Click here to listen to a summary of January 2011 events at the Writers House - including the several-day "North of Invention" program, a gallery exhibit of photographs by Linh Dinh, our annual "Mind of Winter" event, and the 5th birthday celebration of our Common Press. The photograph here, taken by John Carroll at the 2008 Mind of Winter program, gives you a sense of the fabulous soup we make on that wintry evening - or at least of the pleasure taken from said soup by Michelle Taransky.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
January at the Writers House
Click here to listen to a summary of January 2011 events at the Writers House - including the several-day "North of Invention" program, a gallery exhibit of photographs by Linh Dinh, our annual "Mind of Winter" event, and the 5th birthday celebration of our Common Press. The photograph here, taken by John Carroll at the 2008 Mind of Winter program, gives you a sense of the fabulous soup we make on that wintry evening - or at least of the pleasure taken from said soup by Michelle Taransky.
"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 
