Thursday, July 02, 2009
a thoughtful response
Recently I posted here a review of a book called Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic, a collection of essays on Stevens "in" Europe and Stevens "and" Europe. I was less enamored of the latter positioning, finding it a catch-all concept which netted the editors good but conceptually miscellaneous essays. Edward Ragg has written a very thoughtful response and has given me permission to make it available here (as a PDF). I love dialogues like this; Edward's collegial response (somewhat ironically) made me more confident that writing my criticism of his work was the right thing to do (rather than the more typical blandly positive review I tend to write).
"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 
