In a summer 1951 editorial, Ray B. West argued against political writers - writesr who chose the active life. "What...has happened to the artist who has blushed into the open?" He mentions Picasso (joined the Communist Party and ipso facto, says West, botched both the politics and the art), and Malraux (foolishly attaching himself to a political leader). His examples are all on the left.But then the clincher. "Would the cause of art or our political causes be better served if T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Faulkner were to be forced into immediate political activity?" I do know what West, who was a sympathetic liberal, was trying to do here: he wanted to give us three reactionary writers and make us thank our lucky stars that they didn't get involved in politics.
But, wait! It's 1951 and he's asking us to be happy Ezra Pound never engaged in immediate political activity? Had he forgotten or suppressed the fact that Pound had gone on fascist radio in Italy, bespoken Mussolini's cause and railed against Roosevelt and the Jews? Or is possible West didn't count this as immediate political activity?
"The fact is," West's "The Act versus the Idea"* concludes, "most intellectuals have little talent or taste for action."
* in the magazine he edited, the Western Review, published in Iowa City.
"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 
