My real name is Harry Roth, and I live in upstate NY.
My experience includes 10 years in the academic community as a professor teaching writing, humanities surveys, literature, and literary theory. My PhD is in Russian literature and literary theory. I have knowledge of Russian and some knowledge of French. After leaving academia, I spent 6 years as a ghostwriter, so I have a solid understanding of the ins and outs of English grammar and expository prose. One of the primary areas of my ghostwriting was in the sciences, specifically, articles for peer-reviewed journals. My experience with the kind of battling over ideas that is the norm in academia has left me with little patience for those who are offended by being contradicted or who see disagreement as a spiritual flaw. However, I also have no interest in fighting shills in Wikipedia (the new milieu for "viral marketing") nor in wasting my research and writing skills updating entries that are simply vandalized by self-designated "skeptics" who wouldn't know science if it bit them in the ass.
My interests are focused especially on the human uses of plants, especially for religious or magical purposes, but also for scent, dye, fiber, medicine, and so forth. I have professional expertise in gardening and in growing balky plants such as mandrake.
Other interests include magic, especially in the West European tradition, and practical alchemy. And, of course, cats.
I will not longer be contributing to Wikipedia articles, as I have become totally fed up with the relentlessness of shills and people with an axe to grind. Everything they touch turns to crap.