April 14, 2014 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Ancient Fire by William Siegel (Ethiopia 1962-64)

Apr 14 2014

[Will Siegel (Ethiopia 1962-64) is a writer living now in Boston. I recently published on this site two stories written by Will that are set in New York City at the time of the fifties/sixties-era folk-music revival, the time that is portrayed in the film, Inside Llewyn Davis. Will, like many PCVs who were overseas at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, are haunted by those days when we were all outside the ‘family’ when death came to our president. Will solved that problem by writing a novel about Kennedy. What follows is the first chapter of Kennedy in the Land of the Dead. I asked Will to write and tell us how his book came to be.] I wrote this chapter a number of years after Kennedy’s death trying to recreate the tenor of feelings that came up for me that day as well as some of the remembered thoughts and . . .

He Could Have Joined the Peace Corps!

Apr 14 2014

Yesterday’s Sunday’s, New York Post, April 13, 2014 issue carried a piece entitled: “THE SPERMINATOR Father of 99 children tells all.” Ed Houben is his name and he lives in Holland and is, says the Post, “Europe’s most prolific sperm donor, and one who prefers to contribute the old-fashioned way.” He now has children in Australia, Israel, Canada, Austria, Germany, Belgium, France,Luxembourg, Italy, England. Houben charges no money for his services, partly because it’s illegal to buy and sell human material in the Netherlands and partly because he see himself as a true humanitarian. “I could have joined the Peace Corps,” he says. “But I stumbled into this.” What he does is something like this: If a woman arrives alone–which she rarely does–he will have sex with her in the master bedroom of his apartment. Far more common are couples, and logistics can be complicated. While Houben and the woman . . .

Archive - April 14, 2014