Saturday, March 31, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Friday, March 16, 2012
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Bill Keller on how poetry can help American political rhetoric
In August of 2011, Bill Keller wrote an essay for the New York Times Magazine in which he argued that American political rhetoric could well borrow a page from the language of poetry. Along the way he recalled that I had taught him modern poetry back in 2000 at the Wharton School's Advanced Management Program. Keller had been sent by the Times management to learn a few things about finance and "strategic planning" and whatnot and what he liked most - I'm proud of to say - was the long session on Williams, Dickinson, and Countee Cullen. LINK to the article.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
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"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 
