I am generally a disciplined reader. I read one book at a time. At most: two. I start and finish, start and finish. The exceptional time of year is now - late May, early June. The end-of-summer deadlines don't press quite yet (after July 4 they do and will). I am reaching for the shelf of books that piled up over the year, with more enthusiasm about reading than I ever otherwise feel. It's why I got into the work I'm in. This year I've gone especially wild. I am reading, in mostly random rotation, all these now:- Vladimir Nabokov's 1936 story, "Spring in Fialta"
- Vertov from Z to A eds. Ahwesh & Sanborn
- Joyce Carol Oates' newest collection of stories, Dear Husband,
- Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic
- Jeff Toobin's The Nine, gearing up for the Supreme Court nomination hearings
- David Milch's Stories of the Black Hills
- Walter Kirn's anti-meritocracy memoir
- Norman Mailer's huge Hitler/devil novel, The Castle in the Forest
"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 
