When in my quick modern/postmodern American poetry survey course I teach the Beats (in two class sessions!), I briefly follow a few paths forward to see and hear where Beat poetics point. An example of one fairly narrow path leads to the rage for Maggie Estep, whose appearance on MTV (poetry on MTV--remember that?) was pretty much a sensation. Here is a recording of Estep performing "That Stupid Jerk I'm Obsessed With." Note that her final line is: "And I couldn't be happier." Try to figure out if she means that. And, yes, her bootlace is untied.
Monday, June 07, 2010
that stupid jerk
When in my quick modern/postmodern American poetry survey course I teach the Beats (in two class sessions!), I briefly follow a few paths forward to see and hear where Beat poetics point. An example of one fairly narrow path leads to the rage for Maggie Estep, whose appearance on MTV (poetry on MTV--remember that?) was pretty much a sensation. Here is a recording of Estep performing "That Stupid Jerk I'm Obsessed With." Note that her final line is: "And I couldn't be happier." Try to figure out if she means that. And, yes, her bootlace is untied.
"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 
