Here is a recording of the hour-long interview / conversation with Art Spiegelman I conducted yesterday. You'll have a choice here: you can watch a video recording; or you can download or stream an audio-only mp3. Spiegelman was here as a Writers House Fellow. Art spent three hours with the 20 undergraduates in my Writers House Fellows Seminar, then gave a public presentation ("Comix 101") to about 120 people jammed into the KWH Arts Cafe, then joined a small group of us (including the comix genius Charles Burns) for home-cooked dinner in the Writers House dining room, then came back the next morning for the discussion you will see and/or hear when you click on the link above. Do, please, and let me know what you think. Spiegelman's new book, Breakdowns, will be published in October 2008.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
singing disharmony with Ignatz
Here is a recording of the hour-long interview / conversation with Art Spiegelman I conducted yesterday. You'll have a choice here: you can watch a video recording; or you can download or stream an audio-only mp3. Spiegelman was here as a Writers House Fellow. Art spent three hours with the 20 undergraduates in my Writers House Fellows Seminar, then gave a public presentation ("Comix 101") to about 120 people jammed into the KWH Arts Cafe, then joined a small group of us (including the comix genius Charles Burns) for home-cooked dinner in the Writers House dining room, then came back the next morning for the discussion you will see and/or hear when you click on the link above. Do, please, and let me know what you think. Spiegelman's new book, Breakdowns, will be published in October 2008.
"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 
