Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body,Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost scratched that one on a styrofoam cup with his fingernail.
so I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life.
Those who have no courage or honor consider themselves free,
but they are slaves.
I am flying on the wings of thought, and so,
even in this cage, I know a greater freedom.
One of the things we worried about a little in leaving Iowa and moving here was that we would really miss being with writers, and that if there even were people writing in English in Holland they would be far-flung and hard to find. (I was all set to start stalking Harry Mulisch, who I had heard frequented a local pub here in Haarlem, but it turns out he moved to Amsterdam long ago.)
If anyone's interested in moving to Austin for a year for a creative writing
teaching gig at Texas State University in San Marcos (twenty minutes outside
of Austin), email me directly (cristina at cristinahenriquez dot com) and I'll give you more info.
He looked up and saw a small hole in the dike through which a tiny stream was flowing. Any child in Holland will shudder at the thought of a leak in the dike! . . . That little hole, if the water were allowed to trickle through, would soon be a large one, and a terrible inundation would be the result. Quick as a flash he saw his duty . . . His chubby little finger was thrust in almost before he knew it. The flowing was stopped! "Ah!" he thought, with a chuckle of boyish delight, "the angry waters must stay back now! Haarlem shall not be drowned while I am here!"
Haarlem was not drowned. The little boy stayed at the dike all night, too cold even to whistle and attract the attention of passersby, until he was found in the morning and the hole was plugged. Thus, in Hans Brinker or, The Silver Skates (1865), Mary Mapes Dodge told the legend of the sluicer's son who became "The Hero of Haarlem." The practical Dutch pointed out that the story was not true and technically quite implausible. But Americans visiting The Netherlands invariably asked to see the place where the little boy had put his finger in the dike.
The first picture is a side street around here, and the second is Gedempte Raamgracht, our street.
That's something I tore from yesterday's paper.
The lovely Rebecca Johns and her debut novel, Icebergs, have been named a finalist for the 2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. She joins fellow Goat Daniel Alarcon as a PEN/Hemingway finalist.
The PEN New England site hasn't officially posted the news, but former Dallas Morning News book critic Jerome Weeks announced it on his blog, BookDaddy. So I'm breaking the news here.
Unconfessed by Yvette Christianse was the other finalist, and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain took home the prize.
I discovered the following piece while sorting through my files in preparation for our impending move. It is not dated, but the handwriting style suggests my late teens, placing this somewhere in the mid 80s -- probably 1986, when The Fly came out. I was struck, on rereading it, by certain themes that have stayed with me and was helpless to resist indulging in a bit of Freudian self-analysis. The pre-Saunders Saundersesque style, which I figure must have been the Vonnegut at work in my lizard brain, is also notable and recalls a whole absurdist period in my writing which I had nearly forgotten about. It is a cliche-ridden waste product of a flabby mind blasted to ruin from tens of thousands of hours of television and, probably, a multi-drug hangover. But I decided to type it out and post it in the hopes that others may be inspired to come forward with their own early writing efforts. The more glib, awkward, juvenile, or ridiculous, the better!
"Our founders came on the Mayflower, the Arabella, and the early clipper ships. But there were other boats, too. There was the Amistad and her cargo of kidnapped Africans, who commandeered the ship to sail home to Africa, but who were seized in Long Island Sound and imprisoned in New Haven.
On this very day 165 years ago, a young man named Kinna, who had been part of that rebellion, sent a letter from prison to our own John Quincy Adams, who had retired from public life at home in Massachusetts.
Kinna pleaded with Adams to help the 36 captives from his ship to earn their freedom. Adams took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court and won.
As a gesture of thanks and respect, the Africans gave Adams a Bible, called the Mendi Bible, after their tribal homeland.
I took the oath this morning with my hand resting on that same Bible -- and with my resolve strengthened by that same legacy."
And, another weird thing, I'm on a professional listserv for legal writing, and the posters were having an argument over a posting referencing Jesus and praying for the Muslims and what not, and someone posted this:
"The second is to share from a book that I read about a theologian's ruminationswhile on a lengthy pilgrimage in Spain. She told the story of someone she had counselled who had suffered abuse at the hands of a religious authority figure. Expecting that person to be bitter or angry, she found that he had a remarkablegenerosity of spirit. He told her that he believed that in general, everyonedoes the best that he/she can. She observed and he conceded that a person'sbest may not, objectively, be very good. Think about it. If you look at the world as filled with flawed people who are,in general, doing the best that they can, it changes so much. Your students whodon't perform as well as you would like, your colleagues who annoy you, the check-out person at the grocery who doesn't know your celeriac from your rutabaga--they're all doing the best that they can with the talents and abilityand decision-making skill they have in that moment. Wouldn't you appreciate itif the rest of the world thought that about you?"
Basically, I thought it was a neat coincidence, and as much as I would like to get on the listserv and post the name and title of the book (with an Amazon link), I thought that would be pretty tacky.
So, I thought I'd put it up on Earthgoat to get the weird sense of a ours being a very small world out of my system.
And to make me feel like writing is still important in our Internet and television age.
We were going to do another Christmas album, then thought maybe an EP would be good enough, but in the end we managed only a single. But whatta single, ladies and gentlemen!
Perhaps at once the most visible and mysterious member of our class, Fid graced us with her humor and irrisistible English accent -- not to mention those compact, poetic stories -- in between gigs in Africa. She was a Citizen of the World, then she was at Iowa, then she was off again to the Heart of Darkness. What's she been up to these past few years? Let's find out.
We were back in the IC this weekend and managed to see a lot of folks, most of them we found to be drinking. Our first time there with no car, we took the Airport Shuttle, which was driven by a small, elderly man who was quite capable of finding the most circuitous, lengthiest routes to familiar places, such as, -- after a few stops east of town having come into town from the west -- the Bostick Guest House, where we were to stay.
