Join us for this event; rsvp to whlucid [at] writing.upenn.edu. We do remember Bob Lucid and created a web page that conveys the feelings of Bob's students and colleagues.
At the October 19, in my remembrance, I think, I will trace the intellectual-pedagogical lineage that Bob followed and brought here to Penn. A fantastic concoction of non-academic (the radical-anarchist influence of his northwest childhood and his older brother Jack who fought in Spain) and academic (the influence of his experimentalist small-college liberal arts college days and the University of Chicago of Robert Maynard Hutchins). To me it is an important and not-quite-discerned legacy and needs spelling out (I only hope not boringly).
"I always found Bob to be graceful and gentle. I remember him hosting Ginsberg and Creeley at Penn 10 years ago and showing his pleasure at just having them talk about getting into various sorts of trouble. Creeley spoke about how he liked sitting in open air toilets, Ginsberg sang the communist anthem, and Bob just made it all come together. He then held the stage with Norman Mailer and had just as much fun getting into trouble there. I would pass him by on occasion and just enjoy the short moments in common. He was complete kindness."--Josh Schuster
Above: Bob Lucid and his wife Joanne (at right) and (left) my parents, Sam and Lois. Taken in 1999.
"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 
