We have decisively changed the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of extinction.
I am talking about ordinary people making the link between their communities being treated as disposable and the assumption that the environments they depend on are disposable as well. What gives me hope is the kind of bridgework I'm seeing between social movements on the one hand, and young writers and artists on the other, all intent on opposing such pitiless, short-term thinking.
Since I was a graduate student, I've done a lot of journalism on the side, for The Village Voice, The Nation etc. And my greatest passion, as a reader, has always been nonfiction, with its vast, often underestimated imaginative and formal possibilities and its aura of the real. I find that combination seductive.
I also encourage my students to read literary criticism that is deeply personal yet formally inventive and intellectually expansive... books that offer unorthodox ways of doing double duty as literary criticism and as love letters to the power of literature per se.
In volume and velocity, the new media are making available testimony on a previously unimaginable scale. I'm neither as romantic about the new media landscape, nor cynical. But what's indisputable is the experimental energy that digital forms are unleashing. Among my students and among up-and-coming artists, I find myself startled by the creative responses to the technological, environmental, and political upheavals of our time.
I think it's often easier to theorize in the official codes of theory rather than to theorize lightly through scene, object, story, and incident in ways that keeps alive the sensual serendipities of language. This is not a question of being for or against theory, but rather of being suspicious of orthodoxies that concede, in advance, that what passes for theory must be signaled by a narrowing of diction, sentence rhythms, and sensual awareness. I'm in favor of surprise.
