Warm your hands at the radio

Stay close to the radio next week. Think of it as a woodstove for your mind. The nation public radio collaboration Whose Democracy Is It? gathers together hours of special programs that shine the light of inquiry under the rocks of US and world politics. Anything could come crawling out. This is public radio at the top of its form.

Speaking of the tops--thanks to everyone for working the annual miracle. Our final fundraiser total tops $233,000. That's one of those numbers that boggle, like how many M&Ms it takes to fill up a Buick Regal.

Thanks for floating my boat

What a difference there is between working at a job where your employer pays you to do your utmost to advance his interests, and working at a job where thousands of people, in effect, pay you to do your utmost, period. It may be a corny and old-fashioned notion, but public service is a privilege, and a pleasure. God knows there's enough dreary and pointless work in the world. I'm grateful for the chance you all have given me to do something better, to--as our mission statement says--"connect, inform, and enrich the communities of our region." We try.

Without your thousands of modest (and not-so-modest) gifts, the work we do would go undone, the public dialogue would lack for salt, and our cultural light might stay hidden under a bushel. We aim to raise $225,000 by Saturday night.

Deja vu

My first foray in publishing involved medieval technology--900 pounds of cast iron and handset lead type. My college writing teacher was from low-tech India, and all his books were produced using obsolete letterpress equipment and lots of hand labor. My partner and I had a lot of fun losing money on small-press poetry books we clanked off on the converted sunporch. But its hard to get the publishing "jones" off your back. And now, as you will see below, I am in full relapse, thanks to the generosity of Tim Brookes. We hope to follow the serialization of his book, The Driveway Diaries, with other books by regional authors. Much of this kind of high-tech publishing work, using web and email, is now outsourced, of course--to India.

Survival of the Coolest

Is it a simple process of winnowing that makes the past so alluring? A museum of radio gear dating back to WWI lines the shelves above my desk--tubes, coils, boxes and cylinders with a kind of Captain Nemo/Dr. Frankenstein cool. Maybe all the trashy stuff just got trashed. And the pictures are cool--well-dressed young men and women looking earnest and scientific in headphones. "Remember--the Enemy is Listening," the wartime studio poster warns. The good guys and the bad guys both seemed bigger then. But it's probably a trick of the light. The memorable are remembered; the forgettable forgotten. We look at the present through the wrong end of the binoculars. Pretty puny.

I came for the waters. . .

It is hard sometimes for a North Country native, eyeing shot-riddled roadsigns and tumbledown barns, and beaten down by too many hard winters, to credit it when people say they choose to live here for the quality of life. Don't they watch Sex in the City? But it's true. Somehow all the conventional wisdom breaks down as you proceed north of the Mohawk. The logic which says the march of big-box retail is unstoppable--and yet the bankrupt Ames stores are being replaced not by Wal-Mart, but by locally-owned Wise Buys and Hacketts. The logic which requires that no natural resource be left unexploited--and yet we continue to set aside more land for recreation, contemplation, or just for its own pristine sake. Small, liveable towns still resist becoming bedroom suburbs of large employers. Decent housing remains stubbornly within the reach of the middle class, and even--gasp--the working poor. We just don't seem to be able to get with the program. May we never.