As someone who lost a son seventeen hours after being born, I feel plenty of empathy for Karen, whose daughter was determined to be stillborn in the womb two days before Karen gave birth.

Although six months elapsed after the death of Karen’s infant before producer Rob Zawatski recorded her monologue here, she’s still choked up as she speaks into the mic. She may be choked up, she says, sixty years later—as I still feel pain forty years later; one never gets over such losses. Along with her loss, Karen regrets that for a month and a half after her daughter’s death she was constantly surrounded by people concerned that she might do herself harm. She’s bothered that she had no time to grieve in private, something I found therapeutic—as did my wife—after our child passed away.

This is not an easy piece to hear, considering how we all tune into public radio for entertainment and/or information. On the other hand, not enough has been said and heard about this subject. Until we learn to understand the grief of a mother who has lost her child, how can we deal with such issues as marital discord and divorce, both inextricably related to the death of an infant whose birth is awaited with enormous longing and expectation?

Until we hear Karen’s story, how can we fully understand what it means to give birth to an infant who survives and grows into a healthy child?

In Vienna during the 1820s Franz Peter Schubert’s friends nicknamed him “Schwammerl,” mushroom. He was a squat, bespectacled fellow who managed to survive by sponging from his pals and admirers. Of all great composers he was perhaps the poorest, having earned during his lifetime—I long ago read—the equivalent of maybe fifty dollars (this figure may be revised upward to three or four hundred dollars to reflect 2010). According to legend he was so poor that at one point he used wrapping paper from a butcher shop to compose upon. He was so prolific that, as the story goes, while out walking one day in Vienna, he overheard part of a song played by street musicians and asked his friend whose song that was, only to hear his friend say that in fact he, Schubert, had composed it—along with some six hundred other songs.

To top it off—or bottom things out!—he died at thirty-one, leaving no heirs, possibly gay, with most of his music unpublished.

Today he needs no introduction. Listen to his E-flat Major Piano Trio, D. 929, and experience the Master for yourself. I especially want to recommend this Trio’s andante second movement (some twenty-six minutes into the podcast), which has been used in half-a-dozen movies, including Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon.” None of Schubert’s other masterpieces, including his “Unfinished Symphony” and his “Great C-Major Symphony,” matches this single movement. in terms of sheer poignancy and melodic depth; it’s like Chopin’s “Raindrop Prelude” on a larger scale. Like me, you may want to say, “Encore, encore!” and replay the second movement time and again.

David Finckel, Wu Han, and Philip Setzer perform Schubert’s incomparable Piano Trio with soulful panache.

Lately news coverage from Mexico has focused on a new civil war. The conflict waged by drug lords against the Mexican government has overshadowed a long-term struggle between the working and wealthy classes south of our border. Ever since Emiliano Zapata led bloody uprisings in Mexico, the state of Chiapas, hugging the Guatemalan border, has been the epicenter of farmers struggling against oppression by well-heeled landlords, descendants of Spanish conquistadors.

As this piece makes amply clear, an indigenous sort of Marxist revolution continues to smolder in Chiapan villages like Juan Diego. Nearly 17 years ago an armed rebellion led by peasant guerillas forced the federal government to take up its own arms—and eventually step back. Today many children in Chiapas attend Zapatista schools, as opposed to educational institutions sponsored by the “bad guys” in Mexico City. At the moment President Felipe Calderon and the Mexican army have relegated the Zapatistas to the back burner. Embroiled in a full-blown civil war against narco-traffickers, the government is not about to give up when it comes to Chiapan insurgents. Whatever ultimately happens on that front, the Zapatistas have been largely tolerated as angry mosquitoes buzzing remote swamps.

World Vision Report continues to produce stories involving what Paul Tillich used to call matters of ultimate concern. “A Day in the Life of the Zapatistas” will interest everyone, from North American tea partiers to Colbert/Stewart coffee partiers, intent on charting the wobbly relationship of poor people and their distant central government.

This is a groundbreaking piece by an extraordinary young man. Ian Kathan, who has Asperger’s syndrome, flies in the face of the conventional wisdom about his disability. In recent years high-functioning autism — Asperger’s — has been considered a “challenge” needing lots of help from parents, educators, and therapists. Rather than relying on the notion that he deserves special assistance and accommodation, Kathan is annoyed with this attitude of entitlement. He believes that people “on the spectrum” shouldn’t capitalize on their medical condition to make excuses for themselves and their failure. Instead, he believes people with Asperger’s should take advantage of their unique gifts. For Kathan Asperger’s is less a disability than an endowment, a sensibility that is profoundly different with distinct assets to manage.

My grandson David has Asperger’s. For most of his five years his mother — my older daughter — has devoted herself to finding help for him. Going to special doctors, enrolling David in special classes, feeding him fish oil, vitamins, and homeopathic medicines, she has imbibed Dr. Temple Grandin’s gospel that tireless vigilance and assistance are the hallmarks of cure for autism.

Considering this, it’s refreshing to hear Kathan think of Asperger’s as “the mind's tendency to . . . drop into a hyper-focused state. . . . While [Asperger’s is] a distraction, it can also be your drive.” Kathan speaks with his friend, the psychologist Pamela Christy, who agrees with him when he states, “If you give a person too much help, you give them extra exceptions to get by,” a sleazy modus vivendi.

Because of his refusal to make excuses for himself and say he has failed because of his disability, Kathan is able to savor his success: “Look at me. I’m on a radio station. Never in all my years have I ever thought that I’d ever be able to do something as big as this.”

Hats off to Kathan and Carmel High School in Indiana for producing a sound-rich, thought-worthy five-plus minutes!

One day I hope my grandson David will be able to join Kathan in saying, “It’s pretty cool to be me.”

I lived in New York City for 30 years and was never mugged. Listening to Jake Warga’s super-vivid account of being viciously attacked by a couple of teenagers more than satisfies my curiosity about the event.

You don’t have to be from a big city to appreciate Warga’s diamond-clear description of assailants in hoodies asking to use his cell phone. Neither do you have to love Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” to appreciate weird echoes of its refrains in Warga’s statements at the scene of the crime as he tries to explain his situation to the police: “I was not mugged in a tree. I was not. I was not mugged on top of a tall building. I was not. I do not like being mugged. I do not.”

Warga’s narrative revels in nearly nineteen minutes of these kinds of offbeat but right-on-target details about getting whacked over the head in Seattle before being relieved of his laptop computer. He’s an awesome photographer—witness the image of “My glasses” one of whose lenses is stained with blood. Here, as always, his script benefits from his clear-eyed, all but digitized details. From “Dragnet” to “NYPD Blue,” if you’re fond of cops-and-robbers stories—and who isn’t?—you’ll enjoy Warga’s brand-new take on being mugged as a “funny thing.”

This “funniness,” a wacky surreality and suspense, comes through in the background with the piece’s sound track featuring Kodo Drumming music and Placebo’s “Where Is My Mind.”

What a wonderful, sleek tribute to the bicentennial of Mexico’s Independence Day, coming this Thursday! I say “gracias” to Deutsche Welle for the brief medley, including a Mexican “grito,” the national piercing “ai yai” that is half a shout, half a laugh.

My only problem: where’s the final selection listed in this piece’s liner notes, “Jarabe tapatio”? Everyone from the state of Jalisco—plus every Mexico aficionado like me—mourns the omission of this dance. Either the five-minute format of the piece should be extended 50 seconds to incorporate the “Jarabe,” or it should be deleted from the list of musical works included here.

For more than 30 years Bruce McCall has been designing illustrations and covers for The New Yorker magazine. There’s his “First-Ever Guided Tour of The New Yorker,” which gives you McCall’s X-ray vision of a weird Victorian mansion inside of which you can see everything from his fourth-floor “Future Article Selection” Department, with a bunch of crazy “editors” spinning two huge wheels of fortune—to his ground-floor “Filing Department of Unsolicited Manuscripts Division,” with two hulking Neanderthal-types shoveling paper typescripts down a chute into what appears to be a bottomless open-grated hole in the sidewalk.

Or else there’s McCall’s three-part foldout cover, “The Ascent of Man,” for the May 14, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, starting with an ape groping up a log, turning into an ancient Egyptian, a medieval plowsman and a bow-tied Edwardian gent rising atop a steam engine—to a twenty-first century man who has reached the top of things, only to slip off a broken escalator, losing his briefcase and plummeting God knows where.

McCall has also enriched us with his satirical sketches in the “Shouts and Murmurs” section of The New Yorker, as well as having written six zany, inimitable books.

As far as I know, Allan Wolper’s piece is the first radio interview of McCall ever. Thanks to Wolper’s street smarts and his camaraderie with McCall, partly because they’re neighbors living in the same building on New York City’s Upper West Side, this piece is priceless. I’d call it the best of Wolper’s nearly two dozen half-hour productions—which is saying a lot, giving the high quality of the series.

Wolper and McCall click. You’ll hear McCall, who flunked out of high school in Toronto, say that the “biggest myth in the world is that college is a good thing”—in this he agrees with his fellow Canadian, the best-selling New Yorker author Malcolm Gladwell. You’ll hear McCall say that there’s “more damned squabbling and backbiting and ugly rancor in the talk show people like Glenn Beck. . . a new low in the discourse of the republic." While he denies that he’s a liberal, McCall hasn’t much good to say about Sarah Palin, John Edwards and Tiger Woods; he contends that parents, not teachers, should teach kids NOT to be like these ostensible role models.

Whether you agree that Ralph Nader is a “twerp,” that “Scotland has more intellectuals per capita than any other country in the world,” or that religion is “a waste of time,” you’ll come away from this piece with the kind of respect for McCall that I hold for a man like Mark Twain.

Bruce McCall is one cool dude. Listen up and hear for yourself.

As I listened to the dulcet tones of Muriel Murch talking about her knee surgery, I looked down at my shoeless right foot on the floor. Its second toe, next to the big one, has become increasingly painful for the past few days. I’ve suspected gout.

Be that as it may, Murch’s characteristically vivid, detailed description of what happened to her strained left knee, which all but incapacitated her, will restore any listener’s faith in our labyrinthine medical system. The fact that Murch was once a nurse adds credibility to her account. Murch is certainly no Polyanna, but nowhere—not in any of her radio pieces—will you find her beweeping her outcast state, or, to crib further from Shakespeare, looking upon herself and cursing her fate.

Instead, she keeps her eyes and ears wide open for gritty particulars in her essays. In “The Other Side of the Bed” the result is a terse portrait of herself as “an ‘old’ nurse, longtime wife and mother of four.” Or she gives us her thumbnail sketch of people who work in a doctor's office: “The two receptionists behind the glass counter were unflappable, rolling back and forth on their chairs as they moved us through their system.” Or else, inside what could be a nightmarish operating room, she comes up with a human being: “An OR scrub nurse hung out on the railing of my gurney. She brought calm, comfort and connection. We shared the same birthday making us both feisty.”

For my British Pounds Sterling, Murch’s prose is top-drawer. I’m interested in whatever she reports on, precisely because she makes me interested in the offbeat Ps and Qs of her experience.

After listening to this piece, I may well make an appointment to see my doctor about my toe tomorrow.

Nearly ten years ago a few good people who were irritated at the hyper-seriousness and exclusivity of the American Poetry Scene began writing a kind of anti-poetry that came to be called Flarf. As University of Minnesota English professor Maria Damon has said, “If laugh were an F word, it would be Flarf, because it sounds like laugh, larf, fluffy, kind of overly cutesy weird, nonsense baby talk.” Wouldn’t you know it, Flarf tends to look to the Internet, rather than to Nature or “the real world,” as its Muse.

With roots in the Twin Cities, which spawned public radio’s version of a Flarfee, Garrison Keillor, the movement picked up speed in the aught decade. It surfaced nationally last year when “Poetry” magazine devoted a segment of its July issue to Flarf. According to the narrator of “Flarf in Minnesota (tee hee),” “there are only about 30 Flarfees in the country.” I doubt this. I’d estimate that in July 2010 there are between 300 and 3000 Flarfees surfing Google for inspiration.

I very much like KFAI reporter Diane Richard’s piece about Flarf. It’s an ear opener, a laff-in that stretches beyond humor. I wish there were more examples of Flarf poems—perhaps another PRX piece could be devoted to a selection of verse, drawn possibly from four Flarfees reading at the Walker Gallery a couple of years ago. Anyway, the better of the two examples in this piece is a fairly serious thingamajig written by Elizabeth Workman: “Visualize a forest, coppery violet, pulsating. Inside the forest is a looking egg. Peering into a little porthole at the end of the egg is a zealot. Inside the zealot is an antichrist. Inside the antichrist, poetry.”

Muriel Murch’s travel pieces have taken me to a sanitorium in Buenos Aires, the hustings of her native England and, now, to her longtime adopted home north of the Bay Area. In part because of her British accent and cozy style of reading aloud, her pieces sound idyllic. They are worth listening to not only because they evoke distinct locales precisely like all good travel writing but also because they radiate a homey serenity I associate with an “inner Bolinas.”

“Around Tomales Bay” isn’t earthshaking. Murch describes Memorial Day two weeks ago when she drove up the coast with her husband. Along the way she observes, “The stakes of the oyster beds lie half exposed along the shoreline. The fishing boats and yachts anchored in the Marshall harbor bob gently at their moorings, taking the day off from their duties of working draft horse or joy ride seaside donkey.”

Forget the oily waters that have recently killed oysters and wrecked the shoreline after BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Murch’s countryside is unspoiled, and her plans to purchase some Free Range Muscovy ducks on a four-hundred-acre organic farm in Bodega are unshaken by California earthquake tremors. Neither is her odyssey to Sonoma County aglow with the yuppie aura that has settled over towns north of Santa Rosa like a wine hangover.

Segments for Murch’s weekly radio show, “Letter from A. Broad,” are loaded with local color, pitched to an audience renowned for its Marin County chic. “Around Tomales Bay” is savvy and “green”—but it’s also good enough as writing to satisfy a demanding national audience of public radio listeners.

Globe-hopping Seattle photojournalist Jake Warga has produced a first-rate series of short pieces. After megatons have been said about Iraq, Warga “tells it like it is,” but in such fresh, appealing ways that you’ll want to pore over his series like a June wedding gift.

Now that Afghanistan is our major killing field, Iraq has been pacified to the extent that Warga’s portraits of GIs are free to deploy covert activities all their—and Warga’s—own. His secret is the way he focuses on enlisted men and one enlisted woman’s favorite music. From the gospel hymns Staff Sergeant Ike Richardson belts out; to the dulcet harmonies of singer Blake Shelton, which Sergeant Crystal Halbert favors; to Pittsburgh native Sergeant Adam Treen’s preference for Barbra Streisand’s “Send in the Clowns,” Warga’s pieces are well worth hearing, with great music to back up their unscripted monologues spoken by soldiers on active duty.

That Sergeant Treen chooses “Send in the Clowns” is ironic, considering that the U.S. armed forces may be seen as “clowns” who’ve been brought in to resolve Iraq’s far-from-funny challenges. Still, Streisand’s song is more than sardonic; it’s poignant in context, not least because of its haunting melodies and Streisand’s stellar performance.

At under forty years of age, Jake Warga is one of the most promising, accomplished young producers on the public radio scene. If you don’t believe me, listen up—and, if possible, license—his latest series of forget-me-nots.

Two minutes are barely enough to explain what has recently appeared to be a medical panacea. Last year my physician all but compelled me to take 1000 milligrams of Vitamin D every day. According to my doctor, anyone who lives north of Atlanta, Georgia isn’t getting enough D from sunlight. Apparently, tens of millions of people are Vitamin-D-deficient and don’t know it. To listen to my primary care provider, D strengthens bones, wards off certain types of cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure.

Who could ask for anything more? Well, not so long ago the medical establishment was warning the public about the dangers of D. To take more than 2000 milligrams of the vitamin per diem would result in the body’s being unable to expel what was considered a toxic substance.

Sadly, back in the 1980s I learned about a vitamin salesman, an Ohioan, who overdosed on his products and died. That was enough to make me completely swear off multivitamins—until last year when, as I said, my sawbones convinced me that a pill of D a day would keep the mortician away.

Co-producer Janice Horowitz does a feisty job of summing up the pros and cons of the vitamin debate, as she does with other segments in her “Dueling Docs” series. The thing is, of course, she breezes through issues as quick as a two-minute trip to the drugstore.

Nevertheless, for leisure-deficient public radio listeners, hers might be just the pill to pop.

For Americans accustomed to superficial reports covering British politics Muriel Murch’s personal essay about last Thursday’s elections is wonderfully offbeat and richly detailed. As a Brit, she obviously feels back home in the U.K. after her travels. Her monologue expresses affection for dear old Albion at the same time as her powers of observation point out its quirks.

Take her very first sentence, with its gentle ironies, its spoof of horseracing: “This spring may be lost as the May sunshine recoils to March storms but change is in the air as the British politicians gallop through the muddy turf of their constituencies to the finish line.” The candidates speaking in televised debates might just as well be jockeys muddling—or muddying—through the course.

Or else check out Murch’s description of the incumbent: “Gordon Brown is a lion weary with the battle. He looks heavy and sluggish. His face and voice are baleful. The sins of his predecessor, Tony Blair, have fallen on his shoulders.”

Murch finds a bit to admire about the Conservative candidate who won the most votes last week, David Cameron, but, alas, “he has a soft lisping voice that however hard he tries has not the battle fire of Gordon Brown’s Scottish highland roar.”

Here’s what Murch says about the Liberal Democrat who, as of today, will be working to form a new government with Brown: “Nick Clegg skipped across [the] stage, not quite like a court jester but certainly adding an annoying distraction with his good looks. He carried an air of reason, as he asked, like an ardent suitor, so firmly and sweetly, for your vote if not your maiden-head.”

Somewhere between “The Talk of the Town” squibs at “The New Yorker” and the fabled, now defunct magazine, “Punch, “ Murch’s essay stakes out its claim as humorous satire. We Yanks need to learn more about the Monty-Pythonesque nature of politics in what was once our mother country.

To an extent listening to Murch is as edifying—and it’s certainly cheaper—than flying across The Pond.

I’m in a quandary about this impressive production. On one hand, it describes a young Somali woman now living in Minneapolis, striving to make her way in America. After hearing about boatloads—literally—of Indian-Ocean pirates from that hellhole in the horn of Africa, Somalia, we need to hear the voice of Minnesota Public Radio News’s Youth Radio Series Sadiya Mohamed reciting the verses of Stephen Dunn and Theodore Roethke to qualify for prizes for her English language skills. So much depends upon Sadiya’s ability to pronounce a line of poetry, such as “I learn by going where I have to go.”

What gets me here is Sadiya’s earnestness, her wish to distinguish herself in our nation of innumerable gifts, the United States—versus her difficulties with American English. At times she slips and slides pronouncing our notorious tongue twister of a language. We take English for granted. Compared to Spanish or Russian, in which pronunciation is far more standardized, however, English is a humdinger to speak, especially as a second language.

As a result, Sadiya doesn’t win a poetry-read-aloud contest—despite her English teacher’s loving words of encouragement. Worse, portions of Sadiya’s monologue aren’t as Linda-Wertheimer pristine as we’ve come to expect when we tune into public radio for our daily dose of Truth.

Last year the Illinois State Arts Council canceled its individual artists’ grants. This year the situation in Springfield looks bleak for painters, writers and other artists in the Land of Lincoln, where I live.

David Weinberg’s drop-in was aired April 19th on American Public Media’s “Marketplace,” with Kai Ryssdal’s spiffy introduction. The piece deserves to be broadcast widely.

Do we need to be reminded that public funding for the arts is drying up all over the country? Federal support from the National Endowment for the Arts still exists, with its budget a minuscule portion of Washington’s total spending. Last week, however, the Georgia House of Representatives voted to do away with its state arts council. Elsewhere, states strapped for funds have given a thumbs-down to artists.

The good news in Weinberg’s piece is that ordinary people interested in the arts have been getting together in small droves. In Boston, Portland and St. Louis arts backers have been paying a measly ten bucks for a simple monthly dinner, a Sloup—which rhymes with “soup.” As a variation of a soup kitchen, Sloup contributes ten bucks from each of its maybe two dozen donors/diners to local artists who have submitted proposals to be voted upon by the donors/diners. The event resembles a dinner party, a friendly community event, rather than a committee meeting to judge artists’ projects. What’s more, the whole process of awarding a grant takes a month, perhaps a twelfth the time it takes with a grants agency.

For centuries private patrons supported artists. Weinberg sees in Sloup a return to this great tradition, which bolstered such artists as Botticelli and Beethoven.

Thumbs up for Weinberg!