Free Dawit Isaak

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“We will not have any trial and we will not free him. We know how to handle his kind.”
—Isaias Afwerki, President of Eritrea, speaking in 2009 about writer Dawit Isaak

The last time Amnesty International mentioned the case of the imprisoned Eritrean writer Dawit Isaak, it was in its 2011 annual report about Eritrea. Amnesty reported what it believed to be safe to report: that Isaak “remained in detention, allegedly in Eiraeiro Prison. He was reportedly in poor mental and physical health.”
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Today in History: May 26

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The 15,000,000th and final Model T automobile was driven off the Ford Motor Company’s assembly line by Henry Ford and his son Edsel in Highland Park, Michigan, on this date in 1927 (photo above).

The company started manufacturing the vehicle on October 1, 1908, and it was still popular two decades later—Ford’s factories produced between 1.5 and 2.0 million Model T’s each year from 1922 through 1926, but the numbers had been declining. It was time to introduce the Model A to the nation’s consumers. The replacement did quite well, too.

* * * *
Kaspar Hauser appeared on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany, on this date in 1828. He appeared to be a teenager, he carried two letters on his person, and he gave little evidence of understanding anything said to him. Taken together, the letters told a fantastical tale: one letter stated that it was from Kaspar’s caretaker and the second claimed to be from the boy’s mother to the caretaker, but both letters were in the same handwriting, probably the boy’s. Was he a runaway?
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‘Space Is the Place’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Why did you stop playing the sax?” I asked a friend one day. He had been a Bebop player of growing reputation back in the ’50s but ended that career to become a poet.

“It never stopped sounding like a saxophone, no matter what I did,” was his reply. As a writer, he could transform things into words and words into things and essences into essentials, and also none of the above.
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