"He was, for me, the most passionate of the scholars who pushed me to look beyond the easy and simple reading of literature. With cigarette ash always long on the cigarette and cascading down the front of his shirt, he thought more about the fire of words than that ash. I thought he was wonderful and stimulating and brilliant -- he was everything I loved about learning at Penn."--Elsie Sterling HowardBob Lucid died suddenly last December and I can't say I've gotten over it in any sense. In the weeks after Bob's passing, I spent a few minutes of free time here and there making a memorial web page for Bob. I pulled together some audio and video and gathered remembrances from students and colleagues.
This note from a former student stands in well for many others:
"My favorite memory of Bob Lucid is from when he led the summer in London program in 1985 that I attended. He turned up one morning for class, seemingly drunk, and announced, 'What the world really needs is a good breakfast wine!'"--Ilona Koren-Deutsch
Bob's not-quite-finished biography of Norman Mailer is being edited into a final typescript by a friend and colleague in the world of Mailer scholars.
We'll be celebrating Bob's life and legacy on Friday, October 19, 2007, at the Writers House. For more information about that event, click here.
"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 
