Fiction. An extended meditation on the sentence--an inquiry into how we make use of language to express our selves, and an investigation of how language helps shape and determine who and what those selves are. An imaginary conversation between Falstaff and Chuang Tzu, Veronica Lake and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A love story told through grammatical miscalculations, syntactical anomalies, and the fortuitous discoveries of vocabulary: "Intelligence is manifest in the ability to get what one wants, wisdom in the ability to properly determine what that is. For months he lived on Altoids, coffee, vitamin C, and the hope that she would call. There is no present like the one you imagined in the past. Skepticism as a kind of tourism. An economy all their own in which his vocabulary is not even legal tender."

David Carl received a BA in Philosophy from Pomona College, a MA in Philosophy from Claremont Graduate School, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Davis. Before becoming a tutor at St. John's College in 2000, he was a Lecturer in Philosophy at California State San Bernardino; an English Instructor in Wupertal, Germany; a Philosophy and Religion Instructor at Diablo Valley College; Poet in Residence at Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore in Paris; and a Comparative Literature Instructor at UC Davis. Next month, David Carl will begin his term as Assistant Dean of St. John's College.