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Channel: Resident Alien — Being Dutch in America
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If I Had a Semi

The daily writing prompt asks what skill I’d like to have in my back pocket. Well, years ago I saw a truck driver back a semi into a parking space between two other semis, straight as a ruler and with...

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Gender and Grammar and Growth, Oh My!

My son B has been maturing by leaps and bounds the past couple of months. It’s like he’s having a massive mental growth spurt. As a result, he is increasingly finding out what it means to be him, and...

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Reading Circle Linked to Separatist Inclusion

Today’s prompt for NaPoWriMo is to take a news article and use (some of) its words in a poem. My goal was to use all the words. I managed, although I did change some words from verbs to nouns, from …...

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When Are We Going to Get Angry?

I’ve got to vent about this police state we live in again. NaPoWriMo kept me happy-happy for a while, but I have no goodbye poem (today’s prompt), so that’s over. Have you seen this video of a...

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Stay Tuned For The Assault

For at least two years now, I have been meaning to share a paper I wrote in graduate school in the Rio Grande Valley about The Assault (De aanslag), a novel by my favorite Dutch author, Harry Mulisch....

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The Assault: Part 1: The Time Capsule

Anton was reading an article in Nature and Mechanics. For his birthday he had been given a secondhand bound copy of the 1938 edition: “A Letter to Posterity”. A photograph showed a group of well-fed...

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The Assault: Part 2: Summary

The Assault is divided into five episodes, covering a time span of thirty-six years, in which the protagonist, Anton Steenwijk, suffers the violence and guilt of the German occupation of the...

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The Assault: Part 3: Structure and Narration

The Assault is structured like a Greek tragedy. Apart from the five episodes, it also has a prolog and an epilog (1), and Mulisch himself has commented on the exodus at the end, and the choir (2). The...

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The Assault: Part 4: Mulisch’s Five Times

Well, would you look at that–today’s prompt is Student-Teacher! I could link this whole series. But I won’t–just this one. Click here if you want to start at the beginning. Anton’s story is that of an...

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The Assault: Part 5: Time Stands Still

Time comes to a standstill for Anton, and this isolates him from the rest of humanity. Mulisch comments on isolation in time elsewhere: Space is also always temporal. When I look at the stars, I look...

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The Assault: Part 6: The Changing Past

Mulisch’s philosophy about time is inevitably connected to his views on history and writing about history. He has stated: that one can visit the location of past events, but not the time. The past...

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The Assault: Part 7: Causality and Coincidence

As we have seen, Mulisch believes that the purpose of history education is to explain the present, and therefore it should be taught in the reverse. He claims that: since history does not ‘start’ with...

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The Assault: Part 8: Selection and Reduction

In the last post we saw how Mulisch addresses the fact that historical events, as well as events on a personal level, are determined by both causality and sheer coincidence. History is also a matter of...

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Hunger Games?

Originally posted on ipledgeafallegiance:Tonight is one of the most exciting nights of the year for NFL teams and their fans and not one game will be played. It’s the night of the exciting and nail...

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The Assault: Part 9: Familiar Imagery

Although Mulisch demonstrates, especially in the case of the names of the houses and the signs in the gravel, that even the symbols disappear, and even though he explicitly claims within The Assault...

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The Assault: Part 10: Time Eternal

The tinkering with time and events, which I addressed in the previous post, leads us to what Mulisch calls “time eternal;” the elements in his writing which put the historical events into a larger,...

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Sons of Alcoholics Anonymous

I’ve been watching Sons of Anarchy on Netflix. I’m approaching the end of Season 2, and I’m still not sure what to think of it. Is it an ultra-hardcore version of The Dukes of Hazard or is there more...

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NEVER ARGUE WITH A WOMAN WHO READS!

Originally posted on A Laugh A Day Keeps The Morons way...:NEVER ARGUE WITH A WOMAN WHO READS! One morning the husband returns after several hours of fishing and decides to take a nap. Although not...

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Eponymous Me

Kafka, Marx, Orwell, Sade–no reason why I shouldn’t end up on that list. Here’s what I imagine my contribution to Webster’s to be: Barbarist: (Noun) Definition: a person who wants the space and beauty...

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Agile Eyebrow Envy

Oh, to be able to raise one eyebrow! My best friend can do it. My daughter can do it. Steven Colbert can do it with both eyebrows in faster succession than even my daughter can. I dream of situations...

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