Lewis Lapham was at the Writers House last Thursday. Old-school guy in manner, razor-sharp political mind, master editor, whose ideology leans left and right at once, a new-monger and advocate of tradition in one tobacco-filtered baritone. The event was the first in a new annual series (funded by my and our friend Irwyn Applebaum) that will feature eminent editors and publishers. (And Irwyn was there to see the action at first hand. If you weren't there you can watch the video recording.)
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Lewis Lapham
Lewis Lapham was at the Writers House last Thursday. Old-school guy in manner, razor-sharp political mind, master editor, whose ideology leans left and right at once, a new-monger and advocate of tradition in one tobacco-filtered baritone. The event was the first in a new annual series (funded by my and our friend Irwyn Applebaum) that will feature eminent editors and publishers. (And Irwyn was there to see the action at first hand. If you weren't there you can watch the video recording.)
"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 
