Where is my home?

I didn't actually touch him, but I got awfully close to Vaclav Havel during the ceremony in which WMU gave him and Arnost Lustig honorary doctorates.

The middle three dudes, from left to right are Havel, the program director, and Lustig:

It's a strange phenomenon--to witness history and have an awareness of it at the same time.

And then there's one's own personal history. Friday night I kicked off the student reading series.

I had written a new piece the night before about my grandmother and her body. The theme of this year's program is home, homeland (security) and its relation to artistic ambition. We've been listening to people talk about Czech and Central European national identity in various lectures and conversations, and the idea of home and homeland as a woman, a mother, a feminine figure keeps coming up. And this notion has invariably been created and perpetuated by dudes. So I started to wonder, "what must home be for a woman?" Then I thought about Virginia Woolf's quote "As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." So then it occurred to me that the only home a woman knows, really, is her own body, which is in large part, psychically created by her own mother. Are you following me here? So that's why I went back--remembering my own sense of a physical self through my mother's mother.

The new piece was well received. Today I'm working on more new stuff. I'm looking forward to a second workshop with Lopate.

Just for kicks, here's Kiki sitting on the roof of our local.

He's such a good kid. He kept me from joining a stag party of 20 tattoed Brits yesterday afternoon. We went home and ate curried chicken with dhal and more beers out of small glasses. I am like fucking MacGyver in that pathetically underequipped kitchen. Then we watched Germany pummel Portugal and turned in. We're both recovering from weird colds. Beer and ice cream seem to be helping.

I miss my Sunday NYT and CBS Sunday morning. I think I'll check them out online. Happy Sunday!