Swing away the gantry

Radio people are as susceptible to their fantasy lives as anyone else. There are three basic fantasies endemic to the public radio crowd. There is the hot DJ fantasy—“Just let me have my own show and I can put together all that great music that gets lost in the shuffle. Etruscan nose-yodeling just doesn’t get the airplay it deserves.” Then there’s the Ira Glass fantasy—the pernicious desire to put together long-form essays that are witty, ironic, hip, intimate and surprising. How hard can it be? (Don’t make us play the demos.) But the most serious condition arises from the Garrison Keillor fantasy. “Let’s put together a two-hour variety program, with a studio audience, aired live. Garrison does it once a week; surely we can do it once. Doesn’t it always turn out great when Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney and the kids put together a show in the barn in those movies from the ‘30s?”

Weeks of sweat and panic later, drafting help from anyone unwise enough to come in range, we’re finally almost ready for tomorrow night’s live Open Studio special. Now we know how Garrison does it—decades of experience, scores of bodies, tractor trailers full of equipment, and a limitless supply of nerve. Maybe we’ll tackle Ira next; or maybe it’s time to launch Bagpipe Fever.

Tough sledding

Radio Bob is on arctic safari today, hauling radio gear by snow machine up through the ice fields on Blue Mountain. If his mission to replace our damaged antenna is a success, we will be able to stop apologizing to everyone in the central and southern Adirondacks, who have had the insult of no radio added to the injury of a late spring storm. The Blue Mountain facility is a central distribution point for us, feeding our signal on to other transmitters in North Creek, Lake George, Glens Falls, Newcomb and Speculator. We hope to have good news soon. Thanks to everyone for their patience.

This has been a tough week for public broadcasting infrastructure in the North Country. Mountain Lake PBS suffered the collapse of its 400-foot broadcast tower during bad weather on Lyon Mountain. On the other hand, it looks like cell-phone service will soon be extended onto the currently uncovered stretches of the Northway, with the just-announced agreement between the Spitzer administration and Verizon.

It pays to be humble before the power of the weather, though as it turns out, the weather will humble us whether we agree or not. But this just in—the good news I hinted at above--Radio Bob reports the fix is done, and all the transmitters are on. Weather permitting, of course.

A liberal artist

A reader gave me a mild rebuke a few weeks back about how I appeared to devalue my liberal arts education while reporting on the technical problems that arose while our station engineer was away. His point was that the focus of the liberal arts on creative flexibility might enable one to function in a wider variety of situations than the utilitarian approach to learning that comes with technical education.

That I should be properly grateful for my education was brought home to me again by the death Monday of my great teacher and friend, Kelsie Harder, who for many years chaired the SUNY Potsdam English Department. He had the gift for transmitting his passions, taking such unpromising material as myself and my callow classmates, and infecting us--not just with interest, but with fascination--for unlikely topics such as linguistics, grammar, etymology and onomastics. He labored in the sub-basement of language, where the qualities of time, matter and space intersect with the mind to become speech. How does a meme come to mean?—or, Shakespeare’s more-than-rhetorical query, "What's in a name?"--these are questions that will never come up in a job interview, unless the job is writer. But what the study of Clausewitz is to the general, these matters are to the author. Their study unlocks all the strategy and tactics necessary to communicate with clarity, integrity and effect.

Kelsie was a great exemplar of and recruiter for his vocation, teaching. More than a few of his students have gone on to do likewise. I think this is because he treated the student-teacher relationship as just that, a personal relationship, not a pedagogical contract. That makes his loss a personal matter to thousands.

Disconnect

David just walked down the hall to announce, “the internet’s down—and it’s snowing.” Another practically perfect day in “the cruelest month.” There are still things I could do: whittle a banana, whittle a monkey to hold the banana, whittle a tree to hold the monkey. But as web manager, I’ve got nothing to manage—the Maytag repairman of cyberspace. I know that NCPR.org is still out there, but it’s like the train that runs by Folsom Prison, out of reach beyond the razor-wire of the University firewall. I can write these words, but it’s a message in a bottle—no one will ever see them until they have been mooted by the industrious geeks of IT. I could catch up with some old friends, but my contact list has nothing but email addresses. I could continue my research for tonight’s poetry show, but there’s nothing in my notes but website URLs. There’s a poem by a friend--on my website, there are things I could make reference to—in my blog. There are sound clips I could use—in the online archive. Twice now the connection has come back on, only to swoon again in less than a minute: “No! Wait!”—then nothing but my forlorn claw marks in the dust on the screen. How could something that didn’t even exist a little while ago become the center of the universe? Shall I burn incense? Try the Tinkerbell technique? I look out at the snow, but it gives me no information.