I currently (Fall 2005) live on the tenth floor of a highrise condominium in Hollywood, which I share with my domestic partner of ten years, Leston Chandler Buell. He has completed his Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics (his dissertation is on an aspect of Zulu syntax!) and now has a post-doctoral position (research on the Bantu language group) at Leiden University in the Netherlands for two to three years, starting in September 2005.

I plan to visit Leiden as often as possible the first year and go for some longer periods the second. For more on Leston, go to LESTON BUELL (page available soon).

My careers have involved being a trainer and reservations manager for Pan American World Airways in Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas; teaching foreign languages and ESL in San Jose and Santa Monica, California; working for The Argonaut, a weekly newspaper in the Los Angeles area; and founding and directing a nonprofit arts organization, (Beyond Baroque Foundation, in Venice, California).

I work part-time (half telecommuting from home) for The Argonaut, a well-respected weekly newspaper that covers the Santa Monica, Ocean Park, Venice, Mar Vista, Marina del Rey, Playa Vista, Playa del Rey and Westchester communities along the Pacific Ocean about 15 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. The newspaper was founded by my dear friend David Asper Johnson in 1971, and he is still owner, editor and publisher. I have worked there since 1972 (I was the first employee) and was for many years associate publisher and chief financial officer (CFO), until my semi-retirement in 1994. Though I am still CFO, my regular work now involves mostly copy editing, proofreading and overseeing the final coming together of the paper. You can see the Web version of  this newspaper by going to ArgonautNewspaper.com.

I otherwise occupy myself with writing and have recently completed what I hope is a nearly final version of a novel, The Slant Hug ’o Time. And I have returned to writing what I call my “memoires” (sic), begun in 1994, but mostly abandoned during the past seven years or so, when I was concentrating on the novel and several other (non-writing) projects. For more about these, go to NOVEL and MEMOIRES (pages available soon).

My interest in experimental, “avant-garde” writing spurred me to start the magazine Beyond Baroque in 1968. In 1972, what had become a cultural center that focused on literature and publishing became Beyond Baroque Foundation, a nonprofit tax-exempt educational organization at 1639-41 W. Washington (now Abbot Kinney) Blvd, in Venice, California. Around 1980 Beyond Baroque moved to The Old Venice City Hall, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice and I resigned as president and director of the foundation, but stayed on its board of trustees for another decade. Beyond Baroque Cultural Arts Center has survived, and is still in the Old Venice City Hall in Venice, directed by Fred Dewey. For a lot more about this, see Beyond Baroque.

I am interested in languages, which I studied in Europe for three years as an undergraduate. I am still reasonably fluent in French, but much less so in Spanish and German, which I once spoke fluently. I am currently working on Dutch, for obvious reasons. I studied in France, Spain, Austria and Germany for three years as an undergraduate and I received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude with majors in French and Spanish and a minor in German in1953 from Marietta College, Ohio, and went on to the University of Minnesota as a teaching assistant, but did not complete work for an M.A. Later I entered the Graduate Internship Program in Teacher Education at the University of California at Berkeley, and then did some graduate work in French, German and Spanish at the University of California at Los Angeles.

I have been traveling to Europe once or twice a year (mostly Paris) for the past 15 years, and Leston has accompanied me when he was not teaching at UCLA or in Egypt, or off to Africa. I expect to continue these trips to Europe with probably increased frequency, but involving the Netherlands more than France in the next few years.