We should
sit like a cat
and wait for the door
to open.
—”Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry,” by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison
Cat, sitting
Category: Poetry
R.I.P., Ken Nordine
Ken Nordine, a voice you may recall from “Word Jazz,” a staple on NPR for years, has left the studio. He was 98.
A baritone storyteller who began with voiceovers on radio and TV, Nordine would go on to collaborate with Tom Waits, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman and others.
He once said that the goal of his poetry was to “make people think about their thinking and feel about their feeling, but even more important to think about their feeling and feel about their thinking.”
I think he succeeded. Whenever I’d hear that impossibly deep voice softshoe out of my radio and into my head, I’d stop whatever I was doing and pay attention. They’re nodding and yessing and popping their fingers at Next World Coffee this morning.
The Pod People
OK, I’ve been threatening to resurrect the Radio Free Dogpatch podcast for a while now, and the stars finally came into proper alignment this week, so here we go.
For the first time Radio Free Dogpatch is not a solo effort — my friend and colleague Hal Walter joined me for a chat of about 75 minutes that I boiled down in editing to just over an hour.
Call it “Two Dudes Mystery Theatre.” We talked about the passing of poets Jim Harrison and Merle Haggard; Hal’s autistic son, and what it’s like trying to do creative work while raising a child who is not “neuro-typical”; and cooking.
For anyone who’s interested in the nuts and bolts of this Frankensteinian project, we chatted via Skype (Hal lives in Custer County, Colorado, while I’m in Albuquerque). On my end I was using a Samson C01U USB condenser microphone and an old pair of Bose earbuds plugged into an equally old iMac; Hal went even lower-tech, using a $50 Kindle Fire and some Apple earbuds, the kind that include an inline mic’.
I recorded our conversation using Ecamm’s Call Recorder, then split the convo into two tracks and dragged both into Apple’s GarageBand for editing. Once the thing was more or less the way I wanted it, I uploaded it to Libsyn, which hosts RFD and sends an RSS feed to iTunes.
During our ‘cast I promised to provide links with more information about some of the topics we discussed, and here those are:
Jim Harrison
• Tom McGuane’s “Postscript” in The New Yorker.
• Mario Batali recalls mealtimes with Harrison in Time.
• Jimmy Buffett bids a fond adios to his hermano on Facebook.
• Doug Peacock on Harrison and the art of friendship at The Daily Beast.
Merle Haggard
• A recollection from Patrick Doyle in Rolling Stone.
• NPR’s “Fresh Air” reprises a 1995 interview with the outlaw country legend.
Cookery
• The food of Apulia, from Florence Fabricant in The New York Times.
• Her recipe for orecchiette with cherry tomatoes and arugula (being a barbarian, I add hot Italian sausage).
Final notes
If you find yourself interested in Hal’s writing, you can visit him at Hardscrabble Times (yeah, it’s been a while since he updated the ol’ blog) or order up one or more of his books (check the link in the sidebar).
Meanwhile, let us know in comments what you think. It’s a little rough around the edges, but so are we. Happily, the podcast can be improved.
Nuts
Could the Battle of the Budgies be coming to a peaceful resolution?
The Oregonian reports that the last holdouts at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon are ready to give themselves up, and that their patron saint, Cliven Bundy, was snatched up in Portland and faces charges from the 2014 debacle that triggered this whole clusterfuck.
Perhaps as they continue to enjoy the hospitality of the State at another venue these small fellows can take solace from a Longfellow, translating Friedrich von Logau:
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.
Got them Suburban Snowsick Blues
The weather has been, shall we say, unsettled.
One minute a fella’s cycling around and about wearing little more than a bit of team kit marinated in sunscreen, and the next he’s huddled over a furnace grate in a snowmobile suit, Ruger Mini Thirty locked and loaded, ready to repel a terrorist yeti raid on his bacon and beans.
I made my preparations on Saturday, whipping up two steaming tureens of Southwestern fare, the first of a pork-and-potato-laden green chile stew and the second of pinto beans with onion, garlic and chipotle chile. To say the atmosphere has grown heavy indoors since would be an understatement of epic proportions.
The weather wizards were shrieking about inches and feet of white stuff, but this latest resurrection of winter proved to be not so much of a much. What little we got was heavy and wet, to be sure, and at one point I had to venture out with a broom to flog it off the tender branches of the young Canadian red cherry in the back yard.
This morning we have gray skies, temps below freezing, a stiff wind, and flurries, which is to say it’s May in Colorado. It caused me to compose a protest song in the style of Mr. Robert Zimmerman, though it’s tough to be musical without guitar, harmonica or talent. Still, I had a whang at it in an email to a friend and colleague in the mountains.
How much snow have you got there?
They said we’d get it everywhere
But mostly, down here below
the worst was that the wind did blowIt sucked, actually
Real cold
Movin’ t’Arizony(squee honk blaat hoot snort honk twee)
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