Rock journalist Alan Light visited the Writers House in September 2007 and gave a talk about his book The Skills to Pay the Bills, The Story of the Beastie Boys. Light is former editor in chief of Vibe, Spin, and Tracks magazines, and a former senior writer for Rolling Stone. He is also the editor of Tupac Shakur and The Vibe History of Hip Hop.I just completed a Kelly Writers House podcast which features a 20-minute excerpt from Light's talk. Here's a link to the podcast mp3. And here's a summary of the event, and other links, from the Writers House web calendar.
"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 
