Home Worlds of Letters, Iowa City Public Library, Video, September 7, 2005

Reference URL

Add tags

Comment

Rate

To link to the entire object, paste this link in email, IM or document

To embed the entire object, paste this HTML in website

To link to this page, paste this link in email, IM or document

To embed this page, paste this HTML in website

Worlds of letters, Iowa City Public Library, September 7, 2005

Worlds of Letters, Iowa City Public Library, Video, September 7, 2005

1 of 2

View Description

small (250x250 max)

medium (500x500 max)

large ( > 500x500)

Full Resolution

This page

All

Subset

Link
Text

Text Search...

Worlds of Letters, Iowa City Public Library, Video, September 7, 2005

File Format:
Link to Web File

Object Description

Rating
Title	Worlds of letters, Iowa City Public Library, September 7, 2005
Creator	Hemmerechts, Kristien, 1955- Thida, Ma, 1966- Rao, Mani Fatah, Sherko, 1964-
Creator - Nationality	Belgian Burmese Indian Chinese German
Contributor	Ferrer, Hugh
Date Original	2005-09-07
Description	Kristien Hemmerechts, of Belgium, describes the difficulty of describing and identifying Belgian literature. First, she states that there are three official languages in Belgium; Dutch, French and German. She observes that it is unclear whether literature written in the different languages should be considered as separate or as all part of the Belgian tradition. Hemmerechts closes by explaining that some authors are state sponsored in Belgium or the Netherlands. Burmese author Ma Thida opens by explaining that in Burma most authors are viewed as enemies of the state but that non- military citizens see great merit in Burmese authors’ works. Thida describes the rigorous censorship process that written works must undergo and that authors have now learned to include subversive material hidden within their texts. Consequently, most Burmese writing is very serious and is the prominent method the public stays informed. Indian and Chinese author Mani Rao discusses the difficulty of self-identity for people from her part of the world. First she describes the multi-faceted traits of a classical Chinese dragon as an illustration of mixed heritage. She goes on to describe the difficulty of having a distinct cultural perspective in light of this mixed heritage. Rao purposes that a multi-cultural identity is still an identity and that in the end all cultural identity is subjective. Sherko Fatah from Germany discusses the difficulty and lack of interest for contemporary writing in Germany. He describes differences between Germany and the United States in their respective approaches to burgeoning writers. Among these differences, is the fact that German universities rarely invite authors to their campuses and the rarity of authors having agents. Fatah concludes by stating while there are few institutional routs for a beginning author to take there are inroads one may take.
Note	While in attendance, the video does not include Sherko Fatah reading from his paper which is included in the attached PDF.
Venue	Iowa City Public Library
Topical Subject (LCTGM)	Authors Writing
Personal Name Subject	Hemmerechts, Kristien, 1955-; Thida, Ma, 1966-; Rao, Mani; Fatah, Sherko, 1964-
Geographic Subject	United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City
Chronological Subject	2000-2010
Transcription	IWP Panel: “Worlds of Letters” Iowa City Public Library September 7, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp Kristien Hemmerechts (Belgium) Living in Belgium has taught me one thing: it is virtually impossible to explain my native country to outsiders. This is probably true of most countries and communities. Let me try and give you a crash course. 1. Contrary to persistent rumours chocolate, beer and mussels are not omnipresent in Belgium. Novels and poems in which no chocolate is eaten nor any beer is drunk, do find publishers and readers. 2. Belgian literature does not exist. Some Belgian nationals speak Dutch, others speak French, and yet others speak German. Those are the official languages. We also have Turkish, Moroccan, Central African, Yiddish communities, and so on. To simplify matters, let’s say that people in the north speak Dutch-they are the Flemish and they live in Flanders. To confuse matters, some people insist the Flemish do not speak Dutch but Flemish. Dutch, they say, is spoken in the Netherlands. Should the literature written by Flemish people be studied as a separate entity? Or should it be seen as an integral part of Dutch literature? Nobody knows the answer to those questions. In other words, maybe Flemish literature doesn’t exist either. 3. You could say that the Flemish are torn between provincialism (or nationalism, though that’s not quite the same thing) and internationalism. The provincial says: nowhere on earth can the quality of life compete with ours. We have the best housing, cafés, restaurants, social security and health care system. This is the land of milk and honey. A provincial writer writes exclusively for a Flemish public. He or she may well use expressions and idioms that will sound unfamiliar or even be incomprehensible to a Dutch audience in the Netherlands. The provincial doesn’t care. He or she lives unburdened by hang-ups. Often he or she is a writer of crime fiction. This is a little-known but peculiar characteristic of Flemish people: they love crime fiction. It would be a mistake to conclude that the provincial reader only reads local books. He or she reads whatever takes his or her fancy, be it in Dutch or translation. A high number of books in any bookshop in Flanders are translated from English, French, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, whatever. The internationally-oriented Flemish look down on local culture. They wouldn’t be seen dead reading a book by a Flemish person, unless the author has spent a suitable amount of time at Harvard or Yale, or has been hailed as the new literary genius by The New York or London Review of Books. They seldom if ever read crime fiction and they seldom if ever write, since their standards are so very very high. Or more likely: they fill numerous exercise books but keep them hidden from view for fear of being considered provincial. Preferably they read books in the original version. Most writers try to avoid being either provincial or international. This kind of polarization is simply not interesting or productive. However-and this is the second peculiar thing about Flanders-if they want to be taken seriously they have to look for a publisher in the Netherlands, preferably Amsterdam. This is certainly the case for writers of fiction and poetry. If e.g. a volume of poetry is published in Flanders, it almost certainly means that no Dutch publisher would IWP Panel: “Worlds of Letters” Iowa City Public Library September 7, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp have it. A lot of Flemish writers publish a first book in Flanders and then-if the book is well-received-move on and up to Amsterdam. It is in many ways a regrettable situation, for which in my view the local publishers are entirely to blame. The local publishers specialize in the inevitable crime fiction and in nonfiction that addresses local issues. They increasingly publish books by people who have made a name for themselves in politics or the media, for the simple reason that these books will sell, regardless of their contents or style. This state of affairs can be fairly depressing for a “real” author. Being famous in Flanders means nothing in terms of the world, but local fame opens many local doors, including those of a local publishing house. 4. I sometimes gloomily predict that soon writers will outnumber readers, and that readers rather than writers will be entitled to a grant or a subsidy. At present a number of writers in Flanders are state-sponsored. They get a grant or an allowance for pursuing their careers. That is definitely one of the advantages of paying a lot to the taxman. Some of it gets back to you. Obviously you have to convince the board of your merits and credits. This may be an uphill struggle. The system was first introduced in the Netherlands and later copied in Flanders. Dutch writers can apply for grants from Flanders and vice versa. Ma Thida (Burma) The Current Situation of Literature in Burma “Books and literature are our friends,” our proverb says. But most writers in Burma are seen as enemies of the current military regime. We also have a proverb that says the pen is sharper than the knife. So we writers have become sharp enemies of the regime. However, our reading public includes other non-military citizens who are living under the darkness and suffering like us. For them, we writers are sharp friends. In Burma, though the electronic media is now used more than it was in the past, our literature primarily consists of print media. Compared to newspaper circulation, periodical circulation in Burma has dramatically increased within the past fifteen years. According to the Ministry of National Planning and Economic Development’s Central Statistical Organization, the four state-owned Burmese-language newspapers had altogether a circulation of 539,000 in 1985 and 412,000 in 2001. This shows that even during the reign of the Burmese Socialist Party people were more interested in the state’s newspapers. What about periodicals and other books? In Burma, apart from government-sponsored literary works, most periodicals are privately owned. Let me give you some more data. In 1990, a total of 354 periodicals and 1,994 books on various subjects were published. In 2001, the number of periodicals increased to 3,946 and books increased to 7,991. Does this mean that since the beginning of the military regime in 1988, the media has gained more freedom and literature has experienced more development? Though the books published and newspapers circulated have changed a lot over fifteen years, what hasn’t changed is the Press Scrutiny Board (PSB). The board is under the direction of the Ministry of Home Affairs and is responsible for scrutinizing all published books, periodicals, and magazines and for forbidding their distribution. Let me explain some procedures. Right after the military regime took power, we could still print periodicals without submitting them to the board. Soon, however, the Scrutiny Board started asking magazines and periodicals to ink over certain sentences and paragraphs, or to rip out some pages, or to glue pages together that they thought harmful. At that time Burma did not yet have a market economy. We had to print our periodicals using locally-made recycled paper. You can imagine how ugly it was to read stories and poetry on low-quality paper with missing or glued pages and some silver-inked paragraphs and lines. After a few years, the Scrutiny Board decided to change their rules. So now publishers have to submit all pages before printing. The procedure is quite long. Publishers have to submit three copies of all manuscripts. Most authors can expect to be requested to make deletions and alterations in almost any manuscript. We writers are all exceedingly frustrated and also humiliated. Only after this process can we lay out and print that scrutinized manuscript. After that, twenty copies of all pages of the published book or periodical, including advertisement pages, have to be submitted again. We may be asked to make further deletions or alterations to layout, pictures, or text. If everything goes smoothly, we may get permission to print the book, but not necessarily. When our books are ready to be distributed, we have to again submit fifty-five copies to obtain permission for distribution. IWP Panel: “Worlds of Letters” Iowa City Public Library September 7, 2005 International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp So to be more practical and to cut delays, we carefully choose and edit the manuscripts first in order to ensure the fewest deletions and alterations. We use the computer to lay out and print the pages, and then make twenty photocopies, staple them like books, and submit them to the PSB. After we get the order to make deletions or alterations, or receive permission, we start the real printing. The whole process can take two weeks to eight months. That’s why publishing literature becomes a big and patient investment. But some periodicals like sports journals are making a profit. So we have more general-interest periodicals than literary books. During Socialist days, we only had access to limited news and information. We were literally isolated and not exposed to international affairs. Now under the military regime, we want to share our oppressed feelings by any means. Thus writers have become more creative and pass their real messages to the reading public abstractly. Our reading public also has the power of creative imagination. We use some strange combined names for some characters and readers can guess whom we mean. We use strange stories and symbols, which can be understood by our readers. Our reading public can be divided into two groups. One includes upper- and middle-class urban citizens and the other one includes lower- and middle-class rural citizens. Whether we live in an urban or rural area, we still have a shortage of electricity, even in the capital city. Then there is the fact that we have only two government-owned TV stations and two government-run radio stations, and there is not enough airtime to broadcast a wide variety of both entertaining and educational programs. So we still rely on the print media as one of our main sources of entertaining educational material. Most of our magazines and periodicals are a kind of edutainment, but most books are either purely education or purely entertainment. Therefore, most short story and article writers are serious. Seriousness is our literature’s spirit. Though we still have a lot of pop writing, nearly 75% of our literary books are serious. Our readers actually want to express their real feelings by themselves, but they are under pressure. So they prefer to read serious and sharp literature, which expresses those feelings in different words or makes presentations of those feelings on their behalf. Since we are not exposed to the outside world, our writers are weak in writing articles about the outside world but strong in translating good articles from the foreign media. They are also strong in creating a very abstract writing style to describe their isolated world. In trying to get permission from the Scrutiny Board, their sharp pen becomes more creative and convoluted. Finally I want to say that our words have many hidden meanings and that our lives as public writers also have a double meaning; we are a sharp enemy of the regime and a sharp friend of our reading public. Those are the faces of the world of Burmese literature. Mani Rao Halloween Mani Rao (Hong Kong) Halloween (First published in Dimsum, Hong Kong (www.dimsum.com.hk) in March 2005 and next in Nanyang Arts (Singapore) in June 2005). The nine major characteristics of a lung type dragon include a head like a camel's, horns like a deer's, eyes like a hare's, ears like a bull's, a neck like an iguana's, a belly like a frog's, scales like a carp's, paws like a tiger's, and claws like an eagle's. It has a pair of large canine teeth in its upper jaw.1 I guess then, that if a dragon tried to crash in to a frogs-only conference, it ought to be admitted. But that was the classical era. Then came the „50s when many nations formalised their identities and sang patriotic songs like this one in the Raj Kapoor film: “Mera Joota Hai Japani, Yeh Pataloon inglistani, Sar Pe Lal Topi Roosi, Par bhi dil hai hindustani.” (Transl: My shoes are Japanese, and the trousers are English, the cap on my head is Russian, but my heart is Indian).2 Soon after that, second generation migrants everywhere extracted their ethnicity and injected it back into their life with the purpose of increasing their immunity. That made them strong enough to produce fiction, poetry, film and art. It was not that different from Paul Gauguin who made a point about where he was coming from by painting Tahiti. In a letter he wrote to Charles Morice in April 1903, he said: “I am indeed a savage. And civilized people are aware of the fact, for in my works, there is nothing that surprises or shocks apart from my being „a savage despite myself‟. That is why it is inimitable. A man‟s work is an explanation of himself.“3 But he did have to go to Tahiti first, as there was no internet at the time. Thankfully, today everyone has broadband, everyone‟s wardrobe is from China, and unlike Raj Kapoor who had to get by with just one heart, you can receive several hearts in the mail from Amazon, and if your family tree is not already replete with about eight different races, then what the hell, you can easily adopt them. Like Angelina Jolie when she adopted a Cambodian baby and all of Cambodia wrote Letters to the Editor saying she should be granted Cambodian citizenship. I immediately wanted to flatter her, adopt an Indian child and quickly ask, “can I be Indian now?” But it was too soon after the news item, even for flattery. I was afraid to be called a tomb-raider; I mean, even a joke can go too far. Of course these things are only possible because we are all mongrels today and thus able to celebrate Halloween all year by wearing different costumes every day. Yesyesyes we know Halloween but what‟s a mongrel? Mani Rao Halloween 2 “From the beginning of the Bronze Age, circa 4500 BC, five distinct types of dog have been identified from fossil remains. Among them were Mastiff, wolf-like dogs, Greyhounds, Pointer-type and Sheepdogs. These basic types proliferated by natural genetic mutation and selective breeding produced the approximately 400 different types of dog breeds we know today. A "pure bred" dog is a group of dogs that look alike and are the product of parents with a similar appearance and which, when mated together, reproduce their kind. A mongrel or Mutt is a dog whose parents are unknown or is not considered to be pure bred.”4 This paragraph shows beyond all doubt that we are all mongrels and all mongrels are bastards. Bastards will do anything, even distort history. As the infallible Sunil Khilnani states in his book The Idea of India - “The storehouse of shared narrative structures embodied in epics, myths and folk stories, and the family resemblance in styles of art, architecture and religious motifs - if not ritual practices - testify to a civilizational bond, that in fact extended well beyond the territorial borders of contemporary India: to Persia in the west and Indonesia in the east.” 5 Wow! Persian literary anthologies, here I come! And Ubud! I must also remember to follow up on that other opportunity created by that thorough, methodical and authoritative book by German author Holger Kersten called Jesus Lived in India.6 The Pope could use a poet or two. We need to be more creative about who we can be these days because the good old values have all eroded like top-soil. Your name does not count. English-language names that many Chinese people choose for themselves, especially in China and Hong Kong are based on a momentary, inexplicable attraction to a character or a place or a century - grossly misleading. Archimedes could be mistaken for a Greek who can bake a spanokopita but only until you notice that his last name is Wong. Even that could be insufficient evidence because it generally only refers to the male parent, the part one is never sure of. Maybe the mother was Greek. Thirdly, because „other‟ languages always exist as phonemes, people choose names that „sound‟ nice. For all you know, Archimedes could have been copied from a sound. Music is like that. It gets around. Oh well, if a name has been devalued then perhaps a face will do as currency, but no. Michael Jackson will tell you that a face is but skin deep. I feel for 18-year-old Yang Yuan of China who, in December 2003, was thrown out of the Miss International Beauty Contest on grounds that her beauty was man-made. How did they know the plastic surgeon was a man? If spending US$13,000 across 11 operations is not legitimate proof of sincerity, then what is? But all‟s well that ends well and soon enough someone decided to hold a contest in November this year called Miss Plastic Surgery. I am sure everything will be above-board because a spokesman for the organisers, Beijing Tianjiu Weive Culture and Media Co, said contestants would have to produce doctor's certificates confirming their charms were not natural. For the face to be accepted as a criterion, it also helps if the mouth can stay shut unless it comes with compatible sound effects. A Chinese face can be badly unmasked like in the John Woo film Face-Off if the mouth opens wide to reveal a rotten BBC (British-born-Chinese) or worse, an ABC (American-born-Chinese). Hong Kong knows about these things. Locals call someone a „banana‟ when they are yellow outside but white inside. Mani Rao Halloween 3 I still remember that horrible moment in the documentary film Song of The Exile: Chinese restaurants directed by Cheuk C Kwan, the film that traces the history of Chinese-restaurant owners in South Africa, Israel and Turkey. The restaurateur confesses that when he arrived in Israel, he didn‟t know how to cook Chinese cuisine. His Israeli friends say, “never mind it‟s easy, we‟ll show you how - but you cook, you‟ve got the right face” . I hope it wasn‟t his restaurant you ate at when you went to Israel.7 Name delete. Face delete. What about that telling item on immigration forms - the address? No one bothers filling that box any more because one does not stay immobile after birth, presumably one eventually walks; however, unlike other mammals a newborn human baby cannot immediately get up and about to the extent that it can absorb the local culture - therefore, a place of birth has very little meaning. Place delete. Sorting is much easier if the writer arrives tagged with genealogical information. Most of them have several versions of bios in their laptops or handhelds and all the bios are true. Take me for example. If I did not tell you who I am, you would think I was Indian. My parents come from rival towns situated on opposite sides of the same Indian river. I wish my mother had slept with someone more uncommon, but in those days all the ��foreigners” were hanging out in Goa and being hippies. We are from the South. And I do love my Dad. He doesn‟t like Goa. So I am like that Heinz TV commercial which says all the ingredients here are - hold your breath - tomatoes. But the monotony vanishes when you get closer to me. I used to be a samurai and a geisha in previous lives, and I still dream in Japanese. I can‟t prove it, but it‟s not my fault that dream-recording technology has not been invented yet. I have also been married to a man and a lesbian at the same time so I can do justice to both anthologies when called upon. Everyone knows that married people don‟t have sex and infidelity is heterosexual. A writer is like a prism, able to separate into several colors and quite feasibly be at two, three or several places at the same time. Listen to ratio quality from Scared Texts written by the poet Jam Ismail who is a Canadian national in four parts - one quarter Indian, one quarter Hong Kong-Indian and two quarters Hong Kong-Chinese.” “ young ban yen had been thought italian in kathmandu, filipina in hongkong, eurasian in kyoto, japanese in anchorage, dismal in london england, hindu in edmonton, generic oriental in calgary, western canadian in ottawa, anglophone in montreal, metis in jasper, eskimo at hudson‟s bay department store, vietnamese in chinatown, tibetan in vancouver, commie at the u.s. border. on the whole, very asian.”8 She got away with all that? Is she a chameleon? Isn‟t a dragon a chameleon? Mani Rao Halloween 4 Those are profound questions. One needs to turn to biology, or botany, which is the same thing. (Plants are animals. I think this way because I am a vegetarian, which means vegetarians can buy my books.) Says Michael Pollan in Botany of Desire - “… plant species will go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not at all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower‟s rancid scent re-inforces this effect).”9 Identity is a strategy for survival and propagation, a tactic borrowed from life. It is all about the favoring of traits that increase one‟s attractiveness. While trafficking in a metaphor, writers will also recruit other writers and the resulting multifariousness has the potential to be a bogus trend, a symptom of a new culture virus. At the same time as you morph into the clue that can be picked up by culture detectives, you will also get a little careless and forget that there is no teabreak in Halloween, and begin depositing cheques to several names into the same bank account. Banks will have read the latest magazines, got to know that identity is no more than a simulation and no less than the ghost of a disappeared species, and report you to the dog-police. Even banks can be ethical. The dog police will pick you up and throw you into a catchment where all mongrels go. It will remind you of Dante‟s interminable journey. None of this is personal. This sort of thing is starting to happen everywhere. World music is one such home for lost music mongrels, confirming that Einstein was right. In India, the world music section contains African music and in Australia, Indian music. These catchments are being temporarily called „international‟ and „multi-cultural‟ and functioning like rehab centres. You may not even care to get out on bail if you are one of those variants - too Chinese to be Indian and too Indian to be Chinese. When I was postulating my theories at the Melbourne Writers Festival recently, I stumbled upon a slogan at the National Gallery - International like never before.10 I studied the art on offer and understood that an overseas voyage had been involved which made it international. I quietly rejoiced for my Australian writer friends who had to cross the sea to go just about anywhere, even Tasmania. It was then that I decided to drop all plans to adopt an Indian child and to go beg for the international collar. I was sure it would come with a long leash. If Beijing objected that I had traveled by train from Hong Kong, I could always count on the dragon to pull me out of the difficult situation. Copyright 2005 Mani Rao 1 Well known legend about dragons. 2 Hindi film ‘Shri 420”, Raj Kapoor, 1955. Mani Rao Halloween 5 3 Paul Gauguin The Search For Paradise, Letters from Brittany and the South Seas, Collins & Brown. Page 150. 4 www.dogbreedinfo.com 5 The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani. Penguin Books 1998. 6 Jesus Was An Indian, Holger Kersten, Element Books 7 Song of The Exile: Chinese restaurants” directed by Cheuk C Kwan, 2003. 8 From Scared Texts, Jamila Ismail. Many-Mouthed Birds, Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians edited by Bennett Lee and Jim Wong-Chu. 1992. Page 128. 9 The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan. Bloomsbury 2002. 10 Exhibition in August 2004, National gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Sherko Fatah (Germany) Some Notes About Writing in Germany In an interview, German painter Georg Baselitz once said his situation as an artist in society today is one of complete isolation. Although successful and independent he (Baselitz) felt almost like a madman free to produce and sell his things without any interaction or discussion. In the field of literature, it’s true, there are a lot of critics in Germany. They are publishing their reviews in newspapers. The bigger the newspaper the better. But that’s it. Once he has published a book, the writer hopes to find some response to his work. If he gets it he often will be disappointed. Most of the reviews are simply describing the content, occasionally with some remarks concerning the structure. Only in the last two or three sentences does there happen to be some brief assessment. As I said, for most of the writers that’s it. The media landscape in Germany, like everywhere, is dominated by television. There are just a few brief television shows left dealing with literature. All they can do is give some recommandations and present the new books of well-known writers. However, literature seems to be an annex to the mainstream entertainment industry. In my opinion there is much competition due to the new digital media content (video games) the younger people are wasting their time with. The problem is that there isn’t anything left for the imagination. Everything is ready-made, finished and well-crafted-but life isn’t. Looking at the academics, invitations by universities are rare in Germany. I have no clue why they are not interested in writers, but maybe they prefer dead people to talk and write about because they can’t defend themselves anymore. However, I’ve never been to a German university as a writer. The best thing you can hope for is to become known to those people who are connected to literature, whether they are working for publishers and newspapers or simply like to read. This happens via recommandations on a more private level and, most importantly, it needs a lot of time. As a beginner the most important thing is to get in touch with some kind of literary scene. When I started I first checked out the bars. After two years of roaming around it seemed this path would more likely lead to becoming an ambitious drunkard than a writer. In Germany there are a few very good institutions that are dedicated to promoting young writers. One of them is the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin where I’ve made my first steps like many others who are now part of the new generation of German literature as presented in the Chicago Review “New Writing in German” in 2002. The LCB was founded by Walter Höllerer decades ago. During the nineties they offered a kind of literary course which was not exactly what you in the US know as creative writing. The writers had their novels and other projects already. They just wanted to finish them and afterwards launch them into the market. A second possibility for beginners is the literary agents. Unlike in the US, this a pretty new thing in Germany. They are providing some reasonable support, especially in the beginning, International Writing Program http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp but later I guess one may wish to get rid of them (I myself don’t have one). However, having an agent is a good thing for those who aren’t able to find a publisher (and as we all know this means a lot). The second advantage: if there is someone who wants to pay for your work perhaps the agent will get more money out of him. There are some big cultural institutions who will send you around the world if you are lucky and in the mood: Above all there is the Goethe-Institut, followed by the DAAD (students exchange) and some locally-based organisations like the foundation of the Villa Aurora (former home of the exiled writer Lion Feuchtwanger) in Santa Monica, CA, just to give some examples. So if you are feeling isolated like Baselitz there is always a chance to keep on moving. IWP Panel: “Worlds of Letters�� Iowa City Public Library September 7, 2005
Type (DCMIType)	Moving Image
Type (AAT)	Presentations (Communicative events)
Type (IMT)	mp4
Duration	01:13:29
Language	English
Digital Collection	Virtual Writing University Archive
Contributing Institution	Iowa City Public Library
Subcollection	International Writing Program Collection
Rights Management	Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder.
Contact Information	Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/
Date Digital	2005-09-07