About This Website is a text by Jack Rusher It is part of An Instruction Manual.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
— Francis Bacon, Of Studies.
This website was created as an outlet for half-baked textual and musical sketches that were, for one or another reason, unsuitable for publication elsewhere. The back catalogue includes essays on random topics, short bits of narrative, prose poems, the occasional bit of actual verse, and a few songs.
Lately, now some years into this project, my goals have changed. There is a new editorial policy that will hopefully create a better and more rewarding experience for you, the reader.
An artist’s rendering of the rhetorical device itself.
A Queasy Third-person Introduction to the Author
Jack Rusher, the author of this website, was born in the tiny Québecois village of Saint-Jérôme, which was named for the patron saint of librarians, archivists, Bible scholars, students and translators. However, he isn’t Canadian at all. While his passports indicate that he is somehow both Irish and American, he is effectively neither, having spent his formative years traveling the world with a pair of eccentric criminals who claimed to be his parents.
When the time came to hunker down and receive the gavage of education, Mr Rusher studied physics, music composition and computer science within the swampy environs of the University of Florida. This process continued many years later with a brief study of fine art at San Jose State University.
The region in which Mr Rusher currently composes his rhetoric.
After exploring a number of ill-advised bread-winning strategies (including street busker, applied mathematician, line cook, house painter, small time rock star, dishwasher, immigrant day laborer, CEO, no-holds-barred prize-fighter, exhibition swing dancer, special effects technician, pint puller, and furniture assembler), Mr Rusher has settled on a quiet life producing music and prose within New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood. Occasional outbursts of computer science are interspersed, but he tries to keep them under control.
Alms?
Some of you may be interested in sending gifts to help keep this device in service, to which end wishes have been made.