Two nights ago Jessica Lowenthal and I taught a Dickinson "webinar." With 50 people watching and participating from near- and far-flung locations, we discussed two poems, #556 ("The Brain, within its Groove") and #1129 ("Tell all the Truth but tell it slant"). Some participants phoned us and made comments and asked questions that way. We had two phones working so there was some byplay and fun confusion. We also took comments and questions by email. Of course we made a recording of the once-live video and here is your link to it. (You need QuickTime Video on your computer to play this recording.)
The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly--and true--
But let a Splinter swerve--
'Twere easier for You--
To put a Current back--
When Floods have slit the Hills--
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves--
And trodden out the Mills--
This, we decided, was the true end of industrialism-era assumptions about the imagination.
"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 
