Who am I? The question has many answers. I am editor, father, scholar, ... activist, maybe. I spent most of my young adult years working in a variety of careers, from physical labor to computers to finance to academic research, not in any particular order. As I creep into middle age, the material on this web site represents much of what I do, and as I leave aside some of my earlier restlessness, my daily life has changed little since 1993.
I take care of my three children, Egan (b.1993), Audra (b.1995), and Brynna (b.1997) while I work at home. Organizational work for the Medieval Music & Arts Foundation, especially editorial activity and business decisions, takes up an increasing amount of my time. However, even with the demands of my children, I manage to keep pace with my own research and creative work. Although much of my raw material is drawn from "historical music" I am fundamentally an author & aesthetic philosopher.
I was born in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where my parents have always lived. Then I lived in New York for several years. In 1993, my wife I-Heng & I moved to California and the Silicon Valley area. She was raised here, and now teaches high school math & science at Monta Vista in Cupertino. She and the kids help me remain not as unapproachable as I might be if left to myself. I-Heng is a very knowledgeable person herself, from a family of scholars.
Because of my involvement in scientific research in the 1980s, I was able to use the Internet before it became known to the general public. Commercial activity was rather strictly forbidden at that time. This experience continues to color my view of the Internet, so I tend to be displeased with the various fads which arise, and especially with the greed that dominates the Internet today. I am, however, pleased that it can be a resource for the public.
Some people wonder why I am not a professor, or alternately wonder why I am not trying to become rich on the Internet. Some other people seem to grasp immediately why neither would appeal to me. I prefer to follow neither path, but rather to adopt the uneasy road between them, especially after having had concrete opportunities to do both. I am, one might say, afraid of comfort. Moreover, I continue to value physical labor, especially as it was fundamental to my upbringing. Perhaps that is the crux of my seemingly paradoxical decisions, since although I was widely hailed as a prodigy as a child, I was happiest hoeing corn or digging ditches.
Today I try to live a simple life, even if most of my work is intellectual. I find compiling strictly factual information relaxing, so that activity combines nicely with my more abstract (and draining) aesthetic preoccupations. This entire discussion begs the question of whether the information here is factual at all. Further, what makes for credibility on the Internet? This is a fascinating question for me, one I have had ample opportunity to experience in various guises over the years, and one I will not answer in any satisfying way. There is a place for academic-style writing, certainly, and some items on this site fit that style. Others do not, some perhaps provocatively not.
Whereas I draw artistic inspiration from such figures as Borges, the conflation of fact & fiction which I view as fundamental to art does not take the same form. In other words, the factual-type information here is indeed factual, and I make every effort to correct any mistakes discovered. This is one nice thing about the Internet: Whereas paper texts inevitably contain errors simply due to human error, and although these may be noted in errata or corrected in revised editions, on the Internet I can change the original immediately. Of course, this discussion really does nothing to answer the interesting question: What is the nature of credibility? It simply cannot, except in an artificial way.
First version written in November 1994; completely rewritten, for no good reason, in July 2000.
Todd Michel McComb <mccomb@medieval.org>