts of violence. The scribe must also fend off Cellini’s physical advances.
At some point the scribe attempts to scuttle the publication of La Vita altogether, which he comes to believe, transmits a malignant worldview to the future. In truth, the manuscript is not published in Cellini's lifetime.
The Doctor of Disputation, a Controversial Rendering of Gorgian Memoirs With Commentary by the Translator
('19)
The drama is built out of a memoir supposedly written by the well known sophist, Gorgias. Gorgias is an historically real person known to history through his appearance in The Gorgias, the famous dialogue by Plato featuring Gorgias and other prominent thinkers.
In the actual Platonic dialogue, Socrates and Plato show little regard for Gorgias and his sophist philosophy. But within this imagined "recovered text" Gorgias has a chance to tell "his side of the story" and describe his philosophy and worldview where "might makes right."
The Alt-Futurist '17
A philosophical and moral fable about the the Italian Futurist movement of the 1930s, exploring its odd fusion of iconoclastic art and reactionary politics.
Our hero, psychoanalyst Georgio Parigi, falls in love with the lovely Aliada, a rising Florentine art critic. Parigi is shocked when he realizes that his love is drawn to the aestheticized cruelty of Italian fascism.
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PET Thoughts, Ideas We Love
('15)
Pet Thoughts is a faux TED Talk, the popular, slickly produced lectures on science and culture. Our protagonist is encouraged by his comely video producer, to take his sober, peer-reviewed research, “to the next level,” to connect with the broad lay audience, where he can find both fame—and maybe even personal enlightenment.
The Orph Pathways to the Underworld ('14)
A futuristic tale in which a world-famous composer, in perfect health, must decide if he is to seek metaphorical immortality through, 1) composition of a “multi-generational musical masterwork” that will be performed for centuries, or, 2) or literal immortality, via an advanced medical procedure, "The Transmutation" in which a human mind is uploaded to a physical immortality cloud.
—A type of life extension his disapproving (and dying) lover, calls a technological “pseudo-immortality.”
The Interpretant "Object, Sign, Love" '18
The Interpretant explores Charles Peirce’s unheralded yet profound impact on the modern world from logic, and semiotics, to the mathematical underpinnings of modern finance and even modern physics.
The videodrama references Peirce’s famous “triad:” Object, Sign, Interpretant, which he uses to “parse thought itself.” And at the same time to "reconstruct his interior universe."
Adorno! ('13)
The Undocumented Recollections of Gretel Adorno Concerning her Life with
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
Theodor Adorno, famed leader of the Frankfurt School of cultural criticism, comes to New York in 1938 where he has to endure the “vulgar materialist culture” of America as he waits out the war in Europe, and the suspension of civilization in Germany. When Adorno returns to Germany after the war, “at home at last,” he must soon confront students of the 60s who find him insufficiently radical.