What are you currently reading?
- Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood
- Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963
What are your five favourite texts?
- Whitman, section 5 of "Song of Myself"
- Wallace Stevens, "Life is Motion" and countless other poems
- W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
- Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
- Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller"
What are the top five texts that you find to be the most useful for teaching?
- Whitman, the first five sections of "Song of Myself"
- Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
- William Carlos Williams, "Between Walls"
- Willa Cather, The Professor's House
- Bertolt Brecht, "On Chinese Acting"
What texts have you had the most fun researching?
- A.R. Ammons, Sphere: The Form of a Motion and his letters in the archive at Cornell University
- Thomas Merton's journals
- Joseph Cornell's art
- oral histories of the Vietnam war
What would you be if you weren't an English professor?
I hope that I would be a social worker of some kind. But really, who knows?
