Acknowledgments

I thank the following people for helping to bring this website to fruition:

Ben Stern actually offered to host this site for free, but I decided that I was too much of a wimp to memorize the Unix commands necessary to navigate Ben's setup, and I had gotten soft feeding on the amazing handiness of Entourage's Address Book. Nevertheless, Ben has explained the ins and outs of Web hosting and the general Internet to me with commendable patience, penetrating intelligence and constant good humor. Ben is the Spam-O-Matic's Official Information Technology Consultant, but he has gone above and beyond the call of that duty in recent months, and that effort is one reason you see this site before you. Check out the good-natured (not to mention well-denatured) humor Ben writes (with some help from his friends) at www.electromagnetic.net.

No less important to this site's genesis is Nate Vaughan, a professional Web designer (not to mention a fourth-grade classmate) who is undoubtedly crying as he stubs his eyes on the rudimentary layout I have favored. Nevertheless, Nate and I had several extremely productive conversations discussing general Web layout principles this summer, and from those conversations my ideas on how I wanted this damn thing to look began to take shape. Nate also let me "borrow" his copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver, an amazing piece of software which I hope to eventually purchase with my own damn money. If you would like to have a website designed for you that, unlike this one, actually has an attractive style and uncompromised utility, point your browser at Tiny Dinosaur, his web design home, and see what Nate can make happen.

This website would not exist if I had not written a whole buncha stuff, and it seems appropriate here to thank people who have made that stuff better-written than it would have been without their intervention. My mother, Elizabeth Malone, has helped me not only develop a cleaner prose style but also a keener ability to make an argument; in addition, she has served as a sounding board when I didn't know whether I was going off the deep end or what with some of the pieces on this site. My sister Ellen and my dad Frank have also acted as sounding boards at various times, and their feedback has often caused me to eliminate self-indulgences and unnecessary dilatoriness and expand on the rarer good fragments. (My mom and dad and sister also love me even when I'm not writing anything, which is a great comfort when I get blocked.)

Professor Jeanne Fahnestock did not direct all her comments at me in her rhetoric classes, but they had a profound effect on me anyway. As I further honed my argumentative skills and gained an eye-opening understanding of the specific ways in which argument can be advanced by word choice and sentence structure, my prose became yet tighter and better-directed, thanks to her. My godfather Mark Knoblauch has helped with advice not only on being a professional writer but on writing as a professional writer; his guidance on both the prose style and rhetorical position a critic must use has been invaluable.

While Robert Kahn has rarely dirtied his hands trying to contend with my prose, my numerous and wide-ranging discussions with him on matters of import ranging from our upcoming Congressional representation to how cool "Terminator 3" is going to be have had a major influence on my own sensibility. And the readers of the original Spam-O-Matic provided encouragement, advice and factual corrections, all of which I needed regularly — in the case of the factual corrections, distressingly so.

I have been fortunate enough to have editors who encouraged me to do both things I excelled in and things I was not particularly good at when I started doing them. Daniel Piotrowski, David Malitz, Barry Schwartz, Holly Cummings, Lauren Golfer, and Tom LoBianco all edited me in some capacity or another at the University of Maryland's Diamondback, and they all put up with my occasional neurotic control freakery and vocabularic excursions and got my stuff in front of thousands of collegians. Jordan Baker and then Dan Zytnick at the Maryland Cow Nipple encouraged me to immortalize the inanity and desperation of life at Maryland in stinging humor, and if I didn't quite succeed all the time it's not their fault.

Gerry Brennan actually solicited me to write for the All Classical Guide, and though he did not communicate much, his willingness to accept virtually anything I wrote made me willing to take more risks as I wrote about the masterworks that make up the canon and modern works that might join them one day (or might more likely rot in a landfill somewhere, in many cases). Chris Porter communicated more than Gerry when I was an intern at, and later became a contributing writer for, Jazz Times, and what he said gave me insights into the life of a professional writer, the harrying nature of music journalism, and the unceasing oppressive malaise that is the Detroit Lions. His associate Russell Carlson gave me less advice, but encouraged me in developing the benign writerly detachment that has served me well (as much as I have let it serve me) since.

To everyone mentioned above, I owe you a debt of gratitude. To everyone I should have mentioned above, I owe you double gratitude for your indulgence of my lapsed memory. Thank you all.

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