Kelly Writers House Fellows 2009 is both a seminar and a public program featuring three eminent writers. This spring we'll be visited by Robert Coover, Joan Didion, and Mary Gordon. I've put up the beginnings of the seminar site. Choosing four or five works by Coover and Didion each was very difficult, and I only hope I made good choices. Are my Coover selections too basic/easy? I just re-read The Universal Baseball Association of J. Henry Waugh, Esq. and realized once again what a fine introduction to experimental narrative it is. And Didion's The Book of Common Prayer! What sentences! And Miami, with its watery paragraphs. Florida itself! We'll read both of Mary Gordon's recent memoirs - her early '90s grappling with her father, he who wasn't really anything he had told her he was, a turn that threatens her own writing, the very writing we are reading. And, instead of reaching back to the well-known early novels (e.g. The Company of Women) I've decided that we should read Pearl, the novel that comes between the memoir of the father and the very recent memoir of the mother, Circling My Mother. The programs are free and open to the public. Check out the schedule and let us know if you want to attend: 215 573-9749.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Coover - Didion - Gordon
Kelly Writers House Fellows 2009 is both a seminar and a public program featuring three eminent writers. This spring we'll be visited by Robert Coover, Joan Didion, and Mary Gordon. I've put up the beginnings of the seminar site. Choosing four or five works by Coover and Didion each was very difficult, and I only hope I made good choices. Are my Coover selections too basic/easy? I just re-read The Universal Baseball Association of J. Henry Waugh, Esq. and realized once again what a fine introduction to experimental narrative it is. And Didion's The Book of Common Prayer! What sentences! And Miami, with its watery paragraphs. Florida itself! We'll read both of Mary Gordon's recent memoirs - her early '90s grappling with her father, he who wasn't really anything he had told her he was, a turn that threatens her own writing, the very writing we are reading. And, instead of reaching back to the well-known early novels (e.g. The Company of Women) I've decided that we should read Pearl, the novel that comes between the memoir of the father and the very recent memoir of the mother, Circling My Mother. The programs are free and open to the public. Check out the schedule and let us know if you want to attend: 215 573-9749.
"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 
