Thanks Miriam. I'm tucking this list away for those rainy days that
are coming.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/2/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
I read a lot of fiction. Some of it is pleasureable. Some is about the
things I'm most interested in and so it isn't necessarily an escape. I look
at the NY Times Book Review section each Sunday on Newsline on the web and
I
keep lists of books I might like, and I also check BARD each day for new
books plus I'm a member of the DB Review list where, sometimes, people
recommend books I've overlooked, but would have liked if I'd noticed them.
So actually, picking books is a task, but it is rewarding. There are lots
of
great books to read, good stories that aren't necessarily violent. It
depends what things you like. But try The Truth According To Us, DB-Kwan_
Kevin Crazy rich Asians DB77099, DB-Krueger_ William Kent Ordinary grace_ a
novel DB78187, DB-Atkinson_ Kate A God in ruins_ a novel DB81443, and The
secret wisdom of the Earth DB80408. Of all of them, I think you'd most like
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth and The Truth According To Us. But I have a
whole list of other books which are great stories and which keep my mind
occupied,and my spirit flying off in escape mode.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2015 10:43 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Garrison Keillor on Retiring: "Paul Krugman
Is the American Conscience. I Don't Think I Am at All."
Well Dick, "Feel Good" stuff is food for our Souls. In order to offset
much
of the real world posts on this and other social media lists, I bury my
face....or my ears, in fiction. Just speaking for myself, since I'm always
my own best example, I absolutely need time out in order to keep from going
over the edge and beginning to sound like one of those Old Time Doom and
Gloom Prophets. I must say that uplifting escape stuff is getting harder
and
harder to find. I used to bury my face in mysteries, but the violence has
increased and especially the use of sexual violence to women, that I can no
longer enjoy that genre So I escape into humor. Not much on TV, but I wore
out the reruns of, "Everybody Loves Raymond", and "Golden Girls". Wait,
Wait, Don't Tell Me is always good for a chuckle, and until lately I
listened to Car Talk. But stand up comics like Donald Trump are not on my
current listening list.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/2/15, R. E. Driscoll Sr <llocsirdsr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
All:
GK causes me to 'feel good' about myself but then the show is over and
I am forced to be truthful.
R. E. (Dick) Driscoll, Sr.
On 9/1/2015 11:46 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
I've listened to Garrison Keillor off and on since 1976. For me, his
programs are as American as baseball, apple pie and Mom. Over the
years he has had some other American institutions on. Chet Atkins
and Bob Elliot...of Bob and Ray. And you can't get more authentic
American Music. And when I listen to Lake Wobegon, I chuckle because
it could just as easily be my wife's Italian family. I have a dear
friend who is Jewish. She confided that she is convinced that is her
families story. We decided that Garrison Keillor really touched the
center of all communities, everywhere.
I know that I will get past missing the weekly shows when the last
program is aired, but I suspect it will be a bit like how I have
missed my parents. We always talked by phone at least every Saturday.
For years following their deaths, I found myself reaching for the
phone to check in and get the latest gossip from back home. Mother
died in 1996 and dad in 2001. Those dates are meaningless. Time can
enter a warp and years mean nothing. Deep memories trump Time, every
time. Even now, as I write my thoughts, I could pick up the phone
and be certain one of my parents would be waiting on the other end.
I do really miss them. But even as I say that, I've never actually
lost them.
Now how the Hell did I get that far away from Garrison Keillor?
Well, I know that for years to come I'll close my eyes and just,
"Hear that old Piano..."
Carl JarvisOn 8/31/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Excerpt: "My last show, I believe, will be at the Hollywood Bowl,
the first Saturday in July 2016. And then we'll have kind of a
dizzying moment, realizing that life is changing after all these
years."
Garrison Keillor on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, near his bookstore
Common Good Books in 2014. (photo: Jean Pieri/Pioneer Press)
Garrison Keillor on Retiring: "Paul Krugman Is the American Conscience.
I
Don't Think I Am at All."
By Caty Enders, Guardian UK
31 August 15
The Prairie Home Companion host is preparing to leave Lake Wobegon -
but with plenty of projects in the pipeline, he shows no sign of
slowing down
Most nights this month, Garrison Keillor, host of the long-running
radio show A Prairie Home Companion, has put on a white suit, red
tie and sneakers, then stepped off his tour bus to perform a version
of his weekly program to live audiences around the US.
His America the Beautiful Tour features many of the same songs,
skits and stories - like the news from Lake Wobegon - that listeners
to his Saturday night variety show have heard for the last 42 years.
His baritone voice, crooning over rhubarb pie and powdermilk
biscuits, is as sweet as it has always been. The show's themes -
love and family, tragedy and small-town misadventure - are as
poignant as ever. Perhaps there are more prostate jokes these days.
And perhaps lately the songs are a little sadder. Last month,
Keillor announced that this would be his farewell tour: after
wrapping up the 30-city circuit in Alaska on Sunday, he will
complete one more season of A Prairie Home Companion, then leave
Lake Wobegon for good.
For the four million Americans who regularly tune in, it will be the
departure of a man many grew up listening to and the loss of a world
they are accustomed to inhabiting for a couple of hours each
weekend. When he takes the show on the road, Keillor rewrites the
stories for each city, leaving audiences feeling the fictional Lake
Wobegon is just a stone's throw away, the characters as familiar and
eccentric as an extended family.
Keillor says it's time for him to step back and focus on crafting
new worlds. Once a staff writer at the New Yorker, he has, on the
side, authored or edited 25 books of fiction and three of poetry.
The Guardian caught up with Keillor before a show in Eugene, Oregon
- and after he had driven 12 hours from a performance in Salt Lake
City.
I think you should tell NPR they should let you keep the dirty jokes
you used when the show was in Brooklyn a couple weeks ago.
Hm. It was not what I would consider a comfortable show, but it was
there and we did it. The show has changed a good deal since then.
But that's natural, being out on the road. When I was at the Kings
Theater, I was still very uncertain about the monologue, and I was
still sort of pulling it out of the air. I was pulling from some
older monologues, some older Lake Wobegon stories, which I had
intended to do, but I still hadn't quite figured out my way.
You've been riding a tour bus for four decades. When do you find
time to write your stories?
I write on the bus, or I write sitting here in a hotel room. I have
a memoir I'm trying to push along the road. And then the show needs
to be rewritten somewhat for each venue. People like to hear local
references, and so I put those in. I rewrite a couple of songs for
each place. Just, you know, steady workman-like work.
I was worried talking to you would feel like talking to the voice of
God.
No, no, I'm just a writer. I'm just a writer who looked to slip into
radio as a way of supporting myself. You know, I just started out
writing short fiction for the New Yorker. I wrote a non-fiction
piece about the Grand Ole Opry down in Nashville, and that kind of
got me on this track, and I've been on it for 41 years, and now I'm
getting off it.
If you're just a writer, you've spent a lot of free time producing a
radio show.
I'm at the end of a very long and pretty happy detour. I am an
inventor and an editor, and that's what I enjoy. I love rewriting as
much as I like writing. I really do. I love to sit and print out a
hard copy of something and go over it and over it.
I'm not an inventor any more with this show; I'm a curator. I'm
trying to keep something going that I invented a long time ago.
You invent things for the radio: Guy Noir and the Lives of the Cowboys.
You
invent a town with all these characters in it and story lines, and
it's been interesting, until you realize that you have created [wry
laugh] an obligation to keep it going, for the listener. And it's at
that point that your inventiveness wanes. And you feel restless.
You've threatened to retire before. You mean it this time?
When you're 73, you really are aware of how you are changing, the
good and the bad. And you don't want to stay doing something past
the point where you feel confident and presentable.
It's hard to think of you off the air. You've reached the point
where you seem like the American conscience, popping in every
weekend.
No, I think Paul Krugman, the columnist for the New York Times, is
the American conscience. I don't think I am at all.
What comes next?
I want to write a play. That's become the ambition: plays and
screenplays.
That's entirely new to me, and it feels adventurous.
What's the reception been like on your final go round?
The audiences have been very big, and you notice that especially
outdoors, like when you're out at Red Rocks, and there's this great
mountain of people. Or last night in Salt Lake City, and this whole
grassy hill is just covered with people sitting there with blankets
and lawn chairs and so on.
In the show, I go out into the crowd, usually twice, walking around
at the beginning, and then during the intermission, I walk out there
with just a handheld microphone, and I walk through the crowd in the
dark. It's just very mysterious: the spotlight is on you, but it's
in your eyes, so you can't really see, and you're trying not to trip
over people, and you're walking through the crowd, and you're
singing.
You're singing a verse of this and a verse of that - just songs that
they would know. And so they're all singing around you, and they
sing My Country 'Tis of Thee and America the Beautiful and Working
on the Railroad and Can't Help Falling in Love and some Everly
Brothers and You Are My Sunshine - and just on and on. And they love
to do this. They're singing it a capella, there's no band playing.
It's just people's voices around you, in the dark.
The point of all this - so obvious that you don't even need to point
it out
- is that we are one country, and this is the basis of everything.
Is there a reason you called the last tour America the Beautiful?
Coming to the end of intermission, I start the audience on the
Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I make a little speech, and it's a
one-minute speech and it is that every few years, we need to take
back the country. The values for which the civil war was fought is
still at issue and always will be, and the issue of justice and
equality and liberty still need to be fought for by every
generation, and people are emotional about this. I don't know - ha
-
what they think I mean, but I just mean that it never was settled,
and so then we launch into:
I have seen Him in the watchfires
Of a hundred circling camps .
He has sounded forth the trumpet
That shall never sound retreat .
Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the coming of the Lord .
In beauty of the lilies,
Christ born across the sea...
... They do all four verses a cappella, and they do this rousing
chorus, in four-part harmony. It just gets stronger and stronger as
the song goes on.
And it's a very powerful moment. People are moved by it. It's not
political as people understand "political"; it is just very, very
basic.
There's no place else that people get a chance to do that.
So you've been touring the country for decades. Are we in a sorry
state?
What seems to me to be unchanging is the ambition of young people.
When I go and have a chance to mingle with high school and college
students - not to stand up and lecture to them, but to be among them
and to talk to them - if anything, I find them much more socially
aware, much more ambitious, and much more articulate than we were
back in the 1960s.
People my age, I don't know who they are - I don't know them, any of
them, anymore. But when I get a chance to hang out with the future,
I feel pretty good about it.
Hasn't Prairie Home always been on a farewell tour? It seems like
the show has always been saying goodbye to the America that we used
to know.
I don't think so. I'm aware that people look on it as a show of
nostalgia.
I
don't exactly feel that way. I was kind of launched on doing the
show by an affection for what I considered to be classic American
music. Now it's called "roots" music, I guess.
Pop music of my era was trying to create obsolescence, as a business
strategy. I'm not nostalgic for that era, because, in addition to
producing a few things that I think are permanent, it produced an
awful lot of crap and an awful lot of fluff. And, you know, I'm not
fond of that. I'm not.
I never was into kitsch, and that's really the basis of nostalgia:
it's being sentimental about the ordinary. And I don't feel that
way. The America that I feel strongly about is a sort of classic
America. I feel very attached to figures in the 19th century long
before I came along -
writers:
Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson. I feel moved by them, more than by
people of my own time.
So to me that's not an America that has gone away. That's an America
that is permanent. I think Thoreau is permanent, I think Emily
Dickinson is permanent, and . I'm an English major. I'm talking like
an English major.
It's cool. I'm an English major, too.
Hm.
I know you've named your successor on the show, Chris Thile, who's a
musician. What about all the stories? Have you considered trying to
cultivate someone to take that side of it over as a podcast?
Well, I'm not interested in podcasts. Other people are, and I wish
them well, but that's not my line of work. I'm interested in the
show continuing as a live broadcast for the time being, from the
Midwest.
The alternative would be to carry on the show in reruns, which could
be done. I'm not in favor of that. I would rather the show be
carried on by younger people to use this platform - which we've
worked hard to establish
-
and this staff and crew - who are tremendously capable and loyal -
and use it as a springboard for something new: a live, acoustic
American music show with some new spoken elements to be named later.
And that's what I like: I like the idea of paving the way for
performers in their 20s and 30s to come in and take this over. This
seems to me to be utterly natural and the way it should be.
It sounds like your days are so full that it would be a difficult
transition to retirement.
No, I would always find things to work on. Work is really what I do.
I don't have any hobbies. I guess I intend to ride trains more. I
really love trains, and I need to get out and walk more, for my own
good. You know, you become a little monastic in this work life.
So I won't change some things, but I have no end of things to work
on. I have a memoir, and it's due, and I have a novel that I have to
do, and it's not Lake Wobegon. It's kind of a darker novel.
When do we tune in for your last show?
My last show, I believe, will be at the Hollywood Bowl, the first
Saturday in July 2016. And then we'll have kind of a dizzying
moment, realizing that life is changing after all these years.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference
not valid.
Garrison Keillor on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, near his bookstore
Common Good Books in 2014. (photo: Jean Pieri/Pioneer Press)
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/aug/30/garrison-keillor-reti
ring-lak
e-wobegon-america-beautiful-tourhttp://www.theguardian.com/culture/2
015/aug/
30/garrison-keillor-retiring-lake-wobegon-america-beautiful-tour
Garrison Keillor on Retiring: "Paul Krugman Is the American Conscience.
I
Don't Think I Am at All."
By Caty Enders, Guardian UK
31 August 15
The Prairie Home Companion host is preparing to leave Lake Wobegon -
but with plenty of projects in the pipeline, he shows no sign of
slowing down
ost nights this month, Garrison Keillor, host of the long-running
radio show A Prairie Home Companion, has put on a white suit, red
tie and sneakers, then stepped off his tour bus to perform a version
of his weekly program to live audiences around the US.
His America the Beautiful Tour features many of the same songs,
skits and stories - like the news from Lake Wobegon - that listeners
to his Saturday night variety show have heard for the last 42 years.
His baritone voice, crooning over rhubarb pie and powdermilk
biscuits, is as sweet as it has always been. The show's themes -
love and family, tragedy and small-town misadventure - are as
poignant as ever. Perhaps there are more prostate jokes these days.
And perhaps lately the songs are a little sadder. Last month,
Keillor announced that this would be his farewell tour: after
wrapping up the 30-city circuit in Alaska on Sunday, he will
complete one more season of A Prairie Home Companion, then leave
Lake Wobegon for good.
For the four million Americans who regularly tune in, it will be the
departure of a man many grew up listening to and the loss of a world
they are accustomed to inhabiting for a couple of hours each
weekend. When he takes the show on the road, Keillor rewrites the
stories for each city, leaving audiences feeling the fictional Lake
Wobegon is just a stone's throw away, the characters as familiar and
eccentric as an extended family.
Keillor says it's time for him to step back and focus on crafting
new worlds. Once a staff writer at the New Yorker, he has, on the
side, authored or edited 25 books of fiction and three of poetry.
The Guardian caught up with Keillor before a show in Eugene, Oregon
- and after he had driven 12 hours from a performance in Salt Lake
City.
I think you should tell NPR they should let you keep the dirty jokes
you used when the show was in Brooklyn a couple weeks ago.
Hm. It was not what I would consider a comfortable show, but it was
there and we did it. The show has changed a good deal since then.
But that's natural, being out on the road. When I was at the Kings
Theater, I was still very uncertain about the monologue, and I was
still sort of pulling it out of the air. I was pulling from some
older monologues, some older Lake Wobegon stories, which I had
intended to do, but I still hadn't quite figured out my way.
You've been riding a tour bus for four decades. When do you find
time to write your stories?
I write on the bus, or I write sitting here in a hotel room. I have
a memoir I'm trying to push along the road. And then the show needs
to be rewritten somewhat for each venue. People like to hear local
references, and so I put those in. I rewrite a couple of songs for
each place. Just, you know, steady workman-like work.
I was worried talking to you would feel like talking to the voice of
God.
No, no, I'm just a writer. I'm just a writer who looked to slip into
radio as a way of supporting myself. You know, I just started out
writing short fiction for the New Yorker. I wrote a non-fiction
piece about the Grand Ole Opry down in Nashville, and that kind of
got me on this track, and I've been on it for 41 years, and now I'm
getting off it.
If you're just a writer, you've spent a lot of free time producing a
radio show.
I'm at the end of a very long and pretty happy detour. I am an
inventor and an editor, and that's what I enjoy. I love rewriting as
much as I like writing. I really do. I love to sit and print out a
hard copy of something and go over it and over it.
I'm not an inventor any more with this show; I'm a curator. I'm
trying to keep something going that I invented a long time ago.
You invent things for the radio: Guy Noir and the Lives of the Cowboys.
You
invent a town with all these characters in it and story lines, and
it's been interesting, until you realize that you have created [wry
laugh] an obligation to keep it going, for the listener. And it's at
that point that your inventiveness wanes. And you feel restless.
You've threatened to retire before. You mean it this time?
When you're 73, you really are aware of how you are changing, the
good and the bad. And you don't want to stay doing something past
the point where you feel confident and presentable.
It's hard to think of you off the air. You've reached the point
where you seem like the American conscience, popping in every
weekend.
No, I think Paul Krugman, the columnist for the New York Times, is
the American conscience. I don't think I am at all.
What comes next?
I want to write a play. That's become the ambition: plays and
screenplays.
That's entirely new to me, and it feels adventurous.
What's the reception been like on your final go round?
The audiences have been very big, and you notice that especially
outdoors, like when you're out at Red Rocks, and there's this great
mountain of people. Or last night in Salt Lake City, and this whole
grassy hill is just covered with people sitting there with blankets
and lawn chairs and so on.
In the show, I go out into the crowd, usually twice, walking around
at the beginning, and then during the intermission, I walk out there
with just a handheld microphone, and I walk through the crowd in the
dark. It's just very mysterious: the spotlight is on you, but it's
in your eyes, so you can't really see, and you're trying not to trip
over people, and you're walking through the crowd, and you're
singing.
You're singing a verse of this and a verse of that - just songs that
they would know. And so they're all singing around you, and they
sing My Country 'Tis of Thee and America the Beautiful and Working
on the Railroad and Can't Help Falling in Love and some Everly
Brothers and You Are My Sunshine - and just on and on. And they love
to do this. They're singing it a capella, there's no band playing.
It's just people's voices around you, in the dark.
The point of all this - so obvious that you don't even need to point
it out
- is that we are one country, and this is the basis of everything.
Is there a reason you called the last tour America the Beautiful?
Coming to the end of intermission, I start the audience on the
Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I make a little speech, and it's a
one-minute speech and it is that every few years, we need to take
back the country. The values for which the civil war was fought is
still at issue and always will be, and the issue of justice and
equality and liberty still need to be fought for by every
generation, and people are emotional about this. I don't know - ha
-
what they think I mean, but I just mean that it never was settled,
and so then we launch into:
I have seen Him in the watchfires
Of a hundred circling camps .
He has sounded forth the trumpet
That shall never sound retreat .
Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the coming of the Lord .
In beauty of the lilies,
Christ born across the sea...
... They do all four verses a cappella, and they do this rousing
chorus, in four-part harmony. It just gets stronger and stronger as
the song goes on.
And it's a very powerful moment. People are moved by it. It's not
political as people understand "political"; it is just very, very
basic.
There's no place else that people get a chance to do that.
So you've been touring the country for decades. Are we in a sorry
state?
What seems to me to be unchanging is the ambition of young people.
When I go and have a chance to mingle with high school and college
students - not to stand up and lecture to them, but to be among them
and to talk to them - if anything, I find them much more socially
aware, much more ambitious, and much more articulate than we were
back in the 1960s.
People my age, I don't know who they are - I don't know them, any of
them, anymore. But when I get a chance to hang out with the future,
I feel pretty good about it.
Hasn't Prairie Home always been on a farewell tour? It seems like
the show has always been saying goodbye to the America that we used
to know.
I don't think so. I'm aware that people look on it as a show of
nostalgia.
I
don't exactly feel that way. I was kind of launched on doing the
show by an affection for what I considered to be classic American
music. Now it's called "roots" music, I guess.
Pop music of my era was trying to create obsolescence, as a business
strategy. I'm not nostalgic for that era, because, in addition to
producing a few things that I think are permanent, it produced an
awful lot of crap and an awful lot of fluff. And, you know, I'm not
fond of that. I'm not.
I never was into kitsch, and that's really the basis of nostalgia:
it's being sentimental about the ordinary. And I don't feel that
way. The America that I feel strongly about is a sort of classic
America. I feel very attached to figures in the 19th century long
before I came along -
writers:
Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson. I feel moved by them, more than by
people of my own time.
So to me that's not an America that has gone away. That's an America
that is permanent. I think Thoreau is permanent, I think Emily
Dickinson is permanent, and . I'm an English major. I'm talking like
an English major.
It's cool. I'm an English major, too.
Hm.
I know you've named your successor on the show, Chris Thile, who's a
musician. What about all the stories? Have you considered trying to
cultivate someone to take that side of it over as a podcast?
Well, I'm not interested in podcasts. Other people are, and I wish
them well, but that's not my line of work. I'm interested in the
show continuing as a live broadcast for the time being, from the
Midwest.
The alternative would be to carry on the show in reruns, which could
be done. I'm not in favor of that. I would rather the show be
carried on by younger people to use this platform - which we've
worked hard to establish
-
and this staff and crew - who are tremendously capable and loyal -
and use it as a springboard for something new: a live, acoustic
American music show with some new spoken elements to be named later.
And that's what I like: I like the idea of paving the way for
performers in their 20s and 30s to come in and take this over. This
seems to me to be utterly natural and the way it should be.
It sounds like your days are so full that it would be a difficult
transition to retirement.
No, I would always find things to work on. Work is really what I do.
I don't have any hobbies. I guess I intend to ride trains more. I
really love trains, and I need to get out and walk more, for my own
good. You know, you become a little monastic in this work life.
So I won't change some things, but I have no end of things to work
on. I have a memoir, and it's due, and I have a novel that I have to
do, and it's not Lake Wobegon. It's kind of a darker novel.
When do we tune in for your last show?
My last show, I believe, will be at the Hollywood Bowl, the first
Saturday in July 2016. And then we'll have kind of a dizzying
moment, realizing that life is changing after all these years.
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