Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 56

The News from Manhattan: Sunday, June 28, 2020

The comedian Erica Rhodes

Brings in laughs by the loads.

Here in America

I think that Erica

Has cracked the comedy codes.

I loved sitting and admiring Erica Rhodes on Zoom last night from a comedy club in Minneapolis. A tiny crowd, due to social distancing, and they’re Minnesotans so they hesitate to be the first to laugh at a joke, but she is a great pro, keeps moving, doesn’t throw material at you but talks to you, is friendly, works the crowd, and her stuff is so great. So smart. She stays off the well-worn paths, off coronavirus, off DJT, off mother stuff, didn’t make fun of Minnesota (thank you). I’ve been watching her work since she was 11 because she’s my niece, but I’m only slightly biased. She’s good. It’s such a pleasure, after you’ve worked hard for a long time, to sit back and admire someone else. It makes me want to teach a comedy course. Making people laugh is a great gift. Speaking of which: When God created woman, He gave her not two breasts but three. But the middle one got in the way so God performed surgery. Woman came before God with the middle breast in her hand. She said, “What shall we do with the useless boob?” and God created man.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, June 27, 2020

I got up this morning at five

Feeling very awake and alive.

I love this hour

Of quiet and now’re

The thoughts in my brain

Riding a train

That approaches and soon will arrive.

I awoke early because I had a dream about my novel and a scene toward the end where I give a crazed speech about the beauty of sweet corn and in the dream I was adding a song to the dream so I got out of bed and wrote it. Last night, to celebrate the novel, Jenny made a supper of corn on the cob and hamburgers and we ate it on the terrace in a beautiful New York twilight which then turned to sunset. And then Jenny strung lights on the railing — Let Your Light Shine. Maia adjourned to go talk to her friends on Facebook or FaceTime or whatever facial platform they use. She spends hours in her room and we hear constant chatter and laughter and we try to enforce a 10:30 curfew but who knows. It is so pleasurable to sit outdoors with one’s love and talk about her walk in the park that day and what she saw and her conversations with friends and what we will do when this pandemic ends. I worked all week revising the novel so I’m a big bore. Hard to make interesting conversation out of fixing misspellings and quotation marks and what should be in italics and should “hotdish” be one word or two and do we want to accent “café” or make it “cafe”. It’s the Chatterbox Cafe in Lake Wobegon so it’s not accented. The name in the window of the Chatterbox does not have an accent mark. It would be considered an affectation and a signal that prices have been raised and there will be too much garlic and pepper in the hotdish.

The reason to write a novel is to say what you think in a form that allows enormous freedom – you can put the thoughts in different characters so you can express your own conflicts fully. And the other reason is that it’s FUN, especially the last stages of revision. The early drafting part can be tedious because you have to look at your own crappy writing but as the work is revised upward, it becomes more enjoyable and in the end stages – such as when you dream a revision and wake up and put it in – it is downright exhilarating. Some people get pleasure from soaring in gliders, some from gardening, or conversation, or playing banjo, or cooking, and this is my pleasure and I intend to keep on doing it. Maybe a comic novel about dementia. Why not? It’d be my “Finnegan’s Wake”. Or a novel about Thoreau. He and God get into an argument in heaven and Thoreau instructs the Lord what He should do about America and God is offended and punishes Henry by putting him back on earth, married, with three kids, teaching 11th grade English in the Bronx. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau wrote long ago and now he is living it. I think this could be funny. But I’d need to go do research in a school in the Bronx and that won’t be possible for awhile.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, June 26, 2020

I’m a man who’s writing a book,

I’m head bottle-washer and cook.

And I have faith

September 8th

The book comes out, so have a look.

An exciting day, editing galleys and I’m down to the last twenty pages. The end is in sight. An author has to be a tough critic, especially an old one because people tend to be terribly polite to the elderly and you show them a few pages and they’ll say, “That’s very nice” so you need to squint at your stuff and say, “That’s a piece of crap. Dump it.” No time to waffle about writing when you’re 77. And I reluctantly admit that on p. 168 with thirty left to go, I think this is a pretty good book. Last night I thought my eyes were giving out but this morning they’re fresh again and so, God forgive me, I am skipping Morning Prayer on Zoom and going straight to work. This is my joy, this is what I live for: my beloved and our child are sound asleep and I sit in a quiet kitchen and work on a book I am starting to think is pretty good work. Thank you, Lord, for eyesight and all the rest of it.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, June 24, 2020

An old man tripped and he fell

And he did not cry out or yell

But landed, ker-smack,

Flat on his back.

He refused sympathy,

Knelt on one knee

And arose gracefully,

Like a USMC

PFC or QB (NFL).

A lovely evening on our New York terrace made even lovelier by the host, 77, arising from his chair, tripping on it, losing his balance, then stumbling over a serving tray and crashing to the floor. His wife was horrified but he rolled over, got up, and said, “How did I look?” The guests assured him that he looked very graceful in his collapse. He poured himself a ginger ale. He said, “Not many hosts my age would go so far to entertain guests.” It was a jolly bunch, though his wife took awhile to calm down, and the conversation ranged widely from golf to dogwood trees to Connecticut to grandchildren to the Bronx and the need not to fight hopeless battles — and not one mention of the Bolton book or the current president. The old man’s wife was very affectionate toward him the entire evening, putting her hand on his knee, leaning against him, asking him if he was all right every time he couldn’t remember something such as the trip to Mackinac Island or an Episcopal church in Boston, as if he might be suffering traumatic memory loss. MORAL: There are clear benefits to taking a fall but you need to do it carefully.

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The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, June 23, 2020

An old man writes his memoir

And sees how crucial friends are,

Through life’s betrayals,

Their love never fails

Round twists and bends,

It’s all about friends

And their charity

Til you put out to sea

And your vessel is crossing the bar.

It’s all about friendship and the pandemic proves it. You need to avoid crowds of strangers, which is too bad, but you find out who you want to stay in close touch with and it’s your old friends. They have plenty of time to talk and in the lockdown they have plenty to say and you call and before you know it a half-hour is gone and you’re still in the thick of it. Back in my big crazy career days I went for weeks without talking to friends other than my sweetie and now I’m in close touch with a dozen people and it’s wonderful. Who can explain why conversation flows thick with some people and thin with others? For one thing, with true friends, you’re not so bound by orthodoxy and p.c. For another thing, it helps to have common history. And for another, you need to have a rational feeling about civics. It is no longer possible to talk to a Republican. I used to like a bunch of Republicans and now they are beyond the pale. There’s nothing to be said

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Some good advice from an old memoirist. Take it.

My advice to you, young people, is to start asking questions of your elders about family history and who did what when and why and don’t stop until you get answers because, though you’re much too cool to be interested in family history now, someday you’ll want to know these things and by that time they will all be dead.

Okay? Read that paragraph over a couple of times to yourself and then go do it.

I’m trying to finish a memoir and I realize now how much I don’t know and I was too busy careering around as my elders began taking the long walk and I didn’t sit down and ask for the story. My elders were self-effacing Midwesterners brought up not to talk about personal things and they kept many secrets from me such as how did the men fall in love with the women and vice versa, they being such righteous folk and sensible and circumspect. Mother came from a family of thirteen, Dad from eight, and when I knew them, they were all settled in comfortable marriages, and what I want to know is what transpired when they were infatuated and savoring sensual moments and looking forward to throwing caution to the wind.

It happened, even in cautious Christian families like mine. I see the pictures of my youthful aunts in their white summer dresses sashaying around the lakes of Minneapolis and I sense adventure and light-heartedness, not wary mothers I knew them as.

I know that my parents met on July 4, 1931, as teenagers at a picnic at the Keillor farm and were crazy about each other but I wish I’d asked them for more details. He was a farmboy, she was a city girl, slender and shy, and they didn’t marry until six years later, it being the Depression and all, but what happened in those six years? I grew up with two parents who held hands and flirted with each other all their long lives and I’m grateful and I want to know how come and there’s nobody left to ask.

I write about my life, the lost world of hitchhiking, which I knew as a kid and got picked up by angry half-drunk men who raged against the government, their bosses, their Army commanders, their wives, and I got a view of life you couldn’t get in school or from the newspaper. It’s gone and so are the downtown department stores of Minneapolis, the smells and bells, the ladies with white gloves who ran the elevators. I went to a state university back when tuition was so cheap you could pay for your education with a part-time low-wage job, no debt, no need to ask your dad for money, and so you were free to make impractical plans such as become a writer of fiction. I came from a fundamentalist family that was wary of higher education and I plunged into campus life and before I knew it I had four close friends, Larry and Barry and Maury and Arnie, all of them Jewish. I did an early-morning radio show back when people listened to radio religiously, before YouTube and Google and InnerTube and Bugle and iPod and pPod and all the other platforms.

It’s all interesting, but it’s the love stories that a person craves. You want to know that you’re descended from passionate irresponsibility, not a business arrangement or a science experiment, but two people mysteriously drawn to each other. My mother’s parents, William and Marian, courted in Glasgow and she was four months pregnant when they married. Their brood of thirteen children testifies to their feelings for each other. Dad’s parents, James and Dora, were twenty years apart in age. He was an old bachelor on the school board and she was a teacher; she boarded with him and his sister. He came to school and helped her clean blackboards and clap erasers and he kissed her and they ran off and got married. They came home in the buggy and he left the horses standing in harness all night, the reins on the ground, as he carried Dora into the house, his sister having disembarked for a house up the road. It’s good to know these things.

Sit your people down and ask questions. The secret of investigative journalism is: ask questions and keep asking — people want to spill the beans, they just need some warming up. Apply the heat. You will thank me for this someday. I won’t be around but you’re welcome.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, June 21, 2020

Father’s Day, what shall I do?

A burnt-out bulb to unscrew?

Does the A/C compressor

Need repair? Yes, sir,

Soon as I find super glue.

Shall I explain

The cause of migraine

Or the origins of World War II?

I have seniority

As an authority,

So salute before speaking. Thank you.

Father’s Day was a bigger deal back when I was a kid because fathers knew more then and fixed the family car, did carpentry and painting and plumbing repairs around the house, could install A/C or put up a TV aerial, handled the finances, drove the car on vacation trips and packed the trunk as well. He was an expert packer. And my father had built our house from the basement up. He was the Master of the House. So of course we honored him every June.

Compared to him, I am a large pathetic person who spills a good deal and needs wiping up afterward. Plumbing problems, my wife calls a plumber, of course. I ask my daughter to show me how to install an app. I am still called on to dispose of dead bodies and to put away baking dishes that go on a very high shelf. I say table grace. I hold a chair steady so my wife can climb up on it and change a lightbulb.

I am a liberal and so is everyone I know and therefore my freedom of expression is severely restricted and I am constantly editing myself as I speak to make sure I haven’t marginalized anyone — such as Marge or Ina or Liza — and because I grew up fundamentalist I’m not able to curse fluently either and because I’m old I don’t know the current slang like “teeter” and “gouchy” and “25” — it’s a miracle that I can manage to squeeze out a whole sentence. I sit here silently in the kitchen, hoping someone will ask me to unscrew a lid. And hoping I can, when they do.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, June 19, 2020

The pleasure of pure solitude

With no one around to intrude

Brings me to tears.

I love you, my dears,

But silence is basic, like food.

Mothers, as well,

And health personnel,

Teachers, preachers,

All of God’s creatures,

Need periods of quietude.

My family is extremely considerate of the writer in their midst and during the quarantine they disappear into corners of the apartment and let him be, a ghostly presence, tapping at the laptop, scratching at typescript. But the past week has been delicious with them at the old Holman family cottage on the Connecticut shore, hanging out with sociable cousins, breathing salt air, feeling grass under their feet, and meanwhile I toil at the loom. It’s good not to have Jenny here to complain to. So I don’t complain. Shut my mouth. A big relief. The world is better for it. And I dive back into the memoir and remember when I was 13 and visited cousins in Idaho and, with my cautious careful mother away at church, I got to drive a tractor up a steep mountain road, gunning it, avoiding trees, a wild ride with two cousins hanging on for dear life, engine roaring, a big burst of freedom. So now that’s in there. I’m cutting exposition, replacing it with stories. No excuses, just experiences.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, June 18, 2020

I’m the whitest white man you will know,

White since a long time ago,

But Jesus my brother

Said to love one another.

Was he white? I do not think so.

I’m a writer and I write alone

About people and places I’ve known.

I can’t change that

But we need to work at

Making the Other our own.

I’m in quarantine and not about to march in the street, so what’s to be done? Listen, read, pay attention, and send money to places where it’ll do good. Friends of mine have done heroic things in establishing and supporting charter schools in hard-up neighborhoods. With the money I’ve lost in truly stupid real estate deals, I could’ve done something good. I hope to get another chance. The big task is to uproot a corrupt government in Washington and elect people more inclined to see the realities of inequality. It’s amazing to see Mr. Floyd’s picture everywhere — how one man, driving along Lake & Chicago in Minneapolis, a corner I know very well, caught in a terrible vise and executed while people on the sidewalk yelled at the cops and filmed it with their phones, now becomes the inspiration of a powerful movement. How the President of the United States, using tear gas to clear a peaceful protest so that he and his sycophants walk across the street and he can stand in front of a church and hold up a Bible like the alien object it is to him — it’s the dumbest show he ever put on. Anybody who looks at that picture can see that the man is a 10cent phony. Anybody. He lost his re-election by walking across the street.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Why does one write a memoir?

It’s not to promote; that’s bizarre.

It’s a confession

With some discretion,

It’s a thanksgiving

For decades of living,

And what we’ve learned so far:

How temporary we are,

A lightning bug caught in a jar.

The family’s up in Connecticut at a cottage where they can breathe salt air and the old drudge is at work at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Talked to a friend in Connecticut who is trying to fend off deer from his garden and raccoons and now a bear. A disrespectful bear who one night came up on the deck and left a load of bear shit by the back door. The friend is a pianist, not a hunter, and probably the bear is aware of that. The friend has tried urinating around his backyard to mark territory but the bear doesn’t get the message. This makes me grateful to be living on the 12th floor in Manhattan, it enables one to focus entirely on the memoir and writing clearly about those years on the radio. Memory blurs when you’ve been crazy busy, the mass of detail seems to erase itself. I’ll bet my friend has forgotten a lot about the many shows he’s played. I’ll bet the bear will be memorable for years to come. I had no bear in my life. It was all much too easy. The secret of a good story is danger and struggle. I had great freedom to do whatever I wanted to do for forty years. The shortcomings were all my fault and nobody else’s. Painful but true.

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