As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.

I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.

I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.

I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.

We had much more imagery from Vietnam war. The media was not controlled. The storyline, the master narrative was not controlled. I thin it was some those images really radicalized people and shifted things to some extent. And the Viet Cong also, their tenacity.