Since everyone else seems to have a website these days, I thought I'd try my hand at this most narcissistic of activities and tell you (whoever you may be) all about me, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. While I am an extraordinarily fascinating personality, I doubt that anyone other than people who already know me in some way would find this site the least bit useful as it's solely about your humble narrator and only your humble narrator. I was born (in 1985) just a hop, skip, and a jump away from that most pristinely clean of rivers, the Charles, in a Harvard-student staffed hospital called Brigham and Women's in Boston, Massachusetts to a lovely, Italian-American mother and an alcoholic father (whose sole gift to his only son was to teach him, at an early age, how to construct ridiculously long run-on sentences that are low on grammatical accuracy). I've had many passions in life, consistently first among them all has been music. Primarily classical (everyone from Josquin to Dvorak and back again) and jazz (mainly post Bird) but also every other major genre from folk to blues to R&B to early R'N'R to indie noise rock. My favorite piece of music is either Mozart's Requiem or Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (taken as a whole). I've included add-on pages of my 100 favorite pop and rock albums, my 100 favorite jazz albums, and my 50 favorite blues artists as well (for those of you whose interests include peering into the sad existence of a borderline obsessive-compulsive with no friends and far too much time on his hands).

Anyway, second amongst my many passions and interests is philosophy, although I never studied it formally and don't intend to. I consider myself a follower of the Anglo-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and his disciple Charles Hartshorne. I'm also heavily influenced by the entirety of American philosophy from Emerson, William James, Charles Peirce, G.H. Mead, and John Dewey to Justus Buchler and Paul Weiss. Also Henri Bergson, Carl Gustav Jung (and James Hilmann), Paul Tillich, Samuel Alexander, Erich Fromm, Benedetto Croce, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Miguel de Unamuno have all been great influences.

Quite a disparate group of thinkers, I know, but I somehow manage to throw all these meaty thinkers in my own delicious soup of a philosophy (yum!). Don't ask me how, I'm far too lazy to write it all out.

If you want to know the basics of what I think (and why wouldn't you?), you can find out from a lovely little contemporary Whiteheadian philosopher by the name of David Ray Griffin in his three books: Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism; Unsnarling the World Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem; and Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy (editor). David's thought is the closest to my own that I've been able to find so far.

Although I no longer can say that I agree with everything I wrote in this essay (I was 18 at the time), it was one of the more popular aspects of the former incarnation of this site and I thought I'd include a link to it here.

As for my political stance: Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel are two contemporary economic theorists who have recently developed a post-capitalist economic model which they term "participatory economics." Participatory Economics builds upon many of the insights of so-called "left-communism" and the various syndicalist schools but avoids the common pitfalls of these models and of Marxist-Leninist and market socialisms. I, personally, feel that Albert and Hahnel have created something extraordinarily brilliant and, if you have the means and the will, I suggest you run out and find out as much as you can about it (either through their extensive online writings or by going to your local independent bookstore and buying a copy of Albert's Looking Forward or his more recent Parecon).

When I first became politicized (and before I encountered Mike and Rob), I was an anarcho-syndicalist. Anton Pannekoek, Rudolf Rocker, Paul Mattick, Otto Rühle, Maurice Brinton, Stanley Aronowitz, Andre Gorz, Isaac Puente, Georg Lukács, Diego Abad de Santillan, and Rosa Luxemburg were my main theorists. As were the founding fathers of libertarian socialism, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. I continue to take a lot from these pioneering thinkers. I was also influenced by some of the more abstract theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Cornelius Castoriadis.

Many studies of historical periods and movements continue to influence me, such as ones of the Spanish Civil War, The Hungarian Revolution, the Italian Factory Uprisings, the Wobblies, the Paris Commune, the Diggers, early Italian-American and Jewish radicalism, the Kibbutz in Israel, and so on.

Apart from all these radical texts and theorists, some classical liberal political philosophers have also greatly influenced me (chief among these is the now neglected Wilhelm von Humboldt). My theory of a workable, highly decentralised polity is greatly indebted to this thinker as well as to Stephen Shalom's recent essay.

For those of you who have had little contact with radical leftism or progressive politics, I highly recommend ZNet which contains an astonishing amount of useful information (unlike this site).

I'm a huge fan of literature. Very influenced by the canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, as well as by William Hazlitt, Walter Pater, Samuel Johnson, and others. I'm a fervent Bardolater. My favorite novel is Don Quixote (Burton Raffel translation). My favorite writer besides Will Shakespeare and Miguel Cervantes is Leo Tolstoy (followed by Marcel Proust). My favorite poets are Wordsworth, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Blake, Dante, Whitman, Donne, Keats, Dickinson, and Stevens. My favorite novelists are Proust, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hugo, Eliot, Richardson, Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Calvino, Hawthorne, James, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, Nabokov, Garcia-Marquez, and Denis Johnson.. My fav playwrites (again, excluding Shakes) are Samuel Beckett, Henrik Ibsen, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, and Anton Chekhov.

I'm a huge movie buff (make sure to check out the Brattle Theater if you're in the Boston area, they need your support!).
Check out my list of my 100 favorite films!

Let's see, what else?? Oh, yes! The visual arts! Everyone from Leo da Vinci to Wassily Kandinsky, I love it all. Here's a little sub-page about it (what the hell, right?)

I also enjoy baseball, history, birding, cooking, amateur astronomy, comic strips, wine, and playing a woman like a violin.

My two heroes in life are: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a brilliant theologian-philosopher and a martyr to the nazi death machine) and Bill "Spaceman" Lee, a former Red Sox player and activist.

I've worked a lot of flunky gigs and I expect to work many more. I'm currently residing in Wakefield, Massachusetts and yellow is my favorite colour.

That's everything! If you've made it this far, I feel sorry for you. Seriously.

Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro.
Amen.

[JamesHutchins]

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