Back in December of '04 I was finishing up another semester teaching English 88, my course on modern and contemporary American poetry. In the final "chapter" of the course I ended by having the students read two contemporary poets - Jena Osman and Kenneth Goldsmith. Then, as it happened, both of these people were in the Writers House at the same time, so I asked my students to come back to the House for a special evening session, and we spent an hour or so talking with Jena and Kenny. We recorded it, and you can find mp3's and a summary of the discussion here.It will help to know that the person being discussed in the middle of the excerpt is Jackson Mac Low. He gets named after a while but at first it might not be clear. The session took place on the very day that Mac Low died.
Today we released a new episode in our series of PennSound podcasts featuring a 16-minute excerpt from the Osman-Goldsmith. Here is a link directly to the podcast recording.
"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 
