How good to learn that WTIP licensed this piece! No, WTIP is not a big-city station. It’s located on the southern “tip” of Lake Superior. James McIntosh’s ruminations about the year 2009 will be heard by a few thousand people in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and southern Ontario.

On this New Year’s it’s pleasant to think of McIntosh’s piece being pondered by no-nonsense northerners. February is still a good way off, but for millions of us south of Lake Woebegone it’s already, in the words of the Christmas carol, “the bleak mid-winter.” Shall we bless or blame 2009 and, by implication, the aught decade which is fast becoming history?

Whereas most of us have heard George Santayana’s famous quip, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” McIntosh quotes another George—Bernard Shaw: “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”

If nothing can be learned from history except the notion that history can teach us nothing, then it follows that we need to light out on our own, fare forward anew as if for the first time and view the present moment with, as one poet put it, “the hottest fire of sight.” As McIntosh puts it, “Experience is hindsight with enough bite to influence the future.”

Bienvenido, 2010!

More than any travel agent or tour guide, world-traveler Jake Warga is aware of poignant contradictions in various ports of call. In his latest sojourn in the Holy Land, he lets us know that in 2009 Mary and Joseph would not be permitted to enter Bethlehem for Jesus’s birth because both would be Jews unable to cross the checkpoint between Israel and the Occupied Territories. “Jews, “ Warga lets us know, “are not allowed into Bethlehem, the birthplace of the world’s most famous Jew. “

Isaac, we learn from Warga, is the Hebrew word for “He laughs,” and Ishmael for “He weeps.”

As neither a Jew nor a Muslim, Warga uses his mic to record the dead-serious non-laughter of an Israeli woman speaking of Jerusalem’s Colindia checkpoint and, implicitly, of all walls dividing people: “It’s just bad news all around. Can’t put a fence around yourself and have people living in the third world five minutes from your home.”

Warga asks an Arab taxi driver if he speaks Hebrew, and, rather than weeping like his forebear Ishmael, the driver grouses, “No, I don’t speak Jewish.”

These are only a few of this piece’s many rewards. Although we don’t get to see the evidence here, Warga is a superb photographer whose visual images capture the gritty essence of places like Guatemala, Rwanda and Norfolk Island off the coast of Australia.

His script for this piece is an offbeat ear-opener perfect for the winter holiday season—and suitable all year round.

This piece has been five-starred by two topnotch authorities in Raymond Carver Land: Carver’s son, Vance Lindsay, as well as Carol Sklenicka, whose new biography, “Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life,” was today listed among the New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2009.

After such stellar endorsements, here are my two cents:

Carver was, as a man and in terms of his writing, a major person for me. His short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” is part of the American literary canon. As usual—consider the case of “Julia Child and M. F. K. Fisher”—Leet-Ford and Litwin’s production of this piece is a kind of national treasure.

PDs may want to consider the significance of “love” in this story. If it’s true that, as four Liverpudlians sang, “All you need is love,” this story’s protagonist Mel, a cardiologist, has plenty to say about essential matters of the heart. His tipsy tip sheet abounds with unfoolish inconsistencies in subplots you will chuckle and frown over. The two married couples sitting down for drinks before dinner in Albuquerque discuss what it means to “love one another” in terms no one—certainly not Hemingway—ever brought out of the woodwork. In fact, the four main characters in this story, plus another quartet of characters mentioned “offstage,” are part of a late twentieth-century wallpaper design every American will recognize as part of his or her unique and solitary home.

I don’t agree with the host Herbert Gold’s statement that parental discretion is advised when airing this piece. I think young people need to know more about Shakespeare’s notion that the course of true love never did run smooth. I think people of all ages will want to make space in their day to listen to this piece and give it five stars.

For years Cheryl-Anne Millsap has been broadcasting from the Inland Northwest. It’s good to see a hefty bunch of her recent pieces for Spokane Public Radio have been uploaded onto PRX—and good to hear her clear voice again.

In this drop-in, her personal essay about her grandfather has the sentimental warmth of a fireside chat. Her piece is titled “The Poetry of Carl Sandburg,” but it’s more a tribute to her bookish grandpa than to the author of “Chicago Poems.” Millsap begins, “My grandfather was a good man,” and she returns to this line as a refrain and her central theme.

It turns out that one of the main reasons Millsap’s granddad was a good man is that he “gave [Millsap] a good start,” i.e., he gave her Sandburg’s “poetry and steel mills and train cars and ordinary people.” It would have been excellent if Millsap had quoted a few lines from one or two of Sandburg’s poems. Failing this, she leaves us to make the connection between poems like “Fog” or “Gone” and her own plainspoken writing style, as well as her own down-home vision of ordinary life.

Who knows what kind of writer Millsap might have become if her grandpa had read poems to her by T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens? Let’s leave that question unanswered for now—and enjoy her words from a place that could hardly be called a “hog butcher for the world,” eastern Washington state’s Lilac City!

What could be better for November 26th than Guy Hand’s six-minute discourse on what we love most about Thanksgiving, food?

Idaho good-old-boy Guy Hand doesn’t say much about Idaho mashed potatoes and turkey. He has a mouthful of things to say about the pungent Mediterranean lettuce known as arugula. Even if his tongue twists around the word so that he continually mispronounces it while some of his interviewees pronounce it correctly, he knows what he’s talking about. No red-meat-eating, pickup-truck-driving, barn-owl-loving Gem Stater would trade his store-bought plastic-wrapped iceberg lettuce for a fancy-schmancy bitter Italian plant whose name he can’t pronounce. For that matter, Hand mispronounces the word “restaurateur”!

In the Pacific Northwest you can get away with pronouncing Rush Limbaugh as “God.” Which makes Hand’s piece funnier than a barrel of Sarah Palins scarfing brie and chablis at the Poetry Society of Boise. Hand handily edits his ruminations — chewing his cud — into a tasty concoction that may be closer to a blue-plate special than a foodies’ feast. But there’s enough here to please both Volvo-driving, Trader-Joe’s-going, garbanzo-bean-munching vegans and Wal-Mart-loving, Jim-Beam-swilling, Glock-pistol-packing carnivores.

Bon appetit!

Although our current U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan’s work is chiseled and granite-like – far from “confessional” or sentimental – this interview abounds with heartfelt personal details.

Ryan talks about how, while she was biking across the country in 1976, she heard a disembodied voice answer her silent question about becoming a poet with “Do you like it?” She talks about her father, a dreamer, who died prematurely while he was away from home, reading a get-rich-quick book at a motel. Most poignantly, she talks about how her “life partner” Carol died earlier this year, happy about Ryan’s accepting the poet laureateship partly because it offset the horror of her own death by cancer.

Then, too, Ryan muses about the ups and downs of her career, which was slow to take off; this will give hope to many aspiring poets listening to her success story. Her first book, supported by a group of Carol’s friends who got together and anteed up funds, was self-published. Ryan was no less than 50 years old when her first poem was published in “The New Yorker.” She was lying in bed reading the papers one Sunday morning when Carol pointed out one of Ryan’s poems quoted in “Boondocks” in the funnies – at which point Ryan felt as though she’d really “arrived” as a writer.

Everything that I’ve read by Ryan that has struck me as flinty and cold on the page gives way in this terrific interview from the long-standing topnotch Kansas City series, “New Letters on the Air.” Ryan ends up sounding like my image of Emily Dickinson on a fine Amherst morning.

She’s as warm as toast.

What could be more spine tingling for Halloween than a rebroadcast of Orson Welles’s famous radio play, “The Invasion from Mars”? Most Americans know the grisly story of its initial airing on October 30, 1938. Although Welles prefaced his production with a statement that “The Invasion” was a play, at least a million listeners were so persuaded by the power of his drama that they thought Martians were indeed invading the Earth. As a result, the Golden Age of Radio turned into One Huge Dollop of Panic, One Chaotic Evening of More than Trick or Treating.

I for one have never heard “The Invasion from Mars,” and I’d welcome bending an ear to it on Halloween eve. If it were aired, Dick Meister’s introduction would be must-hear material. Even though more than 71 years have elapsed, making the audio quality of Welles’s premiere sound a bit antique, I’d bet that, without Meister’s sage and salty introduction, thousands of people listening to “The Invasion” would go berserk in 2009 just as they did prior to World War Two. After all, we are still involved in at least one war that spans a great deal of the world. We are still as gullible as ever.

I only wish Meister’s elocution were crisper and clearer. He’s a terrific journalist but not expert at reading his script aloud in front of a mic.

Small potatoes when you consider the giant jack-o’-lantern “The Invasion” would be if it were rebroadcast on Saturday night October 31, 2009.

I vote for Dick Meister as MC of the evening.

First there was Yul Brynner. Then there was Michael Jordan. Now there’s John Tynan.

I go along with the notion that bald is beautiful because, I, too, went into the bathroom one Sunday afternoon — like John Tynan — and shaved my head. It’s been a few years, and neither my wife nor I have any regrets about my follicular decision.

But enough about me! Tynan’s lilting, half-lugubrious, half-joyous description of the day he decided to trim his locks is a kind of tone poem. Sure, he had trouble cutting and shaving the back of his head viewed through a mirror. Sure, he had fantasies of ramming a cap over his botched tonsure job and sneaking over to a barbershop to have his hair-mowing finished so he didn’t look like a half-hairy ape. Sure, he suffered the anxiety of anybody about to make a clean cut with the past and begin anew with vigor and a shiny pate.But he seems to have loved the process, and the smile on his face in the photo accompanying his PRX piece attests to this.

Two teensy problems — and maybe I missed something vis-à-vis the first: Tynan makes much ado about using a safety razor and a pair of scissors. The sound track, however, is abuzz with an electric razor. This tiny ingrown hair, as it were, doesn’t prevent the sound track from being as playful and inventive as anything you’d want to hear, given the subject.

My second quibble has to do with the piece’s being a couple of minutes too long. After four minutes Tynan’s shtick begins to sound as though it, like Tynan’s hair mop, could be cut.

Despite the “South Pacific” song, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” there’s nothing quite like “Bald”! It’d be perfect to air during National Shearling Month!

There’s plenty to admire in Steve Webb’s monologue about real estate. First of all, it’s not merely a monologue. Webb expertly intersperses his remarks with amusing sound effects. At the outset, for example, he uses crashing musical chords to emphasize his being a member of “Rentaholics Anonymous,” and the result resembles something like the musical motifs in the famous 1960s TV series “Dragnet,” starring Sgt. Joe Friday, played by actor Jack Webb – any relationship to Steve??

For that matter, everything Webb discusses seems to be right on target. His intention is to spread the good news about home ownership, as opposed to rentals. What he says about home equity appears to make sense – as does his spiel about home mortgages being tax deductible, about the advantages of owning a house so that you can decorate it the way you want and play your stereo as loudly as you like. Et cetera, et cetera.

Overall, this is a meticulously produced piece by a witty narrator whose British accent makes the piece all the more resonant and classy. There’s one problem:

Webb’s Home Ownership 101 lecture may have been copacetic a few years ago. Ever since the real estate market crashed, Webb’s comments aren’t so easy to swallow. It’s no longer accurate to say that homeowners will always acquire equity when they purchase a house. I know quite a few people who spent X number of dollars, only to see the value of their houses fall so far that, in terms of their mortgages, the houses are now “underwater.” I’ve heard it said that people who hold onto their houses for at least seven years are bound to end up in the black. But Webb’s blanket optimism about home ownership may be a bit Panglossian.

A few deft emendations might update this piece. Better yet, the housing market might bounce back tomorrow, in which case Sgt. Joe Friday’s dragnet will be foolproof.

Ever since a poem of mine was published alongside an essay – about tea, of all things – by M. F. K. Fisher in “The New Yorker,” I’ve idolized her. Finally, this autumn in the wake of the movie, “Julie and Julia,” the only recording of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher reading her work has become available. What’s more, the great American chef Julia Child hosts this splendid half-hour. Her full five minutes of introductory remarks, delivered with the resonant squawk Meryl Streep ably mimics in the movie, are as zesty as they are elegant.

It’s trite but true to say that American cuisine has long been dominated by McDonald’s and KFC. Considering this, you will marvel at M. F. K.’s story of a midday meal in France. The year is 1937 when Fisher was 29, but her writing is so impeccable, so vivid with detail, that her piece is timeless. Young Mary Frances is seated alone, off-season, by a stream in a renowned little restaurant called The Old Mill. The wine and food are, predictably, “tres magnifique,” but – and here’s the rub – the solitary waitress is almost demonic in her Gallic devotion to the experience of dining. As Fisher slowly puts away plenty of wine, hors d’oeuvres, trout, salad, dessert and more wine – paying attention to particulars in every delectable sentence – she describes the intimidating waitress to a T.

Fisher’s tone of voice is far more dulcet than Child’s, but this is no formal reading. At one point sitting in what must have been a favorite chair at home, Fisher pauses with an “uh,” and she appears to giggle elsewhere in her reading. Still elsewhere she garbles her diction, but only a bit. Although her writing has the depth and dimension of fiction, she calls it reportage. She’s merely “telling it like it was.”

I’d call this one-of-a-kind performance a national treasure. It should be the duty of every public radio PD to air this piece.

You can’t keep Jake Warga down on the farm, which happens to be his home base, Seattle. The last time I caught him he was in Guatemala. Now he’s packed up his camera as well as his mic and has lit out to Norfolk Island. I couldn’t find this island on Google Maps, but it’s supposedly 900 miles off the coast of Australia, a three-by-five-mile rocky outcrop with a good share of evergreens and a local culture you may be glad to hear about.

It’s sad to hear that the local tourist industry, which accounts for most of Norfolk Island’s prosperity, is suffering because of the global economic meltdown. In 2007 40,000 visitors, mostly Aussies, flew to the island to bike, snorkel, and indulge in what must be delectable fish frys. Last year a little more than half as many tourists lived it up at such quaint local hostelries as the Fantasy Island Resort.

What’s grimmer still, the local language is dying out. Warga gives us islander Rhonda Griffith’s rendition of a bit of Norfolk’s endangered lingo, a melodic combo of Tahitian and “very old English” that derives from the original mutineers of the Bounty. “Watawieh yorli?” or “What way are you?” is Norfolkese for “Hello” or “How are you?” Nowadays classes in the island’s indigenous language are required in local schools.

Warga, who’s had good luck licensing his work, is doing Norfolk Island a great service with his four-minute piece. As one of his interviewees says with a thick Down Under accent, Norfolk Island is “a place you shouldn’t miss. It’s one of the places you must go to before you die.”

Warga’s “Economic Storm” is one of the pieces you must treat yourself to before you give up on wanderlust.

To listen to a former poet laureate – also a major translator of Dante, a professor at Boston University and a critic who has written for the “New York Times Book Review” – discourse about the Biblical King David could be an über-boring, -pompous experience. On the contrary, Jenny Attiyeh’s 28-minute piece rocks. She not only asks her guest Robert Pinsky the right questions; he answers them with his characteristic rollicking street smarts.

For example, drawing on his new book, “The Life of David,” Pinsky is less interested in David as a pious figure, “the one who is beloved,” which his Hebrew name literally means. Neither is Pinsky’s David a stock figure of the diminutive boy who killed Goliath. Instead, Pinsky views David as a warlord, “a big shot,” even “a thug.” To hear him talk, you might consider a gangster like Meyer Lansky a distant relative of the king who bedded Bathsheba. For that matter, Pinsky sees David’s relationship with Bathsheba as having less to do with love than with lust.

Unlike a theologian or a rabbi, Pinsky is spellbound by stories about David. Insofar as stories derive from imagination, Pinsky talks about the paradoxes and contradictions of a figure as complex as one of our Founding Fathers, say, George Washington – or else King Leopold of Africa who was, for all the good he apparently did, an “appalling man.”

Fundamentalists and diehard knee benders might well object to the description of David as being involved in the “pragmatic ways of a warrior-chieftain.” It is precisely David's – and Pinsky’s – pragmatism, their worldly wisdom, that light up Attiyeh’s interview with multiple laser beams and make her conversation with Pinsky part of a great conversation about David that’s been going on for the past 3000 years.

This excellent, all-too-short drop-in deals with the composer whose music first “turned me on” when I was in the eighth grade. It wasn’t so much Beethoven’s Fifth or the majesty of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony as much as the melodic magic of Edvard Grieg’s “Morning Mood” that struck me dumb. I played all of its three or four minutes so many dozens of times that I feared the grooves of its 12-inch 78 disc would be etched clean by my record changer’s diamond needle.

Listening to Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite” or beholding that gorgeous piece of Norwegian wood, “The Last Spring,” still awakens some adolescent core in me, despite my being older than Grieg was when he died 120 years ago this week. The greatness of a composer like Grieg has to do with his schmaltzy tunes that drive straight for a listener’s heart but end up being more than schmaltz. For me, in his A minor piano concerto when he strives to be in a league with Tchaikovsky, he ends up being bombastic, especially in the first movement. Despite the drama of the A minor, it falls short of Schumann’s own A minor piano concerto.

Grieg’s life was, thankfully, not short, brutish and nasty. But neither was it extraordinary. He traveled, married his first cousin and even met Tchaikovsky. He achieved his share of fame and a bit of fortune in his lifetime, unlike another physically diminutive, melodic master, Schubert. But, like Schubert, one could say that Grieg has “lived” more remarkably during the past 100-plus years than he did during his 64 years of life on earth.

I only wish this program were longer than it is. Fred Flaxman has already featured Grieg on several of his celebrated hour-long Compact Discoveries, but to my knowledge Flaxman has not featured a full hour of Grieg for Grieg's sake.

I wish he would.

It’s hard to believe that the man who gave this six-minute speech exactly a year ago on August 25, 2008 passed away yesterday on August 25, 2009. Sure, he more than lived up to his words, “I pledge to you that I will be there next January on the floor of the United States Senate when we begin the great test.” Somehow, although we knew his brain cancer would take its course, we expected him to survive for at least another year – perhaps ad infinitum.

His stentorian baritone survives him in podcasts like this, which attests to an oratorical style I identify with the ancient Roman senator Cicero. His politics, which President George Walker Bush used to vilify by identifying it as the “L-word,” survives, along with that of FDR and LBJ, as being in favor of “fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few”; during our summer of raucous discontent with President Obama’s health care proposals, Senator Kennedy one year ago registered his “new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American – north, south, east, west, young, old – will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”

Most important, his vibrant, flawed, totally human spirit will survive him. Teddy tried with all his heart and soul to serve us, “the many-headed multitude,” whatever our affiliation, whether we believe in the L-word or the C-word. He will continue to serve us as an icon for many years to come.

For starters we might as well listen to some of his famous last words at the Democratic National Convention last summer.

Two-thirds of the way through Alan Wolper’s interview of Hal Friedman, the father of Cory, who has Tourette Syndrome, Friedman states that most people nowadays know quite a bit about autism but not a whole lot about TS.

Wolper’s deceptively laid-back questions allow Friedman to talk about how his son excelled at sports, only to be shunned by his teammates. After Little League and football games during which, beset by TS symptoms, Cory was a pivotal player and was hailed as a “hero of the hour,” he was left standing in his high-school parking lot while his comrades went off together to celebrate their victory. The reason for their rudeness: ignorance about Cory’s TS.

A decade ago Jonathan Lethem’s terrific novel “Motherless Brooklyn” featured Lionel Essrog, a detective with TS. Despite his tics, his involuntary grunts and screeches, Essrog solves a murder case. In fact, he believes he’s better at sleuthing because of his obsessive-compulsiveness.

Nonetheless, in 2009 too many TS sufferers are still afflicted with social ostracism doled out by people who don’t know what to make of a disease – or disability – for which there is no known medication. Thanks to Wolper and Papa Friedman’s shining a spotlight, TS may emerge a bit more from the shadows. Moreover, Friedman has collaborated with the megalithic best-selling author James Patterson in “Against Medical Advice,” one of eight books Patterson published in 2008. Because of this book, TS may not become a household name, but it may achieve the recognition factor of a disorder like Asperger’s.

Among the many nuggets of info you will glean from this conversation is the useful acronym, AMA, which stands, not for “American Medical Association,” but for “against medical advice.” In case you’re in a situation where you need to get out of a hospital’s clutches – or need to spring, say, a family member from a hospital – you may want to express your desire to leave and recite the three letters, AMA, a phrase that will legally permit the you and/or the patient to exit the premises.

I’d suggest hanging around Wolper’s premises and, if possible, seeing about licensing his savvy interviews.