 Hello everybody. Hello. Welcome to the pre-conference reception. My understanding is that the pre-pre-conference reception was last night when Jim Cates delivered a reading at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on campus. I heard it went really well. Warmed up the crowd for us. So thank you Jim for doing that. My name is Russell Valentino. I'm the Alta President and I want to welcome you to the 37th annual Alta Conference. Welcome. A big a big thank you to Leah Leone, the this year's chair of the conference organizing committee standing right there. Please thank you well. And obviously the members of the conference organizing committee of your every year do a great job. I have a few announcements. I want to just highlight a few things in the in the program. The first is tomorrow morning and I know you're all gonna be up at six and so by the time you get to this you'll be warmed up and ready to go. 8 a.m. for those of you haven't who haven't been to an Alta conference before. Bill Johnston is holding the new attendees workshop. I suppose it's a how to get the most out of your Alta experience. That's on the program so you should be able to find it. It starts at 8. And then the Alta Fellows reading is tomorrow from 5 p.m. to 6 30 and that's followed immediately by the National Translation Award and and Lucy and Strike Translation Prize reception which is at 6 30. Then we'll go off site to hold the Cafe Latino is back by popular demand last year. We had something like 85 bilingual readings which was a record 20 more than anyone could ever remember in Alta's history and this year we have 130 which is a tribute to yeah which is a tribute to the organizational skills and personal charisma of Alexis Leviton who has organized the bilingual readings for many years. And so we'll take a number of readings off site to hold this Cafe Latino which will be at La Perla Mexican restaurant. It's about a five minute cab ride I believe and the address is in the program. Then on Friday the NTA long list reading is in the evening at 6 15 followed by the favorite activity of a number of Alta attendees the Declamation which will happen at 8 30. And then the keynote we put it off till Saturday to save some of the best for last and that'll happen at 9 30 Christopher Merrill will be delivering the annual plenary address at 9 30 on Saturday and we'll have a closing reception this year. It is a ticketed event it's I hope not too steep a price I believe it's $40 and there are some tickets left and a number of students were given complimentary tickets thank you to Marion Schwartz for organizing that effort and that starts at 4 p.m. tomorrow 4 to 6 p.m. Sorry Saturday Saturday 4 to 6 p.m. Before we start some of the programming for this evening I want to introduce Johannes Britz who is the provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He's the author of more than 90 scholarly publications most of his work is being done in close collaboration with the European Union with UNESCO and a number of African governments Africa is his specialty he has acted as a consultant for a number of African governments as well as private sector firms he played a key role in the development of information ethics in Africa and co-organized the first ever Africa information ethics conference in 2007 in South Africa during 2009 he co-initiated a UNESCO and South African government funded training workshop on ethics and e government implementation in sub-Saharan Africa and in recognition of his work he was recently acknowledged as a finalist for the ethics award by the World Technology Forum please join me in welcoming Johannes Britz. Thank you very much Russell and good evening everybody I will be short I just want to welcome you all on behalf of our campus to Milwaukee on your 37th annual conference I hope all your panels your roundtable discussions your workshops and your networking will be very successful I've learned a lot already just by being here tonight I'm not in the translation business that much although I did also study theology where we did a lot of hermeneutics and translation but a lot of you are doing extremely interesting research and work I hope also that you stay here in Milwaukee would be pleasant that you will enjoy it that you will not be bothered by the weather and that you will spend some money here before you go back home actually I came here as a visiting professor in 2001 and I simply fell in love with the place and I came back permanent in January of 2005 and then I became a citizen because I said I want to vote and I want to travel and I never look back I really enjoy it here I also want to just express my gratitude Leah and my appreciation for the work that all of you are doing and I will say a few things about what I think about language and why I think it's so important specifically on our campus and the online programs that you're running on our campus if you ever think of something interdisciplinary and if you ever think of something that can make a difference on campus I always say my background in Maniwari are humanities languages I've studied six languages not that I know them all just to say how I value that I always tell people if you think of an MBA without languages you will not be successful because the world has so many languages that I do value that so much with all the disciplines we have and on languages and many times as a provost people ask you well you know what about the humanities what about languages what is the future of languages and it has my full support my children in my house we have a family of two eleven and fourteen year olds they speak Afrikaans my native language although they grew up here even though the Afrikaans is with the Wisconsin accent we can own people don't really understand them initially because it's different but it's so special and unique and if I do spelling test with my daughter it's about a translation because of my accent so she will smile and say let me see the word before I spell the word for you because I say it differently but that's just translation is much more just translating words also think languages just burn bridges or it can build bridges back to my own history in South Africa as you know the 1976 maybe you don't know that part of the history in South Africa the uprising against the apartheid regime was really activated in 1976 when it really had mass involvement based on language was a key issue that really activated the mass action through schools as Afrikaans was the language of instruction but also my own people the Afrikaner people built identity in the 18th century around language around the Afrikaans language versus English or Dutch and I do think you know again back to my own history in South Africa if you ever wanted to find solutions to problems you learn one another's language as a white person I learned Greek and Hebrew and Latin and German and Dutch and English and Afrikaans but I never learned Kosa and Zulu and Sisu too so always when I was an elevator with students and they can speak Zulu or Kosa I didn't understand them and I said wow what an empowerment they can speak Afrikaans and English and I can't speak their language so if you ever are a politician force people to learn the language where you are and that's why I tell my children if you grew up in the US you also learn Spanish because I do think it's so important and not just English so that's for me a very important part I also think there's no one we should move away I know I'm too idealistic here but I don't think one common language like English on the internet or French or whatever is the solution to a global economy I think allow people to who they are and who they want to be in South Africa we joke many times we say the official language is bad English because that's how we talk we don't care if you say he is she is we is as long as we understand one another but the respect for somebody else by speaking their language and my making a useful and a meaningful translation the work you do is a reflection of respect for other cultures and it just opens so much more in a global world when we are more respectful I'm very concerned about how many language are dying out in the world specifically in Africa where people feel kind of this I want to say stupid but that's not the right word but the sense of oh I'm so good if I can just speak English and I don't preserve my own language I think it's so important that proudness in your own language I also think if you're good at languages you just good at politics and you're good at business and you just good at understanding social and culturally other peoples and for me if I look at you and I see the cost of translations and the need for translations I tell students if you want to find a good job combine your economics or your MBA with a translation ability because there are so many opportunities if you're just smart to start your own business there are jobs in languages it is a key important role in the future of job creation and then I always tell people when they say are we on the same page I say no we're not just on the same page same handwriting and same language that means understanding enjoy your conference and thank you there for asking me to be here tonight thank you very much and enjoy it thank you so a big part of this evening's event is a celebration of the life and legacy of Michael Henry Hyme and I'm gonna talk a little bit about a book that is helping us do that in a couple of minutes first I would like to introduce Esther Allen who is going to talk a little bit about Michael and his life and work please welcome Esther Allen I just have an initial question how many people in this room knew Michael Henry Hyme personally a good percentage a very good percentage so when I hold up this cover you all recognize exactly what it shows Russell and Sean Cotter is over there and I conceived a book at Alta in Kansas City this book was conceived in a bar in Kansas City and it contains a photo of the three of us just post conception and we're all just radiant and glowing we're really happy for some reason I'm the one who got nominated to come up here and speak about the book and I just want to tell for those of you who didn't raise your hand and who might be puzzled why are who is this Michael Henry Hyme and why are we honoring him here tonight those of you who did raise your hand know perfectly well and are gonna know everything I say but for the rest of you I just wanted to speak very briefly about him about why we decided to do a book about him and about all that he gave in his life not just to this community but to the entire culture and dare I say it the entire world and I want to do that very very briefly just by telling you three or four things about Mike let's start with the story of how I met him I had obviously read a number of his books as most of you even those who might not recognize the name probably have as well Mike on his web page at UCLA where he was a professor of Slavic languages listed about 24 books and I would always look at that page and say wait but I know he translated that book and that book isn't on the page and wait why isn't that book on the page and so after he passed away in 2012 I went and did some bibliographic research and found the list of all the books that he had done and it was 61 books including titles like The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundra the Number Devil by Hans Magnus Enzenberger lots of books by Dubrov Grisich you're gonna be hearing later on a number of the books that Mike translated and many of them will undoubtedly be familiar to you if you've read anything from Eastern Europe you've probably read Mike and so one day out of the blue I get an email from this translator of so many books that I've read who I had never met before and at that point in my life I was working with Penn American Center and this email said I want to talk to you about something we must set up a meeting set up a meeting at the Penn offices and I'll come straight from the airport because I'm arriving in New York from LA on a red eye so I I was very excited to meet this famous translator and set up the meeting as I was told and made sure that the executive director was there because I'd been told to do that and Mike walked in sat down and you know how meetings go on and on Mike opened his mouth and said I want to give this organization half a million dollars to support the translation of books into English no preamble just that and none of us had ever met him before and the story is incredible in many ways it's incredible because when the money actually came in it wasn't half a million dollars it was 734 thousand dollars why the difference Mike knew that he wanted to give us the money from a certain bank account but he was totally uninterested in money in fact he sort of hated money and he just didn't know how much money was in the bank account because he couldn't be bothered to look because that would have engaged him with money which he hated so it was 734 thousand dollars where was this money from how did he happen to have a bank account with 734 thousand dollars in it well interesting story Mike was the child of a father that he never really knew because his father was a Hungarian poet composer a Hungarian composer of gypsy tunes and his father like many people from outside the United States enrolled in the U.S. Army during World War two to gain citizenship but also to defend America and was killed and Mike's mother received a death benefit from the U.S. government and she didn't want to spend the money it was sacred money it was the father's death money she invested it she never touched it no one ever touched it and that was the money that Mike donated in 2003 to support translation to date the Penn translation fund which is now called the Penn Hyme translation fund and there's another footnote there the one condition of Mike's donation was that it be absolutely anonymous so even those of you who raised your hands when I asked if you knew Mike Hyme were undoubtedly really surprised to learn in 2012 when he passed away that he was the donor of the Penn translation fund because nobody knew Mike hated money and didn't want to be associated with money in any way including as the donor of this incredible fund so Mike's donation of that fund makes us wonder who was this man what kind of person was he how what else did he give well for one thing he gave unstintingly of his time for seven years not just to give the money for the fund which he regarded as nothing but to set up the fund to establish its functioning to make sure that it worked well to make sure that was effective in promoting the work of young translators to make sure that it was effectively getting more work published in translation in English in the United States and I regard the fund as being a sort of constellation of things that happened around ten years ago that just really jump-started translation again in the United States if you think about it words without borders is celebrating its 10th anniversary archipelago books is celebrating its 10th anniversary there's just if you if you want to think about the number of translation oriented projects that began in the last 10 or 12 years it's sort of amazing and I think Mike is one of the catalysts of all that energy by by just showing up with this money and saying this is really important and I'm gonna do something about it what else can I tell you about Mike he spoke 18 languages he didn't translate from all of them because when he felt that there were really good translators working in the language he didn't want to impinge on their territory so he understood Polish well but he never translated from Polish because there were a lot of people working in Polish that he admired he understood Romanian but he translated very little from Romanian because he felt that that was being handled well and there were a lot of languages that he spoke but but but didn't bother translating from he translated from about 10 languages depending on whether you think Serbo curation is one or two and that's not all he did he gave the world the snow clone the award that I owe to Ellen Elias Bershak and the end to Sean Cotter who wrote an incredible essay about it do all of you know what a snow clone is it's a fantastic thing the unbearable lightness of being think about how many times you've seen that repeated the unbearable lightness of being the unbearable whiteness of Portland right how many headlines how many different permutations of that that's a linguistic phenomenon known as a snow clone it's not that easy to unleash a snow clone into the language my kind gave English a snow clone he gave translation 734 thousand dollars he gave us 61 books and he gave us one more thing and then I'll stop many of you have probably read Raymond Carver the last story that Raymond Carver ever wrote was about the death of Chekhov and it was sort of interesting because Raymond Carver himself died not long after writing the story so you can't help but read it as being about Raymond Carver's own death because that's sort of you know that the echoes and resonances are too strong to avoid that reading someone had said something to me about that story a long time ago and when we were doing this book as as Sean was looking into all the permutations of the unbearable lightness of being I thought let's look into this Carver thing so I looked more closely at this Carver story which is called the errand and I discovered that every single place in this story where any of the Russian characters in the story speaks and of course Chekhov speaks in the story Chekhov circle Chekhov's wife Olga Knipper they're all speaking throughout the story the words are taken word for word from Michael Henry Himes translations of Chekhov and his circle and his letters 28 sentences all together in the story they sort of the pivotal heart of the story is Michael Henry Himes work so when I found that I knew Mike had given us a lot I didn't also I didn't realize that he had also given us Raymond Carver's last story and I was a little I didn't quite know what to do with that and I decided look we read the story as being about Carver's death even though it's about Chekhov's death I think we can also read the story as being about Michael Henry Himes and all that he gave us so I read that Carver's story now when I read it as a tribute to him and that was why we did this book to pay tribute to somebody who's really affected all of our lives and you'll hear a lot more about him in the next in the next few minutes and you're all by the way all those of you who knew him and raised your hands you're all invited to come up and talk about him because everybody has a Michael Henry Himes story and we want to hear all of them so thank you very much. So think about if you have a story not right this minute because we're going to do one other thing before that and in order to do that I want to invite a few people up here let me see what the list is I need some pages I need some pages looks like we've got Olga Buhina and Sean Cotter, Alex Zucker, Sarah Novich, Esther Allen, Chad Post, Ellen Elias Bursach, Jen Grots, I think that's everybody come on up here and we're gonna do our best to read around this mic so I guess I should tell you a word about this should I yeah they're there okay great thank you so thank you for putting that there so some time ago I was asked to do a reading in Mike's place this was just after he had passed away and I would have much preferred that he was there to do it but I said okay and I didn't really want to fill it up with my words so I thought okay I want to somehow give the stage to him but I didn't have enough time to really do it well and doing it well I thought would have been compiling a number of texts that were translations that he had done or those excerpts from translations that he had done asking a number of friends to read from them in something like a compelling manner and so that's what we did and so we're going to read from Sean is going to be reading from the Encyclopedia of the Dead no that's is that right yeah so Sean is reading from the Encyclopedia of the Dead Alex is reading from the book of laughter and forgetting Sara is going to read from the Ministry of Pain that's a Dubrovka Ugrashich book Olga is going to be read from a delightful little children's book called Uncle Fedja his dog and his cat I'm gonna read from too loud a solitude Chad is going to be reading from dancing lessons for the advanced in age the Bohemil Krabel book Esther Allen is going to read from one of the last stories that Mike translated it's called the student it's a Chekhov story Jen is going to be reading from another wonderful Dubrovka Dubrovka Ugrashich book called the forwarding the stream of consciousness and let me see did we get them all no one more Ellen is going to read from a different section of the Encyclopedia of the Dead and that's it that's everybody okay and I believe I can just let people do this there once was a little boy named Fedja his mother and father called him Uncle Fedja because he was very serious he could read by the time he was four and make soup by the time he was six he was a good little boy and his parents loved him 17 years after the death and miraculous resurrection of Jesus the Nazarene a man named Simon appeared on dusty roads at crisscross Samaria and vanished in the desert beneath fickle sands a man his disciples called the Megas and his enemies derided as the Borbaraite the bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia the assassination of Iende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Iende the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten life it's sometimes so confusing that you can't be certain what came first and what came later by the same token I don't know whether I'm telling that story to get to the end or the beginning of things since living abroad I've experienced my native language which as the Croatian poet's ecstatic verse would have it rustles rings resounds and rumbles thunders roars reverberates as a stammer a curse a maldiction or as babble drab phrase-bongering devoid of meaning confeder's only problem was this his mother didn't like animals especially cats and because uncle Feder loved animals he and his mother often quarreled one day uncle Feder was walking downstairs eating a sandwich when he saw a cat sitting on the windowsill still a big cat a gigantic tabby cat the student sighed and grew pensive still smiling Vasily says suddenly burst into sobs herself and tears large and abundant rolled down her cheeks and she shielded her face from the fire as if ashamed of them and Lucaria her eyes still fixed on the student flushed and the look on her face grew heavy and tense like that of a person holding back great pain the farmhands were returning from the river and one of them on horseback was close enough so that the firelight flickered over him the student bade the widows goodnight and moved on and again it was dark and his hands began to freeze a cruel wind was blowing winter had indeed returned and it did not seem possible that the day after next would be Easter some claimed that he'd come from a miserable Sumerian village named Jita others that he was from Syria or Anatolia just like I come here to see you young ladies I used to go to church to see my beauties well not exactly to church I'm not much of a churchgoer but to small shop next to the parish house a tiny little place where a man by the name of Altman sold second hand sewing machines dual spring Victroles from America and minimax fire extinguishers this story does not begin abruptly in Medias res but gradually as one night falls in the woods they are dense oak wood so dense that array of the setting sun breaks through the tree trap tree tops only here and there for a moment at the whim of a fluttering leaf then drops to the ground like a spot of blood and disappears immediately the girl does not notice it anymore than she notices the day fading the darkness coming on the minister hated poets they respected him they were attracted by his antipathy poets are like children there is only one thing they cannot stand antipathy Persia was a special case a bastard and a sycophant like the others true but one who peddled his wares honestly even gave an occasional factory reading the reason the minister so despised poets was that poetry for him was like the mumps or the measles something you got over when you were young besides the only poetry that ever meant anything to him were the lyrics of the hit tunes he grew up with Vanda would squeal with delight or giggle as if tickled whenever he sang be my love your dainty little hand you only love once this a me mucho domino and other favorites of his youth he didn't need self-styled poets shoving their creations in his face the few books of poetry he'd been forced to read at the pedagogical Institute had left no trace on him what good were they in fact he took a dim view of literature in general with one exception andridge andridge had won the Nobel Prize he was world famous that counted for something she's absorbed in something else she's following the vertiginous leap of a squirrel whose long tail glides along a tree trunk swiftly giving the impression of two animals chasing each other identical in movement and speed yet different the first the real squirrel is sleek and reddish-brown the second following close behind has longer lighter colored fur they are not thinks the girl more or less they are not twins they are sisters they have the same father and the same mother just as the three of them Hannah Miriam and Bertha that is herself are three sisters with the same father and the same mother and look like one another yet are different Hannah and Miriam for example have black hair pitch black while she Bertha has red hair bright red and braided in such a way that it looks a little like a squirrel's tail such are the girls thoughts as she wades through the moist leaves and evening falls on the woods in times when history still moved slowly events were few and far between and easily committed to memory they formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life nowadays history moves at a brisk clip a historical event though soon forgotten sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty no longer a backdrop it is now the adventure itself an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life that's no way to eat a sandwich the meat never touches your tongue take over the bottom slice of bread yet the sandwich meat side down it will taste better uncle Peter tried it the sandwich did taste better sometimes the minister gave his poets a dose of their own medicine not long ago one of them had come come to him wailing and moaning about how he had nowhere to live how he had a wife and children to support on all but nonexistent royalties and so on and so forth and the minister had glanced up at the poor poetic creature and said as calmly as you please what do you expect we're all pawns on the chessboard of life that shut him up all right and now this check another day another scandal you won't believe this baby but he's locked himself in his room and won't answer the phone and yesterday right in front of Persia he threatened suicide why would he want to kill himself asked Vonda a check how should I know they're a bunch of babies those poets while the gypsy girls were with me Jesus and Lao Tse had been standing together in the drum of my hydraulic press now that I was alone again wound in wires of flesh flies but left to my own desire devices and the routine of my work I saw Jesus as a tennis champion who just who has just won his first Wimbledon and Lao Tse is a destitute merchant I saw Jesus in the sanguine corporeality of his ciphers and symbols and Lao Tse in a shroud pointing at an unhewn plank I saw Jesus as a playboy and Lao Tse as an old gland abandoned bachelor I saw Jesus raising an imperious arm to damn his enemies and Lao Tse lowering his arm like broken wings I saw Jesus as a romantic Lao Tse is a class classicist Jesus is the flow Lao Tse is the ebb Jesus as spring Lao Tse is autumn Jesus as the embodiment of love for one's neighbor Lao Tse is the height of emptiness Jesus as progressus ad futurum Lao Tse as regressus ad originem the student's thoughts turn to Vasilisa if she wept it meant the things that happened to Peter on that terrible night had some relevance for her he turned back the lone fire glimmered peacefully in the dark and there were no longer any people near it again he thought that if Vasilisa wept and her daughter was flustered then clearly what he just told them about events taking place 19 centuries earlier was relevant to the present to both women and probably to this backwater village to himself and to everyone on earth since we can no longer assume any single historical event no matter how recent to be common knowledge I must treat events dating back only a few years as if they were a thousand years old in 1939 German troops marched into Bohemia and the Czech state ceased to exist in 1945 Russian troops marched into Bohemia and the country was once again declared an independent republic but he must have had a reason baby said Vanda compassionately putting her arms around him and planting a noisy kiss on his biceps she was trying to think of the reasons why famous people not necessarily Czechs had committed suicide but the minister pushed her away and scratched the place she had just kissed he claims somebody stole a novel he wrote his masterpiece he says another lunatic why don't they watch who they invite but that's a perfectly good reason baby said Vanda nibbling on the minister's ear if he goes through with it the shuttle really hit the fan how will we know pushes up there banging on his door this very minute Vanda pictured the fat check for some reason she was sure he was fat taking off his tie a blue tie with red stripes fashioning it into a noose throwing it over a light fixture testing whether it would hold and then he gave the cat bite and ask how do you know my name I live in the Arctic I can see everyone in the house from up there unfortunately my attic is closed for repairs at that moment at the moment and I have no where to go who told you to speak Uncle Fede asked which is why sometimes I feel that here surrounded by Dutch and communicating in English I'm learning my native language from scratch it's not easy that's all the words regurgitate vowels and consonants it's a losing battle I failed to convey what I wanted to say and what I do say sounds empty I come out with a word but can't sense its substance or else I'll sense a certain substance but can't find the word for it anyway I went on pushing the green button and the red button until at last I've thrown the final arm full of repulsive repulsive bloodstained paper into the drum cursing the butchers from cramming my cellar full of the stuff yet blessing them for bringing me Jesus and loud say so in the last bail I put a metaphysics of morals by Emmanuel Kant and the flesh flies went berserk attacking the last bits of dried and drying blood with such gluttony that they failed to notice the drum wall crushing and compacting them separating them into membranes and cells I fastened the compacted cube with wire and wheeled it out surrounded by what was left of the still crazed flies to join the 14 other bales all of which were also strewn with flies green or metallic blue flies shining on every black red drop of blood each bail like a gigantic site of beef hanging from a hook in a provincial butcher's shop at hot high noon and this Altman he had a sideline delivering beauties to pubs and bars all over the district and the young ladies would sleep in Altman's backroom or when summer came they set up tents in the garden and the dean of the church would take his constitutional along the fence and those show offs had put a patrol out there and sing and smoke and tan themselves in their bathing suits at that moment at that very moment the girl in the woods takes the small round mirror in the mother of pearl frame out of her pocket and brings it up to her face first she sees her freckled nose then her eyes and red squirrel tail hair and then her face disappears slowly gradually first the freckles on her nose then the nose itself then the eyes her breath spreads across the mirror like a thin film across a green apple but she continues to hold the mirror in front of her face because now she sees the woods and the swaying oak leaves a bird flies up out of a bush suddenly but noise noiselessly a tiny butterfly the color of rust and faded leaves vanishes against the trunk of an oak a deer comes to a sudden standstill and as if stunned only to dart off again and in an instant later a dead branch falls from a tree a spider's web with a drop of dew refracting a blood red Sunbeam begins to quiver a pine cone has fallen silently a branch snapped without a sound as if made of ashes the people showed great enthusiasm for Russia which had driven the Germans from their country and because they considered the Czech Communist Party its faithful representative they shifted their sympathies to it I looked up and realized that Jesus and Lao Tse had disappeared up the whitewashed stairs like the turquoise and velvet violet skirts of my gypsy girls before them and looked down and realized that my picture was empty and so it happened that in February 1948 the communists took power not in bloodshed and violence but to the cheers of about half the population and please note the half that cheered was the more dynamic the more intelligent the better half if the old woman wept it was not because he was a moving storyteller but because Peter was close to her and her whole being was concerned with what was going on in Peter's soul I keep wondering whether a language thus maimed a language that has never learned to depict reality complex as the inner experience of that reality may be is capable of doing anything at all telling stories for instance it cannot be denied that he himself contributed to the confusion answering the most innocent questions about his origins with a wave of the hand broad enough to take in both the neighboring Hamlet and half the horizon a sight for sore eyes it was a heavenly site eaten on earth which is why the dean took all those inspection tours along the fence that and the rotten lucky head with his priests picked up a word here and there the cat replied and I once lived with a professor who study animal language you are lost without language those days you could be made into a head or a color or even a doormat come and live with me uncle Fedes suggested baby wonder whispered all goose pimples her hand inching down to the minister's wand but finding a limp blob in its place Vanda was disappointed she loved everything connected with those unmentionables they lifted her out of the everyday world and into an erotic Disneyland where male wizards turned her into something she felt closer to her true being she loved the magic transformation of that silly little fleshy blob into a smooth pink shiny wand she loved breasts popping up like balloons nipples springing out of hiding wombs widening in wonder at its approach they were the only toys we grown-ups have left she thought and lately they seemed more and more inclined to break in her hands she turned to the wall and with her thumb in her mouth wondered when it would be time to throw the toy into the well he won't do it babe she said softly and all at once he felt a stirring of joy in his soul and even paused for a moment to catch his breath the past he thought is tied to the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other and he felt he had just seen both ends of that chain he had touched one end and the other had moved so i stumbled up the stairs on all threes my head spinning from too loud a solitude and not until i'd made it to the back alley and breathed some fresh air in my lungs could i pick myself up again and get a firm grip on the picture for my readers thank you very much so as promised we wanted to open this up to anybody who wants to make any tell any stories about michael haim before we do that i want to mention that the book the creature spawned in a bar in kansas city is actually on sale there in the corner for anybody who wants it i believe it's a special sale price for this event and they do take credit cards if you if you want and it's been published by open letter books i believe chat post was in the bar also at the same time when this was happening and may have been at a neighboring table this was before he went out to ride the mechanical bull so it's true isn't it and so when he heard about the project he was in anyway so if anyone would like to come up and say anything about michael please feel free i do want to start by saying i once asked him about his motivation for for studying other languages and he said if there was a the shortest answer he ever gave i believe if there was a a ride or worth translating in that language then the language was worth learning