Commentaries - August 2009

Last leader of the uprising

“The Ghetto Fights,” by Marek Edelman, was published in a pamphlet called The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising by Interpress Pu

Online advising

Screenshot from Action News story on online advising, 1999.

In 1999 I was interviewed for the local television news (Channel 6, an ABC affiliate in Philly) about the online pre-freshman advising course I was teaching. Here is the recording.

'Subjects Ramble and So Should You'

Gertrude Stein

“Any sentence is in itself an organization of experience … Any subject naturally rambles around by itself and to keep to it one has to ramble around after it.” — Gertrude Stein, in an interview. For the complete transcript of the interview, go here.

Does a poem do any good?

I’m leading a session during Penn’s Homecoming Weekend on whether a poem “does any good.”

Angry middle-aged editor meets Kerouac

James Wechsler’s memoir is titled Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor. In one chapter, “The Age of Unthink,” Wechsler recalls a frustrating encounter with Jack Kerouac during a symposium on “the Beat generation” at Hunter College in 1958. Here is the text of the entire chapter.

Here’s the moment when Wechsler first encounters Kerouac: