My name is Nathan Turowsky
and I don’t consider myself a good writer, or a bad writer, or even a mediocre writer. I simply write. A lot. On this website, I “publish” some of that writing for you, the reading public.
You might ask, “Nathan, why don’t you ‘publish’ more traditionally?”, and that would be a good question; I have asked it myself. The answer, plainly, is that I neither need nor particularly want to write to make money, and I don’t want a traditional publisher to force me to maintain a presence on what I like to call the bird app (we all know what social media platform I actually mean by this).
My academic background—which I always describe as “my academic background,” because I am a parasite—is in Japanese literature and theology. I’m a cradle socialist, a not-exactly-cradle Catholic, and live in the rural Northeastern United States. I have Jewish ancestors and a Jewish name, which is reflected in my understanding of my religious and political commitments. I don’t particularly wish to go into “how I identify” otherwise, for fear, as 1066 and All That would put it, of Political Economy.
Most of my writing involves some combination of religious issues, so-called nerd culture, LGBT subjects, historiography and philosophy of history, and various New Englander and Masshole concerns. The title of the website comes from a partial translation of “Aomori Elegy,” a poem that the Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji wrote and rewrote several times in his attempts to make sense of the early death of a family member. Despite this, my best friend avers that I am a prep.