 |
|
|
Post to the Host Send your own post to the host.
Post to the Host: Jim H. -- I lived in St. Cloud and Freeport for about four years, Jim, and I found the German Catholics closed off to outsiders. I lived in a farmhouse (cheap rent, beautiful landscape, no interruptions, you could write all day and all night) in a predominantly German Catholic area — New Munich just to the south — and found it hard to engage people even in ordinary conversation. I could understand reticence, of course, and even suspicion, but I simply came to think of it as an alien culture, hostile to people like me. I had a few Catholic friends, and a friend who was a priest and who had literary interests and a fine sense of humor, but I had no sense of confidence telling stories about Catholics. And the great novellist and short-story writer J.F. Powers had preempted the field with his "Prince of Darkness" and "Morte D'Urban" which I studied in college. He was a favorite writer of mine, and last Monday I visited his grave at St. John's cemetery. Telling stories about German Catholics with Powers listening to the show would've scared me to death. He did not tolerate fools gladly and I had no wish to be one of them. Permalink» | Comments (4) »
Post to the Host: Stella Ragsdale -- I'm not a storyteller, Stella, but I impersonate one and that is almost as good. Storytelling is an intimate art, practiced between people who know each other well, and I've known some great ones, a sculptor named Joe O'Connell and my great-uncle Lew Powell and the late Chet Atkins. Chet was a true storyteller. He blanched at the thought of doing it onstage, but when he drove you around in his pickup truck, he'd tell a whole string of stories, some of them ribald, about Nashville stars and he'd imitated their voices beautifully and he embroidered the stories beautifully and, listening to him, I just sat and laughed and wished we'd drive forever. I don't have that gift. What I do have is chutzpah, to stand up in front of an audience and take them into my confidence and try to tell a story, which often as not turns into an essay instead. But sometimes it hits on all two cylinders. I started out, as you did, writing lofty things and then, out of curiosity, got started as a performer, and that, as you know, is a whole other game. The difference between high lit and performance is that high-lit writers can imagine that their readers are as fascinated as they are. In performance, you can see the audience and that is a sobering sight. There is nothing so scary as seeing an audience look off toward the wings, hoping that someone else comes out soon and does something interesting. Permalink» | Comments (6) »
Post to the Host: Thank you for your show. It is a real treat when I get to hear it (which I guess means when my superiors are trying to contact me). SGT Patrick J. DeGeorge -- This sounds like a scene from a comedy, Sergeant. An American platoon is pinned down by enemy fire on a rocky hillside and the sergeant calls for help and he gets a guy talking about eating rhubarb pie at a church picnic. When we do the show — this week in LA, next week in Cincinnati — we try to imagine the listening audience, and I often think of a trucker crossing Nebraska and picking the show up from three different FM stations in the course of two hours, or I think of people sitting on a back porch in Columbus, Georgia, or an old man in a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, but I haven't yet imagined troops in Afghanistan. I will now include you in my imagined pantheon of listeners. Good luck to you and thank you for your service to our country. Permalink» | Comments (3) »
Garrison: Mark J. -- I enrolled at the U of M in the fall of 1960 and so when Miss O'Connor (already a rising star in American letters) came to campus to read, I was a confused freshman, working 20 hours a week in the parking lots, taking Mrs. Forbes's Latin Reading class and Composition: The Essay with Richard Cody and American Government from Asher Christiansen and a freshman Humanities course with Joseph Kwiat, and I did not attend the reading. I'll bet that Richard Foster did, who taught the American Short Story course that I took later, which was where I first encountered Flannery O'Connor. She was, and is, an amazement. A great Christian humorist. Most of the stuff I've read about her tries to make her into a theologian, or a saint, but she was funny as can be, dark Irish funny. She is for sure in the pantheon. I don't know where. She is utterly herself, no doubt about that, and you can do a blind comparison of a hundred texts and you'll pick out Flannery O'Connor every time. I wish somebody would make a one-woman show out of her stories. It would be huge, if they could only get her voice right and squeeze her into a couple hours. Maybe I'll try that when I retire from radio. Permalink» | Comments (1) » | | | |
Post to the Host Archives | |
 |
|
|
