| Sexy is in fact being brought back to Knox College. | |
Wonder what the Off Knox open mics are like? Here's The Interoffice Romance: Evan Sawdey and Andy Scott. Footage from Friday night's event at Pookie's Coffee Bar.
Well, we do serious things too. But nobody taped it.
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It's that season of tension between what you put on in the morning and what the day will do all day with its clammy cold wind and its hot flashes when the clouds clear. The jacket is on, the jacket is too much. I wish I had my jacket, I wish I'd not worn a sweater. I don't know why I'm worrying over the colors in the trees, little spots of wilting orange that look as though they'll sooner drop from the tree than wait for the whole thing to burst out singing. Hot and cold. Mostly gray, mostly windy. Like a precipice: let it fall already.
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postcard: Knox College
Please join us today, Monday, September 24 at 4 o'clock in the Alumni Room, Old Main for the first Writers' Forum of the new academic year. Featured readers will be Jake Marcet and Pat Dodge. Obviously, refreshments will be lavish.
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Herman's 4 o'clock reading on Friday went beautifully. The students established a Facebook Hache Carrillo Fan Club group after. I suppose that's how you know they liked it. Below, my introduction.
Herman Carrillo is the author of Loosing My Espanish, a novel now available in both hardcover by Pantheon Books and paperback by Anchor Books. His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Bomb, Ninth Letter and all kinds of other places. He was awarded a Sage Fellowship, a Provost’s Fellowship, a Newberry Library Research Grant, the 2001 Glimmer Train Fiction Open First Prize, and he was the 2002 Alan Collins Scholar for Fiction and the 2005 Shane Stevens Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He’s the recipient of both the 2001 and 2003 Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize for Best Fiction, a 2003 and 2006 shortlisting for the O. Henry Prize, a 2003 Constance Saltonstall Foundation Grant to an Individual Artist and the 2004 Iowa Award. He is currently a PhD candidate and instructor in the Department of English at Cornell University, where he received his MFA and MA, and he divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. And, as you know, he seems not be able to leave Knox College, either. He has just completed a gorgeous collection of short stories entitled Mala Noche and is, yes, already hard at work on another novel.
I know he is because he sits at my kitchen table every morning and every evening. He frowns at the screen and sips coffee from a glass. He brings home photographs, documentaries, overheard conversations, stringed instruments (--Home: I mean that when we invited Herman to come back to teach at Knox this fall, he was delighted, but you know writers sometimes don’t make B plans about where they’re going to live if a lease falls through and they end up crashing on a friend’s couch for however long it takes), Goodwill sweaters, avocados, steel wool and Comet, Camel Wides, cake from Uncle Billy’s, salt pork for picadillo, Bengay, student fiction, postcards, and House M.D.—all in the service, eventually, of making his wonderful books.
So it is, I sit with him in the mornings at the little kitchen table and listen to him bring more things into the house, more people and their voices, their voices in their languages, and I hear that bit from Ecclesiastes on repeat in my head: “And further…be admonished: of making many books there is no end.” Not, as you might think, because Herman is always at work—because he is—but because there are whole books at work in his words. The novel’s title, Loosing my Espanish, is itself a little book of languages—three words—a wild grammar full of what new thing is loosed through what is lost in translation, a hysterical thing that replaces a homogenous tongue with a multiplicity of imaginative mishearings. English speakers sometimes say: “don’t you mean ‘losing’?” And this too is a book, of assumptions about meaning, of the fluidity meanings that are crossed. In the collision between losing and loosing is a propagating strangeness, Oscar Delassantos’ self-reflexive sermons that end in an inability to account for or name, in history, within culture, and a naming that reminds us: one good strange word is itself prolific if it is at all readable. “Sin Titulo,” Herman tells me this morning when I ask (for I am an English speaker too), means “without title,” is the English equivalent of “untitled.” In a story in which so much has no words, here again: there is no end.
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