Victor Coleman, born 1944 in Toronto, worked for the Toronto Star, Oxford University Press and then did a stint as the linotype operator for Coach House Press. Then for ten years he was the editor in chief at Coach House. And he's done a thousand other things. The other day who should step into the Writers House here in Philly but Andrew Whiteman, the Canadian songwriter and musician, longtime Toronto guy (and now in Montreal). Most people know Andrew from his band, Broken Social Scene. Anyway, Andrew is a fan of PoemTalk, he says, and spends a good deal of time listening to PennSound and Ubuweb recordings. He had with him some recordings of Victor Coleman, whom he thinks should be better known in the U.S. and generally. Well, thanks Andrew, and now we indeed have a new PennSound author page for Victor Coleman. So far we have segmented recordings of three readings, two from 1980 and one from this year.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Toronto poet, hand-delivered to KWH
Victor Coleman, born 1944 in Toronto, worked for the Toronto Star, Oxford University Press and then did a stint as the linotype operator for Coach House Press. Then for ten years he was the editor in chief at Coach House. And he's done a thousand other things. The other day who should step into the Writers House here in Philly but Andrew Whiteman, the Canadian songwriter and musician, longtime Toronto guy (and now in Montreal). Most people know Andrew from his band, Broken Social Scene. Anyway, Andrew is a fan of PoemTalk, he says, and spends a good deal of time listening to PennSound and Ubuweb recordings. He had with him some recordings of Victor Coleman, whom he thinks should be better known in the U.S. and generally. Well, thanks Andrew, and now we indeed have a new PennSound author page for Victor Coleman. So far we have segmented recordings of three readings, two from 1980 and one from this year.
"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 
