Post to the Host

Comments from the Week of 11.06.22

Mr. Keillor,

Congratulations on your successful surgery and your enlightened recovery from that. 

Your comments on bagpipes in today’s Post to the Host mirrored my own thoughts about those wretched things. It is good to hear them about once a year just to remind us how grating their sound can be. It reminded me of a joke that I think I first heard on one of your APHC joke shows: ”Why do bagpipers always walk when they are playing?”

“Even they are trying to get away from the noise.”

Stay well!

Dave

Yes, yes, but I remember May 8, 1995, in Edinburgh when 25,000 pipers marched in celebration of the 50th anniversary of V-E Day, and how the city shook to the sound, it was an earthquake of music, and a great privilege to be there. Old veterans rode in the parade and the sound of the pipes suggested some of the ferocity of warm; it was a hot day and the pipers and drummers in their woolens were red and perspiring. GK

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Hello, Mr. Keillor.

I’m a physician and writer here in Saint Paul.

I had a column in Minnesota Monthly, and I’ve written for MinnPost and the Strib. I’ve also been in WaPo, Slate, HuffPost, Forbes, MarketWatch.

I didn’t grow up in a literary home. I read Dave Barry in the local paper and Reader’s Digest on the toilet.

I admire your work and won’t bore you with the groveling details. You read a poem of mine, Familiar, on a Valentine’s Day show, and used my line “She looked like a funnel cloud out searching for a trailer park” on a Guy Noir skit.

Mayo Clinic Press just released my first book, Man Overboard! A Medical Lifeline for the Aging Male. You’re SLIGHTLY outside of the book’s pre-geezer target audience, but I’d be honored to send you a copy out of gratitude. It’s a most unusual and literary health book, and I can’t think of anyone who has shaped my writing style more than you have. But I promised not to grovel.

Thank you,
Craig Bowron

Very kind of you. I didn’t know Mayo had a publishing arm. I’ll order the book from Amazon so it’ll get here quicker and with less trouble to you. I’m at work on my own book about the beauty of being 80 but I don’t think there’s useful medical advice in it unless you count “It’s easy to quit drinking so long as you don’t drink.” GK

CHECK OUT THE BOOK HERE

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I used to have a T-shirt with that Emerson quote about long walks on the back and a 15-star, 15-stripe US flag on the front. I wonder if I still have it.

Tom Hawley

Lansing Michigan

I am not a Lost & Found, but if anyone has found it, I hope they’ll return it. GK

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Loved PHC, miss it desperately, but my question is this:

Could you please tell Sheila Balls I would be glad to give those three cats a loving home? Provided I live near enough to be able to transport them … within perhaps 1,000 miles? (I’m near Glens Falls, NY.) I do not believe in shipping pets via airplanes, etc. Trauma! Driving, despite the yowls and moans is the only way to go. 

Thank you.

Nan

I am not operating a cat orphanage here but I thank you for the offer and I hope the cats find a home. I, however, am not going to take them. GK

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Dear Garrison,

About that warning to stay away from fentanyl. I had some fentanyl recently. Maybe you did too. I awoke from my colonoscopy and asked the nurse what was in the sedative. She said it was a combination of fentanyl and something else. Drugs have their places. My test was all good, thanks.

Clay Blasdel

Buffalo, New York

Glad you enjoyed it but please don’t take it up as a hobby. GK

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Never wear a beard. If you wear a beard, people presume you have acne.

Michel DuBil

I shaved my beard off around 1976, two years after starting PHC. Beards are not conducive to comedy. Too solemn. Too rabbinical. GK

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Oh, dear. Garrison, don’t you know that the four most dangerous words in the English language are “I have an idea?”

“Lying like a rug” — I like it. It has struck me that the telling of lies, which no one believes (including the teller!) and no one is expected to believe, only to say they believe them, is possibly a new phenomenon in human history. What do you think?

Elizabeth Block

Toronto, Canada

The advent of outright fiction in politics is not exactly new but it’s reached stunning proportions. We live in interesting times. GK

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Hello, and greetings from London.

I enjoy reading your many and varied posts, and normally find myself in agreement with you. Thus, I was rather surprised this morning to find only partial information about Martin Luther. Though nothing you wrote was incorrect, through an error of omission, readers could take away a rather distorted understanding of this theologian.

As well as ushering in the Protestant Reformation, he authored On the Jews and Their Lies, and advocated burning synagogues and Jewish books, and urged that no mercy be shown to Jews. Modern scholarship interprets his precepts as a key influence for later German antisemitism and Nazi anti-Jewish persecution (including book-burning, to say nothing of people-burning). Omitting this legacy of Luther’s is akin to describing Kanye West as an “important musician and pop culture influencer” … leaving out his virulent antisemitic rantings.

Best wishes,

Professor Ruth Mandel

Department of Anthropology

University College London

I’ve read a little about Luther’s antisemitism and of course it’s indisputable but in the Midwest, the Lutheran church is an admirable and amiable institution that never picked up that branch of Brother Martin’s teaching. And we believe in forgiveness. When one writes brief essays, rather than tomes, omission is inevitable. But thanks for the footnote. GK

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Dear GK,

About starting your museum of artifacts of the pre-internet era — good luck. The lines are not long at the Henry Ford Museum, or the Thomas Edison Museum, and those guys were clever, too. Perhaps a museum of statues that have been removed and hidden away? Let me explain.

A passage from Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me jumped off the page at me — at bedtime last night, on Election Day — and I had to crawl out of bed, put my slippers on, type it up, and save it. Maybe you have McEwan on speed dial and you can be blasé in the presence of genius. I’m not so lucky. The excerpt below illuminates vividly the current trend of rethinking our social history. I think it will speak to you, too, in the context of your recent column.

All the Best,

Cliff Adams

Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan — Chapter 2 — (Our hero’s new girlfriend, Miranda, has written a paper on Corn Law reform):

… The academic movement known generally as “theory” had taken social history “by storm” — her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological content, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.

None of this seemed so unreasonable to me, or all that interesting. I didn’t say so. I wanted to encourage Miranda in everything she did or thought. Love is generous. Besides, it suited me to think that whatever had once happened was no more than its evidence. In the new dispensation, the past weighed less. I was in the process of remaking myself and eager to forget my own recent history. My foolish choices were behind me. I saw a future with Miranda.

It certainly speaks to me, Cliff, though not distinctly, because I have no Miranda in my life. Even the young people I know are rather old-fashioned and see history as narrative and don’t impose current theory on it or else they don’t bother to think about the past. Miranda is part of a rather small cult and if I wanted to find it, I probably could, but I’m busy doing other things. GK

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Mr. Keillor,

Regarding your November 9th column, An Idea, probably wrong, but it’s an idea — I’m a 35-year-old millennial who sat in the laundry room with the curled phone cord stretched through the door from the kitchen so my parents couldn’t hear my phone conversations. My dad also insisted that when any of my friends call the house they must ask, “This is so-and-so, may I speak with Kelly?” instead of “Is Kelly there?” He’d respond with a “yes” and then hang up on them if they asked the latter.

I’m also deeply interested in history and culture and regularly host what I call Candlelight Dinner Society dinners. A small group of rotating friends come over for a delicious vegan dinner and they must bring something homemade (a poem, artwork, a song, woodwork, etc.) to share with the group, and they must also share a piece of newly acquired knowledge. My friends and I love learning and seeing our different talents.

My Gramma and I also handwrote letters to each other for years. She passed away on June 11th this year at the age of 90. I still have every letter/card she ever wrote me. I miss her dearly.

We millennials aren’t all bad. I’d love for you to attend a Candlelight Dinner. If you’re ever in Spokane you’re always welcome. I read TWA every day. Thanks for the bit of joy you bring to my mornings. Stay well.

Kelly

Spokane, Washington

I’d love to attend your dinner and bring my wife. I admire your dad. I don’t get down on millennials –– I hope I don’t. If I do, I’ll stop. GK

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I’ve always wanted to go to bed with a violinist all my life, and now that I’m really old (80) she would be next to me to play me through the pearly gates, but no, nothing. I even thought of buying a violin but since early piano lessons were a disaster maybe a photo of a violin would be better in bed certainly better than an upright piano there. Glad you are happy, Garrison, lovely violinist and all.

Take care

John

Take your phone to bed with you and Google the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 1 and enjoy the cadenzas and imagine an elegant lady is playing them. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

I loved the recent story of your going to The Met in NYC to see the wonderful La Traviata.

I thought you would get a kick out of one of my experiences at this opera.

I saw it at Lincoln Center at the smaller theater, done by the NYC Opera. The translations appear on the back/top of the seat in front of each patron. There was an electrical problem with my subtitles in that each letter “P” was shown as a letter “F.”

This became a source of stifled laughter when the repeated lines between characters involved mentions of “I must part,” “It is time to part now,” and “Please do not part …”

Love your work, have been a huge fan for years! Thank you for the joy you bring us.

Sally Deitz

Thanks for stifling the laughter. I hope that management learned of the problem and fixed it. Fart jokes might be appropriate during Falstaff but not La Traviata. GK