Saturday, November 03, 2007

Al's pantheon, just out

That's the late Terrence Des Pres, once my teacher, intermittently my mentor, brilliant and complex and probably tragic. When I teach my Holocaust course, it's largely based on his - which was, so far as we know, the first literature course on the Holocaust ever taught at a college or university (this was the mid-1970s). Terrence wrote an op-ed Times piece about the second running of this course: find it here. Of course my students read his brilliant (but, in the end, probably wrong) book The Survivor.

Terrence Des Pres was nearly the first person whose photograph I thought of to add to "Al's pantheon," an album in my new Picasa picture site. As of this writing, the others in the pantheon are my father, Bud Cox, Bob Lucid, Halbe Brown, Dave King, and John Giannotti.