Dear Mr. Keillor,
One of the casualities of the high price of gas is the pure pleasure of getting in the car, putting on some favorite music or radio show, and driving off to the country back roads.

These aimless adventures always perked up my spirits and chased away for awhile the burdens of the world.

The west part of Marin and Sonoma counties offers rural pleasures of dairy farms and gentle rolling hills.—a refreshing diversion for the mind and senses.

Do you have any favorite routes when life closes in a little too tight?

John B.
Rohnert Park, Ca.

West Marin is great for an old prairie driver, with those hairpin turns on the coastal highway—no guard rail, the ocean surf hundreds of feet below, your passenger stamping her right foot on an imaginary brake—and I've driven it a hundred times from SF north to Stinson Beach and through groves of eucalyptus past the old tiedye compound of Bolinas and up through the dairy farms around Pt. Reyes and north. (It sort of staggers a Minnesotan's imagination to see Holsteins and fabulous scenery together, like running into Lutherans in France—didn't know it could happen.) For driving near home, we flatlanders like to cruise along the Mississippi south from St. Paul. There's a very pretty road on the Wisconsin side and a faster one on the Minnesota side. The little town of Stockholm WI is worth a stop and you cruise on down to Pepin and cross over to Wabasha MN which is worth poking around in and then head back home. Now that I am part-owner of a little restaurant in Avon MN, I like to head up there and the backroads are the preferred route, of course—I like to take Highway 55 which follows the Soo Line railroad out of Minneapolis (my grandpa worked for the Soo Line) and clears the suburbs eventually and reaches Buffalo and then Annandale where the Soo Line held their big employee picnics and Watkins, birthplace of Gene McCarthy, and Paynesville where the Sanctified Brethren used to hold summer Bible conferences and then you head north on county roads toward Avon which is nestled in lakes. You drive through rolling farmland dotted with ponds and strung with river valleys and long before you get to Avon, you are over whatever was troubling you. The trip I was hoping to take this summer and cannot—because work beckons—is the long drive west through South Dakota and the Black Hills and into the Shell Mountains and then onto the amazing high plateau of Wyoming which is one of my favorite states to drive. It's so enormous that 70 miles an hour feels like a crawl and you edge up toward 90 and you're still crawling. A vast sky and the great plain and it's even more stunning when you pull off onto a gravel road and go for a walk. Especially at sunset or on a clear night under the stars. I would be bitterly disappointed if my life did not include at least three more driving trips across Wyoming. The drive north from Rock Spring to Jackson Hole is also spectacular and there is a thrilling drive from Red Lodge MT down to Cody over the mountains, but it's not for relaxation, it's for pure excitement like the coastal road in Marin.

Post to the Host:
Garrison, I just wanted to pass on this link about the Lutefisk Eating Contest at the Ballard Seafood Festival this past weekend. Seems that a brave fishing boat captain picked up his bowl and downed two pounds of lutefisk in seven seconds. This was acknowledged to be a new world record by people who care about lutefisk. Just goes to show that the Scandinavian traditions are alive and well in pockets of the country outside of Minnesota.
Look forward to seeing your show in a few weeks.

Sarah W.
Seattle

Thanks for the news from Ballard, Sarah, a suburb of Seattle and a hotspot of Norwegian civilization (the contest was held in Bergen Square), and congratulations to Einer Johannsen, the hardy winner of the lutefisk eating contest. I notice in the story that Mr. Johannsen "slurped" his lutefisk—drank it down "like Rainier beer," he said—which suggests that this was a liquefied lutefisk, or at least something less solid than what decent people would serve in Minnesota. And of course here in Minnesota we were brought up not to rush through a meal, and certainly not a meal of lutefisk. Food should be savored, not bolted. So this is not the great accomplishment it may seem to be. It is sort of like winning the Loudest Laugh contest. I also note that a sushi bar is opening in Ballard. For some older Norwegians, raw tuna represents a greater challenge than lutefisk. We will watch this with interest.

Garrison,
Is it true that we used to yell at each other from across a basketball
court in the old Suburban Conference?

Warren O.
Sibley High School
1961

I attended Anoka Tornadoes basketball games, Warren, but did not yell as I was not brought up to yell and besides that I was there as a journalist covering the games for the high school paper and journalists have more dignity than that. It is a serious profession. I do remember other people yelling, especially at Sibley High School in West St. Paul and assumed it was due to some emptiness in their lives, some anger that they were not able to express otherwise, and that when they yelled across the court at us, they actually were yelling at their mothers. I didn't take it personally and you did me no harm at all. I hope you've straightened out since then, though.

Dear Garrison,
I just picked up a copy of your new book Pontoon, and was sad to find that the Sidetrack Tap (home of the beer and a bump) was not on the map on the cover! Any reason why it was left off? Not that I need alcohol in order to read your books, mind you. I am anxious to read it anyway, as I have enjoyed your other books immensely. Also hoping we'll see you in New Hampshire sometime!

Cheers,
Mary Jo R.
Hartland, Vt

A terrific artist, Rodica Prato, did the cover of Pontoon who is based in New York and it is her Steinbergian view of Lake Wobegon on the cover. She read the book first and didn't find much mention of the Sidetrack Tap in it, and so she didn't paint it. Pontoon came out last fall, Mary Jo, and so I hope you didn't pay full-price. You can find used copies online for a few bucks. The new book, entitled Liberty, also with a Rodica Prato cover, comes out in a month or so. As for New Hampshire, the Prairie Home Rhubarb Tour will be there in late August, and also at the Champlain Valley Fair in Vermont. At least that is what they tell me.

Mr. Keillor,
I am a recent college graduate and have been a tinnitus sufferer for the last 15 months. I, too, have found only the sound of cicadas to be a comforting masking. My T has turned my world upside down, so I'm encouraged and thankful for how you manage to continually bring joy and laughter to all of us. I love listening to your show.

Sincerely,
Jayne S.

That eternal ringing in the ears can be an irritation, Jayne, but maybe it's some sort of spur, too, to do things that engage us to the point of not noticing tinnitus. As you know, there is no cure for this sort of nerve damage—I tried acupuncture and herbal medicine, no luck—so one simply must live with it. I never notice it during a show or rehearsal so there's one more reason to keep doing. It's bothersome to a writer but it can be masked with music, particularly vocal music. That Faure Requiem I have heard so many times, it's a wonder the words don't creep into the Lake Wobegon stories, a little boy soprano singing "Pie Jesu" in Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church. As always when one's world is turned upside down, it doesn't hurt to talk to a therapist, but I recommend perseverance and reality-avoidance. And if you find a cure, be sure to let me know.

Dear Mr. Keillor:
Having just finished my second year of medical school, I was stuffing my brain for the national board exams when, abruptly, my brain reached capacity and no more would fit. I was perplexed. How was I going to learn fungal infections? What about metabolic disorders? But while listening to your show, the thought came that, though I didn't major in English, I might try putting the material into poetry to make it more memorable. I penned a few dozen, such as:

Oh, Blastomycosis have you.
Away lung, skin, bone lesions!
Oh Blasto I long to see you.
Big and broad-based budding yeast,
East of the wide Miss'ippi.

And also:

Alkapton! My Captain!
Homogentisate oxidase I lack.
The tyrosine is building up,
My urine's turning black!

Well, I took the exam this week, and it went pretty great. Thanks for the weekly muse from Lake Wobegon.

Sincerely,
Ashley
Hershey, PA

You did great on the exam thanks to your innate intelligence, Ashley, and the poetry was only a diversion. That's the line of work I am in, diverting people, and you are heading for the line of work that actually changes people's lives, so we hope it attracts more intelligence than what is required to write. I'm lucky to have a great doctor who I can talk to and who seems to have plenty of time and who is ever ready to do precautionary things that make sense. I am a 65-year-old guy with a 10-year-old daughter so he has got his work cut out for him. He wants me to be around for her wedding.

I was appalled and became disoriented upon hearing you say that Faulkner wrote The Great American Novel. Which would that be? Aside from the fact that we all know Fitzgerald wrote The Great American Novel, I'm not aware that any of Faulkner's dirges have ever even been nominated for the position. I could forgive your naming Twain, or even Toni Morrison, but Faulkner!

Not only might I not listen again to your show, I've begun to doubt now that I've actually ever enjoyed any of them previously. Where you really an English major?

My only hope is that the good people of St. Paul (home of Fitzgerald, of course) will pummel you with new and used copies of The Great Gatsby until you come to your senses.

Walter B.
Austin, TX

This is the finest angry letter I've read in months and it sets a high standard for us all. I've read it over and over with great pleasure. I especially like the "and became disoriented" and the "begun to
doubt....that I've ever enjoyed any of them previously" which are truly original and raise the thing from the usual carping criticism to something like epistolary art.

As for The Great Gatsby, it has its moments, especially in the narrative of Nick Carraway, but the main guy Gatsby is an empty suit and his play for Daisy is rather shallow and adolescent. Dreiser did it so much better in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Gatsby is still popular in high schools, for good reason, but we did a marathon reading of it here for FSF's centenary and it was sort of embarrassing. Ulysses it ain't. We're proud of him here but we're not deluded. (Gatsby is a slim book and so being pummeld with copies of it is like being pelted with marshmallows.)

Faulkner is such a master and I'd have to think hard about which one is the GAN—maybe Absalom, Absalom—maybe As I Lay Dying. I will try to re-read them this year and report back. Meanwhile, thanks for the letter. It made my day and my day is not so easy to make.

Post to the Host:
On a recent show you talked about Midsummer Day but you got two holidays (Sista April and Midsommar) mixed up.

We do light bonfires—yes—but that is on April 30. We also then have fireworks and sing welcoming the spring after a long, dark winter. I grew up in Sundsvall, Sweden, a town 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle. In the wintertime we had to cover up our rose bushes and other plants with pine tree branches to protect them from the cold and snow. When spring arrived we disposed of these branches and other junk with a bonfire. My mother one year set fire to an old bug-infested couch. The flying/popping springs were better than fireworks! Midsummer is celebrated on the longest day of the year, approx. June 20. We dress the May pole (midsommar stangen) with wild flowers and after raising the pole we dance around it and sing traditional Swedish songs. I have lived in the US since 1971 and miss these two holidays tremendously. Last year I visited my daughter in San Francisco and we attended a Swedish midsummer fest more Swedish than a midsummer in Sweden. It was in Sveadal close to Morgan Hill - a small Swedish community that has celebrated midsummer for 114 years!!!!

Sincerely,
Charlotte H.

Midsummer is not part of my tradition, Charlotte, as you probably could tell from what I said—I grew up American fundamentalist and we never danced around a Maypole though we did make bonfires on occasion but usually to incinerate things, not for celebration. We believed we would be joyful in heaven and so we were cautious about earthly amusements, thinking them inferior. The Midsummer I witnessed was in Denmark, not Sweden, and it was celebrated as St. Hans Day (Sankt Hans). On the radio I was recalling a party at Ole and Hanne's farm near Svendborg on the island of Fyn, at which we ate a late dinner at long tables in the garden (Greenland shrimp, lamb, small potatoes, salad, and aebleskiver) and then trooped down to a hill overlooking the sea and young men lit an enormous pile of brush and debris. In the center of the pile, mounted on a pole, was an effigy of a witch. Everyone cheered when she caught fire. We stood around the bonfire and sang songs to St. John and to anything and anybody else and as the fire burned down, men took turns running and jumping over it. Across the water, on the coast of an island opposite, you could see bonfires burning. I think I may have, in my story, referred to that as the coast of Sweden, but of course it wasn't. And good for you that you caught this inaccuracy. It proves that some people actually listen closely to the radio and that we should take pains to say what we mean. I never had heard of a little Swedish community in the Bay Area, but three cheers for Sveadal. Hip hip HURRA hip hip HURRA hip hip HURRA.

Dear Mr. G.K.,
Six years after graduating with my bachelors in English, after a tragic and damaging student teaching experience I am working very hard to overcome and finally leave behind me, I am considering a return for my Masters in English, focusing a a lot of energy in Creative Writing, a favorite pass-time since 2nd grade. What advice might you give to someone who is just not sure if he is ready to go back for more, or wondering if this is, indeed, the right path to take (especially after student teaching depleted my spirits and my dreams of teaching I'd had for so long)?

All the very best,
Andy

Skip the MFA in creative writing, Andy. It's a scam run by English departments to fatten their coffers and doesn't do you much good except as a social club (you can find better ones elsewhere). You're apt to find star faculty who never teach and a whole lot of semi-published writers doing the teaching and the prevailing culture is one of mutual flattery. You waste two years hearing people tell you how wonderful you are and then you graduate and find out that nobody wants to read your stuff. If you want to write, sit down for a few weeks with the most gripping book you've ever read and analyze it to a fine hair—how it's organized, the structure, the time sequence, the characterizations—and then set out and write something similar. Don't turn up your nose at genre fiction—which MFA programs tend to do. Learn how to write a workmanlike novel. And if it doesn't get accepted for publication, no problem—go on and write another one. You're young, you have plenty of time. I wish I had done this when I was your age instead of drifting along on my own whims. Writing is a craft and you need to learn the craft before you can think about yourself as an artist. MFA programs start out by spraying genius aroma on you and that does nobody any good at all. It's a classic pyramid scheme. Don't go there unless there's a teacher whose feet you long to sit at and even so, don't inhale too deeply. And learn to spell "pastime".

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I guess after some 25 years as a loyal listener (and of course, consumer of your books and disks) one is bound to hear material on a PHC airing that would feel very un Lake Wobegon.

Maybe it's especially that the past two days, like all gays, i've been suffering the too-frequent newscaster exaltation of Jesse Helms, but i could not believe my ears this eve when one of your Noir actors said, "You look like a fruitcake!"

Mr. Keillor, surely you know that is a degrading slur to countless numbers of your fans. This also puts you in the company of Focus on the Family's James Dobson, who just last week used the word 'fruitcake' referring to Obama's Bible.

As you know professionally, once a word has been broadcast, it's transferred to the universe, reinforcing a truth—or, sadly, ugly prejudice.

Over the years, I have written you thanks for your extraordinarily beautiful body of work and will continue to site you as a key reason for renewing my WNYC membership.

Never, ever could i have imagined that i'd need to write this note to you.

With great respect,

Jamie L.
New York

The character who says, "It makes you look like a fruitcake" is a Chicago street character, a tough guy, and the word is part of his idiom. But he doesn't mean he thinks Guy Noir is gay. He just means that he looks nutty. Where I come from, "fruitcake" doesn't have such a specific connotation. "Nuttier than a fruitcake" has been around forever, and the term can be applied in various ways, and not implying effeminacy or swishiness or anything of the sort. So I do not "know that it is a degrading slur to countless numbers" of PHC fans. I am not in that business. I don't keep track of Mr. Dobson or Jesse Helms, and I don't plan to. Sorry this caused you distress.

Post to the Host:
as a member of your generation i was deeply insulted and hurt by comments at the top of your July 5th show in which you apologized for our generation revolting and getting things 'wrong'.

oh yeah?

members of our generation helped create Earth Day, the environmental movement and the "green movement" back in the late 60s and early 70s. many of us said back then that alternative energy was the way to go and pollution was killing the planet.

members of our generation protested the war, which was senseless and pointless and hurt a lot of innocent young men and others. and here we are again in a war and today's generation can't be bothered to demonstrate. oh, that's right —we had the draft to worry about didn't we? compulsory service, guys like me graduating with a draft card at age 18, futures interrurpted members of our generation must have been pretty cool and pretty sharp because today's rock music and fashion is STILL stealing/borrowing from what we did back then.

our generation helped introduce something akin to rational tolerance and equality into america—no small feat. maybe you weren't getting chased by the cops gary, but many of us were.

you think our generation ruined the '68 democratic convention? interrupting the convention of a party that escalated vietnam and overreacted by cracking kids' heads?

you're embarrassed by your generation because a few lunkheads took too much dope and made some arrogant political statements? ok, so what, every generation has some of these.

if you feel bad for what happened in the 60s, fine. but do me a favor and don't apologize for ME, thank you very much. i'm not embarrassed by it at all. i no longer look cool and groovy in a pony tail, i never did wear bell bottoms or tie dye, but the 60s gave me hope i never lost, unlike the cynicism of other generations.

sorry you had such a bad time
A listener

The giveaway was the line about our mothers telling us we couldn't swim for an hour after eating or we'd get cramps and drown and our discovering that they were wrong and that turning us against authority: that was your cue that this was a joke. Sorry you missed it.

Dear Garrison,
My wife and I had the pleasure of attending your Tanglewood show this past weekend. Among the evening's many highlights was the hourlong set of music after the show, featuring popular hymns, ballads, and standards. Talk about giving an audience a bang for its buck! Do you regularly perform this much after a show? And do you ever feel like a musician trapped in a writer's body?

Elvis would be proud!

Rob

It's become a habit at Tanglewood for the lawn dwellers to come down into the shed after the show and clap until we come back onstage and it seems to me that what they want to do is sing songs together, not necessarily hear me perform, and so we lean around and sing all the songs we think everybody knows—Home on The Range, Can't Help Falling In Love, Bye Bye Love, Old Man River, America the Beautiful, I've Been Working On The Railroad, Abilene, Down In The Valley, Amazing Grace—until people have had enough. In most cities, people have had enough at the end of the show and they clap and go home, but at Tanglewood for some reason a good share of the crowd wants to hang around. Maybe there's not that much to do in the Berkshires. Maybe people are handing out their business cards. Maybe pickpockets are working the crowd. I don't know. But it's always fun. I don't think Elvis did that, though. He left the building rather promptly after his last song. But people knew his songs and would've been thrilled to sing with him. Ah well, some things you never learn if you die young.

Post to the Host:
The English Majors must cringe when you make up lyrics containing phrases such
as "between you and I" for the sake of a rhyme with "die." Grammar should not be
sacrificed so easily.

Clarice K.
Seattle

You mean we ought to sing "It Doesn't Mean A Thing If It Doesn't Have That Swing"? "It Isn't Necessarily So"? The lyric of "Let Them Talk" wasn't written by me, however—it was written by Little Willie John, an R&B singer from Detroit who had a lot more to worry about than getting his pronouns straight. He was the guy who wrote "Fever" which Peggy Lee made into a huge hit and he was a crazy drunk who went to prison and died there at a young age, and when an old English major like me sings "Let Them Talk" it's sort of a thrill, frankly, when I come to the "between you and I"—I love it, love it, love it. I wouldn't write the song that way but I'm so glad that he did. It's a great song and there is no way around those lines: "Let them whisper for they know not/What lies between you and I./I'm going to go on loving you/Until the day I die." To change it to "between you and me...for all eternity"—makes it something less.

Post to the Host:
I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner and recently I have been thinking about shyness and it's sometimes disabling consequences for many people. I wonder if, as a shy person, you could say more about the power of shyness and how to encourage others who are literally frozen by this condition? I see shyness treated as a pathological condition with medication sometimes. Shyness is very difficult to understand if you are not.

Claudine G.
Portland, ME

I was a very ordinary sort of shy person—the gangly introverted adolescent from a strict fundamentalist background—an American classic—and what got me out of the downward spiral was a natural craving for attention that spurred me to write, and to go into radio (a perfect medium for a shy person), and then to read my writing in public, and then to do the show. A gentle ramp and there were all sorts of kind people along the way to keep me from slipping off, so when I look back, it doesn't seem particularly hard or heroic to me, though I do remember that feeling of being frozen. For some reason, interviewing people for my college newspaper filled me with terror, more so than standing up in front of an audience. Anyway, my shyness strikes me as circumstantial and nothing that anybody would prescribe medication for. And I'm in no position to give advice in these matters.