Radio address for November 30, 2013, a short trip through music, the kitchen, and the woods.

Mention is made of the Superior National Forest.

The last time I talked about Christmas music was in December 2008, in an address titled We’ll Dance and We’ll Sing Love, and you can hear a little more of the Old Christmas music what I’m talking about there.

Radio address for October 12, 2013, which finds me getting ready for a long drive, thinking about the radio and those static voices in the darkness, and where they might be found once radio is really dead.

A good companion episode to this one is the Howell Creek Radio address for January 21, 2008. If you listen to it, you’ll see why. It’s only the sixth episode I recorded, and it’s six minutes long.

Another great piece of further reading is The Quest to Save AM Before It’s Lost in Static by Edward Wyatt, a medium-length NYT article published on September 8, 2013.

Radio address for September 22, 2013. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who, at some point in their adult life, have had their world view and their thinking radically changed, and those who haven’t. Regardless of what ideas you start with, and what ideas you end up with, the experience itself is deeply upsetting and wildly revitalizing: the whole world changes before your eyes and becomes new again. Every sight and sound is up for re-experiencing and reconsideration.

Mention is made of a pompous old essay I wrote when I was 22 called Art Fare for the Common Man.

The poem “The Swimmer’s Moment” by Margaret Avison was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1960, a few years before the author’s conversion to Christianity.

This week’s music is Stubborn Love by the Lumineers, Life is Life by Noah and the Whale, and a cover of Bon Iver’s Holocene by the Vitamin String Quartet.

Iver’s own music video for Holocene is one of my favorite music videos ever. The visuals, and the line “at once I knew, I was not magnificent” captures perfectly the sensation of having been let outside your own defenses.

Radio address for September 14, 2013. This episode draws from and adds a bit of dimension to Habemus Papoose, in which I briefly described our daughter’s birth at 65 MPH.

Sylvia is doing beautifully.

Those are her hiccups at the end, recorded when she was 4 days old.

Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity to retroactively announce my hiatus from podcasting, which lasted for several weeks, and just ended. I was going to announce it ahead of time but...I just...couldn’t, for some reason. Maybe it’s bad for business, but my writing is like the seasons, and there are dry spells. So maybe it’s time we all accepted that, and looked on the bright side, which is that the rain always comes back eventually.

Radio address for June 15, 2013. Numbers and words are my yin and yang, my law and grace. I’m trying to explore the parallel between numbers and incessant rain, and why is it that we even need them? Why is it that as children in school, people always seem to prefer either math or language, but never both?

Mention is made of Ray Bradbury’s short story The Long Rain, which was included in his book The Illustrated Man.

Music cues are Midnight Sun and L’Aura by Richard Harvey, and Mayla by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

The end music is I & Thou by The Daredevil Christopher Wright. I’ve actually included a link to an MPR article about this poetic, philisophical song for the last few months in the email that goes out to email subscribers (speaking of which, I’ll get that updated — sorry folks!). You can also listen to the full song for free there.

Today's rain, which you hear in the background of today’s podcast.