Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 09.05.21

When I was five my family moved from West Virginia to the north central Pennsylvania mountains where my dad worked as an electrical engineer for Sylvania. The town had a lot of Italians, and we had an accent that stuck out.

Years later in life, while sitting on a ski lift in Utah, I came to believe that all Americans should have to live somewhere else in the USA for three months. City folk in little towns, flat landers in the mountains, Northerners in the South, humid dwellers in Arizona. We send students on foreign exchange trips; why not do that within our own country? How else are you going to learn what sticky buns REALLY taste like?

Judy Schwender, Paducah, KY

Excellent idea, speaking as a Minnesotan who lives half the time in New York to please my wife but I’m afraid the nation is heading into a tribal society in which this exchange mandate would be forcefully resisted. Especially by New Yorkers. It’s a big deal for them to go up to Maine or Vermont in the summer. The thought of going to North Dakota or Wyoming terrifies them. Where would they go to buy cheese and baked goods? Are there movie theaters? Would they be able to meet people you’d care to eat dinner with? I think your idea is best carried out with your grandchildren when they’re small, not with adults.

GK

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G.K.,

As a last-ditch effort to settle a running debate with a friend about the definition of a “writer” in today’s literary world, I am appealing to you for help. Both my friend and I have published a book and yet have received less than $500 in royalties between the two of us. So, it’s questionable whether we should even call ourselves “writers.” Our viewpoints about literary achievements and who we consider to be legitimate writers differ dramatically. She favors Kingsolver and Hemingway while I lean toward Kierkegaard and O. Henry. Because we know something about the literary legacy of E.A. Poe and Franz Kafka, we do agree that a “professional writer” these days might be someone who earns their living by getting others to pay them well for the things they write. But who among serious writers today aspires to be the next Barbara Cartland or E.L James simply on the basis of book sales? Asking any author to adjudicate the definition of a “writer” is perilous in itself. When I told my friend I was going to ask for your viewpoint on this subject, she quickly adjured saying you are more of a humorist and entertainer than a writer. She went on to remind me of what Virginia Woolf said about James Joyce’s Ulysses when she finished reading it: “I think it a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think, but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense.” So, while you may not be a legitimate authority on the subject, I would still like to hear what you mean when you claim to be a “writer” (or maybe you would rather I say a “Writer”).

Fred Freelance, Athens, Texas

No need for capitalization, Fred, but I hesitate to explain what “writer” means when you’ve taken much longer to ask the question than I’d need to answer it, and then your friend denies my qualifications. It’s not about money so much though a person needs readers to be a writer. This is not narcissism. A writer is someone who learns by the process of using language in description and explanation. You write in order to find out what you think. It can be surprising. Good luck.

GK

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Hi, Garrison.

I loved your heartfelt sentiments regarding furniture requiring assembly. In my younger days, I fearlessly purchased several components of an IKEA shelving unit. It has since survived two moves — fully assembled, because I refused to suffer through a repeat of that first long night on the floor surrounded by parts, screws, and tools (as I recall, a medicinal glass of wine figured into the ordeal at some point). I love the look, but not the dues I paid to achieve it.

In all fairness, at least IKEA’s instructions were adequate to the task. The Germans could learn something from the Swedes — I still struggle to assemble my portable music stand (made in Germany) as the “instruction sheet” consists of one picture. Lesson learned — if I see the words “assembly required,” no sale!

Pat McC.

To us who grew up Plymouth Brethren, “assembly” means something else, the gathering of closed minds on Sunday morning. I try not to dissemble but I am not an assembler. I have a hard time even assembling prose as you may know if you’ve read some of my books.

GK

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I take great pleasure in finding poems — little gems of storytelling or feeling cribbed from lines in a book, article, or essay, like yours of Sept. 3. Having enjoyed a fine time in your home state a few months back, I couldn’t help but catch these lines when they nearly jumped off the screen.

Minnesota Snow

When the Weather Service says Minnesota was hit by a blizzard,
the verb hit is fanciful, like being struck by a bluebird feather
or being attacked by ants. When snow falls, we don’t hide
under the bed, we don’t need powerful pumps,
there are no dikes to prevent snowdrifts. We enjoy a blizzard,
standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, and we feel grateful
for having teenagers in the family who will shovel the sidewalks.
Bob Dylan shoveled snow, so too Amy Klobuchar,
Jessica Lange, Prince, and Jesse Ventura.
It is a life-shaping experience.

P.S. Speaking of pleasures: It was a kick to experience a PHC show in Lubbock a few years back and then visit with you afterward. I was among a few folks who got down on hands and knees to search the stage floorboards with one of your assistants, looking for a spring that popped out of the side of your glasses during the curtain call. The Day I Crawled with Keillor: There’s a limerick in there somewhere!

Grant Rampy, Warrenton, VA

Thanks for making a poem out of my paragraph. I don’t recall those glasses or the curtain call, but I do remember Lubbock. It felt like Dusty & Lefty territory and I remember singing “Whoopi-ti-yo,” including the verse:

I guess you can see by the way I am dressed
That I am no cowboy but an old humorist,
A man in a suit with no speck of manure
Who sits at a desk and writes literature. 

GK

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Dear Gary. Every politician knows, “You can’t please everyone.” Every pro wrestler knows, “You make more money by making everyone hate you.” You’ve been plowing fertile ground lately. That’s quite an undertaking for a man your age. Being an older, bona fide resident of Lake Wobegon, I wouldn’t advise it. There are too many trolls out there who won’t rest until they break your wonderful heart. Ken Nordberg

I live with an honest woman who says what she thinks, based on what she sees and feels, and I appreciate her candor. Once in a while, she has handed me a Kleenex and said, “Left nostril.” Sometimes a writer needs this basic sort of help. Fear is not a good or generous motive for writing, but of course one wants to step carefully. I could say more but won’t.

GK

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Dear GK,

I admit it: I am a free rider. Your daily musings are a balm for morning’s noise. Somehow, they serve the same role as the late Karl Haas’s Adventures in Good Music. Held together by a slender thread of years. I ask you: how could a subscription make this any better?

Thank you.

Stephen, Boise

I’m not here to sell you subscriptions or anything else. The subscribers get to look at a bunch of archival stuff mostly, this and that, my reminiscence of a mistaken year in Denmark, my homage to the Mayo Clinic, la la la la. A batch of limericks about men and women of letters. You can live without it.

GK

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Garrison:

I have written before about errors in your Writer’s Almanac posts. Today’s Post to the Host has a particularly unforced error when you say, “We have a marble monument in Washington with the names of a number of people I know on it.” As a proud alum of The New Yorker stable, noted for its rigorous fact-checking, it would have been easy to check that the memorial is made of polished black granite. As a combat veteran of the war, I also know too many of the names.

Sean M 

Of course you’re right and I’d only say that the names are the important thing and that the words “polished granite” sound fussy, so I wish I’d just said “stone wall.”

GK

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Garrison,

I’ve noticed since reading this blog that religion has become more and more important to you. And I know you describe your early family as “fundamentalist.” So, I’ve decided you are a good person to ask this question: how can people who purport to be “religious,” even devout, be filled with so much hate? I visited an acquaintance’s Facebook page this weekend (my first mistake), and it featured a picture of Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, holding their newly adopted babies. Both looked to be about as happy as any two people I’ve ever seen. At first, I thought that at least here was a fundamentalist person celebrating love. Then I saw her comment: “Disgusting!” Her friends chimed in, “Awful!” “Sinful!” How can people who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ harbor so much hate in their souls?

dpd

There’s a good deal of fury and anger and destruction raining down in Holy Scripture, so there’s some precedent for fury. Where anger phases into hatred is a matter for discussion. People are capable of change, and I have friends brought up as I was who’ve been surprised to find out they have a gay son or daughter and after the normal confusion and some sadness, they’ve rallied in defense of their own. It happens all the time. Great cultural changes have swept the land in my lifetime and many more are to come, which I won’t see but I know they’ll happen. Jesus was very clear about loving the poor, oppressed, the outcast, the despised.

GK

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Dear Garrison,

The PHC show was a staple, a friend, in our home during the ’70s and ’80s. My daughter still remembers how special she felt when you read the Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout poem to her on a couple of her birthdays, while we lived in MN. With a move to CT life changed and my children lived in faraway North America while I live (for a long time already) in faraway South America. In my new home, Argentina, I have acquired some rented grandchildren, they speak already three different languages, want to learn German also from me and are not in their teens yet. They teach me, a 79-year-old woman what love, kindness, contentment, and irrelevance is. They give me hope. You are still “Garrison” and I share your weekly columns with some English-speaking friends, and we discover over and over again that we all have had similar experiences growing up and aging now, it makes for some joyful conversing over glasses of Malbec. How small is the world really! Keep the good news coming … thanks.

Roswitha Bormann, San Rafael, Mendoza

I admire your courage and enterprise and whatever one should call it, a woman my age living out on the edge. My life gets smaller and smaller. I write now from Gate D10 at LaGuardia, about to fly back to Minnesota for a few weeks, and I feel lonely and vulnerable. Those columns you read are written from a little apartment that sometimes I go for days without leaving. I really must get out more. Thanks for the inspiration.

GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

Søren Kierkegaard said that the simple man on his way home after work is wondering what’s for dinner. The complex man on his way home is debating the complexities and imponderables of life. The enlightened man on his way home from work is wondering what’s for dinner. 

Mr. Keillor, you seem to have reached enlightenment.

Peg S., Iowa girl

We solved this ponderous question by staying home and skipping dinner in favor of a large lunch. So I wonder where my relatives are and how they are doing and when will I see them again. The pandemic has changed our lives and I ponder whether we shall get them back.

GK

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Hello, Garrison.

I remember listening to you as an OB/GYN resident at the University of Minnesota when you and Jim Ed Poole had your morning show.

I was pregnant with my first of two children as I was completing my residency. In the early morning traffic as I was driving through the tunnel from highway 12 toward Fairview Hospital, I would be feeling tired and sometimes depressed. Particularly then, you often played an instrumental combination recording of Simple Gifts and another folk song, the name of which I cannot remember at this time, which always raised my spirits and turned my tears into joy. Do you remember it? Thank you so much for your contribution to making my life more enjoyable.

My last venture with you was on your PHC cruise in the Caribbean, which I thoroughly enjoyed!

Sincerely,

Pamela Morford, MD, retired

I wonder if it could’ve been “Camping in Canaan’s Happy Land,” which Helen Schneyer recorded along with Jean Redpath and Lisa Neustadt. I can’t find her version but there’s this old one by the Chuck Wagon Gang.

GK

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Today I read “The Story of My Life in 750 Words.” It was delightful. 

I dream of being a neurologist on the leading edge, using equipment like EEG technology to read the mind and project it on large screen. The ultimate dream is to have you as my cohort of one.

Thank you,

Ed Fennell

This equipment won’t be developed in my lifetime and anyway my mind is not so interesting as the minds of the so-called intellectually disabled whose problem turns out to be overactive electrical activity which, if a neurologist could figure out how to settle it down, rechannel it, get the impulses in harmony with each other, would give a few million young people a better life. The playful drifting of an old man’s thoughts would be not so interesting. I speak as one myself.

GK

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Garrison, you said in a recent column that you’d like to move to Texas so you could express yourself fully in a way you can’t living in the North among progressive liberals. Then you neglected to say what sort of speech is forbidden up North? Come on, man. Be brave.

Lola

St. Paul

You know very well what I meant, the righteous bullying that is now accepted in progressive circles even by people who resent it as much as I do. I went to a Balanchine ballet once at the University, music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and before the performance, the woman who asked us to turn off our cellphones also asked us to remember the Dakota people who lived on this land in the early 19th century. I don’t mind shutting up but this struck me as the sort of sanctimonious bullying that is going around these days. Why not a moment of silence in honor of Tchaikovsky who struggled with being gay in Russia or in honor of the difficulty of being a dancer?

I know people who are working their tails off on behalf of Native reservations with no casinos or oil wells where people are sunk in poverty and opiate addiction. God bless them. The people who campaign to affix a Dakota name to a lake named for a slave-owning racist (Calhoun) are getting off cheap. The woman honoring the Dakota with a moment of silence is getting off dirt cheap.

Sanctimonious bullies are riding high in blue states and have no traction whatever in red states. Every college professor in America knows that one complaint by an anonymous accuser can end a career, no hearing necessary. Read Anne Applebaum’s essay in the October Atlantic. A man wouldn’t have dared write that piece but thank goodness she did.

GK