Post to the Host (resend)

Comments from 10.03.21

Technical Glitch this AM - Please excuse if you received this POST TO THE HOST already.

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About the photo in last week’s Post to the Host, where you refer to a mimeograph and show a spirit duplicator (Ditto) machine instead. The mimeograph (invented by Thomas Edison) was a silk-screen process where ink was forced through a wax stencil, which was cut on a typewriter; the Ditto machine involved typing a master on a sheet of paper with an aniline-dye backing sheet. Mimeos can produce many hundreds of copies of a newsletter but getting color into it was a nightmare: very few people bothered. Ditto masters, on the other hand, could print a multicolored sheet with a single pass through the machine, as long as the creator had used several different dye sheets to produce the master. It was, however, limited to at most about 150 copies.

Copies made on a mimeo generally are black ink on a rough, absorbent paper, with (at best) very clean lines of type with significant detail. Ditto copies look fuzzier — the ether dissolves the ink, and it tends to spread out on the sheet of paper, which is usually significantly slicker than the paper used for mimeography. If you were in Seattle, I could show you hundreds of examples of each.

You are not alone in making this error, but I am surprised that you got this one wrong.

Cheers,

Tom Whitmore, Seattle WA

Tom, I’m fascinated by the clarity of your writing unlike that of the people who’ve written the instruction manual for my printer and every other piece of electronics I’ve ever owned. You’ll be the head of the American Museum of Duplicating, if ever there is one. I’m sure you could also explain the hectograph, the pad of gelatin that took an inked master and made a few faint copies of it, which we had in Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s third-grade classroom at Benson School. It was a pleasure to use it but I am content with my printer, now that I’ve finally figured out its eccentricities.

GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

There is an old building in my hometown called “Trash and Treasures” with no running water or bathrooms or changerooms, just volunteer ladies of a certain age who take your money (cash only) and give it right to the fire department. There’s skis and crutches and footwear and furniture, and when there’s an influx of items you have the unsettling feeling that someone in town has just died and this is where his stuff has come. But it’s worth it because of the Book Room, and that’s where I first discovered your work. After I read Lake Wobegon Days (50 cents for a paperback), I went back and was delighted that someone in the town had been a big fan because there were more of your books there. I keep reading them every summer as I try hard to be a writer.

There’s something else in my town, too, that I want to tell you about. There’s a Sanctified Brethren Gospel Hall, and it’s in me as much as I was in it. The way you wrote about your Brethren experiences so kindly, the parts you left out, the probable hurt and constant shame — I wanted to ask you, if you had the time, for advice on how to write about this town and these people in a way that doesn’t hurt them even though it’s hurt you. I left the Brethren assembly but am still gratefully someone who loves what Jesus is all about. I think there have been enough years and enough therapy to write about it now and find the funny or redeem the funny. I have saved an interview you did with David Brady that was helpful. Is there anything else you would add?

Thank you so much for teaching me how to look back at a small town with fondness. You’ve redeemed things that were also painful, I think. I would like to do the same. The Brethren perspective told from a women’s point of view, but FUNNY, is hopefully not out there yet! I would be so grateful for any words of wisdom or writers’ groups I should know about.

Thanks again!
Lissa Simms

P.S. I look forward to buying your new book, from a real bookstore, when it comes to Canadian shelves!

Lissa, the Brethren of your youth and mine are now a small faded remnant of the movement they once were, victims of their own schismatic tendencies, suffering from an excess of dogmatists and a shortage of peacemakers. I have many dear relatives still in the Assemblies and I love them and feel no need to write about my childhood there. I’m grateful for the love of my aunts whose lives spoke their faith. And to write about the unworldly Brethren, in this age when evangelicalism has become crazy political, requires so much background explanation, it’s just not worth the misery. But the Trash and Treasures — now there is a subject worth your while. Have fun with it.

GK

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Dear Mr. K,

I am a volunteer citizen scientist classifying camera trap photos of mainly animals. At present, I am working on images taken at Cedar Creek, Minnesota. I imagine you wandering or maybe driving through this area at some point — could this be so? Or have I made a schoolgirl error in assuming that you would have travelled throughout MN?

Kindest regards,

Liz Daw, UK

Liz, I’ve been too busy for the past fifty years to wander in the woods and I have no idea where this Cedar Creek is and I’m guessing there are probably ten or fifteen of them in Minnesota, so any photos you see that show a tall solemn man wandering are of someone else, perhaps a cousin of mine.

GK

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Loved as usual your October 1 story. I was tripped up on the portion describing your nauseous pregnant wife. I believe she was nauseated. Unless she was making you feel ill. If I’m wrong, feel free to correct me in return. 

C. deJong

You are, of course, right. She was nauseated and I am nauseous to have implied that she was.

GK

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Dear GK,

I learned last night that my youngest niece, who had just started teaching fifth grade history at a public school in Denver, Colorado had “reluctantly” resigned her teaching post yesterday ... because “the kids were too violent.”

She had earned her teaching wings through college, of course — and by teaching English for two years to young students over in South Korea.

And now she comes home to this mess.

It is very difficult to take this news without despair.

What have we come to?

What in the world have we come to?

GW

It’s a tough line of work, maintaining classroom order while instilling some love of learning in the kids, and I am so far removed from it, I’m in no position to comment. I feel my life was changed by various public school teachers and I’ve said so many times. Classroom order was assumed in my day. I always felt safe and comfortable there. We’re cheating our kids if we can’t give them the same feeling today.

GK

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GK,

I was very happy to see your show in Pennsylvania on Sunday. I brought my 12-year-old son, and we loved walking around that town. I’m a lifelong New Yorker in the construction trades, grew up in Brooklyn (long before it became hipster central) from the same parish as the DiGiallonardo sisters, but I don’t know them. I moved outside Philadelphia just pre-COVID.

I just turned 53. In 2010 I took a cruise with you to the Western Caribbean. My wife and I had a 15-month-old son at the time, and your daughter who was 12 or so, played with him at poolside along with Heather Masse, who had just gotten married and I could see in her eyes when she met my son in diapers, what her shaggy-haired husband had in his future. The music and shows on those cruises gave me some of the best memories of any vacations I’ve ever taken.

In any case ... I was delighted to see you on stage again and would hope Rich and Sue/Tim and Heather and your other crew may come back for a show at Town Hall.

Thanks for the joy you share,

Bobby Fagan

Thanks for coming to the show and I hope the boy found something to enjoy in the show. I talked a little too much about being an old man, which must’ve bored him, but it’s good for a kid to learn patience. He would’ve enjoyed it much more if I hadn’t been solo but brought Heather to sing duets with but she was busy with the Wailin’ Jennys. I loved walking around that town of Jim Thorpe too. Handsome well-preserved old stately brick buildings.

GK

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Garrison:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your recent essay (10/8, “A Few Beams of Light ...”) on wins and losses in baseball. I’m two years older than you, a Minneapolitan, and I’ve been a Red Sox fan ever since the Giants dumped Mpls. and the Millers and turned us over to the Sox. I even saw Ted Williams hit one of his last home runs with that amazing swing in a Sox/Millers exhibition game. I’ve been a Yankee hater for even longer, and yes, I was thrilled watching the Sox bomb the Bronx “Bombers” Tuesday night (Yankees: “We bombed in Boston”). Sure, the Sox lost to Tampa Bay last night and will probably lose the next two as well but it’s been a great turnaround season.

Bob Buntrock

I was at that Millers/Red Sox exhibition game at the Met where Ted Williams hit that homer and I loved the John Updike farewell to him in his story “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” All great.

GK

A link to the New Yorker article:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1960/10/22/hub-fans-bid-kid-adieu

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In today’s column, you conclude by saying, ”But never make bad predictions especially about the future.” Aren’t all predictions – good, bad, or otherwise – about the future? Is there any other kind?

Coleman Hood

That was Casey Stengel’s joke, not mine, so I can’t explain it except I do think it’s funny.

GK

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A plutocrat, good old folksy you, bashing the Yankees as plutocrats … goodness gracious! A writer of endless, often pointless sentences berating Aaron Judge for being succinct yet gracious after a shellacking. Oh Fudge!

J. Doxey

Good for you, standing up for the Yanks. And doing it succinctly and turning my own words against me. Well done, sir.

GK

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Please tell me you have a succession plan. A few GKs in training. 

The Writer’s Almanac is like a morning prayer for me — so much life, love, and searches for meaning. No better way to start the day. 

Continue to be well and do good work. 

Audrey

Audrey, The Writer’s Almanac goes limping along week to week and I doubt it will go on past summer. It became a podcast after NPR stations dropped it in 2017 during the #MeToo scare and it’s kept going bravely for four years and it’s weary. I’d love to keep doing it but it needs refurbishing and the cost of hiring good staff to research and write it is beyond my means. Other people have done poetry podcasts but the ones I’ve heard seem designed to demonstrate the high intelligence of the host in choosing complex poems whereas TWA has always aimed for clarity. I’ll miss it too.

GK