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John Sebastian Cumpston (named after the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach) was born in Greenwich Village, New York on January 27, 1971 (the same day as Mozart and Lewis Carroll) and grew up in Queens, New York. He attended Saint Michael's Grammar School, and later Archbishop Molloy and Francis Lewis High Schools. He later studied Classics and Philosophy at Bard College, studying under Peter Sloterdijk, the German philosopher and social critic. He wrote his senior thesis, "Sartre's Negative Ontology: An Analysis of Sartre's Theory of Consciousness and Its Ethical Implications" in 1995. At Bard, Mr. Cumpston also studied with poet and art critic, Edouard Roditi, as well as poet Robert Kelly. He also worked and helped edit the literary journal "Conjunctions" under writer Bradford Morrow. He has studied foreign languages, music, and philosophy at the Universities of Saint Petersburg, Budapest, Salamanca, and Heidelberg. He also studied ethnomusicology, composition, and gamelan performance in Bali, Indonesia at the National Conservatory. Mr. Cumpston has lived and traveled in Europe, South America, and Central and South East Asia. He has taught English in Hungary, Russia, and Indonesia. He is presently a securities broker, works for a boutique investment firm in New York, and is listed in Bloomberg's "Who's Who." Mr. Cumpston has written essays on music and art, literary criticism, as well as several short prose works, dramatic sketches, and is currently working on a novel based on the life of philosopher, Louis Althusser. In in his spare time he enjoys playing the piano. He hopes eventually to write full time.
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These are a few of my favorite things
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John Coltrane, Johann Sebastian Bach, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Francis Bacon (the painter), Lucian Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dostoyevksky, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Henry James, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Egon Schiele, Emil Nolde, Paul Gaughin, Poe, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Pinter, Kurosawa, Bergman, Rublyov, Tarkovsky, Polanski, Werner Herzog, Kinski (Klaus and Nastassia), Kaspar Hauser, Pachelbel, Atahualpa Yupanqui, Borer towns, Espresso, Creme Broulee, Sopa de Mariscos, San Sebastian, Tapas, Budapest, Gamelan, Mishima, Georges Battaille, Lascaux, Cathedral of La Sagrada Familia, Tauromachy, Breyer's Reeces' Peanut Butter Ice Cream, Catskill Mountains, The Hudson River Valley, Buchner's Woyzzeck, Die Winterreisse sung by Friedrich Fischer-Dieskau, T.E. Hulme, Aleister Crowley, Peter Greenaway, Bill Brandt, Edward Weston, Edweard Muybridge, Immanuel Kant, Buster Keaton, Dante, Homer, Boecklin, Caspar David-Friedrich, David Friedrich Strauss, Richard Strauss, Stanley Kubrick, J.G. Ballard, The North Atlantic Coast, Hortobagyi Husos Palicsinta.
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