Today I've been listening (downloaded it to my iPod) a two-part symposium on the poetic film that was hosted by the poet and avant-garde film-maker Willard Maas in 1953 at Cinema 16. It's up at UbuWeb here. (Ubu surely has more Maas than any collection.) Ubu hosts a collection of rare audio from the Anthology Film Archives and this is one of them. Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas are part of the discussion--which is odd because neither seems familiar with avant-garde film, nor particular interested in the topic. For a better view of the Facebook posting/discussion, click on the image above.Charlie Conway added this later: "I remember reading some diatribe by Thomas against Maya Deren I think... On the inverse, it's not uncommon for relatively progressive filmmakers to have rather narrow tolerances for experimental theater. Not to mention the other inverse--that is, of course, it being impossible for me to say the last time I heard ANY filmmaker even talk about Rae Armantrout or fill-in-the-blank... I've often found it strange how a person's involvement in an avant-X usually fails to translate to that person's faith in other avant's by, well, even the merest modicum of analogy... Samuel Beckett's obsession with Schubert comes to mind... Though Schubert might be considered 'news that stays news'."
"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 
