We shouldn't forget that definitive speaking is itself a chosen style, a tone, a tried-on mode. I think the aphorism is at base anti-political. A little later in the conversation, Steve Benson wrote: "I like the range offered here for definitive speaking -- a range including improvised assertion and aphorism and likely much else. In my own practice, I suppose I have been very often working out whatever I can to balance prematurity and m...aturity in the preparation for and readiness to effect utterance. One might also say 'Whoever speaks definitively speaks quixotically.'"
To which I replied: "Sometimes, Steve, you pose (posit) an ideational prematurity. And at such moments I always think: he's so amazingly definitive about that." Then:
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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 
