Earlier this autumn I wrote about the late David DeLaura, a Victorianist and long-time activist citizen of the University of Texas and of Penn - a super-energetic and hyper-sympathetic person whose sanity was Arnoldian and whose sentiment was The Man of Feeling. Now we'd done a Kelly Writers House podcast that features a 22-minute excerpt from the program we held at the House in '05 to remember him. Please have a listen. Be sure to hear Wendy Steiner tell about her dream of David and Roger Abrahams describing their heady faculty-centric politicking at UT.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
when you dream a dead friend's phone number
Earlier this autumn I wrote about the late David DeLaura, a Victorianist and long-time activist citizen of the University of Texas and of Penn - a super-energetic and hyper-sympathetic person whose sanity was Arnoldian and whose sentiment was The Man of Feeling. Now we'd done a Kelly Writers House podcast that features a 22-minute excerpt from the program we held at the House in '05 to remember him. Please have a listen. Be sure to hear Wendy Steiner tell about her dream of David and Roger Abrahams describing their heady faculty-centric politicking at UT.
"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 
