I'm looking at a file that is an accumulation of letters, emails and documents all pertaining to a longtime search for a few frames in a documentary. The oldest item is a letter dated 1989. In all the time since, on and off, I've been trying to get a screenshot of a painting by Alice Neel featured briefly in the film Alice Neel: Collector of Souls, produced by Nancy Baer. Bear made her Neel film for TV and it was aired on PBS (part of a series called Women in Art). 
Neel did a portrait of Ronald Lane Latimer, who was born James Leippert and had about five or six pseudonyms other than Latimer. In the mid-30s Latimer published books of poems at the small press he founded, Alcestis Press. He published Williams, Moore, Allen Tate, Stevens, Robert Penn Warren (Warren's first book), Willard Maas, Ruth Lechlitner and others. Until I published by book on Stevens' poetry in the politically radical context of the 1930s, very little was known about who Latimer/Leippert really was. He was a bisexual avant-gardist living and publishing booked in Greenwich Village, while being a semi-secret Communist, while enrolled in a school preparing him for the priesthood upstate, while engaged to a young woman in Albany...while corresponding crucially with Stevens and other poets, while running away from certain demons. I was able to track him mainly because I compiled a list of his pseudonyms. I became fascinated with Latimer and tried to find photographs of him in his various phases: Columbia student, publisher-communist, then Buddhist in flowing robes in New Mexico, then expatriate in Japan, finally Episcopal priest in Florida (while living with a young man whom he told neighbors was his son--and who might have been his son, for all I know, but doubtful). I actually have a photo of him in Florida, posing, in his collar, with his large dog. And I have one of him standing on the steps of Columbia's library from 1932. But I've only had a glimpse--on TV as it aired--of the Alice Neel portrait of Latimer depicted in the Nancy Baer documentary. (There's also a painting done of Latimer in Buddhist robes done by Santa Fe-based painter Miki Hayakawa.)
For some reason I'm back on the trail, looking to be in touch with Nancy Baer, hoping to find a reproduction of the Neel portrait, hoping even to see a copy of the documentary (which is rare). Anyone with leads? Please contact me at afilreis AT writing DOT upenn DOT edu.
"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 
