Call me crazy or call me a digital anthropologist, but here you see me (well, my avatar, "Alf Fullstop") entering a poetry cafe in Second Life. Pretty nice looking place, a bit more upscale and cozy than the Bowery Poetry Club. I'm sure the coffee is better, though. I teleported to about a dozen poetry cafes, writers' hangouts, museums, digital schools, just to have a look around. It did this at 3 PM on a weekday, and there wasn't much poetry going on, but I found one reading space that was clearly set-up for an open mic. But again for now, nothing happening in the "arts & culture" areas. Nicely set up spaces but few people. Is this one of those new media solutions that turns out to be all talk and no serious action? If I ever attend a poetry reading, I'll report on it in a future entry. Some reading this will be way ahead of me--already denizens of such readings and writers' communities in SL, but for me it's new and I hardly know yet how to talk about it. I'll get there. (I'm exploring possible virtual venues for Kelly Writers House-hosted readings and seminars. SL might not be it. I know there a dozen other easily accessible virtual communities, but this one seems to be catching on quickly. At least the software is not difficult to download.)
Interested enough in SL to read more about it? Go here and see that I've made links to eight articles about it.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
