Recently we took the recording of my February 14, 2006 interview with novelist Richard Ford and segmented it into short recordings on various topics, taking one question and response at a time, one topic at a time. Here's your link to the Ford page, where you can stream or download all this audio.A few days after Katrina first hit New Orleans, Ford - who has lived in and around N.O. on and off for many years and in recent years, with his wife Kristina (a city planner), has owned a house there - wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times: an elegy for a city. When he visited us in February, a few months later, I asked him to read a passage from that piece, and he and we were surprised and moved by how difficult he found it. Click here to listen to that.
"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 
