After several years of reading and enjoying blogs such as Instapundit, The Corner, The Anchoress, Powerline, Captain's Quarters, Fraters Libertas, and The Daily Bleat, I have decided to bring my bucket of thoughts to the blogospheric sea. I do so with some trepidation. For one thing, these bloggers seem to have a superhuman work ethic. How do they crank out all that good work, all the time, especially the ones with day jobs? But at the same time I am emboldened by their example. Captain Ed, for example, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a talk by Jonahh Goldberg, said he started his blog to sharpen his writing skills. And James Lileks wrote today that he has long tought a day lost that did not produce some piece of writing. Anyway, here are a few pensees to start.
Blog Name
I thought of calling the blog "Garlic and Sapphires," after a line from Eliot's Four Quartets, but it was taken, although that blog does not appear to be active. Also taken was Cacoethes Scribendi, a line from Juvenal meaning an insatiable urge to write. So I settled on Nunc est scribendum, a play on the Juvenal quote as well as on Nunc est bidendum, which is Latin for "It's Miller time."
Local TV News
In the Twin Cities, the local TV news on Channel 9 could be so much better. It could do more investigative pieces, for example, or more in-depth stories on local political races or legislative issues. Instead, it has a "Wildest Police Chases" mentality, grabbing whatever graphic video is out there, no matter the absence of any local angle. What a waste of broadcast spectrum. On the bright side: they no longer have Janie Peterson doing the weather; she was fingernails-on-a-blackboard annoying. The new guy isa slight improvement, although he is a collection of odd mannerisms. Where is the latter-day Bud Kraehling?
Garrison Keillor
James Lileks and Mitch Berg have weighed in from time to time on the subject of Garrison Keillor. I don't know what led Keillor to turn so nasty toward Republicans. Perhaps Mitch is right that Republicans could be dismissed or patronized as long as they were not in power. Living in a liberal town like St. Paul, I frequently encounter the view that Republicans and conservatives are not just wrong, but stupid. Condescension is a common attitude; those unenlightened unfortunates who do not see the wisdom of the progressive worldview are just not as highly evolved as those who do.
I prefer to recall Keillor's more individualistic style of years past. For example, in the 1980s he had the humorist Roy Blount, Jr., on the Prairie Home Companion show; Blount did a hilarious sendup of various PC sensibilities: he started out with a trio of backup singers intoning "So fine," in the manner of sixties rock groups. First, someone objects to the singers being black (racist), then to their being female (sexist), then to their being young (ageist), so the end result ( as I recall) was three old white guys singing "So fine."
Similarly, when Keillor had a daily radio program on Minnesota Public Radio, he would sometimes poke fun at the earnest types at places like the University of Minnesota who were pushing their multi-culti agenda even back then. But those quirks seem to have disappeared.
I don't listen to his Saturday show much anymore (the Guy Noir sketches are hard to bear, and there isn't as much bluegrass as there used to be when Hotrise was on regularly). But it seems to me that the appeal of the Lake Wobegon monologues lay in the balance or tension between poking fun at small-town foibles and celebrating (albeit hedged with irony) small-town verities and values. Take, for example, the mother who comes to visit her married son (or daughter, I can't remember) in "the Cities." She is puzzled by their sophisticated, well-heeled ways. When they give a party, she heads for the kitchen to help, only to discover the catering crew; she does not have to do any work, which is disorienting. So is the idea of food in the living room. I did not get the idea that Keillor was having fun at the Lake Wobegon mom's expense.
So too with the anecdote about the grown children who return to Lake Wobegon at Christmas and pretend for the sake of the grandparents that the grandchildren are being raised as good Lutherans or Catholics, when the parents are in fact neglecting the religious formation of the kids. I did not see that as anything but Keillor poking fun at the hypocrisy of the parents and perhaps lamenting the loss of religious tradition.
As I say, I don't listen to PHC much these days, but I wonder if that balance is still there.
After 9/11, I was interested to see if and how Keillor would handle this attack on America. He did work it into a monologue: a Lake Wobegon family had a son who was killed in the World Trade Center. But it was as if the building had been destroyed by a tornado or some other force of nature. It seemed beyond Keillor's worldview to say anything about Islamists who want to kill the maximum number of Americans. Perhaps saying anything along those lines would be to get too close to the idea that we as a nation should respond to this act of war by going to war. Which was what the Bush administration did, of course.
