Watching protesters occupy Wall Street for the past several days, I've been thinking back to the two years in the early 1990s when I worked at the headquarters of the JP Morgan Bank at 60 Wall.

I did not find myself on Wall Street by accident; I had graduated from a state university with a computer science degree six years earlier, and had taken a series of jobs that each brought me closer to the top of my field. I wasn't particularly interested in high finance, but I was ambitious for an exciting career, and the financial industry was considered the most prestigious place for a techie to work in New York City at this time. I did not find what I hoped for there. My two year adventure at JP Morgan left me deeply disappointed on many levels, and I consider myself lucky that I was able to leave the financial software marketplace for better work elsewhere (I never looked back, except sometimes in anger).

Like the blessed protesters who are causing trouble there today, I always felt like an outsider on Wall Street, even though I knew what I was there to do. I was part of a consulting team managed by a brilliant Oxford-educated Nigerian named Tayo Ibigundi, a boss I respected very much. We were both employees of Sybase Professional Services, the consulting arm of an innovative database software firm with a big presence on Wall Street, along with two other members of our project team: Carmela Balasso, an Italian-Israeli who lived with her parents in Brooklyn, who was about six years my senior and never stopped mentioning how sorry she was that a nice Jewish boy like me was already married, and Mike Toole, a taciturn database administrator with the brawny physique of a Staten Island brawler (because that's what he was). My team worked together very well, but we didn't really fit in with the regular employees at JP Morgan.

Many consultants from many different companies worked at JP Morgan, and it was always easy to tell the consultants from the employees. We wore $300 suits and had accents from England, China, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Cote D'Ivorie, Nigeria, Ghana, France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Brooklyn or Queens. They wore $800 suits and usually came from either uptown Manhattan or small-town America, by way of colleges with one-word names. The consultants and employees worked together on various trading system projects, but we didn't often mix much. It would be an unfair generalization to say that we consultants had made it to Wall Street because we were highly skilled and they were there because they had an uncle in Global Markets. Well, I don't know how some of my employee co-workers had gotten there ... but I don't think they got there because of their tech skills.

Four months ago I announced my intention to publish one e-book a month for the next year, thus launching a new publishing branch of this long-running website. I've released three Kindle books so far, right on schedule, and I'll be presenting the newest title on Thursday. Unlike your local train line, I've still never been late.

This is hard work, but it's going pretty well so far. The first of my three books seems to keep selling, and while the other two are lagging behind, my latest chapbook of selected literary essays did get a very nice review at Dead End Follies. Still, as I proceed I can't help feeling that I'm going both too fast and too slow. I'd like to explain what I mean by this.

I suppose it's obvious that I'm going too fast, because I'm publishing one book a month. Nobody publishes one book a month! I originally pledged to maintain this fast pace because I figure if I'm going to jump into the indie publishing business with both feet, I may as well do it Kerouac-style. I don't want to waste a lot of time triple-proofreading or worrying over spreadsheets. I want this new publishing venture to go, go, go.

Since I began publishing e-books three months ago, I've discovered that the most annoying part of the process, hands down, is marketing and publicity. The most fun part? Easy: cover artwork. I love designing covers, and I love working with artists like Vince Larue and Goodloe Byron (who's working on a cover for a new book I'm particularly excited about, which is coming out in August). For my latest book Chiaroscuro: Assorted Literary Essays I went digging into my own archives, and I thought I'd share with you what I found. You see, when I was a teenager I spent a whole lot of time doing pen and pencil sketches of my favorite rock stars.

My latest e-book, the third in a series of twelve, is out, and this one means a real lot to me. Chiaroscuro: Assorted Literary Essays is my own selection of the best literary essays I've written on this blog since 2004.

I wanted this to be a short book, so I forced myself to choose only ten pieces (and, in a Spinal-Tap-like moment, ended up choosing eleven). You can see the table of contents if you click through to the official book page, where you can also read the blurb I solicited from my good buddy Ed Champion (hey, what are friends for?).

I'm being flippant, but the truth is that the eleven pieces in this book mean more to me than I can say; they are my gems, my blows against the empire, my big fish, my keepers. This book is also arranged to represent a progression of ideas and literary notions -- transgressive visions, comic visions, great writers, overrated writers -- that encapsulates something I believe about the meaning of literature in all our lives. Mostly, this book contains the eleven essays that moved me the most when I wrote them, and I hope you'll give the book a chance and see if they move you too.

I've been pondering an article by Writer's Digest blogger and editor Jane Friedman, who is "getting frustrated with people who say they're bad at marketing & promotion because they're introverts". In the age of social media, Friedman reminds us:

... introverts should be over the moon at how lucky we are to live in an age when we can effectively market and promote by

• staying at home
• using whatever tools suit our communication style best (e-mail, IM, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• crafting and controlling messages to our own satisfaction
• limiting interaction when needed

I see what she's getting at, and this is a good message for independent writers and publishers to hear. It's a message that feels relevant to me, because I've been trying to push myself to work harder on publicity and marketing since beginning an e-book publishing venture in April. I know how important this is, and I already knew (before Jane Friedman reminded me) that I wouldn't get where I needed to go without stepping way beyond my comfort zone in terms of self-marketing.

I've played poker all my life. I learned five card draw as a kid, and moved up to seven card stud in college. During the late 1990s, I started to hear about Texas Hold 'Em from my older brother Gary, a serious player who won a few tournaments around Foxwoods, Mohegan Sun and Atlantic City. I quickly became obsessed with the game myself.

My best-ever tournament showing is third place, unfortunately, but I do pretty well at table play. There's a misconception that poker is unsavory in some way, or that players risk losing a lot of money; this is only true on The Sopranos or among clueless tourists, because skillful and experienced poker players are responsible and careful, never risk more than they can spend, and come out ahead as often as not. The average suburban Joe spends more money on golf or fishing than I will ever lose at poker.

I raised all three of my kids to play Texas Hold 'Em, and they're all excellent at the game. I'm sure the experience builds character; it trains important life skills like patience, awareness. subtlety. I think there's tremendous psychological and literary significance to poker, and that's why I occasionally write articles about the game here on Literary Kicks.

An NPR review by Jessa Crispin alerted me that a book I'd been awaiting with some dread is now published.

Janet Malcolm's Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial is about the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a young woman who arranged the murder of her ex-husband Daniel Malakov, a young orthodontist in Queens, New York, in an attempt to gain full custody of their 4-year-old daughter. The reason I've been awaiting this book with some dread is that, a couple of months before this murder, I met the victim.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET: Words, words, words.

POLONIUS: What is the matter, my lord?

HAMLET: Between who?

There's a whole lot of sarcasm in this 17-word exchange. The castle is in a crisis, the Prince's mental state is uncertain, and the King's elderly aide tries to calm the tension with a bit of small talk, querying the Prince about the book he's reading. When Polonius asks "What is the matter, my lord?" he's inquiring as to the plot of the book. But Hamlet pretends to misunderstand the question, and his cutting reply -- "Between who?" -- brings the conversation out of the ethereal realm of books and into the present moment. Where, of course, plenty is the matter.

These are the books I kept. I probably threw out or lost about as many from the five years I spent earning a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the State University of New York at Albany. But these books followed me in all my life's travels, and the ideas they held did too.

The University at Albany was a good school, and I got a strong education there. I didn't appreciate the college as much at the time as I do now -- but it's hard to feel special inside an education factory with a population of 18,000.

The Philosophy department was a small, slightly quaint and dusty retreat inside the giant factory, notable for its complete lack of career focus. I liked all my professors (though I find it odd to realize, now, that I never knew any of their first names). Prof. Cadbury taught the proverbial Philosophy 101; he introduced me to Rene Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant. (These names thrilled me strangely, then, and they still do today. Call me a philosophy nerd, I don't care.)

So I've pledged to begin a new weekend feature on "philosophy, ethics and practical debate" here on Litkicks, a series intending to offer something more substantial, unusual and potentially important every Saturday or Sunday than a weekly bitch session about literary criticism.

As I ponder several possible beginnings for this series, I am overwhelmed by the realization that I have chosen a Sisyphian task, and also a thankless one. My hope is to write lyric essays, polls and questions, book reviews and explorations in various formats that will engage difficult or controversial topics often in the context of various philosophical disciplines -- existentialism, epistemology, analytic philosophy, Platonism, etc.