Commentaries - January 2009

Cell phone in the garden of exile

Alicia Oltuski, a fabulous writer (usually comic, in the Max Apple vein), tells a story about losing her father in the axis of death.

The end of the lecture

Happily I join MIT science in calling for the end of the lecture as we know it. Here’s today’s New York Times on what MIT is doing. Back in March ’08 I waxed rhetorical on this topic in “end of the lecture (redux).”

The people in cars, do they see? Do they care?

Kathleen Fraser’s ominous, disorienting prose-poem “The Cars” is the topic of the thirteenth episode of Poem

can't stop the cars (PoemTalk #13)

PoemTalk is back after a bit of a holiday hiatus. Happy to be back with episode 13 on Kathleen Fraser's disorienting prose-poem "The Cars." The piece appears in two paragraphs on a single page in Fraser's great book Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling.