On Thursday evening, Lisa New returned to Penn to read from her forthcoming memoir, Jacob's Cane: One Family's Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of Baltimore and London, A Memoir in Five Generations, which is being published by Basic Books in the fall. But it was more than a reading. Lisa left Penn about 10 years ago (been that long?) to join the faculty at Harvard. She had and has lots of ties to Philly, and the room was full of family. And Erin Gautsche (KWH program coordinator) did her magical thing, producing (with help from the students) a fabulous Mediterranean spread for the reception. All in all, a memorably warm evening inside 3805 Locust on a bitterly cold night outside. The Writers House web calendar entry describes the event further, and provides links to the video recording as well as to the audio-only recording (mp3). And I took some photos also--not great in quality but they give you a sense of the spirit of the gathering.Above at right: Nancy Bentley, Lisa New, and Jim English.
"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 
