Poet Linh Dinh is on the road now - I should say the railroad; he's taking trains from the east coast to Chicago, down to Austin, out to L.A., giving poetry readings along the way and taking photographs for his superb blog Detainees. His blog's photos depict the American economy as keenly as any medium I've seen/read. When I heard Linh would be traveling by train I immediately fantasized my own version of such a mode: reading a stack of books, and writing. No, said Linh, I can't do that. I will just sit and stare.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
transcontinental hypnotics
Poet Linh Dinh is on the road now - I should say the railroad; he's taking trains from the east coast to Chicago, down to Austin, out to L.A., giving poetry readings along the way and taking photographs for his superb blog Detainees. His blog's photos depict the American economy as keenly as any medium I've seen/read. When I heard Linh would be traveling by train I immediately fantasized my own version of such a mode: reading a stack of books, and writing. No, said Linh, I can't do that. I will just sit and stare.
"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 
