Anthony DeCurtis had a piece in the New York Times yesterday, called "Peace, Love and Charlie Manson"--Anthony's contemplation of 1969, partly written in response to Arlo Guthrie's recent assertion that other than Woodstock there wasn't really anything else to remember from that year. Because I've been on the road a lot, and knew I wouldn't be able to take time to read the piece on paper or on screen, I decided to use Read the Words to make a quick audio version of it - read by a one of the Read the Words avatars, "Tom." Tom misses his share of pronunciation but I'm at least going to hear the piece twice tomorrow when I'm on the road again. You can hear Tom read Anthony's piece here.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
read the words
Anthony DeCurtis had a piece in the New York Times yesterday, called "Peace, Love and Charlie Manson"--Anthony's contemplation of 1969, partly written in response to Arlo Guthrie's recent assertion that other than Woodstock there wasn't really anything else to remember from that year. Because I've been on the road a lot, and knew I wouldn't be able to take time to read the piece on paper or on screen, I decided to use Read the Words to make a quick audio version of it - read by a one of the Read the Words avatars, "Tom." Tom misses his share of pronunciation but I'm at least going to hear the piece twice tomorrow when I'm on the road again. You can hear Tom read Anthony's piece here.
"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 
