Readers of this blog will note a silence over the 4th of July weekend. Well, silence here at any rate. Around the rural Connecticut roads I ran, the martinis consumed and tennis played, good meals happily eaten with friends, there was plenty of noise, but not hereabouts. July will inevitably be a slower blog month, although stay tuned. I've plenty to say, but perhaps not daily. Meantime, I noted with pleasure that PBS' NewsHour re-ran a July 4thy piece featuring my friend and colleague Greg Djanikian talking and reading about his immigrant family (Armenian by way of Egypt). Here's a link to the video.
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
immigrant picnic
Readers of this blog will note a silence over the 4th of July weekend. Well, silence here at any rate. Around the rural Connecticut roads I ran, the martinis consumed and tennis played, good meals happily eaten with friends, there was plenty of noise, but not hereabouts. July will inevitably be a slower blog month, although stay tuned. I've plenty to say, but perhaps not daily. Meantime, I noted with pleasure that PBS' NewsHour re-ran a July 4thy piece featuring my friend and colleague Greg Djanikian talking and reading about his immigrant family (Armenian by way of Egypt). Here's a link to the video.
"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 
