My diatribe against Schindler's List (which, I'll admit, risks accusations of elitism) is the third most-often visited entry in this entire blog, and it dates back to March of 2008--a while back--and is thus not all that easily viewable other than through web searches. It's not, by any means, that my criticism is well known or well linked, but rather, probably, that there's a nation full of high-school kids who are made to watch the movie in school and are being asked to write papers about it. I wonder if any of them, upon reading my concerns, absorb that into their analyses. (If you are such a student, please let me know by clicking the little envelope below this entry.)
Thursday, November 26, 2009
third most oft-visited blog entry
My diatribe against Schindler's List (which, I'll admit, risks accusations of elitism) is the third most-often visited entry in this entire blog, and it dates back to March of 2008--a while back--and is thus not all that easily viewable other than through web searches. It's not, by any means, that my criticism is well known or well linked, but rather, probably, that there's a nation full of high-school kids who are made to watch the movie in school and are being asked to write papers about it. I wonder if any of them, upon reading my concerns, absorb that into their analyses. (If you are such a student, please let me know by clicking the little envelope below this entry.)
"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 
