On Pacifica Radio, April 22, 1979, Susan Howe interviewed Bernadette Mayer. They discuss, among other things, Mayer's poem "Baby Come Today, October 4th" and then Mayer gives a terrific reading of that poem about giving birth. Thanks to Anna Zalokostas we at PennSound have now segmented this reading, which had previously been available as a single file. As usual during the process of segmentation, we (re)discover some gems. Mayer's reading of "Invasions of the Body Snatchers" is another such. Here is our Mayer author page, and here is a link to all the shows for which recordings survive of Susan Howe's radio show aired on Pacifica and WBAI in the late 1970s.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Bernadette Mayer on giving birth
On Pacifica Radio, April 22, 1979, Susan Howe interviewed Bernadette Mayer. They discuss, among other things, Mayer's poem "Baby Come Today, October 4th" and then Mayer gives a terrific reading of that poem about giving birth. Thanks to Anna Zalokostas we at PennSound have now segmented this reading, which had previously been available as a single file. As usual during the process of segmentation, we (re)discover some gems. Mayer's reading of "Invasions of the Body Snatchers" is another such. Here is our Mayer author page, and here is a link to all the shows for which recordings survive of Susan Howe's radio show aired on Pacifica and WBAI in the late 1970s.
"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 
