In 2001 I invited Geoffrey Hartman to speak at the Writers House about video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Hartman was one of the founders and has been the long-time director of the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimony at Yale's Sterling Library, an archive that I urge you to see if you're ever passing through New Haven. We've created a web page that gives a good deal of information about the event, with links to audio mp3's of the whole presentation. And today I released a new Kelly Writers House podcast featuring a 22-minute excerpt from the program. (Thanks to Andy White who did the editing.) Listen to the podcast 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
