Mark Ray Martin Parrott is an American philosopher, writer, musician, photographer, designer, and programmer, known for his early adoption of independent, small press Publishing, and as developer of GetWiki, a wiki/blog website focusing on Philosophy and other subjects. M.R.M. Parrott's books include the "Timeless" Trilogy of novels, "Driving Home" Travelogue, the "Dynamism" Series of Philosophy and Science treatises, and a number of chapbooks of poems and short stories. Also a Philosophy professor, M.R.M. Parrott's books include detailed work on Kant and Gilles Deleuze, refutations of Objectivism, String Theory, Dark Energy, Intelligent Design and other popular ideas.

Life and Works

Born in Fairhope AL, Mark grew up in Mobile, Gulf Shores, and Pensacola on the Gulf Coast. "Metaphysically precocious", as he has said of himself, Mark questioned the validity of Religion and embraced Atheism at the age of seven, despite being raised in a Southern Baptist and Methodist family and having lost his Father at age two in a car accident. He grew up playing the drums and racing cars, then attended University of South Alabama in Mobile, pursuing Art, Poetry, Journalism and Theatre, wrote and edited for student newspaper The Vanguard, and by his second year in 1987, moved to Columbia SC and continued study at University of South Carolina, where he pursued Philosophy and Art, Film and Photography, Theatre, Music, Science, earning the BA in 1990. He continued at South Carolina in 1991, studying Philosophy, Logic and Mathematics, Photography and Theatre, composing Music, and with his thesis, What is Enlightenment?: The Foucauldean Ethos of Modernity, he earned the MA (1996), and has taught Metaphysics, Logic and Ethics.

In 1997, M.R.M. Parrott founded his small press, "rimric press", and began releasing and touring his completed books in 1998 with his 1997 novella, "To Lie Within the Moment," set on the Gulf Coast. In published essays and accounts, he argued that big publishers, traditional academic houses, as well as commercial, New York publishers, were long behind the curve of new voices and ideas. Instead of devoting years of creative time merely toward getting published in an increasingly competitive marketplace, he published all of his remaining books of Fiction, Poetry, and Philosophy, and argued philosophical and technological issues on a variety of websites, developing his work independently of both academic and commercial demands.

At forty, Mark put everything in storage and traveled by car on an open-ended road trip across the North American countries of Canada, United States and Mexico, writing about his experiences on what he called the "trip of a lifetime." He wanted to see, as he wrote in Driving Home, "as much of North America as I could get away with seeing", to find a new home, "larger and denser than Atlanta or Charlotte, more cultural than New Orleans or Miami, more diverse than any city of the South, and hopefully, liveable". After his six-month, 40,000 mile (64,000 km) journey, during which he visited more than 400 cities, national parks and attractions, he settled in Chicago IL in the Spring of 2007. There, he released his travelogue and autobiography about the journey, Driving Home: A North American Tour, along with the second book of his "Timeless Trilogy" and "Exfoliate", his fourth chapbook of poems and stories.

M.R.M. Parrott later returned to Columbia SC and resumed teaching, eventually returning to his design and programming career. By 2011 M.R.M. Parrott released his first full-length play, and formed the Blues-Rock band Fury Road using the title from Part Three of "Driving Home", and he also released the second volume of "Dynamism", "Life", along with revised editions of "Force" and "Synthetic A Priori". In 2012, he relaunched the Fury Road concept as a solo recording artist, releasing his own album of songs, "Intersections". The album features Parrott's songwriting, singing, drumming, virtual instruments and sound engineering, as well as his photography and design.

By 2015, Mark completed the "Timeless Trilogy" (2013), and worked on design and programming projects with numerous businesses, University of South Carolina. Re-locating to Charleston SC, he now works with the US Department of Defense. His 18 books and music remain commercially available from Kindle, Amazon and iTunes. Mark is said to be working on a second "Fury Road" album as well as a new novel series idea.

Classical and Contemporary

M.R.M. Parrott's written work is independent and does not fit within the traditional areas of American academia or the commercial traditions in the "New" South. Deeply influenced by the Ancient Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the European side of Modern Philosophy, much of Parrott's work has focused on Immanuel Kant. Studies of Kant, along with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and new treatises on metaphysical issues, describe a Dynamism based upon the beauty and fallibility of individuals and societies and the infinite complexity of the Universe. Ethical principles, for Parrott, are built up through the development of the social animals, derived from and applied to interpersonal situations.

Parrott's fiction and poetry works are often hybrids of many forms and traditions, where he has explored themes of "affluent decadence" and individual loneliness, time travel and scientific triumph, backdrops of "timeless" love and familial belonging. His prose is influenced by Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Austen, and his novella, To Lie Within the Moment, shows influences from Greek Mythology, Plato, and Contemporary Philosophy, along with nods to Mrs. Dalloway, Moby Dick, Albert Camus and Marcel Proust, and thriller films. In his Timeless Trilogy, works rooted in ethical dilemma and futuristic economic and geo-political theory, Parrott comments on causal paradoxes and Quantum Entanglement, present and future World Politics and History, and numerous Science Fiction ideas, with direct structural allusions to Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Aeschylus' The Oresteia Trilogy, and films such as the Peter Jackson-filmed Lord of the Rings. In Poetry and short stories, there are daring, lyrical, sometimes intentionally incoherent or juvenile, sometimes restrained and erudite forms and tales. The many varied literary snapshots within his freeform Chapbooks of poems and stories stand beside high criticism and seeming flights of fancy.

Having worked in Art, Design, Photography and other visual media, Parrott also designs and produces his books in a custom folio, making use of his own abstract photographs, publishing them through rimric press. While titles have been commercially available through retailers, Parrott has made them directly available as PDF downloads from mrmparrott.com, a site linked with rimric.com, where he published many essays and reviews on topics such as The Matrix Philosophy and the The Messiness of WikiDemocracy. Also the developer of websites and database-driven Software, in January 2004 he produced a "fork" of the software on which the popular, but troubled, Wikipedia runs. GetWiki became a topic of controversy, due to its then new XML import of pages from the online encyclopedia, as well as its unconventional licensing. Parrott's other software programs have included an XML-to-PDF ebook application once used to produce his books, SOHOdb, and other PHP/MySQL software for LAMP systems.

External Links

MRM Parrott.com (Facebook)
rimric.com
Fury Road (Facebook, ReverbNation, iTunes)
GetWiki on Facebook

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[ last updated: 2:20pm EDT - Sun, Oct 18 2015 ]

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M.R.M. Parrott

Life and Works

Classical and Contemporary

Further Reading

Selected Bibliography

Selected Discography

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