Compass Rose takes its name from the diagram on maps and nautical charts showing the cardinal and intercardinal directions radiating from a center point — 32 in the traditional version, fine enough for navigation without being unworkable. This site attempts something analogous — bearings rather than a map, rough and intermittent rather than hedged and final, oriented without quite arriving.
My interests are linguistics — variationist, corpus-based, but also formal — languages (German, French, some Korean), classical literature and horror films, backpacking (Great Basin, Southern California’s desert ranges, the Sierras, Europe, Korea), piano and guitar, cooking, Linux, mathematics. The range requires organizing; homelabbing is the closest I’ve come to a method: an infrastructure discipline that’s emerged from concerns about data ownership and security, but equally from an appreciation for complex systems. This site is an attempt to wrangle the range.
Posts appear when something is worth saying. Microposts are authored by a gnomic entity named Arcanus Fidelis. The garden is English, not French: occasionally tended, visited more than maintained, and less interested in symmetry than in what volunteers at the edges. Older pieces may resurface unannounced, the way something forgotten comes back given enough seasons. What’s here now in the summer of 2026 is a start, not the first one I’ve made; the aim going forward is density with more return visits.
I currently teach British and American literature at the Waterford School in Sandy, Utah. A linguist by training, I hold a PhD in linguistics from Stanford and an MA in German from Georgetown.
Outside teaching, I design and maintain infrastructure systems (Proxmox, Docker, networking, systems architecture).