I am a man of disparate interests: books and booze, oddball history, paper ephemera, rust-belt aesthetics. I am currently an associate professor of modernist literature and book history at the University of West Florida on a year-long sabbatical in Cleveland. This blog is my tool to organize and disseminate my writings on literature, cocktails, books, pulp magazines, ephemera, and esoterica, but it is also a "catch-all" for random interests. My current projects include a History of the Cocktail Book, a collection of the flapper stories of Dawn Powell, a general history of pulp magazines.
But besides all that, I am also a displaced Clevelander, now home for the year and enjoying it; I am a former bartender at Mike Symon's Lola and, from time to time, find myself behind the bar again at his Lolita (located at the corner of Professor and Literary in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood, ironically enough), hence there will also be blogs entries on Cleveland, food, cocktails, and academia here, as well as blogs growing from my research. Welcome, wander, and enjoy.