I've long been a big fan of journalist Murray Dubin. No one knows more about Philly than Murray. He was recently at the Writers House and this link will take you to links to both audio and video recordings of the event. A Philadelphia native and Temple grad, Murray's publications include South Philadelphia: mummers, memories, and the Melrose Diner (1996, Temple University Press) and Living Under South Street : Photographs of South Philadelphia by Jonathan Elderfield (2003, Kehrer Verlag). Along with freelancing, he is currently co-authoring a book with Dan Biddle on America's "first" Civil Rights movement, the effort by free blacks in the North to secure true freedom for themselves in the 1800s by advocating ending discrimination in employment, transportation, education and on the baseball playing fields.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
salt o' earth Philly-style
I've long been a big fan of journalist Murray Dubin. No one knows more about Philly than Murray. He was recently at the Writers House and this link will take you to links to both audio and video recordings of the event. A Philadelphia native and Temple grad, Murray's publications include South Philadelphia: mummers, memories, and the Melrose Diner (1996, Temple University Press) and Living Under South Street : Photographs of South Philadelphia by Jonathan Elderfield (2003, Kehrer Verlag). Along with freelancing, he is currently co-authoring a book with Dan Biddle on America's "first" Civil Rights movement, the effort by free blacks in the North to secure true freedom for themselves in the 1800s by advocating ending discrimination in employment, transportation, education and on the baseball playing fields.
"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 
