Episodios

  • A Letter from Greenville, S.C.

    A Letter from Greenville, S.C.
    Jul 20 2024
    I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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    7 m
  • A morning walk along Columbus Avenue

    A morning walk along Columbus Avenue
    Jul 13 2024
    Now I’m an old man, in no rush, keeping an eye out for curbs and crevices and treacherous slabs of sidewalk, hoping not to make a spectacle of myself, knowing that in New York I am surrounded by writers, real or imagined, who would find the crash of a tall elderly author rather satisfying. Once I was swift afoot and long astride, and now I amble along, accepting distractions, my barber Tommy, a sculptor of hair, at work in his shop, and the newsstand, a historic relic, in the Online Age, and the security woman in her yellow vest at the schoolyard gate, and these beautiful children, apartment kids growing up on crowded streets, learning social skills. I had the Mississippi River and woods to go wander off alone in and so I picked up a pencil and a Roy Rogers tablet and wrote, as I am doing now.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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    7 m
  • A lucky man admits to happiness, and why not?

    A lucky man admits to happiness, and why not?
    Jul 6 2024
    Ask a Midwesterner, “How are you?” and we tend to say, “Not bad” or “It could be worse,” feeling it’d sound glib or boastful to say, “Delighted,” and we men in particular tend to adopt an easygoing grumpiness as suitable for all occasions, but I think it’s bad luck not to acknowledge that I am very fortunate to have added my tongue to the other 999 at church, to lift my voice with the two women’s in trio to an audience in Vermont, to see that ecstatic little boy finding the joy in pablum that the Dead tried to find in acid. I am tired of conversations with fellow libs that start with ritual lamentations about the horrors we read about in the paper. We are right to be aware of the horrors, but the display of outrage at cruelties I haven’t experienced strikes me as show-offy. Donate money to organizations that relieve suffering. Volunteer at the food shelf, visit the sick, tutor the needy children, do good where you can, and count your blessings.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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    8 m
  • Spring is here, time to get to know each other

    Spring is here, time to get to know each other
    Jun 29 2024
    Myself, I have a bias in favor of public education because that was my experience. I came from very exclusive fundamentalist evangelicals who looked down on Methodists and Lutherans as Scripturally off-base, so when I left home and walked into public school, I found myself among — O my gosh! — Catholic kids, boys who took the Lord’s name in vain and told dirty jokes, girls who hung out with those boys. A nice Christian boy felt rather lonely at times.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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    8 m
  • The beauty of falls that you walk away from

    The beauty of falls that you walk away from
    Jun 22 2024
    I fell twice crossing 89th Street, once in the middle of the street, once at the curb. I misjudged the step, crashed down on my hands and knees and chin, and once I walked into a tree branch on the path around the Central Park Reservoir and got plonked on my keister, and each time strangers rushed to my side to ask if I was okay and I said I was and jumped up but now I see these falls were a turning point in my life. Once you come crashing down, there is no longer a need to have a smart opinion about everything; you’re simply part of the human race. Your job is to be a biped rather than a quad. As Scripture says, It is God who has made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.And so long as you can stand up and baa, you can do comedy. I have a good sense of sentence structure and my vocabulary is exemplary. Thanks to my aunts Elsie and Margaret, I speak clearly. They listened to me recite my verse in Sunday school and said, “We could understand every word.” From Ephesians and Ecclesiastes to stand-up comedy is a hop and a jump.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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    7 m
  • On the road again, meeting folks again

    On the road again, meeting folks again
    Jun 15 2024
    It’s an age of dread, the news perpetually discouraging, TV and media merchandising ugliness, and either you join the Greek chorus of gloom or you go with the American choir of cheerful resolve, and I choose cheerfulness. I am capable of dismay: I’m dismayed by the Working From Home syndrome that is leaving our big office buildings half empty. I call up an office to get answers to difficult questions and I hear Death Chute singing “Vanilla Windows” and a guy says, “Yeah?” and a dog barks and a woman yells, “Put it on headphones!” This is what Allied Federated has come to. I’d prefer to get a woman named Mildred who is an authority on health coverage and who is looking at me across her desk. But never mind me, I’m old.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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    7 m
  • The critic who lit up my week and more

    The critic who lit up my week and more
    Jun 8 2024
    I’m still writing books but haven’t been reviewed by anybody in ages, maybe because I’m an Old White Male and our time is up, or maybe I’ve written too many books, and I’m okay with unreviewing — going way back to Veronica Geng’s caramel custard review of Lake Wobegon Days in the New York Times in 1985, the reviews have been warm and sweet, which is nice for the publisher but for me, the hardworking writer, are unremarkable, like a friend’s cat climbing into my lap: not the equivalent of good conversation. But O’Gieblyn’s essay is a brilliant and engaging piece of work and I feel honored that she went to so much trouble. It pleases me that she quotes funny lines from the book and not pretentious ones: she could easily have used my own words to make me look like a hack and a bore. She does use the word “schtick” in connection with my radio monologue, but I don’t mind: in stand-up, schtick is simply useful, like the handheld microphone. She says that my willful optimism seems somewhat strained at times, and she writes, “There is, alas, no shortage of holes in the book’s logic that could be exploited by an attentive critic”and she goes ahead and sticks her finger in some of them, but she also says, “It’s hard not to conclude that Keillor has reached the sunny equanimity of enlightenment.” (I’ve made it as hard as I could, Meghan.) And then she says, “The prose throughout the book is both sharp and buoyant, and often arrives, somewhat unexpectedly, at profundity.” I was aiming for buoyancy. Profundity is well above my pay grade; it’s Ms. Gieblyn’s territory, not mine. To me, this sentence from a writer so sharp as she is worth more than any prize given by a committee. “Sharp and buoyant” is a nice phrase for promotion, but what makes it meaningful to me is the brilliance of Meghan O’Gieblyn.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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    8 m
  • Let's talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff

    Let's talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff
    Jun 1 2024
    The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling, snorting. I, being prehensile, was sent into the henhouse to snatch chickens, while the others distracted the farmer’s dog, and I bit the chickens’ throats and bled them dry and carried the bodies back to the den where we ate them raw.I was rescued by hunters and returned to my parents who had recovered from their grief and didn’t know what to do with me. I relearned English and I regained a semblance of good manners, though even now, years later, I sometimes urinate on the bathroom floor to mark my space against intruders, which upsets my wife and so does my habit of woofing in my sleep and sometimes I’ve smelled feathers in my sleep and attacked my pillow and chewed a hole in it, so we switched to foam rubber.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe
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    7 m