WEVO Radio Commentaries

Through the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, while living in Manchester, NH, I was allowed to broadcast two- to three-minute radio commentaries on WEVO, the public radio station located in Concord. Through their generosity and patience, I was able to hone my writing by having to cut all indulgent crap in order to make the thoughts fit the alloted time.

I have listed the essays below by name, with a brief tag line for clarity. (You can return to this table of contents from any of the essays.) Links at the bottom of each page allow you to move back to the just-read or move forward to the as-yet-to-be-read. I have also created a PDF version for those of who would like to sample off-line.

Commentaries

1. Reading as Radicalism - A person who believes that books are more essential to life than material necessities is dangerous.
2. Spirits in the Material World - I, too, am looking for that simplicity which his synonymous with beauty which is synonymous with reality in all its fullness.
3. Winter - When Shakespeare began Richard III with "Now is the winter of our discontent," he began with the wrong season. Summer is the real season of discontent.
4. Ultimate Questions - Asking "What is the meaning of life?," not finding the answer, is the meaning of life to those interested in ultimate questions.
5. Connections - John Donne, I think, had it wrong; we are all islands.
6. Those Who Are Still Among Us - We compound our social and moral dishonor if we believe even for a second that people actively want the degradation and marginal survival that a life of poverty brings.
7. Squirrel - They've been foraging steadily this last month, moving through the fallen leaves around the tree like electrons through a cloud chamber, leaving faint trails flagged by a twitching gray exclamatory tail.
8. Chainsaws - A chainsaw is not the first symbol people would use to describe the age-old turning of the seasons in New Hampshire.
9. Where I Live: Manchester NH - Each time I do my shopping or deposit my money or watch the aged Salvation Army sergeant stand inside Allegro's angling for people's change, I know that I live in a world that can be known.
10. Santa At The Mall - It's the day after Thanksgiving and here I sit, enthroned at the center of the Mall, prepared to confess (or prime) the greed of children.
11. In Praise Of Weirdness - It's weirdness, properly understood, that makes life worth living.
12. Suck - The liberty of none of us is safe while the wolves in wolves' clothing prowl the democratic pastures. Let's start the impeachment proceedings now.
13. My Nephew Christopher - Christopher has an addiction to toys. The source of his addiction can be easily identified: grandparents (and a few other culpable adults).
14. Anne and Leo - A few weeks ago I was watching the local 11 p.m. news when I heard about a fire in Sutton, a town where I used to live. The 200-year old house of Anne and Leo Austen had burned down. I knew Anne and Leo.
15. Why I Want To Be A Poet - Why write poetry? The usual reasons of ego and hubris. But also something a bit more pure: a love and a thirst for language so expansive that it forces me to try to make some dent in the obdurate world I live in.
16. What Does "Rural" Mean? - The North Country won't be the same for any of my students again, and they won't be the same for it.
17. Adult Illiteracy - The usual school reforms won't work (as they haven't worked in the past) unless we take a harsh look at what our desire for profit does to certain people in this society.
18. The Official Language - With "official" English we will only be able to have "official" thoughts - that is not what liberty, and supposedly what the United States, is all about.
19. The Burden Of The Rich - The "culture of richness,”: one of the most unheralded dangers we face today.
20. English Revisited - The real question here should be what makes for literacy, not what makes for Americanness; action should be for education, not for the nativist conceit of an official language.
21. Spring - There are other small seasons in spring if you think about them. It's important to notice them and not let them be swamped by the official induction ceremonies granted to March 21 and Hallmark cards.
22. Just Say Yes - Simple obedience to an outside authority will never produce a moral life in adolescents.
23. In Praise Of Pleasure - In the midst of all this righteous love for sobriety I would like to praise pleasure, lest we forget, in our zeal for purity and safety, an important premise in the argument for being alive.
24. What We Do To One Another - "Life is a pain in the arrears" a friend of mind once punned, and I think of that line as I watch my fellow humans go about this debit-and-credit business called living.
25. Smoking - Do smokers have rights? The more I think about it, the more I think they don't, at least in regard to smoking where non-smokers are.
26. Graduations - Why are people are willing to dress up in funny robes and hats, sit in stuffy rooms, listen to mostly predictable speeches, endure agonizing hours of read-off names and shuffling movement, for that small moment when they walk alone across the stage to receive their diploma?
27. A Quiet Of Breathing - We can breathe full, we can breathe shallow, we can modulate it or ignore it - but we can't avoid it. We need to figure out what makes us breathe the best, and then breathe as if our lives depended on it.
28. Friendleaving - Soon a good friend of mine will be leaving. Supposedly Hallmark, or Bartlett's Quotations, has words for any occasion. But not really something for this, not anything that can grab the particulars of the loss and hope I have for him. This, then, is my clumsy attempt at a tribute, words not only to thank him but also to deal with the coming fact of his absence.
29. Street People - They warn us away from the seductive unvital efficiency that a city eager to be gentrified can come to, away from an architecture and mind set feudal in design and purpose.
30. Commentary On Commentaries - The commentary has, for me, become a kind of poem, a concentrated language in a small space.
31. Children As Aliens - Many adults suffer from J.D. Salinger's near-deification of imagined childhood simplicity and truthfulness.
32. The Lock-Down Of Work - Perhaps next Labor Day we should talk less about the "dignity" of work and more about how this "work" locks most of us down, keeping us too unsure to buck the tide and too tired to be well-informed.
33. Autumnal - How quickly this time goes. Just beyond the edge of daily memos and the duress of circumstance, carbonating our routines, is this tonic air and pervious light of autumn.
34. Work Revis(it)ed - There's a bumper sticker which says "I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go." Wouldn't it be better if we could say "I grow, I grow, it's off to work I go"?
35. Addiction - Every society has its sanctioned addictions. The high season for ours begins soon. Watch how the addiction machine gets up to speed between now and January 1st.
36. Endings - Living is really a series of endings lapsing one into the other, patterns finishing and blending into other patterns like the scales on the serpent that eats its own tail.
37. Christmas Passed Up - I have a solution to the dilemma of the buyers in the Temple.
38. Miami - A good friend of mine has a hypothesis that climate is what causes people to be what they are. I recently visited him in Miami and had a chance to test his hypothesis against my own boosterism for the New England winter. Much to my surprise I found myself changed, less fond of winter, more drawn to the even luxury of a mild and seductive climate.
39. Sliding - The sole purpose of sliding is to get to the bottom of the hill as quickly as possible, riding some edge of permissible, but not too dangerous, risk.
40. Getting Angry - Here is my list of some things we should be angry about in these troubling days of the American empire.
41. Education And Morals - Are the conservatives confused? I think so. And they're confused because they ground their moral thinking in a corrupt source - the Bible and the Judeo-Christian myth. Is there a better source? Yes, I believe there is - secular humanism.
42. Be All That You Can Be - Young adults in this society, in terms of clear, unambiguous information with which to make decisions for themselves, are malnourished, if not starved.
43. Late Night Musings In The Emergency Room - This cough. It's been mine for a week. Actually, it's not really true to say I have this cough; the cough really has me.
44. Freelancing - I've been trying to freelance-write my way to fame and fortune for the last year or so. If free-lancing had a rank system like the military's, I'd still be a private.
45. The Nature Of Human Nature - If there is a human nature, it lies in the tendency for humans to assume any moral shape they wish, to be plastic in the face of the historical, natural, social, economic, and political forces in their lives.
46. Koppelization - Koppelization is the tendency of the media, most notably television, to decide for us what is important, what passes muster as information we need and should have.
47. Sex Education - The Union Leader's vision of the world, like the vision of many conservatives, is rooted in fear and contempt, in a loathing for tolerance and change.
48. Voices From The Street - We just moved into a new apartment in a neighborhood that's flush with kids, and every afternoon, barring rain, blizzard, or everyone being grounded, the streets and alleyways thicken with the voices of children playing.
49. Bathing - How often in our modern lives we are bathed by things we haven't chosen, things that are designed to lull us into an easy submission.
50. What We Need - We need to think in terms of a "sustainable society," one that sustains itself by sustaining its members, not a society where the market declares its fiats ignorant of the future or of people's values.
51. Men And Woman - Call me irresponsible, but I wonder if there are any real differences between men and women.
52. Tenderness - I'm often struck by how untender our lives can get.
53. Core Curriculum - Colleges might be better off if they crafted their core education along the lines of children playing in the back yard.
54. What's Love Go To Do With It? - In loving, on whatever level, we come closest to making "human" a transitive verb.
55. Photography - I think my writing will change because the eyes through which I see the world are changing, into shutters and lenses and apertures, where the brain will become film developed by delight.
56. Liberal - Being a liberal still has the power to make people take notice, stir up the juices, even if in ridicule. It is certainly something to be proud of.
57. Just Say No To This Drug Bill - Whatever the drug crisis is about, it doesn't require devouring our own liberties.
58. Hibernation - Imagine the benefits if humans restored their ability to hibernate. Our bodies would move to their own rhythms and there would be a comfortable buffer between the necessities of the outside world and our own universe of heartbeat and breathing. We would become full of health.
59. Thanksgiving - On this day it would be worth it to give time to remembering what and who has made things possible rather than impossible, passable rather than impassable.
60. Guns - What do so many guns tell us about the people who have them? The answer is brutally clear: the guns signal that people in a land overflowing with wealth are feeling scared, distrustful, powerless, and vindictive. Why are they feeling this way? What went wrong?
61. February - By February most of us have run out of ways to purify ourselves; we're white as a radish and feel about as physically attractive, and are troubled in our sleep by visions of Miami.
62. Personal Responsibility - The recent outraged response over the plea bargain for two boys who killed a Dover store owner raises one of the most vexing questions humans face: At what point, and with what penalty, are we fully responsible for our actions?
63. Abortion - The debate over abortion has been so mucked up by invective and fantasy that pro-life and pro-choice people will never agree on anything.
64. Miami Revisited - The future's color is brown, not white, and Miami is its port of entry.
65. An Easter Message - The real challenge of Easter is not emulating Christ's resurrection, though that is what the official doctrine tells us we should do. It's living with the choices Christ's absence forces on us.
66. Ethics In The School - "Morality" means teaching behavior that supports the status quo, which does not mean devoting a lot of energy to critical analysis of social structures or creating students who are free-thinkers.
67. The Hero - Oliver North, whatever his qualities as an individual, is a dangerous man. I would have liked to ask him, during his testimony to Congress and his trial, what he thought he was defending when he took an oath to defend the Constitution.
68. New Orleans - Sometimes I think all New Hampshirites should be required to make a pilgrimage to a warm climate at least once a year to provide a respite from the quarrels of New England coziness. And a suggested Mecca? My choice would be the French Quarter of New Orleans in the middle of May.
69. Backstage - The best show is often the one the audience doesn't see.
70. The Exxon Trap - What Seabrook and the Exxon Valdez suggest is that we need to examine how our "free market" mentality and practices have made us unfree.
71. Copywriting - In writing poetry the poet aims to give the reader a "re-vision" of the ordinary through innovative word play and form, seeking to make the eyes of the reader see something new. This is exactly what good copywriting does.
72. Father's Day - Not all fathers have served their children as well as mine has served me. I can only hope that my life has given him moments of pleasure and satisfaction.
73. Jesse Murabito - The fact that the Union Leader finds it necessary to demean someone it does not agree with is in line with the kind of conservatism it espouses: resist change, fear those who are different, and disguise its meanness by calling it truth.
74. Peace And Lasting Security - What is "national security"? To the respondents of recent polls, "security" meant what any human being other than George Bush knows it means: freedom from fear, a reasonable expectation of justice, a decent opportunity for food, shelter, and clothing, and a sense of purpose.
75. Neptune - The pictures Voyager sends back are really family pictures; we can see ourselves becoming ourselves as we look at them. The more we look, the more we look like the universe, and the more the universe will look like us.
76. Thornburgh And The Reporters - Thornburgh doesn't have to clamp down on reporters; their employers and the capitalist system that employs them already do.
77. Ethics In The Schools: Part II - To keep ethics non-controversial means to deprive students of the chance to work out their beliefs on topics that directly affect their non-school lives: AIDS, abortion, war and peace, the job market. Instead, they'll get pabulum about trustworthiness or courage.
78. Midlife - Midlife seems to be about that struggle to keep feeling young in a body and a mind that's moving into unknown and finite territory.
79. Nest-Making - This summer two sparrows built a nest in the gap between my air conditioner and window jamb. When they were both gone, doing whatever sparrows do when they take breaks, I'd open up the window and survey their work.
80. Soul-Searching - Most likely, this is is all there is.
81. Robert Mapplethorpe - In his own way Mapplethorpe was trying to encourage that process of self-definition and self- discovery, which is also a means of resisting authority, that drives the culture and politics of a democracy.
82. The Public Mind - Once information and ideas become considered commodities, no different than cars or shoes, then an idea's value is proved by how well it can be sold, not by whether it is sound or useful.
83. Licenses For Dropouts - if the citizens of the United States aren't willing to spend the money to have good public schools, as the report states, then why should the students suffer for their stinginess? Why blame the victim for the victimization?
84. Abortion - Access to safe and legal abortions recognizes the fact that women do not need to have babies to define who they are and what they're worth.
85. Bathtub Madonnas - It's good to know that as the social landscape becomes corporationed and the frequencies on which we are allowed to communicate get more filled with static, someone makes the effort to evoke the mysteries and pay attention to the spirit.
86. Valentine's Day - To regain our health we are going to need to give ourselves the equivalent of cultural heart therapy: fruitful exercise, a regimen of humor and common sense, and, above all, a diet of connections.
87. Obscene Phone Call - My friend calls an obscene phone call a "mini-rape"; the term is apt. For a short time, and in a very limited way, I think I felt what many women must feel: a sense of strong forces out there that do not have my best interests at heart.
88. NKOTB - confess -- I like the New Kids On The Block. Their music is much like the eight-to-fifteen age group that soaks it up: momentarily effervescent, straddling the grey area between innocence and sensuality, and commercialized to the last drop.
89. State of Emergency - the war on drugs is not about stopping drugs but about trashing the Fourth Amendment and consolidating the power of the state over the individual.