My friend Cathy Crimmins died recently. Far, far, far too young. She'd had a difficult life, but there should have been lots more of it. She was always utterly hilarious, the sharpest wit I've ever known.In the late 80s we lived next door to Al and Cathy - and then Kelly too. I say "next door," and I really mean it. Or "next window." Our living room windows were three feet from each other, in two row houses on the 23rd block of Spruce Street. In the warm months, when windows were open, we heard everything going on in each other's lives. When infant Kelly was up all night (screaming for an hour at a time), sometimes I would lean out the window and talk with Cathy as she walked the baby around on her shoulder, trying to quiet her. Sometimes I would even hum the baby a lullaby from my neighborly perch. I can't remember what Cathy and I talked about on such occasions, but I'm certain it included hilarious riffs on the ironies of parenting. She was of course deliciously funny, especially at moments otherwise tough to endure.
"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 
